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."

KFC is no stranger to bizarre promotions- remember the prom corsage that included a piece of chicken? Their newest venture is a collaboration with game developer Psyop called I Love You, Colonel Sanders! It includes an anime version of the Colonel as a young man, nevertheless sporting his signature white hair and goatee. The actual young Harland Sanders looked like this. The game involves a lot of chicken, too. A description from Steam includes the game trailer.

I Love You, Colonel Sanders! A Finger Lickin’ Good Dating Simulator follows you, a promising culinary student, as you try to date your classmate, Colonel Sanders. Throughout your journey, you’ll be faced with life-changing decisions that will affect your chances of friendship and love. But be careful! Your choices have real consequences with real animated characters’ feelings at stake.

Do you have what it takes to survive culinary school? Will Colonel Sanders choose you to be his business partner? Or maybe even so much more? Find out in the most finger lickin’ good dating simulator ever created—a game that KFC actually made.

The game will be available for free beginning on September 24. -via Uproxx

Jessica, an 18-year old Sydney teenager, gets rejected after a job application. She applied as a retail assistant for discount supermarket ALDI and she believed that she had the necessary skills for the position but she was not even given a slight chance for a job interview.

Out of her mixed emotions, she managed to send another email in response to their rejection.

“My skills are on par with your store, with the ability to be exceptionally fast paced to scan items like every ALDI Team Member does.

“I pride myself on my impressive sale skills and can describe myself to be very persuasive and show effectiveness.

She continued: "So persuasive in fact, that I would like to confidentially reject your rejection. Thank you for letting me be a part of the team, I won’t let you down. See you on Monday for my 9-5 shift."

Fortunately, her confidence in herself paid off! She was invited for a job interview at her convenience.

Read Jessica's full email message here.

Image Credit: Mamamia Website

The Roppongi Crossing Exhibition was conducted earlier this year, but the artworks can be seen from the 2019 presentation on Mori Art Museum’s Website.

Included in the presentation is the surreal piece, Contact, that looks just like a real body of water – moving, swelling, and surging towards the viewers. With the additional effect of good lighting from the window behind it, the installation mimics ocean waves perfectly!

Image Credit: Mori Art Museum Website

Before the Panama Canal was built, ships traveling from the Atlantic to the Pacific went around the tip of South America, through the Drake Passage. During the Age of Exploration, they only went through during the Southern Hemisphere's summer months, because the cold storms during the rest of the year gave the rocky passage the nickname the sailor's graveyard. In 1741, the British navy sent the HMS Wager on a mission that was delayed so long that the ship found itself in the midst of the Drake Passage in April.

Aboard Wager, veteran ship’s gunner John Bulkeley was the officer of the watch, overseeing the ship’s navigation in the midst of a violent storm. The sky was a wet, howling tempest, the sea undulated with mountainous swells. Wager’s timbers creaked and her sails thrashed as the air and ocean conspired to smash the ship to pieces. Bulkeley had seen a lot of storms in his day, but nothing like this. One ocean swell—the largest he had ever witnessed—swept over the ship and briefly submerged Wager and her 160 crew in frigid water, washing Bulkeley across the quarter-deck.

Wager had entered the Drake Passage about a month earlier. She had been accompanied by seven other Royal Navy ships, all part of a secret squadron on a wartime mission heading for Patagonia on the west coast of South America. A principle hazard in sailing westward in the Drake Passage is that the winds and currents are powerful, relentless, and moving in exactly the wrong direction. Temperatures are frosty in autumn at such a southern latitude, and precipitation is nearly constant. In the era of sailing ships, the Drake Passage was a perilous venture even for a robust vessel manned by an intrepid crew in the calm season—a collection of characteristics that utterly failed to describe HMS Wager.

Wager’s speed and maneuverability were compromised due to the loss of a mast in the storm. Her captain was dead, her acting captain was bedridden, and many of the men were deathly ill. Wager had lost contact with the other ships of the squadron, having fallen hopelessly far behind. And her crew’s troubles had only just begun.

Everything that could have possibly gone wrong with the mission did go wrong, both before and after the ship wrecked. Yet some survivors made it back to England to tell the story. Read the saga of the HMS Wager in a thrilling account by Alan Bellows at Damn Interesting.