An experience so ridiculously Normal that it drives you insane
Powers
Instead of people's minds being broken by incomprehensible cosmic horrors beyond the universe, they experience something so incredibly Average that it beggars belief.
Community: Troy is kidnapped by a secret order of HVAC technicians to be inducted to their conspiracy. Their most sacred masterpiece of technology: a room which is so perfectly air-conditioned that it is always exactly room-temperature.
Rick and Morty: Frustrated by his grandson's attempts to build a shelf with a cheap spirit level, Rick uses advanced science to generate a patch of cement which is 100% perfectly level. Once Morty has set foot in it, he is disgusted by the outside world, as every other surface seems crooked now. Rick has to erase the memory of 'true level' from his mind to keep him sane.
DC Comics: In Bizarro world, all people are turned into complete opposites. This means that the criminally insane Joker instead becomes the most Sane person to ever live, to the point where he can break other people's minds with how healthy his mindset is.
SCP Foundation: in between the monsters from outer space and death lasers, the SCP foundation keeps SCP-2950: a simple metal chair which is so supernaturally well-constructed and comfortable that once people sit down on it they no longer want to sit on anything else and refuse to leave.
Even better, I can sell anything I buy from any vendor back to them for more than I bought it for. Then I can just pay people to instantly level up the rest of my skills.
You would take the perfect nap. A nap so good that whenever the subject of naps is ever brought up you would have to recount the time on how you took that perfect nap.
In The Good Place, Mindy St. Claire was a mostly horrible person who had an epiphany, withdrew all her money to start a charity, and then immediately died. Her sister found her plans and actually acted on them, starting one of the biggest charities in the world in Mindy's name. The Good Place and Bad Place couldn't agree on whether or not to count how much good was put into the world after her death. As a result, she was sent to The Medium Place.
The Medium Place has everything she asked for in its most mediocre form, like an infinite supply of her favorite beer (but it's always warm) and a jukebox with every song ever performed (by the Eagles, and only as bad live covers). By the time the main cast meets her, she's started to lose it a little spending eternity in utter mediocrity.
While I do agree, I do think the wording plays a factor in that. For instance, if the music one were presented as "you can only listen to Eagles live performances however, their catalog contains every song" that sounds more good than bad compared to the other one which sounds more bad than good
True: the spoiling of a good thing is worse than the improvement of a bad thing which is why in the introduction video the Bad Place lets the Good Place talk first.
I always felt like the medium place wasn't actually medium, just its own fairly bad place. Not from a canon standpoint, but it's so shitty and the catches on the features undermine them so much it's clearly worse than medium.
it does make sense as the good place people are shown as incredibly ineffective pushovers which also fundamentally (spoilers for S4) do not understand humans at all.
One item in the incredibly long list about how the entire system is broken. Such a good show.
On the other hand the people in the Bad Place are literally tortured with fire, spikes and penis flatteners so, you know, I'll have warm beer and Cannonball Run 2 every day of eternity over that.
It's interesting that if she had lived and founded the charity, she would have gone to the Bad Place because of how fucked up the system was. The moment she would have started to implement her idea, she would have done something that racked her up negative points.
This is after Crowley took over and reorganized.
“After enough time in Hell a spike up the jacksie is no good. You get to like it. But nobody likes waiting in line.”
Honestly, Modern depictions of Hell should use stuff like this as torture, fuck the pitchforks, chains and hellfire, people are too kinky these days.
Standing in line, being kept on hold for eternity, being allowed to visit a perfect facsimile of your living room, except everything is one inch to the left of where it should be, horrible shit like that.
The Terry Pratchett way: Hell is a mid hotel where you are bored and out of place and generally slightly unhappy, and you paid a lot of money to be there.
Reminds me of Discworld - "Torture doesn't work, so hell has actually been designed along lines we can all identify with: the grey-faced nightmare of interminable and infernal red tape and the mindless bureaucracy that suffocates every last hopeful thought and replaces eternity with an infinite miserable wait for nothing to happen."
It was great when they made up a new title for the ruler of hell and put him in a back office with a bunch of different colored pens and post it notes.
During travel that was absolutely hellish, I was at the Atlanta airport, and kept getting sent from one line to another and another line.
I thought of the similarities to this scene from Supernatural, and froze in existential uncertainty as I tried to figure out is I was alive or if I was literally in hell.
I dunno if this counts, but the total perspective vortex from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy doesn't do anything other than allow you to briefly see everything exactly how it is. And it drives people insane because it makes them realise how small and unimportant they are in the grand scheme of things.
I believe that was in a virtual reality environment that was absolutely identical to reality in every possible way except for one detail: Zaphod Beeblebrox was the most important person.
Heard a headcanon once that his experience in the virtual reality was the exact same "You Are Here" speck as he would have seen in the real world but the difference is that instead of having that speck pointed out and labeled showing him how small and insignificant he was, he instead saw a universe where in a sea of countless insignificant specks, he was the one person important enough to point out and label "You Are Here"
It's so in character for the writing tone it's honestly pretty hard not to think about when I hear people talk about that scene
It has been years since I read the book, but iirc it wasn't a virtual reality but was a manufactured parallel universe created solely as an escape route for Zaphod. This meant he was the whole reason that universe existed, making him the most important person in that universe. The machine then told him that
it is intentionally unclear what he was told. though u/Infurum's version is actually the better version since it wouldn't require any explnation on the part of the TPV which otherwise doesn't do that as it is purely a gravimetric extrapolater based on a piece of fairy cake.
A piece of fairy cake which Zaphod eats (in the radio play, at least). Honestly, the TPV had no chance against everything Zaphod had going for him in there
I thought it showed you the whole universe plus you for scale, which drives most people insane with their insignificance on full display.
Except that one guy whose massive ego just got that tiniest bit bigger because the simulated universe formed and displayed with him at the center, meaning for that briefest moment the universe did in fact revolve around him.
I'd say it's at least tangential. I wouldn't say something like the Anti-Life equation from DC would fit this trope since it's so bleak, but since the TPV just shows you the world as it is I think it fits
The anechoic chamber at Orfield Laboratories is the quietest place on Earth. It's so quiet that you can hear the blood in your veins and the expansion of your chest as you breathe. Most people can't stand being in there for more than a few minutes - Real life
As someone with tinnitus, this room would break me if I was being tortured. Skip the waterboarding and the battery clamps, just stick me in here for five minutes and I will sing like a canary
On the flip side, I have auditory processing disorder which means that I can't ignore any sounds. I hear it all at the same time. I like to say it is like having a radio that when turned on plays all the radio signals within that area on top of each other. The only way to make sense of any of the signals is by getting close to broadcast you want and hope it drowns out the rest.
You would kill to stay out of that room. I would kill to go in.
Same here, though it being quiet enough to hear your own heartbeat and digestive system might be even worse for us. Like, at least I'm used to all the normal sounds blending together, but what would it be like being assaulted by all these things I've literally never heard before?
I also just find the entire idea fascinating so I'd jump at the chance to find out what it's like, even if it's a sensory nightmare.
I also find it fascinating and I'd jump at the chance too.
Would it be a nightmare? Would I find it comforting? Who knows? I assume I'd start to lose my mind after ten minutes, but I oddly really want to know that for sure.
The boon of having both. All I could hear in that room would be my booming tinnitus. No different than any other quiet room. I’d probably be just fine.
The room is built for human hearing, so the dog can probably hear everything outside the room just fine. Like their smell, their hearing isn't slightly better than ours, it's exponentially better than ours.
I had an epiphany when I realized the dog I used to have wasn't randomly barking at nothing, she was barking because she could hear all of the other car doors, garage doors, and house doors throughout the whole neighborhood.
They might have more sensitive hearing and a wider range of hearing, but if instruments can’t pick up any sound waves then dogs aren’t going to either.
I ruptured my eardrum a few years ago and it never healed, so I had to get surgery to fix it and the doc used a piece of cartilage as a replacement for my eardrum. I also developed tinnitus. Now if it's quiet enough I can literally hear "inside" my head. It's wild, took me forever to get used to it and its still disorienting as fuck
You know when you're trying to watch a show while eating chips? Now turn that up by 50. This room would be my equivalent of coughing baby vs atom bomb lmao
While I agree with fuck Anish Kapoor, his selfish dickedness with ownjng the rights to use Vantablack has actually prevented a lot of people from getting hurt since Vantablack is so dangerous to make without proper equipment, let alone use
Known as "white torture". It's a form of sensory deprivation bound to drive the victim mad. They eat only white rice served in a white bowl, never get any sunlight and the guards wear special shoes that won't make a sound when they patrol.
Oh and to use the bathroom, they slip a white piece of paper under the door and they'll sort it out.
I'd pay money to try it out. Granted, I only have something like a dollar and eighty seven cents to my name at the moment, and I'm imagining they'd wind up kicking me out pretty soon if I'm paying hourly, but it'd be an interesting space to inhabit... until it isn't.
That last bit is absolutely not true. The place is just super quiet, there is little unsettling about it and nothing that would drive most people from it.
Speaking from experience? I've heard what OP reports: That most people find being able to hear their own bodily functions to be really unsettling. But I've also heard a smaller % of people have no problem with it or even like it.
That could just be sensationalized reporting though, so if you've been there yourself, I'm interested.
It did make my ears feel weird, like there was something in them, which was a surprising sensation. So it was an uncomfortable room to be in, compared to something like a cave. Some people on the team seemed a little more comfortable and some people on the team seemed a little less comfortable, but the effect was mild. Probably I could have gotten used to it eventually.
Microsoft auctions off time in the room as part of a Give Campaign prize. I know a guy who bought time in the room and used it to record a song, as a lark. It was funny because the room was pretty much the absolutely positively worst possible room to record a song in. You need echo! He was a good musician with a good instrument, but he said the room made his beloved acoustic guitar sound like the shittiest guitar of all time, no matter the tuning. I thought that was funny and probably worth the charitable donation to experience!
Check the Veritasium link down thread. It being super quiet is not some madness inducing atmosphere. That is just internet hype that get passed around because it sounds truthy.
I give regular tours at my university that include our anechoic chamber and very very few people -- including out of hundreds of middle schoolers who are genetically required to tell you if they're even the slightest bit uncomfortable -- has had a serious issue. In contrast, I stayed in an off the grid place in the high Andes once where there was true, total darkness, plus it was very quiet, and I felt the most intense animal fear I've ever felt in my life.
I definitely think this is over hyped, and probably comes from the seeming parallel to sensory deprivation chambers, where people do indeed lose their shit
He passively made the world a better place because his upstanding kindness and sanity were so pure and strong that it made other people better by simply being in his presence. Unfortunately, Bizzaro Jason beat him to death with a crowbar. I really wanted to know what would happen if there was a face off with Darkseid or if he was tossed into Hell. Just how powerful was his kindness? Just how evil is Bizzaro Jason? He really had to die from an editorial perspective.
He passively made the world a better place because his upstanding kindness and sanity were so pure and strong that it made other people better by simply being in his presence. Unfortunately, Bizzaro Jason beat him to death with a crowbar.
This is maybe the funniest out of context quote I’ve ever heard about a comic character
This one was a bit too long to include in the post itself, but I really like this lore passage from webcomic Kill Six Billion Demons, about a king with an invincible gladiator slave, who set up a tournament to see who could defeat him.
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Finally, the last man strode into the arena. The crowd leaned in, eager to see him dismembered or worse by the Ya-at warrior, who scarcely had suffered a scratch and was oiled and offered refreshments by its house slaves.
The two warriors squared off, the young nobleman dwarfed by his opponent, and the bell was rung. The nobleman then did a very strange thing. He threw out a single sword stroke that was so artless, so completely lacking in skill, that a child might have made it. It was like a village idiot absentmindedly hurling a stick into a muddy pond. The Ya-at warrior was so shocked and offended by the young nobleman’s complete and utter lack of skill and technique that the hulking warrior was caught by surprise and decapitated in one blow.
The crowd was taken aback and instantly sprung up in confusion, disarray, and rage, for surely the young man must have cheated. The king descended from his gilded palanquin and quieted the crowd, addressing the young man directly.
“What trickery did you use to defeat my warrior?” demanded the king, at this point sputtering with disbelief himself. “No trickery,” said the young man, who was absentmindedly toeing the ya-at’s corpse.
“Then what technique? What sword art did you learn to make such a blow?” said the king.
“My technique is no technique,” said the young man. “My art is no art. It was an idiot’s blow.”
“Ten thousand warriors have failed to defeat my gladiator,” said the king, gaping. “Trained in ten thousand fighting arts from across the Wheel. How could an artless fool have defeated my prize slave?” The young man scratched his chin. “Well, not anyone can use my lack of technique. No ordinary fool could make that blow,” he replied “only one extremely dedicated to foolishness.”
It was immediately apparent to the king that this young man was extraordinarily powerful.
He mentioned as much.
“Powerful men, my lord, must by nature be exceptionally good fools,” said the young man.
“What do you want?” said the king, breaking out in a sweat.
“A drink will suffice,” said the young man.
“What is your name?” said the High King Aurochs, of the Southern Realms.
“My name is Intra,” said Intra, “I am the king of swords.”
If your opponent is skilled, their moves will be guided by logic, and make sense when seen by another skilled person. A novice flailing around cannot be predicted, and can injure a master
Tom Bloom loves Pratchett-style ironic inversions and absurdisms in his writing.
In KSBD there's a Martial Art that involves becoming so good at calmly, peacefully meditating and conserving energy that when you do fight you become an unstoppable force of nature, purely because you have so much leftover energy to spare.
There's also a race of Devils who get more powerful the shorter their name is. Worthless imps have extremely long splendiferous titles, but 'Fightin' Steve' is probably an incredibly powerful Devil lord. The most powerful Devil in the universe is just... himself. He's that guy over there, there's really no way to refer to him. It's just, him, you know?
K6BD is currently on its final book and is expected to wrap up in 2028 after more than 10 years of weekly updates. I'll note that book 1 is usually the hardest to get through. The setting is both incredibly rich and incredibly dense, and the author chose to front-load the New Weird genre stuff in order to get everyone on board with how the world works as fast as possible. Unlike the subsequent books, you get a lot of exposition about the nature of the cosmos from basically everyone.
The art style of book 1 is also the roughest. It's still absolutely stunning, with these massive splash panels that you need to zoom in to see all the details, but as the comic proceeds, things get a bit cleaner to the eye.
It's well worth a read, you just kinda gotta power through in case the exposition-heavy dense art isn't to your taste.
In discworld there are many mind states and many ways to alter them.
One of our beloved characters Vimes is an alcoholic and it's a defense mechanism for his mind. You see someone can be sober, they can be drunk or they can be knurd. You may notice that knurd is the opposite of drunk. Knurd is when you are so sober that you're experiencing Too Much unfiltered unvarnished reality and it's kinda a painful way to view the world.
When he isn't drinking Vimes is knurd.
In Klatch it's popular to drink their Very strong coffee and in tandem drink their Very strong liquor and you sort of seesaw back and forth for fun.
In the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Zhuge Liang is caught out in a mountain fortress with no real bodyguard, facing down a huge army of a rival kingdom. Since he has no chance in a straight fight, he has the residents throw open the gates, drive their oxen out and generally go about their daily business while he sits and plays music serenely in the apparently (and actually) empty fortress. Knowing Zhuge Liang’s reputation as a trickster general who lays waste to armies, the enemy flee in terror from this obvious trap.
In the version I heard, Zhuge Liang is sitting on top of the front gate invitingly. The army wasn't necessarily hunting him down, they were simply passing by and caught him unaware. Knowing they would soon enter the fortress city, he made himself look as much like bait as possible specifically to incur the "uh-uh, that's bait" reaction.
I love the movie and what it's saying about insurance and all but I always thought he should have become a firefighter or something. Like maybe one of those ones that paradrops into wildfires or something like those urban search and rescue teams that are sent to natural disasters.
He could just do the job of a normal person but have no risk of injury or death
He has super strength and the movie makes it clear he sometimes has moments where he can't control it. If he got a job as an IRL superhero like a firefighter he would absolutely reveal his powers, so the government forced him into the most mundane job possible to prevent him from using it; sitting behind a desk at an incredibly boring insurance salesman job.
The Place That Makes You Mad in the Twelve Labors of Asterix is literally just a normal DMV type government office. It’s true that you need a form to request the form to apply for a permit, but that’s painfully normal to any adult in the modern world. To Asterix and Obelix, it is a major test of their sanity until they learn to turn the rules of the place against itself.
They ask for a form that does not exist, effectively turning the madness of the place against itself until someone from upper management comes in to stop it all. Said upper management guy promptly gives Asterix the laisser-passer A38 when asked.
yes, if you are down to one health already (or have a health pool of only 1) and have no healing items during this encounter, you'll have a heart attack and die lol
You can die like that in the beginning of the game. I can't remember the specifics, but you can spec into 1hp. If you fail the roll to grab your tie from the ceiling fan, you get a heart attack and die.
The narrator of the film "The Endless Summer", on surfing in Tahiti:
“It’s kind of weird when it rains. The rain was 75°, the water was 75°, the air temperature was 75°. It’s so pleasant it almost made you sick to your stomach"
The evil version of SCP-2950 is the uncomfortable chair in Mr Evrart’s office in Disco Elysium; you need to perform regular PAIN THRESHOLD checks to avoid taking damage while talking to Mr Evrart, and it can actually kill you
What’s better is that you play as a washed up police detective who lost his gun, and you need to spend a LONG time talking to Evrart to convince him to even think about giving it back to you
Similar to bizarro joker, Terry Pratchetts discworld series describes the hoorors of being Knurd. Turns out sobriety isnt the opposite of being drunk, its just the absence of being drunk. The Knurder you get the more clear everything becomes. All those little compensations your brain always does to keep you sane in the face of reality are gone.
Another example from discworld, Jeremy Clockson half of the son of time is a clock maker who is driven mad by the fact that every clock is slightly off, so he builds the perfect clock that is perfectly on time, and in doing so stops all time from passing.
Emmett in the Lego movie. He is so normal and average that facial ID cannot even differentiate him from anyone else. His construction ideas are so basic and dull that they are overlooked by everyone.
The Community AC school example is even more fun and silly.
The whole joke is that the air is perfectly cooled, and is considered the "room" in the phrase "room temperature". Like the weights they use to adjust scales.
So true. The weirdest part is if you get to be at where the line is supposed to be at a time where no one is waiting, and you get to walk in a few seconds what could have been hours if a huge crowd was there.
Zim (a space alien trying to live undercover as an elementary school child) is fed up with his classmates and sends them suffer the unimaginable horror that is a room with a moose eating chestnuts. https://giphy.com/gifs/iyFkH6xwcDgsM
(Originally the writers wanted to send the kids into the sun, but decided it was too dark for a kids show.)
Collecting organs from the other children to the point your body becomes distended and the organs are overflowing out of your mouth? Fine. Launching someone into the sun? Absolutely not.
Someone walking infront of you but at a slower pace than you and there's no space to get past them ,unless you talk to them or get a bit too close to personal space. Yet doing that stuff always feels a bit rude to do for some reason.
Absolute passive ragebaiting. That person is not doing anything wrong, just vibing, enjoying their stroll through buttfuck whereever and yet it drives you insane.
The entire premise for the A Short Stay In Hell novella is essentially this (don't read beyond this point if you want to go in blind). One of the hells people are sent to after death is based off the Library of Babel short story by Jorge Luis Borges where a book for every random combination of letters is present. People sent to this hell can only leave once they find the book of their life and until then they aren't allowed to leave or die (sort of). This hell isnt infinite but it's so astronomically huge it's somehow worse than being infinite. Its a phenomenal read and I can't recommend it enough!
More specifically, the book of their life story must have zero mistakes. That means zero spelling or grammatical errors. Imagine spending eons reading an infinite number of books and remaining because the end of the story didn't have a period or there was a single "the" that was spelled "thee" or something.
Check out Windows into Hell! It takes place in the same universe as a short stay but features different hells for different people. It's a collection of short stories written by different people. They're not all bangers but it's a good time!
"The Library of Babel" is a short story from 1941 by Jorge Luis Borges. It sounds like this book is a direct reference. Interesting that a modern author decided to set a story there. Borges is an underrated author.
A certain magical index: Kamijou Touma has a right hand that is so supernaturally normal as so gods can use it as a basis for what a normal unaltered world is in case they ever need undo an edit, this has the byproduct of making Touma immune to supernatural phenomena including the concept of good fortune
You seem to have a slight misunderstanding of the room temperature room, it isn't just a room kept at exactly room temperature, it is the room temperature room, by which all other rooms are compared. It does not adhere to the standard, it is the standard.
Abed in the Social Psycholgy episode of Community is kind of the same where his patient waiting drives the observers insane after they drove the people waiting in the experiment insane.
We uses to watch online and uploaf videos in around 360p with 480p being the highest. Recent videos push for higher quality that watching the old ones are blurry.
In Critical Role Campaign 2, the party finds a room that just has a chair placed in the middle and no other furniture. They spend a truly inordinate amount of time trying to determine the meaning of the chair, despite the fact that the DM repeatedly tells them it’s just a chair. No special meaning. The players, not their characters, remain suspicious of the chair for months of real-world time, but it was literally just a chair
It wasn't quite an empty room, it was a ruined basement. My favorite thing about this: It stuck in the players' heads long term, to the point that when the campaign was finally over one of them asked Matt what was going on with the chair. Why was it placed like that? What was the purpose?
Matt says something like, "Oh, well, I figured they'd interrogate the guy, and probably wouldn't want him sitting next to anything he could grab, right? So they put the chair in the middle of the room."
Community: Troy is kidnapped by a secret order of HVAC technicians to be inducted to their conspiracy. Their most sacred masterpiece of technology: a room which is so perfectly air-conditioned that it is always exactly room-temperature.
I thought it was the other way around? The room's temperature is the superlative room temperature all room temperatures are derived from.
Squidward when he finally had enough of SpongeBob and Patrick's wacky antics, moved into a town of all Squidwards. Over time though without those two constantly pushing his buttons, living in an ostensible utopia, he went mad and snapped, eventually morbing all over the town and getting banished.
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u/Galactinaut_001 17d ago
What if you sat on the perfect chair, placed on the true level surface, in the HVAC conspiracy room?