Cute comic, but I'm starting to hate how people think that an insult is the same thing as an ad hominem. No. If I call you an idiot without attaching any propositions to that, it's just an insult and not a logical fallacy.
As the story goes, John Steinbeck was told by one of his professors that he would become an author when pigs fly,[...]
The accurate phrase is “ad astra per ALAS porci,”[“to the stars on the wings of a pig.”] which means that Steinbeck in his snarky revenge was demonstrating far and wide that he was a bad student after all – and thanks to his famous but inaccurate imprint, countless people are running around with tattoos which actually say “to the stars through other pigs.”[“ad astra per alia porci”]
For the record, Deus ex Machina is more a specific literary device- literally a crane lowering a god to save the protagonist in Roman and Greek dramas.
To be fair they were more interested in telling a moral than being a good story. But the whole hanging-actor thing was meant to say they were a god and could just wave problems away. (Apparently literally.)
More literally, memento mori is "remember you will die". There was a Roman ceremony called the Triumph when a successful war commander would parade on a chariot through Rome.
Allegedly, someone would follow them through the day telling them "memento mori" to... keep them humble, I guess? as they were basically showing off to everyone in a god costume.