I understand where they were coming from, having to look at a pink/rainbow bm ui while debugging a page didn't make it any easier. But it was also one of the greatest April fools jokes of all time.
Honestly it was fine enough for a YouTube error, "we couldn't find that video." But then everyone started copying it, including Microsoft who, in Windows 8, updated the blue screen of death to have a "whoopsie poopsie! Your computer has a widdle boo boo!" type message, accented with a :( sad face emoticon.
Which I can guarantee was presented to countless people who lost real work. I'm sure they found that real reassuring.
It was a strange mix of humorous and clever and 4chan-ish waste. The Xorg.conf-like entry for an LCD w/ five dead pixels was a highlight for me. It sort of mocked the slightly bygone era of having to know your syncs and refresh rates and hand-enter them amidst warnings that, in theory, being very wrong could destroy your perfectly normal monitor.
You know what's really not fun? That font and color against that background.
If computers aren't fun for you anymore, at what could reasonably be described as the apex of what's ever been possible with a computer right now, it's not computers that are at fault here, it's you.
YMMV but when the presenter of the WWDC AutoLayout track had to dig into Instruments to find out why his layout was throwing exceptions I felt like I was watching some kind of really nerdy April fools joke.
I couldn’t believe the first time I saw the sad smiley blue screen. It seemed like such a ridiculous thing for Microsoft to have done.
Then I remembered fiddling on Macs as a kid, if you screwed up you’d see a bomb. If you did something really wrong you’d get the mac icon with Xs for eyes.
The point being: cutesy errors are about as old as personal computing, but they do seem to becoming more prevalent.
I remember pranking a colleague's computer after a Linux advocacy rant so that that Bill-Borg picture came up on her PC's splashscreen, with the message "You WILL be assimilated".
As it happened, that morning, she had just had a meeting with the boss about turning up late too frequently, and was thrown into a momentary paranoid panic, before she figured out that I was the culprit!
Obvious joke is obvious, but he could have called it the Unno Fish Shell?
Looks interesting. I expect my fingers will be even more confused than ever switching machines now (they've never learned that Alt-3 isn't # on linux or that middle-click isn't paste in Putty)
I dunno, that reads less as comedy to me and more as a quick visual way to express "you're in trouble". Notably, the text in that screenshot is completely serious - "Sorry, a system error occurred. [details]" is perfectly reasonable, and the icon is just... flavoring. It presents to me as vastly more respectful than, say NT's ":(" error screen.
RIP My Little Borgmaster: Production is Magic
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