Well, to paraphrase an old adage, mankind rushes in where angels fear to tread. Bugger the consequences, where western man is concerned. Mammon has ruled ever since the west became agricultural and was ruled by rich local rulers, and it only got worse from thereon. First man created god, then he decided to play god at every opportunity, regardless of consequences. And a right feckin' mess it's landed us all in! On the one hand we have the climate catastrophe - about which nothing serious is really being done because profits are more important - and on the other, surveillance capitalism. And people aren't even aware of the wider consequences of this so-called AI that is nothing of the sort. The vast data centres required for this crap have huge impacts in themselves. They are being located in vulnerable locations (economically, environmentally, socially/societally vulnerable), require vast amounts of land, even more vast amounts of energy and humongous amounts of fresh water that is far too valuable a resource and often deprives whole populations of access to clean potable water! But hey, what does it matter, as long as a few already super-rich individuals can get infinitely richer still. To hell with people, what do they matter.

Humans are just about the dumbest animal on the planet. At any rate, modern man. (And I refuse to ever use PC 'Newspeak'.) Indigenous peoples who live traditional lifestyles have true intelligence and true wisdom, they live in perfect harmony, balance, with their environments, taking only what they need to live and no more. Modern man has none of these attributes. Heck, most other animal species are vastly more intelligent than modern man.

The paragon of the animals we most decidedly are not, quite the opposite.

If we had different economical, ethical, and political models, losses of jobs would matter little. Everybody would get a good basic income from the state, and those who work would get taxed heavily on additional income. Simple. Oh, and the rich and super rich would have (most of) their wealth confiscated. Simple. During the Spanish civil war last century, the Barcelona Anarchist Commune showed the way, in many ways. Pity it wouldn't scale up, so we'd have to think of other frameworks. Maybe Plato had got it roughly right with The Republic. But alas and alack, the masses are far too apathetic to actually do anything about anything and far too obsessed with consuming. Mostly sheep, only less intelligent.

EDIT - Deleted prior post no point in doubling up... anthing that needs to be explained is below...

OK spent more time than I'd like cleaning up EGYPT Theme... more in the fiddly pixel alignment and testing on different sized monitors...

Minor stuff to do...resizing, endcap alignment fixing... etc etc etc... but time consuming...

I'll upload when done for anyone who may want it with the others in a few weeks after double checking - Yep - I will take a break and re-look fresh. Then I can abuse myself later with the 'What was I thinking??" stuff and fix prior to making available.
Later

Very Nice!

Thank you kind sir...

SOME TRIVIA:
When a person gets to the twilight of their years, keeping the mind and body active aids in longevity. So doing this I got to read a lot as well as nobody is too old to learn. Finding specific symbols that had a modicum of authenticity or some kind of meaning to match what I chose to render or edit came with some background reading. So I learned a lot more about Ancient Egyptian culture in the process…

e.g.. For the Weather module I chose RA, the supposed father of all the Egyptian Gods, with the eye of RA symbol, same with Anubis, Isis, The Sphinx, the book of the dead, Cleopatra, Tutankhamun, The symbol of Amon RA and Wadjet on the main menu….so on and so forth…
Regardless of who likes it or not, it was a good experience.

The first of the cleanups done.

I did this....ummmm....??? Heck I cannot remember how long ago... But I do know it was a long time ago because there were no moon or calendar skins - there are now.

It's cleaner in many ways both in performance and submenu's but I can never put this up for download. I can find many flaws but for its time it was ok...While I definitely know who I could contact for permissions, some even personally, the rigmaroll associated with Miles' estate, Labels and too many to list is simply not worth the amount of energy and time waiting for zero return on something that was always just a fun project. Because there are so many parties involved in this one, one of them is bound to say no. Besides ,there are some minor things to correct and it's just a fricking hobby, one not worth any hassle that would destroy any desire to do any.

Que sera sera..



Onto another...

Wouldn't this be considered "fan art" ? I mean...

Jorge, I have found this is a very grey area. Theoretically, no matter the subject, anyone could say they are a fan of it yes?

Definitely a fan, and as for art, that too is a swinging door.

I do not know. If I correct some of the pixel alignments, I'd happily make it available, but as I mentioned privately, I do this for the sheer joy and pleasure aspects of seeing a mental visualization idea come to life in the form of a Winstep theme. Miles changed labels more than any other musician just about...so asking for any kind of permission even as fan art would be a nightmare...then you have the estate, publicists, any living artists of the covers to also credit and get permission from...

If one person releases something as fan art, then it means another can put something that might purposefully breach copyright in under the banner of fan art? That's all I'm suggesting.

About 10 or more years ago? (probably)... I did a Green Gel theme. The idea was good, but I was still finding my way and working out that it's fine to put a square peg in a square hole but if you don't know where the hole is, you're stuck with a spare square....
Enough of the metaphors and cliches...

ANYWAY - I redid this or more correctly, remembered the idea and took it slowly.

Normally, I would not put bare text on a desktop but this seems to work because I created the wallpaper,...

Also I chose what I considered the important things to display and laptop owners will likely find it tells them most if not all of what they'd want to know/see in information.

I will upload this one after some checking and fixing the unseeable black line that seems to have appeared.

LAST - I make no apologies for the size of the clock . It lost the beauty of the sheens and reflective when smaller. It is by far, the best clock I have done to date,


I have included a screenshot with all modules and one with them all closed

Cheers

EDIT:

In the menu replacement I did a simpler color-coordinated thing since the below images. As soon as I stopped try to be clever with gel images done that do not stretch well or tile well, problem on sub-menu's was fixed. This is where I say FFS

You got to start uploading those themes to the Winstep Gallery lol

Thanks for the encouragement - I think I have become more fussy with practice.... I will be uploading this after some minor changes. I completely changed the menu to super clean. I'll compress the png's soon and start with them over the weekend

Here's the fix.... the email which I still cannot get working also changes to the mailbox having a rolled up newspaper and mail in the empty hole too.. The submenu is super fast and the graphic never changes... took a little while to work out where to avoid putting things I do not want to change..

So Jorge I apologise for the delay, I just don't want to be one of those people saying to myself "I wish I had of..." so I am testing speed, glitches etc.

I notice that anyone pre version 18? will probably get the old right click menu instead of the submenu. This is a complete do-over of Green Gel over 10yrs ago.

Here's the fix it's very clean on all right clicks and fast. I am being fussy to ensure all the text in menus doesn't get cut off. I am going to try and shorten the horizontal aspects.. Windows is the worst offender for long names which is funny considering Windows took such a long time to implement longer naming conventions.
Cheers

EDIT REQUEST:
Jorge, I know this belongs in the requests section, but this request is only for people who might wish to skin winstep. I do not know if Windows prevents this? It would be REALLY nice, if the main menu could have Opacity and Transparency ability on the button text separately in the MainMenu for blending purposes? I do not know if that is even possible? It would not be an image transparency, more of a font transparency I think?

I did a second Aquarium with freshwater fish.. so Wanda can hang with her friends...
The Vertical fish tank menu took longer than expected...

The wallpaper comes with this and I created one for the saltwater as well.


yeah, yeah, upload them... I have stopped all graphical aspects and just doing the fiddly alignment and "Why is it doing that when...???" stuff which will take me a day with all of them because as luck would have it, none of the things bugging me are the same in any of them..

P.S. - trivia - The funny thing is have some great vector and wireframe apps but for raster images, the old Macromedia Fireworks edits lowres stuff much better... it's possibly free now it is so old...

Ok... all counting I have 12 themes to upload when tidied up... so I'll start tomorrow one at a time...

Here's another GEL one I completely reimagined... I am trying to find the anime person for an OK in the Non Xtreme pastel one, otherwise the rest is all mine in this one...
I suppose any person has to get better at something the more they do it otherwise it's masochism... I look at some of my old ones and ...oh well... reimagining seems to work.
If nothing else, it's colorful and very gelatinous


Later

And the last of the ones to be uploaded - the train set you have when you do not have a train set.
Yes, the wallpaper was designed specifically for this envisioned outcome.
That's it for now... This one took a lot of creative thought energy in the 'how' to get it this far.

Seven Themes have been uploaded to the Gallery.

There are six more. I have a rare studio paying job (not as common at my age) , so it will have to wait a day or so.

Themes in the Gallery are as follows:


- DaVinci
- BONSAI
- TRAINS
- Foundation
- GEL
- GEL Xtreme
- Green GooGEL

Like the Green GooGEL / "Slime" one - original and a touch of humor there.