Taking something that was already pretty charming and dorky—Joss Whedon’s “The Writer’s Guild is on strike and I am not yet the King Of All Superhero Movies” lark Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog—and driving it to affably geekish extremes, you can now make your computer “sing” the series’ “Bad Horse” song to you via a little bit of command prompt trickery. The end result looks something like this:
If you want to see the nerdy magic yourself, here’s how to do it: If you’re on Windows, bring up your command prompt, and type in “tracert -h 64 bad.horse.” (You can get a command prompt by hitting your Windows key+r and typing “cmd,” or just searching for Command Prompt in the Windows Search interface.) On Mac, open up Network Utility, click the traceroute tab, and enter “bad.horse” into the field. Now, on either system, hit enter, and let the magic of weirdly named computer servers whisk you back to good old 2008.
What’s happening here is that your computer is running a built-in command called traceroute, which identifies the path between your own system and the one that you designate with the command. In this case, you’re looking for bad.horse, which has been placed at the end of a bunch of other servers named after lyrics from the song, causing them to print out as the trace bounces from system to system. We have no idea who’s spent their precious seconds on this Earth setting this up—command prompt awareness groups, Buffy-loving hacktivists, maybe Felicia Day—but now you have “Bad Horse” stuck in your head for the rest of the day for the dorkiest reason possible, so please have fun with that.