Mailbag: Halloween 2026
I’m curious what you thought about the Halloween spell on Unsung! In case you enjoyed it, here are some follow ups I collected since publishing:
A few people online suggested the distinctive and creepy “I can do it” Monopoly Deluxe sample is from a cartoon Ren & Stimpy, which premiered not long before the game. I found an example that’s very close, but not quite exactly like the one from the game. (It’s not creepy in the video!)
Nik Clayton added some color to the YouTube red and blue squares mystery, and specifically of the name of the YouTube channel – “Webdriver Torso”:
This was a test not just of the video encoding pipeline, but of the entire end-user experience. So rather than using an API to upload the videos directly, a web browser was controlled, aka driven by a script to navigate through the YouTube UI and upload the random videos.
This was done without showing any of the browser UI on the screen so it could be completely automated, often referred to as running the browser in headless mode, or if you prefer, just the torso. Hence “Webdriver Torso” as the account name. Obvious if you know the lingo, completely baffling if you don’t.
Daniel Vincent wrote to me to explain the bug that caused the texts to my date to go completely missing:
I work in the messaging business and I can tell you exactly why your use of typographer’s quotes caused mayhem in SMS. Back when the iPhone came out most carriers only supported the GSM-7 character set. Originally SMS only supported ASCII, which gave you the 140 byte limit. By using a 7-bit GSM-7 encoding they could cram 20 more characters into a message and also support certain extended characters (accents, etc. for languages that needed them).
Needless to say, typographer’s quotes fall outside these character sets. When the messages were sent, the Unicode data would either get corrupt or the carrier (inbound or outbound) would mangle the message in other ways. This situation was different in other parts of the world – e.g. Asian countries – which adopted different character sets. (There was also the Latin-1 character set, but it did not fully cover Unicode and characters like typographer’s quotes were outside of it as well!)
Other consequences of using characters outside the set may break the byte counting used for message concatenation […] resulting in only the first segment being delivered or no delivery at all.
When Unicode support came to SMS in Western countries they supported it using UCS-2, which translates Unicode into a byte format which can be carried over SMS. This was about the time when Western countries started seeing emojis and such in their text composers. UCS-2 also has the downside of cutting segment length in half (to 70 characters) because it’s a double-byte encoding. This could increase your SMS bill back when people were charging per-SMS.
It’s an interesting design challenge that might not be solvable. There was no way for my phone to ask the carrier whether the quotes were supported, or whether the message was received. You could imagine some sort of a situational warning that my special character use might cause the message to not appear, but design of warnings is hard thing and the message would have to be vague. What if this scared me for life, fearful of using other characters, or future emoji, or texting in general?
Lastly, I could imagine the curly quotes to be replaced by straight ones quietly in this context, but… that ruins typography for everyone, and it’s entirely possible there I was one of the very few people on Earth facing this particular problem.
A conversation with Nikita Prokopov made me piece together some of the iPhone jump scare bug conditions.
The reason the touch screen might still respond to touches after clicking on the lock button is that the lock button still waits a bit to detect whether you tapped it twice for Apple Pay, or thrice for an accessibility shortcut. (If you disable both of these features, the problem disappears!)
You might ask: why is the touch screen active if the phone is only waiting for the button press? Likely because… it’s cheaper.
I don’t mean it disparagingly. Code needs to be as simple as possible. Disabling the touch screen would mean having to re-enable not just upon waking the phone the next time, but also it at the second button click, too – and that could be a source of new bugs.
But Prokopov cast a shadow at “never caused any problems”:
Same, but right pocket and I was getting letters a and z inserted into text fields that I will discover later after unlock. Drove me crazy.
It seems that Apple doesn’t realize that their decision might be causing all sort of phantom touches for people. (I filed the bug inside Apple’s systems as FB25320712.)
Vis-à-vis the Pac-Man sound bug, someone unearthed a bug report thread where people complain about it as it’s happening. At least this group of people identified it as coming from Pac-Man relatively quickly, but it’s still hard for me to read all these, even 16 years after:
Disabling CoolPreviews did the trick. You guys are right... definitely a screw up somewhere along the line. I was getting sick to my stomach hearing that sound. Thank you for the information.
Lastly, I got an email from Russ Segal, the creator of N.Y.C. The Big Apple videogame – and its bug that scared me so much as a kid:
I had no idea that bug was there.
I can tell you exactly what is happening. The old Atari computer did not have enough memory to keep the picture of the whole city at once, so the program just had a basic map of the whole city, not a whole picture. As you drive horizontally, the program only creates a vertical “slice” of the picture of the city – centered on where you are. And just before you drive off the end of the picture, it paints the next slice in front of you.
When you went backward on the bridge you fell off the left side of the available picture, and the program painted more city for you. But because you are technically “off the map”, the city map is being read incorrectly – with some sort of misalignment. Not only will this make the buildings and blocks look weird, the painted city streets do not line up with where the cars think they should drive. So the cars will crash into stuff that is not supposed to be there.
It was fun to see that message in my mailbox, and fun to see echoes of computing history: the way NYC The Big Apple did it is not exactly the same as streaming in Grand Theft Auto, but it’s a similar category of creating reality on demand just ahead of where the user is looking – and you can now imagine all sorts of similar GTA bugs that happened internally at Rockstar as the game was being made.