normals vortex rearrangement

Black-and-white reconfiguration of a lolumad GIF.

The spheres, originally blue-purple, were cropped, stretched, and enlarged. The background was transparentized, then everything was converted to black and white in the Online Image Editor, which has a great (as in retro and unpredictable) algorithm for converting color gifs to pointillist monochromes.

The next phase will be to reverse the motion to eliminate the jump when the GIF resets.

Update: Here is the two-way version: [484 KB .gif]

lolumad_spheres_rmx

Your (Or Somebody Else's) Recent Image on Twitter

Year by year the formerly minimal Twitter comes to resemble every other social media site, offering users "options." Lately it has a "Recent Images" feature. Please note that if you haven't uploaded any images, the twitter team will take care of that for you. Let's visualize the discussion that led to this:

"So we have this great upload feature and we want all twitterers to use it. Some folks don't want graphics on their pages though. What do we do?"
"If they ever linked to something on Flickr, we could pull that image up automatically, call it their 'Recent Image.'"
"Hmmm, is that really honest?"
"Uh, last I heard, twitter is free. These people have no rights. And it is technically a 'recent image,' even if they didn't upload it."
"Hmmm, OK, damn good idea."
"But what if the twitterer is an artist or a photographer, doesn't this look like they're posting someone else's work to represent themselves? Maybe there's some copyright issues."
"We'll get Legal to look at that, if it's not covered in the terms of service we'll just slip it in there. None of these freeloaders will sue us, though, it's too expensive."
"Cool."

revised for accuracy - "recent images" isn't quite as egregious as I thought but it's still pretty bad