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.

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.

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 It’s outdated (from ten months ago, apparently) but added some context that I, at least, was missing - and that also largely aligns with what you said.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

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California, I think.

I don’t know if it is, but you can always just use yt-dlp or something similar.

They can get pretty big, but the ones I encounter are generally about the size of my big toenail.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentatomidae

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.

Trackballs are glorious, just saying.

That’s pretty much what all the medical staff said!

At one point I had to stop and just kind of breathe in the middle of a sentence, then said “sorry … It hurts.” The nurse looked down pointedly and said “well, yeah. Have you seen your foot?”

I disagree.

If there’s going to be splashing, I’d very much rather it be around the toilet (which is presumably only going to be used for toilet purposes) than around the sink (which might be used for hygiene purposes as well as maybe filling cups, washing hands, brushing teeth, etc.).

This is written by someone who a. Is tall enough to piss straight in the sink and b. Is not a grower.

When my mom was pregnant with my eldest sister in Greece, she apparently once headed to the bathroom, only to find a scorpion waiting on the doorknob.

Stepping on a spider seems preferable.

This does not seem like an effective way to reduce splashing.

Heh. I can’t tell if this is a deliberate misinterpretation (in which case, pretty funny) or not (seems unlikely).

I broke my ankle taking out some recycling. It was sleeting heavily at the time and I was wearing my wife’s flip-flops because I couldn’t find my shoes (edit: fun fact, it turned out I had set the recycling on my shoes while looking for them). I slipped and fell off the front porch and my ankle broke when I landed.

I’ve dislocated my shoulder fourteen times, so I thought the ankle was just dislocated. Based on my experience with my shoulder, I tried to reset the ankle and stand back up … Twice. I only stopped because my neighbor heard me and came over to investigate; in a twist I wouldn’t believe in a movie, he turned out to be a physical therapist who mostly worked with ankles. He was a tremendous comfort because he was able to answer most of my questions while we waited for the ambulance.

The EMTs made me hop down the stairs of my front porch on one foot before they put me on the stretcher. To this day I wonder what they would have done if I’d broken both ankles or been several floors up or something.

I have so many stories about that night. It has shaped my life in one way or another ever since.