lime

it's weird that. it's obviously possible to have a flat-shaded skeuomorph, just look at basically all of windows 95, but for some reason we connect them to this particular graphical style. files and folders are both part of the old classic "desktop metaphor", so they basically have to be skeuomorphs. but like, the application icons are basically just mosaic tiles of the normal icons.

a proper skeuomorph would indicate what the program is for. krita and whatever map software that is are both good, if a little flat. but the libreoffice suite just being squares with a letter on them? have them be like, a spreadsheet for calc, a stack of cards for impress, and a printed page for write.

remember all the icons for windows 95 network utilities that have people in them? those are also (attempts at) skeumorphs because they're trying to communicate what the program does.

a skeuomorph (from greek, "tool/container-shape") is something that retains the characteristics of another thing that it is based on, even though those characteristics are no longer useful. think lamps shaped like candles, or the floppy disk save icon, or media player programs with volume knobs.

skeuomorphic UX is a good way to get users comfortable with a system by using designs they are already familiar with, and the original iphone used this to great effect.

This is a good example of skeuomorphic UI:

all to say, I'm not entirely sure these icons are skeuomorphs. they're just glossy.

this reads like a teenager wrote it

definitely that too, but the franchise owners and Craig have called out austin powers as a catalyst in the past.

[The pivot] had to happen the way it did. I can't see it happening any other way. We had to destroy the myth because Mike Myers fucked us - I am a huge Mike Myers fan, so don't get me wrong - but he kind of fucked us; made it impossible to do the gags.
-- Daniel Craig, 2012

god i hope they go back to being campy. the austin powers franchise inflicted generational trauma on bond that they should really deal with.

The Incredible Machine! the original Rube Goldberg game. me and my friends played the shit out of it in the 90s. a few years ago i decided to give it a google and i found out that not only were there an expansion i hadn't heard of, there were five other games in the series.

i don't know about "cross" :P it's a bit-for-bit reimplementation of Elite 2. i loved that game as a kid and pioneer is a great version of it.

i'm currently going through it! company is slowly collapsing around me and despite promises of transparency there is no official communication from the board. we get all our information from news articles and office gossip. people are quitting left and right and no acknowledgement of this is made from above. it's a very odd situation.

yeah one thing we couldn't fix before losing interest was eventual consistency and authority. files would sort of flicker in and out while state was being propagated. i dread to think what kind of bandwidth use that thing would have when sharing large files.

yeah it's been set up to look that way. although i do love the idea that the outline looks like that because he *splat*ed against the wall and bounced clean off.

i mean that's the point though, to codify the will of the people.

and honestly, if that makes live service games go the way of the dodo, good riddance. it's a predatory practice that uses fomo for players retention.

meh, i'm ambivalent. s&box will probably be a lot more flexible than gmod due to deeper access and a higher performance language. that will most likely lead to some very high quality mods.

besides, i was active on the fp forums between 2006 and 2012ish, some people just refused to take money. we asked them for donation links and they said no.