A slow fail pet: Teh Fail Snail

Haven’t posted new fail pets in a while! Perhaps because this one took so long to arrive.

This “fail snail” was released by its creator into the public domain and has since been happily frolicking coughing up HTML color codes on the Web. Though I haven’t seen it used for an actual error page yet.

Categories: websights | Tags:

Wikileaks Parodies MasterCard Commercial

Online whistleblower website WikiLeaks spoofed a MasterCard commercial as criticism to the credit card company allegedly blocking multiple millions of dollars in donations (press release).

At the same time, they also sued MasterCard and Visa in Denmark for their interfering with WikiLeaks’ donations, which they call a “financial blockage”.

Here’s the viral video in all its glory:

Categories: websights

Twitter has a fail-robot, too

Twitter’s fail whale has a little friend, a fail robot. Not sure how the two relate to each other, but it seems the whale comes out when twitter struggles under the sheer load of tweets, while the fail robot denotes service errors not caused by load?

Now, evil tongues would claim that there’s so much fail at Twitter that a single fail pet just doesn’t do it justice… But, knowing how challenging it is to scale a service to millions of users, I wouldn’t quite dare to say so — and therefore, I welcome the poor injured robot to my fail pet collection. Quick! To the fail pet emergency room!

Thanks to jabba for taking a screenshot for me!

Categories: Tech Talk, websights | Tags:

Tumblr’s Fail Pet: The Tumbeasts

In a recent comic, The Oatmeal asked tumblr to blame their service outages on an imaginary animal like twitter’s Fail Whale and promptly came up with one, the Tumbeasts.

What’s awesome is that Tumblr actually did end up using his artwork on their error page. This is what it looks like:

Mad props to the Oatmeal and Tumblr for this stellar addition to my fail pet collection!

And thanks to michaelk for pointing it out to me!

Categories: Tech Talk, websights | Tags: ,

bit.ly: Fail-Pufferfish

Noah’s Ark The fail pet collection is glad to welcome a new member! bit.ly, the URL shortening service used by default on twitter, hosts a family of pufferfish in their logo, and consequently, a really big one of them is also responsible for guarding their 404 page:

Let’s hope all the sea creatures in my giant fail pet aquarium get along well…

Thanks for the link, dolske!

Categories: Tech Talk, websights | Tags: ,

Must-watch: Greenstorm Film

Greenstorm Film is an independent production company from Moscow, Idaho. They make great short films, such as this one, called “The Package”:

I find this really funny :) . There’s another one, more grotesque but no less amusing: The Great Couch Caper.

I like how creative these guys are, and how well they put everything in scene. Another example of their talent is this music video of a cover version of “Airplanes” by B.o.B. (which, by the way, also features some really good musicians!)

And now that I’ve hooked you up on their filmmaking, you’ll be pleased to know they are working on a feature-length film named “The Protagonist” (trailer), due to be released in the fall. I, for one, can’t wait to see it.

Thanks, Jenny, for pointing out Greenstorm, and thanks, Noah, for the cool performance in the video :)

Categories: USA, websights | Tags:

Some geek humor

Look what last.fm has in their robots.txt file:

User-Agent: *
...

Disallow: /harming/humans
Disallow: /ignoring/human/orders
Disallow: /harm/to/self

Allow: /

Oh, who wouldn’t like geek humor :)

Thanks for pointing this out, jsocol!

Categories: Tech Talk, websights

battle.net: Fail-something

As it turns out, Blizzard Entertainment’s game service battle.net has a fail pet!

Well, “fail pet” might be the wrong word for this, but who expected battle.net to have a cutesy kitten on their error pages anyway. Instead, they have a fellow who somewhat looks like the alien cousin of Lennie from “Of Mice and Men”.

“Oops”, indeed!

Update: Deb says, it’s a Murloc. Thanks!

Thanks for the screen shot, clouserw!

Categories: Tech Talk, websights | Tags: ,