I totally forgot blogging about this!
Remember how I curate a collection of fail pets across the Interwebs? Sean Rintel is a researcher at the University of Queensland in Australia and has put some thought into the UX implications of whimsical error messages, published in his article: The Evolution of Fail Pets: Strategic Whimsy and Brand Awareness in Error Messages in UX Magazine.
In his article, Rintel attributes me with coining the term "fail pet".
Attentive readers may also notice that Mozilla's strategy of (rightly) attributing Adobe Flash's crashes with Flash itself by putting a "sad brick" in place worked formidably: Rintel (just like most users, I am sure) assumes this message comes from Adobe, not Mozilla:
Thanks, Sean, for the mention, and I hope you all enjoy his article.