Man gets BSOD message tattooed on his arm

If anyone gave that Zune tattoo guy props for his bravery / stupidity, you owe a handful of kudos to this fellow, too. In an admittedly bizarre move to show one's disdain (right?) for the always infuriating Blue Screen of Death, this man has went so far as to tattoo the BSOD error message on his arm, presumably as a battle scar for all those Windows driver installations gone terribly awry. Next up? We're betting on a Kernel Panic tat for arm number two.

[Via Tumbl, thanks Laura]

[moondy @ Jul 28th 2007 5:12AM]

look how red is arm is lol...

[moondy @ Jul 28th 2007 5:12AM]

look how red his arm is lol...

[Blackster @ Jul 28th 2007 5:16AM]

never been tattooed before eh?

[Ben Hobbs @ Jul 28th 2007 9:07AM]

Its red with shame!

[eh @ Jul 28th 2007 3:28PM]

I wish people would wait until the redness goes away before showing people their tattoo... yuck. I dont know why they think the best time to take a picture of a tattoo is immediately afterwards when it looks like they have some infectious rash.

[neilmc @ Jul 28th 2007 4:56AM]

MORON!

[BobTurbo @ Jul 28th 2007 4:58AM]

Legend!

[Dustin Frazier @ Jul 28th 2007 5:00AM]

That's what happens when you try to run a desktop windows on an ARM processor. He shoulda gone with windows ce.

[Ant @ Jul 28th 2007 8:17AM]

sooo nerdy and i laughed =)

[SOAD @ Jul 28th 2007 5:16AM]

good luck getting laid with that

[Ellianth @ Jul 28th 2007 1:39PM]

I'd sleep with him... for a price :P

[Joe Smith @ Jul 28th 2007 5:20AM]

eh... i'd call it RSOP > red screen of pain.

[drew Eastman @ Jul 28th 2007 5:38AM]

Way cool ... !!!!
a billion times more original than havin some tribal thing from a tattoo catalog on ya body somewhere .. cos that is pathetic ..!!!

You go man !!!
EXIT.

[zuricher @ Jul 28th 2007 5:59AM]

15min geek credit... but the tattoo is nice, must be very difficult to get the font right.

[Russ @ Jul 28th 2007 6:12AM]

totally - its as if the tattoo was done by some robot arm...

[TerrorBite @ Jul 29th 2007 8:56AM]

It's freaky how accurate that tattoo is. Even the font spacing is perfect....

[DR PEPPER @ Jul 28th 2007 6:01AM]

Oh dear. What an idiot.

[Carbonize @ Jul 28th 2007 6:02AM]

Except of course the BSOD is disabled by default in XP and Vista so most people probably wouldn't even know what it is.

[Clayton @ Jul 28th 2007 7:14AM]

you don't have mess around much, do you?

[Carbonize @ Jul 28th 2007 7:20AM]

The only people who would mess about are geeks who want to see what caused the error. Most normal users wouldn't want to see the BSOD or even know what it is.

[Speedmonkay @ Jul 28th 2007 7:51AM]

I dont know what is dumber ... the guy getting this tat or your statement that BSODs are disabled by default.

You dont have to be a geek or screwing around with computer to get a BSOD.
You can have a failing harddrive and easily get a "Unmountable Boot Volume" BSOD.
Or you can install something new like a new printer and on the next boot your PC may not like the drive so you will get the wonderful "IRQ Not Equal or Less" BSOD

Its a part of life when we use Windows. I have accepted this, but this guy has taken the acceptance to a whole new level.

[Carbonize @ Jul 28th 2007 7:59AM]

Funny because in all the years I have been using XP and more recently Vista I have never had a BSOD.

As to the IRQ error thats something you should really only get if you've tried manually configuring your IRQ's and didn't know what you were doing.

[Clayton @ Jul 28th 2007 8:17AM]

seriously, can i come live with you in your fantasy world? of course, i've never had a bsod when i wasn't personally messing around with my pc, but i've cleaned out people's computers that would bsod whenever you'd boot in normal mode... loaded up with tons upon tons of malware. so yea, it can happen to non "geek" people.

[Clayton @ Jul 28th 2007 8:18AM]

oh and "As to the IRQ error thats something you should really only get if you've tried manually configuring your IRQ's and didn't know what you were doing." is one of the most laughable things i've ever heard. anyone who has spent enough time fixing other people's computers knows that windows isn't always savvy when it comes to irq conflicts.

[Carbonize @ Jul 28th 2007 8:33AM]

Yes we all bow down because Only Clayton and SpeedMonkay know computers. They are the only computer techs in the world. The rest of us are just poor users.

Given that nearly all home printers these days are USB the odds on an IRQ conflict are slim to none.

I love the comment about if you spend al your time fixing computers you're going to find BSOD's. Thats like saying if you deal with ill people all the time you're going to find a dead one.

Most USERS, note the word users and not techs or repairman, will never see a BSOD on XP nor on Vista because it only happens on an exceptionally few errors. Anything else just results in the machine rebooting with a little message explaining that an error has occured and the machine will now reboot. Windows 98 on the other hand would BSOD for every little thing.

[Carbonize @ Jul 28th 2007 8:33AM]

Yes we all bow down because Only Clayton and SpeedMonkay know computers. They are the only computer techs in the world. The rest of us are just poor users.

Given that nearly all home printers these days are USB the odds on an IRQ conflict are slim to none.

I love the comment about if you spend al your time fixing computers you're going to find BSOD's. Thats like saying if you deal with ill people all the time you're going to find a dead one.

Most USERS, note the word users and not techs or repairman, will never see a BSOD on XP nor on Vista because it only happens on an exceptionally few errors. Anything else just results in the machine rebooting with a little message explaining that an error has occured and the machine will now reboot. Windows 98 on the other hand would BSOD for every little thing.

[Carbonize @ Jul 28th 2007 8:33AM]

Stupid bloody works proxy made my post get sent twice.

[Rees Clissold @ Jul 28th 2007 8:41AM]

Nerd fight!

FWIW, I've had BSODs on XP. It can happen if a virus takes out a system file, or you have corrupt RAM, as well as all the various other reasons you've mentioned.

[Clayton @ Jul 28th 2007 9:40AM]

"I love the comment about if you spend al your time fixing computers you're going to find BSOD's. Thats like saying if you deal with ill people all the time you're going to find a dead one."

you're still defending your comment that the bsod is disabled. my comment was a demonstration that bsods happen to non-tech people. you know, you can work at a hospital and never find a dead person, that doesn't mean dead people are disabled at the hospital. continuing with this analogy, as medical equipment and techniques get better, less people die from various ills. on the other side of this equation now, it's nice xp (and presumably vista) handles memory read and write failures better and pnp has come a long way, but this doesn't mean that things still don't kill it... :P

[Carbonize @ Jul 28th 2007 9:56AM]

So we agree that 98% of normal users will never see a BSOD and this guy who got the tat is a tit. A tat for a tit. Better than tit for tat.

[Mike Klein @ Jul 28th 2007 11:35AM]

Kids!

As 20+ yr engr using Win...I can state I only see these every blue moon (being once every 6 months perhaps)...and doing upnp, mediacenter, etc.

It still happens but is fairly infrequent even with heavy pounding.

All depends on the crap you have installed and how much it stresses your system...(i.e. your mileage may vary).

As far as being 'disable' though...hmmm...that's a new one.

[Carbonize @ Jul 28th 2007 11:54AM]

Ok disabled was probably the wrong term. Replaced for all but the most serious/fatal errors.

[db26 @ Jul 28th 2007 1:49PM]

98% of normal users will never see a BSOD? I think you highly underestimate just how ****ed up the average user's computer is. Not to mention that they also have no idea how to fix it, so the problems just pile up more and more...

[Bobs @ Jul 28th 2007 6:10PM]

Fatal? ive goten BSODs ages ago, i didnt know what it was for, or why it happend, so i just restarted and went along my happy little way. 4 years later, im fixing these things as a hobby, my parent's computers have had BSODs, but i wasnt there when it happend, so i didnt know what happend, but most of the BSODs ive had to deal with were rare, and a restart later, nothing was broken, computer acted fine. as far as non computer geeks getting them, anyone who has had one of those creative X-Fi cards know that they are prone to IRQ errors, ive seen many other people with them on creative's forums. the simple fix is just moving the card to a new PCI slot, and everything is fine. BSODs are not disabled, ive goten them on my old HP a735w computer 4 years ago running XP. knock the OS back to something like 95 or 98, then yeah, BSODs happen a lot more often, they have improved windows since then.

[Seamus Bartlett @ Jul 28th 2007 6:06AM]

he has more muscle mass than any nerd of his caliber should.

ctrl+alt+tool

[logyk @ Jul 28th 2007 6:23AM]

That's cause it's his jerking arm... his left is probably spaghetti thin.

[k @ Jul 28th 2007 6:28AM]

how g33k!!!

[Damian @ Jul 28th 2007 6:45AM]

AHAHA love it.

[Tony @ Jul 28th 2007 7:16AM]

i already have BSOD in vista ...

[bobbymelbourne @ Jul 28th 2007 6:53AM]

Can't wait to see someone get the Mac OSX Kernel Panic tattooed.

[rynthart @ Jul 28th 2007 9:37AM]

Lol, they havn't found someone with long enough arms yet.

[Luigi193 @ Jul 29th 2007 8:10PM]

you mean the grey screen of panic and disarray?

[rafael @ Jul 28th 2007 6:54AM]

would love to punch this guy on the face.. what a moron.

[eric @ Jul 28th 2007 7:07AM]

I would feel stupid later in life with a regular tattoo. I would probably shoot myself with that shit on my arm.

[NovaLand @ Jul 28th 2007 7:08AM]

At that time Microsoft is a party which enslaves linux enthusiasts, gas them to death and use the gold in their teeths to build up a new empire. History comes and goes to be repeated over and over again.. humans never learn.

What I wanted to say with that is that; then, this tatoo will be his fall.

[TheWakeUpCall @ Jul 28th 2007 7:36AM]

Oh.... my god....

[tekdroid @ Jul 28th 2007 7:53AM]

I'm not convinced.

To be a real blue screen, the blue would have to be the background of the text and the text would have to remain white-ish.

I call for inversing of colour :)

[teckfrek @ Jul 28th 2007 8:14AM]

Dude, it's not IRQ, it's IRQL, or Interrupt Request Level and it's caused by a driver attempting to either read/write data structures at an interrupt level that is too high or attempting to access paged data while at a IRQL that is too high. You have no control over it. The IRQ's you're referring to are hardware IRQs and do NOT cause this BSOD.

[CF @ Jul 28th 2007 8:03AM]

And thus the seeds of a new religion are sewn...

Steve Balmer is Lord Vader and Bill Gates the emperor who rules behind the scenes...

[WhackMushroom @ Jul 28th 2007 8:11AM]

i found it alot easier to just switch to mac os.