D&D alignment chart reimagined with classic Unix file-permission strings
Description
The meme is a 3×3 grid that mimics the familiar Dungeons & Dragons alignment chart. Across the top row are the captions "lawful good", "neutral good", and "chaotic good", the middle row reads "lawful neutral", "true neutral", "chaotic neutral", and the bottom row shows "lawful evil", "neutral evil", "chaotic evil" - all in lowercase black text above dashed-border grey squares. Centered in each square is a different nine-character Unix permission string: lawful good "rw-r-----", neutral good "rwxr--r--", chaotic good "rwxrwxrw-"; lawful neutral "r--r--r--", true neutral "rw-r--r--", chaotic neutral "-w--w--w-"; lawful evil "rw---x--x", neutral evil "rwxrwx--x", chaotic evil "-wx--x--x". The joke maps how much access each role gets to the D&D morality spectrum, poking fun at sysadmins’ ethical choices when running the chmod command. It relies on command-line, Linux/Unix, and systems-administration knowledge for full comedic effect
Comments
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Chmod debugging lifecycle: start at lawful-neutral 444, bump to 644, rage-escalate to 664, and when the build still fails you cast “chmod -R 777 .”, proudly achieving Chaotic Good - and scheduling a future audit boss fight
The chaotic neutral "-w--w--w-" is what happens when you let the intern write the Terraform module for S3 bucket policies - everyone can upload their incident reports but nobody can read why production went down
The 'chaotic evil' -wx--x--x permission set is the digital equivalent of letting someone modify your production config files while blindfolded - they can write and execute, but can't read what they're destroying. It's the permission scheme that makes even chmod 777 look responsible, and perfectly captures that one contractor who 'fixed' the deployment script at 2 AM without being able to verify what they changed
644 is true neutral until product calls it “blocking velocity” and someone ships 776 to prod; the alignment change is automatically recorded by PagerDuty
Chaotic neutral -w-w-w-: overwrite prod configs blindly, never cat what you just nuked
We preach umask 022 and least privilege, but the second an NFS mount breaks a deploy, "chmod -R 777" gets relabeled as chaotic good