And then one if the lines wasn't painted all the way through and suddenly your whole image was Olive green
Then, that older cousin teaches you about "CTRL + Z", which you think you also had to press the + key for it to work
Is this a universal experience from the time period. How did it start. Nobody told me to do this. I just did.
It's the millennial equivalent of just being handed a box of crayons and being told to go nuts. It's baked into our DNA.
I think I remember my computer class teacher saying something about it to my classmates and I.
I used to do this with Kid Pix on DOS back in the day. It was like paint but with sound effects lol.
I just liked to spam the dynamite tool (I think it was?) whichever one put the funny explosion effect on the screen.
You could also freeze the explosion midway through for a cool swirly effect.
I liked to switch the language to Spanish and do some fire remixes with the alphabet tool.
I remember in early middle school doing this incomputerlabe after finishing our work.
Sometimes the teacher would let us print it out 😁
I liked dragging a selection box on the desktop and seeing how thin of a line I could turn it into. When it was perfect the line would dissapear and just have one pixel on the top and bottom. It was also fun to draw the smallest possible box around random things on the desktop wallpaper. I did that with the windows 7 stock wallpaper a lot.
My 5 year old has done this a couple of times as well - I just has to adjust my semi-crazy mouse speed to her. :) I even saved the pics.
Another thing I distinctly remember is watching my das defragmentating the drive. I know that I at the same time hated it because it meant that we could not play games, but it was also strangely mesmerizing...
I remember drawing the Death Star and lots of TIE Fighters. One version of paint had this line tool that produced the hyperspace lines effect. Nowadays, I dabble with pixel art in Aseprite.
Another thing I loved doing was doing a single color fill, then zipping the mouse around with the free-form selection and deleting the selection.
I still occasionally do this if I am on the phone with someone and need something to do with my hands that doesn't take much brain power or make any noise.