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Forum URL: http://www.eyrie-productions.com/Forum/dcboard.cgi
Forum Name: eyrie.private-mail
Topic ID: 654
Message ID: 14
#14, RE: Film at 11
Posted by Gryphon on Nov-08-15 at 01:46 PM
In response to message #12
>Okay, freakiest thing that's happened to me lately? I watch the
>videos, amused, then CLOSE MY BROWSER, planning to switch back to the
>game I was playing.
>
>And I hear the music still running in the background, barely. It's so
>soft I think it was just my memory until I hear YOU. WILL. DIE.

Uh... yeah, I can't speak for the entire Incompetech catalog, but that is not a feature of either of the music tracks I used. Have your computer checked for demonic possession. I think both the current version of Norton 360 and the equivalent Kaspersky product can do that as part of the "Full Scan" option.

This does remind me of something vaguely similar that happened to me many years ago, though. When I was in high school, I had a Tandy 1000 TX computer. For those of you who came in late, this was an enhanced version of the original Tandy 1000 (an IBM PCjr clone that, unlike the PCjr, was actually successful, mainly because its ergonomics were about 1000 miles ahead of the PCjr's). At the time I had it, the TX was the top-of-the-line model, the best computer you could get at Radio Shack, and back then that was not the punch line of a joke. It had better graphics than the original PC, and - most important for this story - it had built-in sound. And by that I don't just mean a speaker that could go "beep" and/or "blat", like the PC's speaker or the one in, e.g., the Apple //e. The Tandy sound system wasn't exactly THX, but it was high-end for its time; only Amigas could challenge it without aftermarket intervention.

OK. So I had the TX set up on a table in the living room back then, because thanks to the unique way in which the BBCour household was funded,* we didn't have central heating and the living room, where the woodstove was, was the only room in the house that was actually warm in the winter. The events I'm about to recount happened in the summertime, but still, that's why the computer was where it was. Anyway, one afternoon I was sitting on the couch nearby, reading a book; I was the only one at home, the dog was asleep, and the house was quiet.

And I suddenly became aware that someone was speaking. Not loud enough to be intelligible, but that distinctive pattern of low murmury sounds you get when, for instance, someone is talking outside the house, or watching TV in an upstairs room. Except nobody was talking outside the house, and the TVs upstairs weren't on. When I got back downstairs from checking the latter, if I stood very still in the middle of the living room, I could still hear it.

Now thoroughly weirded out, I checked down in the basement; nothing going on down there. Back upstairs, I could still hear the sound. I started walking around the room trying to figure out where it was coming from... and eventually realized it was emanating from the computer.

The thing was, the computer was not turned on. This was in about 1989, long before always-on Internet came to homes (certainly long, long before it came to our home), and there was no reason to leave a computer running when you weren't using it. The Tandy was sitting there, completely powered off - in fact, we had it plugged into a power strip, and that was turned off, so the computer's power supply wasn't even live - and the muffled, indistinct sound of someone talking was emanating from the speaker anyway.

I sat at the table for a while, listening, trying to think what in the hell could possibly be going on. As I noted before, I couldn't tell what the voice in the speaker was saying, the volume was too low for that (and of course adjusting the computer's volume knob did nothing), but something about the cadence of it seemed familiar, and I couldn't figure out why...

... until it started saying something in what I recognized as the excited way the Red Sox radio commentator of the day made home run calls. It was the play-by-play of a baseball game. Shortly after that there was a pattern that, now that I had the context, was unmistakably the jingle for one of the radio baseball coverage's usual sponsors.

(This part wasn't quite as weird as it may seem - the local radio station in town carried Red Sox games in syndication on its AM program, and though I wasn't much of a baseball fan in those days, I occasionally listened to them because there was literally nothing else to do on some summer afternoons in Millinocket in the '80s if you didn't like what was on the FM station (mostly country music).)

At any rate, the house where I grew up is within a mile or so of both of the station's transmission towers - and evidently through some quirk of atmospherics or geometry or induction, the speaker assembly in my TX was sufficiently impinged upon by its signal for the program to be faintly audible sometimes. That was the first time I noticed it, but it happened several more times over the year or so before I moved the computer to a different part of the room.

At no time, however, did it play silent movie piano music and remind me of my mortality, though. That's obviously some... other... problem.

--G.
* Obviously by this I don't mean we were poor; we had a computer! But in some matters my father was the cheapest man in the world, and, for whatever reason, one of those matters was equipping the house with heating technology.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
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