Mystery Legends: Sleepy Hollow

I just finished my first Hidden Object Game -- Mystery Legends: Sleepy Hollow!!! :D It was cool!

I hadn't really played a Hidden Object Game before, so my closest frame of reference was the Where's Waldo? books from the late 1980s. Except that once you find an object in the game, the object disappears after you click on it, so you don't accidentally find it again.

(Note: Half a second of researched reminded me that Where's Waldo? was actually originally Where's Wally? as the creator/illustrator, Martin Handford, is British. Just in case my sweety's reading this, I want to give her -- and any other non-US readers -- a frame of reference.)

I really enjoyed the Where's Waldo? books, because they not only provided puzzles to be solved -- puzzles that always yielded to dogged, relentless perseverance (my favorite kind of puzzles) -- but also each image (which, itself, told a story) provided the viewer with any number of micro-stories within the macro story. Like those tiny illustrations in a Sergio Aragones did outside or in between the panels of Groo the Wanderer!

The Sleepy Hollow game wasn't as deft at storytelling as Arogones or Handford, but it was a lot of fun, none the less!!! Whoever composed those images was kind of genius (and kind of a bastard, too, cheating as they did from time to time), but the games has a system of "Hints" that you can collects, so that you can accrue Hints throughout the game that help you find some of those less-clever, more-diabolical hidden objects.

If I were trying to write a review for Amazon.com, I would be less honest and probably write something like this:

I gave the game five stars but it doesn't deserve them. It only took me nine and a half hours to finish the game what a jip! The artwork is amazing and the levels are challenging and that music really provides a cool atmosphere while your [sic] searching for the items and once or twice the voice of the headless horseman made me wet myself but I'm not going to admit that to you because I want you to think I'm cooler than I suspect I really am and did I mention that I solved the game fast? Grammar is for wimps.

Something like that. (I sometimes suspect that sites like IMDb and Amazon must have de-editors: persons who are employed to go through all reviews written and make sure they don't contain an overabundance of proper grammar, spelling or punctuation (which falls within the purview of grammar, I know, but punctuation on the Net sucks and I don't believe I can emphasize that quite enough).)

[I know: I like to use parenthesis a lot, but I believe you will find that my use of it is grammatically correct.]

This weekend I also watched The Losers with my brother, spent a day in bed, ill, and also watched Death Race! great fun! (Except the being ill part. Nothing to worry about, just a mild infection of the gum on one side of my mouth where I've had a root canal and crown. Never -- so far -- lasts longer that 24 hours, and I'm good now.) Brian just bought this HUGE big-screen TV (I believe he said it was 32 inches) and, luckily, Netflix had just sent us a few Action flicks! And they were both AWESOME!!! :D It was like seeing these movies in the cinema!!! :D

I also finished reading this book called Witness to Roswell: Unmasking the Government's Biggest Cover-Up, which firmly lifted me off the proverbial fence and set me down on the side of the certainty that extraterrestrials crashed outside of Roswell, New Mexico in July of 1947, and the United States government (or, parts of it) retrieved the craft and the bodies!

AWESOME book!

Skeptics of the paranormal decry that if there are these strange things going on in the world -- ghosts, UFOs, cryptids (cryptozoological animals), etc. -- where's the proof? Well, as far as the issue of extraterrestrials visiting our planet is concerned, Witness to Roswell is the proof! Using the same standards of proof that the United States Justice System uses to send a human to be executed (or not) for his/her alleged crime, the authors Thomas J. Carey and Donald R. Schmitt provide a preponderance of evidence -- as well as a staggering amount of evidence -- intended to cast "a shadow of a doubt" upon the 4 official explanations that "debunk" the Roswell incident as mundane.

When I say this book floored me, please understand that I "hunt ghosts". I have recorded numerous inexplicable voices and sounds, and thrown them out as possible evidence because a skeptic could possibly concoct mundane "explanations" for them.

AUTHOR'S RANT:

No kidding, in the attic of an historical building, I recorded what sounded exactly like an old-time radio or TV news broadcast! I am a huge fan of OTR, and I have worked for TV stations that broadcast the local news since 1995, so I am uniquely versed in the speech patterns of news broadcasters from the 1940s-1960s and 1990s-2010s. Watch Good Night, and Good Luck and then watch Dateline and/or your local news, and you will see that there is a cadence that news anchors and reporters adopt or affect that is vastly different starting around or during the 1980s. This EVP -- and it is an EVP, even though we decided not to present it to the client -- was maybe 2 minutes long, in this droning male voice using the same cadence of speech as a 1960s newscaster reading a news story! There is no other sound like it, and no reporter or news anchor nowadays uses that same cadence (no one anywhere does; it's a wholly unnatural way of speaking)!

Then to top it off, there were no TVs in the building that the recorder could have picked up on. And if there were a radio in the building, we never once heard it turned on over the course of 2 investigations. AND, if it HAD been turned on, it would have had to been tuned to an OTR NEWS STATION to produce the sounds that this recorder recorded! (Because, as I have emphasized before, no newscaster uses that cadence anymore, not even NPR, or BBC News.)

So I remain convinced that I recorded the sounds of the Past on my RCA digital recorder. Maybe it was a radio news broadcast from the 1960s or earlier, maybe it was a TV news broadcast from the 1970s or earlier, but it wasn't mundane or natural.

AND YET...

And this is the important part...

When my fellow investigators voted to chuck it as evidence -- after I put up a minor fight, of course, explaining my reasoning as eloquently as possible -- I obliged. Because when a skeptic (read "cynic") can explain away your "evidence" it isn't really evidence.

END OF RANT.

My problem with the Roswell incident is in my ability to imagine the events of the 4th of July weekend and beyond.

Early on, I heard a theory, liked it, and bought into it. Aliens crashed at Roswell; cool!

But then I hear someone else speak -- someone who claimed to be a witness of some sort -- but they didn't fit into my understanding of the events. And after a while, there were so many "eye witnesses" and they were claiming all kinds of (seemingly) tangential events that my mental construct of the events couldn't hold them all.

"Okay, I can imagine a nurse at the base seeing the aliens, but who is this woman who claims to have been a girl who visited the site? I remember one boy and one girl, so how could this other girl have been there and gotten a piece of the memory metal? Wha--?!"

I have to admit: It became easier, after a while, to simply believe the skeptics. "The reports claim that a boy and a girl were at the site, so where did this other girl come from all of a sudden?"

My problem (and theirs) was one of scope.

My mental image of the Roswell incident was, I am embarrassed to admit, formed largely by movies and "dramatic recreations" of the events. My mental image was limited to the 5 to 15 minutes any given visual entertainment medium could allot it. I didn't pursue books on the subject, so if it didn't fit into a movie or a podcast, I wasn't exposed to it. And if it could be squeezed into a podcast, but it didn't fit into my pre-conceived timeline, then it was easier for me to take the skeptic's way out. "I dunno, maybe something happened there, but it might not have been an extraterrestrial crash."

So then Mr. Carey and Mr. Schmitt compile their decades of research into a coherent timeline that even I can follow and DAMN!!!

Seriously, if I weren't already a believer in the possibility of alien visitation, I would be now!

AWESOME book!

OH! And I watched this great documentary called What On Earth? Inside the Crop Circle Mystery!!!

The documentary isn't really about the UFO phenomenon at all. It examines the circles themselves, asking more metaphysical questions presented by the appearance of inexplicable crop circles. For instance, if they are from any non-human means, why are they being left?

Now, first you have to get over the question of the apparent "debunk" back in the early 1990s that 2 English dudes created all the crop circles since the 1970s, but I believe the documentary handles that question nicely.

Once past that, you get to ponder the really cool questions and ramifications.

Wow, I guess I've had a pretty full weekend for someone who spend a whole day sleeping, lol.

So here's to an even cooler week! May yours surprise you with an embarrassment of abundance!!!

:D