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littlefics posting in

seasonsofdrabbles

We have now closed signups and nominations! Below is the expected timeline for the next couple days:

Like always, for the next 12 hours, people can contact us to add to their signups. This is intended for people who may have run into the character tagset bug when signing up close to the deadline, or whose nominations were approved late. However, anyone may ask to have characters/fandoms added to their requests or offers. If you would like us to add to your signup, please post on the screened mod contact post or email us at seasonsofdrabbles@gmail.com. Please make sure to include your AO3 username.

After that window has closed, we will check the matching and send out emails to anyone who is unmatchable on offers. They will be given 24 hours to respond.

Barring unexpected delays, assignments will go out before the end of Wednesday, October 22.

As you wait for assignments to go out, please feel free to check out the app to browse requests and start writing!

lassarina

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

cahn

( Mostly about the kids. )

liam_on_linux

No, honest, it did.

Windows 2 was kinda ugly.

https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/win203

Windows 3/3.1/3.11 were fine.

https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/win30

Muted, boring, but you could look at it all day. And we did.

95 improved it.

https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/win95osr2

Tasteful greys, spot colour.

NT 4 improved that a bit more.

https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/winnt40

Categorised Start menu, for instance. But nearly identical.

95/NT4 were visibly inspired by NeXTstep, IMHO the most beautiful GUI ever written.

Then it all started to go a bit wrong. The first pebbles bouncing down the mountainside presaging a vast avalanche.

Windows 98.

https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/win98

IE4 built in so Microsoft didn't get broken up my the US DOJ. Explorer rendered local content via HTML. Ugly extra toolbars. Some floating, some embedded in the task bar. Ugly gradients and blends in window title bars.

Cheap and plastic and tacky.

But that is around the time that media and gaming PCs went mainstream, home internet use (often over dialup) went mainstream, and the alternatives died out (Amiga, ST & GEM, Arm & RISC OS) or very nearly died (classic MacOS, NeXT merger, Rhapsody).

So it's what many saw first and loved and remembered.

Result, people write entire new OSes designed in affectionate homage:

https://serenityos.org/

Look at the toolbars. Look at the textures in the title bars. This isn't Win9x, this is specifically Win98.

https://www.digibarn.com/collections/screenshots/KDE%201-x/i...

Specifically:

https://www.digibarn.com/collections/screenshots/KDE%201-x/h...

<- textured title bars

https://www.digibarn.com/collections/screenshots/KDE%201-x/t...

<- gradients in title bars

https://www.digibarn.com/collections/screenshots/KDE%201-x/m...

<- Windows-style colour schemes

KDE started out as a reproduction of Windows 98/98SE by a team who didn't realise that what they were looking at was WordPerfect 5.x instead of WordPerfect 4.x -- as the late great Guy Kewney put it:

"WordPerfect 4.2 was a bicycle. A great bicycle. Everyone agreed it was a great bicycle, just about the best. So what Wordperfect did was, they put together a committee, looked at the market, and said: 'what we'll do is, we'll put 11 more wheels on it'."

Win98 is Win95 festooned with pointless needless Internet widgetry because the DOJ was about to split MS into separate apps and OS companies, because MS drove Netscape into bankruptcy by bundling IE free of charge with Windows.

Strip all that junk off and what's left underneath is a better UI. But the German kids writing their "Kool Desktop Environment" didn't realise.

After that came WinME and Windows 2000, which turned down the bling a bit as the lawsuit was over, but it was only a blip.

Then came XP with its "Fischer-Price" themes.

Then Vista with gratuitous transparency everywhere because GDI.EXE had been ripped out and replaced with a compositor and that's no fun if you don't use some 3D features like see-through stuff.

Then 7 toned that down a bit and everyone love it.

Then the universally detested Win8, and then that was toned down and the Start menu put back for Win10, which is roughly what UKUI and Deepin copied in China, or Wubuntu in the West.

Then Win11, as copied by AnduinOS and a few others, which for this long-term Windows user is the worst release ever. I can't even have a vertical taskbar any more. It's abhorrent.

(Content repurposed from here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45626910

Inspired by this:

https://blogsystem5.substack.com/p/the-ides-we-had-30-years-ago-and )

meningioma

i have windows 10 on a 2 in 1 pc. its pretty nice. but clip studio touch controls fucking suck. and i barely use it bc my brother gave me his ipad. starting a counter for when i eventually throw debian kde on this thing.

also, i have become completely obsessed with pokemon romhacks. the drayano guy does amazing work, pokemon actualy feels challenging and fun again.... i want to put them one by one on my 3ds, it feels like christmas all over again~

nagamas posting in

nagamas_exchange

It's been almost 48 hours since nominations opened!

All currently-pending nominations have been reviewed. You can list the full list of all characters/relationships that have been approved at the tagset here.

A reminder that we won't approve nominations that involve group names. For instance, "Dimitri & Blue Lions" won't be approved for Three Houses, nor would "The Shepherds" be approved for Awakening. This is to avoid ambiguity/misunderstandings. You are welcome to nominate a small group by spelling out the specific individual characters you're interested in. For instance, "Claude & Hilda & Lorenz" for Three Houses would be fine.

Nominations will remain open through the end of the day on October 25th and you can always contact the mods if you have any questions.

Edited to add: Note that "Fire Emblem Series" is too general; you should submit tags for a specific Fire Emblem game/universe. If you submit tags for "Fire Emblem Series" and they are rejected, that's probably why—but don't fret; we have just moved that tag to the appropriate subcategory. (If you look at the tagset and don't see your tags in the appropriate subcategory, reach out to us and we'll see what went wrong.)

karel

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karel

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

littlefics posting in

seasonsofdrabbles

You have just under 48 hours, as of this post, before both signups and nominations close on Sunday, October 19 @ 11:59pm Eastern Daylight time (Countdown).

As you finalize or submit your signup, remember to check out Uncategorized Fandoms for crossovers and other fandoms you might have missed! Here's the requests app that may be easier to browse than AO3.

As usual, there will be a 12-hour grace period after signups close during which you can ask us to add tags to your requests/offers.

proustbot

For various reasons, I have been temporarily empowered to make official flyers for an upcoming Work Thing. This is because my colleagues did not anticipate my unwholesome zeal for the ironic deployment of Comic Sans.

Tears of Themis (2021, iOS) -- To everyone's surprise, Tears of Themis has been kind of...good recently? The recent events -- especially the "Forever Young" high-school AU and the current 80s-crime-soap "Island Suspense" -- have been thoughtfully constructed, pretty well-written, and pleasurable to experience. This is a real change of pace for Themis, which typically slams together some janky RPG Maker-esque gameplay with an incomprehensible and typo-filled scenario and calls it a day. (I have a suspicion that miHoYo belatedly decided to devote some additional company resources to Themis, their neglected afterthought otome gacha, simply because Love and Deepspace has been such a hit in the same genre.)

And yes, sure, "Island Suspense" featured a villain who was aging backwards due to ~science~ and thus appeared to be a twelve-year-old waif until his stunning reveal; the actual plot was as ludicrous as anything else in Themis. But! The pacing! The code-searching gameplay! The interface! The surprisingly graceful way that the game incorporated each member of Your Four Boyfriends into the plot! The whole event was fun and interesting and enjoyable to play through -- which are not the words I typically use to describe literally anything in Tears of Themis.

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Spirit of Justice (2016, 3DS) -- I'm halfway through this game (just finished Case 3), and I feel as if the people who made it had some overlap with the team that made the Ace Attorney Investigations games (doing lots of international intrigue with fake Ruritanian countries) and/or the team that made Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright (bolting lots of absurd magical/religious systems onto legal trials; a certain shared sensibility of broad comedy). Considering the latter game came out in 2014 for the 3DS, I guess it is the more plausible influence. (I guess I could also look up which Capcom staff members worked on which games. But I won't!)

So far, I like Spirit of Justice fine, but I don't really see the need for the Ruritanian Romance relocation. And since half the game seems to happen back in Ace Attorney City, the studio itself doesn't seem entirely convinced that it was the right move. But! I did enjoy seeing Maya again. And Case 4 has kicked off with Athena and Blackquill reuniting, which delights me.

Lost in Lualand

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Grace Period and Info About Matching

Tales of Vesperia Liveblog, Part 5

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Once upon a time, Windows looked good

LOLLING!!!

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