Nick forced a laugh. "No, no, it's a technical issue. I'm very together. Look—" He pointed at himself. But on the screen, his compressed doppelgänger split into sixteen tiny Nicks, each one mouthing a different, silent word.
Kyle raised his celery stick. "Does this count as a craft service credit?" party down s02e06 openh264
Henry shrugged. "You wait for the next IDR frame. Or you quit. Become a bartender. The compression artifacts are way nicer to us." Nick forced a laugh
Ron looked up from the encoder, his face ashen. "I think I made it worse." On screen, all sixteen Nicks suddenly merged into a single, horrifyingly high-definition close-up of his own nostril. Look—" He pointed at himself
On the screen, the glitched Nick now appeared to be weeping digital tears—rectangles of blue that cascaded down his frozen cheeks. Kyle, sensing an opportunity, shoved a celery stick into the frame and began a freestyle rap about "crunchy authenticity." Ron Donald, wearing a headset for no reason, marched toward the A/V cart.
But the openh264 bug hit right as Nick lifted a tray of "deconstructed tamales" (a single corn husk containing one kernel of blue corn and a dollop of anxiety). The video feed from the party's own promotional livestream—projected onto a massive agave-fiber screen—suddenly froze on Nick's face. Then the macroblocking began. His eyes drifted into two separate squares. His mouth became a horizontal smear of gray and magenta.