“Once you get yourself into this situation, it’s hard to get out.”

(It’s Halloween Week on Unsung, where we’re sharing scary, spooky, and creepy stories.) Everyone knows and hates a blue screen of death, but blue isn’t the only color for the job: Wikipedia has a list and while it’s very interesting, I think it tries too hard to fit anything into a formula. Can this below really be called a white screen of death? The most terrifying screens of death might be black, anyway. Even Macs have one: Earlier PC users would shudder thinking of this black screen of death, which didn’t mean trouble in the moment – it meant trouble forever: Over at The New Old Thing, Raymond Chen shares a story from the 1990s of the worst case scenario: a black screen of death showing… nothing at all. As always, Chen shares some fascinating technical underpinnings: If you hold a PC’s power button for 12 seconds, it will turn off at the hardware level without notifying the operating system. This is a safety feature so that you can turn of the computer even if the operating…