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.

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:

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!

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!

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

Thanks for the link, dolske!

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

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!

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!

Very funny!

Thanks to several people who have pointed this video out lately!

The story is intriguing:

An object in the sky spreads radiation over North America. Fearing terrorism, U.S. Homeland Security agents are dispatched to investigate and contain the damage. What they discover will have implications for the entire world.

The pilot episode has been filmed on a budget of a mere 6000 dollars (all of it funded by private donations), and for that, the idea has been very well executed. I suggest you all see it, as the video is freely and legally available through VODO. Pioneer One is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Sharealike license.

What I find very impressive about the show is that unlike traditional producers, they embrace rather than demonize P2P file sharing. Therefore, the makers of Pioneer One have the chance to show that grassroots film-making (or rather, TV-series-making) that is successful beyond a tiny scale is possible by actively engaging the Internet community (for both funding and distribution) rather than using the Internet as a simple, tightly controlled broadcasting medium as if it was a glorified TV set.

When the article on Pioneer One faced (and fenced off) a deletion request due to alleged irrelevance on Wikipedia, I wrote the following in the deletion discussion:

Keep. Not for it being a low-funds TV series, as it is not exceptional in that respect, but for its attempt at being successful through Torrent distribution. [...] The main reason for its notability is that we see a huge effort on the side of traditional media distribution groups against P2P networking as a concept. They essentially argue that P2P is [not] tightly controllable and therefore it must be objectionable. Making an active effort to legally distribute media content via P2P is much more a political statement for the legitimacy of P2P as a cultural phenomenon than it is a way to keep distribution cost low. Compare this to other attempts at making a (mini-) series popular on the Internet (Dr. Horrible, for example) that while being free-as-in-beer (initially) did not use P2P technology (or any free-as-in-speech distribution channel), and you’ll see how radically different Pioneer One is in that respect. [...]

Sure, it is not the first free-to-torrent project. But it’s the first free-to-torrent series that might actually become successful. And it is a way for the filesharing community to show what it is really about: Free speech, not free beer.