With all the many surprises — with most of them being bad surprises — that have happened since the beginning of this year, it might take a one in a billion chance for a person to say that he loves this year. And when we do get to time travel in the near future, I doubt that one would be willing to go back into this year.

Image via Slice of Mallow on Facebook

Ross McSweeney built this lovely hand-cranked wooden kinetic sculpture of a boat being tossed by ocean waves. It also includes fish jumping around it. It's just one of his kinetic sculptures you can see at YouTube or Instagram. McSweeney is working on making plans for his automatons available so that you can try them yourself. -via Laughing Squid

The retro handheld console FunKey S is small but powerful! The console can run Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, SNES and PlayStation titles, but you’ll need to get used to its very small screen. The FunKey S has the dimensions of 42.5 x 44.5 x 13.8 mm, and is built around open-source hardware and software. The novelty gadget is being sold for £57. Would you purchase one? 

image via nintendolife

Some people spend huge amounts of money to get the orthodontic treatments they need to realign some parts of their teeth. Having a metal wire attached to your teeth is both a pain and a nuisance, but braces are a guaranteed method for fixing one’s crooked teeth. With all the pain and money people pour into treatments that can make your appearance look better, one can’t help ask the question, “is it really necessary to undergo these treatments?” According to history, orthodontic treatments weren’t to prevent health problems, but to create a more attractive profile, as Slate details: 

Norman Kingsley, considered one of the early fathers of orthodontics, was a classically trained sculptor. During his day job as a dentist in New York, he applied his understanding of facial symmetry to the faces of patients, diagnosing what he referred to as “irregularities” and “deformities.”

“This was probably the cornerstone of the medicalization in orthodontics,” said Alexander Spassov, an orthodontist and researcher in Greifswald, Germany. Angle’s criteria gave orthodontists a measure that could supposedly identify which bites needed treatment and which didn’t. Still, the transformation of orthodontics into a medical specialty was gradual and hard to trace back to a specific moment in history, Spassov said. For example, although Angle did help establish the specialty by founding both the first orthodontic school and the American Society of Orthodontists (today the AAO), he made no mention of health benefits, Spassov added. It was only later, perhaps after World War II, that orthodontics began to be seen as a preventative treatment for various ills, Ackerman said.

image via Slate

Look, it’s summer. It’s hot, and sometimes you’d want to consume ice cream to ease the heat. However, it isn’t a great experience if the ice cream melts before you finish it, right? Ice cream tastes better cold or frozen, and this bowl can keep your ice cream cold while you savor it. HOST’s Ice Cream FREEZE is a plastic bowl insulated with a cooling gel that keeps its contents cold for hours. Just make sure to store it in the freezer for at least four hours before you use it! 

image via Mental Floss

Seventeen-year-old Brynjar Karl Bigisson from Iceland spent 700 hours building the largest LEGO Titanic replica in the world. He used a whopping 56,000 LEGO bricks to build the seven-meter(26-feet)- long model. This project decided to build this project as a homage to the famous liner when he was ten years old, as Bored Panda detailed: 

“LEGO has been an important part of my life since a very early age,” Brynjar told Bored Panda. “Because of my poor social and communication skills, I was always on my own, playing by myself, so LEGO bricks became my best friends.”

“While building with LEGO, I was using and developing my imagination and creativity. I don’t remember feeling lonely, I was too busy building something.”

“My mother helped me to set up a crowdfunding page, so I was able to raise the money I needed to buy the LEGOs. Also, I was offered space in a warehouse to build the model and I came every day after school and built for 3-4 hours for 11 months until I finally finished my LEGO Titanic model.”

Brynjar said he feels really thankful that his story is an inspiration to other kids and parents who are going through autism diagnoses and are scared about the future.

“I know that my family was worried and that is completely normal because they only had the Rain Man stereotype to compare their experience to. Today, we know much more about autism,” Brynjar explained.

image via Bored Panda

We were charmed by the 1982 Steven Spielberg movie E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. It's such a universally-loved film that Screen Junkies had a bit of a problem coming up with enough snarky material for an Honest Trailer. So they did something different: they combined an Honest Trailer for E.T. with an Honest Trailer for another movie that tried to be E.T. The comparison is spot-on, while the contrast is the joke.

Help him scratch his ear, quick! Watch this short video posted by Twitter user @minoovo of a cat happily lying down on the couch. Poor cat was trying to punch itself in the face! It took me a few times of replaying the clip (without reading the original caption) that it was trying to scratch his ear. 

he doesn't realize he can't scratch his ear while lying down pic.twitter.com/lR17ph2VM3

— ياسمين (@minoovo) July 26, 2020

image screenshot via Twitter

The image above is of a painting called Tree Roots. Vincent van Gogh was working on it on July 27, 1890. That evening he shot himself in the chest, and he died the next day. The exact location of the real-life tree roots has recently been discovered, about 150 metres from where van Gogh was staying. The discovery came from examining an old postcard.

The scene in Tree Roots, a painting of trunks and roots growing on a hillside near the French village of Auvers-sur-Oise near Paris, was first spotted on a card dating from 1900 to 1910 by Wouter van der Veen, the scientific director of the Institut Van Gogh.

Following a comparative study of the painting, the postcard and the current condition of the hillside, researchers at the Van Gogh Museum and Bert Maes, a dendrologist specialising in historical vegetation, concluded that it was “highly plausible” that the place where Van Gogh made his final brushstrokes had been unearthed.

Although it no longer looks the same, the site was located, and a wooden fence was erected around it Tuesday for protection. Read more about the tree roots that inspired van Gogh at the Guardian. -via Damn Interesting

A list of scary but not gory horror movies will draw the attention of 1. people who like the thrill of horror, but become ill at the sight of blood and gore, 2. those of us who decry the cheap tactics of blood-and-guts movies and long for the days of carefully-crafted suspense and dread, and 3. people who have spent months binge-watching TV series at home and want to try something different. That's probably most of us, in one category or another. The list was compiled by Beth Elderkin, who has a condition that makes her pass out at the sight of blood. Yet she is a movie buff, and keeps watching so that you don't have to.

I used to faint a couple of times per year until I learned to mitigate it, although it can still happen (the latest episode was in January). Since then, I’ve gotten to the point where I can watch an episode of Game of Thrones or Westworld, but I have to close my eyes occasionally. And don’t even get me started on scary movies. Some of the best horror films and franchises of our time, like Get Out, The Witch, American Horror Story, and Crimson Peak are pretty much off the table. I can sometimes work my way around them if I close my eyes a bunch, but what’s the fun in that? Sometimes I want to be free to be scared, without worrying if it’s going to make me keel over.

Check out the ten films at io9.

The Nintendo data leak may have just happened recently, but people combing through the leaked data already have found juicy stuff for gamers all over the world, like the tool that video game programmer Dylan Cuthbert used for StarFox 2 (an SNES game which was supposed to be released in mid-1995), the prototype title screen for Super Mario Kart, a prototype version of Yoshi’s Island, and a hidden Luigi texture in Super Mario 64. And, apparently, Luigi had an unused character graphic asset in Super Mario World, and this shows him giving the player the middle finger.

Know more information about these leaks over at Kotaku.

(Image Credit: axoonium/ Twitter)

Jaden ‘Wolfiez’ Ashman from Essex ranked in the Fortnite World Cup last 2019. The fifteen-year old player was the youngest player to win a million dollars! BBC checks in with Ashman one year later, to see if he fulfilled his promise to buy his mom a house. Check the full video here. 

image via wikimedia commons

Yoora Jung hopped on the trend of sending quizzes to her past crushes. Forget the letters Lara Jean wrote to all her crushes in To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before, this one takes the cake for being straightforward! She sent a Google Form link to her crushes, which she admitted was out of her comfort zone. If you need the courage to go and confess to your crushes, maybe watching this video can give you the boost! 

Auntie Anne’s Pretzels is famous for their delicious pretzels (which are honestly my favorite snack). But did you know that the founder of the store initially bought a pretzel store to fund her and her husband’s counseling center for women? The origin story of Auntie Anne’s isn’t as bright as you’d expect, as Cracked details: 

She was well on the path to traditional Amish wife-and-motherhood until one of her young daughters was killed in a tractor accident, which -- if any comfort can be found in such a situation -- is at least an extremely Amish way to go.

Because people in some religious communities don't so much as change their underwear without consulting their church leader, Beiler sought help with her grief from her pastor ... who proceeded to rape her and manipulate her into a six-year coercive sexual relationship. When Beiler finally broke her silence, she blew the lid off a jar of theological deceit that was way more full than she ever guessed. It turned out the pastor had been doing the same thing to basically every woman she knew, including all of her sisters. 

That's actually why she bought her first pretzel shop in 1988. Her husband wanted to open a counseling center where women could seek free help that was guaranteed not to end in sexual torture, but the Amish are not known for their vast wealth, so she bought a local pretzel shop that happened to go on the market at a deep discount to fund the venture.

image via wikimedia commons

Regarding the title, one could argue that no one in Britain knows what an inch is now, because they use meters and centimeters. But that's not what this is about. Any measurement must have standards. While measurements are now defined by physics and can be accurately recreated, those standards were once physical. So what happens when the standard prototype is destroyed? That happened when the British Parliament building burned down in 1834. Tom Scott tells the story, and a short history of measuring standards.