And then, in 2000, the culmination of all that effort and culture: Pygmoelion.

I added more context to my original response. Hope you enjoy it!

Apparently, “The Rain in Spain.” (To be clear, I would not have known that before looking it up to verify the quote.)

The original lyric I was parodying was “the rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain.” (Which, again, I would have gotten wrong if I hadn’t researched it.)

edit: After a few minutes reviewing YouTube videos, apparently it was prose recited by the protagonist of “My Fair Lady,” the movie from which that song came. Eventually she gained confidence via that song.

I don’t know, I previously lacked context for the quote, but after watching a relevant video I realize I’ve seen a parody of it in Family Guy.

Spanish pronouns are used mainly in the plain.

(Side note: I thought the original quote was something like “the rain in Spain falls mostly on the Spaniards,” but I can’t find anything to support that. Only today did I even learn that it was from a song.)

Well, fair enough that you were exposed to them. I didn’t have a lot of friends, especially not those even remotely into any kind of tech, as a kid; I think I first heard of trackballs from a programming teacher in about 1996 and bought one to try out of curiosity. Ever since then I’ve used one whenever it was an option.

I’ve even mostly used the same model. If you look in my comment history, you can see I recently mentioned that most of what I use is Kensington Orbits. I’ve tried other models, but they don’t work for me.

The one PC gaming exception for me is Minecraft. In that game you have to right-click a lot (as I’m sure you know) and I guess I haven’t developed the muscles for that because it makes my wrist very tired very quickly. Still, I play a lot of FPS games and have no problem holding the right click for zoom and such; only quick, repetitive right-clicking causes problems for me.

edit: To address your original comment, I have one friend who uses a trackball at work but a regular mouse for anything else. Other than that, I rarely meet anyone who has even heard of them, let alone used them, let alone consistently done so.

Apparently, some politician tried to shutdown the patent office in the nineteenth century because “everything that can be invented has been invented.”

edit: no need for “I” there.

On PC, I game exclusively with trackballs and have since the nineties. I’ve never not been given the side eye when someone found out that’s how I play.

When was this magical time during which they were popular?

It’s been a year or two, but I had no issues with Star Citizen in Linux. IIRC, I ran it through Lutris.

I like the dichotomy between the two currently existing responses to this post.

The person perhaps (eventually) most qualified to answer this might be Graeldon, who is on a quest to play every Steam game in alphabetical order.

Ancient video time!

https://youtu.be/yWYvl_AIIbU

My pleasure! Glad it helped. Also, I like your username.

I’m still not sure how much to fear AI, as I’m not knowledgeable on the subject (never even intentionally interacted with one yet) and have seen conflicting reports on how worryingly capable it is. Today I did see this video, which isn’t explicitly about AI but did offer an interesting perspective that could be compared to the paradigm: https://youtu.be/fVN_5xsMDdg

(Warning, the video was interesting, but I got invested about halfway through when I started comparing it to AI, then was disappointed in the ending)

I saw an interesting video about this. It’s outdated (from ten months ago, apparently) but added some context that I, at least, was missing - and that also largely aligns with what you said. Also, though it’s not super evident in this video, I think the presenter is fairly funny.

https://youtu.be/L6mmzBDfRS4

deleted by creator

It’s just the special effects department showing off.

It was probably the Technology Connections one. Even if not, I strongly recommend his channel.

https://youtu.be/udNXMAflbU8

Well, you might enjoy Steve1989mreinfo, a YouTuber who sporadically posts videos of himself consuming and reviewing MREs of varying ages.

Are you Steve?

Or long-click / long tap the back button.

I’ve never had to manually do that. I use almost exclusively Kensington Orbits and have for around twenty years. Maybe my hands are either clean or dirty enough that the balls are being polished by use.

That said, while I would say “have to” is strong wording, it’s still probably a good idea to polish your balls, innuendo or not.