Windows brings out the Rorschach test in everyone

Raymond Chen's articles are true wealth of contemporary tech-lore. My favorite is the one where a user reported error on Flight Simulator map [0] and it escalated all the way up to Bill Gates & the then chief of FS division.

[0] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20170418-00/?p=95...

years ago my father got a decomissioned, wiped clean notebook from work and asked me to set it up for him. i didn't want to shell out a hundred bucks for windows, so i suggested trying linux (ubuntu) and he agreed. "intrepid ibex" was installed without issues. a few weeks later i asked him if everything was ok and how he liked it, and he had no complaints, except one: he didn't like the edgy skull on the desktop wallpaper: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_version_history#/media/...

The wallpaper in question: https://windowswallpaper.miraheze.org/wiki/Red_moon_desert

I suppose it looks like buttocks?

This article includes the photo of the (clothed) hologram (it's the third image).

https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/038-design...

"The original wallpaper for Windows XP was Red Moon Desert, until people claimed that Red Moon Desert looked like a pair of buttocks."

That's not what 'this looks like ass' means.

I find it worrying because being super sensitive to stuff like that is usually red flag that the person is kinda into it - Senators in Bathroom stalls and all that (bonus if you get the reference).

But I think the person who directly contacted Microsoft about this was probably not the person who noticed it and brought it up on the Government side just the Person who was tasked with communicating about it so its good they remain nameless.

Let me introduce you the splash screen of Krita (pretty much the only capable digital painting app in open source realm): https://krita.org/images/pages/electrichearts_20250824A_kiki...

Raymond Chen is my favorite MS blog writer

Red Moon Desert is now my wallpaper for the rest of the week.

Looking at it from a distance indeed may raise some brows.

[edited to more align with the essay's thesis, thanks to the reply for pointing out misalignment]

I don't think anyone complained about the hologram or red moon desert background because they disliked windows; they complained because they were hypersensitive to possible inappropriate/sexual connotations in imagery.

(Conversely, I very much doubt that the baby hologram or the red moon desert background swayed anyone to dislike Windows.)

People who hated Windows for being Windows would complain about it on technical grounds. It was terrible, and it crashed all the time. People who hated Windows because it was by Microsoft, would complain about Microsoft's bundling and monopoly tactics.

I’ve never heard these criticisms about Windows before.

My challenge to the author would be to address the much more serious criticisms of Windows that have been frustrating real users and have been left unresolved.

Address the forced Microsoft login in Windows 11. Even walled garden Apple doesn’t force that in their desktop OS.

Address the pre-installed junkware games that plagued Windows 10.

Address the Bing and Edge nags and hostility toward the will of the user.

Address sending my start menu search query to bing by default, and how Windows search is horrendous compared to every other OS. How is a free program made by a single person able to perform faster and with more accurate results? (Everything)

Address the fact that Microsoft still tolerates OEMs dumping spyware/junkware/scareware like McAfee on their computers when you buy them new.

Address the nags to put my data on OneDrive.

Address the dual hidden right click context menus in File Explorer that annoy power users to this day.

Address the fact that File Explorer will hang for multiple seconds with completely unresponsive UI upon bootup if you pin a network share that is no longer accessible.

Address the reason why the taskbar lost its decades-old customization options with Windows 11.

Address the disaster that was the Windows 8 UI, which was even more of a disaster in the context of Windows Server where tablet UI made even less sense.

Address the reason why telemetry fingerprints your connected devices and installed programs and sends that private information to Microsoft by default.

Address the reason why a $200 OS charges an extra dollar for HEVC video extensions support to gain compatibility with the most popular phone in the world like it’s a sleazy used car dealership.

Address the fact that a $200 retail price operating system made by one of the largest and most resourced companies in the world is somehow slower, less user-friendly, has less stable drivers, and is an overall worse experience than a grocery store ice cream aisle stocked full of free operating systems cobbled together by volunteers. This has gotten so bad that mainstream technology influencers and very non-technicial surface-level mainstream audience phone and car reviewers like Marques Brownlee start recommending Linux.

In what universe does it make any logical sense that I abandoned the operating system made by the creator of DirectX, Xbox, and the owner of potentially the largest collection of game studios in the world because a game developed and published by that very same company (Indiana Jones and the Great Circle) continually crashed with my mainstream commercial graphics card on that company’s OS? By switching to a different OS that’s not even supposed to be compatible with this game, my graphics driver instability stopped entirely. (AMD RX 9070XT, a top-of-the-line most recent generation GPU).

It seems like the purpose of this article is to humanize this OS that comes from a monopolistic and generally horrible, unethical company; to say “everyone will criticize Windows over anything minor, when it’s actually a great artisan OS made by real people. Look, we put a picture of a baby on the sticker! How cute.”

While I agree that Microsoft employees are real people who aren’t necessarily responsible for the draconian choices of their C-suite lords, and that making any functioning modern OS is no small feat, let’s not pretend that Windows wouldn’t be a better much OS if it was produced by someone else — almost anyone else.

Another example: [0]

Have to say this never would have occurred to me. There are also examples of US people being offended by scenes considered harmless in other cultures, ie the Totoro bathtub scene [1], search for "family bathing scene".

I guess if this hologram offended people, there must be some nice stories about Nirvana's Nevermind (1991).

[0] https://velvetshark.com/ai-company-logos-that-look-like-butt...

[1] https://uk.movies.yahoo.com/my-neighbour-totoro-10-things-di...

How do I view the collectors edition Windows XP without Googling “naked baby” ?

Did this comment already put me on a list?

I must say that "But it makes me wonder about the mental state of our beta testers [...]"

cought me off guard while drinking coffee

> Windows XP had its own share of complaints. The original wallpaper for Windows XP was Red Moon Desert, until people claimed that Red Moon Desert looked like a pair of buttocks.

oh thanks, now I cannot unsee it. :)

[2003]

The same government should sue all new mothers: how dare they deliver babies into this world completely naked!!!

the ubuntu logo is a skull and the windows logo is four little windows and somehow both are accurate descriptions of the people who use them

I'm kind of offended they changed them all. At some point you just have to say 'okay this is just complete bullshit' and stand for the things you create. Otherwise everything ends up in this corporate bland soup of nothingness. Of course we know where Microsoft ended up, but I doesn't have to be that way.

By all means be pragmatic if it's a government complaining, but you don't have to take all crazy feedback at face value.

So what was the government that complained?

What is an “obscene body part”?

If this body part is obscene, shouldn’t the author do the moral thing and remove his own?

The original 1989 SimCity box was a Rorschach test that cost Maxis $50k.

The cover was a Bakelite toy city simulator appliance with a red MONSTER disaster button, and a stompy T-Rex-looking creature waving over San Francisco on its TV screen.

Maxis never called it Godzilla on the box or in the game. Reviewers looked at the inkblot and saw Godzilla anyway.

Original monster cover:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/SimHacker/MicropolisCore/m...

Revised cover after the lawsuit, monster swapped for a tornado (the MONSTER button survived):

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/SimHacker/MicropolisCore/m...

In Feb 2024 I emailed Jeff Braun (Maxis co-founder/CEO) and asked what actually happened and how much Maxis had to pay. He wrote back the same day:

> Maxis was sued by Toho. We never referred to the name Godzilla, our monster on the box cover was a T-Rex looking character, but... a few magazine reviews called the monster, Godzilla. That was all it took. Toho called it "confusion in the marketplace". We paid $50k for Godzilla to go away. In all honesty, Toho liked Maxis, they said $50k was the minimum they take for Godzilla infringement.

All the box scans are in the Micropolis repo -- high res front, back with the "floods, earthquakes, fires, tornados, meltdowns and monsters" disaster list, side panels, and the platform variants, each with descriptions:

https://github.com/SimHacker/MicropolisCore/blob/main/docume...

Full email thread:

https://github.com/SimHacker/MicropolisCore/blob/main/docume...

The back of the box kept advertising monsters as a feature the same year the monster got lawyered off the front.

The function names in the code all refered to it like "MakeMonster()", but admittedly there was a "GOD" symbol in the code used to index the Monster sprite likw "GetSprite(GOD)", but Toho could not have know that, since it was a C preprocessor macro that was compiled away in the binary:

https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/master/micropol...

They should have told them to gtfo and use Slackware then.

I was watching YouTube the other day and it was talking about Nirvana's Nevermind album, showed the album cover but with a square censoring part of it. In these cases it really is the censor themselves who is debauched. Reminds me of the classic story where Samuel Johnson left out some rude words from his dictionary. He was congratulated for having left them out, to which he is said to have quipped "I congratulate you on being able to look them up!"

This is why large companies should employ a few pedophiles to run things like this by them first. Long term, much savings.

Why should the govt remain nameless?

satanic

> Until we got a complaint from a government (who shall remain nameless for obvious reasons) that was upset with Windows 95 because it depicted naked children.

How dare you violate the government's exclusive right to naked children!

niceee

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Users scare me.