It sounds like he actually orchestrates a "big night out" each time:
One of the things I learned is that my review will be worse than useless if I am not having a good time the night I review it. I'll feel bad for underperforming, you'll feel bad for having a stressed, depressed drunkard on the line, and no one's knowledge of UX and the world is improved. So, I've made a few rules. One: I never drink alone. That means I need to ask friends whether they're up for a night out. I normally pay for their drinks, too. Two: I never schedule in a rush. That means that I now commit to a general two-week turnaround, but it can be longer than that, at times, and there's nothing I'm willing to do about it to make it faster.
"I'll pay you to look at this and give me your thoughts next time you're drunk." and "I'll pay you to look at this when you're drunk." are not mutually exclusive.
I was excited for zen garden but didn’t see anything there that stood out as I was expecting more of a focus on the design rather than the css purist lens. There are some amazing things that can be done purely through css, https://a.singlediv.com/2014-2019/ comes to mind.
Not sure what the accessibility implications of (abusing?) html/css in this way are. Perhaps wrapping adding aria-role=figure would alleviate my concerns
Related but I wrote a Tampermonkey/Greasemonkey extension script [1] that when activated randomly rotated all the letters on a website from between -25 to +25 degrees as a part of my experiments around forcing more active "visual engagement" when reading to see if it made a measurable difference for recall.
How about, the reader is old and computer illiterate. Being drunk is not needed. For example, here on this site, there is this unused space left and right. I meanwhile scale all websites with such unused space, using Ctrl+`+` to get the font bigger without losing functionality. But this site has an attribute `width=75%` in the outermost table #main, which makes this unused space stay there. So scaling up the font using the mentioned key combination is losing functionality (= less space). Luckily I can tweak that here using a user CSS (`#hnmain {width: revert;}`) but an old computer illiterate will probably have a slight problem. So, don't make your users drunk, just ensure they are, like, 80 and do not have advanced computer skills.
There is also so much more to designing for low tech literate than spacing. The accessibility guidelines focus so much on UI and being able to see what is there, but don’t focus enough on understanding what can be done with the website/app. Making sure your buttons actually look like buttons is a decent start but knowing that you can press a button, what it will do as the action, and being able to undo it and go back are so so valuable to helping them learn how to engage with sites.
CSS is amazing. So much can be done with so little code - blur, animation, insanely tiny loading spinners.. but there are SO many things I didn’t know about on display here.
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I remember the first time I read this post, the message really stuck with me. "The user is drunk" is a brilliant line.
That being said, I don't think every website or tool needs to aim for the lowest common denominator.
Any application that will be used occasionally with the goal of not using it as quickly as possible should work this way.
A counterexample would be e.g. retail POS software, which should be optimized for minimum work and maximum responsiveness for trained users.
If it was "ill test your site when I next come home from a big night out" it may be OK.
Dead Comment
(Source: have been drunk many times, and used a computer.)
https://csszengarden.com/
[1] https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/551208-rotate-letters-scri...
There is also so much more to designing for low tech literate than spacing. The accessibility guidelines focus so much on UI and being able to see what is there, but don’t focus enough on understanding what can be done with the website/app. Making sure your buttons actually look like buttons is a decent start but knowing that you can press a button, what it will do as the action, and being able to undo it and go back are so so valuable to helping them learn how to engage with sites.
exactly how it becomes when sufficiently drunk
To the author - hats off! A toast!