To me “do you believe in ghosts?” and “do you believe in UFOs?” are basically the same question.

It depends how loaded the word “ghost” (or UFO) is in your mind.

Do I believe we have an immortal soul, or that consciousness can exist outside of a human or animal brain? Do I believe in angels, demons, spirits and entities etc? Absolutely not.

But do I believe that people who aren’t lying, and are being 100% genuine, truthfully report seeing things we cannot explain? Yes. Whether it’s pure hallucination of the human mind or something else that is genuinely being witnessed I don’t know and don’t suggest to know.

As proof that “ghosts” don’t actually need to be anything to do with the dead, I saw my mum at home once as a child, when she wasn’t really there at the time. She’s was wearing clothes she owned, but not what she was wearing that day. She was and still is very much alive. I’ve always remembered that I didn’t make this up, but the memory is too distant and vague at this point for me to put any real trust in it now.

Maybe I genuinely saw something unexplainable. Or maybe our brain hardware that generates the reality we perceive around us can occasionally vividly generate what isn’t really there. Who knows.

Instead of making me think about space, the solar system or the universe… this just gives me an existential crisis, visualising how few weeks are actually in a year and how brief a lifetime actually is.

Then I try to think about space instead.

I’m going to strongly assume you’re about 40 in that case haha

• The Simpsons: From seeing Season 2 episodes someone had recorded from Sky TV on VHS before it was on terrestrial TV, through to Season 9 when it stopped being good many years later. It was on all the time and we never got bored of it.
• Red Dwarf: The first TV show I was allowed to stay up “late” for, when it broadcast at 9pm. Felt like I’d entered a new stage in my life watching a late-night comedy show.
• The X Files: Similar to the above, this was the first serious, “grown-up” TV show I watched, and I was hooked. I thought anything with a paranormal tinge was awesome at that younger age (I guess I still do, although through an admittedly far more sceptical scientific lens these days).

Ghostbusters, Back To The Future trilogy, Terminator 2, Beetlejuice, The Matrix, OG Star Wars Trilogy, Pulp Fiction, The Shawshank Redemption, Blade Runner, Goodfellas, Jacob’s Ladder, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, Boogie Nights

Ed Balls

I find it insane that people somehow think they have to make that noise when they sneeze. It’s totally a learned and unnecessary behaviour. People who are born deaf don’t ever make that noise when they sneeze.

There Goes My Gun in my ass

Playing 2600 on original hardware is pretty awesome.

Probably up next on my retro gaming to-do list!

Recently changed to top.

Occasionally you’ll click on an article or photo and there’s a really important explanation or disclaimer as the most-upvoted comment, but you’ll only see that first if you sort by top.

Yeah, I’d actually only ever played VII and VIII before recently.

Now I seem to be going backwards through the series. Played VII, VI, and now V, where I currently find myself doing some rather boring endgame grinding to try to defeat the final boss battle.

Oldest this year.

But maybe up until this year, or in the last 5 years would have been the more interesting question.

Yeah, Myst was definitely something else when it came out

Yeah, playing Resident Evil for the first time was something incredibly atmospheric and special. I rented it from Blockbuster and knew straight away I had to buy it.

Before it released my friend and I used to speed-run the Resident Evil 2 demo which let you play as far as you could get into the full game, but with an 8 minute time limit.

Yeah, I very nearly added seeing the Mortal Kombat arcade to my original post but decided maybe I was writing too much!

Shake it baby!

I feel the same way about it being a privilege. I missed the earliest part… but even to have lived through the NES and Master System era through to today has been amazing.

Games will continue getting ever more impressive, but nobody again will witness the kind of seismic leaps in what games could accomplish that people saw between the 70s and 2000s.

Just remembered that seeing Doom for the first time is another obvious one. Man that game was incredible when it came out.

All my friends and I used to have Yahoo! email addresses. But for some reason around 2010 almost everyone’s accounts seemed to be getting compromised and sending weird messages around to their contacts… and now I don’t know anyone with a Yahoo!

I never figured out what was going on and why Yahoo in particular seemed so affected by it.