My desktop background is black

Black as the night sky, because kids, that's closer to the natural color of the phosphors, right? Seeing somebody's desktop that is some nutty kind of leaf pattern, or kitties, or a picture of their kids, I am like "How in hell can you stand looking at that every day"? I can barely stand looking at bright desktops. The only thing worse is that default windows desktop. god. why not have more obvious product placement. With a black background, everything else is nice and crisp. For variety add a planet or asteroid (the new one that NASA is currently orbiting is a good one).

In addition, in this age of flying toasters and other pointless "screen savers", we have fogotten the UNIX roots of things like XEarth and XMoon. Desktop savers. Which look best when sitting on a nice black background.

My desktop is black, and I am more productive and have a better time than you.

stride: My desktop is love itself, gender issues aside. But since I am on a mac and have 3 screens, I will dedicate one to sweet lesbian love to compare/contrast.

I use a black background for everything. It is the most efficient color (or non-color) for your monitor to display. It is also the most energy-efficient, as a monitor displaying all white can use up to twice as much power as one displaying all black. It's much easier on the eyes as well. I get a headache looking at a mostly-white screen all day.

I hate how some Seattle-based software companies try to make applications work like paper. Paper is paper; a monitor is not. Most monitors only display a max resolution of 72 DPI, while paper is capable of 600 DPI and higher... They are not the same, so why try to make them the same. This is an example of a bad metaphor.

White text on a black background also has better contrast. If there is any color bleeding from the light of the activated phosphors, it bleeds into the black surrounding the text, perhaps making the text slightly bolder. If you have black text on a white background, the white bleeds into your text, making it thinner and harder to read.

I have also configured Internet Explorer to force all web pages to a black background. Of course this causes a problem for sites who specify black text explicitly, unless you also tell IE to "Ignore colors specified on Web pages" under the Accessibilty button in the Internet Control Panel. The default link colors also suck with a black background, so I have lightened each of them up to a luminance value of 200 from their defaults (under the Colors button in the same control panel).

Everything (including Everything) looks awesome this way. It's nice to still have some control over how I want stuff presented to me, rather than large consultant-committee-driven corporations telling me how I should live my life.

Well, you wonder why my desktop background's black?
Why you never see bright colors on my Mac?
And why does my crypto-clearance seem to have somber tone?
Well, there's a reason for the things that I turn on.

I fly the black for the poor and the beaten down,
Livin' in their headphones, on the angry side of town.
I wear it for the hackers who've long been doing time,
But are there because they made them up a crime.

Well, we've got a DSL lines, I do suppose,
We've got jumbo jets, flash cars and UFO's
But just so we're reminded of the ones who are held back,
My desktop background continues to be black.

Aw, I'd love to use a rainbow every day,
And tell the world that everything's OK.
But until the RIAA yields to my dictionary attack,
Till things are brighter, I'm the man in black.

(By SharQ with apologies to Johnny Cash)

-30-