Oh, GOD, My EYES!
Stereoscopic, stroboscopic, epidiascopic, kaleidoscopic …
I was going to redesign my profile with the colours in reverse, but … as you can see …
… because Medium’s self-proclaimed ‘designers’ and ‘developers’ are nothing of the sort, their automatic lightening of fonts on darker backgrounds (helpfully) doesn’t extend to darkening fonts on lighter backgrounds — and trying to read white text on a background of that hue of blue is an exercise in futility in the dark, let alone in sunlight.
I suspect their complete failure to grasp there is a world beyond their parents’ basement might also explain why any image larger than what will comfortably fit on a phone display now disappears offscreen when I paste it in … and then altogether, when I close/publish the story … meaning I have to save images to my drive and then import them rather than simply pasting them as I used to do in ye oldene dayes of last year.
Which is inconvenient for a variety of reasons — not least the unnecessary housekeeping involved in clearing out images I had no intention of keeping, merely of using here (*sigh*).
And that’s only if I’m lucky and Medium doesn’t pop up a red banner saying my story couldn’t be saved right now … and, moreover, nothing I do from now on will be either — obliging me to close it, hunt through whatever route to it has not been removed in the latest ‘redesign’ (getting to incomplete stories is increasingly tortuous), re-open it and pick up where I left off (pasting things into your stories is strictly verboten!)
Also for the ever-disappearing features, such as the ability to use non-printing characters for layout purposes (so, now, you can only print a single, endless screed or else use their ‘divider’ fonts).
Or emojis Medium doesn’t directly support with it’s ‘:’.
Or special symbols.
Or diacritics.
Although you can still use a transparent pixel … that will take up a lot more room than a single pixel for no good reason but, hey, it woks, so …
The irony of all this is that this self-proclaimed generation of ‘digital natives’ knows nothing about either design or digital and, hence, according to all reports I’ve received, the app for this increasingly appified site is not only still no better than it was three years ago, but is (seemingly) getting increasingly worse as well. They are (successfully) contriving to render Medium … already long-since pretty much the worst site for publishing there has ever been … ever worse! If it weren’t so sad, it’d be both hilarious and impressive at the same time.
Anyhow … the upshot of it all is that my profile now looks like I designed it especially for Aura … who really shouldn’t complain, lest I redesign it yet again, to match the new theme I’ve applied on my laptop …
Tasteful though the previous colourscheme was (restful on the eye and calming), it doesn’t make for good reading in either bright light or total darkness … so, I decided to do something about my longterm hankering for some neon in my life again.
It took some doing, let me tell you!
Over the years, I’ve searched for neon font sets and themes, but all I found was the visual equivalent of a Southern Rail limp lettuce sandwich, unwrapped, washed in grey dishwater and re-wrapped in clingfilm every week for eighteen months … not the “Oh, God, my eyes!!!” neon of my misspent youth ².
But, finally, I’ve managed to track something down that isn’t reliant on KDE (Ack! Spit!), or Gnome (Hiss!) and is (I suspect) the basis for the look of Garuda Linux. And, furthermore, found a Kvantum version that means I’ve been able to get a uniform look and feel across both GTK and QT apps (which is nice ³ ).
Check out the Sweet themes, Candy icons and Rainbow folder icons and components by Eliverlara on the XFCE Look, Gnome Look and KDE Look sites. He even has a Firefox theme available (there’s a Sweet Dark one on the official Mozilla addons site too, but it’s not as good as the Github one). The mouse cursors are a bit of a disappointment but, hey, you can’t have everything.
No, it isn’t a poke in the eye with a glow-stick, but, if I hadn’t been so determined on that before and given up as a result of not finding it, I might’ve found this theme all the sooner,
And, tbh, whilst it might look eye-catching, actually working on something that very quickly induces eye-strain isn’t the best idea I’ve ever had.
Besides which, there’s only so many times you can say “Here … look a this!” to your epileptic friends and family before they catch on and don’t … taking at least half the fun out of things ⁴.
So, all in all, a bit of a result. I’ve finally got a nice, neon themed desktop and Aura gets to enjoy the new colourscheme here — everyone’s a winner.
Right … that’s your lot — I’ve got things to see, people to do … ⁵
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¹ You can’t have bold italics in titles or the text applied to embedded objects either — it’s almost as if none of them had never used Livejournal (or even Geocities) and thus never learned that there are a great many things you can do with HTML beyond the pitiful subset available to us here.
² Yes …that’s it … my youth … I misspent my ‘youth’ <ahem> 😉
³ Another reason for giving up in the Past was the undesirable “Oh, God, my eyes!” prompted every time I switched from a supported GTK/QT app to an unsupported QT/GTK one — it’s a surprisingly jarring experience and it was simpler just to leave things unthemed (or pick a grey theme that meant the difference was, comparatively, unnoticeable).
⁴ I’m sure Jacky wouldn’t dream of doing such a thing. But I’m not her 😉
⁵ Tumpty-tumpty-tumpty-tum …There’s no cause for alarm … I’m just getting some powertools … Just a moment … Why is there an folder labelled ‘fuck-off’ in my images and what’s in it?
