corvi

Once upon a time, we had a coop student at work. And every time someone completed a pull request (a small but publicly visible unit of accomplishment; a couple day's work), it would be automatically posted on our internal chat room and the coop student would reply with the octopus emoji.

When asked why he did that, he answered that the octopus emoji used in our internal chat, which looks like this:

was clearly waving its arms around in celebration. It was a party octopus, celebrating the creation of delicious code.

Then I sent him an octopus in a funny hat and he - woe unto us all - dug too deep into the internet and returned with The Fell Image. And thus began his dark reign of terror. For months, everyone dreaded accomplishing anything in particular at work, because the coops student might respond to the automatic announcement in the chat with ... this:

All the whiteboards in the building developed a strange propensity for drawings of octopods, followed a few hours later by drawings of octopods being attacked by assorted complex death traps.

So yesterday, the coop student finished his entire project and celebrated his last day.

And I knew what I had to do. I was on a Holy Mission From The Powers That Be: Dancing Argyle Octopus Puppet Cake.

Unfortunately, the purple icing was somehow both thin and runny and lumpy and bulging, and the octopus' head developed horrific tumors and began to flow off away over the cakescape as if desperately trying to escape what it knew it would become. It came out even more horrifying than I could have possibly imagined.

Truly, this is the Worst Cake In The World, and a worthy incarnation of that horrible image.

A really badly drawn icing octopus