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I used to think religious zealots and talk show hosts trying to make a name for themselves were the only people who thought Dungeons & Dragons was a threat to America, but back in 1983 the FBI believed D&D was bad news too.

But their reason didn't involve Satan or the corruption of souls- it involved cocaine trafficking, and they even had the game's creator Gary Gygax on their list as a possible suspect:

The first, dated 1983, has to do with “significant cocaine traffickers in the Lake Geneva, Wisconsin area.” The birthplace of D&D was, and still is, a sleepy lakeside town just over the Illinois border. An FBI agent rooting around there for drug traffickers seems pretty far fetched, but the report appears to be genuine.

D&D co-creator Gary Gygax is named in the document, but whatever the FBI’s interest in him was has been redacted. It ended with a note that the FBI would proceed to “review corporate records for TSR, Inc. in effort to identify corporate officers and attorney of record.” A second document, dated March 1984, seems to show the FBI doing its due diligence to make sure that TSR was a publishing company and not a front for cocaine trafficking.

Twelve years later TSR, the makers of D&D, were the focus of another FBI investigation, but this time Dungeons & Dragons players were investigated in connection with The Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski:

The document also mentions an FBI visit with a gaming group in Fresno, California. Members of the group were shown pictures of one of the Unabomber’s explosive devices and asked if they recognized an individual from a “composite drawing.” This is likely the iconic image of the man in a hood circulated for more than a decade prior to Kaczynski’s arrest.

The final document, the most heavily redacted of the bunch, is dated April 1995. It seems to focus on an interview with a single individual at TSR, and centers around that person’s relationship with another individual in their gaming group.

“Many of the members of the group became paranoid,” the agent writes, “and began pointing fingers at one another. [The interview subject] indicated that he believes this is based on the suspicious nature of the individuals that were in the gaming group [and] indicated that he is quite sure that some of the members of the group fantasized about the possibility that maybe one of their members was responsible for the bombings.”

Read The FBI Kept A List Of D&D Players As Part Of Its Hunt For The Unabomber at Polygon

Clint Eastwood seems like the last guy a bully would mess with, but in this animated interview by Esquire Clint talks about how he was bullied as a teenager because he was shy, gangly and his family moved around a lot.

And his solution to the bully problem is straight up old school as expected- stand up to the bully and punch them right back, so the bully will respect you for fighting back and leave you alone.

(YouTube Link)

-Via GeekTyrant

Having a crush can make you act irrationally and feel more emotional, and when you're full-blown crushing on someone it really messes with your head, causing us to say and do really dumb things.

This all too human reaction to the flood of emotions we feel when we come face-to-face with our crush is something we all feel, and yet we each have a different embarrassing tale to tell about the crazy stuff we said while crushing.

Redditor Gmb1t asked the lovers "What is the most cringeworthy thing you've ever said to your crush?" on AskReddit, and their responses remind me of a simpler time when I asked a girl out with a note.

I started the note by saying "hey howdy buckaroo!" and signed it "Billy Bonnie"(sic), because at the time I thought Young Guns was the absolute coolest movie. She was nice about it but understandably wasn't interested in dating a twelve-year-old outlaw.

Read People Share The Most Cringeworthy Things They've Ever Said To Their Crushes here (NSFW language)

Big Bird is a character who helps connect the puppets and humans who live on Sesame Street, so he's human enough to hang out with people on the street all day and puppet enough to be happy about street life.

But he's also a very advanced puppet, one which legendary puppeteer Caroll Spinney operates like a second skin as he becomes one with Big Bird.

(YouTube Link)

This clip from I Am Big Bird: The Caroll Spinney Story shows how Caroll operates the revolutionary 8-foot-tall Big Bird puppet/costume, and how being Big Bird can cause long-term injuries to a puppeteer's arm.

We assume growing old will make us look a certain way, but everybody ages differently and some folks are blessed with good genetics that keep the wrinkles, sagging skin and grays away.

But good genetics isn't quite enough to explain how the mom in the middle of the photo above looks so young at 63-years-old, so she and her daughters must have discovered the Fountain of Youth.

Her 41-year-old daughter Lure Hsu (on the right in the photo above) made headlines for her youthful looks a while back, so Lure decided to share pics of the rest of the fam, including her sisters Sharon (on the left above, age 36) and Fayfay (age 40, in the middle below).

Some think their youthful appearance is a product of airbrushing or that they're lying about their age, but take a look through Lure's Instagram account and you'll see there's no airbrushing necessary!

-Via Bored Panda

Condors don't strike me as being the most affectionate animals, but maybe that's just me judging them by their somewhat vulture-y look and those beady little eyes.

For all I know they're the cuddliest critters on Earth, and this video shot by Nestor David seems to indicate condors are quite loveable after all. In it we see Nestor's friend Edgardo Della getting lotsa love from the condor he nursed back to health:

One day in March he appeared here alone and with a broken leg. We were healing him from an injury that did not seem to be serious and from that day he approaches me every time I call him.

-Via Laughing Squid

Underwater Panther is an animated short created by French artist Tony Darsonval which is based on Native American mythology, and if that all seems confusing don't worry- it'll all make sense after you watch the short.

For the underwater panther in question is a mythological water being the Algonquins thought of as "the most powerful underwater being", the French dialog has English subtitles, and the 2D art is very appealing.

Plus there's a battle between the Underwater Panther and the Thunderbird that looks like something straight out of Final Fantasy or Pokemon, so dive in and enjoy!

(YouTube Link)

Animal drawings are animal drawings are animal drawings, in other words pretty boring to look at unless they're drawn in a style other than realistic and present a different point of view.

So if you want your animal art to get noticed you need to think outside the rectangularly-framed forest scene and do something wild.

Illustrator chrs_r creates fantastic drawings of fantasy animals the old fashioned way- with pencil and paper and time and imagination, with a healthy dose of love for animals thrown in to keep his art critter friendly.

See more at Bored Panda

Crash Bandicoot got just as much attention for the character designs as it did for the groundbreaking gameplay, and since both elements of the game were a cut above the rest Crash quickly became a big hit.

But the game's developers had no idea their fun indie platformer would come to redefine the genre, nor did they have a clue that Crash would become the unofficial mascot of the Sony PlayStation.

They just knew that they'd been hired to create a game for the Sony PlayStation by Universal Picture's new video game division, Universal Interactive, but they had to move to Hollywood to get started.

Polygon's Blake Hester spoke with Andy Gavin and Jason Rubin, the creators of Crash Bandicoot and founders of game studio Naughty Dog, to discuss the birth of a bandicoot and the making of an epic game studio.

During this interview we learn, among other things, how the duo picked up and moved from Boston to Hollywood to make Crash Bandicoot:

We didn't have everything we owned in that car, but we had everything we owned either in that car or the truck that was following us. We were moving from Boston, where Andy was [working on] his master's degree at MIT, to Hollywood. And we didn't know Hollywood because neither of us had [been] there, but we were going to work on Universal's backlot, so a lot of what we were talking about is what Hollywood would do to video games. ...

[We] drove it straight. I've done it three times in my life. It's long. It's about 36 to 40 hours, depending on how you drive. So we probably slept once, maybe, in there.

How their time on the Universal backlot influenced their games:

There [were] celebrities everywhere. I have a thousand anecdotes of having some celebrity walk by us or something. This is one thing about it: Part of our deal with Universal was that we got to bring our dog on the lot, and there was no other dog allowed on the lot. The gentleman that brought us to Universal, Skip Paul, still one of my best friends, managed to get us a badge. So I had a dog on the backlot of Universal. She was an amazing dog; my daughter is now named after this dog. [She] was huge. She cornered Sylvester Stallone in an elevator. ...

We were next to "The Suzanne Somers Show," so Suzanne Somers gave me a signed Thighmaster, which was stolen by somebody because it was such a cool thing to have. It's crazy times. The stories, they're just insane from back then.

And how it felt to make their epic debut at E3 1996:

[Twisted Metal] was supposed to be the front of [Sony's] booth for the 1996 E3. It would have been Twisted Metal, and they booted Twisted Metal to put Crash there, which they had just signed weeks before E3. And it was Crash, and right next to Crash, it was Mario. From that point on, it was legendary. There are photos online of Miyamoto playing Crash Bandicoot and that was, like, the moment, right?

I was standing right behind him for the whole time. It was like an hour and a half as [he and Mark Cerny] were chatting in Japanese. ... Yeah, it was definitely a cool moment, because he was one of our icons.

Read Crash Bandicoot: An Oral History here

Dealing with rude customers is one of the worst things about working retail, because you have to handle their anger and bad attitude without blowing up in their face or being rude back if you want to keep your job.

And while it is extremely satisfying to tell a customer where they can stuff their opinion then quit the job on the spot most people can't go out in a blaze of glory because they need to pay their rent.

So instead of storming out you should do like the retail worker does in this comic strip by AC Stuart and come up with clever yet snide responses to the stupid and rude things customers will inevitably say to you.

But whatever you do don't show customers any fear...they feed on that stuff...

See 8 Perfect Responses For Rude Customers here (NSFW language)

Nowadays most people think of truckers as little more than the drivers of those giant trucks folks like to curse at on the freeway, but back in the 70s truckers were seen as larger-than-life figures who ruled the road.

Movies like Every Which Way But Loose, Convoy and Smokey and the Bandit made truckers out to be blue collar heroes, who tamed the highways and took s#@t from no man, and people were lining up to drive big rigs.

Truckers even had their own magazine- Overdrive, known as "the voice of the American trucker". 

Overdrive was made for the red-blooded American truck driving men, and every issue featured lovely models meant to "inspire" those guys while on the long haul across the USA. They even included a "date master" so they wouldn't lose track of the days while they're truckin' for a livin'.

-Via design you trust

Some cartoonists have a gift for visualizing thoughts and feelings we've all had about society, humanity and life in general, but a clever cartoonist can put ideas in our minds by presenting their personal take on a situation.

Now whenever you shake hands with someone who has a bunch of tattoos you're going to remember what happened in the comic above.

Russian cartoonist Gudim Anton is good at illustrating comical strips that stick with the viewer long after viewing, and when he presents an explanation it often seems a bit silly but it also somehow makes sense.

See 18 Clever Cartoons From Russian Artist Gudim here

You'd think an Oscar-winning animated short starring Tom Waits would be well known in certain circles, especially when it's entitled "Tom Waits For No One".

But it appears this 1979 short by The Lyon Lamb Company was hiding out on the edge of the pop culture infosphere waiting to reappear and blow our minds.

(YouTube Link)

Here's a little background on this obscure animated short:

“Tom Waits for No One” is the title of an absolutely amazing animated short that was made in 1979 by the Lyon Lamb company, the Oscar-winning technological innovators behind the Lyon Lamb Video Animation System which allowed animators to see immediate pencil tests of something without having to shoot it on film.

Through a series of lucky events (seeing Tom Waits in his memorable TV appearance on Fernwood 2Night, then a few weeks later noticing Waits’ name on the marquee of the Roxy nightclub after a screening of Close Encounters of the Third Kind was sold out), John Lamb came to direct Waits in a rotoscoped animation for his song “The One That Got Away” to demonstrate their new device for the film industry.

Over thirteen hours of video was shot and edited down to 5,500 frames, which were then individually re-drawn and hand-painted onto celluloid acetate. What today would take a comparatively trivial amount of time then took the best in the business about six months of hard work.

adly, the impressive short had few outlets for people to see it, preceding MTV as it did by just a few years. The film remained in obscurity until it was uploaded to YouTube a few years back, and Lamb—who kept nearly all of the film’s elements safely stored away—started a Kickstarter to fund a remastering in modern day video resolution. There’s also a book, Tom Waits for No One: The Illustrated Scrapbook, that was published in 2014.

Read 'Tom Waits For No Man': Obscure Oscar-Winning Animated Music Video From 1979 here

It's rare to find a teen or tween who even wants to be at the hospital while their mom gives birth to a new family member, much less hang out in the delivery room.

But 12-year-old Jacee Dellapena wanted to attend the birth of her new baby brother Zadyn, so her parents allowed her to be in the delivery room while her mom Dede gave birth.

Then Dede's obstetrician Dr. Walter Wolfe suggested Jacee should suit up and help him deliver Zadyn, a suggestion she was surprisingly excited about.

And with her parents' wholehearted approval Jacee stepped up and helped bring Zadyn into this world, which will forever give her the upper hand in arguments with her little brother!

-Via Bored Panda

There are so many skateboarding dogs and cats out there I won't be surprised when they start going pro, especially the dogs who don't mind a crowd forming around them.

But cats seem like they'd be less keen on a crowd, preferring to skate behind a grocery store instead of at the skate park, so they can chill and focus on the ride.

However, Boomer the Bengal could go pro any day now- because he isn't afraid to show off his skating skills in front of an attentive crowd, as long as they don't touch his board...

(YouTube Link)

-Via Laughing Squid