The 80s and 90s were definitely the raddest decades ever, with the awesomest characters, most tubular movies and TV shows, and the absolute greatest toys and video games ever made, which is why my love of all things retro will never die.
If you're a fan of radical retro style then you've gotta head to the NeatoShop and grab a shirt or three with some amazing old school inspired artwork from the top indie artists who love retro as much as we do!
The 80s introduced us to the world of personal computing
Making s'mores out of Peeps is the true fusion of spring and summer confections. You can do that without even going outside with the Peeps S’mores Skillet Dip! A hot cast iron skillet under a broiler replaces a campfire, and a rainbow of Peeps provide the eye candy. That won't last long, as you swish a roasted, melty Peep with the melted chocolate using a graham cracker. Or maybe a fork, if you want a neater s'more. Since Easter is the last of the candy holidays until Halloween, you might want to stock up on Peeps so you can have this again and again. Get the complete recipe, with a video, at Hello Giggles. -via Pee-wee Herman
Love is supposed to be a good thing in our lives, a positive force that brings out the best in two people and makes them grow in ways no other force of nature can, but more often than not love just hurts the ones who dare to love.
Some people take the pain in stride, others let it twist them up inside, but Cindy's mom took the pain of love lost and turned it into a curse- which she passed down to her poor little daughter. Can Cindy move past the black cloud her mom cast down upon her head and let the light of love shine down upon her?
CINDY- A Love Story is a twisted animated short with amazing looking art created by Marco Bucci and Bryce Sage, a fairy tale for those who feel like every romantic relationship they ever have is doomed.
Who knew an anthropomorphic pickle, a killer hobo and a horde of rats would make such a great cast for an action TV show? Rick Sanchez, that's who knew, and that's why he decided to turn himself into a pickle, create a really cool robo-suit so he could move around and stuff, since pickles are armless and legless. Rick's fighting for the rights of strange scientists everywhere to make life more interesting by performing weird and totally unnecessary experiments that may or may not f$#k with the integrity of entire dimensions. Because life without the "if" is just le...
Add some extremely odd adventure to your geeky wardrobe with this Pickle Vs. Jag t-shirt by Donovan Alex, it's an action packed way to show love for your favorite cartoon show and keep cool like a pickle Rick at the same time!
Are you a professional illustrator or T-shirt designer? Let's chat! Sell your designs on the NeatoShop and get featured in front of tons of potential new fans on Neatorama!
In late 2016, Sam Garland (Poem_for_your_sprog) wrote a funny poem that spawned an entirely new genre of poetry, now called bredlik. You can see many examples in the subreddit /r/ilikthebred or at Twitter. For World Poetry Day last week, O. Westin had the wild idea of fusing bredlik with the iambic pentameter of a classic sonnet. The result is a poem about poetry.
My naym is pome / and lo my form is fix’d Tho peepel say / that structure is a jail I am my best / when formats are not mix’d Wen poits play / subversions often fail
Notice you can read the left side by itself and get a completely different poem. You can also read the right side alone, but the real effect comes by reciting it as a whole. There are four stanzas with a twist at the end. You can read the poem, and the thinking behind it, at Micro SF/F. -via Metafilter
There's something about the name "floppy diskette" that has always sounded a bit crude, and I couldn't help but crack a smile at the mention even when people shortened it to "floppy".
Does that mean I have a perverted mind?
Perhaps, but no matter how pure your mind is you'll agree that "floppy diskette" is an unfortunate name for a product after hearing this woman repeat it over and over again in this video tutorial edit from back in the good ol' days of computing.
Neatorama is proud to bring you a guest post from Ernie Smith, the editor of Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail. In another life, he ran ShortFormBlog.
From literary advocacy to union battles to communism claims, the origin story of the organization that publishes Consumer Reports kind of has it all.
Last year, a consumer advocate showed up in the most unlikely place: On YouTube, the home of the no-questions-asked unboxing channel. Cody Crouch, aka iTwe4kz, reviewed a set of earbuds from a company called Kanoa. In a Nike hat and a Puma sleeveless shirt, Crouch (who was clearly frustrated) trashed the earbuds at length and questioned the behavior of the company that was banking on him to give a good review. The company, blaming Crouch’s bad review for spooking investors, shut down, with thousands of paying consumers left in the lurch. However, it’s now widely believed that the company was running a scam, only made a few pairs of headphones, and used Crouch’s review as an out. Now, there’s talk of class-action lawsuits. This might sound like a crazy story, but it’s nothing compared to the tale that gave us the modern consumer advocacy movement. Strap in and we’ll get to testing.
The standards nerds who formed the basis of the consumer rights’ movement
The thing about watching a video from a guy like iTwe4kz is that you’re watching, really, for his opinion, which is likely to be loud, brash, opinionated, and not entirely impartial. That’s not a knock on him. That’s just the way YouTube works—we watch videos for the opinions shared.
But the problem, of course, is that biases swing in all directions, and in a world where you’re getting marketing at every single second. A lot of people read this in their inboxes. And a lot of the messages surrounding it are often promotional or marketing in nature.
And the problem, over the years, has gotten worse. How do you rein it all in?
Robert E. Jackson found and compiled a collection of Easter bunnies from back when you expected them to look weird and creepy -and we liked it! Yeah, back in the day, we didn't have any of these 3D printed bespoke furry costumes. We just had papier-mâché heads from someone's kitchen and recycled pajamas.
Or people just put on bunny ears and did the Bunny Hop. Or we skipped all that nonsense and put our kids on ten-foot rabbits and took their picture. See all 16 images at Flashbak. -via Boing Boing
Surreal animated shorts are often too bizarre and too obscure for most viewers to sink their teeth into, but Hen, His Wife is easily accessible to all- even if not everyone understands the symbolist subtexts.
Hen, His Wife is a bizarre short created by Pilot animation studio back in 1989 about a guy who ignores his wife, who is an anthropomorphic chicken, but there's a lot more going on beneath the absurdist surface story:
Igor Kovalyov, one of the studio’s founders, directed a tale so densely symbolic that it's tough to interpret. In terms of narrative, the film is about a family couple in which the husband, dressed in prison-like garments, ignores his dutiful wife – an anthropomorphic hen – until a stranger arrives and jolts them from their absurd coexistence. The plot itself, however, makes little sense without interpreting the abundant symbols of impotence, autoeroticism, and sexuality. Kovalyov’s wordless, surreal drama easily captures one’s attention, leaving a lingering unease in its wake, even without Freudian analysis.
Before YouTube, before websites, and even before computer graphics made advertising as in-your-face as it is now, movies at your local theater were advertised in newspapers. Newspapers were printed with hand-set type, and graphics required their own custom-made print blocks. KB Typesetting was one of the companies that made new print blocks for movie advertising images, which were send out to newspapers around the country, and then usually thrown away after the run of the movie was over locally. As movies became immortal and advertising became ephemeral, the rare print blocks that survived became highly collectible.
That quaint little world of finite supply and demand was blown to smithereens—as thoroughly as the planet Alderaan—in November 1998, when DJ Ginsberg and Marilyn Wagner of Omaha were invited into the back room of a local store called Franx Antiques and Art. That’s where they first encountered a cache of 400-plus cardboard boxes filled with more than 50,000 assorted-sized print blocks, plus another 8,000 or so printing plates, all featuring advertisements for movies produced from 1932 to the early 1980s. It was literally tons of stuff, and it had been sitting in that back room, undisturbed, for roughly two decades, when Franx purchased it for several thousand dollars from its Omaha neighbor KB Typesetting.
Naturally, Ginsberg and Wagner had to have it all. So, they scraped together the money to purchase the collection from Franx and find a place to store it, and proceeded to load all those boxes, albeit a few at a time, into Ginsberg’s car.
“My poor Corsica got beat to death,” Ginsberg tells me when we spoke over the phone recently. But the Corsica was the least of Ginsberg and Wagner’s worries: Like the proverbial dog chasing the milk truck, the bigger question confronting the two friends was what to do with their prize now that they had caught it.
The collection included print blocks for everything from The Mummy through Star Wars. Appraisers were astonished, and their estimates of the collection's value have grown over the years. It's even had a documentary made about it. The story of how the collection of movie history came to be and what will happen to it is told at Collectors Weekly.
There are lots of people out there who would like to tour the country in an RV but simply can't afford the fuel costs, and as the cost of gas continues to rise this dream of RVing the nation slips further away.
So the German RV company Dethleffs has come up with a great invention to make our RV dreams come true- a solar powered motorhome.
The "e.home" is covered in solar panels so it can soak up all the solar energy it needs to keep its 107-horsepower electric motor and all the components inside the RV running for as long as you need to make new memories on the road.
And just for fun Dethleffs even included a starlight projection system over the alcove bed, so you can space out in style before bed.
As The Last Jedi rolls out on home video, it's not a moment too soon for an Honest Trailer! Screen Junkies repeats a technique they used for The Force Awakens, in using both the current announcer Jon Bailey and their original Honest Trailer voice, Gannon Nickell. Why? Because any Star Wars movie can only be discussed by arguing whether the old ones or the new ones are better.
If you've just ordered The Last Jedi for your first viewing, save this trailer for afterward. Not only does it spoil every plot point, it explores why this movie is the most divisive Star Wars movie since the last one. Or the one before that. I got a real giggle out of the cast names, especially Short Round as BB-8. In case you want to take a deep dive into the making of this Honest Trailer, there's a commentary video to accompany this one.
Galactus is a massive dude with an even bigger appetite, and throughout the universe people live in fear of Galactus setting his sights on their planet when he's feeling a bit peckish.
But there's one place where they not only don't know his name they refuse to get it right even if he spells it out for them- his local Starbucks.
There he's often known as Gale, Cactus, Garfield, Garakkus or simply G, and as this Pictures In Boxes comic shows their baristas are the only people in the universe who can make Galactus feel small!
Garfield, the fat cat of comics and movie fame, always craved lasagna. Andrew Rea shows us why that lasagna was so delicious in the latest episode of Binging With Babish. The good news is that Garfield doesn't have to appear in this cooking video, so he doesn't.
All the parts of this lasagna are hand-made before they are assembled. J. Kenji López-Alt's recipe for Ragu Bolognese is at Serious Eats. To see Brad Leone make the ricotta cheese, see his video. The instructions for homemade pasta is in a previous video by Andrew Rea. I can guarantee that after going through all this for a pan of lasagna, the cat is not getting it. -via reddit
Hedgehogs are magical little creatures, and even though they're very tiny critters they have big hearts and wonderful personalities, which is why humans are so enamored with those little insect-munching lurkers in the hedgerow. The humans who have brought hedgehogs home to live with them have said they're gentle, playful and a bit shy, but quite sweet when they get to know you well- and quite happy to eat the bugs in your backyard!
Show some love for the cutest little critter on the planet with this Hedgehog t-shirt by Bongonation, it's a fun and magical way to take the spirit of the hedgehog with you wherever you go!
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