I guess even though I’ve managed to find more acquaintances thanks to Cohost, one random event still sticks out in my mind. I generally find it very difficult to write and joke about things, so I write very neutrally about everything. It’s like keeping a diary.
One time, Coda posted a random idea of an image that gets compressed every time someone looks at it.
I’m sitting here, reading this and thinking - I might be able to do this really quickly, in an hour or two. As it happens, I’m on an intercity train right now with about two hours left in the journey - so I quickly whip up a Python script and upload it to Cohost. For the image, I obviously had to choose something free to use; and since I had recently been rewriting an article about the Game Boy, detailing the history of its display selection, I picked this one by Evan-Amos.
Image of a train, representing the journey where this story takes place
After publishing the post, I go about my business, only returning a couple of hours later. And I see that the image has already been heavily compressed, with a terrifying face appearing in the middle of the screen. It was a completely random but incredibly fortunate coincidence… and then a few hours later, the image deteriorates completely when some kind of write conflict occurs, apparently. And the Game Boy is left… bleeding, entirely, completely.
Scary Face
Blood Sea
So what now? Who knows. But it was one of those memorable completely random organic events.
Sequence of images merged into a video, which by virtue of the compression resulted in the Blood Sea nightmarishly pulsing: