Many Otakus think anime girls would make great girlfriends, because they're powerful and beautiful, with plenty of magical charm and cute little voices that can make a raging bull stop and smile.

But if these anime girls existed in the real world they would be virtually undateable, and any Otaku who made a play for them would instantly regret their decision.

Jealous boyfriends would rage when they're forced to watch as their anime GF falls on top of their male "friends" in suggestive ways over and over again, because that's how clumsiness is portrayed in anime.

The new BF would also have to deal with the brooding and sinister ex, who still somehow has a hold on that seemingly innocent little anime girl despite having tried to once tried to kill her.

But, as this comic by JHALL shows, the worst part about dating an anime girl would be the quest to find something to talk about, because they might be kick-ass warriors but they definitely aren't known for their conversational skills.

-Via Dorkly

It's a shame that geeks are unfairly judged by some simply because they're passionate about pop culture, but geeky pursuits really bother people for some strange reason, and yet these people will still date geeks.

This creates big problems when the two decide to move in together, since geeks typically collect geeky stuff that a hater won't want to see in their space, and stupid arguments ensue.

Imgur user ohhaibroadcast found out his girlfriend was an anti-geekite when she told him he couldn't put any of his geeky stuff upstairs, so he hid little Warhammer minis and LEGO figures around the house.

Meanwhile, his basement looks like nerdvana, so don't feel too bad for the guy:

He has a full sized MAME arcade cabinet, shelves full of board games, plenty of space for tabletop gaming, and a big screen and comfy recliners so he can watch movies about happy couples.

Something tells me their friends would rather hang out in the basement than upstairs in boring old Dullsville...

-Via TechEblog

(Image Via Cosplay America)

Kitty Cosplay understands that Will is the most iconic character in Stranger Things, so when she decided to do a cosplay based on the Netflix show, she decided to go as Will while he was trapped in the Other Side and communicated with his mother. The decision to throw the Demigorgon's arm through the wall really sells the terrifying side of the show. I have to wonder if she was inspired at all by this previous Stranger Things wall cosplay.

Via Fashionably Geek

"Gravedigging contest" feels like best metaphor for Election 2016 yet."

"Slovak brothers win gravedigging contest" https://t.co/BiXObSP3P0 pic.twitter.com/pWqf4oQ0e2

— pourmecoffee (@pourmecoffee) November 11, 2016

We have long held that any human activity will eventually be made into a competition. The International Exhibition of Funeral, Burial and Cremation Services was held recently in Trenčín, Slovakia. One event during the convention was a grave digging competition. Eleven teams of two men each from Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia dug in to see who could produce the fastest and neatest grave, using only hand shovels and pickaxes. Slovakian brothers Ladislav Skladan and Csaba Skladan won by digging a grave five feet deep in only 54 minutes.  

"We want to show and appreciate the hard work of grave diggers," said Ladislav Striz, who established the contest last year.

"Most Slovak graveyards are so crowded and spaces between graves so narrow that we need human diggers instead of machines," he said. "They work hard, come rain, come snow."

Read about the competition and see more pictures at Reuters.  -via mental_floss

(YouTube link)

The future of artificial intelligence! Brian Kane installed an Alexa Voice Service in his Billy Bass. They weren't kidding when they said you could add it to any device! The common response to this is, "Shut up and take my money!" But you can do this yourself, if you have a bit of skills. "Alexa, sing Take Me To The River!" -via reddit

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Helmets are a life saver when you're fighting in a war, but you know what's useful come war, peace and utter doldrums? A cooking pot, which a helmet resembles when it's turned upside down.

After World War II many Germans found themselves destitute and without a pot to piss cook in, so steel factory workers started turning old helmets into cooking pots.

(YouTube Link)

This video posted by British Pathé shows steel factory workers turning surplus German military helmets into collanders and cooking pots, which is pretty neat to watch. Make soup, not war!

-Via Laughing Squid

If you want to celebrate Star Trek’s 50th anniversary with a Starfleet Halloween costume, go for it! But if you’re attending a party with die-hard Trek fans, you better be accurate. When Star Trek debuted in 1966, Gene Roddenberry color-coded Starfleet uniforms to indicate service divisions, and added gold braid to denote rank. However, he did not know how long the series would last and how many new iterations would follow. Besides, the production had a very skimpy budget. Starfleet uniforms evolved over the years as Star Trek went to movies and several more modern TV series. And some of the uniform innovations didn’t go over well.

The Star Trek movies that followed the cancellation of the original series, threw most of the original coloring schemes out the window for a cleaner look, which is surprisingly harder to read. In 1979’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture (which takes place in the mid-2270s), the bright colors were done away with and replaced with white, grey, and beige uniforms.

Here, a person’s position could be determined by the color of the ring behind the Starfleet insignia on their breast. A white ring was used for command, orange and green were used for the science divisions, and red, gold, and grey were used for operations. Rank was now worn on either the sleeve and/or on a shoulder tab. Thankfully, these creamy jumpsuits didn’t last long.

By 1982’s Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Starfleet (and the film’s production department) had adopted an even more standardized and militaristic look. Taking place around the late-2270s, the second film introduced a standard maroon color that was worn by all officers in jumpsuit and jacket styles.

As Star Trek movies and series proliferated, writers and producers tried to streamline the color-coding and ranks, but time-travel plots further complicated the overall fashion scheme. You can catch up and get an idea of how Starfleet uniforms work in a rundown at Atlas Obscura. 

It’s been a while since we’ve heard a Pogo remix, so it’s extra-special that his new one is Star Trek themed! It’s a remix of sounds from Patrick Stewart as Captain Jean-Luc Picard and Brent Spider as Data. Even though it’s rendered as nonsense, you’d recognize those voices anywhere, wouldn’t you? And we even get to see Pogo!

(YouTube link)

From the YouTube page:

The track opens with the Klingon Victory Song, followed by a remix of Data singing Che Gelida Manina in the episode 'In Theory'. This episode was the first ever to be directed by Patrick Stewart and I didn't realize this until after the track was finished.

I sourced the Ben Nye makeup that was used to turn Spiner into Data, and a replica of the iconic Star Fleet uniform. Unfortunately I couldn't get the contact lenses in and I could only get the uniform in red, so I spent a huge amount of time changing the colour of my eyes and uniform in post.

Pogo is the professional name of Nick Bertke, whom we’ve featured many times before. -Thanks, Øystein Dale!

Why are Young Adult novels so popular with young and old alike these days? Because of the formula- sexy plus pitiful plus surprisingly powerful equals dystopian hero born to save us all.

Add in a dash of the supernatural, some silly yet memorable names and a pinch of peril and you've got a formulaic story for the masses.

Prefer pictures to word problems? You can thank Adam Ellis for his illustrated breakdown of Every Dystopian YA Novel, which he posted on his site Books Of Adam. I wonder how he cracked the code?

-Via Geeks Are Sexy

People with dirty minds like to turn location names into crude jokes, and with the exception of places like Lake Titicaca that are totally asking for it these towns don't deserve to be thought of as smutty.

In fact, there are too many lewdly named places on the planet as it is, and in the United States there's at least one town with a lewd name in every single state, towns that were clearly founded by perverts.

Okay, so maybe you don't need a dirty mind to think town names like Humptulips, Wankers Corner and Bumpass sound like the punchline of a filthy joke.

But Hooker, Oklahoma was obviously named after all the crochet enthusiasts who founded the town, and Blue Ball Village was founded by racquetball enthusiasts, right? *wink*

See The Lewdest Town Names In America here

Did you know that Napoléon Bonaparte tried his hand at fiction before he became a revolutionary? Well, if Saddam Hussein could write a romance novel, why not Napoléon? In 2007, a French publishing company found (and published) a novella written by Napoléon, and now a few pages of the original manuscript is going up for auction.

Clisson et Eugénie is unabashedly autobiographical. Penned in the autumn of 1795, while Napoleon was still rising in the ranks of the French army, the novel centers around an officer named Clisson, “a man of fervent imagination, with his blazing heart, his uncompromising intellect and his cool head”. The war-weary Clisson decides to quit his position and enjoy the spa baths of central France. There he meets two young women, Amélie and Eugénie, and falls desperately (and tragically) in love with Eugénie. While tender, this romance is also quite tame. The closest the author comes to sex may be: “Their hearts fused … the most exquisite voluptuousness flooded the hearts of the two enraptured lovers.”

The novella only runs about 22 scribbled pages, so the plot swiftly progresses from love to marriage to melancholy.

Only four pages will go to auction; the rest are in a museum or single pages in private collections. Napoléon wrote the story when he was 26 years old, and it very well may have been a kind of self-therapy, as it was based on a woman he knew and loved. Think about how history may have been different if he had found success as a novelist! Read more about Clisson et Eugénie at the Guardian. -Thanks, John Farrier!  

Everything changed when Disney bought Lucasfilm and all the Star Wars properties. At first we were excited, because that meant that we’d get more Star Wars movies, while feeling apprehensive, because we didn’t want it to turn into Mickey Mouse. Then Disney announced that the "expanded universe" of novels, games, and fan fiction up to that point were not to be regarded as canon, which startled fans. What were they thinking? They were thinking of unifying all Star Wars lore. And that in itself raises many questions.

When Lucasfilm was purchased by Disney, the decision was made that anything that advances the Star Wars story would become part of the same singular canon. Books, comics, games—they’re now as definitive as TV and film. Anything you pick up related to Star Wars adds to the whole; there’s a group of executives called the Lucasfilm Story Group whose sole job is to make sure all of these moving parts come together in a cohesive way.

As a Star Wars fan, I can’t think of anything more exciting than it all having a purpose. The amazing fact that we’re finally finding out what happened to Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, and Han Solo (RIP) after Return of the Jedi is just the icing on the cake. Now, every single bit of Star Wars out there gives us another piece of the puzzle. You can go to the store, pick up Marvel’s Star Wars comic, and read crucial pieces of Star Wars history. Did you ever wonder how Darth Vader would’ve reacted between when he realized Obi-Wan Kenobi hid his son from him? Well, that happens in the comics—and it was a result of Luke Skywalker meeting Boba Fett, if you can believe it.

At the same time, longtime fans are having a time shifting from a malleable fictional universe to a concrete universe, and newer fans wonder if you really have to buy all those comic books to learn what’s going on. The pros, cons, and questions about Disney’s new approach to Star Wars are laid out for your reading pleasure at io9.

In the 1980s gamers were introduced to a new kind of interactive game-VCR board games, the games you played while sitting in front of the TV.

VCR board games were seen as cutting edge by some, a weak comparison to console video games by others, but every kid who liked board games had to try out a VCR game at least once, to see what all the buzz was about.

The difference was immediately apparent, as a live action game master on the tape guided their gaming experience by yelling at them, telling them what to do or simply by adding some video scene flavor to the game.

(YouTube Link)

This supercut compiled by Found Footage Fest pays homage to those strange niche VCR games of the 80s and 90s, check it out and see if it brings back any good or bad board game memories!

-Via mental_floss

Mr. Israel Kristal turned 113 years old on Thursday. Earlier this year, he was certified by the Guinness Book of World Records as the oldest man alive. Born in Poland on September 15, 1903, Kristol studied the Torah from a young age and was a master candymaker most of his life. His mother died when he was seven, and then his father was drafted by the Imperial Russian Army and died in World War I. Kristol turned 13 during that time and never had a bar mitzvah.

During World War II, Kristol’s two children died during the family’s confinement in the Lodz ghetto. He and his wife were sent to Auschwitz in 1944, where she died. When the Red Army liberated Auschwitz in 1945, Kristol weighed only 37 kilograms (81 pounds). Within a few years, he remarried, emigrated to Haifa, Israel, and had two more children. He now has dozens of descendants. And soon he will have the bar mitzvah he was denied during the Great War.

His daughter, Shulamith Kristal-Kuperstoch, told CNN that Kristal's long-delayed bar mitzvah would be held close to his Hebrew birthday, which falls this year on October 2.

Kristal-Kuperstoch said it would be a "privilege" for her to organize the upcoming ceremony for her father, as a way of correcting the past, and as a gift to him.

Kristal has been carrying out Jewish rituals and responsibilities for 100 years now. When they get to the part where they traditionally say, “Today, you are a man,” they will really mean “Today, you are THE man.”

(Image credit: Guinness Book of World Records)  

What states make up what Americans consider “The South”? It’s not so much climate as it is culture. I live in Kentucky, which was a slave state before the Civil War, but stayed with the Union. The people here speak with an accent that is more hillbilly than southern drawl. Yet we drink our tea extra sweet and keep electing Tea Party politicians. A majority would classify Kentucky in the South, others have called us the Midwest, while the term “Appalachian” makes the most sense -yet that classification doesn’t appear on most cultural maps. But what about Delaware? Maryland? Oklahoma? Vox is conducting a survey to see how people think of the region we know as the South. You are asked to click on the states on an interactive map that you would call the south. When you submit your opinion, you’ll see how it compares to others who have done the same. You can also click on individual states to see what the responses were.