So what is with all of this amateurish phishing spam that has been sliding right past SpamAssassin like shit through a goose for the past few months? Has someone recently discovered a new technique for finding open relays that will SPF-sign anything?

Received: from mail.vividdreamqb.name (milestone.clevervistakb.com [170.130.167.11])
From: Dicks Rewards Team
Subject: Final notice: YETI Beach Lounge Wagon unlocked by your gear score
Message-ID:
X-Request-ID: d36d3311-8a4b-4ac9-91b0-4afeee106923
Feedback-ID: jhkmk:vividdreamqb.name:mail
X-Spam-Report:
    * 0.0 HTML_MESSAGE BODY: HTML included in message
    * 0.4 KHOP_HELO_FCRDNS Relay HELO differs from its IP's reverse DNS

I can't even tell who has been popped here. "clevervistakb.com" and "vividdreamqb.name" have the same IPs but different registrars (maybe that's a TLD thing?) It's also not clear to me which of those domains sender_access matches on.

I have, however, come to the conclusion that that there are simply too many web sites.

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Andrew Paul:

But -- and just hear me out here -- the American voters did resummon Nyarlathotep because enough of us remain enthralled by his unfettered madness, wanton cruelty, and nonsensical brinkmanship. This is classic Negotiating 101 courtesy of the Faceless God himself! Sure, he may have kicked it up a notch from "sheer madness" to "abject depravity," but that's for the pundits to debate.

That said, yes, it seems like the promise to "fill every womb with salt and every testicle with spiders" is sort of backfiring. People don't respond well to that type of unprompted threat, and his immovable, hulking form appears to have finally met an immovable object. It's a little ironic that the "immovable object" in this metaphor is reality itself, but I'll take the poetic flourishes where I can these days. You can never have too much light in these dark times.

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▶︎I miss the olden days when I could manage to give even one fractional shit about human spaceflight.

When every news article didn't require navigating whether it was propaganda, or a grift, or both (because it's never science).

When I thought that humanity surviving beyond Earth was even remotely possible.

This timeline sucks.

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Arguing with robots has become something of a hobby of mine.

▶︎

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I see we are at the "US Navy base in Virginia asking for donations of toiletries" stage of the victory lap.

Sailors have been arriving in Norfolk, Va., home to the world's biggest naval base, since at least the middle of March. Several groups that provide aid to military personnel say that the sailors arrived with very little. A call went out to community groups, asking for basic supplies like hygiene products.

"The base was asking for donations of toiletries and different things for the sailors coming back, because they were coming back with nothing," said Derrick Johnson, commander of American Legion Post 327 in Norfolk.

The post hosted a spaghetti dinner for some of the sailors, said Keith Shanesy, one of the post's vice commanders.

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▶︎Each message starts with the Farsi word for "attention" followed by what is assumed to be some header information as two 5-digit groups. Then there is a set of 181 five-digit groups. Each message is padded out to take 20 minutes, and there are six messages in each transmission.

Direction finding has traced the signal to a US base near Stuttgart, Germany. In addition to using Farsi, Iran has repeatedly attempted to jam the signal, causing V32 to change frequencies a few times. There's also a more recent, so far unidentified, jammer trying to block the signal.

In addition to direction finding, there is a surprising amount of information you can glean from the audio. The first few days of broadcasts had specific beeps in the background, which appear to be warning tones from a specific type of American military transmitter that warns the operator when encryption is not engaged. At first, a human read the numbers. Eventually, the station switched to using automated numbers. In addition, there have been a few times when Windows 10 system sounds have leaked into the transmission.

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My "No use of geiger counters on church property" sign has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my sign.

Highly esteemed deeds are definitely commemorated here.

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XScreenSaver 6.15 is out now, including iOS and Android. A whopping thirteen new savers this time:

• New hack by me, worldpieces.
• New Shadertoy hacks brought into the fold: bestill, bubblecolors, darktransit, downfall, driftclouds, goldenapollian, noxfire, prococean, rigrekt, trainmandala, trizm and universeball.

Shadertoys are so wild; you'll see like 30 lines of code, and when it runs it build an entire environment without there being a polygon or a model apparent anywhere. What witchcraft is this?? Well, here's a really good article that explains the techniques used: Painting With Math: A Gentle Study of Raymarching.

I fixed a bunch of Android bullshit, too (some of which meant needing to reimplement glRotatef etc. from first principles). Android's implementation of GLES is a buggy mess. Also I think Android has again lost the ability to ask for permission to load photos. I can't figure it out, so someone who gives a shit will have to send me a patch. I also still can't figure out why transparency doesn't work on Android. This makes Peepers be particularly horrifying.

Map Scroller: I updated the list of available maps, and made it show the name of the nearest city. One of the new map sets that works is the Google Satellite Map, and if you have two monitors, I highly recommend running that map in "Fully random location" mode. It has a habit of picking two places many thousands of miles apart that look surprisingly similar, like Greenland and Syria.

▶︎ Boy do I have a lot to say about World Pieces:

This one took so much time! Most of my screensavers are pretty quick; generally they'll percolate in my head for a while, then I do the first 90% in half a day, and then the second 90% in another half day to two days. But this one was composed entirely of ratholes.

1. Oh, first I have to find some sane way to get the country outlines. That means learning about GeoJSON and getting the proper data set from Natural Earth Data. Then that data has to be massaged and merged, and while there's probably some command-line way to do that, using mapshaper.org was easier.

2. Now I've got a bunch of polylines with weird "hole" rules (not winding-rule!) and I need to triangulate them. Next rathole: learning how to use triangle.c correctly.

3. Then I notice that while the GeoJSON has population data for countries, it does not for states and provinces. Ok, that should be easy to grab from Wikipedia, right? Next rathole: learning about SparQL, the Wikidata query language. It is one of the nastiest and most baffling query languages I've seen. Good job on that.

4. Then I realize that while the GeoJSON contains the names of the countries translated into various languages, it doesn't tell you which ones are the official languages! Next rathole! Ok, surely we can get that from Wikidata too... Nope. While the Wikipedia pages contain the endonyms in the local character set, the Wikidata items only have them transliterated into Latin characters. To fix that, I had to scrape the Wikipedia page and parse the Wiki markup using regexps, dooming us to inhuman toil, etc. etc. Anyway, I got it working so that Japan can be spelled 日本...

5. ...on macOS, iOS and Android. Why doesn't it work on Linux? Oh ho ho ho, another rathole, this one un-solved! So on Linux it notices when all of the characters came out as square boxes and falls back to the transliterated Latin versions. You're welcome.

6. Ok, it's starting to come together. But since I'm zooming in a lot, the Earth imagery is looking a little grainy, since the image I have is 2048x1024. Well let's just go upgrade that. Next rathole! The old images I had were from the public domain 2002 NASA "Blue Marble" images and 2000 "Visible Earth, City Lights" images none of which still exist on NASA's site (all praise archive.org!)

   They seem to have deprecated those data sets in favor of the 2025 "Blue Marble: Next Generation" images and the 2012 "Black Marble" images. But... they're weird. First, both sets of images completely omit the North polar ice. Second, the 2025 daytime oceans are colored completely flat, whereas the 2002 images contained bathymetry details. And third, and worst of all, is no pairing of 2025 day images and 2016 night images where the pair have the same ice extents. This means that when we blend between the day and night images, it looks very weird. It took me days to finally accept that there was nothing that I could do to work around that.

7. So now that those various ratholes are out of the way, it's trigonometry time. The way the countries pop up and face forward toward whereever the camera is a technique called "billboarding" and it's pretty easy. But what's not easy is doing a smooth transition between the object being billboarded, and the object being back in the scene. Especially since it's position in the scene is spinning and wobbling about willy-nilly. (Remember, you can also spin the globe with the mouse, and it has to keep track of that as well!)

8. So the final rathole was finally coming to terms with quaternions. Quaternions and I have had a passing acquaintance for many years, but I finally had to get down and dirty and really understand them to make all of this work.

   Wikipedia describes quaternions as:

   Quaternions form a four-dimensional associative normed division algebra over the real numbers, and therefore a ring, also a division ring and a domain. It is a special case of a Clifford algebra, classified as Cl₀,₂(ℝ)≅Cl⁺₃,₀(ℝ). According to the Frobenius theorem, the algebra ℍ is one of only two finite-dimensional division rings containing a proper subring isomorphic to the real numbers; the other being the complex numbers.

   "I did not understand a math thing, and then I read the Wikipedia article on it, and now I understand the math thing" -- said literally no one ever. As far as I can tell, every math article on Wikipedia is written with the target audience of "person who wrote their grad school thesis on it" and no one else. Wikipedia's math articles are absolutely fucking useless for purposes of, you know, education.

   Anyway, 3Blue1Brown has a good intro video that is not like that!

   By the way, I propose that "Quaternions" should be pronounced like extruded cornmeal toroid "Funyuns".

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I hear Spotify is the new hotness, let's see if they will take our money:

Ad name: DNA Lounge Bruno Mars Party
Your ad wasn't approved for the following reasons:
Reason: Your ad contains only music.
Recommendation: Submit a new ad with a clear voiceover that explains what's being advertised.

Do you want TikTok AI Voice? Because this is how you get TikTok AI Voice.

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In 2002, Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine, Let Forever Be, etc.) made a great video for Kylie Minogue's Come Into My World. I guess he has mortgage payments to make because he just remade it as a commercial for a purse but that's neither here nor there. What I'm here to complain about is that the official Kylie Minogue YouTube channel (1.5M subscribers) has the "Official video" (45M views) "Full HD, Remastered".

Now, I'm old enough to remember when "remastered" meant "we re-scanned the 35mm negative". Let's take a look at the upper left quadrant of the first 15 seconds of that video at half speed. On the left: a 702x576 rip I made of the video in 2003 from the SD DVD release, Directors Series Volume 3: The Work of Michel Gondry; on the right, the 1392x1062 "Official Full HD Remaster".

Pay special attention to the text on the white sign at about 8 seconds in. Full-screen it for the true zalgo-level, AI-upscale, edge-detect horrorshow.

This is why I have trust issues. Kylie.

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