Vampires are supposed to be terrifying. The legends go back several hundred years of dead people who rise from their graves and stalk the living to drink their blood. But there was a sea change in the legend when vampires made it to the movies. Dracula was a well-dressed member of the noblity that struck the audience as kind of sexy. Hollywood ran with that idea, and made vampires attractive monsters that didn't always kill people, but could, so that they gave us the thrill of danger that draws audiences in. Even in supposedly scary movies, some are scarier than others.

As the vampire became an iconic movie character, comedies about them popped up. Vampires in comedies are not all that scary. Then there are movies that have entire families and communities of vampires, in order to give us something a little different. In these larger groups, there will be variations in how terrifying and how lame a character can be. You might be surprised at how many movies and TV shows have featured vampires, some of them horrifying, but others comically impotent, while a few are downright beloved. Read a list of the least scary vampires we've watched at Den of Geek.

The Merkins, who do horror film song parodies all the time, but espacially around Halloween, are back with a takeoff on Mötley Crüe's "Girls Girls Girls." Except the band is named Möstly Crüel and the song is "Kills Kills Kills." This one knocks it out of the ballpark, as the production values are top-notch, they've got the hair band moves down, the lyrics are, yeah, weird, and the music is good, too! Check out their previous slasher film parodies, "As Long as You're Bloody," "Every Life I Take," "I'll Kill You That Way," "Friends with no Faces," and others. -via Geeks Are Sexy

🔥 On Earth, fire is shaped like, well, fire because of gravity. In space, it is nothing like what we've ever seen: NASA did a combustion research and showed that fire is spherical in microgravity.

🐱 Cats of the Wedge Tour is a walking tour of neighborhood cats in Minneapolis that drew in hundreds of people.

🏠 Wife complaining of the same view out the home window? Build her a rotating house.

🦠 Watch COVID-19 spread across the USA from Jan 2020 to Oct 2021

🧱 Now this is charming: Calvin and Hobbes Crossing the Bridge in LEGO

♕ Let's play! The Queen's Gambit mosaics made out of chess symbols.

🧛 Is this a smiling vampire bat or a cat?

More neat posts over at our new sites: Pictojam, Supa Fluffy, Homes & Hues, and Pop Culturista. Please check 'em out!

Image: NASA

Holy Snokes! New York Times best-selling author Ian Doescher has crafted a new book of poems based on his love of Star Wars. I Wish I Had A Wookiee And Other Poems For Our Galaxy has over 75 adorable and kid friendly poems. Most of those poems also feature delightful drawings by illustrator Tim Budgen. 

Many will recognize the name Ian Doescher.  Ian Doescher is a Portland, Oregon based author known for his witty William Shakespeare’s Star Wars Trilogy, William Shakespeare’s Star Wars Prequel Series, and William Shakespeare’s Star Wars Sequel Series. To say that he knows a thing or two about Star Wars would be putting it mildly. 

I Wish I Had A Wookie is a bit of a departure from his other books. Instead of writing his usual approachable Shakespearean inspired fan fiction, this book is designed to be pure Star Wars themed poetry.  I Wish I Had A Wookie is for the Star Wars fan who is young or young at heart.

A lot of the mythic lore surrounding classic monsters only came about because of the movies they appear in. We have a distinct image when we think of Frankenstein, or more accurately, Frankenstein's monster, but it is nothing like the monster that Dr. Frankenstein brought to life in Mary Shelley's 1818 novel. We recognize a vampire by the costume made popular by the actor Bela Lugosi, but Eastern European vampire lore bears no resemblance to the Hollywood Dracula at all.    

Also, considering how many movies have used the same monsters over and over, certain characteristics about them have become canon in our minds, like slow walking zombies shuffling up to consume our brains. Why are they like that? It's the movies. They give us an image, and it sticks, so they use that vision in our minds over and over to make sure we recognize what we see on the screen. Read about the myths of monsters that Hollywood made up at Mental Floss.

Fashion trends of the past were often so ridiculous that we have to wonder whether future generations will laugh at what we wear today. Yeah, they probably will. Taking a look at some trends of the past, we see that they are often a scheme to flaunt one's status at the expensive of others. Sometimes that idea backfired spectacularly. BlueJay explains four really weird fashion trends from previous centuries in a rather amusing way. -via Nag on the Lake

Tom Scott, a traveler and teacher about the world’s curiosities, muses philosophically about what makes a place fascinating to people. It is usually a combination of the very familiar and the unfamiliar. For example, we’ve probably all eaten at McDonald’s at some point. But very few of us kayaked up to the restaurant for our Big Macs.

In Germany, a canal that connects to the Elbe River features a McDonald’s. You can drive up or walk up, as usual. But you can also boat up, too. Be sure to watch to the end for Scott’s punchline.

Exit question: can you swim up to the dock and get service?

What a sweet dog! 

Meet Moose, a 1.5-year-old golden retriever who lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He is a friendly boy who enjoys interacting with everyone around him, including a new mailman who delivers parcels to their house. Moose loves his new friend to the point that he waits outside to say hi to the mailman and get a hug from him. The pupper does this every day; it’s so cute! “It was adorable,” Meghan Gruszynski, Moose’s owner, told The Dodo. “I loved how much he loved our boy and loved how much Moose loved saying hi to him.”

Image credit: via Carolyn Mullet 

Thanks to a monsoon rain in Arizona, hundreds of odd-looking critters have popped out in a temporary lake in the area. These prehistoric-looking creatures that emerged from tiny eggs are called Triops. The reason for their sudden appearance is a unique trait of their eggs. According to Central Michigan University, their eggs can lie dormant for decades in the desert until enough rain falls to create lakes that provide real estate and time for the hatchlings to mature and lay eggs for the next generation. 

Image credit: L.Carter/NPS

Whether or not you love Korean dramas, the impact and success of Netflix’ Squid Game is undeniable. From dozens of posts and videos about the show’s lore, characters, and story, it is safe to say that viewers love the show. 

If you’re one of those people who crave more content about a series after watching it or you’re just drowning in the feels given to you by the show, check out Buzzfeed’s Isha Bassi article where she shares some top-tier memes made by the fans from the show. 

Image credit: Netflix 

Has anyone ever accused you of relying on ellipses or dashes too much? Have you ever wondered if you use too many exclamation points? We now have a way to visualize the answers to exactly those questions.

Clive Thompson made a tool that strips all the letters from a passage of writing and shows you only the punctuation. Why? Because you can learn a lot about style that way. In explaining the application, Thompson himself realized that he used a lot of parentheticals, long ones with punctuation inside them, which indicates he digresses from the subject more than he would like. In another example, look at the image above. On the left is the punctuation in Adam J. Calhoun's analysis of Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. On the right is Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner. It only rakes a glance to see how the writing styles differ, just by punctuation.

You'll find the tool called just the punctuation here. I put in some of my own writing, and found that I don't use nearly as much punctuation as I expected to see. This is all the punctuation from an entire Mental Floss feature article from years ago.

' . ' , , , , . ' ? , , . , , , . , - , . , . , ! , , . ' , ' . , , , . , ' , . . ( ) , . , . . . . . , ' . , . , . , , . . , . . . . , ' . . , . . , , . , . ; ' . . ' - , . . , . , ' ' , . . ( ) , .


-via Metafilter 

What a nice show of camaraderie!

A passing stray dog noticed another dog that was tied outside a store in Novorossiysk, Russia. Thinking that the ‘trapped’ pupper was abandoned like him, the stray dog was determined to free the other from its restraints. 

Fortunately, the dog tied to the fence was just left there by his owner who went inside to shop. Definitely not abandoned. Not knowing this, the passing dog was seen doing his best to free the pupper by Dmitriy Timchenko, who was able to capture the entire interaction. “I’ve seen this stray dog around town many times,” Timchenko said to The Dodo. “He always uses the crosswalk to cross the street. He’s a very smart dog.”

Image credit: Instagram / Dmitriy Timchenko

Remember when buying a box of sugary cereal meant there was a free toy inside? Remember your brother spilling cereal all over the kitchen to get the prize, and then your siblings would fight over it? It still happens, but those prizes are fairly rare these days, limited to special movie premieres or something. The premiums began to appear in cereal boxes in 1948 and were often disappointing, but some were surprisingly cool. Mr. Breakfast compiled a list ranking the 50 best cereal box prizes, and some of them make me wish my parents had bought sugary cereal. Coming in at #15:

In the 1950s, Wheaties cereal offered a snazzy little 2-inch high microscope with an adjustable focusing lens designed by General Scientific Corp. "Kids! Explore the Wonders of Nature with your 6 Power Microscope Free in this Box! Magnifies objects to 6 times normal size. See things invisible to the naked eye on leaves, flowers, insects (and) rocks."

Then I remembered that my dad was a science teacher and we had a full-size microscope. Here's #5, from 1989 or 1990:

To have a send-away offer to get a watch from a cereal wasn't unusual, but to have a working watch actually inside the box was very exciting for kids. To make matters even more incredible, it didn't display just the time. It could also show the date! From what we could find looking at pictures, there were as many as 8 different styles available over a couple years. The best ones had the Honey-Comb logo and graphic interpretations of the cereal pieces.

Yeah, you can imagine that toys containing batteries didn't last long considering the expense, but they have resurfaced as recently as 2008. Check out the list of the top 50 cereal box prizes for a walk down memory lane or a glimpse at what you missed out on. -via Fark

The calm waters off of Puerto Madryn, Argentina are famous for the many visits of southern right whales. UPI tells us that tourists flock there during whale watching season, which runs from May to December. So far, there have been 1,600 sightings of these majestic leviathans this year.

One paddleboarder got a very close look at one. In the perfectly calm waters, a whale approached and looked at the human for a few minutes. Then he gave the back of the board a push with a fin, submerged, and left.

The human, Analia Giorgetti, tells BBC News that she wasn’t scared. She describes it as a “magical moment” that coincidentally occurred on her birthday, so it was a birthday present from the whale.

-via Lawrence Everett

Last month, a giant model of the Moon decided to make a run (or more accurately, roll) for it.

The inflatable Moon was for a local Moon festival celebration, which took place during the full harvest Moon in September. It broke free of its anchor and was blown down the street by the wind as two hapless officials ran after it.

According to The Guardian, this wasn't the first time the Moon went rogue. A similar model blew away in 2016, when strong winds due to Typhoon Meranti caused it roll over cars in the streets of Fuzhou.