It’s the late 90s. I’m 13 years old, living with my family in an old house out in the sticks. I’m home alone late at night (a very uncommon occurrence) and I put on the movie Full Metal Jacket, which I had never seen before.
Spoilers ahead (Do I need to call out spoilers for a movie made 40 years ago?)
The main character, “Joker,” is in boot camp. While on night watch, he finds a squad mate, “Pyle,” sitting on the toilet holding his rifle. Pyle is slow and has been getting bullied throughout the movie. He puts a magazine in his rifle and says some creepy shit… he has clearly lost it. Joker tries to talk him down, then gets the drill instructor. The drill instructor yells at Pyle. Pyle smiles, then shoots the drill instructor dead. He points the rifle at Joker then sits back down on the toilet, puts the barrel in his mouth, and blows his brains out.
I’m not exaggerating here: the power goes off at that exact moment; I see a close up of Pyle blowing his brains out all over the tile wall behind him then everything goes black… pitch black. Like I said, I’m in the sticks. There are no streetlights or nearby houses providing any light, and not much moonlight; It’s all just darkness.
Im 13, alone, and freaked out. I can’t see shit and don’t know where a flashlight is. I stumble around for a while and finally find one. Old house bonus: the house has a crusty old fuse box, not a circuit breaker, and the fuse box is outside. I find a fuse and muster up the courage to go out there. I go out to the creepy, spider infested corner where fuse box is, find some more courage (or maybe desperation), and start swapping fuses in the hopes that one is blown. I just about start crying with relief when I find the right one and the lights pop on.
I did not finish the movie that night.
Vincent D’Onofrio is so good in everything.
I am… in a world… of shit
Watched the horror movie [REC] (the original Spanish one, not the remake). It’s sort of a found footage type thing where it’s all told from the POV of a reporter’s camera.
The climax of the scene…
Mild Spoiler
takes place in pitch black for the characters and a night vision filter on the camera.
After the film ended, friends went home, and within a couple minutes of them leaving, all the power went out in the neighborhood. I’m not normally scared by horror movies, but I went and hung out in my car for a bit.
I was busy getting absolutely sloshed on scotch at home alone because I was an alcoholic, the power went out, and I thought “I’ll light some candles and read a book in bed!”
Promptly passed out and woke up to the smoke alarm going off with flames crackling up the wooden bedside cabinet and the mattress starting to smoke, burning my forehead and some of my hair.
The only reason I didn’t die is because I forgot to close the bedroom door, the smoke detector was out in the hall. If the door was closed, the room would have filled with smoke and killed me before the alarm went off.
Wow. Thank you for sharing. I hope you’re doing much better these days!
Haha thanks, I’ve been sober nearly 4 years, and all my candles are battery powered now.
Remind me to never drink alone
Or at least drink alone without any open flames.
If nothing else, do put a smoke detector in your bedroom. There are non-blinking ones.
I’ve got 2:
Playing phasmophobia. The ghosts hands reach around my screen signifying I’m about to die. As my head is snapped back the power shuts off and everything goes black. And thunder clapped outside. Properly scared the shit out of me.
Another time, power went out and fried my Seagate hard drive mid write. No clue what was happening but pre power outage it worked. Post it did not. Now I’m scared to buy more Seagate drives.
I’ve never had good luck with Seagate drives. They die much sooner than my favored brand, Western Digital Black. I have WD drives that are 14 years old that still run.
For every anecdote like this, there’s another with different/reversed brands.
Aside from some particularly bad runs (like the IBM “Deathstar” or WD Greens), no brand is much more reliable than another.
There is, however, a big difference when you get to Enterprise drives. Often SAS but not always. They are a lot more expensive, but with much higher MTBF ratings. But even within this, the brands are pretty close.
Yeah, yeah, “the data shows…”
Still not buying Seagate drives ever again. Because, that anecdotal evidence is my own.
Wait, I’m using WD Green SSD’s in half my stuff. Am I safe?!
The answer is always “no”, regardless of what you have. Follow the 3-2-1 backup rule for anything important.
As for whether you’re sitting on a ticking time bomb, I’m referring to a run of mechanical (IIRC) 1TB drives from around 2010 or so. Quick googling suggests Green SSDs have a slightly higher than average failure rate, but only slightly.
I’ve heard great things about that game
Flashing the BIOS on a PC.
Fortunately that M/B had a removable EPROM/whatever and I could get a replacement from the manufacturer.
God I miss all those removable parts in PCs and especially laptop
MBs used to have five or six slots and you had to fill them all. Sound card, HDD driver board, video card, network board, extra ports, etc.
And sometimes you ran out of ports and one thing wouldn’t work and you had to figure out a way to juggle everything so everything would work.
Dip switches and interrupts.
That sheet of paper taped to the inside of the case to record what devices were using which IRQ and DMA channels…
I was “don’t take that kid to a store full of expensive fragile shit” age and disposition.
My mom took me through the expensive fragile shit section of Dillards or some other mall store.
Pitch black. The first thing everyone heard was my mother, standing next to me and holding my hand with a death grip, yelling “STRANGER DONT FUC-UH-SHITTING MOVE GODDAMIT”
My soul rocketed out my ass directly through my pants and I did not fuckuhshittingmove.
Because shouting “shitting” is slightly more socially acceptable than “fucking”. I guess?
I was in traffic 30 minutes away from home when the 2003 blackout started. That was a long drive home.
I hadn’t saved my game for a VERY long time.
Not power but our hot water heater went out in the dead of winter and we had a well. Our coldest winter is near freezing, not insane but those showers were awful. Ice water shower. I couldn’t adjust ever. The one upside was that I was warm stepping out of the shower, oddly much warmer than after a hot shower.
The trick to showering in cold water is to stand in front of the water stream on low, wash your hands, then rub the water up your arms, keep cupping and rubbing up your shoulders, neck, legs, hair, face, chest, and back. Your hand are pretty tolerant of cold water, and they warm it slightly. As you work around, you’re slowly desensitising your skin to the cold. All the capillaries begin to contract but not all at once sending a shock through your body. After a couple minutes of the rub down you’ll be able to step into the cold stream, still rubbing all over vigorously, without getting a shock. Thereafter, the cold stream doesn’t feel so bad.
The same works for swimming in very cold water. Go in about knee deep, rub the water all over yourself, and eventually you’ll be able to fully immerse and swim without the sudden shock
Hot shower triggers cooling mechanisms in your body, you’ll start to sweat and your body will start moving warmer blood out to the extremities, making you feel cooler as the heat radiates/convects off. When you step out of the warm enclosure into the cooler air, your body is still trying to dump heat so you’ll feel colder.
Basically the opposite happens with a cold shower. Warm blood is kept toward your organs to keep them functioning, so your extremities are chilled by the water. On top, the shower enclosure will be colder than the rest of the room, so you move from a cold area to a warm area, so that instant temperature change makes you feel warmer.
The worst thing for me is the breathing, the body seems to switch into “you’re freezing to death, breathe accordingly” gear. The rest is perfectly fine. It is okay if I am doing something physically demanding (like swimming in cold water), but in the shower it just annoys me. Any way to deal with that?
I was working at my power plant and it turned into an 18 hour shift lol
Northeast blackout of 2003. People started to talk to their neighbours again and play cards instead of watching TV
They also called the cops because there were lights in the sky they’d never seen before.
The lights were stars.
I thought that was the big LA outage, where the Milky Way was visible. Could be both, I guess.
I used to go backpacking out in the middle of nowhere, miles from any city or town. The night sky is amazing, but nothing like what is shown in long-exposure pictures of the milky way.
Not that anyone asked, but it doesn’t look like this:
It’s more like this, and it needs to be a moonless night:
All I’m saying is, if this is on your bucket list, be prepared for the reality, or you might be a little disappointed. Still very much worth seeing, though.
Hmm, as a kid growing up in a remote pacific area, the milky way felt blinding when looking up at it with dark-adjusted eyes. It’s magnificent.
Nightfall IRL
My first son was one week old and we were living in the Bronx. It was nothing in the end, but at the time it was damn scary considering what happened in the Bronx the previous time.
Growing up in an area with frequent lightning storms, the number of times i remember being left with no light and no water (because well pump) in the middle of a shower is very high
The power went out while I was taking a shower when I was a kid. The bathroom had no window, so it was completely dark. I freaked out and got out with soap in my hair. My dad asked me why I didn’t just continue with the shower, “You know where everything is”.
Yeah, well, that sounds logical and obvious in hindsight. Thanks, dad.
Working on a project, and I hadn’t saved for a few hours.
After that I now save after every small addition to my projects.
I was playing stardew the other day and it only saves after you sleep for the night. Had an epic in game day. Character is getting into bed, power goes out. Welp, there goes my auto petter.
The machine I was hooked up to that was draining my fluids after surgery thankfully had a battery backup, and the power was only out for 3 hours. After talking with the nurses, we had come up with a plan to express the fluids manually if necessary, but thankfully that didn’t end up happening.
9/11
To be clear, I was nowhere near NYC at the time, but I was kinda glued to the TV, and what was functioning of the Internet, like the rest of the country was there for a few days.
