467 karma · joined February 15, 2017
I have no idea where you'd be able to find it since it's a proprietary product but InfoLease 9 had one of my favorites TUIs from a long gone era. You could navigate through and edit complicated contract information extremely quickly through a series of fixed number based menus and views. Once I got the hang of it I could blaze through entering tons and tons of data without any effort. I suppose a lot of BBSes had a kind-of similar interface but without the field validation and documentation (you could write ? virtually anywhere to get quick documentation about what you were editing or what something was intended for, and fields were validated in this really "perfect" way where it never felt like you lost time if you fat-fingered something).
It's usually not that complicated: They enjoy provoking people, particularly people that can be reflexively upset by reading words. It's a game to them, against a party that they do not respect. The words they say might upset you, but the words ultimately mean nothing to them outside of provoking you, and the more chaotic they can make the situation the more amusing it is.
Ortholinear split takes a while to get used to but you really never want to go back to a regular keyboard after you get used to it - it makes you feel like you've been breaking your wrists.
I don't know Japanese but with what I know about classical Chinese character construction, I'd expect that melon acts as a phonetic hint and dog hints at the meaning (e.g. the word this character represents sounds like "Melon" but is related to "Dog").
Edit: I was curious and looked it up, it's exactly this https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%8B%90#Chinese
If the muses strike me just right I feel like I could write for ages though. Then it goes in a directory somewhere, never to be seen again.
I don't expect anyone funding these efforts to ever let it get to that point, though. It's more likely that they focus on making inferior, specialized intelligences to do specific tasks: effectively, mechanical animals that render the need to pay for a working class obsolete.
You'd just be another weird wild animal on this rock, maybe to be kept as a pet while it does far more interesting things with its time, or an obstacle to be mostly worked around and avoided (perhaps appreciated at a distance as some potentially dangerous semi-conscious curiosity).
I used to love seeing BBS ANSI art. There was just such an aesthetic to it.