this is probably nostalgia, but I really liked metro, the design language microsoft used around 2010 to 2017 (in no small part because my first smartphone was a windows phone)

people say it was the worst offender in the trend towards "minimalist flat" design we have today, but for me it was actually one of the biggest victims of the overall trend plus a lot of misunderstanding. a lot of it sucked, not because it was bad, but because most attempts at doing it got more and more botched over time, until it was only a vague memory of its former self

the true vision

the thing about metro, is that it wasn't just "coloured rectangles with monochrome icons". it was about minimising the ui elements in favour of focusing on information, making heavy use of bold typography and lyout for hierarchy, what should be front and center is not the fancy gradient effects of this play button, but the album art; if you want to determine what information is most important don't decorate it, make it big, if you want to make pages navigatable make them visually connected to each other as part of a big canvas

the best examples of it, and what it should have been, are the zune and windows phone 7/8 uis

clean but not sterile

the main thing that metro was, was a contrast to the previous skeumorphic style, the almost 3d panels to simple rectangles, the intricate textures to flat colours, the photorealistic icons to logograms

it was all that, but it wasn't about being unfun, it was about making the fun out of something more subtle, the layout. the use of white space, assymetric items, massive text, elements that would overflow the view, whole screen animations, that is where the fun went, and even then there still would be some decoration like gradients and layering, it wasn't all flat

the ui elements in isolation are simple, but the overall composition much more nuanced and unique

the botched execution

the thing about nuance, is that it is hard to keep around, and when you have such an intricate design that makes use of practically invisible elements, it gets hard to keep everything to the same level of quality, especially over time in the corporate tech world

over time with later iterations of metro microsoft and all the designers that wanted to copy it watered it down, gone the wild layouts and in with the grid, down with purposeful typography and welcome in dozens of monochrome icons, away with that negative space and overflow as everything shall be fitted into neat boxes, and so on, who needs nuance when now anyone with excel could make a ui?

you can see it windows 8, the star example of how bad metro can be (also in trying to shove a table ui on a pc), it had the tiles, but metro wasn't just the tiles, and in every other aspect it was a bastardised version with none of the inspiration

and then come windows 10, microsoft pretty much gave up on it, they kept the "everything is square and monochrome" (except in all the parts it wasn't, because of course) and nothing more, not even a hint of fun and intricate, only bog standard layouts that were safe but absolutely soulless (even more soulless than they already were)

the material of hope

I'll be honest, after a decade of watered down minimalism, google's material 3 (aka material you, aka material 3 expressive, who knows, google sucks at naming things) was quite a neat departure, not necessarily a breath of fresh air as it still is very much corporate, but finally another design language that tries to be fun, that puts emphasis in typography, layout, motion, and goes for a more 'messy' look

it is not perfect, and not everything made with it will be good (it takes some creativity to make an app that is not just a grid but now with rounded corner), but it certainly is a nice direction that I wish more people would take a hint of. not a true successor to real metro, but certainly learned from quite a few of its points. it is not subtle and it is very playful, and that makes it better than every minimalist sleek modern ui today

the concept of measuring games in hours, more specifically as "dollar per hour" is such a capitalist brain-worm way of valuing things, that doesn't even make any sense

first that games aren't always linear consistent experiences, a game can have a story line that takes 8 hours to go trough but it takes a 100 hours hours to get every collectible or achievement, or is a game with multiple story paths you can explore each time, or an 'endless' games like tetris, minecraft or every multiplayer title, none of those cases you know for how long you'll play the game until right after you're done with it, which is simply unpredictable and only applies to your experience

most important, enjoyment isn't quantitative, it's qualitative, you'll enjoy certain games a lot more or less, certain mechanics or stories might resonate better or worse with you, mechanics or stories might be better done with certain lengths and aren't scalable. your subjective enjoyment is not something that can be put in a bar graph as a function of time!

this mentality especially sucks because it tends to value more games that end up having more padding (lots of repetitive quests, shallow grinding, treadmills of content) than ones that have a solid vision of what they want to be and execute it well with a concise start middle and end

and this is more personal, but longer or "infinite" games feel like a trap, where you're captive to a singular experience, and don't get to experience variety. personally playing 10 games with 4 to 8 hours of unique stories and mechanics each is so much more enriching than spending 80 hours with the same game over and over again for days on end, you do you though

the capitalism brain-worm

art, entertainment is not - or at least should not be - a consumable like iron or coal, it doesn't have some objective value by utility, it is non interchangeable and personal, and anyone telling you otherwise is someone who doesn't truly value human experience, the same kind of view that pushes for ai "art" or the mistreatment of developers and artists, also why calling it "content" is such a reductive thing to do

Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game.

one can say that given the opportunity, gamers will optimize the fun out of gaming, where it's constant discussion about technical aspects, development cycles, revenue, competitive balancing, if it's woke or not, how many dollars per hour it is worth, about everything, except about "I'm having fun"

oh hey, this is the first actual blog post

the calamity

so, as you might have noticed, all my sites were down for most of yesterday (2025 may 28), and that most (at time of writing) are still down

well, that's because for some reason when I went to install updates on the alma linux vps hosting those, it ended up dying, becoming unreachable (no ssh, not responding to pings, and oracle's management panel didn't really give any info about the machine, only if it's 'up'), I still honestly don't know why, as there was no feedback before telling it to restart that something was off, and after trying to reboot then certainly there was none

the good thing is that I had made a backup to my pc just before, not of the whole thing, just the /home of the opc user, which is where all the important things were stored really, so at least there was no loss of important data, maybe I could have done a full backup, but I'll be honest, never really found the backup option in oracle cloud, and I was not going to try transfering about 10 GBs of a system image

after the server became unresponsive after rebooting from it, I of course tried rebooting it a few more times from the oracle panel, which no luck, which then led to me to having to delete the instance and create another, big mistake

you know what's the problem of offering a free vps service? lots of people want it. apparently in the region my account was situated (ashburn) their datacenters were out of available resources for new vms or something, and I then also learned that there's people that write scripts just for spam the "create instance" button to try slip in when there's a chance

the scramble

of course I wasn't going to waste my time for who knows how long pressing a button until a new machine was created, so looking for a new vps provider it is, which is quite a complicated task when your current budget was 0, and you have no income at the moment. was quite an annoying few hours of looking over and over again at dozens of sites and lists of providers, my main criteria being one that overs a package with at least 8GB of ram (most of the time the server was idling with about 7GB any any give time) for at most 7 to 8 eur a month (and was willing to contract for longer terms if it means a better deal, as long as the total to pay didn't exceed 300 brl (46 eur), which it often did with most)

then finally landed on one small and quite unknown one, datalix.eu (not an advertisement for them, just glad they exist), which seemed to have some pretty good pricing somehow (feels a bit too good to be true tho), got one of the packages in their sale for 6 months, which I paid about 31 eur. in a few minutes got a vm running with rocky linux and up for doing things with

the climb

after that, then it was spending an hour or two re setting up the server, creating an admin account (the machine starts with a root account), first things first adding neovim¹, then zsh, git, caddy, etc

a side quest

I wanted to use this re-setup time to do things more properly, and one of the things I've wanted is to have a catch all subdomain routing. previously when you were to go on doesnt-exist.dragon-vi.be you would just see the browser telling you there was an error getting to that page, no fancy error, not even a white page with "404 Not Found" then an <hr> and the name of the webserver

site.com {
    # handle
}

admin.site.com {
    #handle
}

*.site.com {
    # handle
}

but there's an issue with that, caddy, wanting everything to be https, doesn't let you have a wildcard subdomain without either using on_demand tls, or a tls { dns ... } section, the latter being preferred, the thing being that to tho that caddy needs to call an api from your nameserver provider, and it only has integrations with a few providers, and of those none (for what I could find) for hostinger, where I have my domain name and use to setup my dns records

so time to look for a separate dns provider (not another registrar, I still wanted to keep my domains on hostinger), and ended up landing on bunny.net (again, not advertising them), why? second most important, they have pretty generous pricing; most important 🐇 (yes, really, I'm the kind of person who makes my contracting decisions based on having cute mascots)

so after some more time of setting them as my nameserver resolver, then copying the dns records from hostinger to them, rebuilding caddy with the proper plugins, changing the caddyfile to use the tls section, now if you go to a subdomain that doesn't exist (which is quite a few still as I still haven't re setup the other services running in the server) it will show at least something other than a browser error page

the conclusion

at least main site is back up (as you're reading this at all), do have a vps on a company that's not oracle, also now outside of the states, with a slightly more complex setup but it still works

rest will get back up with time whenever I feel like it

make backups of things you care about!

this site still is work in progress, but really wanted to have it up even in an unfinished state

stuff I still want to do

• desktop pet ::3

hello there cool people ::3