THE INTERNET – Fans of classic screensavers were privy to a very special sight today as the starship that has been live-streaming its journey in the form of the starfield/warp screensaver appears to have reached the planet it’s been travelling to since at least the early 90s.
“It was a real ‘holy shit’ moment for me,” vintage screensaver enthusiast Patricia Schmidt said. “This ship is on a faster than light flight through the deep dark silence of space, launched from a world we can’t imagine, about to make planetfall on a mist-shrouded globe we can’t comprehend. I’m so privileged to be witness to this momentous event because I got distracted by a sext from my sometimes boyfriend Ronnie and the screensaver activated when the YouTube video I was watching about adult diaper fails was paused for too long.”
Screensavers, used to prevent image burn-in on old monitors, were once thought to be nothing more than randomly generated patterns until documents declassified last year revealed that the flying toaster screensaver was footage from the US government’s first experimental drone program.
The origin of the starfield screensaver is still murky. According to veteran computer programmer Shane Levitan, “the rumor is that it started when this programmer at Apple was looking around the proto-dark web, which in the early 90s mostly consisted of low resolution photos of the Perfect Strangers cast altered to make it look like the show was about sexy werewolves.”
“But instead of sexy werewolf Balki, he found a mysterious website streaming a spaceship’s POV, whose link he wrote into the screensaver. Right after he’d done this, poof, that programmer disappeared.”
“I later heard he didn’t actually disappear,” Levitan said. “He just got a job at CompuServe… but then, poof, CompuServe disappeared.”
At press time, screensaver enthusiasts watching the live feed were unsettled to find that as the mist surrounding the ship’s destination cleared, the continents of the seemingly unknown planet looked disturbingly familiar.
