Neatorama

Marvel initiates the rollout of Phase 4 of the MCU with a megatrailer that focuses on the human side of our favorite Marvel superheroes, which pulls us all in as we emerge from isolation and deprivation with a desire to return to human contact. That emotionally sets us up for an impressive schedule of movies over the next few years that will get us back into theaters. Marvel is making up for lost time. -via Metafilter

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Alex Solis did not have to present me with this gruesome interpretation of the famous Super Mario character without his hat on. Listen, the game franchise’s Toad is cute, okay? However, Solis’ nightmare-like interpretation is way too difficult to unsee. The artwork is part of the artist’s series called #UnpopularCultureSeries. If you’re looking for what Toad looks like without his mushroom hat, check out Super Mario Odyssey producer Yoshiaki Koizumi explaining it. For now, good luck unseeing Solis’ creation. Is it creative? Yes, of course. Is it something I didn’t need to see? Yeah!

Image via Creative Bloq

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First-person shooter game Team Fortress 2 will not run if you delete an image file of a coconut from its game files. The discovery of this sent fans into a frenzy (also it’s funny, right?), as removing the image will actually make the game unplayable. The Gaming Bible details how the image holds the entire first-person shooter game:

"In the Love & War update, when particles for the taunts were added, one of the particles were [sic] the unused coconut.vtf," said Reddit user TheThunderGuyS. "It was literally a coconut. Due to some spaghetti code other taunts were linked to this particle, so even though it was unusued [sic], it causes errors and crashes when removed (crash on map load because TF2 preloads everything)." As Valve itself hasn't acknowledged the coconut in Team Fortress 2, it's not known just how entangled the file is with the code and whether it could ever be extracted. Still, it's a funny quirk of one of the most influential games in the multiplayer genre.

Image via the Gaming Bible

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This brilliant woman is the next Martha Stewart. Watch as Anna of The Anna Show mixes ice, candy, and sherbet into a toilet bowl and then puts several flavored sodas into the empty tank in the back. When she flushes the toilet, the ingredients form the perfect party drink (well, absent alcohol) in an eye-catching serving bowl. I want to try this trick at home, but to modify it to create an enormous root beer float.

-via Nag on the Lake

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You could turn the animals into handbags, but you can also choose not to! Developed by Springloaded Games, Let’s Build a Zoo is a zoo management game where you can build your own zoo and fill it with over 500 types of animals. The game’s pixelated art style adds a cute and nostalgic flair as well. Don’t underestimate this game, though. There is a dark and twisted side to game, as PC Gamer details:

One exciting hook of Let's Build a Zoo is the DNA splicing feature, which lets you turn those 500 animal types into hundreds of thousands by mixing up their genes in your lab. If your exhibits are a bit on the bland side, just take a crocodile, a duck, and some science, and whip up a crocoduck. Dr. Moreau would be proud.

Playing god with animal DNA sounds fun, if not exactly ethical. And it sounds like Let's Build a Zoo is going to be keeping tabs on just how evil you might be planning to get:

"Sure, you can build a loving environment for your animals, guests and staff," reads the press release sent to PC Gamer, "but with a fully-fledged morality system, you have the choice to go down an evil path, work your staff to the bone, and essentially turn your zoo into a meat factory."

An adorable pixelated zoo management game with a morality system? I'm definitely interested, and the potential for evil looks like it includes using your alligators to make handbags, your chickens to make drumsticks, and your pigs to make bacon.

I don’t know about you, but the game’s premise has me hooked! I’ll be looking forward to this one when it launches on Steam. In the meantime, if you want to know more about the game, you can check their official website here.

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It’s likely that she didn’t receive the game console. A publisher commissioned the creation of a golden Nintendo Wii and had it delivered to Queen Elizabeth II as part of a publicity stunt back in 2009. Now, twelve years later, the luxurious console is available on eBay for $300,000. The story behind that eBay listing is that the golden Wii landed in the hands of Donny Fillerup, one of the guys behind the website consolevariations.com. Fillerup is now selling some items from his collection as he is looking to buy a new home.

Image via Kotaku

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In northern Scandinavia, cups of coffee get enhanced with cheese. https://t.co/zxtwubmm5P
— Atlas Obscura (@atlasobscura) May 2, 2021

Atlas Obscura introduces us to kaffeost, which is a traditional drink from the Sami people of northern Scandinavia. Place a cube of juustoleipä, which is a type of cheese often made from reindeer milk, into the bottom of a wooden mug. Pour in coffee, which melts the cheese. Drink the mixture or use a spoon to scoop the cheesy mixture into your mouth.

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In the 21st century, any studio planning a summer blockbuster is looking to build a franchise. If it’s a hit, there will be sequels down the road. It wasn’t always so. George Lucas did not have nine movies planned out when Star Wars premiered in 1977. Today’s fans have valid criticism about how the final Star Wars trilogy should have been planned better, but that has nothing to do with what happened in the 1970s. And that sort of criticism has affected discussions of the 1985 movie Back to the Future.

Of course the irony in this is that Back to the Future was not planned as a trilogy; this was a “universe” structured around only one story, with its sequels acting as mere expansions on those initial foundations. Even the “cliffhanger” ending of the first movie, with Marty, Doc, and the original Jennifer Parker (Claudia Wells) piling into a now flying DeLorean to “do something about your kids,” was never meant to be more than a gag.

“We never designed the first Back to the Future to have a sequel,” director Zemeckis confirmed on the 2002 DVD release of Back to the Future Part II. “The flying car at the end was a joke, and it worked as a great joke and a great payoff. Everyone assumed we had this grand design like George Lucas did about Star Wars and had all these sequels. My only hope for Back to the Future ever was that it would make its money back.”

But of course it did, and there were two sequels that only made a trilogy in hindsight. Read how Back to the Future came about and how it ended up with two more movies at Den of Geek. -via Metafilter

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What should do you with any extra Cadbury Creme Eggs around your home? If, for some unknowable reason, you have not eaten all of them, Difford's Guide, a cocktail website, suggests making a drink.

It's a quite complex process. You'll need a week to properly season the ingredients, which include vanilla vodka, Licor 43 liqueur, white creme de cacao, Advocaat liquer, half-and-half, a vanilla pod, and, of course a creme egg.

-via In Love with Drinks

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The Barcelona-based digital design studio Six N. Five worked with industrial designer Arthur de Menenzes to take three common computer error messages, such as the Blue Screen of Death, and turn them into chairs. I'd hesitate to use one as a computer desk chair, lest I jinx my computer.

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In the depths of lake Lucerne in Switzerland, archeologists have discovered a sunken Bronze Age village. The underwater archeologists happened upon the village by accident. Divers from the Office for Urban Development of the City of Zurich were assisting with the installation of a pipeline when they found numerous wooden piles buried underneath a layer of mud. The discovery can rewrite Lucerne’s history, as it suggests that the region was settled much earlier than what was believed. Check All That’s Interesting’s piece on the discovery here.

Image via All That’s Interesting

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Project Catchy Content is a new AI from Adobe that can analyze online content and tell its users if people engage with their content or not. In addition, the project can also tell its users why their website or content is gaining traction or not. According to Adobe’s latest Sneak (or a tease of a new tool to come), the AI promises to analyze online uploads and suggest everything from better colors to tweaked copywriting, in order to get the best possible response, as Fast Company details:

As Steve Hammond, a VP of Adobe Experience Cloud who leads the Sneaks program, explains, the work stems from years of Adobe’s AI research. The company has already developed some powerful AI-based tools for creatives, such as Content-Aware Fill, which uses AI to analyze a scene and fill in plausible objects such as grass or water over a blemish that you’d like to cover up.

“That ability gives Photoshop an understanding between pixels, colors, and patterns,” says Hammond. But he explains that Catchy Content pushes Adobe’s image prowess farther, from editing to a deep evaluation. The AI classifies photos with all sorts of keywords (such as “swimming woman”), deconstructs their color palettes, and analyzes the accompanying text. It can then cross-reference all of this information against what people engage with—highly specific, demographic data—to develop a scorecard for your content.

The system is one giant AI analyzer that correlates what’s on your page to what people read, click, or buy.

[...]

There are no two ways about it: This is a cold and calculating way to view creative work. But it’s also an analytic tool that reaches a lot deeper than existing options such as Google Analytics or Parse.ly, which can often track how well a piece of content on the internet is doing but can offer very little in terms of actionable advice to improve it.

image via Fast Company

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These women in Nepal appear to be running over a wavy surface. Is it liquified soil? It is vegetation on the surface of water? Snopes has not reached a conclusion, but proposes a few possibilities, including a "lawn blister" or bubble of water just below the topsoil.

In the meantime, I agree with Just-Call-Me-Sepp:

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Notable..!!!!👏👏 falto el fósforo no mas... pic.twitter.com/fxGj07cDRQ
— osvaldo vega patriota 🇨🇱 (@Osvaldo04110700) April 29, 2021

A gang of robbers in Chile had the perfect plan. They had trained and prepared for the moment when they would leap out of a van and rob someone at a gas station temporarily distracted by a common task: pumping gas.

Alas, they experienced a major failure in the victim selection process. Or, perhaps, they had simply chosen the wrong venue for this type of robbery. You see, a person holding an active gasoline pump is armed.

This reminds me of an old, golden line: