Given the title, I bet you thought I was going to be all highfalutin’ and stuff. You know, nearly no one reads those posts where I really bust out with some abstruse galaxy brain stuff. I can see you not reading them.

But this pretty lowfalutin’. I was thinking how in several Phillip K. Dick stories there are time loops that trap the protagonist in some situation where the very actions(s) they do to attempt to break the time loop are the ones that cause the loop to eternally repeat.

And in the absolutely bonkers American Horror Story: Coven my manic pixie dream witch, Misty Day, ends up in her version of hell, and her hell is an eternally-recurring experience of bullying and shame after she accidentally resurrects a frog she was supposed to be dissecting.

Hell as an eternally-recurring time loop has been used in other media, too. The “eternal recurrence” idea itself has a long history, of course, with variants going all the way back to the ancient Egyptians.

In more modern terms, the hellish time loop and variants has been used effectively in movies like Triangle and Before I Fall to more mainstream fare like Edge of Tomorrow.

See, very little falutin’ of any type in this post. I just wanted to mention some things I liked. In particular, Triangle is worth a watch because Melissa George is great in it, and there is one particularly effective scene where she comes upon a pile of…well, just watch it and see.