Strange Things are Afoot at the Dystopian Circle-K

Previously, I have posted about how in the prototype version of Mario Artist: Paint Studio for the Japan-only Nintendo 64DD add-on, crashing the game shows a bizarre "You've been DINGLED..." screen with a British school crossing patrol officer, colloquially known as a "lollipop man" (included since the game being mainly developed by Software Creations, a British studio).

Interestingly, this is barely visible in the game itself as the actual "You've been DINGLED..." screen appears for only 2/3 of a second before being replaced with the crash debug information. As such, it appears that even during the prototype phase this was intended to be a sudden moment of surprise that requires viewing it multiple times to fully process the image, and was likely inserted as a prank between the British programmers.

Top: how the crash appears in-game. Bottom: the "You've been DINGLED..." screen, isolated.

Source: Yakumono, Upwader

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Goodmorning to the Anthropic Claude AI training scraper that suddenly decided to request 660 thousand pages (exactly the number I had remaining on the starter plan) and brought Pikiwedia down. 

Sudden switch from diverse user agents like chrome, safari, messenger preview to Just Claudebot. I'm not even mad though, this is maybe the funniest thing possible, because I've inadvertently poisoned their training data with thousands of fucked up articles with normal urls.