“All these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided.”

(It’s Halloween Week on Unsung, where we’re sharing scary, spooky, and creepy stories. After this and this, the post below feels like a third story in an accidental “angry rectangle” trilogy.) If you used Windows in the 1990s or 2000s, it’s likely you’ve seen this effect, which today we’d call a “glitch”: The reason for it had to do with window compositing. If you look at how things are drawn on screens, at some point you realize that despite all the handwringing about additive vs. subtractive colors, on-screen drawing is not really that far off from an artist working on a painting: in both cases you can’t really remove anything, but you can always add new paint. On screens, at least, the paint is 0% thin and 100% free, so nothing prevents you from forever piling it on, but ultimately it’s the same end result: removing a window from the screen isn’t really deleting its pixels, but painting over it with pixels of the background, or another window, or the memory of what was on screen…