My comprehension of how computers and the Internet works is on the same level as the Insane Clown Posse’s understanding of magnets. Whenever anyone mentions DDOS, my go-to mental image is a Nintendo Game and Watch called
Parachute that my brother got for his birthday when he was a kid.
Game and Watch were hand-held liquid crystal display games. Despite being very basic, they were labours of love and aesthetically pleasing in terms of their overall design.
In
Parachute, your thankless job is to row back and forth across shark infested straits, between a pair of desert islands, catching parachutists who are bailing out of a chinook in ever increasing numbers, and plunging towards earth at faster and faster speeds.
Your small vessel is able to comfortably accommodate an infinite number of these falling men. Any who you fail to catch are chased across the bottom of the screen by a shark and consumed. It is very harrowing, comparable to a real shark attack.
Matters are further complicated by parachutists becoming caught on the canopies of the palm trees on either side of the screen and dangling for a while by their chutes. As the game progress they begin falling in pairs and you need the lightning reactions of Cheetara from Thundercats to catch both at once.
In common with all political careers, every game of
Parachute ends in failure. Eventually the ‘man rain' becomes a deluge and it is impossible to catch them all. The death count by shark rises to three, which is the acceptable level of collateral damage for this military operation, and the game freezes in a snapshot of your failure, preserving for the ages your inability to save the lives of good soldiers.
Anyway, that’s what my Homer Simpson-esque brain thinks of whenever the Kiwi Farms goes down: too many parachutists at once.
To complete this circle of autism, I found footage of someone playing
Parachute.
