unix personified.
© 1998 Jamie Zawinski <jwz@jwz.org>

There used to be a stand-up arcade game called Block-Out which was a 3D version of Tetris; you looked down on the stack of blocks, and rotated and dropped wireframes in three-space. But that's not the point.

The point is that when a round of the game ended, this big computer-generated Oz-head image appeared on the screen, growling something at you with way too much reverb for anyone to possibly be able to understand a word that it was saying, and as it was doing this, the background had a list of Unix error messages scrolling by! Including such classics as

core dumped
bad system call
too many links
fsck failed
not a typewriter 
hangup

and my personal favorite, in the true Unix spirit of fixed-size buffers,

network is unreachabl

So now whenever Unix shafts me, I get an image of this giant, angry, polygon-faceted Oz-head guy, yelling at me with way too much reverb.