Sunday, March 23, 2008

Easter eggs are the best.

Whether it's Homsar hidden in a Trogdor toon or an automated psychotherapy script embedded in Mac OS X's Terminal, we love easter eggs. Like the oversized Mickey Mouse etched into the Tron countryside, or the understated phallus in the Little Mermaid cover. My art history teacher suggested that Michelangelo thumbed his nose at religious authority by painting phallic acorns on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

Lifehacker has compiled 10 of their favorite software easter eggs, which we love. Software easter eggs are the best, because you really have to know some geek sauce to find them. Like Eliza:
How to find it: In the Mac Terminal (or at any command line), type emacs, hit Enter, press Escape, type "xdoctor" (no quotes).
What you get: An interactive dialogue with a shrink named Eliza. To get out of it, hit Control+X Control+C.
I'm pretty sure nobody stumbled on that by freestyling UNIX commands into the prompt, just to see what would happen. Eliza is actually somewhat theraputic, in a pointless kind of tao.

My favorite easter egg is musical, on my brother's debut album. For the rare collector that owns Jonathan Toth from Hoth's "Brainwashing: The Art of Hip-Hopera" on CD, there's a hidden track before the album begins. While everybody and their mother (read: Nirvana and Dave Matthews) had a "secret" track at the end of a CD, this was the first album ever to hide a pre-track at the beginning of the CD. To hear it, you have to play the first track and scan backwards for about 2:47. It begins with some mutant foreign language and segues into some obscure sermon about the ideal man over a freakazoid beat. I love this track, and it's one I hardly ever hear. Maybe the coolest contribution to the album, and effectively no one knows about it.

Post your favorite easter eggs (like, the ones that aren't already documented all over the web) in the comments.

2 comments:

GlobalWhisperer said...

Interestingly enough, 'Phallic Acorns' on the side-stage at Warped Tour* this year.

Can't wait to get home and try some UNIX freestyling. I'll post my findings.

*Not really, but they should be.

rob getzschman said...

They should be on the mainstage.