I read it as "Fail Whale" ... between aging eye-sight and on-and-off-again dyslexia, I didn't really stand a chance.

OTOH ... awesome article - thanks for sharing!

And I thought it was going to be about Zynga's monetization strategy.

Talking about sci-fi references, my first thought was of a budong.

I thought it was about a gamer whale failing.

I read "whale fail". I expected an insightful article on the failure of large software projects. smh.

Came here having misread the title as "Whale Fail" and thought it would be about some early days of Twitter where they displayed whales when the server went down.

But actually learned something very cool!

Here's what a "Whale Fail" is [1]. In 1970, a whale died near Portland, Oregon and washed up on the beach. The local authorities decided to blow it up using explosives, with awful and unexpected results.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBgThvB_IDQ

Haha in a sense this is also a "whale fall". In fact, this is more of "whale fall" than the original article. The whale literally fell from the sky!

I thought the same, but went back further in time to the live-ish news report of the demolition team trying to vaporize a dead beached whale back into the ocean using construction dynamite.

It didn't go well. Classic news blurb though.

Twitter sunk all those countless fail whales only to provide a perfect habitat and breeding ground for scavengers and bottom feeders. What a perfect metaphor.

To me, 'Whale Fall' makes think of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, when the Heart of Gold invokes it's infinite improbability drive to avoid incoming missiles and said missiles turn into a pot of Petunias and a Whale, with both then falling towards the nearby planet at high speed[1].

--

[1] 'I wonder if it [the planet] will be friends with me?', thought the Whale.

"Oh no, not again!" To this day, I still wonder why the bowl of petunias thought that

Because Arthur Dent keeps killing Agrajag over and over again and he reincarnates into various people and creatures that then are killed by Arthur. The pot of petunias is one such reincarnation.

The entire character arc is basically Douglas Adams taking out his frustration with Jaguar drivers in traffic.

> I still wonder why the bowl of petunias thought that

It’s covered in the third book! (Life, the Universe, and Everything)

It is an incredible set of books. You can return to it years later and find jokes and references that you missed in first... few hundred readings (don't judge me :) ).

Wasn't there was a film where a sentient missile refuses to explode as it wants to live?

In Dark Star a sentient bomb gets stuck in the drop mechanism. One of the crew teaches it existentialism in an attempt to stop it detonating, but then it comes to believe its the only being in the universe and decided “Let there be light”.

While the sibling comment correctly points out Dark Star as the movie, I'd also like to point out Starship Titanic - Douglas Adams was involved in the game, based on a throwaway line from one of the Hitchhiker novels. Terry Jones novelized the game. Both include a talking bomb where the plot involves distracting the bomb until it looses track and has to start counting down all over again.