There was an episode of an anthology about that! It was Amazing Stories or Tales from the Darkside or something. A couple gets stuck in one particular second and there are all these faceless people moving everything a fraction of an inch. I wish I could remember what it was!

Anyone know?

There was this movie....Dark City, which was something like that, atleast the faceless people changing etc

Damn, jrossi4r, I think I've seen that one, too. But I know no more. That's going to bug me.

I'm already weirded out by your estimate of the interval to be an eighth of a second. That seems about right to me, as a percussionist I have a pretty keen sense of these sorts of things, but I still found it sort of odd. I don't think it'd occur to me to characterize many light flickers to be of a specific duration (on average).

Every time there's a light flicker, I just wonder. It's something I think in the back of my head.

Ah, see...I always just thought it was the tumor...the matrix resetting is much more comforting. ;)

Red pill? Blue pill? I took the green pill.

I liked Dark City, as cheesy as it was. At least it was much better than eXistenZ or whatever that one was. "Suddenly everyone all wakes up and it was just a dream!" If I had actually seen that one in the theater I would have howled and thrown things and spat blood. Though the bone gun was trippy.

But neither were as good as Videodrome, just because it's fuckin' Videodrome. Cronenberg did eXistenZ too, right? Hey Cronenburg! When did you write that one? Junior high?

Anyway.

The lights have been doing that all evening here. Except it's actually power outages. Thank god for the UPS or I wouldn't even be here. I'd have all the computers turned off and unplugged and I'd be sucking my thumb in the closet, shivering woefully and wondering why the Gods of electrons hates me.

I really liked Dark City. My wife and I still use the "Shut it down" and "Sleep. Now." lines.

And I'm sure that these short power glitches are something very much like a glitch in the matrix. Our alien overlords aren't perfect, either, you know.

Oh, yes! p&c - if you haven't seen "Dark City" yet, you must (it will speak to your inner paranoid). I really loved that film.

Now I'm going to think that every time the power flickers. Thanks, puke & cry.

*shudder*

Heh heh, I went to go put Dark City on my Netflix cue... only to find that it was already in there.

jrossi4r, that was one of the episodes of The Twilight Zone new series in colour in the 80's. All those guys with overalls building the "sets" of every second. Explaining where all those misplaced items go.

Regarding the flicker, though, we wouldn't notice a thing if it was purely a time thing. Time would stop for us, too. I do, however, think about life, death, and memory. I recall vividly almost dying (drowning in a tropical hurricaine in SEA). I don't clearly recall getting out of there. It reminds me of a line in Mystic River. Maybe I'm imagining what my life would have been like if I got out of there... And the Star Trek "what if the transporter kills you and just creates another being with your memories" is disturbing. (not from Star Trek but low level philsophy discussions talking about the concept of identity and consiousness)

Not a Dark City fan here, though. And I wanted to like it.

Yeah I've seen dark city. I was pretty wasted at the time though so I only remember basic plot points. I liked it though. I'm beginning to wonder if this idea got stuck in my head because of all the twilight zone/dark side/etc I watched as a kid. Probably. And very interesting, dreamsign.

Thank you, dreamsign. That would have driven me crazy. I've watched so many of those shows, I can't really tell them apart anymore. (Except for the original Twilight Zone. There's no mistaking one of them for anything else.)