Atari held its first arcade world championship tournament on Halloween weekend 1981 in Chicago. Video games were becoming hotter by the day, even though to play them, you had to go to an arcade and feed quarters into a console weighing hundreds of pounds. The hottest of the arcade games that year was Centipede, the first arcade game that appealed to women as much as it did to men. Centipede was the game chosen for the tournament. But that 1981 tournament had a lot more going on than gameplay, and you don't even have to be familiar with Centipede to be sucked into the shenanigans of that weekend.

The tournament story is actually five stories. First, it follows three women who came to dominate the competition. They had very different backgrounds and very different motives. And after the tournament, they went on to very different yet fascinating lives.

Another story concerns the inventor of Centipede. Game developer Dona Bailey was a fish out of water in the male-dominated Atari company, and she designed a game that appealed to her own taste. That it became Atari's hottest game and the tournament choice that year was gratifying, but on that very weekend, she was called out to court to defend her creation from pirates hoping to cash in on the tournament. One of the challenges of that case was a judge who didn't quite understand what an arcade game was.

The final story concerns the organizer of the event, who bluffed his way into the job and hoped to make enough money on the side to cover his house of cards financing before Atari found out they had hired the wrong organizer.

Read all those stories together at Truly Adventurous, or you can listen to it as a podcast at the same link. -via Damn Interesting

What in the world would inspire a Hollywood studio to spend $100 million on a comedy? Sometimes it's because they think they have a sure thing, like the biggest box office star of the era, in the case of The Adventures of Pluto Nash, or maybe a parody of another franchise, which shouldn't cost that much. Or it's a beloved cartoon character getting the live-action treatment, which can work, but it's never a sure thing. Or it's a sequel to a big hit, so of course it will work again, right? Again, there are no guarantees.



The thing is, just because an idea worked once, doing it again is just as risky. It's not the stars, or the familiar characters and setting, or even the special effects that make a good comedy. But those things can add millions of dollars to a movie that should have spent more money on an original idea or a funny script. See 15 comedies where the producers' calculations went completely wrong at Cracked.

The violent eruption a few hours ago of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Haʻapai volcano captured by satellites GOES-West and Himawari-8. pic.twitter.com/PzV5v9apF6

— Wonder of Science (@wonderofscience) January 15, 2022

The Hunga-Tonga-Hunga-Ha'apai volcano near Tonga has been erupting occasionally for the past month. After a break in the action since January 5, it erupted again Thursday and Friday, but the biggest eruption was on Saturday (January 15), with an explosion that was heard 800 kilometers away in Fiji. A resulting tsunami hit Tonga's largest island Tongatapu, and tsunami advisories went out for parts of Japan, New Zealand's north island, and the US west coast this morning. Here's a video of the tsunami rolling in to Tonga.  

BREAKING: Tsunami hits Tonga as nearby volcano erupts pic.twitter.com/TRM1iKtAft

— BNO News (@BNONews) January 15, 2022

Tonga's next challenge is falling ash and acid rain. Let's see that eruption from another satellite image.

I have never seen satellite imagery of a volcanic eruption quite like this. Incredibly powerful eruption of Hunga Tonga volcano in the South Pacific. Tsunamis impacting nearby islands. Reports of people feeling and hearing the eruption in Fiji, 800 km away! Wow. https://t.co/EG2EYdssBX

— Elizabeth Leitman (@WxLiz) January 15, 2022

The shock wave generated by the recent eruption of Hunga Tonga #volcano is even visible on satellite imagery. Unbelievable. pic.twitter.com/5Hih2mPePs

— CyanideCN (@CyanideCN_) January 15, 2022

To understand how big the eruption was, this one shows the curvature of the earth.

Different perspective shows the waves propagating outward from the eruption. pic.twitter.com/fetNumZnYs

— Dakota Smith (@weatherdak) January 15, 2022

CNN is providing continuing updates on the effects of the eruption. -via Fark

anatolian shepherd dog puppy in training pic.twitter.com/KkGBSP89W3

— theworldofdog (@theworldofdog) January 11, 2022

Actually, I get this. My Pomeranian puppy thinks that she’s a guard dog just because that’s what adult Pomeranians do.

Likewise, this Anatolian Shepherd puppy is following her heritage. They’ve been sheepdogs for hundreds of years and she’s already in training for the profession that she was born to.

Some redditors point out that the puppy looks a lot like the sheep—at least by coloration. She blends in so seamlessly that some may think that she’s a lost baby lamb. They certainly aren’t the least intimidated by her, nor are they deferring to her for guidance. That will come later.

-via Boing Boing

🚗 Honda's newest electric car tops out at just 5 mph and seats just one very small driver. It'll never be in the showroom but it may just be the best thing Honda's ever done. Meet the Honda Shogo, which lets pediatric patients drive on the hallways of children's hospitals.

🦌 Oh dear, this is a traffic stop surprise: Pennsylvania Police found a live deer in the trunk of a car during a traffic stop.

🏰 Got $6 million? Make the real estate agent an offer he can't refuse and buy yourself The Godfather's Sicilian castle in Italy.

🤣 Pokemon lovers know that even though he's nearly useless, the bumbling Bidoof will never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down.

🧙‍♂️ Here's a story you can tell your little children or grandchildren: The Wizard and the Unfillable Hole by Nathan W. Pyle. See if they laugh or groan.

🎵 This CGI Rube Goldberg xylophone plays the intro to One Summer's Day, the theme of Studio Ghibli's Spirited Away. Clever!

🐶 Cute of the Day: let the plush Amagami Ham Ham robot bite your finger.

More neat posts: Pictojam, Homes & Hues, Infinite 1UP, Laughosaurus, Pop Culturista, and Supa Fluffy.

🕹️ Featured art: I Want To Play by indie artist DAObiwan. A video game design in the style of the sci-fi I Want to Believe poster.

Current special from the NeatoShop (ends tonight): Save up to 20% on all Anime T-Shirts, Video Games T-Shirts, Board Games T-Shirts, Books & Reading T-Shirts.

A common trope in Victorian melodrama that survives in stories today is the tale of a husband who comes home early and finds his wife with another man. The enraged husband shoots the interloper, and the question goes to the jury of how culpable he is of murder. Will he be acquitted of this crime of passion as a justifiable homicide? A case in Georgia from 1893 turns that story on its head.

When C. F. Stephens suspected his wife of carrying on with his employee Frank Wilkerson, who lived with the couple, he came home early one day and indeed found the two in the bedroom in a "compromising position." Stephens shot Wilkerson, but only wounded him. Wilkerson was armed (and therefore we can assume, not naked), and shot Stephens, hitting him between the eyes. Stephens, incredibly, lived long enough to jot down a note about the incident. Or did he?

Frank Wilkerson was put on trial. Was it murder or self-defense? There were a surprising number of witnesses for a crime of this sort. Read about the Wilkerson murder case at Murder by Gaslight.  -via Strange Company

If anyone has noticed my habit of posting iPhone-related tips and tricks, get ready because here’s another one! 

For iPhone users, clearing the memory storage or cache isn’t as straightforward as it is in Android phones. To compare, there’s an option to simply clear an Android phone’s cache in its settings. For an iPhone, however, things get a little complicated. Check out SlashGear’s tips in clearing your iPhone’s cache here. 

Image credit: Bagus Hernawan

More photos from photographer and astronaut Thomas Pesquet’s stay in the International Space Station were shared by the European Space Agency. After sharing the images of the ISS against the inky blackness of space, and the Earth, the organization shared a photo of the  ISS 250 miles above the Nile Delta in Egypt. The satellite can be seen shining against the darkness of space and the night lights on Earth below. 

Image credit: Thomas Pesquet/ESA

Big Bend National Park reported that a visitor or visitors carved their names and the date in a pictograph panel of a 5,000 years old petroglyph in the park. The boulder and the engravings on it had survived millennia of punishing weather, but all it took for it to be ruined were people who had no right to ‘leave their marks.’

Park service personnel moved as fast as they could to repair the vandalism, but according to Big Bend’s chief of interpretation and visitor services Tom VandenBerg, much of the damage is permanent. 

Image credit: National Park Service

Hey, we’re all here for the drama. All jokes aside, sometimes it's best to part ways if your relationship will only bring harm to each other, right? Well, some couples have outrageous reasons for filing a divorce. Reddit user u/dankph asked divorce lawyers the juicy details that they were willing to share. From a husband thinking his wife was having an affair but the wife was just driving around to play Pokemon Go to another breaking it off with his wife after a car accident made her incapable of giving oral pleasure, Buzzfeed lists several outrageous and outright ridiculous reasons for divorce. Check the full piece here!

Image credit: Afif Kusuma

Long before the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the popular monster movies of Universal Studios started doing crossovers, implying that Dracula, Frankenstein's monster, the Wolf Man, the Mummy, and others all lived in the same universe and time frame. It was a way to churn out more and more sequels, because everyone loves a good monster movie. However, even though these monsters could meet each other, their cinema versions were developed over decades.

That's why it's important to know the difference between Lon Chaney and Lon Chaney, Jr. The older Chaney was known as "the man of a thousand faces" in the 1920s. He played Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame and the title character in The Phantom of the Opera. His son, Lon Chaney, Jr. played the Wolf Man, Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, and a mummy in three movies. This family had a whole universe of monsters in just two actors!

Find out a lot more movie trivia about the Universal monster movies in a list at Mental Floss.

Keep hearing of train burglaries in LA on the scanner so went to #LincolnHeights to see it all. And… there’s looted packages as far as the eye can see. Amazon packages, @UPS boxes, unused Covid tests, fishing lures, epi pens. Cargo containers left busted open on trains. @CBSLA pic.twitter.com/JvNF4UVy2K

— John Schreiber (@johnschreiber) January 13, 2022

If you're still missing that package that you ordered online a while ago, this could be the reason: it's stolen off cargo containers aboard freight trains traveling through southern California.

Apparently, thieves in Los Angeles discovered that stealing packages off people's porches are so ... inefficient, so they moved up the logistics chain: they're now raiding cargo containers on trains.

In the tweet above, photojournalist John Schreiber took videos of thousands of boxes strewn along the railroad tracks near downtown Los Angeles. Trains frequently slow or stop in the area as they arrive at Union Pacific's intermodal facility and thieves simply hopped on the train, break open the cargo containers and grab what's inside. "I'd say every 4th or 5th rail car had opened containers," Schreiber tweeted.

In a letter, Union Pacific wrote that in the last 3 months of the year it had made over 100 arrests of "active criminals vandalizing [their] trains," but the arrested individuals are released from custody within 24 hours.

During the Apollo program, when missions got long enough to require food for astronauts, they had to rely on nourishment like roast beef squeezed from a tube directly intones mouth. Now that astronauts  spend weeks or even months aboard the International Space Station, that fare won't fly. NASA Astronaut Megan McArthur explains how space food is engineered to be as much like normal food as possible, but it still looks like C-rations to us. They don't really cook, because everything they take with them is already fully cooked if needed, but they can warm it up or cool it down in the refrigerator. And since they can't wash dishes, everyone needs to keep up with their own spoon. At about six minutes in, we get to see the chaos of McArthur putting beef in a tortilla and chasing the stray bits around. -via Laughing Squid

Read the title again- this is not a list of the top-selling fast food chains. That ranking would rely heavily on the number of outlets, advertising, and longevity. You can see that list here, and as you might guess, McDonald's is on top. But a new list at Eat This, Not That ranked fast food by what people think of the chains.

According to YouGov, popularity is "calculated by taking the proportion of people who view something positively and showing it as a percentage of all of the people who have given any opinion about that thing, including 'have heard of.'"

This kind of calculation allows a higher ranking for a chain that does not cover the entire nation, and is less weighted toward customers that eat there often as opposed to once in a great while. So which chains benefit from opinions rather than sales? McDonald's came in at #14 in this list. The top chains in favorability lean heavily toward sweets! In fact, five of the top six are chains that specialize in sweet treats. Guess what they may be, then take a look at Eat This, Not That. -via Digg 

(Image credit: Daniel Barcelona)

🔪 Twenty years after enhanced airport security, people are still trying to board airplanes with forbidden items like a meat cleaver above. The TSA has compiled its "Top 10 Catches of 2021" featuring bear spray, antique gun, gun that doubles as a belt buckle, and so on. You'll never guess the number 1 forbidden item.

🪑 This "nervous chair" is afraid that you'll sit on it.

🗺️ The world's largest dungeon map is probably bigger than your dungeon master's basement.

🦀 How do you spy on the Christmas Island red crab during its annual migration? With a robot spy crab, of course.

🚗 The Honda Shogo: A mini motorized car that let young pediatric patients roam around the children's hospital hallways and have a little bit of fun during their hospital stay.

🦷 Marlon Brando's "dental plumper" gave him the jowls of Vito Corleone in The Godfather.

More neat posts: Pictojam, Homes & Hues, Pop Culturista, and Supa Fluffy.

🤡 Hey, hey, kids ... take a look at this featured art: Kamp Krystal Lake by indie artist jorgetiradoart

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