UIs that have random symbols
My favorite was the Windows Phone interface circa 2011 or so. They had a "save" button (I forget what you actually had to save on a phone) that was the standard floppy disk icon (ironic for a phone) except it was elongated and leaning to one side. When I first saw it, I thought it was a semi trailer tipping over and couldn't imagine what it was supposed to be for.
Not really "never", but the standard movie deals have long called for the studios to get a 90% cut of the box for the first two weeks a movie runs, then it switches to a 50/50 split the rest of the way. Nobody seems to have noticed that this arrangement incentivizes movie studios to produce overhyped pieces of shit so that no good movie with serious staying power cannibalizes their own revenue stream. Just a total coincidence that most movies now are overhyped pieces of shit.
Because hovering/tooltips doesn't work for touchscreens and designers don't give two shits about anything else.
The thing that drives me the craziest is when a long title or sentence or whatever is just truncated with ellipses, even when there is ENORMOUS blank white space around it that would easily allow the whole thing to be shown with word-wrapping. Youtube shorts is the most egregious example of this, and they recently managed to make it even worse. It used to be that you could open up the comments for a short and that would make the entire long title readable, but they "fixed" that so it stays ellipsized even then.
The app I use at work to clock in and out ellipsizes my own name halfway through my middle name, and it could be easily fixed by just stretching the control that displays the name all the way to each edge. I used to be a mobile app developer and I know exactly why this happens: the UI designer uses a bogus short name like "Bob Smith" on the original design document and the developer who implements it puts in a control just big enough for that. I used to encounter this kind of thing and I would fix it with common sense, and then the UI designer would get mad and insist that my fix be reverted, even though that resulted in something that couldn't display the information properly.
I have a co-worker who fought in Vietnam. I showed him the thing about the Pentagon straight up admitting that the Gulf of Tonkin incident was bullshit, but he refused to accept it. Still feels that we had to fight that war because if we had allowed the communists to win, it would have meant that communism would have taken over the world ... even though we actually did lose that war.
I still think it's possible that in 2016 they told him they were signing him up to play the President in a mockumentary. And that they still haven't told him otherwise.
There's a great scene in Das Boot where the crew ends up trapped on the bottom of the Straight of Gibraltar. One guy starts fingering his rosary beads and praying and another guy punches him in the face and says "cut that shit out, we've got work to do!"
I switched to Mac about 15 years ago because I started writing iOS apps and you can only do that on a Mac. As a lifelong Windows user I was initially pretty dubious, but I soon came around. Now I hate MacOS and Windows equally.
This guy was only a "new co-worker" because I was the new employee, but: my first day on a new job I watched a guy get escorted out of the building by security carrying his shit in a cardboard box. His story ended up on the local news. Turned out he was running a prostitution ring from his office, using his work computer even. He had an 800 number that redirected to his office phone, and he kept track of his girls and customers on an Excel spreadsheet on his Windows desktop. The only reason he got caught was that the company upgraded everybody's computers, and they had techs check through all the old machines to make sure no important documents got deleted, and they found "CallGirls.xls" or something like that right on his desktop. Security through dumbassery.
As someone who was alive and nearly a legal adult at this time, I can say that the Bhopal disaster was widely reported on by mainstream media. It's not all that well-remembered today, but neither would Chernobyl be if not for that miniseries and the memes it generated. It's less the result of capitalist propaganda and more the result of our innate apathy towards what happens to brown people halfway around the world.
a vike ride
I feel like this could be really uncomfortable because of the helmet horns.
Ha ha, I just looked it up: there are five Domino's Pizza restaurants in Vietnam.