Movie actors become celebrities, and then we make movies about celebrities because people like that. Also, Hollywood screenwriters can feel very comfortable writing about things they know firsthand, which is Hollywood. The result is quite a few movies about movie actors, which you get movie actors to play. The most obvious example of an actor playing himself is Being John Malkovich, because who else would they get to play the part of Malkovich? But things get even more meta with Robert Englund doing two roles in the 1994 movie Wes Craven’s New Nightmare.  

In New Nightmare, Freddy Krueger invades our world and terrorizes the actors and crew who helped make the Nightmare on Elm Street films. Englund reprises his role as the iconic killer, but as this movie is set in the “real” world, he also plays himself, the actor who played Freddy Krueger.

Can it get more meta than that? You’ll have to check out the list of 17 actors who played themselves to find out.

Swords worthy of being named must thereby be given a suitably epic sounding name, because Camelot would have played out differently if Excalibur was called Stabby McStabStab.

The epic fantasy series Game of Thrones is full of equally epic swords, such as Oathbringer, Lightkeeper and Longclaw, the mighty Valerian sword wielded by Jon Snow.

But does the Game of Thrones cast know the names of these mighty swords of legend and, more importantly, can they tell them apart from the names of 80s heavy metal bands?

(YouTube Link)

-Via Laughing Squid

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!

(Image credit: Jurriaan)

by Alice Shirrell Kaswell, Improbable Research staff

The industrial revolution may have contributed to an increase in navel lint production,1 but inventors have created few truly new tools for bellybutton lint removal. That changed, slightly, in 2007.

A patent application (US #2007/0041923) filed by Takao Okajima and Susumu Fujinami is titled “Body recessed portion cleaning agent.” It describes:

A body cavity cleansing agent which is either poured into or applied to a navel cavity or an ear hole, solidifies after a specified period of time and takes a form that can be removed from said navel cavity or said ear hole together with dirt in said navel cavity or said ear hole...

The inventors wax nearly lyrical:

Kalahari Spectre by Petrol Blue

There's a spirit stalking around the Kalahari desert, a spectre that drains the essence of the living in hopes of becoming strong enough to best the other spirits that call the African continent home. This apparition doesn't use physical force or the screams of the dead to subdue its human foes, it attracts human victims by offering them things they need like food, water or companionship, using the oasis as its hunting grounds...

Scare up some dark and geeky style for your wardrobe with this Kalahari Spectre t-shirt by Petrol Blue, it's one scary good design!

Visit Petrol Blue's Tumblr and Twitter, then head on over to his NeatoShop for more geek-tastic designs:

View more designs by Petrol Blue | More Horror 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!

Making a realistic looking replica of a weapon featured in a video game is hard enough, but making a replica weapon that looks like it has survived a nuclear winter multiplies the difficulty by ten.

But bringing a weapon from Fallout 4 to life isn't supposed to be easy, it's a quest worth lots of XP and a legion of followers, so builders betters make it count.

The talented artisans at Show and Tell Props took a pile of plywood and some geeky dreams and brought Fallout 4's brutal The Last Minute Gauss Rifle to life, and while it may not be combat ready it sure looks like it can do some serious damage!

You can see step-by-step pics of the entire build here

-Via Kotaku

In 1990, the number of cable channels was exploding, and programmers were looking for a way to stand out among the crowd. At the same time, stand-up comedy was surging, with clubs replacing live music with live comedians. And The Comedy Channel was born -later to become Comedy Central. The creators, comedians, and participants got together for to talk about the creation of the channel, its shows, and the people who put it together. Here’s a snippet about Mystery Science Theater 3000.

[Joel] Hodgson: We had done I think 22 shows locally, so once it appeared that the Comedy Channel was going to get going, we cut together a sell tape. That was important, because when I started, it wasn’t clear to me how much we should be riffing. How much people could dual-task—watching a movie and hearing commentary—wasn’t really clear. When we made that eight-minute tape, it was basically a highlights reel. When I saw that, suddenly it made all the sense in the world to me: “Oh, this is how the show has to be. We have to have jokes all the time.”

[Stu] Smiley: Somebody sent it to us in the mail. We opened this package and saw it, and said, “Gee, this is kind of cool!” We were not so dumb as to not see something in it.

[Art] Bell: It was the two puppets and Joel Hodgson sitting in front of the movie and commenting… I think they actually used The Godfather. They were literally using movies they’d just pulled off the shelf. No rights involved, no licensing fees, none of that. Why complicate life? When they put that in front of us, it looked great; our challenge was to turn it into something you could put on television legally. We had to find really crummy, often public-domain movies or movies that could be licensed for almost nothing.

Hodgson: It registered with them right away. It was so ambitious to try and do an all-comedy channel: They needed a show like ours that was 90 minutes long and filled a lot of time.

The story of Comedy Central is a long one, divided into sections by years. You can skip back and forth if you want to, but you’ll end up enjoying it all.  

(Image credit: Nick Wanserski)

Sorry, but that bottle of Irish cream is not, by itself, a healthy breakfast. You need to supplement it before starting work. And Amy of the food blog Oh, Bite It! knows how.

Her latest recipe is incredibly simple. To make Snickers bar shot glasses, just cut off the tip of a snickers. Then cut off or mash down a bit of the end so that the bar will stand upright. Next, use a knife to press open a hole in the middle. Fill that hole with the liqueur of your choice and get started.

The Brothers Green give us step-by-step instructions for making classic Taco Bell items at home. You might think this is more trouble than its worth, but listen: I’ve been a fan of the Taco Bell Meximelt since they were introduced in the early ‘80s. Back then they were meat- and cheese-filled and heavenly. I still like them, but now they have very little of anything inside. Sometimes they forget the meat completely, sometimes you can’t find any cheese, and you can take a couple of bites with no tomato, so making them at home would be nice.

(YouTube link)

The first video explains the ground beef, refried beans, fire sauce, nacho cheese sauce, tacos, crunch wrap supreme, double decker taco, and Mexican pizza. Although you really can’t explain Mexican pizza.  

(YouTube link)

The second video has the seasoned steak, marinated chicken, creamy jalapeño (Baja) sauce, quesadillas, Baja gordita, chalupa, grilled stuffed burrito, and the cheesy gordita crunch.
If your favorite isn’t here, remember that most of Taco Bell’s dishes are combination of basic items that are pretty easy to figure out. And I’m going to make that quesadilla, sans steak, as soon I stock up on groceries. -via Digg

When you hear about a school bus being converted into a recreational vehicle you probably think of a hippie bus with psychedelic paintjobs or something that Otto from the Simpsons would live in.

But sometimes the bus is just the frame and engine used to convey the traveler across the country in style and comfort.

The 1984 Blue Bird school bus purchased by Steven and Lindsay for a mere $2,000 didn't look like much on the outside or the inside, but once they were done renovating it became a boxy palace on wheels.

The couple used reclaimed and recycled materials during the renovation, giving the interior a warm, cabiny feel with lots of wood and a cool corrugated metal comode.

Steven and Lindsay drove the bus from Florida to their home state of Oregon over the summer of 2014, exhaustively documenting not only the renovation but the trip back home for their website The New Oregon Trail.

It's a real trip to see what Lindsay and Steven were able to put together for under ten thousand dollars, and if their current careers don't pan out they could certainly find work as RV renovators.

See more photos of the renovation process here

-Via Country Living

Uncle Rob has a fun arts and crafts project you can do with your kids. It involves using a lawn mower to apply spray paint to a canvas. What could possibly go wrong? Seriously, try to guess how this turns out. 

(YouTube link)

After watching this, I bet you don’t try this at home! “This may be the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen,” said a friend of mine.  -Thanks, Tracey!

Peter Thomas says that the project started simply:

One day I thought to myself, "I love to make books and I love to play the ukulele. Can I put these two loves together? Can I make a book out of a uke?"

He and his wife Donna proceeded to make one. Thus began their life's work: to turn book making into an inventive art. Most commonly they build books within the bodies of ukuleles, but they also make miniature books for earrings and books within the bodies of old accordions.

The Thomases also teach classes on book art and exhibit their work. Mostly the wander, traveling across the country constantly in their vargo--that's a gypsy wagon. Fine Books & Collections magazine explains:

The Thomases seem to embrace the old saying about life being a journey, not a destination. The couple spent their early years exhibiting papermaking and bookbinding techniques at California Renaissance Faires. From running a private press, to experimenting with and producing a rich range of museum-quality handcrafted books, to being gypsy artists, it has been a long, and not always straight path for them. “You know the Tarot? I think my card is the Fool, or the Wise Man and the Fool, two steps forwards and one back. Or Mr. Magoo, walking along and walking off a bridge but landing on a moving truck, then being dumped into a river, landing on a barge,” joked Peter Thomas. “When I began I never attempted—or was tempted—to imagine the future. I was too busy doing what I was doing. Learning to make paper. Learning to print better. Gaining my aesthetic voice. Now that I am in the future, I am just trying to make things that are beautiful and bring joy to the beholder,” he added.

-via Messy Nessy Chic (content warning:  nude J.D. Salinger)

Liz Hammett and her mother have the most interesting text conversations. Yes, these texts could be fiction, but they are still gems. Liz has apparently always been a brat, but she’s inherited her sense of humor from her mom. And sometimes Mom gets her revenge.

See a selection of the best conversations at Uproxx, and read them all in Hammett’s Facebook album.

(Video Link)

Yeah, he's one of those dogs. If you live next door, he's going to get on your nerves. Thankfully, he gets all of his barking over quickly. In a mere 4 minutes and 40 seconds, he can bark 376,572,715,308 times. His owner, Jesse Hamel, helps. With a Python script, Hamel multiples each barking iteration 9 times. Soon, your screen and ears fill with barking Gabes.

-via Blame It on the Voices

Randall Munroe came up with an elaborate interactive comic for April Fool’s Day, but due to technical difficulties, couldn’t get it online until Sunday night. Called Garden, it’s a game of sorts, but requires patience. The hover text says, “relax.” You are given what I first thought were UFOs, but they are adjustable grow lights. Set up to three grow lights and leave your garden to grow. According to the site Explain xkcd,

If you leave the lights on and wait (or relax) then the plants in your garden start to grow slowly. The plants appear one at a time slowly, but only a few of them actually grow. There is a large tree that does, but most other plants just appear. Some of the plants sway in the breeze.

Also animals and characters including Megan, Ponytail and Cueball may appear. See examples here 1663: Garden/Images.

Every so often the image will refresh. You can change the number of lights, their position, direction, beam width and the color temperature from red to yellow to white to blue. How much this affects the growth is hard to say, but there seems to be some correlation.  

They have tips there to help you out. As your garden grows, the URL will change. You can copy the URL at any point to share and show people how your garden looks, and they won’t be able to change it. What you see above is my garden from a few minutes ago. Who knows what will happen if I manage to leave that tab open for the rest of the day!     

Relaxing Bath by Lallama

Imperial stormtroopers are just like every other humanoid in the galaxy- they don't like being force choked, they take their armored pants off one leg at a time, and sometimes they just want to unwind in a tub full of warm liquid. However, according to Empire regulations they must wear their helmets at all times, which is why they never have clean hair, so when they sit in a warm bath the lenses on their helmet often fog up, making them easy to catch unaware. This is why the Empire has gone forward with certain anti-bathing regulations, which nearly cost them the war since the Rebels could smell them coming a parsec away, but some troopers are willing to risk TR-8R status for a good soak!

Take some trooper me time with you wherever you go with this Relaxing Bath t-shirt by Lallama, it's the funny way to become a sci-fi star

Visit Lallama's Facebook fan page, official website, Instagram, Tumblr and Twitter, then head on over to his NeatoShop for more delightfully geeky designs:

View more designs by Lallama | 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!