this post was submitted on 22 May 2025
114 points (97.5% liked)
Lord Of The Rings Memes
1122 readers
78 users here now
founded 5 months ago
MODERATORS
Ash nazg durbatulûk, ash nazg gimbatul, chkdsk /f /r /x
"Never before has any voice dared to utter the words of that tongue in Imladris, Gandalf the Grey,"
I do not ask for pardon, Master Elrond, for the Black Speech of Mordor may yet be heard in every sector of the drive!
What is actually happening to the computer in the image?
It's a busybox prompt, which normally looks like this: 
busybox is a set of minimal space saving command line tools (really just one executable linked to with various names, that immitates basic tools when called with that name, eg. it echos when called as echo or cats when called as cat etc.) and it's commonly provided in the initial ramdisk loaded at boot of various Linuxes. If the boot fails after liading it, you get this to diagnose the problem and maybe even fix it. Now what happened here is that additionally the output is garbled up. It's either the memory that holds the console font, the console font definition on disk (may be in the kernel or a module), the graphic cards memory or maybe even the display/terminal. In one of those components the bits for the font didn't take the correct values or lost them again. Therefore the text gets displayed with wrong characters.
Well I learned something about busybox today.
Also wanted to add that this happens when you cat binary. Not that I’ve ever done that of course.
My guess is their terminal got messed up with a mess of control characters in the output of a command. If true, running tput reset would fix it.
My mom calls these “schmishmoids”, and that’s a top tier one.
I was sure somebody else would have named this
Also I had to laugh at “See Also: Bush hid the facts”
I thought someone was just trolling Wikipedia and this page was so niche it got missed
Youtube has been pushing some videos related to that, implying there's a version where the Unicode goes airplane, rectangle, rectangle, skull... star of David.