The ninth, or possibly tenth, movie in the Fast & Furious franchise is called simply F9, or sometimes F9: The Fast Saga, or maybe Fast & Furious 9. At any rate, that's so many movies that the main cast has wandered far from the world they inhabited in the first film, yet they continue to use the same action movie tropes to reel in an audience. Screen Junkies is well aware of this, and so they had plenty of material for this Honest Trailer.
It’s true that the more advanced our technology becomes, older people have a harder time adapting with them. While there’s no questioning their ability in digesting and consuming information, the pace at which technology advances gets too fast for them to cope up with. They try their hardest, and that’s what matters, right? Sometimes, their efforts result in some ...hilarious instances. It is funny and cute, and is in no way a slight against them! Bored Panda compiles some top moments when old people get outwitted by modern technology. Check the full piece here!
Image credit: Bungalowbeast
For 32 years, actor Peter Falk played the role of Frank Colombo, a LAPD detective who could intuitively know who had committed murders that he investigated. In 69 television movies, Colombo gradually ensnared each murderer who thought that he was far too clever for the seemingly erratic, dim-witted detective.
Falk played other roles, including the grandfather in The Princess Bride. But he best known as Colombo.
Yet Falk did far more than just act. He was also an artist. A tweet by Diane Doniol-Valcroze alerted me to his self-portraits as Colombo. Pictured above is one sold by the Bonham's action house.
DeviantArt has noticed the amount of artworks posted on their site being stolen and sold as tokens online. In order to protect their users, the company has begun to fight against these thieves. The online art gallery has launched an AI-powered tool that raises alarms when one of its members’ artwork is found to be stolen and sold by someone else as a NFT:
Liat Karpel Gurwicz, chief marketing officer of DeviantArt, told Motherboard that the expansion of DeviantArt’s protection tool to cover NFTs came after a devastating period for the community. Qing Han, a “well-known and beloved” artist best known as Qinni, passed away in February 2020 and had her art stolen and sold as NFTs. “And it was at that point that we felt that we needed to look into what we could do to offer our artists protection, beyond just our own platform,” Gurwicz said.
NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, are cryptographic signatures stored on the blockchain that are supposed to prove ownership of the digital work in question. Its immutable record of ownership and provenance has convinced crypto investors to pay huge sums of money to claim ownership to a jpeg. Even if it’s just a rock jpeg based on free clipart.
[...]
DeviantArt said in a blog post that artists can focus on creating because its AI will do the detective work and “scan public blockchains and third-party marketplaces for potential art infringements.” The platform will also deploy an army of human moderators so as not to leave the final word to AI since automated image detection technology can so easily mess up. If a near-identical match is detected, users will get a notification on the site.
Image credit: Vice
Sound baths are a great way to focus during meditation. With the current situation over our heads, sometimes we feel the need to relax and destress. Sound baths and sound therapy are used in meditation to help people focus and stay present, bringing them back to the moment, as Tara Atwood shares to Lifehacker:
“Sound healing therapy uses aspects of sound and music to improve physical and emotional health and well-being,” she says. “Rich, audible tones and invisible frequencies are heard and felt, and our bodies naturally resonate with the frequencies emitted into the space, restoring normal vibratory frequencies from out-of-harmony parts of the body, mind, and soul, while encouraging a deep state of relaxation and healing. The frequencies of sound and audible tones have deep effects on our breath, blood flow, cellular movement, biorhythms, thoughts, and our brain waves.”
Atwood uses ancient Tibetan singing bowls and pure quartz crystal alchemy bowls for her sound baths, but you can start a little smaller. She said you can even use your voice to hum and create vibrations.
To learn more about sound bath meditation, check Lindsey Ellefson’s full piece here!
Image credit: JD Mason
It’s a majestic sight, and it provides shade-- how nice! Spanish crochet teacher Eva Pacheco and her students created a massive crochet canopy that covers a shopping corridor in Alhaurín de la Torre. The canopy, which was established as a project three years ago to bring a sustainable shade to the area, is made up of multiple crocheted squares:
[...]Since then, Pacheco and her students have continued adding to their creation—using recycled fabric in a variety of vibrant colors—so that it now covers almost 500 square meters (5, 381 square feet).
As people walk underneath the ongoing masterpiece, they can admire a variety of different patterns, including geometric, floral, and abstract. Not only does this covering provide shade for shoppers, but it also decorates the street with whimsical art.
Image credit: Alhaurin de la Torre.
This feat would have been amazing if not for its environmental implications. For the very first time (in recorded history), it has rained at the summit of Greenland’s ice sheet. This was most likely caused due to the massive heat waves that the country has been experiencing, with temperatures at the glacier’s summit rising above the freezing point:
"There is no previous report of rainfall at this location, which reaches 3,216 meters (10,551 feet) in elevation," NSIDC reported, noting the amount of ice lost in one day was seven times more than the daily average for this time of year.
On August 14, 2021, temperatures rose above freezing on the summit of Greenland, fueling a rain event that dumped 7 billion tons of water—the heaviest since records began in 1950. pic.twitter.com/EyTDhS80f5
— National Snow and Ice Data Center (@NSIDC) August 18, 2021
"Greenland, like the rest of the world, is changing," University of Colorado Boulder glaciologist Ted Scambos told The Washington Post. "We now see three melting events in a decade in Greenland - and before 1990, that happened about once every 150 years. And now rainfall: in an area where rain never fell."
"Like the heat wave in the [US Pacific] northwest, it's something that's hard to imagine without the influence of global climate change."
Image credit: Annie Spratt
12 frames of stop motion animation I made using knitting! Process video out now as well! 🐑 pic.twitter.com/zFUR5G7Ulg
— Chloe Lemay (@chloe_glow) August 10, 2021
Chloe Lemay is a professional animator and a yarn crafter as well! This sequence of sheep jumping over a fence is the result of hand-knitting. Don't try counting them, because you might fall asleep. But do turn the sound on. Here you can see how she made the video.
Lemay first drew the cartoon, then pixelated each frame on graph paper, then knitted a dozen squares by the pattern for each one. Did they end up on a sweater? No, but they sure made a cool wall hanging!
-via Nag on the Lake
While the rest of the world is turning off lights to save energy, the Orkney Islands are producing so much clean renewable energy that they don't know what to do with it! To be honest, there are plenty of things they can do with it, but the necessary infrastructure is not quite there yet, so they are looking in many different directions to keep from wasting it. The obstacle, of course, is money. Sadly, according to an Orkney resident in the comments, one thing the power companies haven't considered is dropping the price of electricity for local residents, so they still burn coal and oil to heat their homes, if they don't have their own turbine.
The village of Trasmoz, Spain, has only a few dozen year-round residents, but it's a mecca for thousands of people who take part in their witchcraft festival every July. Or visit their sorcery museum any time of the year. Trasmoz is a cursed village, and has taken that status to heart, becoming the Spanish equivalent of Salem, Massachusetts.
Its unorthodox past goes back to a series of squabbles that began more than 700 years ago. At the time, Trasmoz was a prosperous community of Christians, Jews and Arabs with a powerful adversary: the neighbouring monastery of Veruela.
A quarrel between the two over whether villagers could fell trees in the area for firewood came to a head in 1252, leading the monastery’s abbot to demand that Trasmoz be excommunicated from the Catholic church. “One could call it a tantrum,” said Ruiz.
I didn't know a town could be excommunicated. But that was only the beginning. Another dispute 250 years later saw the abbot put a curse on the town. The villagers mainly shrugged and went on with their lives. Afterward, Trasmoz's reputation provided a handy cover for crimes, such as counterfeiting and even murder. But when other Spanish villages began to use local themed festivals to draw tourists, Trasmoz knew what it had to do. Read about the cursed village of Trasmoz at The Guardian.
This photo above, titled "Ohhh Nein" by Doris Dörfler-Asmus, was one of the over 606,000 photos from 170 countries submitted to the CEWE Photo Award 2021. It was shortlisted in the category Animal.
View more fantastic animal photos from the competition over at our new cute animals and pet site Supa Fluffy.
Image: Doris Dörfler-Asmus/CEWE Photo Award 2021
Meet the X-Men Princesses, a series of mash-up artwork of what Disney's Princesses would look like if they were X-men mutants. This marvelous (ahem) artwork series is drawn by the talented illustrator and comic artist Marcus Williams (AKA Marcus the Visual).
Pop Culturista, our new pop culture site, has the gallery, X-Men Princesses: Disney Princesses and X-Men Mash Ups by Marcus The Visual
Images: Marcus The Visual
Paul Rantham's company specializes in turning shipping containers into offices and bathrooms. One day in 2016, while on a trip to Palm Springs, he got an idea of turning shipping containers into swimming pools, and thus Modpools was born.
During the lockdown period last year, Rantham's company saw a huge increase in demand as people couldn't travel and decided to put in swimming pools in their backyard instead.
Homes & Hues has the story Modpools: Turning Shipping Containers Into Swimming Pools
Image: Modpools
According to his bio, Chicago-based digital artist Doctor Photograph is an expert in creating "doctored images, fake cover art and bootleg toys." So his images may be fake, but the laugh he got from his imaginary items are quite real!
Take a look at a compilation of Doctor Photograph's fake grocery items over at Pictojam. Here's 30 Grocery Items That Don't Exist But Should.
Images: Doctor Photograph
Don't just bring a bag. Bring a roll of bags. You need a backup plan in case your dog is backed up. Listen to your dog's warnings.
