Demonstrators shouted "Eat a dick!" and "Fuck ICE!" as they pelted the vehicles with dildos.

Activist Russell Ellis, who posted video of the demonstration on Instagram, said the protesters "showed real balls." "Dildos coming your way! Dildos! Dildos!" Ellis barked as the toys rained down on vehicles, landing with rubbery thwunks. "It's raining dicks!" [...]

Later in the afternoon, police declared the protest an unlawful assembly before rushing in to arrest 54 demonstrators.

"Declared an unlawful assembly" is one of those phrases like "officer-involved shooting" that our lickspittle copagandist media like to trot out un-challenged and un-examined.

There are no unlawful assemblies. Fuck you.

Protesters Wield Sex Toys Outside ICE Facility In Broadview:

The protests were held Saturday outside immigration facilities in Broadview, Portland and Los Angeles, as well as the ICE headquarters in Washington, D.C., with dildos donated by a sex shop that went out of business in Minneapolis.

"The logistics of the last couple of weeks have been insane," said Abe, an organizer of the local protest who declined to give their last name. "[We've] been moving dicks around all these states and we have more than 350 [dildos here at Broadview today] with more than 6,000 available nationally."

I have seen articles about a similar protest in Los Angeles, but the contemptibly cowardly LA media have seemingly all blurred out the dildos in their photo coverage. You call this journalism???

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.]]> https://cdn.jwz.org/blog/2026/04/operation-dildo-blitz/feed/ 11 https://www.jwz.org/blog/2026/04/popup-video-2/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2026/04/popup-video-2/#comments Fri, 10 Apr 2026 22:30:45 +0000 https://jwz.org/b/yk6C Last year I wrote popup-video.js, a Google-surveillance-defeating YouTube player. You may have noticed it in action on the DNA Lounge calendar pages and galleries but I've made some improvements recently.

• The web page contains only a locally-hosted thumbnail. Nothing from YouTube is loaded until someone clicks play. This means no surveillance trackers on every one of your pages that has a video, and also the pages load dozens fewer megabytes.

• When you click play, a fake-window pops up inside the page with a YouTube player.

• Clicking anywhere makes it go away.

• There's a "minimize" button that makes it drop back down into the place where the thumbnail was and continue playing.

• If the inline thumb is nearly as wide as the page, it plays inline instead of doing the popup thing (this is often the case on mobile).

• It works on playlists as well as single videos.

• For single videos, it generates an ad-hoc playlist of all of the other YouTube videos linked on the current page, so the "previous" and "next" buttons show those.

• It works on portrait videos and videos with weird aspect ratios.

Dear Lazyweb,

If you understand the ever-changing rules about auto-play, perhaps you can offer some guidance.

On desktop Safari, you have to click twice to get the first video to play: the YouTube player pops up but does not then auto-play, unless you have done "Website settings / Allow all auto-play" for jwz.org. This is -- what's the word -- fucked up, because the creation of the IFRAME and the sending of the "play" event all happen underneath the user's "click" event, so this should be considered interactive.

And on mobile Safari you always have to click twice.

(I don't remember what the situation is on Chrome or Firefox on account of not caring.)

Anyway, if you know how to make it play with one click instead of two, I would like to know how to do that. Your suggestion should take the form of, "Here's a modified version of your JS file that works". Your speculation is acknowledged and ignored.

Previously, previously, previously.]]> https://cdn.jwz.org/blog/2026/04/popup-video-2/feed/ 10 https://www.jwz.org/blog/2026/04/jwz-mixtape-258/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2026/04/jwz-mixtape-258/#comments Fri, 10 Apr 2026 21:42:08 +0000 https://jwz.org/b/yk5-

Please enjoy jwz mixtape 258.

Because of the recent unpleasantness, here's a mixtape of songs about nuclear war!

This idea popped into my head while I was standing at the bar last night and I thought, "Yeah, I probably have enough videos for that" and started writing down song names... 10 minutes later I had more than 2 hours worth.

Oh yeah, and I had to find an alternate upload of the Two Tribes video because the official one is marked "inappropriate for some users, sign in to confirm your age." "Based on community guidelines." That video played hourly on MTV from like 1984 through 1988. I hate you, Milkman Youtube.

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.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.]]> https://cdn.jwz.org/blog/2026/04/space-2/feed/ 76 https://www.jwz.org/blog/2026/04/today-i-woke-up-and-chose-violence/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2026/04/today-i-woke-up-and-chose-violence/#comments Sun, 05 Apr 2026 19:13:53 +0000 https://jwz.org/b/yk5y Arguing with robots has become something of a hobby of mine.

▶︎

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

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.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.]]> https://cdn.jwz.org/blog/2026/04/new-numbers-station-just-dropped/feed/ 9 https://www.jwz.org/blog/2026/03/xscreensaver-6-15/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2026/03/xscreensaver-6-15/#comments Tue, 31 Mar 2026 01:15:32 +0000 https://jwz.org/b/yk5c 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.

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".

Previously, previously, previously.]]> https://cdn.jwz.org/blog/2026/03/xscreensaver-6-15/feed/ 91 https://www.jwz.org/blog/2026/03/official-video-full-hd-remastered/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2026/03/official-video-full-hd-remastered/#comments Thu, 26 Mar 2026 23:51:30 +0000 https://jwz.org/b/yk5U 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.

Previously, previously, previously, previously.]]> https://cdn.jwz.org/blog/2026/03/official-video-full-hd-remastered/feed/ 36 https://www.jwz.org/blog/2026/03/stop-threatening-me-with-a-good-time/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2026/03/stop-threatening-me-with-a-good-time/#comments Wed, 18 Mar 2026 02:39:47 +0000 https://jwz.org/b/yk4m

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.]]> https://cdn.jwz.org/blog/2026/03/stop-threatening-me-with-a-good-time/feed/ 4 https://www.jwz.org/blog/2026/03/globes/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2026/03/globes/#comments Tue, 17 Mar 2026 19:14:48 +0000 https://jwz.org/b/yk4k by hand!

On Friday, government lawyers in the lawsuit filed a court record which said they asked the plaintiffs to remove the videos "from the internet due to concerns that the publication of the videos could subject the witnesses and their family members to undue harassment and reputational harm." The filing then said that Fox specifically "has been subject to harassment and has received a number of death threats since the videos and video clips were publicized and circulated."

Internet Archive; torrent magnet link (only 5 seeders!)

Update: Judge says "no".

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.]]> https://cdn.jwz.org/blog/2026/03/the-removed-doge-deposition-videos-have-already-been-backed-up-across-the-internet/feed/ 24 https://www.jwz.org/blog/2026/03/lightning-on-demand-is-back/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2026/03/lightning-on-demand-is-back/#comments Sun, 08 Mar 2026 10:20:44 +0000 https://jwz.org/b/yk4I " Let's start out with just the normal unboosted one million volt discharge to establish a baseline."

Monarch, Legacy of Monsters has a fantastic title sequence. Since the show takes place in two timelines, they split the titles between the past on the left and the present on the right, contrasting similar events in each timeline. And season 2 keeps up this conceit, but it was completely rebuilt!

So here are all four quadrants from seasons 1 and 2, stacked.

Also, this show is still killing it.

In honor of this important anniversary, I downloaded the original Flash SWF file from Internet Archive, played it using Ruffle in a full-screen window, and replaced the audio with the original MP3 of "Invasion of the Gabber Robots" by The Laziest Men on Mars. So this is probably the highest fidelity encoding possible, without going back to the original forum GIFs.

Make your time.

Please enjoy jwz mixtape 257.

Date: Mon, 02 Feb 2026 22:39:59 -0800
Subject: Your channel has lost access to advanced features
From: YouTube <no-reply@youtube.com>

Hi yesthatjwz,

To help keep our community safe, we limit some of our more powerful features to channels who have built and maintained a positive channel history or who have provided verification.

As of now, your channel doesn't have sufficient channel history. It has lost access to advanced features. This may have happened because your channel did not follow our Community Guidelines.

How this impacts your channel

You won't be able to do things like:

• Get higher daily limits for live streams, Shorts, and video uploads
• Embed live streams
• Pin comments
• Add external links to your video descriptions

How to restore access to advanced features

To restore access, you can:

• Build positive channel history by following our Community Guidelines.
• Provide video or ID verification for quicker access. This may not be available for all channels.

Thanks,
The YouTube team

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.]]> https://cdn.jwz.org/blog/2026/02/advanced-features/feed/ 7 https://www.jwz.org/blog/2026/01/whale/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2026/01/whale/#comments Sat, 31 Jan 2026 09:54:48 +0000 https://jwz.org/b/yk2r Whale, one of my favorite 90s bands. They only had two albums but I have 14 CDs by them, which might be their entire output. So Pixies influenced! So sleazy! (Their grungey-slow-grind cover of Darling Nikki is just... *chef's kiss*.) Tricky co-wrote/produced half their first album, before Maxinquaye.

I finally got to see them live in 1998 opening for Tricky on the Angels with Dirty Faces tour at The Fillmore, and they killed it, and then I saw them again headlining the following night at Bimbo's, and nobody came, and they were clearly angry about that and kinda jerky. I forgave them and loved them anyway.

Eye 842. Eye 842.

If you don't know what I'm talking about I have so many Previouslies for you. Almost exactly a decade's worth!

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.]]> https://cdn.jwz.org/blog/2026/01/my-long-payphone-nightmare-has-reached-a-middle/feed/ 8 https://www.jwz.org/blog/2026/01/xscreensaver-6-14/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2026/01/xscreensaver-6-14/#comments Thu, 15 Jan 2026 22:48:29 +0000 https://jwz.org/b/yk19 XScreenSaver 6.14 is out now, including iOS and Android. A whopping eighteen new savers this time! As I mentioned last month, I wrote a new XScreenSaver module that is API-compatible with Shadertoy, which means that I am now able to pull demos written that way into the XScreenSaver fold. These 18 savers are the first of that batch.

A limitation here is that I can only redistribute Shadertoy-derived savers that have licenses that are compatible with the rest of XScreenSaver.

The default license on shadertoy.com is "CC-BY-NC-SA", and so the vast majority of uploads use that. However, that license, by prohibiting commercial use, is not an open source license, and is more restrictive than the license used by the rest of XScreenSaver. For a Shadertoy saver to be distributed with or within XScreenSaver, it must be licensed under a compatible license, such as: MIT, BSD, CC-BY, CC-BY-SA or CC0.

So this first batch of 18 new savers are the ones that I was able to find that were both interesting and compatibly-licensed.

If you know of other cool Shadertoys that use one of the above licenses, please send them my way, and maybe I'll include them in a future release.

Likewise, if there are some others that are really good but that are not compatibly licensed, let me know about those as well and maybe I'll ask the author if they'd be willing to relicense them for inclusion. It's worth a shot.

(XScreenSaver does not, cannot and will not load the savers from shadertoy.com directly, because reasons, so let that idea go.)

One odd thing that you may notice about these is that they are oddly static as far as screensavers go, which is to say that despite their complexity, they draw the exact same scene every time. Most things written for Shadertoy generate each frame based on time-since-launch, without any mechanism for external sliders, or a random number seed. That's just how they're written.

Anyway, about the new XShaderToy framework that powers these new savers:

You may find that performance sucks on your machine. That means your GPU is not good, oh no. In particular, the Raspberry Pi 4b sucks at running most of these. Crank down the "Resolution" slider for a better frame rate.

To make these work in the wider XScreenSaver ecosystem, I had to target four different versions of GLSL that are all stupidly and arbitrarily incompatible with each other, both in the set of available library functions, and in basic syntax of the language such as the type promotion rules and whether integers exist.

• Linux: An OpenGL "compatibility profile" context anywhere from 3.1 to 4.6. Pi is 3.1, some other Linux devices are other versions.
• macOS Cocoa: An OpenGL 4.1 "core profile" context, which means no backward compatibility affordances for earlier versions.
• macOS X11: OpenGL 2.1, yes, 2.1.
• iOS: OpenGL ES 3.0. Note that "OpenGL ES 3.0" is not "OpenGL 3.0", it is "WebGL 2.0". This is all completely sane and normal.
• Android: An OpenGL ES context anywhere from 3.0 to 3.2.

So I had to write a bunch of compatibility shims to, for example, make code written to the "OpenGL ES 3.0" API able to run on an "OpenGL 2.1" system. And it's a complete shitshow. Maybe it will work, most of the time. Huge thanks to Carsten Steger for helping me understand this nonsense.

And of course thanks to the original authors of these "new" savers for putting there work out there, and under compatible licenses: mrange, otaviogood, nemerix, kali, jaszunio15 and 3w36zj6.

Previously, previously, previously, previously.]]> https://cdn.jwz.org/blog/2026/01/xscreensaver-6-14/feed/ 28 https://www.jwz.org/blog/2026/01/watchmen-being-topical-again/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2026/01/watchmen-being-topical-again/#comments Tue, 13 Jan 2026 03:51:41 +0000 https://jwz.org/b/yk1t

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.]]> https://cdn.jwz.org/blog/2026/01/watchmen-being-topical-again/feed/ 8 https://www.jwz.org/blog/2026/01/eyeball-landscape/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2026/01/eyeball-landscape/#comments Fri, 09 Jan 2026 04:40:24 +0000 https://jwz.org/b/yk1g Brazil "eyeball" sequence was actually filmed. I may need to make adjustments to the Peepers screensaver.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.]]> https://cdn.jwz.org/blog/2026/01/eyeball-landscape/feed/ 18 https://www.jwz.org/blog/2026/01/dali-clock-in-the-wild/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2026/01/dali-clock-in-the-wild/#comments Sat, 03 Jan 2026 21:35:11 +0000 https://jwz.org/b/yk1R New Years Eve countdown featured Dali Clock, because we use all parts of the buffalo here at org du jwz. And yes, it was NTP synchronized to within 1 frame, thanks for asking.

In only vague and fickle order of favoriteness:

• Emika - Vega & Frames
• Ela Minus - Acts of Rebellion & Día
• Marie Davidson - City of Clowns
• Lou Hayter - Unfamiliar Skin
• Vanbot - How Could I Prepare For This
• The Knocks & Dragonette - Revelation
• Garbage - Let All That We Imagine Be The Light
• Scratch Massive - Nox Anima
• Screensaver - Three Lens Approach
• Black Honey - Soak
• Witch Fever - Congregation
• Pudéndüm - Øne
• Zanias - Cataclysm
• Chloe Qisha - Chloe Qisha & Modern Romance
• Au/Ra - Soundtrack to an Existential Crisis
• Wet Leg - Moisturizer
• Gloomy June - Gloomy June
• Lydia Night - Parody of Pleasure
• Scowl - Are We All Angels
• Shriekback - Monument
• Vowws - I'll Fill Your House With an Army
• Just Mustard - We Were Just Here
• Al1ce - As Above, So Below
• Catherine Moan - Chain-Reaction
• Causeway - Anywhere
• Llynks - Time Reborn
• Bootblacks - Paradise
• Immortal Girlfriend - Sojourner
• Ovrgrwn - Chasing The Good Dreams
• Momma - Welcome To My Blue Sky
• Sally Shapiro - Ready to Live a Lie
• Vague Lanes - Divergence And Declaration
• Winona Fighter - My Apologies to the Chef
• Guerilla Toss - You're Weird Now
• Magic Wands - Cascades
• Rocket - R is for Rocket
• Lambrini Girls - Who Let The Dogs Out
• Die Spitz - Something To Consume

Please enjoy jwz mixtape 256 -- a nice round number.

Previously.]]> https://cdn.jwz.org/blog/2025/12/2025-music-wrap-up-and-mixtape-256/feed/ 12 https://www.jwz.org/blog/2025/12/xmas-movies/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2025/12/xmas-movies/#comments Wed, 24 Dec 2025 12:33:12 +0000 https://jwz.org/b/yk05 in 2022, the elves did their work in one night and gave us two perfect Christmas movies. In case you're looking for something to watch with mom.

Previously, previously, previously.]]> https://cdn.jwz.org/blog/2025/12/the-donut-shop-ends-police-discount-guy-is-no-longer-deputy-director-of-the-fbi/feed/ 3 https://www.jwz.org/blog/2025/12/video-text-remover/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2025/12/video-text-remover/#comments Sat, 06 Dec 2025 04:42:20 +0000 https://jwz.org/b/ykyK adequate but has some annoyances so I would like to try anything else.

Only use case I care about is: scrub thru video; select a series of rectangles and start/end times; run ffmpeg with a series of "delogo" filters.

Auto-detection or anything "AI" is an explicit non-goal.

Web search for this topic has been utterly poisoned by grifters.

Previously.]]> https://cdn.jwz.org/blog/2025/12/video-text-remover/feed/ 16 https://www.jwz.org/blog/2025/11/happy-bitblt-day-to-all-who-celebrate/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2025/11/happy-bitblt-day-to-all-who-celebrate/#comments Wed, 19 Nov 2025 20:08:49 +0000 https://jwz.org/b/ykxp Crazy Eddie's Used Computers:

I declare that today, Nov. 19, 2025 is the 50th anniversary of BitBLT, a routine so fundamental to computer graphics that we don't even think about it having an origin. A working (later optimized) implementation was devised on the Xerox Alto by members of the Smalltalk team. It made it easy to arbitrarily copy and move arbitrary rectangles of bits in a graphical bitmap. It was this routine that made Smalltalk's graphical interface possible. Below is part of a PARC-internal memo detailing it.

BitBLT was implemented in microcode on the Alto and exposed to the end-user as just another assembly language instruction, alongside your regular old Nova instructions -- this is how foundational it was. And since it was an integral part of the Alto, it enabled all sorts of interesting experimentation with graphics: user interfaces and human/computer interaction, font rasterization, laser printing... maybe a game or three...

And it wasn't just a gimmick; if you had BitBLT microcode, it was a very fast way of rotating a bitmap!

The details on BitBLT itself start on page 172. Circle 359 on inquiry card.

Previously, previously.]]> https://cdn.jwz.org/blog/2025/11/happy-bitblt-day-to-all-who-celebrate/feed/ 11 https://www.jwz.org/blog/2025/11/we-cant-have-nice-fountains-part-3/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2025/11/we-cant-have-nice-fountains-part-3/#comments Thu, 13 Nov 2025 18:30:35 +0000 https://jwz.org/b/ykxW

Previously, previously, previously, previously.]]> https://cdn.jwz.org/blog/2025/11/pi-4-spi-lossage/feed/ 81