I've always been interested in the paranormal. God, ghosts, lake monsters, yetis, time portals, telekinesis and everything else 'unexplained' fascinated me from the minute I was aware of them as concepts (if a toddler can grasp the concept of God, which I suppose is not necessarily plausible).
This evening I was talking to @oye_billy on Twitter and I brought up a PC game I loved as a kid. I had to look it up. It was based on Sam & Max, comic book characters created by Steve Purcell in the late 80s (I'm an 80s kid). The game was called Sam & Max Hit the Road and I loved it because they went across America solving mysteries in weird places. Like at the giant ball of yarn.
Another game I played, again on the PC, was 'WeiRd.' In this game you went through various levels solving puzzles and reading about things like the woman with asthma, which for some reason caused her breasts to glow blue. The game was a place of different dimensions that were fantastically designed, from holes that descended miles underground with stories to unearth as you went down, to labs and misty mazes. It was magnificent.
I even enjoyed the Goosebumps PC game, One Day At Horrorland which was neither cool nor magnificent.
On TV, The X-Files was a seven-year-old revelation. From the first episode I found my mother watching in our living room (Mulder running a tooth through a supermarket check-out and alien code screwing the system) to the the hole in the smoking man's windpipe near the end.
And with a backdrop of Fortean Times Magazine from the age of eleven, all these things were absorbed with a lot of love. Yet somehow I still don't think I've turned out as a geek. Not really.
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