I forget where I heard the idea from, but I remember someone coming up with a similar idea, just way more sinister. Basically you get a bunch of these really cheap, battery operated speakers like they mention in the comic, but you put sounds on them like creepy children laughing or ghostly noises that are juuuuust loud enough to hear. Set them to have very long timers at random intervals, and scatter them inside someone's air vents
this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2025
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Back when they were cool ThinkGeek would sell the Annoy-o-tron, which just randomly made a loud beep.
They also had one that made creepy sounds. I had one set to a child laughing in the air vents in a creepy hallway with flickering lights in an old church building.
It was awesome.
Pretty sure I have one of these kicking around somewhere
what happened to thinkgeek?
They were bought and basically no longer exist. Hot Topic was going to buy them but then GameStop came in with a higher offer. For a while they launched ThinkGeek retail stores in shopping malls but eventually shut them all down and now they basically only exist as some tchotchkes in GameStop stores. Even the website just seems to redirect to the main GameStop page now, not their “store” within the GameStop webstore.
Enshittification.
I rented a room from my boss in college and he pulled this prank on me. First he hid it in the office and convinced all my coworkers to pretend not to hear it. It would switch between a creepy child's laugh to a man groaning to other random noises. I was pretty sure it was a noisemaker, but I couldn't get anyone else to admit that they could hear it so I couldn't confirm.
Then he moved it into the air vents of his house that I was renting a room in. I started to think I was developing schizophrenia since my mom suffered from it and after I confided as much in my roommate / coworker, he finally came clean and showed me where our boss hid it.
All of this to say, it's a very effective prank.
bro thats seriously fucked up
Fallout 76 has a location, Alpine River Cabins, which is rigged up to have random screams and suchlike play, along with some other rigged things, like doors randomly opening and closing.
I remember the first time I ran across them, walking by the road that ran near the cabins, and was like "what the hell?"
A cricket sound, on a random interval going up to an hour between.
Edit: FOUND IT! https://lemmy.ca/post/41987749
Sounds like AnnoyingPCB
Alternatives: Discord DM sound, Microsoft Teams notification sound
Grindr notification sound.
Pornhub sound!
.
MUHAHAHAHA
Facebook messenger notification. Everyone I know who uses it has a Pavlovian reaction to that.
Skype or ICQ for extra mindfuck.
o-oh!
You joke, but I've actually done something very similar, back when Woot was worth something (before Amazon destro-- I mean, bought them).
ThinkGeek used to have the annoyatron that would do that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5z1I1grocF0
God I miss the OG ThinkGeek so much.
I got so much mileage out of my annoy-o-tron and the second version that had a few "spooky" sounds added as options. The fact that it had a magnet on the back made it so easy to hide in an office because it could stick to the backs of so many things. The most successful were the backs of (or bottom of if on wheels) filing cabinets,
this can be easily avoided by using linux.
How can Linux help you secure your walls?
you won't think the sound is from your computer.
My computer makes Yoshi noises when usbs connect or disconnect and that has nothing to do with Linux.
There is a PCB make it Yourself Project that was very low power and played a cricket sound at random intervals. It lasted Years on a coin cell. Don't use this on mentally unstable people!
The alert sound of a USB device connecting
Is this a Windows thing or something?
EDIT: On Linux, if you somehow knew that some USB device had been connected, but didn't know what, I'd run sudo journalctl -krb
I believe that the kernel will always log a message when a new device is connected. Also, lsusb -t would show the layout of the USB tree and what devices are where on it.
KDE Plasma has a USB connected and disconnected sound, I'm sure may other mainstream DEs do too.
On Windows, if you wanted to confirm the sound was from your computer, device manager usually flickers every time a new device is plugged in. New devices should also be logged in the Event Logs.
Wouldn't it be more portable to use dmesg, instead of journalctl, which is only on systems with systemd?