It’s an entirely different experience to play a horror game than to watch a horror movie, and I believe that the former is a more terrifying experience than the latter. In a horror movie, you just watch the story unfold. In a horror game, the experience is more immersive — you get to participate in the story as the character. The result is something more intense than what horror movies can offer.

Over the years, various developers have released their respective horror games on the market, and many of them have become hits. 

Kotaku has interviewed a few gamers and asked them the question: “what’s a game that really scared you?” For some, it was Resident Evil. For others, it was Silent Hill. 

More about this over at the site.

How about you? What game scared you the most?

(Image Credit: QuinceCreative/ Pixabay)

Steven Novak of Dallas, Texas, went all out with his Halloween decorations this year, turning his front yard into the scene of a gruesome multiple murder. Several bodies plus disembodied parts are laid out among puddles of blood and gore, while zombies are at the window, trying to get out.

“I’m most proud of the wheelbarrow tipped over by the street full of Hefty bags, looking like a failed attempt to dispose of the dismembered bodies in the middle of the night.” Novak says. “A kid walked by and asked me what happened to them; I said they ate too many Skittles.”

Officers from the Dallas Police Department have gone to the home numerous times, responding to calls from those who drive or walk by. He said the cops are cool with it, but they have to respond to each call. Read more at the Dallas Observer. You can see additional pictures at Facebook here and here. -via Boing Boing

(Image credit: Steven Novak)

Scientists have grown human brain tissue from stem cells, producing tiny clumps of tissue called organoids. Neuroscientist Alysson Muotri is among many scientists who have used such organoids for all kinds of research.

But one experiment has drawn more scrutiny than the others. In August 2019, Muotri’s group published a paper in Cell Stem Cell reporting the creation of human brain organoids that produced coordinated waves of activity, resembling those seen in premature babies1. The waves continued for months before the team shut the experiment down.

This type of brain-wide, coordinated electrical activity is one of the properties of a conscious brain. The team’s finding led ethicists and scientists to raise a host of moral and philosophical questions about whether organoids should be allowed to reach this level of advanced development, whether ‘conscious’ organoids might be entitled to special treatment and rights not afforded to other clumps of cells and the possibility that consciousness could be created from scratch.

Now ethicists are trying to create guidelines for lab-grown brain organoids. Some scientists would welcome the possibility of producing a conscious brain from stem cells, while others shudder at the moral implications. How developed can a brain get before it is unethical to use it for experiments? And how do you measure consciousness when a brain has no way to communicate? How do we even define consciousness for this purpose? Read some deep thoughts about lab-grown brains that may or may not have their own deep thoughts at Nature. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Fabio Buonocore)

The cats that live in your ceiling need to keep an eye on you. Try to be helpful to them as this shopkeeper in Japan has been. Twitter user SCMCrocodile reports that a friend swapped out the drop panels in his shop's hopefully sturdy ceiling with sheets of glass. The security cats can now see everything that happens in the store.

Our game is titled The House on Blue Lick Road. It's a real house and actually for sale in Louisville, Kentucky. You can take a 3D tour of it . . . if you dare!

Walk around the sprawling and labyrinthine structure. There are mysterious and disturbing things beyond just the carpeted urinal and walk-in blue bathtub.

Can you walk through the whole structure while still alive? Some gamers are testing that out, as you can see from the above speedrun video. It may be safer than touring the home in person. WAXY News researched the history of this lair:

But a larger question remained: what’s the deal with this place? Whoever owned it, they were too organized to be hoarders. The home appeared to double as the office and warehouse for an internet reseller business, but who sells a house crammed floor-to-ceiling with retail goods?

Internet sleuths unearthed several news articles from 2014, outlining how police discovered thousands of stolen items being sold online during a raid at the address, the result of a four-year investigation resulting in criminal charges for four family members living and working at the house.

But it didn’t add up. If they were convicted for organized crime, why was there still so much inventory in the house, with products released as recently as last year? Why is it still packed full while they’re trying to sell it? And what’s with the bathtub!?

-via Super Punch | Photo: Redfin

The Omega pants by Graphene-X is made of a three-layer fabric that’s stretchable, waterproof, and destruction-proof. That’s right, destruction-proof! Graphene, hailed as the world’s strongest material, is integrated into the fabric. The material helps the Omega pants show less wear and tear, as Yanko Design details: 

You could take an abrasive pad or sandpaper to it and where most tactical clothing show signs of failure, the Omega ends up looking like nothing ever happened to it. The pants’ construction further enables this durability, with knee-panels, a reinforced crotch, and taped seams to hold the stitching together even after a rough day. The Graphene pants are naturally anti-microbial too, which means they need less frequent washing than your regular pair of pants, and the fabric comes treated with a water-repellent coating too, allowing it to never get stained or wet if you jump into a muddy creek or accidentally drop coffee on it.

Image via Yanko Design 

The winners have been announced in the Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards for 2020! The overall winner is the picture above, in which Terry the turtle flips the bird. Is he sending a message to the photographer? That would be Mark Fitzpatrick, who caught this image at Lady Elliot Island along the Great Barrier Reef. It also won the "creatures of the sea" category. The "creatures on the land" award went to Charlie Davidson for this picture of a raccoon waking up and having a stretch.

See all the winners and some hilarious highly commended photos in the winner's gallery. -via Bored Panda

The high plains town of Lusk, Wyoming has a wild, cowboy history. It has a peculiar relationship with the soiled doves of its past. For example, the Yellow Hotel brothel and its madam, Dell Burke, were famous in the region and respected in town.

So it is not surprising that, just outside of the town limits, there is a monument at the gravesite of Mother Featherlegs, a prostitute who was murdered 1879. Her nickname came from the ruffles of her pantalets, which were publicly visible on windy days. In 1964, people in Lusk erected this monument, which you can find 10 miles south of town, in her honor.

Photo: Jimmy Emerson

Walking 300 miles in over 20 days is not an easy thing to do. To walk the same number of miles while wearing 63 pounds of armor is much harder, but it is still achievable. Meet Lewis Kirkbride, a 38-year-old charity worker from Durham, northeast England, who did just that as he walked from York to Hastings.

Over 20 days, Kirkbride walked some 300 miles to raise awareness of the English population’s widespread, if largely undiscussed, struggles with mental health—struggles he likens to battles fought by the knights of yore. One particular knight, as it happens.

Kirkbride modeled his route after the one taken in 1066 by King Harold Godwinson (or Harold II), the last Anglo-Saxon king of England.

But why King Harold?

The answer is at Atlas Obscura.

(Image Credit: Lewis Kirkbride/ 1066 Battle Walk/ Atlas Obscura)

Pelagornithids are a group of ancient avians that can be described as the largest flying birds of all time. These humongous birds had a wingspan of 20 feet, and were capable of soaring across seas. Paleontologists were able to identify the birds’ capabilities by comparing a pair of remains of related birds, as the Smithsonian Magazine details: 

During the 1980s, University of California Berkeley paleontologist Peter Kloess says, scientists searching for Antarctic fossils found some delicate bird bones—a jaw and part of a foot from an ancient bird—on Seymour Island. Those bones then made a long journey to California, but their story was only just starting.

The jaw and foot bone were just two of a huge collection kept at the University of California Riverside. In 2003, however, the more than 10,000 fossils of the Riverside collection were transferred to the University of California Museum of Paleontology at the Berkeley campus, the bird bones among them. And they stood out. “Bony-toothed jaws are rare in the vertebrate record,” senior museum scientist Pat Holroyd says. “When you see one, you remember it and mentally file it away for later.”

The bird jaw, which came from a rock formation laid down over 37 million years ago, looks almost like a woodcutting tool rather than a bone. The jaw has a series of large and small spikes, outgrowths of the beak that have a passing resemblance to teeth. On a living animal, the points would have been covered in keratin and given the bird a sinister saw-toothed smile. That feature immediately identified the jaw as belonging to a pelagornithid, also known as bony-toothed birds that have a very long fossil record. The oldest pelagornithids evolved about 56 million years ago, and the most recent flew through the skies about two million years ago. Their fossils are found all over the world.

Image via the Smithsonian Magazine 

Don’t worry, the cat didn’t lose its life. Rescuers were ready to catch the orange cat in their arms as it jumped from a burning second story window in Harlem, New York. I’m surprised that the cat was willing to jump straight down even if there was a chance that the rescuers wouldn’t be able to catch it. Way to go, little cat! 

(via Flipboard) 

Image screenshot via Flipboard

We’re used to enjoying our favorite cup of tea using tea bags (which are honestly messy, especially when it’s time to throw them in the bin), but did you know that there are other options to enjoy a hot cup of tea? These Pique tea crystals are a less messy alternative: 

Now let me explain: at first glance, Pique’s tea crystals definitely look a lot like those influencer-endorsed tummy tea products that never seem to leave your Instagram feed. However, what makes these tea crystals truly unique is the cold-brewing process used to create them, as brewing whole-leaf tea at low temperatures, for longer durations of time, supposedly preserves the active compounds found in tea at maximum potential, according to the brand website. 

And yes, the easy-to-use factor of these tea bags is definitely worth writing home about, as they instantly dissolve into water at any temperature, whether it’s ice cold or piping hot. This makes it a major win for iced-tea fanatics (like yours truly), as whipping up some unsweetened iced vanilla rooibos tea only took me a matter of seconds instead of waiting for it to steep. 

In short, Pique’s innovative crystals are definitely a must-see for tea drinkers who are looking to skip out on both the longer steeping times, and annoying messes associated with traditional tea bags. 

Image via The Daily Beast 

When the climate gets warm enough, we may have to turn to desperate measures, like altering our own atmosphere. What could possibly go wrong? Putting stuff up in the stratosphere to block the sun's rays might work, but that has happened before, like in 1816, the year without a summer. Besides, we'd probably need solar energy just to launch the scheme, which is akin to biting off our noses to spite our faces. Or it might work. Kurzgesagt has some details. -via Damn Interesting

This is the quokka, a marsupial native to Western Australia. Like the other marsupials native to the country, such as the kangaroo and the wallaby, quokkas are herbivores and are mainly nocturnal. But one thing that sets the quokka apart from the aforementioned animals is its smile, which John Wells describes as “perpetual”.

Cute!

Image via John Wells on Facebook

Chicago — About a week ago, Antoine Tissier was flying his drone on Lincoln Park, trying to capture the sunset. But this day was about to give him something even more beautiful than what he had in mind. As he flew his drone across the park,...

he spotted a couple having a photoshoot under the Ulysses S. Grant monument in Lincoln Park. Antoine quickly captured the view, landed his drone, and tried to catch up with the couple. Unfortunately, by the time he reached the monument, the people were already gone.

The photographer decided to post the spectacular shot on Instagram in hopes of tracking down the mysterious couple. “Unexpected picture of a mysterious #couple we are trying to identify!” Antoine wrote in the description of the picture. Thanks to the power of social media, it only took a few days for the photographer to find the couple he captured.

So how did Tissier manage to find the couple?

The answers over at Bored Panda.

(Image Credit: tissier.antoine/ Bored Panda)

(Image Credit: cranesweddings/ Bored Panda)