Some many years ago I wanted to get physical as a developer and therefor started playing around with my computer ports.
www.blinkenlights.de from the famous ccc inspired me to do something likewise but smallscale and www.blinkenleds.de provided exactly the manuals I needed.
Since then I have a small 9×14cm and 144 LED-pixel display in my living room connected to my (noiseless) general purpose mini-itx server. The display is mainly serving as an oldschool digital clock but occasionally when we have guests I surprise them with some archetype blinkenlights movies.

Some months ago it happened to me that I was a bit drunk when watching a random movie and didn’t realize that the clock software stopped working at 23:34. At around half past midnight I had a concsious look at the clock and was quite pleased that the “evening” was still early …

Recently I started to exploit that effect to hold back our sometimes busy guests from leaving (work, kids, appointments and other week excuses). So from 20:00 on the clock starts skewing time linearly so that a displayed 24:00 is actually 00:40. That implies every minute is effectively 10 seconds longer. Depending on the progessive alcohol level this seems to be the empirical maximum to me before it gets too obvious, but I’m not yet sure if non-linear approaches yield better delays …
Certainly this works well, because the display is the only clock in our living room and especially in the evening it’s very prominent.