Title text:
With a good battery, the device can easily last for 5 or 10 years, although the walls probably won't.
Transcript:
Transcript will show once it’s been added to explainxkcd.com
Source: https://xkcd.com/3100/
this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2025
511 points (99.6% liked)
xkcd
11504 readers
52 users here now
A community for a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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
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