Remember the creepy clown scare of 2016? Even before that, there was a viral clown that you may have missed. In 2014, a surveillance video of a clown hiding under a child's bed caused a stir. As strange as that was, the truth is even stranger: the parents hired Wrinkles the Clown to pull off the stunt and scare their daughter into behaving. Wrinkles is a retired Florida man who will appear as a creepy clown for any reason you want to pay for, and became national news after the bedroom video went viral.

Now Wrinkles is the subject of a horror film, set to hit theaters on October fourth. This one should give Pennywise a run for his money in the creep competition, because this movie is a documentary. -via Mental Floss

There are days where we have the strong urge to laze around and do nothing. Doing nothing might consist of you lying around until the late afternoon, or just browsing on the Internet. But is that really doing nothing? By browsing or lying on your bed, that is actually doing something. How can one really do nothing? In a keynote talk at EYEO 2017 in Minneapolis, Jenny Odell shares her thoughts on doing nothing: 

1. making nothing

I want to backtrack a little here just to say that I’ve long had an appreciation of doing nothing — or more properly, making nothing. I’m not lazy, but the most I have ever made or constructed is a new context for, or perspective on, something that already existed.

2. the architecture of nothing

The artist creates a structure — whether that’s a map or a cordoned-off area — that holds open a contemplative space against the pressures of habit and familiarity that constantly threaten to close it. 

3. the precarity of nothing

There’s an obvious critique of all of this, and that’s that it comes from a place of privilege. It’s possible to understand the practice of doing nothing solely as a self-indulgent luxury, the equivalent of taking a mental health day if you’re lucky enough to work at a place that has those.

4. nothing for something

That’s a strategic function of nothing, and in that sense, you simply could file my talk simply under the heading of self care. But if you do, make it “self care” in the activist sense that Audre Lorde meant it in the 1980s — self preservation as an act of political warfare – and not what it means when it’s been appropriated for commercial ends. As Gabrielle Moss, author of Glop (a Goop parody book) put it, self care “is poised to be wrenched away from activists and turned into an excuse to buy an expensive bath oil.”

image credit: Rembrandt via wikimedia commons

PlayStation players, here’s a revelation for you: your heavily-used X button should not be called the “X” button. According to a tweet from PlayStation UK, it’s supposed to be referred to as the “cross” button. However, this might just be a UK thing, where they say “cross” instead of “X”. 

The main PlayStation account has not weighed in on this situation but instead posted a Twitter poll on what people should call the “cross” button, with 81 percent of respondents choosing “X” button.  At the end of the day, it’s up to you on what to call the “X” or “cross” button. 

(via The Verge)

image credit: via wikimedia commons

In an age when technology can make information easily and readily available for users, along with the age of an “information cornucopia”, one of the main problems the world has faced is the emergence of fake news. No matter how hard the media, the government, and academia tell users how to discern whether the information they retrieve is legitimate or not, there are cases where users decide wrongly. But why are we susceptible to fake information? It might be because of an information storm, BBC’s Tom Chatfield detailed:

the information suffusion of digital culture has introduced something new into this ancient psychological equation: a whole new level of reliance upon social information; and a whole new set of hazards and anxieties around errors, manipulation and cascades of influence.

Danish researchers Vincent F Hendricks and Pelle G Hansen give these tumultuous processes a name – an “information storm”, or infostorm, in the sense of a sudden and tempestuous flow of social information – and suggest an intriguing alternative to the narratives of human folly and unreason so often applied to fake news and tribal divisions online. 

“when you don’t possess sufficient information to solve a given problem, or if you just don’t want to or have the time for processing it, then it can be rational to imitate others by way of social proof”. When we either know very little about something, or the information surrounding it is overwhelming, it makes excellent sense to look to others’ apparent beliefs as an indication of what is going on. In fact, this is often the most reasonable response, so long as we have good reason to believe that others have access to accurate information; and that what they seem to think and what they actually believe are the same.

image credit: Unsplash via wikimedia commons

Pizza is a perfect and stable comfort food for anyone, especially for someone whose ideal way to spend the night is watching anime while eating food. Domino’s Pizza in Japan, to cater to the otaku market, is now selling the world’s first Tsundere pizza (tsundere refers to an anime character/personality type of running hot and cold with one’s affections)! Soranews24 details on what makes this pizza tsundere: 

So what makes a pizza tsundere? Well, first you’ve got to have the hateful tsuntsun part. See the massive pile of circular toppings atop the pizza? Those aren’t sliced mushrooms, they’re jalapenos! With the volume of spicy peppers almost equal to that of the entire rest of the pizza, so just like if you’re going to get into a romance with a tsundere, if you’re entering a gastronomic relationship with a Tsundere Pizza, you probably should expect it to hurt.

you can’t have the tsun without the dere. Domino’s Pizza promises that the Tsundere Pizza’s cheese coating will lovingly spare you from the full fire of the triple portion of jalapenos, and that the resulting flavor is “nice and mild,” though we wonder if that’s an assurance we should take at face value or not, given tsunderes’ proclivity for downplaying the sharpness of their tsuntsun actions. 

image credit: Domino's Pizza via Soranews24

A fourth-grader was bullied for wearing a handmade University of Tennessee shirt, an orange t-shirt pinned with a hand-drawn “U.T.” label. The elementary student, who wore the shirt to a College Colors Day at Altamonte Elementary School in Florida to represent their favourite university, returned to Laura Snyder’s classroom in tears. Snyder shared this heartbreaking event on Facebook, as Buzzfeed detailed: 

"He was DEVASTATED. I know kids can be cruel, I am aware that it’s not the fanciest sign, BUT this kid used the resources he had available to him to participate in a spirit day."

Snyder wrote that she was going to buy her student an official UT shirt, and ended the post by asking if any of her Facebook friends had any connections to the school so she could "make it a little extra special for him."

The university store's official Twitter account shared a picture of the pack's contents Thursday afternoon, which included jerseys, hats, notes from school officials, and a football signed by head coach Jeremy Pruitt for the student himself, along with items like notebooks, pens, and water bottles for Snyder's entire class.

The university announced Friday that they would be making the student's hand-drawn design into an official T-shirt and donating a portion of the proceeds to an anti-bullying foundation.

image credit: via Buzzfeed

The Insight Investment Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition has announced its 2019 winners. The competition, now in its 11th year, is a collaboration between the Royal Observatory Greenwich, Insight Investment, and BBC Sky at Night Magazine. There are many categories, and the winner in the People and Space category is shown above. Titled “Ben, Floyd and the Core,” it features British photographer Ben Bush and his dog Floyd underneath Mars, Saturn, and the galactic core of the Milky Way. See the overall winner and the top photos in the various categories at Gizmodo. 

(Image credit: Ben Bush)

It’s a whole new world #NFID20 pic.twitter.com/hxsTICBNjG

— Kamilla Baybayova (@kamii__bb) September 12, 2019

The idea of high school students needing to carry ID only came about when schools grew too large for every student to be known, for safety reasons. My old high school is still too small to need them. North Farmington High School in Michigan has over 1200 students, but they are still pretty easygoing about student IDs. It's an annual tradition there for seniors (who the staff know pretty well by then) to dress up and pose as pop culture characters for their ID photos!

wakanda forever! #nfid20 pic.twitter.com/fIYfTMwtvm

— myaaa (@WatkinsAmya) September 12, 2019

Like most of us have experienced before, the first day of class has always been overwhelming. Most kids are afraid to go to school because they will be separated from their parents.

Cooner Crites, 8, upon reaching his school just stood alone in a corner crying. Maybe he was overwhelmed and overstimulated. Then suddenly, Christian Moore (right) held the hand of Conner Crites, who was crying on the first day of second grade. 

While Conner stood alone in a corner crying, his classmate Christian Moore happened to glance over at him.

“Instead of overlooking him like most kids would have, he (Christian) just reached over, grabbed his hand and made my son’s day better,” Crites, 29, said Tuesday in an interview.

Christian's mother, Courtney Moore, was so happy for her son's act of kindness. Also, here's what April Crites (mom of the boy who cried) learned from this experience:

“You could choose to see someone who’s having a really bad day and say something horrible to them and make their day even worse,” Crites said. “Or you could choose the opposite and better route and say something nice, hand someone a tissue who’s crying and make their day better.”

This is also a reminder for parents to start teaching their kids the way they should go as young as they are.

Photo by Courtney Moore

A list of reader-submitted wedding catastrophes includes much drunkenness, desertion, police intervention, infidelity, and vomiting, plus one fart and one fire, although they aren't in the same story. No wedding is perfect, but few are as awful as these. Take the one where the knot was to be tied in a public park.

"My husband and I attended an outdoor wedding at a public park in town. When we arrived the police and coroner's van were there, surrounded by the wedding guests. Apparently a homeless man had sought shelter behind the lattice surrounding the bottom of the gazebo floor and had DIED several days before. It was June in Missouri and the stench was horrible! So...they proceed to move the wedding to a field on the OTHER side of the park, and although everyone was shaken up they decided to proceed.

The preacher was in the middle of the vows and one of the groomsmen interrupted and said, 'John, I'm sorry but you can't marry Sherilynn. I love her and she's pregnant with my baby.' Wow. Then the groom proceeds to yell at his bride (not)-to-be that she was a cheap whore. Then one of the guests STANDS UP and yells at the groom, 'Serves you right, you bastard! You've been screwing my sister for a year!' Yep. —Sarah Taylor, Facebook

Believe it or not, several of the stories could actually be worse than that. While some may be made up, they are all fairly believable, if cringeworthy. Read 33 such wedding tales at Buzzfeed.

(Unrelated image credit: wordjunky)

A new study published online recently in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance suggests that distractions may alter our perception of what’s real, “making us believe we saw something different from what we actually saw.”

Worse, the study also suggests that people may not be aware that their perception was already altered. Rather, they might feel great confidence in what they believe they saw.

“We wanted to find out what happens if you’re trying to pay attention to one thing and something else interferes,” said Julie Golomb, senior author and associate professor of psychology at The Ohio State University. “Our visual environment contains way too many things for us to process in a given moment, so how do we reconcile those pressures?”

The results… indicate that, sometimes, we don’t.

“It implies that there are deeper consequences of having your attention drawn away that might actually change what you are perceiving,” said Golomb, who is director of Ohio State’s Vision and Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory. “It showed us that we clearly don’t understand the full implications of distraction.”

Know more about the study at Ohio State News.

This study reminds me of how close-up magicians manipulate our perception of reality. What do you think?

(Image Credit: geralt/ Pixabay)

Researchers who discovered the eel species in the Amazon say that it's "the strongest bioelectricity generator known." It can deliver 860 volts, which is well over the current record of 650 volts.

They've named it Electrophorus voltai after the Italian scientist Alessandro Volta, who invented the electric battery. It's one of three Amazonian electric eel species that this research team cataloged. The Guardian reports:

The findings, published on Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications, theorise that the three species evolved from a shared ancestor millions of years ago. [...]

And they suggest that the particularly strong electric shock that E. voltai can produce could be an adaptation to life in highland waters, where conductivity is reduced.

Electric eels use their shock tactics for a variety of reasons, including hunting prey, self-defence, and navigation. They generate electricity from three specialised electric organs that can emit charges of varying strengths for different purposes.

-via Dave Barry | Photo: Leandro Sousa/Getty

Have you ever seen something like this? Maybe in an antique store, or maybe in a china cabinet of someone's home? This is called an epergne, and it was very popular during the Victorian era. It's strangely fancy, but what was it for?

They first appeared around the 17th century. The name originates from the French noun épargne, meaning “savings”, as it ‘economised’ space on the dinner table by regrouping several hors d’oeuvres and decorations into one apparatus. Meaning: its centre bowl could bear fruit, while its arms tentacled out with mini vases of flowers, candles, sweets, and whatever your heart desired. That’s the classic blueprint, at least, as they’ve varied throughout the years. You know an epergne when you see one, though. Trust us.

See a wide variety of epergne designs at Messy Messy Chic. Whether they deserve a comeback is a matter of opinion, and I would say, no thanks.

Is it possible to make a functional knife blade out of human poop? Researchers at Kent State University tried their best.

They actually had a not ridiculous reason: they were testing a story of an Inuit man who used his own poop, once it had frozen, to butcher a dog. The story has been passed around ethnographic circles for a long time. But until these researchers tried it, none had been so bold as to see if it could be done.

And that's what science should do. So one of the researchers went on a high-fat diet similar to what an Inuit person might eat. S/he collected his poop and offered it to his/her colleagues. Those researchers then used knife molds and their hands to shape the poop into blades. After freezing the poop blades, the researchers tried to cut pig flesh, as you can see in the photo above.

They were unsuccessful, as their article in the Journal of Archaeological Science Reports explains:

We began our cutting experiments with the hide, reasoning that if our knives could not cut hide, then subsequent attempts with muscle and tendons would be futile.

Neither the “knife mold” samples, nor the “hand-shaped knives” could cut through hide (Figs. S5–S6). Despite the hide being cold from refrigeration, instead of slicing through it the knife-edge simply melted upon contact, leaving streaks of fecal matter (Fig. S4).

We repeated the experiment using the fecal samples of another team member (M.R.B.), whose diet was more traditionally Western (see supplementary online materials). The “hand-shaped knives” were subject to the same procedures and temperatures as the first set of knives (Figs. S7–S8). However, these knives also did not cut through the hide. For curiosity's sake, we tried to cut the subcutaneous fat on the underside of the hide. With some difficulty, only the shallowest of slices could be produced, and the knife-edge still quickly melted and deteriorated (Fig. S9).

-via Dave Barry | Photo: Journal of Archaeological Science Reports

I can find little information about Ukrainian artist Diana Yevtukh. But I'm deeply struck by the mysticism within her embroidered works. This one is captioned "Multitudes of life, hidden in plain sight."