like yeah they haven't fulfilled their original purpose of allowing you to keep a CRT warmed up without burning in an image in about two decades but it annoyed me that we went from "computers are Contraptions that do Whimsical Things like dinging and playing back animated GIFs and making a whole lot of clatter to remember a few megabytes of information" to "everything with a CPU in it is a Device and it must look flat and abstract and be able to turn on and off instantly and anything fun it might do is a waste of power so by the way we pumped it full of ads and subscriptions"
i do not think this is specific to computers, but rather that it is a symptom of a broader cultural eradication of whimsy in all things
totally agree. when I was growing up screensavers were more of a Mac thing, i.e. a "toy computer" thing, and then when LCD screens became commonplace that was an excuse for getting rid of 'em, even though all display technologies are liable to photobleaching, I would suspect. it's more of a problem with OLEDs, however. ~Chara
in our computing and otherwise
for this exact reason
edit to add: *ago
