Subpage: Infodumping
I find stuff like coins, bills, and stamps really interesting. Something about the idea of a small document that's mass produced and gets sent around and stuff is very appealing to me. But I also hate the concept of money. I hate that an arbitrary number is used to determine whether people are allowed to use resources or not. But while a post-money society where people can just use resources as they need them might not have much use for coins and bills, I think postage stamps could remain useful for allowing people to drop off mail without overloading the postal system. In such a situation, postage stamps would be used as a measure of how much stress a piece of mail puts on a postal system; the "lightest-effort" piece of mail could be valued at one stamp, while stuff like packages would take more stamps. Every month (or some other time unit but I'm using month as an example) each person would be allowed to take for themselves an amount of stamps, calculated to be the amount of mail that if everyone served by that postal system were to send, would put it near peak capacity without overloading it. This amount of mail would probably be much more than the average person needs, but not enough for some other people; if someone needs to send mail but has already used up that month's stamps they could go to the post office and have it sent in person, and if a person or organization (such as a school) regularly needs to send a lot of mail they could fill out paperwork with the reason why they want/need to get more stamps per month. Ideally most people who walk into the post office could ask for something to be mailed and it would be done without asking for stamps, unless a person is trying to send an excessive amount of mail. The goal of this system would be to allow people to send all the mail they want or need to send, while limiting people's ability to overload the system by sending out spam.
Generally when something is designed, every aspect of it has some some sort of intended use, some reason why it is the way it is. But sometimes, stuff is a certain way because a kind of usage was planned at some point but never actually implemented. Sometimes a design element actually did get used to interact with something else, and when that something else is gone the design element is not immediately removed, or cannot be removed. So it remains without a purpose, only as a reflection of what once used to be. The concept is somewhat broad and fuzzy, but the main categories of vestigial design I can think of are 1. Planned But Never Implemented 2. Implemented But Then Removed and 3. Technically Still There But Very Hidden
Video game consoles sometimes have the first category of vestigial elements, to varying degrees. For example, the connectors underneath the NES, SNES, and N64. The latter two were used for the Satellaview and 64DD attachments, but those never released outside of Japan. To my knowledge these connectors are not used in any other official attachments, and I haven't heard of any unofficial attachments that make use of them, so in every other region the SNES and N64 released in, this connector is a vestigial design element. A much clearer but also less relevant example of this is the Virtual Boy's link cable slot, since a Virtual Boy link cable never released (but also unless you're a gaming youtuber, you've never used a virtual boy). In these examples, the design elements are only vestigial because nothing that could interact with them ever released, but they are still technically functional. Examples where this sort of vestigial element is visible but not functional at all are harder to find; after all, why would someone make a design element nonfunctional if they plan to give it a use later on? But sometimes with the element's removal, the blank space it leaves behind is noticeable. But also it's hard to know for certain it's not just a blank space that's there for any other reason.
The second category can be a lot easier to notice because all it takes is to see that a design element has been removed or changed, and look around for anything that interacts with it that might've made more sense with the prior version of the design element. An example I remember noticing as a kid was Minecraft's "locked chest" block. In one of the Beta versions, it was added as part of an April Fools update, and it was meant to look exactly like a regular chest. They could only be normally found throughout the world in this one joke update, but even afterwards the block remained in the game, except it didn't do anything anymore. In Beta 1.8, chests were updated to be slimmer than most blocks and have an opening/closing animation, but locked chests kept the appearence of old chests. They were like this until 1.2.5 (when I personally found out about the locked chest, probably from getting some mod like TooManyItems that shows you blocks which the player isn't meant to see). Later in 1.3.1 the old chest texture got deleted but the block kept using the same location in the texture file, which was mostly placeholder textures but an emerald block texture on top. In 1.5ish(?) the texture system was overhauled to make each texture have its own individual file, and the locked chest started using placeholder magenta/black square textures. And I think at some point later the block finally got removed in its entirety. Old games that keep getting updated have a lot of examples like this; Minecraft also kept around an old variant of the wooden slab that the game considered to be a type of stone slab, TF2 is full of weapons that hold more/less ammo than their models indicate, Portal 2 has a whole cosmetics microtransaction store that never really got off the ground. But the example that got me to type this up was Splatoon 3's tricolor battles, because it stands out how quickly a lot of its design became vestigial. Specifically, its asymmetrical 2v4v2 teams and its only being available on the second day of Splatfests. The original purpose was to make things more challenging for whichever team was in the lead at the halfway point; that team's members couldn't opt out of tricolor battles, and they would always be the 4-player defending team, while the other teams' members could choose whether or not to play tricolor matches and would be in the 2-player attacking teams. But this was only kept up for the first two or three splatfests of the game. Since then, anyone from any team can gets to choose whether or not to play tricolor battles or just regular turf war, and any team can be assigned as attacker/defender; all that remains from the original formatting is leading team members get bonus points as defenders, and the other teams' members get bonus points as attackers. This isn't necessarily a bad change, but it does make it feel a lot more pointless that the only 3-team gamemode is so asymmetrical with the two smaller teams sharing a common goal, and particularly pointless how the mode is only available on the second day of splatfests (previously justified by how the halftime results determined player roles).
The third category is probably most common when it comes to computing stuff, especially when it comes to stuff like Windows that tries to maintain as much backwards compatibility as possible. Like if you use you've probably already noticed how newer versions have both their own dedicated settings pages as well as the older control panel, with a lot of specific settings being shared between the two but some being unique to one or the other, and some of the newer pages' buttons opening up pages from the older control panel. The A: and B: drive slots being reserved for floppy disks is pretty well known too; you could still get some USB 3.5" disk drive and plug it into your modern Windows PC and see that it defaults to A:, it all still works. It's just not something you'd probably ever run into unless you were deliberately looking for it. Somewhere in between this and the second category there's Super Mario 64 DS' backlight button. In a sense it still works but it's also completely broken on anything that isn't the very first Nintendo DS model. The game calls it a "backlight" but really it works more like a GBA SP AGS-001's frontlight did, except it's from the back; the screen doesn't rely on the light to function, and it can be completely turned off and the screen will still be visible with ambient light. Usually this would be done from the console's main menu, but Super Mario 64 DS had a button for it within the game's own menu too. And on the original DS it works just as intended. But on the DS Lite or any newer model, pressing that button will just turn the screen black; it'll still be turned on, just completely black. I don't actually know why it reacts like this, I would've assumed that it would either do nothing or crash the game. But still, vestigial design element that's useless in most consoles people might have played this game on.
Personally I think there's no right or wrong way to speak a language as long as you understand its speakers and its speakers understand you while both are making an effort to understand and be understood. Some people think the best way to define speaking a language is to define a certain way to speak it as "proper" and determine speech that's closer to it as more proper and speech further from it as less so. But personally I lean towards the "fuck prescriptivism" side of things. Languages change over time, dialects that were once similar become more different, and if you determine any way of speaking a language as the "proper" way then eventually some dialects are gonna drift away, close enough to still be mutually intelligible and broadly considered the "same language" but far enough to be considered a "wrong way of speaking". And then that becomes a way to judge people who don't fit the standard close enough as less educated (Source: All the people I've seen disregard AAVE words as 'improper'). And an answer to this is to say "this is its own dialect that does this so it's fine" but that seems like a band aid fix when the actual issue is that speaking differently from standards is considered "worse" than being within them because that's what deciding on one as a standard does, and why doing so at all seems bad to me. Sometimes people will speak in ways you won't understand, but the instinct here should be to ask them about it and try to understand it before going either "ok I understand I'll keep that in mind" or "some people might not understand that so maybe you could use [X] to mean the same thing". Just like, be respectful of how people speak language yknow.
This would be within the context of the above anti-prescriptivism section. This wouldn't be prescribing any way of speaking or writing, it's just a couple of things I would like to see more commonly accepted.
E.g. pingüino -> pinghuino/pingwino. Not that I have anything against ü, but sometimes it can be hard to type and it shows up in the very specific instance of "gue" and "gui" where the u isn't silent. Whether you consider it its own letter or just u with a diacritic, it's a whole element of the writing system that barely gets used. I think either "hu" or "w" could work because they are used (as far as i can tell) exclusively to represent the sound /w/, either syllable-initially or in loanwords.
In all honestly I have only one example for this sort of thing. Alcohol -> Alcol. Since with other words such as "leer" and "Sahara" double vowels imply having a pause in between both vowel sounds, it's a bit counterintuitive when a word where those vowel sounds have merged into a single sound but it's still spelled with two of the letter.
E.g. hámster -> jámster, líving -> livin. For this one I really want to emphasize that there's nothing wrong with some words not following spelling rules completely, especially when it's a proper noun, but it is also nice to be able to tell a word's pronounciation just from its spelling. It's not too much of a problem yet, because older loans have already had respelled versions become commonly used (e.g. football -> fútbol) and newer non-respelled loans are mostly limited to tech stuff. This isn't just a thing with loans, as shown by my whole section about 'alcohol' being weird. And to clarify this shouldn't be some forced thing where RAE decides "the respelled form is the correct one" (this is a 'que la RAE se vaya a la mierda' webpage), but rather something people get more comfortable with doing just cause. Maybe in more structured formal writing, you could have the original spelling for a thing but have the phonemicized version on top like furigana. If people aren't used to seeing "Waifay/Huaifay" or "Maus" or "Estrimin" then those might look kinda silly so they might not wanna use them and that's okay, but like, keep an open mind to it yknow? Especially the furigana thing.
At least for like, the first time it's mentioned in a text. Of course pronounciations for these can vary, but that's okay because whoever's writing something can choose to either do it how they pronounce it, do it however they think the most common pronounciation is, or just not include a guide if they think there's too many alternatives and they don't want to claim one is the most correct. You could do this with parentheses next to the original spelling, e.g. Arkansas (Árkinso), but the difficult and therefore fun way to do it is with furigana/ruby text.
