One night, I was thinking about those old DOS programs that embedded a plain text file in an executable and let you view it just by running the .EXE (readme.exe). They were helpful for the uninitiated.
Some were quite full-featured but I always much preferred using a proper file viewer like Vernon D. Buerg's list.com.
It struck me: what if I made something like that for Linux - but even simpler? Surely it wouldn't be well-received. For a lot of reasons but mostly because the implementation I had in mind would be comically simple.
Thinking about a possible backlash (or more likely a meh reaction), a new short story was born!
The Council of Linux Graybeards
I didn't actually have a "text to self-displaying binary" to serve as the story's cursed artifact. So, while writing, I threw together a little script that does exactly one thing: uses printf to send the text to stdout.
Its sole reason for existing is to be the tool that horrifies my "fictional" Graybeards - a prop for a story I had way too much fun (re)writing over ~three days.
note: the txt2bin script actually works well for its intended use (converts text to .C and compiles with musl-gcc with error-checking). Polished before release.