Donnie Darko uses OS X

I think it's been previously commented upon, but we were watching Donnie Darko over the weekend (controversial opinion: we prefer the director's cut, we think it's an improvement) and noticed that Donnie's reality is powered by a familiar processor and operating system. These are direct grabs from the Blu-ray.

The entirety of the crash dump can't be seen and the scenes in which it/they appear are likely a composite of several unrelated traces, but the first two shots have a backtrace showing symbols from Unsanity Application Enhancer (APE), used for adding extra functionality to the OS like altering the mouse cursor and system menus. However, its infamous in-memory monkeypatching technique could sometimes make victim applications unstable and was unsurprisingly a source of some early crash reports in TenFourFox. (I never supported it for that reason, refused to even use it on principle, and still won't.) As a result, it wouldn't have been difficult for the art department to gin up a genuine crash backtrace as an insert. The second set of grabs appears when the Artifact returns to the Primary Universe and the Tangent Universe is purged (not a spoiler because it will make no sense to anyone who hasn't seen the movie).

All four are specific to the director's cut that premiered theatrically in May 2004. While APE was available at least as far back as Puma, i.e., OS X 10.1, Puma didn't come out until September 2001, months after the movie premiered in January of that year. In fact, the original movie is too early even for the release of Cheetah (10.0) in March. The first two images don't give an obvious version number but the second set shows a Darwin kernel version of 6.1, which corresponds to Jaguar 10.2.1 from September 2002. Although Panther 10.3 came out in October 2003, the recut movie would have moved to post-production (in its fashion) by then, and the shots may well have been done near the beginning of production when early versions of Jag remained current.

I'm waiting on the next Firefox ESR (128) in July, and there will be at least some maintenance updates then, so watch for that.