Time – Page 17 – Robot Claw

It’s Time To Address The Paranormal

February 23, 2017

I’ve had a lot of discussions recently with my students and coworkers on the topic of the paranormal, and I’m intrigued by how many of them believe in the existence of such matters. While most people are skeptical, others have simultaneously expressed belief in very specific things (mermaids, psychics) and a small few don’t deny anything. One student yesterday told me “I believe in everything!”

For the most part I simply ask and am happy to hear their responses without commenting. I think they know I don’t believe in ~~any~~ most of it, since often they pose questions asking me why ‘things’ can’t exist (as opposed to whether I believe them or not). But enough people have asked me about these topics I thought it was time to address it all here.

So here we go, in no particular order…

Ghosts aren’t real, period. There is absolutely no evidence for them, there never has been, and there never will be. There is no theoretical basis for their existence, and they occupy no part of the world that we don’t understand. Ghosts are – have always been – a figment created by human fear of death and the afterlife. Wouldn’t it be nice if our dearly departed weren’t gone after all? Of all the topics in this blog, ghosts are the most widely believed with about a third of westerners thinking they are real (and about a fifth of believers claiming to have seen one).

So if ghosts aren’t real but millions of people believe they have seen (or felt) one – including an intelligent, well-educated coworker of mine – what is the explanation? There are a few, but my favourite is the tendency for the brain to find patterns where none exist. Very few people have ever reported seeing ghosts clearly in broad daylight when they were wide awake and calm. They are more likely seen at night or in very poor light, when the viewer is alone and in a state of heightened tension. Suggestible if you will, like the haunted card deck.

Cryptids (excluding bigfoot) might be real. A cryptid is an unknown animal (although some expand the definition to include sentient creatures) and while the most famous examples include lake monsters, bigfoot (see next), chupacabra and ‘Beasts of Exmoor’ there are also much more fantastic (not to mention unlikely) examples such as Ningen, Bunyips and the Congo river dinosaur Mokele-mbembe (allegedly filmed by a Japanese expedition in 1988).

Though it pains me to say it, most of these don’t exist. I say this because as a youth I was slightly obsessed with cryptids, and to this day have several volumes on the topic on a shelf in this very room. My particular forte was ‘sea monsters’ but despite sightings going back centuries none have ever been found, nor has any real evidence been located. Likewise for the other famous cryptids, most of which have been ‘seen’ far less than lake monsters.

And yet this is not a topic that can be easily dismissed. For years gigantic squids were the stuff of legend, but we now know they absolutely exist. These are the largest examples of ‘unknown’ creatures being recently discovered, but every year we find more and more hiding in dark corners of the world. Might there be a colony of large cats living in the wilds of England? Possibly.

The weird ones though, such as werewolves, unicorns, dragons and ‘cloud creatures’ that live permanently in the upper atmosphere are exactly as they seem: creatures of myth and legend. The most open-minded (some may say optimistic) cryptozoologists may entertain the possibilities of some of these being real (or at least based on real animals) but I remain firmly skeptical.

Bigfoot (also known as Sasquatch, Yowie, Yeti, Yeren etc.) isn’t real. Centuries of searching for these man-apes has produced no actual evidence short of dubious footprint casts and hair swatches that when tested have always been identified as known animals (such as elk or bears).

Most belief in bigfoot stems from the famous 1967 ‘Patterson-Gimlim’ film that has now been exposed as a hoax. In the years since there have been a few other notable claims of bigfoot’s authenticity, but none held up under scrutiny and all have since been confirmed as hoaxes. In fact almost ever single ‘sighting’ is quickly determined to be fake, and the very few that may have involved someone seeing an unidentified creature are almost always bears or other large woodland creatures.

And yet the myth continues. ‘Bigfoot hunters’ exist, sightings continue and (some) people believe. There is an overwhelming amount of scientific evidence and theory contradicting the existence of this guy, but as long as money can be made on hoaxes or TV shows about searching the legend will continue.

After all, aren’t we now living in a ‘post truth’ world?

UFOs and Aliens are a tricky subject. One certainly exists, the other probably doesn’t.

It’s been about 60 years since UFOs entered the public consciousness, but reports of unidentified objects in the sky have been around for centuries, long predating the invention of manned flight. It was in the middle of the 20th century that the mania took off though, and for a while there it must have seemed possible that an actual alien landing on Earth was imminent.

I’ve written about UFOs before since I find the topic intriguing, I’ve never seen one, and I believe those that have are experiencing the same sort of phenomenon that explains ghost sightings, and yet I think the possibility exists that they could exist. Here’s why:

There’s nothing supernatural about them. If we put our minds to it, we humans could build a craft that could traverse interstellar distances.
If we could build such a craft and survive the journey to another planet I’m convinced we would.
This is the most compelling proof: Aliens certainly exist

I’ll get to that last point in a bit, but first more on the second. Just this week NASA announced the possible existence of life-supporting planets about 40 light-years from Earth. Suppose we built a craft that could safely traverse that distance. Using the known laws of physics – in particular with regards to energy and relativity – it is very, very unlikely we could get to that planet in anything less than thousands of years (and likely far longer). So if we wanted to send our own UFOs to them, no-one could survive the trip. ‘Generational’ craft (that support communities that breed in space) are hardly a possibility given the social and technological obstacles, and suspended animation is science fantasy.

And yet, I am 100% sure that life on other planets exists. The universe is so impossibly – possibly infinitely! – large that Earth is just one tiny planet in one tiny corner of one tiny room. There are trillions upon trillions of other planets like ours out there and it is absurd to think that life evolved only on this one. It is equally ridiculous to suppose we are the most advanced life in the universe, which is to say if we ever could build interstellar craft than ‘someone’ else already has.

But those distances! Those energy requirements! The light speed constraint!

Yes aliens exist. Yes they may be able to build spaceships so advanced we perceive them as magical. But can they actually get here and have people actually seen them? I won’t say for sure, but it seems extremely unlikely.

I could go on, and discuss topics such as time travel, espers, fairies, crop circles and many more but I’ve covered the big ones and I think you could anticipate my thoughts on the others.

While it’s fun to believe – and in fact I want to believe – I’ve become a very rational man and simply don’t. What I do enjoy is the belief of others, so if you are convinced your home is haunted or you saw an alien on a windswept beach one evening then please, please, don’t let anyone tell you it didn’t happen. Memories like this are what makes us unique, and it would be a shame for anyone to ever take them away.

My Collection: Dreamcast

February 16, 2017

Sega released the Dreamcast console on September 9, 1999. I bought mine that day, with the launch game Soul Calibur and a Visual Memory Unit (ie. save game cartridge). Total cost: $275, or about $400 today.

The Dreamcast (DC) had a rough life, burdened by piracy, strong competition from the PS2 and disinterest from the public. It failed quite spectacularly (especially outside of Japan) and when Sega discontinued it in 2001 it marked their departure from the hardware industry. Even so some publishers continued to release software for a while after, but by 2002 the system had become a memory.

While I remember the Dreamcast quite fondly I purchased fewer than 30 games during its lifetime. I own less today due to an ill-advised trade-in event I may one day dedicate a blog post to. Here (excluding an additional controller) is the entirety of my Dreamcast collection today:

Here are the games I still own:

I set it up this past week and gave most of these games a whirl. To be honest, few hold up now. While we thought the Dreamcast a beefy system back in it’s day, the 3D (polygon-based) games are a bit muddy and suffer from slowdown, and the load times on most other games leave a lot to be desired. Also – bizarrely! – many of the games don’t even use the analogue stick on the controller.

There’s also the issue of the terrible VMU, which is essentially a USB drive with a tiny LCD screen on it. It had a pathetically tiny amount of storage on it, and it’s telling that I bought a second one the day I bought my second DC game. I recall the horror of continually moving or deleting save files just because storage space was limited and I didn’t want to buy another overpriced VMU.

That said, there are some real gems on the system, including most of these:

Cannon Spike is a curiosity – a top down almost-twin-stick 3D shooter/Smash TV hybrid. It’s not great – arguably not even good – but it came out three months after Sega killed the system and is among the pricier games on the system these days.

It’s companions on the photo: Mars Matrix, Giga Wing and (the mighty!) Giga Wing 2 are the triumvirate of superb and these days very expensive DC shooters. Giga Wing 2 in particular is a monster bullet-hell tour-de-force that holds up oh-so-well even now 17 years later. If you want to play it though you’re looking at more than the cost of a Dreamcast today. In fact those four games in the above shot are probably worth collectively well over $500 today, which isn’t bad since I paid a total of $70 to buy all four of them!

Other notable games include Record Of Lodoss War (a still-unique RPG I could sit down and play for hours right now) and Sword Of The Berserk (the first game based on the manga Berserk featuring a story by Miura and the famous anime soundtrack by Hirasawa). While the latter is an important part of my collection, to be honest the gameplay is utter crap and wasn’t much better back then 🙂

And then we have this guy:

Typing Of The Dead, the utterly bonkers “is that real?” arcade machine was converted to the Dreamcast and I bought it used (complete with keyboard) for a laughable $4.95 four years after the DC was dead. The game design is classic House Of The Dead but instead of using a light gun to shoot the zombies you attack via quickly typing words that appear above the attacking hordes. It’s as insane as it sounds, but is a lot of fun and the DC port plays beautifully.

Seriously, this may be the most fun game I own for the system.

The rest of my collection includes racing games, a few fighters, some puzzle games and some RPGs that are almost unplayable these days due to clunky systems or excessive loads. Most of these games have become footnotes, or curiosities at best, and in fact rarely are any Dreamcast games included in lists of landmark games through history.

Which is why, going through my collection as I did I was surprised how much some of these games are ‘worth’. In fact the average cost per game may be higher for my DC collection than for any other system I own. I’ll never (say never…) sell them, but it’s good to know their not worth less than the space they take up.

Which reminds me, is there any interest in a blog post about the ‘stars of my collection’? I started one once but didn’t post it since it seemed indulgent. But I think there’s some good stories to be heard there about games I paid retail for that have now skyrocketed in value if you want to hear them…

Thanks Mr Dever

December 1, 2016

Most of you probably haven’t heard of Joe Dever, even though he was an author of over 50 books that sold more than 10 million copies combined in many languages. As the owner of more than 50 of his books (in several imprints), it was sad to hear that he passed away the other day at the age of 60.

Starting in 1984 Joe Dever was the creator and sole author of the Lone Wolf series of gamebooks that continued for 29 installments and spun off into other gamebook series, novels, computer games, audio books, role-playing games and even a phone-based adventure game. It’s still going strong (more or less) with iOS games, reprints of the books and even a new installment which was released a few months ago. Lone Wolf was every bit as important as the Fighting Fantasy series, and is as much-loved today by it’s legions of fans.

As a 12-year old already caught up in gamebook mania via the Fighting Fantasy series, I ate up the Lone Wolf books when they were first released. Unlike the FF books, they were all set in the same world and told a continuing narrative where you played the same character through each book. You could even use your old character sheet, which was remarkable in those days! The world of Lone Wolf, inhabited by the jedi-like Kai Lords (and more powerful Magnakai) and the evil Daaklords was exotic and dangerous and fascinating and illustrated by the wonderful art of Gary Chalk.

In those days I had no way of knowing when (or if!) a new book in the series would ever come out so it was a real treat when I went to the bookstore and found the latest one. I must have played through at least ten in the series before I grew out of them (as a youth at least). As an adult, when I fell back into gamebooks about a decade ago, it wasn’t long before I’d acquired most of the low-number Lone Wolf books. My collection grew to include a mishmash of USA, UK and Australian imprints and would soon expand to include Dever’s other gamebooks (Combat Command, Grey Star and the Mad-Max Freeway Warrior) as well as Long Wolf novels and the (long sought-after by myself) The Magnamund Companion Lone Wolf Atlas. All of these are now important parts of my collection.

And yet to this day even in my expansive and encyclopedic gamebook collection there are a few books that remain elusive. And many of them are from the Lone Wolf series. I have books 1 through 20 (in some cases, multiple versions of each) and then book 25. This leaves 9 books out there to be one day found, with evocative titles like The Hunger Of Sejanoz and Vampirium. These books had small print runs, are quite rare, and very expensive (hundreds of dollars for some). One day I may own them.

I’ve read every Dever book I own and enjoyed them all. The gamebooks in particular are among the best written, and the quality of the Lone Wolf novels was a great surprise (since my expectations were influenced by the for-kids FF novels). The Lone Wolf books though are the keystones of his legacy, and I’m just one of millions that have enjoyed them now for over thirty years. Apparently Mr Dever was still writing new installments up until he fell ill. Even though those books will never be read, I believe the many works he left behind will keep readers entertained for many years to come.