Technology

Does anyone else find it horrifyingly scary whenever one of your techno-devices does something you’ve never seen it do before? Like, it displays some sort of new icon, or the font changes on you, or it starts making some new beeping noise late at night and you have no idea what it’s supposed to mean?
I think humans might have some instinctual fear of being stealthily conquered by robot overlords because I totally freak out when I see things going wonky like that.
I had this Atari 800 when I was really young and we had this Sesame Street video game for it. We put the Atari 800 in my closet just because we weren’t using that space. Well I had this dream that the Atari 800 would turn on and there would be Ernie’s face flashing on the screen with some sort of low “boo-BOOOOOOP” chiptune noise playing over and over and it scared the hell out of me.
And today when my cell phone ran out of batteries I tried starting it up, and it played the “on” jingle, and half-way through it started playing the “off” jingle, with “RECHARGE BATTERY” on it. Nowhere as frightening as a pixelated Ernie staring at you in the middle of the night, but still like “oh man I’ve never seen that before that’s scary.”
Tell me about your scary gadgets!
Also, here is my laptop’s desktop background to fit the occasion:

16 comments

  1. oh and this one isn’t as scary but once i look on my phone’s external LCD display and it said like 3:05 when my friend asked me what time it is. she goes “really? wow. today’s moving so slowly.” then i opened the phone and the inner display was like 4:30

  2. Yeah I had that fear, but I don’t think it really affects me as much now. Mainly cause I lumped the “fear of computer mystery” together with “fear of realistically depicted human skulls” of which there are many games where you can find those. So once the latter ceased to make me run for the covers the former kind of followed.

  3. One time my laptop woke me up by making an awful grinding sound. Turns out it was just the hard drive trying to ensure that I’d never access my data ever again!

  4. the scariest shit is furbies. i had a furbie that woke me up in the middle of the night saying “cockledoodle doo! cockledoodle doo! i LOVE you” and the little shit wasn’t even on. O_o

  5. I had a poor sense of reality when I was a child so I was frightened by a lot of things that probably never happened. My computer in 1991, which was always off, would sometimes turn itself on but I’m sure that’s probably because of power surges and what not.
    I would space out watching this one Sesame Street tape and after it was done it started playing Strawberry Shortcake shorts. I thought that was the weirdest thing in the world and it scared the shit out of me. I think after that I was sure to only watch some tapes half through because I imagined one day some evil force would try to communicate my death through the end of a VHS.

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