drop-outs

n.

  1. A variety of power glitch (see glitch); momentary 0 voltage on the electrical mains.

  2. Missing characters in typed input due to software malfunction or system saturation (one cause of such behavior under Unix when a bad connection to a modem swamps the processor with spurious character interrupts; see screaming tty).

  3. Mental glitches; used as a way of describing those occasions when the mind just seems to shut down for a couple of beats. See glitch, fried.

../_images/73-05-20.png

A really serious case of drop-outs.

(The next cartoon in the Crunchly saga is 73-05-21. The previous one is 73-05-19.)