You might fall in love with pictures of a certain breed of dog and get it in your head that you want one of those. But do you know what that really entails? Personality matters more than over the long run, and adopting a dog is a lifetime commitment. That said, most mutts are pretty sweet and normal, even though they each have their own personality. But if you are pining for a particular breed, you need to be informed about what you are in for. Comic artist Grace Gogarty, who goes by little tunny on her Tumblr blog, captures what these breeds are generally like in hilarious cartoon form.
Screen Junkies looks at Justice League and tackles the question: What went wrong? They had the opportunity to improve on Batman v Superman, and try to catch the magic of Wonder Woman, but that didn't happen.
They came down to three answers: the color scheme, bad CGI, the depressing heroes, and the lame villain. Oh, that's four. But there's even more in this Honest Trailer for Justice League. -Thanks, Lacey!
For almost 40 years now, movies about the Vietnam War set the tone with songs from Creedence Clearwater Revival. It started with the movie Who’ll Stop the Rain in 1978, then became forever connected with Vietnam in Apocalypse Now (1979). You'll also hear various CCR songs in 1969 (1988), Born on the Fourth of July (1989), Air America (1990), Forrest Gump (1994), Tropic Thunder (2008), The Sapphires (2012), and The Post (2017), among others. The sound has become a shortcut for placing the viewer into Vietnam during the war.
Most Creedence songs contain no direct reference to the war (though “Run Through the Jungle” is frequently misinterpreted as such), but they do evoke a period when the war dominated American life. “That was when the band was popular,” says bassist Stu Cook. “Creedence was part of the soundtrack of the time.”
Creedence’s career was a model of speedy efficiency: seven albums in four years. The band recorded at an absurd pace, releasing three LPs in 1969 alone, and disbanded less than five years after adopting the Creedence name. But the brevity of the band’s career seems to have contributed to its longevity as a cultural avatar of one hyperspecific era—a particularly tumultuous period that’s constantly depicted onscreen. If you’re soundtracking a movie set between 1968 and 1971, why not go with the iconic band whose hits were entirely clustered between 1968 and 1971?
But there's another, even more practical reason you hear Creedence music in movies about the era, which you'll find out about in the story at Pitchfork. -via Digg
Police in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, were on the lookout for a suspect in the robbery of a farmer's market. A witness provided a sketch of the perpetrator, which was shown on the local TV station. Let's watch that report.
The response by newscaster Ethan Forhetz is priceless. Considering he was winging the news as it came in, he kept his cool pretty well. Now, lest you think this is a police sketch, it's not. It was drawn by a witness. Yet it was enough to lead police to identify 44-year-old Hung Phuoc Nguyen, who was still on the loose at the time of the report. It turns out that police were familiar with Nguyen already, and honestly recognized him from the sketch. -via reddit
Dogs who aren't afraid of cats are usually pretty dumb, but they quickly learn to fear them after getting a bit too familiar with a testy feline, the cat rewarding them for their familiarity by scratching their nose..or worse.
On the other hand dogs who are afraid of cats ain't no dummies, because they have learned the secret to surviving in a house with cats is to keep your head down, stay out of their way and never look them directly in the eye.
Because, as this strip from Port Sherry Comics shows, the arcane powers possessed by pussycats can zap you straight into oblivion with but a glare.
We've been taught that our brains are made up of neurons, which transmit electrical signals among themselves. That's true, but the model of a neuron either firing or not firing has led us to think of them as binary switches, and the work of the brain takes many cells to decode the firings.
When talking about how neurons work, we usually end up with the sum-up-inputs-and-spit-out-spike idea. In this idea, the dendrites are just a device to collect inputs. Activating each input alone makes a small change to the neuron’s voltage. Sum up enough of these small changes, from all across the dendrites, and the neuron will spit out a spike from its body, down its axon, to go be an input to other neurons.
It’s a handy mental model for thinking about neurons. It forms the basis for all artificial neural networks. It’s wrong.
Those dendrites are not just bits of wire: they also have their own apparatus for making spikes. If enough inputs are activated in the same small bit of dendrite then the sum of those simultaneous inputs will be bigger than the sum of each input acting alone
The image above shows a neuron on the left, and a flow chart of how it can work on the right. The explanation is much longer than I can summarize here, but it explains why human brains are so much more powerful than any artificial intelligence we've come up with yet. Read the whole thing at Medium. -via Metafilter
It seems like the lonelier some people get the more they pine for the "perfect person", and they start to develop unrealistic standards that make it easy to turn down all the potential daters they meet as they wait for Mr. or Ms. Perfect to arrive.
But what if biotech could allow those lonely people to print out their perfect partner so they could skip all the awkward dates with awful peole who don't live up to their lofty standards?
Print Your Guy was created by a team of talented animators led by Alwin Leene, and even though this type of technology will never exist lonely guys and gals may someday soon have a "perfect" robot to chat with. Not really the same thing though is it...
I'm not really sure if this is a hedgehog or a porcupine, but you get the idea. If you're in Britain, it's a hedgehog, and if you're in America, it's a porcupine. The cactus is the same everywhere. And now you see why Jim is glad that Bill's eyesight was going -all the better for avoidance! This comic is from Shreya Doodles. You can see more of her work in a gallery at Bored Panda, and follow her work at Instagram.
Black History Month is a time to celebrate African-American achievements, milestones and social victories, but it's also a good time to explore the lesser-known historical figures who never got the accolades they deserved- like the Harlem Hellfighters.
During World War I the all African-American 369th Infantry Regiment of the United States Army, nicknamed the Harlem Hellfighters, spent 191 days in combat, which is more than any other American unit in WWI.
And yet, like all Black people who signed up for the draft, they were treated like uninvited guests from the start:
All in all, 2.3 million black men registered for the draft. The Marines turned them down, the Navy took a few, and the army accepted the most — resulting in the enlistment of 380,000 African-Americans.
About 200,000 of those soldiers would be shipped overseas, where they remained segregated into their own units — most of which were relegated to difficult manual labor in noncombat military camps.
Only 11 percent of black soldiers actually saw action. The Harlem Hellfighters were among them.
The Harlem Hellfighters were assigned to French command when they arrived overseas, which was ideal since the French respected and appreciated Black soldiers more than American leaders.
Under French leadership the Hellfighters thrived, and two soldiers in particular proved Black troops were total badasses:
Under these circumstances, the Hellfighters ended up contributing significantly to the war efforts — successfully repelling the German offensive and launching their own counteroffensive.
Two soldiers in particular — Corporal Henry Johnson and Private Needham Roberts — received widespread fame.
The men had been defending a lookout post when a German unit attacked. Together, they defended the post against the entire group. Wounded and with limited weaponry, they managed to fight them off — even after the fight had come to direct hand-to-hand combat.
Both were severely injured and they had run out of ammunition. But as the Germans began to drag Roberts away, Johnson still managed to rescue his comrade using a bolo knife.
“The Germans, doubtless thinking it was a host instead of two brave Colored boys fighting like tigers at bay, picked up their dead and wounded and slunk away, leaving many weapons and part of their shot riddled clothing, and leaving a trail of blood, which we followed at dawn near to their lines,” the Hellfighters’ white colonel, William Hayward, was quoted as writing in The Chicago Defender. “So it was in this way the Germans found the Black Americans.”
The two men were the first Americans to be decorated by the French for their service, receiving the prestigious Croix de Guerre medal. (Though they wouldn’t receive their deserved Purple Hearts until 77 years later, after they both had passed away.)
"She may not look like much, but she's got it where it counts, kid."
This purse looks just like Han Solo's/Lando Calrissian's/Chewbacca's spaceship the Millennium Falcon! It's the kind of thing you could spend big bucks on and still only use it for special occasions. But this is not on sale. Mikaela Holmes made this, and you can make one for yourself using her instructions. Looking through the supply list, I realize that I have most of the materials and tools already, except my leather is not vegan, and I can use the library's printer. Well, there's the electronics. Did I mention that this purse lights up with LEDS?
And then I read the steps, and I now understand why a purse like this would be worth big bucks. Maybe I will be okay with just reading the instructions, because it sure is pretty. See it all at Instructables. -via Geeks Are Sexy
Papa can't find his phone. It rings, but it's not in his pockets. It's not in his car. When he walks away, no one can hear the ringing, so it must be on him somewhere. Can all the assembled family members help him find it? The best part of this video is his sense of humor about the whole thing. The mystery will be solved by the end of this video. -via Laughing Squid
There are many good reasons why you should never leave a fire unattended, like the fact that they cause forest fires and pose a threat to wild animals, but the main reason you shouldn't leave it alone is because they may get lonely and start to howl! When a high-spirited fire demon feels lonely it looks for ways to get attention, and since they're little hotheads they often get carried away in their quest to be seen- and end up setting every flammable thing in the room on fire. So be careful when you spark a flame in a young fire demon's heart- because they can be dangerously clingy!
Add some animated hotness to your geeky wardrobe with this Lonely Fire Demon t-shirt by Adho1982, it's an adorable way to show love for the moving castle and that little cutie Calcifer!
Visit adho1982's NeatoShop for more delightfully geeky designs:
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!
There's an alley in the middle of Chinatown in Manhattan that's different from almost all the other streets in New York, because it has a bend in it. It has a dark and mysterious past, but it's still lined with businesses, including the Nom Wah Tea Parlor, which has been in business since 1920. The eatery has witnessed some of the events that gave the alley, called Doyers Street, the nickname Bloody Angle.
For this cramped corner of Chinatown, with its sharp angled bend, was the home of the Hip Sing Tong, who waged vicious gang warfare with the rival On Leongs. According to the Times, “law-enforcement officials say more people have died violently at Bloody Angle….that at any intersection in America.”
The angle was the perfect ambush spot. Herbert Asbury in his slightly more salacious than historical 1928 book ‘Gangs of New York’, wrote how “armed with snickersee and hatchet sharpened to a razor’s edge, the Tong killer lay in wait for his victim, and having cut him down as he came round the bend, fled through the arcade, or plunged into the theatre and thence into Mott or Pell Street through one of the underground passageways.”
The Nom Wah Tea Parlor looks much the same as it did in the 1920s, and the Hip Sing Association is still headquartered at Doyers Street. Read about their history, and see plenty of pictures at Messy Nessy Chic.
The 2016 animated film The Secret Life of Pets deals with the drama that happens among New York City animals when their humans are not present. It gets pretty suspenseful when the protagonists, dogs Max and Duke, leave home and fall in with a gang of dangerous strays, including cats, snakes, pigs, rabbits, and other creatures. The movie was a huge hit around the world, but there are things you probably don't know about The Secret Life of Pets, namely, the large number of cultural references scattered through the film.
10. Gru from Despicable Me is visible in the park scene.
It’s a ‘there and gone’ kind of thing but if you watch closely you’ll see him walking his dog. These movies love to throw in those little details that take some watching to notice.
9. The name of the rabbit, Snowball, is the same name used by George Orwell in Animal Farm.
Snowball was one of the two pigs that led the overthrow of the humans. He was eventually run off when the greedier pigs decided he wasn’t going along with their plans.
Video games seem like no big deal to those of us who grew up gaming, and aside from the occasional parental or religious controversy over innappropriate content video games are a fairly innocent form of interactive entertainment.
But Buddhist monks in Thailand are having a hard time reconciling the tenets of their religion and the addictive joy of video gaming, and smartphones are at the center of the conflict.
VICE reporter Robert Rath photographed a poster at a Buddhist temple in Hanoi, that says people who "waste time in playing games" will be "hardly reborn into human life", meaning if you space out too much in this life you're doomed to be a spaced out zombie in the next.
Curious to discover more about how Buddhists feel about video games Robert headed to Thailand to speak with three monks at Wat Chedi Luang in Chiang Mai, Thailand and see how games interfere with a Buddhist life:
“Video games distract junior monks, [they] cause problems,” answered Veerayuth Pongsiri, a former monk who has continued serving the temple as a layman.
“This [period in the monkhood] is their time to practice meditation,” he says. “If the junior monk pays attention to a game two hours a day or five hours a day, that’s less time for learning Buddhist teaching. He cannot manage the time.”
However, Pongsiri also points out that it can also be a problem of personal conviction. In Thailand, the monkhood is not a lifetime commitment. In fact, most novices will eventually leave the monkhood. And a large number—particularly boys from the rural villages—join because it’s a chance at an education. For talented scholars, the monkhood can open a path to a master’s degree or a PhD, not just in Buddhist studies but also in English. These education-minded novices, he says, are more interested in the practical benefits of the temple life than any sort of religious journey.
“They study the Buddha a little bit. They use the Buddhist religion as a stairway to other education,” he says. “They do the chanting and the sitting meditation but do not understand.” Such novices, he claims, are more likely give into temptation and open Realm of Valor in between classes.
