Armed with Controllers plays: World of Illusion
Ready for another 15 minutes of merriment, confusion and whimsical one-liners from the Armed with Controllers crew?
Ready for another 15 minutes of merriment, confusion and whimsical one-liners from the Armed with Controllers crew?
Last Friday, we introduced you to Armed with Controllers, a YouTube channel run be three light-hearted Londoners who like to spend their free time engrossed in videogames old and new. Their debut on The Paranoid Gamer, Fabs’ Injustice: Gods Among Us playthrough, has gone down a storm with our audience, and so true to our promise to make them a regular feature we have another video for you.
A modder by the name of ‘Bacteria‘, a.k.a. ‘BacMan’, has unveiled possibly the most impressive feat of engineering we’ve ever come across, a mega console that combines a total of fifteen (yes, FIFTEEN!) retro videogames systems into one. It is the result of three years of love, blood, sweat and tears, and has our gobs well and truly smacked.
For the majority of the population, the world is a rich visual palette that gives depth and texture to the things we see around us. The panoramic explosion of color in a a fireworks display, the muted tones at a formal gathering, or the riot of hues on display at a Mardi Gras celebration, these are all examples of situations in which color is such an integral part of the experience that one cannot imagine anything different. So as far as colors are concerned, we can already see all there is to see… right?
Empathy is the “intellectual identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another.” But claims exist that some individuals take this innate human capacity a step further into the paranormal, and are able to precisely synchronize their emotional state with that of another person, or alternatively, project their own emotions onto the psyche of others around them. This is distinct from telepathy, in which an individual is believed to literally read another person’s thoughts, much as one would read this article. Paranormal empaths would be individuals who are able to forcibly alter someone else’s emotional registry. Can any evidence of such a phenomenon be found?
Human beings have evolved a highly sophisticated capacity to receive and process information from their surrounding environment. While most of us take our traditional five senses for granted, there are individuals who function with fewer than five, yet what they are able to achieve with the senses they do possess borders on a precociousness that seems superhuman. Take for example the case of Ben Underwood. Born with a form of cancer that necessitated complete surgical removal of his eyes at the age of 2, Ben learned how to see without sight using human echolocation. Similar to the ability of bats and dolphins, he was able to gain detailed information about his immediate environment using a series of audible clicks that served as a type of sonar. A battery of tests determined that his hearing had not increased in sensitivity or range; in fact, his audible range was not distinguishable from sighted human beings. What had changed was his ability to process the sounds he heard to provide information about the
Death imparts an irreversible finality that human beings have developed many ways of addressing. Rituals surrounding the end of life have been an inseparable part of human civilization, with traditions spanning centuries around the world. From the embalming practices of the ancient Egyptians, to the modern day interment of the deceased, people have devised many methods of preserving bodies and memories of loved ones and honored fallen. Indeed, memories are typically all that are left behind, while the empty human shell decays over time. But in some instances even that does not happen…
Sometimes the things that go bump in the night are more terrifying if they’re not in your closet. It is estimated that there are hundreds of undiscovered species out in the wild, but the stories that captivate the most interest describe creatures that are the most elusive… and sometimes dangerous. Where mainstream science is concerned, some of these monsters are often an undiscovered species that have branched off from the main trunk of their evolutionary kin and have remained hidden by virtue of the fact that human beings have not explored their habitat. The discovery of many varieties of marine life that exist in the depths of the world’s oceans fall into this category, and quite often look like creatures that would terrify the regular person outside the context of marine biology. As well, certain tropical regions of the world are recognized as biodiversity hotspots that contain hundreds to thousands of species of uncharacterized microfauna. So while a new species of sea plankton is not as sensational as a fanged
If you’ve ever had to be in two places at the same time, you’ve probably wished there was a way to accomplish that. Outside the worlds of sci-fi and fantasy, however, that remains a distinct impossibility… or does it? Some mystic traditions from around the world have reported such a phenomenon, and as unbelievable as it sounds, witnesses provide corroborating stories that raises both intrigue and skepticism. Bilocation describes the ability to simultaneously exist in two places, with the “copy” acting independently of the original. It is further distinguished from the phenomenon of astral projection in that there is no sensation of leaving the body and traveling to a distant location; in fact, the “copy” has a physical presence, and is able to hold conversations with people and interact with objects. The sheer volume of witness accounts throughout history suggest that this is not as rare an occurrence as one might believe, with consistent details threaded through various accounts. Surprisingly, one of the best catalogs of episodes of bilocation can be
Fans of fictional characters such as Cyclops from the X-men, or Sookie Stackhouse from TrueBlood will appreciate the fantastic human ability to generate light, whether as concussive optic beams, or ambient mystical flashes. Nothing quite this spectacular exists in the real world, but humans may have evolved a subtle, but complex system of light detection and generation beyond what is normally expected. Light detection is an expected characteristic in biology. Vision and photosynthesis are the most common manifestations of this ability, but there is now evidence that some of the molecular machinery related to sight can be found deep within the body, without an immediately apparent evolutionary rationale as to why it would be in tissues other than in the eyes. In a series of experiments on a species of eyeless fish, animals exposed to light consistently demonstrated avoidance behavior, termed negative phototaxis, despite the fact that they had no eyes. Maybe this ability to detect light within the body can be related to the notion that the body emits
This story is a recollection of something that happened when I was in high school… so yes, a long time ago, back in the 90’s. Though I’ve actually ventured to the location that this story centers on, I have not actually had any of the experiences that I am relating. Nor is this an interview, at least not in the strictest sense, as it is a re-telling of the facts and supposed events.
You know you’ve been in that situation before- scratching your head, wondering where you’ve put your car keys. Or clicking on folder after folder on your computer, knowing that you just left that document in an “easy-to-find” directory. Such memory lapses are something that everyone has experienced, and would not come as a surprise to many. But for some, memory lapses are rare events, if not completely foreign to them. Eidetic, or photographic, memory describes a type of recall where an individual is able to describe with almost superhuman precision, extremely accurate details concerning events, people, places, or things that he or she has witnessed in their lifetime. This capacity to summon memories with computer-like precision has been suggested to be a direct consequence of re-wiring of the brain in individuals with autism, or as a compensatory response in individuals with savantism. In fact, in a subset of the latter, termed prodigious savants, eidetic memory seems to occur rather frequently. While many reports of individuals possessing photographic memory has surfaced,