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!
š 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.
š¦ See the inside of a shark's mouth while it's chewing without losing any limb. Nom nom!
š How many video games feature skeletons? A lot, that's for sure, and this Twitter account is dedicated to finding 'em all.
š¬ Blooper reel: for a famous comedian, Gene Wilder sure had trouble keeping a straight face while filming Young Frankenstein.
š Hell has a new mayor, and she's particularly good lookin' (for having such big eyes).
š Need to grow a giant pumpkin for a giant Jack O'Lantern for Halloween? We've got you fam.
š¤£ Lastly, drummer recreates Attack on Titan theme music with rubber chickens. LOL!
Many more neat posts over at our new sites: Homes & Hues, Pictojam, Pop Culturista, Supa Fluffy, Infinite 1UP, Spooky Daily and Laughosaurus. Check 'em out!
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 ZhÄo’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.
(Image credit: Martincco)
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.
Dareās latest work, called Nebula, was made from a 4.5 billion-year-old meteoriteā and itās 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. Itās like a legendary loot you can get from a video game!
Image credit: Tristan Dare
New game plus (NG+), is a game mechanic that encourages players to replay a game theyāve finished all over again. The plus part is allowing players to retain different things theyāve gained from a previous playthrough, such as levels, stats, items, and more.
While this sounds easy for developers, it turns out that some games that actually provide a new and fun NG+ experience consider more things in the actual game itself. According to Graeme Lennon, a senior designer at Spearhead Game, aspects of gameplay need to be tested. "Itās rarely as simple as tweaking some numbers for a harder NG+. Wave timings, hit counts, heal rates, etc, all interact and all need to be tested."
Read more about how this mechanic is implemented here!
Image credit: Intelligent Systems/Nintendo via GameWith
Games usually do their best to fully immerse their players into the worlds theyāve built to encourage further gameplay. Some do this by allowing players to make significant choices and allow them to change a few aspects of the narrative.
Now, this kind of āyour choices matterā mechanic is usually hit or miss. Some games just put choices for the sake of mechanically allowing players to pick, but do not actually fully implement the weight of their choices during playtime. Which is sad.
This horror game, however, makes sure to show the consequences of their choices. Meet Weird West, a top-down immersive sim developed by WolfEye Studios. A simple example of this is how the game gives you expiration dates on quests. But quest deadlines arenāt a new thing, right?
Well, this game shows you how your choices to fulfill a quest or not affect your traversal in the fictional world of Weird West, as Kotakuās Sisi Jiang describes, āSure, I could restore my health by sleeping in a bed, but then I would be off-schedule by eight hours. Or if I took the easy way out of a quest, my reputation could take a hit for unscrupulous behavior, and life-saving supplies would cost more as a result.ā
Image credit: Devolver Digital
Experts have uncovered new fossils that suggest a different explanation as to how Neanderthals were wiped off the Earth. Initial theories suggested that it was the Homo sapiens who drove them away, which led to their extinction.
Thanks to a childās tooth and some stone tools unearthed in southern France, scientists have discovered that Homo sapiens was in western Europe about 54,000 years ago.
But what does this mean for the Neanderthals? Well, the discovery actually suggests that the two prehistoric species could actually have coexisted for a long period of time.
Read more about the discovery here.
Image credit: Rob Hope Films
Before the rise of smartphones, people had their own neat little ways to take note of the supplies they needed to replenish their groceries.
Note-taking is a staple already, of courseā but some actually use a grocery list out of metal! Now, how does that work if it canāt be erased?
Well, the mechanism has an etching of various produce items and other household items on it. Bendable metal tabs are next to each engraving, where one can bend them the other way if they run out of that particular item.
This is cool, but this list isnāt customizable at all. Itās cute and cool, sure, but I think I prefer taking down my grocery list on my phone!
Image credit: U/DE_ASSET/REDDIT.COM
Walter Orthmann of Brusque, Brazil doesn't have to work at the age of 100, but he wants to. It gives him a sense of purpose. And he's carried that sense for the last 84 years at RenauView, a textile manufacturer. He's done so since he was 15 years old, when he started on the factory floor. Now he's a sales manager.
Reuters reports on Orthmann's secrets to longevity. Aside from a passion for productivity, Orthmann has paid close attention to his health for 60 years. He exercises daily and avoids junk foods. His methods have clearly worked well and have secured for him a Guinness World Record for the longest employment at one company.
-via Oddity Central | Photo: Guinness World Records
Nothing signifies a serious permanent commitment like comic book superheroes. But if you insist, you can get wedding rings branded with the essence of Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, the Flash, Aquaman, or the Joker. Imagine reciting your vows to your beloved while slipping on a Joker ring. The ring company Manly Bands has teamed up with DC Comics to present the DC Collection of wedding rings for which to pledge your troth.
You may wonder why there's no Green Lantern ring, as he is the only superhero who gets his powers specifically from his ring. My guess is that they don't want to reproduce the exact design familiar to us from the comic books, and even if they went with a stylized version like the other rings, it probably wouldn't sell well. Which makes us wonder how many Aquaman wedding rings will be purchased. Read about the collection and see each one up close at Nerdist.
World War I was the first war in which submarines were used effectively on a large scale. German U-boats devastated British shipping in particular and the Royal Navy was keen to find new ways to destroy this new threat. In a 2006 issue of the International Journal of Naval History, David A.H. Wilson writes about efforts to use birds to locate and mark submarines.
The Royal Navy considered a variety of proposals involving seagulls landing on submarine periscopes. Seagulls have sharp vision and search out places to land while at sea. Inventor Thomas Mills advocated training seagulls or pigeons with a floating drone that would travel through the water, dispensing food at its top to bait seagulls. The machine is only a few feet long; it is not the same size as a submarine. But its elongated shape might encourage birds to associate submarine shapes with food.
Alas for Mr. Mills and other advocates for avian anti-submarine warfare, the Allied navies adopted other approaches to combating submarines, notably the newly-invented depth charge. The age of seagull warfare would not come yet.
-via Weird Universe | Photo: European Patent Office
The more we go to space, the more trash we leave behind. There are 4,852 working satellites orbiting the earth, with ever more being launched as the cost of deploying them falls. They have to steer through more than 36,000 pieces of space junk more than 10 centimeters wide, and perhaps 100,000 smaller objects in orbit. The company Privateer, founded by professor Moriba Jah, engineer Alex Fielding, and Apple founder Steve Wozniak, aims to do something about it. They've developed a product called Wayfinder with which anyone can monitor space debris. Their other idea for helping with the problem is ...to launch more satellites. This may seem counterintuitive, to say the least. These new satellites are expected to act as traffic cops, helping working satellites and manned missions avoid collisions, and they also hope to reduce the number of new satellite launches by allowing other companies to use their satellites instead of launching their own. Does it make sense? Read about the problem and the project at Inverse. -via Damn Interesting
(Image credit: Privateer)
We all learned about Prohibition, when alcohol was illegal, but people drank it anyway because to many, it was a necessary part of life. Less well-known, but following the same logic, earlier laws against birth control were flouted regularly. In America, the Comstock laws went into effect in 1873, banning the trade in "obscene materials" which included not only pornography, but also birth control, abortifacients, and any information about them. But all that did was drive such information underground. Birth control methods of the time weren't nearly as effective as they are today, but they were something. Women talked about them over the back fence or in their parlors, to avoid any written materials that might lead to arrest. But they were also available for sale to those who knew how to decode language designed to toe the letter of the law.
Every day, across the nation, ads for abortion and birth control appeared in newspapers. Readers just had to know what to look for. “Women had to get creative” about how to get that information out, said Rendina. It was “restoring the menses,” not an abortion. It was “getting rid of a blockage,” or “cleansing the uterus. They came up with all these ridiculous euphemisms.”
A perusal of newspapers from this period shows advertisements for “Mother’s helper” or “Portuguese female pills,” medicine for those “laboring under the suppression of their natural illness,” “renovating pills from Germany” and the like.
Read about the whisper network in which women passed along such information when it was illegal at Atlas Obscura.
Which is better, old Batman or new Batman? The Caped Crusader has come a long way from from the campy style of the mid-'60s Batman. Now he's a dark, brooding, action-not-words type of superhero. Corridor saw the new movie The Batman and asked, why not both? And that's why we now have a version of The Batman with Adam West stepping in for Robert Pattinson. But that's not all- the Penguin and the Riddler have traveled through time to menace our hero as well. The worst thing about this mashup is that it could have been twice as long, and that's something you rarely say about a YouTube video these days. -via Digg
