A very cool exploit...very impressive!
The only very very remotely similar thing that I've ever seen is using the "sed" utility as a general purpose programming language. Because "sed" is Turing complete, someone actually decided to use it for writing nontrivial programs. Why? I guess, "just 'cause".
But the folks who wrote this exploit wrote their own 64 bit processor using pixels in a gif image. Wow. Genius.