Editing 1229: Screensaver

| titletext = I'm entering my 24th year of spending eight hours a day firing the Duck Hunt gun at the flying toasters. I'm sure I'll hit one soon.

This comic features the "Starfield" {{w|screensaver}}, a popular Windows screensaver of the 1990s, which presents a moving starfield, like what would see an observer moving past stars at {{w|superluminal}} speeds (see [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3wV33rfbwE#t=15s a video example]). This illusion is generally created by drawing white dots on the computer screen, and then moving these dots outwards towards the edge of the screen before disappearing. Some of the "stars" appear to pass closer to the viewing point than others, resulting in movements of visually greater speeds, and more excitement; one can also fixate the center of the screen, hoping to see the appearance of a star as close as possible to it, which would later on pass very close to the viewpoint. This comic extends it to the situation where the observer actually collides with one of these stars (something that never happens with screensavers of this type). The "signal lost" error message appears because the source of the signal is no longer transmitting, since it was destroyed by colliding with said star.

The "Duck Hunt gun" is a reference to the {{w|NES Zapper}} used with the {{w|Nintendo Entertainment System}} game {{w|Duck Hunt}}, originally published in 1984. The user would point the Zapper at the connected television screen while playing Duck Hunt, and the NES would recognize whether or not the zapper was pointed at an appropriate target or not. "Flying Toasters" is another old screensaver (in the {{w|After Dark (software)|After Dark}} package, made for computers but not for the NES). In the title text, [[Randall]] states that he is trying to use the NES Zapper to shoot down flying toasters. However, the Flying Toaster screensaver and the NES Zapper are two separate things that were never meant to be used together, so the flying toasters will never react to being "shot" at by the NES Zapper.

 

:[An image of a starfield; a set of white dots irregularly spaced on a black background.]

 

:[An image similar to the previous, but most of the dots have shifted apparent position; one central dot is noticeably larger than the rest, and actually appears like a star, with a glow.]

 

:[Similar image, but the central star is even larger.]

 

:[What used to be the central star now dominates the entire field of view.]

 

:[The final panel is a black-and-white static screen overlaid with the words "signal lost".]