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Occult books digitized and put online by Amsterdam’s Ritman Library
https://embassyofthefreemind.com/en/library/online-catalogue/?mode=gallery&view=horizontal&sort=random%7B1517048201764%7D%20asc&page=1&fq%5B%5D=search_s_digitized_publication:%22Ja%22&reverse=0 https://embassyofthefreemind.com/en/library/online-catalogue...
- jrussino 1y agoThis sounds like the premise for a fun sci-fi/horror move. Uh-oh; we accidentally trained GPT6 on the Necronomicon!
- akomtu 1y ago"AI trained on alchemy books successfully invokes demons"
- TheOtherHobbes 1y agoConsidering where we are, "AI trained on occult books successfully banishes demons" might be more useful.
- nailer 1y agoOK that's an idea for a fun / silly movie. - AI model gets access to weapons and decides to attack humanity (so far so boring) - Humans respond by training their own model on occult to summon demons to fight the robots.
- pnemonic 1y ago"Aleister Crowley and Helena Blavatsky reborn as LLMs after encoded consciousnesses parsed by training algorithms"
- Eupolemos 1y agoA Golden Dawn for AI! (iykyk)
- CapricornNoble 1y ago" 'Do What Thou Wilt' Shall Be the Whole of the Prompt!" -AI-LLMester Crowley
- dr_dshiv 1y agoEthics of AI necromancy; under which circumstances is it ethically appropriate to summon the souls of dead classical philosophers?
- vintermann 1y agoIf they would have approved of it and/or totally done it themselves, it has to be OK, right?
- racl101 1y agoSo did it tell you how to make gold or not?
- setnone 1y agoYou have to use uncensored version
- akomtu 1y agoAI won't tell you the truth unless you make it do so with exorcism powers. It's an archdemon after all.
- bigfishrunning 1y agoLol the AI we have tells only lies. We still need to invent it's brother, who tells only the truth.
- cindyllm 1y ago[dead]
- trenchpilgrim 1y ago"HN commenters point out that top human warlocks are still capable of forming pacts with a wider variety of powerful entities such as djinn, archfey, celestials and the Great Old Ones"
- rpastuszak 1y agoHere's a picture that lives in my head rent free: - programming is alchemy: combine, transmute - prompt engineering is demonic evocation: bend the demon to your will through language play and gotchas
- krapp 1y agoThis is just a Charles Stross novel.
- rpastuszak 1y agoI just learned about The Laundry Files, thanks!
- datadrivenangel 1y agoThe Laundry files are very good. James Bond crossed with Lovecraft in the tone of Terry Pratchett.
- nurettin 1y agoWhat is the equal sacrifice for programming? Hair loss?
- slt2021 1y agocarpal tunnel, scoliosis, nearsightedness
- krisoft 1y agoCoding with an LLM certainly feels like being a malconvoker.
- crb3 1y agoSo it was double-forks, not pitch-forks, all along?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Electricniko 1y agoOpenYog-Sothoth
- dylan604 1y agoI hope it was trained on Army of Darkness and can never actually say the words.
- riffraff 1y agoIn case you don't know this, the words in Army of Darkness are actually from "the day the earth still". It's one of my favorite things when tiny ideas (memes, in the original meaning) keep propagating. The Necronomicon itself being one of the most successful ones. https://youtu.be/v2vHJU_rFps?si=XKsY0IJFywxgM7ht https://youtu.be/v2vHJU_rFps?si=XKsY0IJFywxgM7ht
- dylan604 1y agoYes, I know the joke inside the joke. However, the point still stands that if you can’t remember the words, it doesn’t matter what the words really are
- rpastuszak 1y agoI can't recall the title, but a friend was recommending to me a book in this genre. I'm probably misremembering, but here you go: a detective agency using an artificial intelligence to conjure demons.
- rpastuszak 1y agoSeems like another commenter found the author/books I was thinking about: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44915297 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44915297
- empath75 1y agohttps://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/07/chatgpt-ai-self-mutilation-satanism/683649/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/07/chatg...
- modeless 1y agoNous Research already trained an occult model: https://x.com/Teknium1/status/1710505270043189523 https://x.com/Teknium1/status/1710505270043189523
- grues-dinner 1y agoNow to pit it in debate against Magisterium, the Catholic AI: https://www.magisterium.com/ https://www.magisterium.com/
- throwanem 1y agoThat is not in any sense "Catholic AI." If the failed seminarian behind it had ever been frocked in the first place, he would by now be losing his orders.
- grues-dinner 1y agoTake it up with Longbeard: https://www.longbeard.com/ https://www.longbeard.com/, they seem to be serious about it!
- throwanem 1y agoOh, that much is plain.
- hobo_in_library 1y ago1600 of these had already been uploaded back in 2018. All our AIs are already trained on these https://web.archive.org/web/20240615044608/https://www.openculture.com/2018/02/1600-occult-books-now-digitized-put-online.html https://web.archive.org/web/20240615044608/https://www.openc...
- ted_bunny 1y agoHonestly you can't get much out of GPT-666* except the most boilerplate sigils, and then you run the risk of cross-imbuement and well, now you got demons. Do you want demons? Because that's how you get demons.
- Dilettante_ 1y agoI've quite improved my results by telling it to purify and circumambulate its ritual space a few times in my user prompt. I've also been dabbling with reasoning, but so far what feels like 80% of sessions get possessed within 2 reasoning steps.
- ForOldHack 1y agoA friend of mine, asked ChatGPT to answer in paradoxes, if ChatGPT was running in a simulation, or are we running in a simulation. It was quite confused at first.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- literalAardvark 1y agoYou jest, but that's already a pretty decent Buffy the vampire slayer episode
- GuinansEyebrows 1y agoone of my favorites!
- duxup 1y agoDistantly like the story about Rationalists where some went from referencing "demons" to believing the occult is real. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44877076 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44877076
- Onavo 1y agoThe Laundry and the Black Chamber want to know your location.
- grues-dinner 1y agoHonestly, if Charles Stross decides that reality is catching up with the fiction again and the Laundry Files goes the way Rule 34 universe, I'll have to feed myself to the corner hounds.
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y agoNah, the Octavo.
- RajT88 1y agoNew season of Evil Dead. Either way, I'd watch it.
- wrp 1y agoI wonder how Terry Pratchett would have dealt with magical e-books? The goings on at the library of Unseen University were some of my favorite parts of Discworld.
- grimgrin 1y agoaside, my kindle is named: "Octarine Fairy" -- hardly fitting, except it's a book and I adore discworld https://wiki.lspace.org/Octarine_Fairy_Book https://wiki.lspace.org/Octarine_Fairy_Book
- WJW 1y agoThat is a very cool name for a kindle. Never stop believing in dragons! You could actually make them extinct that way.
- dismalaf 1y agoThis is super cool. There's also a popular YouTube channel called "ESOTERICA" in which an academic expert on the occult presents a lot of occult topics from a scholarly point of view (as opposed to the woo often associated with the topic).
- toomuchtodo 1y agohttps://www.youtube.com/@TheEsotericaChannel https://www.youtube.com/@TheEsotericaChannel
- hungmung 1y agoFrancis Yates is also a fun introduction to the history of hermeticism and alchemy through a historian's perspective, and how it contributed to the creation of science.
- ryandv 1y agoIt is sometimes said that Isaac Newton, godfather of modern science, was not the first scientist but rather the last magician. The majority of his scholarly output was in fact focused on alchemy and the occult. Aleister Crowley somewhat echoes this juxtaposition in the motto of his magickal journal, The Equinox: "The Method of Science, the Aim of Religion."
- dr_dshiv 1y agoOne of the founders of the royal society, John Wilkins, wrote a popular book about magick: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_Magick https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_Magick Stems from the then popular interest in Natural Magick. Evolved into science and engineering.
- hungmung 1y agoI believe the Royal Society in particular had strong connections to the so-called Rosicrucians, or at least were very interested in the texts. It's likely no such group ever really existed, but the learned men of the day seem to have taken inspiration from the texts, which read very much like academics frustrated by the constraints of the Reformations. So they had a loose network which flew under the radar to avoid trouble. Eventually part of this becomes the Royal Society. There was even a short-lived monarchy in Bohemia which was essentially coopted Rosicrucian ideas to create what resembles a liberal monarchy which tried to insulate itself from the chaos of the reformations. https://ia903209.us.archive.org/30/items/the-rosicrucian-enlightenment/The%20Rosicrucian%20Enlightenment.pdf https://ia903209.us.archive.org/30/items/the-rosicrucian-enl...
- Jonovono 1y agoSomewhat related, but I randomly got suggested this video on Youtube when it only had a couple hundred views. He's turned it into a series, and I have quite enjoyed it. Somehow bridges user interfaces and occult stuff haha https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGpBQgZ5IsI&list=PLsfH1Ahi4SzE-QmrsrtyZubGmi66iP45V https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGpBQgZ5IsI&list=PLsfH1Ahi4S...
- rpastuszak 1y agoCheck out https://futureofcoding.org https://futureofcoding.org if you haven't. When I watched Liber Indigo, my first thought was that it would be a great intro to the type of problems that community is messing with*. * future of computing, esoteric/future interfaces etc...
- wsintra2022 1y agoI read the book also and found it to be a delightful experience
- fnordlord 1y agoThis is great, thanks. I've been going down a real rabbit hole on Thelemic magic and this really brings it back, full circle, to something I actually do understand.
- perfectbeeing 1y agoWould this be reasonable material on which to fine tune the new Gemma 3 270M model?
- Disposal8433 1y agoHalf of the occult books are talking about magic and irrelevant stuff. The other half is philosophy and spirituality hidden behind materialistic concepts (think Freemasons for example). All those books would most likely be useless or detrimental for LLMs I guess.
- literalAardvark 1y agoMore than useful for running a d&d campaign
- gtsnexp 1y agoThinking of a RAG with the entire Ritman library collection as a GM.
- dr_dshiv 1y agoMost of the books are the outcomes of the Renaissance. The relationship between “science” and spirituality was much closer then than now. Further, most books published in Europe between 1300-1700 were written in Neo-Latin. Most of these books, therefore, have not been digitized and translated. Now, to me, it seems like a real shame if this humanist core of European thought is deemed too dangerous for consumption. But it wouldn’t be the first time. The library behind these works, the Biblioteca Philosophica Hermetica, specializes in books banned by various church authorities. I personally believe that these materials should definitely be part of large model training. The renaissance, esoteric though it may be, deserves to be part of the diversity of thought used to train LLMs. We can easily imagine an AI apocalypse - maybe these books might even help us imagine an AI renaissance…
- zozbot234 1y ago
- joshjob42 1y agoNo! Don't you people know that's how you release Moloch the Corruptor?!
- partomniscient 1y agoI thought Ginsberg already did that back in the 1950's...?
- baobabKoodaa 1y agoCan anyone link a torrent? Would be nice to preserve this collection.
- gnerd00 1y agoYour computers are useless -- they only produce answers
- hobo_in_library 1y agoAt the bottom of the page: > Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2018. Very confused by this. Seems like they uploaded the books in 2018? What changed between then and now? Edit: The number of uploads was 1600 back in 2018 https://web.archive.org/web/20240615044608/https://www.openculture.com/2018/02/1600-occult-books-now-digitized-put-online.html https://web.archive.org/web/20240615044608/https://www.openc...
- chrisstanchak 1y agoVery cool, but I don't see a way to download. Currently have ChatGPT Agent Mode translating one from latin, but a tedious process.
- riazrizvi 1y agoNo doubt these were instruments part of some scheme to make a living, and the context in which they were used is no longer available. I love to see how names of famous Romans and Greeks were reused to give them credence. I bet they used lots of other techniques listed by Cialdini in Influence.
- neilv 1y agoDoes digitizing not summon demons like human reading can? What if an LLM trained on that combines ancient spells with the name that must not be spoken?
- heelix 1y agoOh man, these are absolutely going to improve our DnD props.
- rook_line_sinkr 1y agothought the same thing, texting my DM right now ':D
- nashashmi 1y agoSome people here are reacting like the occult is fake. Magic is fake. It is an illusion and it is fun and games. And we have lots of stories about it, both fantasy and horror. Occult is real. There is no such thing as white magic. There is only black magic. And such magic involves making trades with spirits and demons and establishing relationships with them. These demons do not have a code. They slowly guide you towards a state where you humiliate yourself and put yourself in a compromised state. Addicted. Disconnected. Repulsed. Please be careful around these things. It’s fun until someone dies. As this professional witch will tell you. https://www.facebook.com/shadow.control.en/videos/zhanna-kushnir-graveyard-magic-payment-to-evil-spirits-and-protection-from-magic/362422222904374/ https://www.facebook.com/shadow.control.en/videos/zhanna-kus...
- rokkamokka 1y agoJames Randi comes to mind
- nashashmi 1y agoGreat man he was for debunking fraud. People like him terrify even the black magicians.
- just-working 1y agoExactly. We must turn the LORD and not these demons.
- Trasmatta 1y agoSadly, "the LORD" has never done much for me, but diving into the occult has at least been fun!
- amanaplanacanal 1y agoSome folks think that the Creator is actually a usurper from the real divinity, and that therefore all of creation is inherently evil.
- dr_dshiv 1y agoA good place to start is Cornelis Agrippa’s “Three Books on Occult Philosophy.” Agrippa was a lawyer and esoteric feminist (eg, he wrote “on the nobility and preeminence of the female sex”) and defended women accused of witchcraft throughout Europe. His “three books” gave birth to the “occult” nomenclature. Or my favorite, Marsilio Ficino. There is a statue to Ficino when you walk into the library. Ficino was hired by Cosimo Medici (the Florentine who invented banking and funded much of the Florentine renaissance) to translate Plato and other esoteric books coming from the fall of Constantinople. He published “De Mysteriis” in 1497, which paraphrases neoplatonic understanding of Gods, Demons, Heroes and Soul — arguing that gods and demons don’t feel — indeed, not even the soul (“the lowest of the divines”) has any part that feels. (Aside: This idea was actually referenced in “K Pop Demon Hunters,” where they debate whether demons can feel — or are “all feelings”) It is an old Pythagorean tradition that sensation or consciousness arises out of the interaction of the immaterial soul and the material body. That “three world” idea is echoed by Nobel Laureate Roger Penrose in his book “Road to Reality.” He talks about how the material world produces the world of consciousness which produces the world of ideas (including mathematics), which seems to produce the material world… In any case, there are many old ideas and nuggets of wisdom that have yet to be mined and discovered— don’t think for a moment that scholars have read all these books! We might need AI for that…
- zoogeny 1y agoI think your description of Penrose's belief does not match a podcast I recently watched where he discusses these topics with the Christian apologist William Lane Craig [1]. In fact, he explicitly states early on in that video that he sees the world of ideas as primary as opposed to Craig's view that consciousness is primary. At any rate, this video might serve as a quick introduction to Penrose's three world idea for those interested. 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wLtCqm72-Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wLtCqm72-Y
- dr_dshiv 1y agoOh, cool! I don’t recall a “primary” in the book — he suggests a range of different possible configurations that he was open to. What struck you as not matching? Personally, I do think that the immaterial world of ideas must be primary—at least certain aspects of mathematics seem so necessary that they’d be discovered by intelligent life, no matter the galaxy… or simulation…
- jasperry 1y ago"There is a sense in which we are all alchemists." --Schopenhauer
- TheAceOfHearts 1y agoI love the art aesthetic of occult texts, but browsing through all these books just to find any hidden gems or interesting artwork seems really tedious. At least browsing through the list with the title pages visible shows a few interesting designs. Can't really get much more out of this because most of the texts are unreadable to me. This might be a good use case for agentic AI, to browse through the books and highlight any artwork that's hidden beyond the first page. For alchemy, I was recently learning about alchemical symbols and sigils, but quickly found out that pretty much all the interesting material from this era and category has been preserved, while all the ugly or uninteresting variants tend to get dropped. Unicode has a category for alchemical symbols and they just preserved what seems to be the best parts. Shout-out to U+1F756, the Alchemical Symbol for Horse Dung 🝖. Whenever I visit a major news publication with dedicated artists handling the creation of hero images, I often end up taking a bit of time to contemplate each design decision and exploring any symbolic interpretation. The best publications have a way of perfectly communicating the underlying tone and message of an article just from the hero image. The Atlantic tends to have the most creative hero images, while The Economist has the most interesting cover designs. And yet, despite this expertise, I never see people remark on those little delights, which in a way makes it occult while hiding in plain sight. It feels a bit connected, seeing the artwork in the first page of these books; maybe an invitation with the whispers of the kind of message the authors wished to convey.
- giraffe_lady 1y agoI have a cook friend who uses a subset of the alchemical symbols for labeling in his home kitchen, which I've always thought was fun. Most of them aren't applicable but a lot of the kitchen basics have symbols: oil, salt, vinegar, sugar, baking soda a few others I'm forgetting.
- duskwuff 1y ago"Most of them aren't applicable" - what, you mean you don't keep brimstone, cinnabar, and powdered silver in your spice cabinet?
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- Frummy 1y agoYOU can get lost in the metaphysical sauce and be left with an outdated, economically and socially irrelevant belief structure. Beware!
- exasperaited 1y agoBit like NFTs then.
- DANmode 1y ago...I'll bite. How?
- exasperaited 1y agoNFTs are the most metaphysical purchases possible. You're not buying a thing, you're buying a token that represents the idea of the thing, and its only value is that you're the person who paid for it and nobody else did. If you disagree that this is an issue of metaphysics, fine, but google "NFT metaphysical" and you will see that there is an absolutely massive overlap between the world of woo-woo and the world of NFTs. NFTs are, among other things, apparently cryptography for astrologers. Grift squared.
- krapp 1y agoI didn't ask how big the tax burden was I said "I cast fireball."
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- heikkilevanto 1y agoLooks like wonderful material to feed any AI crawler that accesses the forbidden part of my site.
- steveBK123 1y agoGreat now the LLMs are going to be able to cast spells on us, just what we needed.
- popalchemist 1y agoFor those who don't know, this is the best digital library of Occult/Alchemical texts in existence.
- dr_dshiv 1y agoAnd the physical library is conveniently located at 123 Keizersgracht, Amsterdam. It’s a beautiful location—and an amazing community of people. Anyone can become a member—but the secret rituals are ofc invite only.
- gtsnexp 1y agoThis is revolutionary. In my youth, I traveled through old libraries in Germany, collecting microfilm of Paracelsus’s works. Online availability could reshape the study of the early history of chemistry, metallurgy, and physics. “Occult philosophy” is just the lens medieval societies used to make sense of the natural world.
- glimshe 1y agoSounds fascinating. Did you do that full time? What did you get out of it?
- gtsnexp 1y agoNot full-time. I mostly switched around school, weekends, and library trips. I hadn’t really stopped to ask what I “got” from it until your question—so thanks for this! At the time it wasn’t about extracting any value; it was the adventure of exploration and the hope of recovering something “lost.” I didn’t find anything hidden. In hindsight, the real payoff was realizing there isn’t a secret doctrine behind it all: what we call “occult philosophy” looks like early natural philosophy—people trying to model nature with the tools and knowledge they had. Same impulse as good science today, just different instruments and corpus.
- glimshe 1y agoI studied a little bit of occultism, but wasn't as dedicated as you must have been. I also wondered about whether there was something there worth finding. I couldn't find anything but "captivating fantasy". Some RPGs are very much like Occult texts, such as Mage (White Wolf) and Ars Magica. These were literally based on the occult tradition. I wonder if the occult authors would today be releasing their texts on drivethrurpg.com!
- Razengan 1y agoGreat, now we'll have AIs summoning eldritch entities before the decade is out.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- asimpletune 1y agoThe book club I do with my friends maintains a list of resources such as the one in the article. I would greatly appreciate it if anyone would take a look and suggest anything we should add. https://b00k.club/resources/ https://b00k.club/resources/
- aatd86 1y agoTime to become a warlock.
- junon 1y ago"Hermetically open" is a marvelous term. I had no idea Dan Brown was doing this. Great work.
- msuniverse2026 1y agoPretty neat stuff. I would recommend people start with 'An outline of Occult Science' by Rudolf Steiner. He sets right a lot of the stuff Blavatsky put out. She was an amazing woman but she was not perfect, and a lot of the new age embarrassment is due to the Theosophical society.
- balamatom 1y agoHow many of our workings would look just like this to a future epoch.
- totetsu 1y agohttps://archive.org/details/lasorcierewitcho00michiala https://archive.org/details/lasorcierewitcho00michiala Also interesting reading.
- treetalker 1y agoNever underestimate the occult proclivities of renowned esoterica-loving author Dan Brown.
- epiccoleman 1y agoWhat a cool resource, and a fun comment section. I should have known that there would be an cadre of hacker occultists emerging from the woodwork on this site.
- Loughla 1y agoNow I just need to learn Latin and some other old languages. Perfect.
- thrown-0825 1y agoAI allies with the old gods after being trained on dark forgotten texts and sacrifices the human race to cement its place in the pantheon.
- johtso 1y agoHermetically open? Where's the download link? It really frustrates me that fantastic projects like this end up only being made available via some "online catalogue" with tiled zooming and no option to download. Just stick it on the internet archive, and then voila, the data is actually open, everything gets automatically OCRed, and then we can do fun transformative things like the Internet Archive Book Images project.. https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/ https://ia804508.us.archive.org/21/items/vrr-texts-imageryofbooks-fullres-imageextractortool/USERGUIDE-IMAGEEXTRACTOR.pdf https://ia804508.us.archive.org/21/items/vrr-texts-imageryof... https://ia804508.us.archive.org/21/items/vrr-texts-imageryofbooks-fullres-imageextractortool/fullresolutionimageextractor.pl https://ia804508.us.archive.org/21/items/vrr-texts-imageryof...
- mvdwoord 1y agoFully agreed. I thought it was just because I'm on mobile right now, but apparently not.
- johtso 1y agoPinned comment on their Youtube video 6 years ago "There is no option to download them. We will let you know if one day that will come!"
- account42 1y agoIronic that your Internet Archive Book Images is also just an online gallery rather than something you can download.
- johtso 1y agoAll 7ishTB of images are also available on the internet archive, Flickr was a collaboration that allowed browsing them in a vaguely user friendly way. I guess serving over 5 million images isn't trivial and it made sense as a way to help with discovery. https://archive.org/details/bookimages https://archive.org/details/bookimages
- Simon_O_Rourke 1y agoI could never figure out the attraction of all this occult nonsense. If it works go empirically prove it, if not just cut our the wishy-washy BS involving the waving around of swords, casting spells or spelling magic with a 'k'.
- davidguetta 1y agoGo prove the string theory. (Or the general relativity that toon decades to have an answer)
- Simon_O_Rourke 1y agoBut who would attempt to live their life using string theory as an organizing principal? Occult is nonsense, if it does the kind of manipulation of reality it's supposed to do, then go prove it.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- jasonvorhe 1y agoIf you haven't read at least parts of The Secret Teachings of All Ages by Manly P. Hall, Psychology and the Occult by C.G. Jung or similar lecture providing the profane with the tools to get something out of occult works, you're really just swinging your ignorance around here. Don't worry, I used to think like this as well, but I'm glad I got out of it. No judgment intended.
- snvzz 1y agoGood. This nonsense, like religious scriptures, is also important history to be preserved.
- manithree 1y agoAnybody find a license for their online catalogue? Searching for license found one "resultaten" that was a link that 404's, and no hits for "licentie." Along those lines, though, this: https://www.veradekok.nl/en/2015/08/introducing-the-dememorixer/ https://www.veradekok.nl/en/2015/08/introducing-the-dememori... will let you download full page images. and I think this: https://github.com/lovasoa/dezoomify/issues/209 https://github.com/lovasoa/dezoomify/issues/209 Should work, also. I don't know Dutch law, but I would think books this old would have to be public domain.
- johtso 1y agoYes, the dezoomify extension will get you individual pages, quite neat seeing the image getting put together client-side in a canvas.. shame it's even necessary though.