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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.

Read In Thailand, Buddhist Monks Grapple With The Meaning Of Video Games here

There's a chair on the beach. Right there, by itself, with no one sitting in it. Not the kind of thing you come across every day. The smallest thing can make a man feel territorial, and raise his competitive hackles. At the same time, we have evolved the ability to calculate possible outcomes before engaging in conflict.

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What's universal about the video is how well it depicts the weird stuff that goes on in our minds all the time about things that don't matter, the internal monologue that we'd never share on purpose. Or maybe that's just me. This subtly ridiculous short film is from Bridge Stuart (previously at Neatorama). No, it's not a Tide ad, but it would have been a good one. -via Digg

The following is an article from The Annals of Improbable Research, now in all-pdf form. Get a subscription now for only $25 a year!

Research About Cigarette Butts and Large Groups of Humans
compiled by Stephen Drew, Improbable Research staff

Cigarette Butts in the Federal Republic of Germany (1972)

“The Effect of the Economic Depression on the Length of Cigarette Butts in the Federal Republic of Germany/Die Auswirkung der wirtschaftlichen Rezession auf die Länge der Cigarettenstummel in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland,” W. Schulz and F. Seehofer, Beiträge zur Tabakforschung/Contributions to Tobacco Research, vol. 8, no. 7, 1976, pp. 455-458. The authors, at B·A·T Cigaretten-Fabriken GmbH, Forschung und Entwicklung, Hamburg, report:

The influence of the economic depression on the length of cigarette butts in the Federal Republic of Germany was investigated in the summer of 1974. After the interruption of the continual increase in the butt lengths of filter cigarettes and plain cigarettes by the tobacco tax rise on 1st September 1972, there was a further decrease in the butt lengths until August. This was 0.44 mm for filter cigarettes and 1.5 mm for plain cigarettes.

FutonSpecialOps shared this picture of his cat. What do you see? At first glance, I thought they had a transparent TV. No, that's a human body! Oh yeah, his wife took the picture, and that's her reflection. She just thought the cat looked cute, so she grabbed her phone to snap a "Kilroy was here" picture. Since the TV isn't on, it's acting as a mirror. Notice the space between her arm and the chair looks like the cat's front leg. So part of the picture is a selfie, the other part is a cat. Together, it's an illusion. That's three of the most popular pictures posted on the internet, all in one. -via reddit

The Olympics in PyeongChang saw something really unusual today- a halfpipe performance with absolutely no tricks. Half-pipe skiing has been a Winter Olympic event only since 2014. Elizabeth Swaney is an American skier competing for Hungary. She is, by all accounts, an average skier, but she made the Olympic team by consistently showing up in a sport that doesn't have many competitors, especially in the women's division. The Denver Post tells her story.

Swaney, who said her grandparents came from Hungary, earned her Olympic berth more from attending World Cup events than actually competing. Women’s pipe skiing World Cups rarely see more than 30 competitors, so it’s not hard to meet the Olympic requirement for a top-30 finish. At last December’s World Cup in China, when most of the world’s top skiers were competing in the Grand Prix at Copper Mountain and Dew Tour at Breckenridge, Swaney finished 13 out of 15 competitors, her best career finish.

“The field is not that deep in the women’s pipe and she went to every World Cup, where there were only 24, 25, or 28 women,” said longtime FIS ski halfpipe and slopestyle judge Steele Spence. “She would compete in them consistently over the last couple years and sometimes girls would crash so she would not end up dead last. There are going to be changes to World Cup quotas and qualifying to be eligible for the Olympics. Those things are in the works so technically you need to qualify up through the system.”

How freeskier Elizabeth Swaney made it to the #WinterOlympics with this very simple halfpipe run: https://t.co/enfDyoQjGC pic.twitter.com/kHTAV7XND4

— NBC Olympics (@NBCOlympics) February 20, 2018

She certainly skis better than I do, but this is not what you expect at the Olympics. Swaney ended up in last place in the qualifying runs at PyeongChang today. -via Uproxx

The Olympic Games were canceled in 1940 and 1944 due to World War II, but athletic competitions went on just the same -in POW camps. The German POW camp called Oflag II-C camp staged what they called the Woldenberg Olympics in 1944, in which prisoners -Polish officers in this camp- competed in a variety of events, but were forbidden to try fencing, archery, javelin, or pole-vaulting, for obvious reasons.

Music, art, and sculptures were put on display. Detainees were also granted permission to make their own program and even commemorative postage stamps of the event courtesy of the camp’s homegrown “post office.” An Olympic flag was crafted out of spare bed sheets, which the German officers, in a show of contagious sportsman’s spirit, actually saluted.

Roughly 369 of the 7000 prisoners participated. Most of the men competed in multiple contests, which ranged from handball and basketball to chess. Boxing was included—but owing to the fragile state of prisoners, broken bones resulted in a premature end to the combat.

Another camp in the Polish town of Gross Born put on their own games as well. Read about the POW Olympics at Mental Floss.

Dolly Parton is an acclaimed singer, yet few outside the country music world know her as a songwriter. If she had never sung a note, she'd be a rich woman for a little tune called "I Will Always Love You." Dolly recorded the song and took it to #1 in 1974 and then again in 1982. And you probably remember how well it did in 1992 when Whitney Houston sang it in the movie The Bodyguard. But when the song was still fresh, she was approached by one Colonel Tom Parker about Elvis Presley recording the song she wrote. Dolly said no.  

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Why did Dolly turn down the offer? According to Wikipedia:

When the 1974 recording of the song was reaching number one on the country charts, Elvis Presley indicated that he wanted to cover the song. Parton was interested until Presley's manager, Colonel Tom Parker, told her that it was standard procedure for the songwriter to sign over half of the publishing rights to any song Elvis recorded.[15] Parton refused. She recalls:

I said, 'I'm really sorry,' and I cried all night. I mean, it was like the worst thing. You know, it's like, Oh, my God … Elvis Presley.' And other people were saying, 'You're nuts. It's Elvis Presley.' ...I said, 'I can't do that. Something in my heart says, 'Don't do that. And I just didn't do it... He would have killed it. But anyway, so he didn't. Then when Whitney [Houston's version] came out, I made enough money to buy Graceland.[16]

Mark Levin wrote and performed a little song about the incident, with charming stop-motion animation by Heather Colbert.  -via Metafilter

People can select from hundreds of channels of TV, but only a small fraction of those show cartoons, and the major channels only have one or two animated series at a time. That means you can still peg someone's age by the shared culture they grew up with, as new and different cartoons are offered over the years. For example, Baby Boomers watched Looney Tunes, and Gen X watched He Man and the Master of the Universe. Jill Harness designed a quiz that tests the recognition skills of Millennials in identifying cartoon characters, although anyone is welcome to try it. Yes, some are from animated series aimed at adults, but few older viewers know them. If you are a Millennial and didn't score at least 90%, you haven't been watching enough TV. I did respectably well for a Baby Boomer.

Try the quiz yourself, and find out how cartoon-savvy you are!

It's funny how much cooler scenes from movies and TV shows look when we picture them in our minds, because our imagination and memory fill in the blanks and put characters together even if they don't appear in the scene.

We typically picture these scenes as a wide or full shot showing the entire surroundings and every character rather than the series of cut-together shots we actually saw on the screen.

So when you picture a scene from Seinfeld, The Empire Strikes Back or The Walking Dead you probably picture something like these video game-inspired pixel art scenes created by Argentinian artist Gustavo Viselner, only less pixelated and without subtitles.

Gustavo's awesome pixel art renditions capture the mood without bogging our eyes down with all that fine detail, and they're so retro fresh I wanna see more pop culture scenes through Gustavo's eyes!

See more at design you trust

Fortress of Solitude by Hillary White

Cats like to be the center of attention, running around the house breaking stuff and making a scene so their humans can see how cool they are, but when our kitties don't feel like being watched anymore they long to hide in their very own fortress of solitude. So we give them their very own cat tree in hopes that they'll find the privacy they need, and how do they return the favor? By using their tree as a launching pad for their aerial assaults...

This Fortress Of Solitude t-shirt by Hillary White is the cat's meow, and it's sure to make cat people super happy wherever you go, and it'll probably appeal to other types of animal people too!

Visit Hillary White's Facebook fan page, official website and Tumblr, then head on over to her NeatoShop for more kittie-riffic designs:

View more designs by Hillary White | More Funny T-shirts | New T-Shirts

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!

The 1990 crime comedy Quick Change starred Bill Murray, Geena Davis, Randy Quaid, and Jason Robards. Murray robs a Manhattan bank dressed as a clown, and then deals with multiple difficulties trying to get away from the city. The movie didn't make much money, even though some critics said it was Bill Murray's best role yet. In case that tempts you to dig Quick Change out to watch on home video, you can first learn some trivia about the film.   

10. Bill Murray stated that New Yorkers would really identify with this movie.

He believed that it showed them just how messed up their city could be at times. Strangely this statement was met with more approval than anything.

9. This is the only movie that Murray directed.

After the original director bowed out and no one else could be found he couldn’t make a decision on who to ask so he went ahead and did it himself.

There's more about Quick Change at TVOM.

Lots of people are shy about their dancing skills, so if you're hesitant to break out your patented brand of footloose fun in front of strangers then you're not alone. In fact, the only reason so many people go out on the dance floor at nightclubs, parties and weddings is because they've been drinking.

As you can see in this Poorly Drawn Lines comic alcohol is the key to unlocking your body's natural boogie potential, but beware of the dehydration caused by drunken dancing- or else you'll be stuck doing the Robot.

-Via Geeks Are Sexy

Spider-Man doesn't spend all his time fighting crime. Every once in a while, he has to go out and pick up a few things at the store. And if there's a good song playing, he gets the urge to dance!

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YouTuber Ghetto Spider put on a show for other shoppers, who all pulled out their phones because no one would believe this otherwise. -via mille batson‏

There's a big difference between the Hulk in the Marvel movies and the one from the classic TV show The Incredible Hulk, and that difference is Lou Ferrigno- the mighty man who portrayed Bruce's angry green alter ego.

Lou Ferrigno really brought the Hulk's rage to life, and he made the scenes where Bruce Banner Hulks out exciting to watch, as viewers sat wondering what he was going to smash next.

But before Bruce could turn into the Hulk he had to be provoked into having a full-blown Hulk Attack, and the reasons Bruce Hulked out were often pretty ridiculous:

• Receiving a lethal injection, and then having the person say, “Oh. I just gave you a lethal injection. Sorry, David.”
• Wandering around in the service ducts of a hotel (predating Bruce Willis) only to accidentally yank several of the pipes loose and get a full blast of hot steam
• Being tied up and fed soup by an elderly Japanese woman who doesn’t
  understand words like “You’ve GOT to cut me loose!”
• Being thrown under a New Orleans Mardi Gras parade float by a mean guy in a gorilla suit who gives David a few kicks for good measure
• Receiving a speeding ticket
• Wandering around inside a carnival funhouse, only to have someone turn on the machinery so that David is somehow caught in a rolling tumbler and flipped over a few times and then thrown down a convenient slide

Producer and creator of The Incredible Hulk, Kenneth Johnson, compiled a list of all 131 reasons Banner Hulks out in the series and posted it to his blog under the title Incredible HULK Provocations or "Ways To Make Dr. David Banner Angry". Here are a few more that made me laugh:

107.  Tied up by the Japanese mob in San Francisco and thrown in his bathtub with the shower blasting scalding hot water on him (why he doesn't simply get out of the tub is a mystery)

92.  Being trapped in the middle of a forest fire so that burning branches keep falling on him and setting him on fire, and a giant, burning tree falls directly on him as the last straw (Different from last forest fire predicament)

56.  Somehow getting himself into a bellfry and then realizing that a bell is there, just as it strikes the hour

47.  Being stuck in a cab in New York rush hour traffic - "You don't understand, I have to be there by 4:00!" - "Hey, mac, it's rush hour, we ain't gettin' there til five, so relax." - "BUT I HAVE TO BE THERE BY FOUR!!!"

52.  Locked in a drunk tank with a crazy person who insists he is Ernest Hemingway and then beats the stuffing out of David

-Via io9

Competing under a neutral flag, curlers Anastasia Bryzgalova and Alexander Krushelnitsky win first medal for curling in #Russia history at #Pyeonchang2018 https://t.co/XuhRChMQfZ pic.twitter.com/na4yl1TVfv

— The Moscow Times (@MoscowTimes) February 13, 2018

The Russian Olympic Team was barred from the 2018 Olympic Games because of doping. That doesn't mean there aren't Russian athletes in the games, but each had to register as an independent athlete, and they were not allowed to march under the Russian flag at the opening ceremonies. The IOC had considered letting the athletes unite under the Russian flag at the closing ceremonies, but that idea has been dropped for now. What could have changed their minds? A new doping scandal. After winning a bronze medal, Alexander Krushelnitsky failed a drug test. His sport? Curling. If you are surprised that curling has a doping problem, you aren't the only one.

Alexander Krushelnitsky, who competes in curling, one of the Games’ least physically taxing sports, is suspected of testing positive for meldonium, a banned substance that increases blood flow and improves exercise capacity.

“It’s stupid, but Alexander is not stupid, so I don’t believe it,” Russian women’s curling coach Sergei Belanov said.

He echoed a general bewilderment among curling athletes who could not fathom why anyone would use drugs that aid endurance in a sport that is a kind of chess on ice, needing steady hands and concentration rather than physical fitness.

Krushelnitsky, who won bronze with his wife Anastasia Bryzgalova in mixed-doubles curling in Pyeongchang, has not responded to a request for comment.

Read more on the Olympic curling doping scandal at Reuters. -via Leslie Jones