All of Cyan's games were in Hypercard up to Myst. (Cosmic Osmo and Spelunx were the other two.)
Myst ran in Hypercard in early Mac releases but switched to a cross-platform runtime Broderbund built to sell Myst on Windows CDs (and consoles and more).
Riven was also majority designed/prototyped in Hypercard as a development platform, but more directly targeted from the beginning that same runtime Broderbund built for running Myst cross-platform.
ScummVM refers to that Broderbund engine as Mohawk [0]. It's interesting all of the other games that used that engine, including several major Carmen Sandiego games. A lot of those Living Books series also felt like Hypercard stacks. I wonder if those Carmen Sandiego editions might also have been at least partially prototyped in Hypercard (though some of them seem to me like they'd be more complex than Hypercard).
The single most soul-crushing experience I have on today's tech is the whoopee cushion.
I type this on a touch device that randomly Cheevers the words. (It literally changed "changes" just now. Henceforth, my word for this shall be Cheevers.) it Cheevers the words. It offers suggested words that you can tap to complete the word you're typing, and milliseconds before your finger makes contact with the screen, the suggested word flips to Cheevers and your finger taps that.
Now with the new improved iOS Liquid Glass, and possibly with janky web app development kits, buttons can move as you try to click on them. UI animation was supposed to help the user. But helping the user is hard.
Pop ups. The web needs more pop ups. More "Are you enjoying this app?" in your face.
But on the desktop, I recall complaining to a Windows (the OS) developer about stealing focus... in 1995. At the time, classic macOS tended not to do this, but it happened quite often multitasking on Windows, and I couldn't offer any constructive feedback, no obvious solution.
The sheer unpredictability, at 100 millisecond time scale... a few hours of this and I'm literally shaking. Because it affects muscle response, a startle reaction. Keeps firing away at the limbic system.
If I wanted slot-machine online gambling levels of simulation, I'd go to a casino. I hate this stuff. I hate where "engagement" metrics and the quest for more clicks has brought us.
I wonder what the average interest rate is these days... I just saw a credit card with a usual (non-penalty) annual interest rate of 28%. Perhaps credit cards and car loans are not comparable. But it's an indication of where we are at with consumer debt.
Having lived in Estonia some years ago when the debate over whether Russian should be taught in schools was raging (only changing after Russia's full scale invasion of Ukraine) it seems to me that the grey passport holders who refused to acknowledge and assimilate into the independent country that returned to its rightful state after fifty years of brutal occupation are the ones holding most of the blame here. Estonia is an exemplar in upholding human rights since regaining independence.
>who refused to assimilate into the independent country
"Cultural genocide may also involve forced assimilation, as well as the suppression of a language or cultural activities that do not conform to the destroyer's notion of what is appropriate" [0]
>are the ones holding most of the blame here
Blaming the victim. Classic.
>Estonia is an exemplar in upholding human rights since regaining independence.
You must be kidding. Or you just don't count Russians as human.
My hot tale on the ground in 1990 was that Russia treated Estonia like an imperial colony. Forced mass relocation of Russian citizens into the country after World War II, all children taught a Russian curriculum in the (public, free, Soviet) schools.
The doctrine of cultural assimilation was at that time understood to be incorporation into a larger Russian society.
"The Singing Revolution" tells an Estonian side of this dynamic.
When the USSR collapsed in 1991, the citizens of the USSR had to choose their future. If they were in countries that declared independence from the USSR as it was falling apart, they could become citizens of those countries. They could also apply for the citizenship of Russian Federation, because RF had declared itself a successor state to the USSR. By default, those who did nothing, became aliens, which is a funny legal term for people without citizenship.
A shitload of Russians outside of Russia did nothing out of misplaced belief that the Soviet Union would return any day now, and they remain without any citizenship.
The irony is that all sorts of human rights organizations see stateless people as horrible tragedy, but the stateless Russians prefer it, because being an alien grants certain privileges on both sides (like visa-free travel in both Europe and Russia) while simultaneously exempting from certain duties like mandatory conscription (again, on both sides). In some regards, both countries treat you as a citizen; in others, both treat you as a foreigner. If you have regular business on both sides of the border, then the alien passport is the best travel document to have.
And if you don't want it anymore, all you have to do is demonstrate B1 level language proficiency and knowledge of the constitution to get a citizenship.
Hello, old friend.
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