This player is a legend. Weeks after the release of the latest FromSoftware hit, Elden Ring, players have complained over defeating one of the game’s hardest bosses named Malenia.
One player has offered their services in helping others to defeat this character. Their presence in the gaming community started with a Reddit post that told of their encounter with a naked, jar-wearing crusader who just wants to slay Malenia by himself. Aptly named “Let Me Solo Her,” the player has garnered the attention of the Internet in just a few hours.
The mythical-sounding player posted a thread, with a video of them beating Malenia as a summon. This person is now officially an icon, I tell you!
Meet the ootbox (you read that right; that is its name), a rentable portable office made of an upcycled shipping container. An American entrepreneur designed and built a prototype of this contraption in his backyard when he had the urge to have a private but nearby place to conduct business.
The ootbox was a result of his collaboration with business development specialist Allison Zofan. The portable office measures 10 feet long by 8.5 ft high by 8 ft wide (3 by 2.6 by 2.4 m). It also sports a fiberglass door, along with large windows and signage panels. The interior is simple and beautiful, equipped with finished/insulated plywood ceiling and walls, carpeted flooring, motion-activated lighting, and a smart thermostat.
The ootbox is actually available for rent, with rates starting at $1,000 a month.
This user has single-handedly saved most of us through his walkthrough maps. StarFighters76 is still creating maps to this day– overall, he has made over 3,700 maps , and helped a lot of people get out of many roadblocks during their playthroughs.
Creating maps since the early 2000s, this user has made them just in Microsoft Paint, as can be seen by the bright, basic color palettes and thin visible black lines. As to how his creations have helped players, his simple-looking images actually contain legends, arrows, and other instructions that guide players through different games. Learn more about his work here!
When she was 18 years old, Madeleine Talmage Force seemed destined for a happy life. In 1911 she had married one of the richest men in the world and embarked on an extended honeymoon that included travel to Bermuda, Egypt, and various European countries. Before long, she was expecting a baby. Her marriage to John Jacob Astor IV was controversial, coming what the public considered to be too soon after his highly-publicized divorce the previous year. He was 47 years old, and had a son older than Madeleine.
The Astor's lives would take a turn when they decided to return to America on the luxurious ship called the Titanic. Madeleine was accompanied by her husband, her dog named Kitty (yes, really), a maid, and a private nurse. After the ship hit an iceberg, John Jacob Astor helped his wife, the maid, and the nurse into a lifeboat, but was denied a seat for himself. Read how that adventure played out and what became of Madeleine Astor afterward at Mental Floss. -via Strange Company
A couple of musicians walk along the Crown Heights area of Brooklyn playing the Gloria Gaynor hit "I Will Survive." It starts out fairly simple, but then more and more musicians join in until it's a rollicking musical celebration, getting jazzier by the minute. Everyone gets a solo! They end with a surprisingly plausible fade by descending the steps into a subway station. This is actually a collaboration between three bands, Too Many Zooz, Lucky Chops, and High and Mighty Brass Band. -via Laughing Squid
Two years ago, NASA's latest Mars rover Perseverance landed on Mars in a stunning maneuver we got to witness in real time (though delayed, because Mars). Although the spacecraft crashed, that was part of the plan. The Perseverance mission took along Mars' first helicopter, named Ingenuity. On its 26th Martian reconnaissance flight, Ingenuity revisited Perseverance's landing site and recorded the debris left behind from an overhead view.
With no scavengers, fungi, bacteria, or rain on the red planet, the debris is in almost pristine condition after two years. The wind on Mars has partially buried the spacecraft's parachute under dust. The backshell is surprisingly intact, considering the speed and heat involved in its landing. Photographing and studying the debris field will help NASA to plan future missions, including one designed to return to earth carrying Martian samples. Read about Ingenuity's photographic mission and what it means at NASA. -via Kottke
This sea lion named Wendy sure acts like she owns the joint. First she waddles into a luxury hotel's pool, swims a bit, then kicks a man out of his very own deck chair to do a little sunbathing!
Early in Nike's history, the company was in a fight for its life against a crushingly large tariff assessment. So what's a scrappy little sneaker company to do? Phil Knight revealed the story of how Nike actually produced its own counterfeit Nike shoes called The One Line to fight the US government ... and won!
"A Young Boy Running at Midnight" is a touching story of a journalist who came across a teen running at midnight, after he got off work at a local McDonald's in the northern Indian city of Noida near New Delhi. But why did the young man run? You'll never guess the reason.
This biblically accurate Clippy is an angelic Microsoft Office Assistant drawn by illustrator Evangeline Gallagher.
Thousand-year-old conical vessels dug up in Jerusalem turned out to be ancient hand grenades used against the Crusaders and perhaps also against the Rabbit of Caerbannog.
Usually, when you need to reach something a bit too high and all you've got is a chair, well, you stand on the chair like it's a stepladder. Apparently that inspired the creation of this artful Stepladder Chair: it transforms from a regular kitchen chair into a three-step staircase though at $1,800 a piece, you could presumably buy a chair and an actual stepladder instead, or simply hire a butler to do your bidding.
Concert at the cemetery is a touching event by the Last Words Legacy Project to help people heal.
Why aren't they wearing capes? Looks like anyone can be a Bat in the Hat in Mana-hatta! This funny What We Do in the Shadows-inspired t-shirt design is by indie artist Nemons.
When the US airline industry was deregulated in the late 1970s, it opened the door for almost anyone with some money to incorporate a new airline. That opportunity gave rise to an entire crop of specialty airlines, each with a gimmick to draw passengers with particular tastes or desires. For a few years, flyers could select an airline that would cater to your religion, let you smoke despite FAA regulations, fly your cat or dog to a new city, or make you feel like a movie star. There were certainly travelers who chose such amenities, but those specialty passengers mainly wanted to get to a particular destination, and none of the niche airlines were big enough to travel to that many destinations. Eventually, the novelty wore off as passengers prioritized ticket prices, direct routes, and availability over novelty. Read about five such bygone specialty airlines at CNN. -via Digg
Zombies come from dead bodies, right? No, they come from movies and TV. No, that's not right, either. The idea of zombies is much older. You're thinking of Haiti, aren't you? That's the answer if you're discussing the origin of zombies with your friends, yet this TED-Ed lesson from Christopher M. Moreman starts even further back than that. But how they were regarded in Haiti is more chilling than any movie about undead brain-eaters. The zombie metaphor was true horror, because it was a little too close to the truth. Maybe you should reserve a little sympathy and respect for zombies. Well, maybe not the walkers, but the people whose lives gave rise to the zombie myth. -via Geeks Are Sexy
In a densely populated city like Tokyo (16,122 people per square mile), land must be used thoughtfully. A sprawling graveyard with plots for individual graves can be expensive. Japan has a solution. AFP describes a modern cemetery that takes up a floor of an office building. Vistors wait in individual mourning booths while a machine retrieves the ashes of the dead from storage and delivers them to the booth.
Facilities such as this one may, after 30 years, send the ashes to collective memorials far away from Tokyo. But these memorials are marked with QR codes for individual interred persons, which family members and monks use while praying for the departed.
Read more about these innovative burial solutions at AFP.
In 2018, we brought you the story of Akihiko Kondo, who married virtual Vocoloid singer Hatsune Miku. A company called Gatebox built a hologram of Hatsune Miku that used artificial intelligence, allowing Kondo to interact with her and hold simple conversations. Then in March of 2020, Gatebox ceased support for the hologram, explaining that it was a limited production model that had run its course. There couldn't have been a worse time to lose communication with one's spouse, at the outset of the coronavirus pandemic. However, Kondo still talks to Miku, although she doesn't reply. Miku now lives with Kondo in the form of a larger doll. Or many dolls, as seen in Kondo's Instagram gallery.
Kondo's life has changed in other ways. He took up the cause of bullying in Japan, and has enrolled in law school, hoping to explore the topics of anime, minority issues, and freedom of expression. Read about Kondo's life since marrying a fictional character at The Mainichi. -Thanks, WTM!
🏠 Some old houses have a tiny door that opens to the outside of the kitchen. Whatever could it be for? Find out the reason behind this mysterious door, as well as many other bygone features found in older homes that would confound modern homeowners.
One of the tools that astronomers use to calculate the rhythms of space phenomena is historical accounts, which can go back as far as written language itself. The difficulty of finding these historical records is translating them, both in language and in deciphering what the description refers to in modern terms. Scholars have identified what may be the oldest written description of an aurora yet found, in an ancient Chinese text called The Bamboo Annals. These court records of King Zhāo’s reign have a reference to "a five-colored light seen in the northern part of the night sky." The writing is dated to 977 or 957 BC. That makes it 300 years earlier than the previous earliest known account.
The records have been available for a long time, but scientists say a 16th-century translation erred in calling the sight a comet instead of a five-colored light. They also know that at the time, the earth's magnetic pole was in the right place for aurora to have been seen in central China. Read more about this finding at Smithsonian.
This is a love story, but it's not for children, because nature is metal. Don't watch this with the sound off, and don't listen to it while doing something else, because you need both the audio and visuals to get the full effect. Get ready to start caring about the fates of two random insects in a swamp. The story is gentle and inspiring, dark and absurd, tearjerking and hilarious all at once. For some reason, I feel the need to apologize for all the above, but it's Ze Frank, so you should know you're getting into something quite weird.
This 19-year-old is so cool. Tristan Dare is a bladesmith who has been creating knives for five years. The teenager is known for adding ancient materials to his blades.
Dare’s latest work, called Nebula, was made from a 4.5 billion-year-old meteorite– and it’s exquisite. The bladesmith already has experience with working with this kind of space object, so handling one of the oldest ones ever recorded was a breeze for him. The resulting blade also has opal, gold, and an ancient wooly mammoth tooth as a handle. It’s like a legendary loot you can get from a video game!
