Right now my workplace is being such a shit that come the evening I can’t think of anything much intelligent to say. But that’s why you keep coming here isn’t it? For the stupid?
Isn’t it?
Have a look at this link. It’s supposed to be creepy.
I don’t get this actually. Why is this scary? That’s not saying it’s not, but asking – why so? Maybe it’s just loud colour and sound. One commenter said about the Viacom logo that was like it was going to come flying out of the TV. But I’d really be curious if there was a more empathic reason for the distress.
One comparison is with the ‘fortification’ visual distortion in migraines. I’ve had this a few times and it certainly seems like some part of your brain is frying like a TV set on full blast. Harsh geometrical shapes that twist around your peripheral vision and you feel like you’re million kilometres long.
Reminds me of a ‘true ghost story’ I read on Something Awful which I’m sadly unable to find at the moment – the writer recalls being a small child and turning on the TV set to unexpectedly see the introduction for a TV show called something like ‘R.A.V.E.’, weirdly animated with bright red 90’s style vector graphics and for some reason intensely frightening. There was never such a show and he thinks it might have been a waking dream. So a hallucinated ’scary logo’. That could mean scary logos can be designed – RESEARCH GOLD!
(Oh, and the Muppet story although that’s in a class of it’s own.)
I’ve already said I love TV graphics and my first childhood memory is this guy: Dollar Bill
He introduced decimal currency on television in 1965. Which means I can date my first memory to age 3. Perhaps Dollar Bill wasn’t loud enough or the TV being black and white means some resonant frequencies were missing from the psycho-radiation. I can also remember an advertisement for a political party called the DLP. It had animated olive leaves that grew around the logo. Obviously when you are three years old, TV is a lot of brightly moving shapes. I think those two advertisements must have been repeated endlessly in late 1965. “Better a gramme than a damn.”
Seeing as I don’t get the vibe I have to rely on simulations made by sufferers:
That’s a famous spoof of the ‘worst children’s TV show’ that I think started on 4Chan. It sums up pretty much everything that makes a child run screaming from the TV set and off a cliff. But we’re drifting away from pure TV graphics as scary. One thing that seems to be common to scary logos is they were made on a Scanimate…
… which was a bloody big machine that used magnets to bend and stretch the image on a black and white monitor. Another camera would reshoot that and colour it, you’d have to run the tape again and again to build up the colours. The web site claims there was only 8 machines built. Hell, there were more than one in Australia. We got offered one once from a commercial station in Canberra that was throwing out their 2 inch video gear. No room for it unfortunately. Think of all the kids we could have traumatised.
Theory – the scanimate was actually an experimental mind control device. The evidence is compelling. Please tell everyone you know THE SCANIMATE WAS AN EXPERIMENTAL MIND CONTROL DEVICE.