Aggressively Stupid: The Story Behind After Dark (2007) | Hacker News Reader

Aggressively Stupid: The Story Behind After Dark (2007)

lowendmac.com

130 pointsecliptik23 comments

This program was so popular, references to it were made on Beverly Hills, 90210. When the "Peach Pit After Dark" nightclub opened, the wordmark above the nightclub entrance was the same as that of the screen saver After Dark. There was also a flying toaster on the door, and some of the disco lights had flying toaster stencil masks in front of them, projecting toasters onto the dancefloor.

It was a very rare instance of a real-world computer culture reference appearing in something as aggressively pop culture as 90210.

A thread from 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14900647

2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7702105

A bit from 2010: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1338175

(These links are for the curious. Reposts are ok after a year or so: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

I have my own fond memories of After Dark, especially the Satori module. The colored whorls Satori produced were so aesthetically pleasing, and I do think part of its durability would be the “organic” quality of the render, a quality probably partly due to the excellence of After Dark’s randomization.

Jack Eastman attributes quite a bit of After Dark’s success among the competition due to the team’s striving for high quality randomness:

> The other thing we were careful to do was not to put the toasters on a track and repeat the show. Random numbers were always important from that point on. I had done Monte Carlo simulations in my physics work and knew how to produce random numbers in various distributions. I think that was an important idea – we had these little movies, but you couldn’t predict them.

> Competitors didn’t have that insight. With After Dark you could just zone out and watch for a long time. Plus it was really a screen saver – it wouldn’t do to have images sitting in one place or in repeating patterns. [0]

[0] https://lowendmac.com/2007/aggressively-stupid-the-story-beh...

Example of even how the most absurd successes often have nailed the important details really well.

I didn't realize that implementing a screen saver for Mac back then required such low-level hacking. I guess that shouldn't be surprising, if the OS didn't have built-in support for screen savers.

The interview briefly mentions that the same company, Berkeley Systems, developed a screen magnifier for people with low vision. They also developed a screen reader, OutSpoken [1], for blind people. Utilities like those also required low-level hacking.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OutSpoken

Run a mac emulator to save your screen in your browser: https://archive.org/details/AfterDark2

another screen saver was Johnny Castaway. Was an IT guy at a company in the late 90s and this screen saver was on many workstations where I worked. Was always intriguing to see what Johnny would be into next...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r10WuRo7c50

Special dates would do certain things. Occasionally he’d leave the island.

I miss Lunatic Fringe. Simple enough to be learned quickly but interesting enough to not get bored.

Was reminded of this game while reading the article but was racking my brain to remember the name. Thanks for mentioning it, fond memories.

Every time I opened a network share or similar "slow" device on Windows XP's File Explorer (alas not in Windows 7 or 10) I'm reminded of After Dark, since that sweeping flashlight (that goes left/right) is more or less exactly copied from Disney Mickey Mouse something/screensaver which was a clone of After Dark.

Screen savers were such a fun thing, two decades ago. It feels like all of the fun has been crushed out of computing these days.

Why so serious?

I am starting think it is the money that strips all of the fun out of it. Most software developers are not developing for fun these days. They are interchangeable cogs developing CRUD for soulless corporations whilst praying not to be rifed in the next culling. It is hard to produce art in that environment.

Part of the difficulty is that technical feasibility of the software is no longer as much of a limitation. Half the things in XScreenSaver or Future Crew's Unreal https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=InrGJ7C9B3s were things it was really surprising to see on the screen of a computer in 1993, especially one that wasn't a $50000 SGI. But now pretty much anything you can see, you can record an HD video of, and your $100 hand computer is fast enough to play it back in real time.

So there's no longer the wonder factor of "how is this even possible? Am I dreaming?". Except sometimes there is. Like with Deep Dream. Or GPT-2. Or the Looking Glass light field display. Or GauGAN. Or a lot of math things. Or topology optimization. Or Wikipedia.

But I do think it's a constant danger, forgetting that this stuff is supposed to be fun.

I still run XScreenSaver everywhere. Grab a copy from the website and compile it up.

Not exactly the same thing, but 'Wallpaper Engine' is very highly rated on Steam for its ability to create highly customized 2d/3d live wallpapers for Windows PC's.

Another mesmerizing screen saver is Electric Sheep, which just keeps getting better and better over time, as it evolves in response to user's feedback:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17861723

Electric Sheep is generative crowdsourced evolutionary art that enables viewers to vote for their favorite "sheep" animations to send them off to the pasture to breed with other user's favorites with genetic cross-over and mutation.

So it just gets better and better, in response to what people actually enjoy!

https://electricsheep.org/#/about

http://scottdraves.com/sheep.html

http://scottdraves.com/flame.html

http://flam3.com/

https://web.archive.org/web/20050425102606/http://flam3.com/...

Once I fell asleep while watching Star Trek Deep Space 9 on Netflix, and then half woke up after the Electric Sheep screen saver has kicked back in but I didn't realize it, so my brain struggled for several minutes trying to make sense of the never-ending wormhole sequence that I though was an out-of-control shuttlecraft lost in space!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15668253

I have spent so many hours staring at Electric Sheep, thinking and wondering about how it works, that I finally looked it up, and found the papers about it!

It took less time to read the papers than it took to stare at the screen all day tripping out and wondering, but I like to do both.

The Flame Algorithm

Flames are algorithmically generated images and animations. The software was originally written in 1992 and released as open source, aka free software. Over the years it has been greatly expanded, and is now widely used to create art and special effects. The shape and color of each image is specified by a long string of numbers - a genetic code of sorts.

http://flam3.com/

The Fractal Flame Algorithm

https://web.archive.org/web/20050425102606/http://flam3.com/...

Evolution and Collective Intelligence of the Electric Sheep

http://draves.org/aoae07/draves-aoae07.pdf

The Electric Sheep and their Dreams in High Fidelity

http://draves.org/npar06/npar06draves.pdf

infinite evolving crowdsourced artwork

https://github.com/scottdraves/electricsheep

https://github.com/scottdraves/electricsheep/blob/master/cli...

2015.05 moved from code.google.com repo 2011.01.30 based on revision 1546 on sf.net

The Electric Sheep is a cyborg mind. It harnesses the collective intelligence of 450,000 computers and people to create abstract art with mathematics and Darwinian evolution. The result is seamless, organic, and infinite. See also http://electricsheep.org and http://scottdraves.com .

The rendering engine is a separate project at https://github.com/scottdraves/flam3

I had this screen saver when I was 12 maybe (15 years ago) in which these two armies would fight each other forever. Like infantry and tanks and helicopters would come out on each side and blow each other up. I’ve been trying to find it for a long time, does anyone know what it is? It ran on WinXP.

For *nix screensaver fans feeling nostalgic, there's an XScreensaver version for iOS, FYI

XScreensaver is also available for Android, and likely for windows/Mac as well.

Does an After Dark clone exist for the modern Mac?

Yes: http://en.infinisys.co.jp/product/flyingtoasters/index.shtml

It works fine on High Sierra but probably won’t on Catalina, you can download the trial version and give it a spin though.

XScreenSaver includes a flying toaster screensaver.

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