Brown Note: Difference between revisions

== Films -- Live Action ==

* ''The Signal'' features an audio/video signal that has a psychological effect on anyone who hears/sees it, causing people to go insane, or become obsessed with the signal, and trying to make others experience the signal.

** To be clear, although the death of anyone who watches the Tape is just as inevitable as a Brown Note artifact, the videotape itself is harmless, it's the fact that anyone who watches it draws the attention of the psychotic ghost haunting it that leads to fatalities, making it more of a [[Speak of the Devil]].

* [[David Cronenberg]]'s ''[[Videodrome]]'', about a TV signal that causes brain tumors and hallucinations. The discoverers of the signal attach it to a violent [[Gorn]] show {{spoiler|in order to clean up society by killing everyone who watches violent television}}.

* In ''Wheel of Darkness'', an [[Agent Pendergast]] novel, the {{spoiler|Agoyzen is a type of this - the mere sight of it unhinges something in the viewer's brain, making them become a sociopath. Pendergast is one of those who suffers from Agoyzen sociopathy, but [[It Got Better|he gets better]].}}

* German sci-fi pulp series [[Perry Rhodan]] has Alaska Saedelaere, a man who had an alien fragment fused to his face in a transporter accident which made everyone go insane and die just from looking at it. He had to wear a mask to disguise it. Being one of the series' main characters who had received cell activators to make them immortal, he had to wear that mask for a very long time. He got better after a couple of centuries, but had his condition [[Reset Button|reverted again]].

* Some of the magical tricks Garrett keeps up his sleeves in the ''[[Garrett P.I.]]'' series would qualify, as they impair anyone who's looking at the flashy F/X when he activates them.

* In Tad Williams's ''[[Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn]]'' trilogy, we have ''Du Svardenvyrd'', the Wyrd of the Swords. The man who wrote it was insane, and the first person to encounter it immediately committed suicide. Only one other person's response is shown, and he went from being the best and brightest of a circle of wise, learned men to being a wandering thief and alcoholic, unable to commit suicide, but unable to live with what he'd read.

== Newspaper Comics ==

* ''[[Li'l Abner]]'':

** Stupefyin' Jones was the opposite. She was so stunningly beautiful that any male who looked at her would freeze, rooted to the spot. (She was a deadly hazard for any confirmed bachelor on Sadie Hawkins Day, and she would often use her powers then on purpose, [[For the Evulz|simply for fun]].) Her cousin, Available Jones [[Intrepid Merchant|(who was ''always'' available — for a price)]], wasn't above providing her power for a fee if anyone needed someone subdued.

* ''[[Dilbert]]'' once [https://dilbert.com/strip/1996-04-25 exposed Ratbert to his company's marketing plan]. It gave the rat a brain tumor.

* Some substances (and there are many) have smell so horrible they incapacitate long before actual toxicity have a chance to kick in.

** Derek Lowe in "Things I Won't Work With", mentioned some of the those - next to the stuff that's horribly toxic, catches fire when someone looks at it funny (or sets on fire things that normally aren't considered flammable), explodes without any discernible reason, or all of the above. Some of the stinkiest are things mammals don't meet in any natural condition, and they have a very convincing way of telling you this.

{{quote|But today’s compound makes no noise and leaves no wreckage. It merely stinks. But it does so relentlessly and unbearably. It makes innocent downwind pedestrians stagger, clutch their stomachs, and flee in terror. It reeks to a degree that makes people suspect evil supernatural forces. It is thioacetone. [...]

Attempts to crack this to thioacetone monomer itself have been made – ah, but that’s when people start diving out of windows and vomiting into wastebaskets, so the quality of the data starts to deteriorate. No one’s quite sure what the actual odorant is (perhaps the gem-dimercaptan?) And no one seems to have much desire to find out, either. [...]

This reaction produced “''an offensive smell which spread rapidly over a great area of the town causing fainting, vomiting and a panic evacuation''”. An 1890 report from the Whitehall Soap Works in Leeds refers to the odor as “fearful”, and if you could smell anything through the ambient conditions in a Leeds soap factory in 1890, it must have been.

«''During early experiments, a stopper jumped from a bottle of residues, and, although replaced at once, resulted in an immediate complaint of nausea and sickness from colleagues working in a building two hundred yards away.''» }}

{{quote| ...isonitriles are not shy about announcing their alien character. Our noses can ''immediately'' tell the difference between garden variety nitriles and their evil twins. [...] And the pride of that bunch seems to be the n-butyl, which should come as no surprise. Straight-chain butyl compounds are well known to be just a poor match for human sensibilities. Butyl alcohol is stinky, butylamine foul, butyraldehyde reeks, butyric acid is famously disgusting, and butyl mercaptan is a standout even in the vile crowd of thiols.

So butyl isocyanide is, well, something to experience. I've never had the pleasure, and will take pains not to. I can do no better than to quote the 1937 observations of one of the first groups to figure out how to prepare this noble reagent in quantity: