I'm just curious what unusual fears everyone has. For instance, even though I'm more or less completely immune to things that show up in horror games and movies, I still have a few weirdly specific fears.

First and probably strongest are strange computer glitches. I've definitely gotten more comfortable with them than I used to be, but I still don't like them. I think it's mostly related to the fact that, when I was much younger and didn't know too much about computers work, I couldn't understand why computers would ever just spontaneously stop running properly. Windows 95/98 BSOD was probably the biggest offender, because it would show up at random and do all kinds of weird stuff, like leave Windows in a broken state if you tried to continue. Even the change to text mode freaked me out, since CRT monitors are so much more dramatic when they change resolution. I remember one particular instance where the BSOD took long enough for me to appear that I was able to ask myself "why is it going into fullscreen mode?" (which I essentially conflated with change in resolution/color depth since almost all games used that when entering "fullscreen" mode. It got to the point where even "fullscreen mode" itself made me uncomfortable and I'd often close my eyes during the change. It didn't help that old games often changed color palette before the game itself appeared or after the game had already quit to desktop, resulting in a brief glimpse of whatever else I was running with a messed up palette which was creepy enough already. I also didn't enjoy it when Windows 95 programs would inexplicably display those Windows 3.1-style black on white error messages, simply because it didn't make "sense" that only some programs would do this.

I'm sort of over that now, but it still happens to me every once in a while. Recently, I experienced this on a Sega Genesis game I'm working on. I managed to do something that would suddenly corrupt the entire tileset before issuing an invalid instruction. I was running on an emulator, which I'd have thought would make it even less frightening. Instead, it made me uncomfortable enough that I ran the whole thing in windowed mode until I fixed the bug. I guess a big part of it is that fullscreen glitches seem to take complete control away from me, whereas in windowed mode I can still see some things working the way I expect. Same thing goes for weird corruption due to video card failure, although I guess it's not totally irrational to be afraid of a video card failing.

Anyway, I'm sure I have quite a few others, but this is the first one that comes to mind for me.

Not really fears, but my story...

Due to several traumatic events in my childhood and an overactive imagination, I've had nightmares almost every night for the last 28 years. For a while doctors tried a few medications to help with it, but they ended up turning into night terrors, effectively nightmares that you don't remember but you end up drenched in sweat and often calling out or screaming.

While I wouldn't call it 'fears', there are certainly some wonderful items on the list: Trying to help my child struggling to hold on to a cliff ledge, as they begin to fall they call "Daddy, help me!". Severed fingers, hands, toes, feet, pierced eyes, and other mutilations. Assorted deprivation situations, starvation, dehydration, suffocation, drowning, blood loss, hypothermia, hyperthermia. Various issues and attacks involving zombies, aliens, government agents, disease, pestilence, and animal attacks.

Sadly my active imagination works against me here. Eventually XCKD featured a comic about it.

One of the funnier stories was nightmare where I was driving through the mountains on hairpin turns. I had a tight grip on the steering wheel, and I was stomping on the brakes as hard as I could but the brakes were failing. In the dream I had a certain knowledge that failing to make the turns meant death to myself and my wife, and lifelong debilitating injuries to my kids in the back. Had the dream been allowed to continue I have no doubt that eventually I would have failed to make a turn and woken in terror. In the dream I spent several minutes stomping on the brakes and yanking the wheel with all my might. My wife was yelling at me, "Stop, Bryan! Stop!" and I called out "I'm trying!". The calling out happened several times, but try as I might I could not stop the car.

Suddenly I realized I was awake. My hands were tangled in my wife's hair, which I had been vigorously pulling while kicking her shins. And just like my dream she was yelling "Stop, Bryan! Stop!", while I was shouting aloud, "I'm trying" while kicking and pulling with all my might.

On that note, it is past my bedtime. Based on today's experiences involving some sewing and yard work, I predict my oft-recurring dreams involving toes firmly stubbed on infected needles (which naturally embed themselves deeply and painfully and immediately break deeply under the skin, sometimes embedded in bone) and shovels and similar implements being dropped and serving as a guillotine on someone's toes.

Feet. I don't know exactly why, but I get this feeling between disgust and revulsion. I see people touching feet, massaging feet, families playing barefoot with feet all over each other and the anxiety that wells up inside me is palpable.

First and probably strongest are strange computer glitches.

Haha, me too! Growing up, my family had a Commodore 64. Because of it, I learned how to program at a very early age (between 8 to 12 years, for context), but it was also the source of nightmares. This machine was unusually susceptible to background radiation, which caused it to occasionally soft lock in a sometimes spectacular fashion. Memory corruption trashing sprites and video to garbage, and trashing the sound chip registers to accompany the mess with a harrowing noise.

Sometimes it would happen instantly. Other times, a bit is would be flipped and an avalanche of glitches will start and you have a handful of seconds to reach for the power switch before it explodes. Here’s a demo written in 2003 for the Commodore 64 that’s intentionally done in an similar style that would have strongly provoked that fear: Booze Design - Industrial Breakdown (2003). Another example: PWP - Conservative Megademo (2012).

I’ve since grown out of it, but the fear that something’s off and something’s gonna explode soon still haunts me irrationally from time to time.
Fair trade off for learning how to program, I guess… ಠ __ಠ;;

Not really fears, but my story...

Due to several traumatic events in my childhood and an overactive imagination, I've had nightmares almost every night for the last 28 years. For a while doctors tried a few medications to help with it, but they ended up turning into night terrors, effectively nightmares that you don't remember but you end up drenched in sweat and often calling out or screaming.

While I wouldn't call it 'fears', there are certainly some wonderful items on the list: Trying to help my child struggling to hold on to a cliff ledge, as they begin to fall they call "Daddy, help me!". Severed fingers, hands, toes, feet, pierced eyes, and other mutilations. Assorted deprivation situations, starvation, dehydration, suffocation, drowning, blood loss, hypothermia, hyperthermia. Various issues and attacks involving zombies, aliens, government agents, disease, pestilence, and animal attacks.

Sadly my active imagination works against me here. Eventually XCKD featured a comic about it.

One of the funnier stories was nightmare where I was driving through the mountains on hairpin turns. I had a tight grip on the steering wheel, and I was stomping on the brakes as hard as I could but the brakes were failing. In the dream I had a certain knowledge that failing to make the turns meant death to myself and my wife, and lifelong debilitating injuries to my kids in the back. Had the dream been allowed to continue I have no doubt that eventually I would have failed to make a turn and woken in terror. In the dream I spent several minutes stomping on the brakes and yanking the wheel with all my might. My wife was yelling at me, "Stop, Bryan! Stop!" and I called out "I'm trying!". The calling out happened several times, but try as I might I could not stop the car.

Suddenly I realized I was awake. My hands were tangled in my wife's hair, which I had been vigorously pulling while kicking her shins. And just like my dream she was yelling "Stop, Bryan! Stop!", while I was shouting aloud, "I'm trying" while kicking and pulling with all my might.

On that note, it is past my bedtime. Based on today's experiences involving some sewing and yard work, I predict my oft-recurring dreams involving toes firmly stubbed on infected needles (which naturally embed themselves deeply and painfully and immediately break deeply under the skin, sometimes embedded in bone) and shovels and similar implements being dropped and serving as a guillotine on someone's toes.

Whoa, similar here. Ever since I can remember I've had nightmares pretty much every night (or at least I wake up panicked every morning. I can't really remember any normal dreams), which seem to manifest things I did during that day. For example watching sesame street would have me dream about being eaten by the elephant/dog thing, when I went to my friend's lake house I imagined him and his parents getting ripped apart by crocodiles, things like that.

I had to sleep during a 14 hour drive and my girlfriend and we ended up sleeping at a rest section in the middle of West Virginia's mountains, and had a dream where everything was frozen and a truck slammed into our car/knocked us off the side of a cliff. When we woke up, we were in the middle of a huge snowstorm on top of the mountains (think it was this one, but it may have been in 2013 https://usnews.newsvine.com/_news/2012/10/30/14804730-foot-of-snow-sandy-brings-blizzard-conditions-to-west-virginia?lite)

At first I thought I was dreaming for a few seconds.

As for specific fears, being alone in or near woods when it's quiet out. I can't even sit through a minute of videos like it, even, and if I have to go through wooded areas (driving or walking) I'll blast music.

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As for specific fears, being alone in or near woods when it's quiet out.

I live alone in the quiet woods just like in that video. It is the best. Except when it drops below -30 ⁰C and the wind is blowing, then it gets creepy they way the trees moan and creak and you have to go out to the woodshed to get a load of fuel and you end up backing all the way in to the house again so they don't attack from behind when you arms are full and you can't defend yourself.

Anyway, my fears are more rational: calling people on the telephone, talking to people I don't know, being found out I'm a fraud and have been faking it my whole life, that sort of thing. There's nothing about computers that scare me, I've probably seen it all (and if you think letting the magic smoke out of a circuit is scary, wait till your boss expects you to get it all back in and get it working again).

Weirdest fear I probably have is turning around and my computer completely glitching out on me when it was working a minute ago. I don't know why I dread that idea so much but I do.

Hmm, so it looks like fear of computer glitches is actually surprisingly common. I'm sure there's a bit of a sampling bias here, but I bet it's more common than I thought elsewhere as well. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that part of the whole point of computers is that they always do exactly the same thing with the same inputs, in which case unpredictable behavior is especially surprising.

Anyway, I'm trying to incorporate some of theses glitches into a game I'm working on, and I think it might be pretty effective. Right now I'm going for corrupted blocks of pixels and audio that that really rapid skipping thing that seems to come up before a blue screen. I'm pretty confident that it'll be scary, since yesterday when I tried to open up the game to work on it, my machine (a fairly middle-of-the-road laptop that I put way to much stress on) glitched out in real life in a way that was, amazingly, substantially identical to the fake glitched I'd designed. Sure enough, it was scary. I shut the computer off immediately and was afraid to turn it back on for quite a while...