had to rescue data via a live USB boot. turns out the USB image got corrupted too

Maybe your VRAM is damaged

I don't think it's an issue with the image. Looks like your GPU is acting up

Yeah that looks like hardware damage, not disk corruption.

To those saying it's likely hardware damage: nope, luckily not. Booting into a different USB image doesn't produce this. But booting into tone same ISO produces these errors every time (it starts out normal and progressively gets worse over time).

maybe it's actually some hardware clock chip being broken, as window animations also use timers, but could be coincidence the clock region started acting up first.