13th Century Tiktok Live Streamers Pregame a Night at the Tavern pic.twitter.com/42vpRsZnyC

— Sklumper (@InternetJumbo) November 7, 2023

This summer, geezers such as myself discovered the trend of people paying streamers to eat virtual foods and interact with them. Don't ask me to explain how it works. I'll just refer to this article in The Guardian for the rundown.

I really shouldn't be having an Old Man Yells at Cloud moment because streamers and the people who follow them have been doing this for literally centuries. Sketch comedy performers Sklumper demonstrate this in a recovered video file from the Middle Ages. These two middling lords are about to head to the tavern and are pregaming (i.e. getting drunk) with their subscribers. It fortunately ends before Lady Anne gets too racy with her content.

It would have been their 69th anniversary. But as Virginia and Tommy Stevens held hands as they lay next to each other on their hospital beds, Tommy passed away on September 8th, one day short of their anniversary. He was 91. Virginia would soon follow him after nine days, also at 91. It almost sounds like something from the movies (The Notebook anyone?), but this is real, and I don't think there's a more peaceful way to pass on than being beside the love of your life, with hands firmly clasped, holding onto the vow you made on your wedding day, "Til death do us part".

Their love story was quite a normal, typical one. They met in high school, fell in love, went to the same university, and got married in 1954. Tommy went to the army, and after being discharged, they had a son and a daughter. They built a business together, retired after 50 years, and spent their retirement years with their grandchildren at sporting events, school activities, and family vacations.

Tommy was later diagnosed with Alzheimer's and spent most of the time in the hospital. Virginia was also brought to the hospital after suffering from a fall which gave her six broken ribs, a spinal fracture, and a hip injury. There they spent most of their days until their last moments together.

(Image credit: Stevens Family)

When I was a kid, I watched a horror film about crocodiles running loose and attacking civilians. I couldn't really understand how terrifying that actually was, until I grew older and watched some shows that featured how vicious and ravenous crocodiles can be. I also learned from those shows how to fight back when you do find yourself ensnared by the jaws of the hungry reptilian beast.

A 60-something year old cattle producer, Colin Deveraux, must have thought that if he didn't fight back when he fell into the clutches of an adult crocodile, he would surely lose his life, and fought back he did. As he was about to do some fencing near the Finniss River, south of Darwin, Australia, he found himself being grabbed on the foot by a 3.2-meter (10 1/2 feet) saltwater crocodile. Colin struggled and tried to kick the croc in its belly. At the same time, he also tried biting the animal back, literally.

Fortunately, his teeth were able to poke the croc's eye and it let him go. He ran straight for his car, and for a moment, he thought that the croc would give chase and it did for about four meters, but then gave up. He has been receiving treatment at a hospital and might soon be able to walk again.

(Image credit: Thomas Couillard/Unsplash)

It may not look it but this little shotgun house has been standing for more than 100 years. Built in 1910, it's 388 sq. ft., large enough for a bedroom, a bathroom, and a 10-foot high ceiling. Located at 423 S. Orleans Ave., in Tampa, Florida, it has been designated as a historical site as it is one of the few houses that survived from the Dobyville neighborhood during the city's segregated era. It has been recently listed on Zillow and lists for $379,000 on the market.

Even though the house is small, it's cozy and has a very good location. Not far away, one will be able to walk to the Hyde Park Village shopping center as well as Bayshore Boulevard and downtown Tampa. Originally, it was sold in 2002 for $108,000 and then listed in 2014 for $199,000 but was then taken off, and became a rental space costing $1,300 a month. Now, it's once again back on the market and has received quite a lot of attention.

(Image credit: Harvey Petty)

Have you ever wondered how books get onto the New York Times bestsellers list? One would think that the books that sell the most are the ones that go on that list, or perhaps, books that have made an impact on a greater scale and thus, spurred people to buy them and read them. But one thing is for certain, bestsellers are made, they don't just happen. And this was something that Sy Montgomery, a 65-year-old freelance writer who had dreamed of having one of her books listed on that illustrious NYT bestsellers list, had discovered.

Much like the Oscars, there's a lot of promotions and marketing involved in order for books to get attention. Publishers would usually be the ones pushing to have certain books considered as a bestseller. And then, the Times would have to track the sales data for those books so that they can find out which will be the bestsellers. The secret however, lies in the network of shops and bookstores that the Times uses as reference. Nobody knows which bookstores will be tracked.

But there is a way to get around the system and increase one's chances of making it onto the list. Data scientists have looked into the patterns based on eight years of NYT bestsellers to gain insight on what is the recipe for success in making a book into a bestseller. Check it out on The Hustle.

(Image credit: Shiromani Kant/Unsplash)

I used to base whether I'm going to watch a film or not on reviews by other people online, specifically, those on review aggregator sites like Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic. However, I have learned that sometimes it can be a matter of taste, so I'll just watch whatever I feel like watching, paying no heed to other people's opinions. The consensus of a number of people might be that the film is amazing, but it might just be decent in my taste. Meanwhile, there might be films or shows that the majority of people, posting reviews and ratings on these sites, abhor, but then again, I might find it somewhat of a guilty pleasure.

Now, looking through the list of the worst movies of all time according to Rotten Tomatoes, I have only watched a couple of those movies, Left Behind (2014) which starred Nicolas Cage and A Thousand Words (2012) which starred Eddie Murphy. Though I wasn't particularly raving about them, I thought they were so-so, yet I didn't consider them to be particularly the worst. You may check out the rest of the list on BGR.

Instead, I found the films I Origins (2014) to be difficult to stomach, Darren Aronofsky's The Whale (2022) quite unsavory, although Brendan Fraser's acting was superb, and the horror film Hush (2016) poorly done despite the reality of such a situation being truly terrifying.

(Video credit: Rotten Tomatoes Trailers/Youtube)

We're excited to introduce you to THE OFFICIAL GAME OF THRONES COOKBOOK!

Preorder THE OFFICIAL GAME OF THRONES COOKBOOK by Chelsea Monroe-Casselat here: https://t.co/JSBX2HrqnE pic.twitter.com/LDkjPolT9H

— George RR Martin (@GRRMspeaking) November 1, 2023

Twelve years, eight seasons, and one prequel later, fans are still agonizing over when the much-awaited sixth installment of George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series will be finished. Many have been haranguing the author online to finish the book which he had promised to complete by 2020. Then again, a pandemic had swept the whole world, and one might think that that would have given him enough time to sit at home and write, but the 75-year-old author has been quite busy, and perhaps, still ruminating about how the story must progress.

Nevertheless, he announced on X (formerly Twitter) that they will be releasing a new Game of Thrones book, but not the Winds of Winter. Instead, it will be an official GoT cookbook which will include recipes of the Dothraki. It was written by Chelsea Monroe-Casselat, with a foreword by Martin. It sounds like a troll, but George R.R. Martin seems to be as affected by people's hounding him over the Winds of Winter as anybody would, as evidenced by the meme he tweeted.

pic.twitter.com/JlNJbS4I6f

— George RR Martin (@GRRMspeaking) November 5, 2023

To be honest, he can take as much time as he needs to finish the book, but considering his advanced age, we do hope that he is able to finish the whole series which, if anybody would remember, still has one more installment, Dream of Spring. At least, for now, we know that he's working on it but no guarantees that it will come out anytime soon.

(Image credit: George R.R. Martin/X)

In the tradition of Deep Blue Sea and Birdemic, except intentional, comes GCI Gator. Yes, it's a real full-length film, from Charles Band's Full Moon Features, the studio that gave us Puppet Master, but also The Dead Hate the Living! and Gingerdead Man. Bad CGI Gator is exactly what it says in the title. The premise is that a group of college students on spring break throw their laptops into the lake to declare their vacation from school. The electronics shock a real alligator into becoming a computer generated monster that comes after them for revenge. The joke is that the gator changes color, floats in the air, and changes size. That's what bad CGI does. Outside of the alligator, the production values are good, and the cast, while as homogenized as any horror cast, does pretty well with what they have to work with. For a one-joke monster movie, it looks like it could be fun. Bad CGI Gator will be available for streaming on Amazon Prime Video and FullMoonfeatures.com beginning November 24th. -via Digg

A "gravity hole" sounds a lot like a black hole, but that's not what it is. It turns out that gravity is not the same all over the earth, meaning you could weigh more or less in different parts of the world. However, weight is just a number on a scale, and you wouldn't look any different. Water, on the other hand, is very much affected by gravity. There's a spot in the Indian Ocean where the gravity has much less force, and the water level is up to 106 meters (348 feet) lower than in the rest of the earth! See, water flows in the direction of gravity, and the area outside of this gravity hole has more, so the water flows away. That's a lot of water, since this area, officially known as the Indian Ocean Geoid Low (IOGL), covers an area of three million square kilometers (1.2 million square miles)!     

The cause of variations in gravity is the composition and density of the earth, in this case the earth below the ocean. The IOGL was discovered in 1948, but it is only recently that scientists have discovered the reason for it. Its origin goes back 120 million years, when the tectonic plate carrying India crashed into Asia and raised the Himalayas. Read that story at Big Think. -via Atlas Obscura   

(Image credit: ESA – GOCE High Level Processing Facility)

John Wyatt Greenlee is known online as the Surprised Eel Historian because he holds a doctoral degree in medieval European history who specializes in discovering surprisingly novel uses of eels in the Middle Ages.

In modern times, we mostly load eels into our hovercrafts. But in medieval England, eels were a staple food that were eaten so prolifically that people often paid their rents in eels.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus' Seinfeld character Elaine Benes showed us how to dance in 1996, but her horribly awkward dancing became a meme decades later. The dance was first seen in the Seinfeld episode "Little Kicks," and Elaine was quite proud of the dance she invented. Since then it's become the subject of a meme, tributes, and even dance contests. It's appealing because for one thing, it illustrates the character so well, but more importantly it gave all of us an example of someone who actually dances worse than we do.    

Now The Bell Bros. have liberated dancing Elaine from Seinfeld entirely and have her dancing in pop culture's most iconic dance scenes from West Side Story to The Office to Dirty Dancing (a list of the scenes are posted in a comment at YouTube). What's weird is how well her bizarre dance moves fit in, whether the dancers around her are competent or not. -via Boing Boing

As a book lover, I place a certain value to the way a book is presented, printed, and packaged as a whole, not just the content inside them. Of course, the content is important as that is the main selling point of the book, although at times, the author is the reason why people buy certain books, and other times, the book cover's appeal piques the curiosity of readers, thus inducing them to buy the book.

In the early modern era, which spanned between the 1450s to the 1800s, saw a lot of books being printed in a certain fashion. There was more thought into how texts were printed as well as how the elements on a page were formatted. Nowadays, we won't generally see images in novels or non-fiction works, and oftentimes, those can only be seen either in textbooks, children's books, or graphic novels. Back then, since it was an explosion of information, writers wanted their readers to be immersed and experience something new from reading their books. And so, there are several books with drawings in them, as the examples shown by Res Obscura.

Nowadays, we prefer standard fonts, but early modern books had much more character and personality showing through the pages as different authors chose different typography and design throughout their books, and that's why many of them have a very distinct feel that defines the zeitgeist of that era. For more examples of the beautiful early modern books, Benjamin Breen of Res Obscura shares them in his article.

(Image credit: Natalia Y./Unsplash)

After almost 20 years, Mean Girls has been causing a buzz as of late, mainly because some of the cast reunited to film a two-minute video for a Walmart ad promoting Black Friday deals. The video came out on November 1st and features Lindsay Lohan along with castmates Amanda Seyfried and Lacey Chabert who reprised their roles from the original movie, but this time, as their older selves with Lohan's character becoming a school counselor. On the other hand, Seyfried's Karen apparently became a weather reporter, and Chabert's Gretchen Wieners became a mom of a teenage daughter who's also going to the same high school they did.

Not only that, there is also a stage musical, written by Tina Fey, touring in Canada which will be showing on Edmonton, Calgary, and Vancouver next January. Along with the stage musical, a 2024 movie adaptation of the same will also premiere next January.

(Video credit: Lindsay's/Youtube)

CleanTok is an area in TikTok where people share cleaning tips and one user, Rochelle Stewart, who goes by the handle @operation_niki, specializes in making videos for travelers. Whenever we travel, we have this confidence that the accommodation at which we will be staying will have done their best to clean and organize the rooms before guests check in. Whether it be a hotel or an Airbnb, cleaning is part of the service. But even with regular cleaning, Stewart said that it doesn't get rid of the germs, and some spots in the space may be dirtier than we think.

Even though it would be too troublesome to clean our hotel rooms right as we arrive, it wouldn't hurt to be a bit cautious. Stewart suggests that guests should pay particular attention to high-touch surfaces like sinks, counters, switches, faucets, and shower heads, as they would have thousands of times more bacteria than a toilet seat. And of course, the best way to prevent getting infected would be to employ hygiene practices such as frequently washing your hands, avoiding touching your face, and getting a sanitizing spray to disinfect those surfaces. Stewart shares her other essential cleaning tips for travels with Kathleen Wong of USA Today here.

(Image credit: Mky Moody/Unsplash)

Those are two things you normally wouldn't think of going together. It's a weird combination but at the same time it's not at all mutually exclusive either, as one could be a chocolate lover and love beer at the same time. However, the people at Uproxx have decided to ask craft beer artisans what are the best beers for chocolate lovers. Now, the concept is whether there would be beers that taste like chocolate or have a scent of sweetness to them, or beer that would go well with chocolate. Again, it seems odd to pair those two up, but actually, there are beers like the ones described above.

Some of these beers are definitely very niche and any beer lovers might find them different from the typical beer. Just from the names of these beers, you'll know they are targeting a specific group of people. For example, Yuengling Hershey's Chocolate Porter which has a 4.7% alcoholic content and costs $11 per six-pack. It includes Hershey's chocolate syrup, cocoa powder, and cocoa nibs, and it was brewed in collaboration with Hershey's. It's technically brewed chocolate, if you were to ask me. Check out the rest of the craft beers great for chocolate lovers on Uproxx.

(Image credit: Stefan Grage/Unsplash)