Chimerelda E. Error, layabout

A couple friends and I came up with it a few weeks ago, and it keeps rattling around my head: every type of food in the world can be split into two categories. These categories are not good or bad, not tasteful or tasteless; they are simply an entirely new dichotomy. The "King Rule," as we called it, is very simple:

Pick any food, then imagine a restaurant named "[food name] King" (Hoagie King, Gyro King, Salad King, etc). Would you have a good time there?

Many options are easy:

• Gyro King is delicious, obviously
• Teriyaki King is pretty solid
• Hoagie King will be your go-to lunch stop for years

Other foods fall closer to the line:

• Meatball King tastes amazing and WILL give you food poisoning. Near pass.
• Pizza King is terrible but beloved. Depends on personal preference.
• Eclair King will disappear in six months after the owner is arrested for tax evasion

And others fail the rule miserably:

• Salad King is bad, AND costs twenty dollars a plate
• Waffle King is just a less reliable Waffle House
• Burger King.

It's difficult to describe the line between these foods, but it's felt very instinctively. You already know in your heart of hearts that Barbecue King is amazing, while Steak King is mid at best. This isn't to say that steak isn't good, nor salad, waffles, or burgers; in fact, they're all amazing foods in the right context. But regardless of their quality, they fail the King Rule.

I don't know what any of this means, but it feels vitally important. The whole of our future rests upon our ability to understand the full ramifications of the King Rule.

if you right-click the speaker icon in the windows 10 taskbar and click "open sound settings", a windows 10-style panel called "Sound" opens. if you click the "Sound" option further down the context menu, it opens a windows xp-style panel. the "Sound" option is linked from Sound as "Sound Control Panel". the "Sound" option also has a link to "Manage sound devices" which is an internal panel that performs the same functions as the "Sound" option, except for managing the sound theme, which is found in that panel under the tab... "Sounds".

every so often I'll have people say to me that MacOS is harder to use than Windows and they list off a whole bunch of grievances and I tune out because I immediately start thinking about shit like this that I have to do at least twice a week for various reasons

to elaborate further on this, I think that windows 8, legitimately, might actually be the worst thing to ever happen to windows from a UX perspective. the very second there was any divide between the primary modes of interaction with the OS was the point of no return as far as getting anything even remotely advanced done. they add in this whole-ass tile interface, one of the most half-baked thing I've ever seen in a production OS, but properly realized "wait, what if people need to actually get shit done?"

so they keep the old desktop interface in there. alright, fine. but the tile interface was intended to be easy to use and upfront with relevant information, which meant it needed its own settings panel. okay. annoying. but okay. so naturally what they do is shove everything they can into that thing, sometimes taking them out of control panel entirely, sometimes having some overlap, and, in more advanced cases, sometimes having that settings panel bring you to the control panel because there was no clean way to divide those things

but it doesn't stop there! because they also decided to make it so that the desktop version also needed a simplified settings menu, which I actually do agree with! but sometimes that settings menu would actually bring you to the tiles settings menu in the case of certain things that were shared because they really wanted that whole situation to be a thing. they were banking huge on the idea that everyone would be using touchscreen devices like the surface because, like many tech companies, they did not understand the popularity of tablets and smartphones

so what we've ended up with, because of this absolutely bizarre half-commitment to a new interface paradigm, is three separate settings systems, all of which have some degree over overlap with one another, and there's basically no unifying design to the OS because every single aspect of having two desktop modes works against this at its core!

AND THE WORST PART IS THAT THIS IS LITERALLY ONLY ONE OF THE PROBLEMS THAT CAME WITH WINDOWS 8 THAT WE STILL DEAL WITH IN SOME CAPACITY TO THIS DAY

the "category view" introduced in XP marked the beginning of the end, it got worse over time but this is where they began to muddy the waters

this already set up a dichotomy of "classic" vs "category" view which made it harder to navigate, rather than easier

it got worse in 8, for sure, in truth if Microsoft had committed to any single UI overhaul (they had like 4 of them between 98 and now) and seen it through we'd have at least one fewer of these options

instead we got a toe dip into Metro before immediately turning tail and running, and now everything is compromised

I still firmly believe they should've committed to Metro as a new OS, instead of bolting it to the Windows Desktop and ruining the chances of either succeeding

You may think this game element is pointless, that it’s obscene, overdetailed dribble that probably resulted in an intern working an 80 hour shift and sleeping under a desk. But it would make a poster in the Games forum of Something Awful happy for a microsecond, and goddamnit, that’s what the games industry is about.

I'm dunking on some Twitter rando below this cut, but: