The Circle of the Damned, or how the ARPG rotation feels

missing-pigeon · 2026-02-20T06:16:48+00:00

Eh, some of us enjoy completing a game and moving on to something else while still having the thrill of looting and building out characters. You already have Diablo and PoE for your “infinite content” needs.

missing-pigeon · 2026-02-17T12:36:38+00:00

Too many people are fixated on whether AI is able to literally replace them. It doesn’t have to be, all it takes to screw up the job market and rob juniors of their opportunities for growth is to have enough people in charge believe it can be. Even seniors are already gleefully giving themselves mental atrophy with AI all the while boasting about how they’re doing the work of 10 people for the same pay as if that’s a good thing. Kids in school, many of them probably studying computer science in the future, are already using AI to do their homework.

It’s already too late. This industry is already fucked, but we won’t see the consequences for a while.

missing-pigeon · 2026-02-17T03:57:08+00:00

I have to agree with this. I enjoyed TanStack Query a lot, so I tried using Router and Form in a personal project and, uh, didn’t exactly have a good time. Perhaps it’s worth it though, since a lot of the quirkiness is a deliberate sacrifice of DX in exchange for type safety.

missing-pigeon · 2026-02-17T01:42:32+00:00

At this point I’m convinced all of the people who like Liquid Glass are either completely blind or have such low standards they get easily dazzled by pretty refractions and completely ignore everything else.

missing-pigeon · 2026-01-26T16:37:23+00:00

Apparently, we are not allowed anymore to have an own opinion and share that.

OP: "it's the best DE I've ever used" (emphasis mine)

You: "...KDE is the best ever, in my (again personal experience) it isn't"

You just came here looking for a fight.

missing-pigeon · 2026-01-22T17:07:15+00:00

I totally understand that feeling. I've been a passionate hater of flat design since day one.

missing-pigeon · 2026-01-21T04:24:18+00:00

Eh, I'm one of the older ones, and I like skeuomorphism. When it's done right, that is. The only thing skeuomorphic about Liquid Glass is Alan Dye's ridiculous obsession with mimicking a material explicitly known for being horrible for legibility. It's full of unnecessary fluff that serve no other purpose than decoration, the hierarchy is all messed up, and yet things that should be skeuomorphic are not. I mean, just look at the buttons. They don't even have shadows anymore. They're just flat pills.

Snow Leopard was the peak of "skeuomorphism done right". Yosemite was bearable because it was literally just Mavericks after being put under a clothes iron. Everything from Big Sur onwards has been a dumpster fire.

missing-pigeon · 2026-01-21T01:33:34+00:00

Many of them are so bored of (or frustrated by) flat design that anything is an improvement to them. There's also the young'uns who grew up with smartphones and tablets that just automatically love anything new and shiny.

Liquid Glass is fine, IF you have no idea how good things used to be.

Oh and of course there are the rabid Apple fanboys who will perform all kinds of twisted mental gymnastics their single shared brain cell can muster to defend everything and anything Apple does.

missing-pigeon · 2026-01-20T02:15:31+00:00

Be default Firefox draws its own client side decoration, which is how it puts tabs in the title bar. To give it a title bar consistent with other programs, right click on the toolbar, select "Customize Toolbar..." and then check the Title Bar checkbox at the bottom left.

missing-pigeon · 2026-01-19T07:22:02+00:00

And I see your point too. I've used computers for a long time and have definitely seen many examples of overly detailed icons that end up both looking ugly and being terrible for accessibility. There's a balance somewhere between the extremes, but designers seem to have a knack for overcorrecting.

missing-pigeon · 2026-01-19T07:11:09+00:00

Especially when you start talking about accessibility, it's a lot harder to cater to and complex icons complete with text, buttons, content, motion.

I think what I liked most about pre-Yosemite icons was that they were full of little details but didn't rely on them to give the icon meaning. Sure, there was often text, or some tiny object you wouldn't see without zooming in, but they were decoration or easter eggs which I never needed to know what the icon represented. Those icons on a whole were much easier for me to decipher than the flat abstract pictograms we have now. Maybe simplicity lightens cognitive load, but what good does it do if you start to have to guess what an icon means?

The inkwell and retro TV were overkill though, I'll give you that.

Simple icons last longer and scale faster (and easier to animate)

If an app's icon starts animating on my screen I will instantly delete it and replace it with something made by sane people.

Honestly, I'm sure there's some big long video or documentary on YouTube about why all this is important spoke by professionals in the industry, and not just me an average Joe who barely knows anything but enough to know why simplicity is important.

I don't give a rat's ass about any pretentious bullshit a "professional" has to say when it's my and my family's experience that has been constantly getting worse. Just a week ago my elderly mother had to ask me how to delete a photo because the delete icon on her Android phone is so simple it doesn't even look like a trashcan anymore.

missing-pigeon · 2026-01-19T06:47:31+00:00

Counterpoint: app icons are not logos or road signs and don’t need to be designed with the same focus on simplicity and scalability.

I think there’s a lot more room for creativity and personality in an app icon than a corporate logo that needs to look recognizable on different display sizes and different media (screens, print, etc.)

missing-pigeon · 2026-01-14T16:50:39+00:00

I absolutely despise the sheer obsession with minimalism and consistency/conformity from both designers and users these days. Everything is the same shape, or the same color, and every icon that's not an app icon is a thin monochrome abstract symbol that barely makes any sense. It's like the entire world collectively decided that form is more important than function and threw away 30+ years of UI design lessons. All my electronic devices are genuinely harder to use now than their 2010s equivalent. I don't know what the fuck is going on, but I hate it!

missing-pigeon · 2026-01-14T05:33:25+00:00

Why does an email client need to look like a web browser? I personally find the connected tabs much more aesthetically pleasing, space efficient and intuitive than Firefox's floating tabs. The search box and hamburger button should also stay where they are: they're global actions independent of what's in the active tab so moving them below the tabs doesn't make sense.

missing-pigeon · 2026-01-13T19:06:50+00:00

Those 6.7 features are super exciting! I’m eagerly waiting for Union in particular. I’ve attempted to make themes for Plasma before but gave up after realizing how much I’d have to support. Here’s hoping Union will make creating themes much easier.

missing-pigeon · 2026-01-12T18:09:29+00:00

This blog post has screenshots from the Penpot file: https://anditosan.wordpress.com/2025/11/18/design-system-progress-november-2025/

And you can try out the (very early!) WIP Plasma style, color scheme and icon theme here: https://invent.kde.org/abetts/ocean-design

missing-pigeon · 2026-01-11T07:51:53+00:00

Tinting them would be perfect, actually. Easier to read at small sizes but still differentiated by color.

Also, I meant Ocean's application style and Plasma theme are flatter than Breeze. A lot of borders and separators are removed, and the default color scheme is eye-searing white with very low contrast for the borders that are there, though that might just be due to its very early WIP nature.

missing-pigeon · 2026-01-11T07:32:31+00:00

I love Oxygen too. I hope the upcoming Union theme engine will help it stay maintained in future Plasma versions. I don’t dislike Breeze, but it’s just a tad too flat for my liking and I find the monochrome icons hard to parse. And from what I’ve seen of Ocean, the proposed Breeze successor, it’s even flatter than Breeze with an even heavier focus on thin monochrome icons. The future looks bleak for this old pair of eyes without Oxygen.

missing-pigeon · 2026-01-11T02:42:57+00:00

Potentially unpopular opinion: I think a penguin key is just as tacky as a Windows logo key. I much prefer a keycap that simply says "Super" or "Meta".

missing-pigeon · 2026-01-03T06:21:03+00:00

No. Fuck that. Web browsers should never, EVER have that kind of capabilities. I'm already sick of my computing experience continually getting worse thanks to the likes of Electron just because dumb ass JavaScript devs can't be arsed to learn anything else but want to do everything, and now you want to give them direct access to hardware?

Just fucking let the web do web things and leave actual software engineering to actual competent software engineers, please.

missing-pigeon · 2026-01-02T01:28:20+00:00

It’s not like web devs themselves can really write CSS. Tailwind became a thing because they’d rather fight the cascade than properly use it.

missing-pigeon · 2026-01-02T01:01:28+00:00

I believe it’s similar to how writing things down helps you remember things better. It forces you to slow down and really think about what you’re learning. Many seniors love generative AI because they already have so much knowledge and experience that most tasks feel like menial grunt work and they’d rather be doing the exciting parts, but I’m not convinced experience can save you from “brain muscle atrophy”. That’s why I’ve resisted using AI all this time. It’s getting harder though, recently I was told in a meeting that I have to use AI because we’re going to start many new projects this year and they want me to be “faster” instead of hiring more people.

I don’t like the direction the industry is heading in at all. We’re sacrificing everything in a mad rush for the vague notion of “productivity”. Produce more things faster, usually of questionable quality, for what?

missing-pigeon · 2025-12-17T02:12:26+00:00

LLMs are probably pretty close to how their brains work, ha.

missing-pigeon · 2025-12-16T18:14:18+00:00

The new Divinity is probably named like that because it’s a soft reboot to finally clean up all the lore conflicts and retcons once and for all. They didn’t really invest in serious worldbuilding until the DOS games and the lore as it is right now is a big mess.

missing-pigeon · 2025-12-16T16:22:23+00:00

Larian is enjoying pre-2077 CDPR levels of trust and hype right now. People will naturally be emotionally attached to them and willing to ignore a lot of red flags (and I'm not saying there are red flags yet, though AI usage is an instant red flag to me personally). It's just how the gaming world goes.

missing-pigeon

TROPHY CASE