Welcome, one and all, to the phenomenon known as Pixel Flood. You've certainly noticed this sort of thing happening before; in the final week leading up to a Stevenote (especially one at which Fearless Leader is expected to announce new hardware), a flurry of badly overcompressed JPEGs saturates the 'net, each purporting to be some sort of smuggled spy photo or "artist's conception" of the genuine article. Sometimes they're authentic, sometimes they're not, and sometimes they're just downright laughable in their ineptitude. Personally, we never much mind to which category a given Pixel Flood image belongs, because hey, it's all still grist for the mill.

As far as we can make out, Pixel Flood officially kicked off sometime yesterday, when what appeared to be a scan of a creased and crumpled black and white printout of something that may or may not have been the Power Mac G5 started making the rounds. While it has since disappeared from its original server, a reduced version is still available over at Mac Rumors. If you didn't get a chance to see the picture at its original size, trust us-- you're not missing much, except for a screening job so dithered it looks like the artist overdosed on Zip-a-tone. Apparently we've moved past the traditional method of disguising a picture of "questionable origins" by compressing it all to hell; now it's all about screening, printing, and rescanning. Next we predict it'll all be about pudding smudges and burn marks.

Anyway, not terribly much later, faithful viewer WYSIWYG informed us that AppleInsider had posted a fresh installment in its new oeuvre of fictionalesquish pieces. This latest one features 1) an apparent "homage" to the Naked Mole Rat's inimitable style (which, to us, fell flat because the Gay Blade's style is... well, inimitable, and author Kasper Jade was also apparently unadvisably sober when he attempted the stunt), and 2) an artist's rendering of what the G5 might look like. Amazingly enough, said artist's rendering looked exactly like an Illustrator tracing of the aforementioned screen job before someone went all Lichtenstein on its ass. Coincidence? Hmmmm.

Meanwhile, faithful viewer The DerekCat also sent us winging our way over to this forum thread, which displays what the administrator claims to be a "leaked image of the new 970 desktop macintosh computer!" Now, we're not going to come right out and say that this one's an obvious fake, but we will say this: if this does turn out to be the new G5, then we'll finally know what Jonathan Ive spent his £25,000 prize money on: a whoooooole lotta crack. We're not going to get into a point-by-point analysis of why we think all the images so far are probably bogus, because it really just comes down to a gut-level feeling. These don't feel like Ive's designs. If we're wrong, hey, no big deal. We'll just have to learn to live with a vaguely hexagonal footprint...