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Comment by latexr | Hacker News Reader

At the start of Good Omens, there’s a scene where demons are sharing their recent misdeeds. A couple of them are sharing “classic” demon stuff like killing and possessing, but Crowley (the protagonist demon) shares more modern evil deeds, such as creating traffic jams.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Omens

I’d link to a clip of it, but to your point some devil is making it frustratingly hard to find.

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It's been years, but I seem to recall that Crowley specifically is very proud about making sure some motorway project got botched, because the continual drip of suffering from the accumulated jams and road rage makes him look really good in the spreadsheets even though he's not much for the classical showy stuff. Millions of little instances of suffering adding up year on year, instead of a handful of incidents of really intense suffering.

I thought it was that he altered planning documents and even went and moved physical markings to make the M25 the shape of the ancient evil sigril Odegra (this is from memory; I just read it a lot as a teenager) so every angry drive round it powers that sigil.

Yes, I think you’re right. And if I recall correctly, near the end he’s trying to get somewhere but gets stuck in traffic by the same problem he caused.

In all fairness, he gets stuck trying to do something good, which is not the standard "evil trapped by its own design" moral.

Ha, that's right! I forgot about that bit.

Man. I do miss Terry Pratchett.

Whoever decided adding silly audio effects to an operating system is surely one of these lesser devils. Just think of how many people have been aggravated by a colleague's laptop when it "wakes up" every day, or an inappropriate notification sound during a presentation or something. On any desktop PC I interact with I do my bit by disabling all sound effects before I continue.

The real genius was whoever decided to add fake typing sounds to virtual keyboards on touch screens.

Blessedly everyone around me has disabled these, I had forgotten how enraged that makes me. Even though I don't think physical keyboards bother me at all.

https://youtu.be/M0S3a32RzEo with David Tennant as Crowley.

It's a well done scene that is properly faithful to the original.

I think Good Omens may have been influenced by the 1960s version of Bedazzled. In that, Peter Cook's version of the Devil spends much of his time creating petty annoyances such as scratching vinyl records and putting them back on shelves, breaking parking meters so drivers get fined, and ripping the last pages out of Agatha Christie whodunnits etc. Definitely a touch of Douglas Adams in there as well.

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