Greg Egan404 errors and blue screens of death are so boring, and even display-memory corruption looks a bit hackneyed. Tech should fail in more evocative ways, with glyphs coming unstuck and plummeting towards the bottom of the screen, burning up from friction as they descend.
Jonatan Hildén@gregeganSF Like i imagined computer viruses as a child, after hearing about the ”Ambulance” virus. The reality was dreadfully boring.
SaturniusMons 
@gregeganSF We need more explosions and horrible painful death!
❄️❄️❄️@SaturniusMons @gregeganSF yes, when one of the students accidentally re-invents the fork-bomb on the HPC cluster it should involve the fire department, not just an automated scheduler pausing the run queue.
Tom Isaacson
Windows WSYP Project
BadExampleMan 🟣@gregeganSF thinking of the old "bomb" and "dead Mac" icons from MacOS.
George William Herbert@gregeganSF fail whale descending, wiggling it’s fins. “And What are these? I think I’ll call them… tweets!”
And the bowl of petunias.
Thorne Lawler@gregeganSF or you can just fall back on the classics. Halting and Catching Fire is as realistic now as it ever was. 🔥
Vaneshi@gregeganSF A little cartoon CPU looking confused.
Tina Stormcaller@gregeganSF bring back the guru meditation
jwz@gregeganSF I agree, I designed my 404 pages to create just as much anxiety as possible... (make sure you click) https://www.jwz.org/nope
@jwz @gregeganSF I'm glad I had the sound muted for that.
Then I went back and tried it again with the sound on, and I'm now glad in a different way.
Cadbury Moose@gregeganSF There were the two spoof "virus" programs back in the old days: Bitrot and Crumble; an enhanced version of the latter would be amusing (albeit briefly). (I vaguely remember "Earthquake" from somewhere, where the CRT image would jitter briefly followed by all the text ending up in a jumbled heap at the bottom - can't remember where it was from, though.)
Laurent Duval@gregeganSF Maybe not on airport screens
Jon Marnock@gregeganSF Should look and sound like the death/explosion animations in #Round42 …
Round 42
hwestiii@gregeganSF why does my Blue Screen Death now contain a QR code? That seems flat out ridiculous to me. My cell phone now a critical component of my general purpose computer operation? New MFA technique?
Xebulun EnEssEitch@gregeganSF i stumbled upon the most beautiful failure mode a few weeks ago on a stackexchange thread about fractal explorer code golf but i failed to get a screenshot before declaring tab bankrupcy and wasn't able to replicate it. was truly a marvel though... i'm almost tempted to retrieve it from the local spooks' mass-collection buffer
BoredomFestival@gregeganSF the monkey's paw finger curls...
0xflick.eth@gregeganSF my favorite crash is still "GURU MEDITATION" on Commodore Amiga
KiwiRed@gregeganSF Is the world really ready for BSODs that can crash?
@gregeganSF This looks like a job for @neilsardesai !
Non-Euclidean Dreamer@gregeganSF This morning, I thought something was wrong with my YouTube account. After a while of staring blankly I realized I just had 404 followers.
MaggieLThere used to be a prank command you could run in a PC-DOS command prompt that then behaved normally except that starting slowly and then at a gradually accelerating rate, characters from previous lines would detach and fall straight down until they encountered a character below them.