Excited to be able to control my air-conditioner with a GameBoy Color, using my own ROM!

(How I built it: https://t.co/K1Rzhx0qbn ) pic.twitter.com/wQGq3iMHQC

— JinGen Lim (@jg_lim) April 27, 2020

Just when we thought that the GameBoy Color was already obsolete, we then find something rather amazing in this late 90’s gadget. Apparently, it can be used to control your air conditioner because of its feature that’s often forgotten — its infrared transmitter/ receiver. This feature…

allowed users to wirelessly share data and play co-op for supporting games, but so few titles used the feature (they didn’t call the system the Game Boy Infrared, after all) that it was often overlooked and is now largely forgotten. But forgotten or not, the infrared communication port is still there along the top edge of the system, and as Singaporean technophile JinGen Lim (@jg_lim on Twitter) looked at it, he got an idea. What if, instead of waiting for the extremely rare opportunity to use the infrared function to play some obscure decades-old game, he used it to help keep his home comfortably cool?

Since the Game Boy Color’s IR transmitter sends out invisible-to-the-naked eye flashes of light, just like a remote control, Lim’s theory was solid.

Lim was apparently inspired by this video that’s been around for quite some time.

Wow!

(Video Credit: JinGen Lim/ Twitter)

Director George Miller began working on an idea for a fourth Mad Max movie in 1998. It didn't hit theaters until 2015, for various reasons. By the time production started, Mel Gibson was too old to play Max, so Tom Hardy got the role. But the real star was Charlize Theron, who played Furiosa. Five years after the movie burned up theaters all over the world, Miller, Hardy, Theron, and more of the cast and crew share their memories of making Mad Max: Fury Road. It was an intense nine months spent in the Namibian desert, performing non-stop stunts, which you can get a glimpse of in this video. 

“Like anything that has some worth to it, it comes with complicated feelings,” Theron said. “I feel a mixture of extreme joy that we achieved what we did, and I also get a little bit of a hole in my stomach. There’s a level of ‘the body remembers’ trauma related to the shooting of this film that’s still there for me.”

“It was one of the wildest, most intense experiences of my life,” said the actress Riley Keough, while her co-star Rosie Huntington-Whiteley added, “You could have made another movie on the making of it.” As for Hardy? “It left me irrevocably changed,” he said.

Here, in the cast and crew’s own words, is how a nearly impossible project managed to become an Oscar-winning action masterpiece.

Read the crooked path Mad Max: Fury Road took from concept to silver screen, the difficulty of the actual shooting, and its lasting legacy in this oral history. -via Metafilter

This genius student almost got away with his trick. Oh, if only he spelled "reconnecting" right!

Image Credit: imgur / u/reddericks

Mitch Hedberg famously said, "This shirt is dry clean only. Which means... it's dirty." Certainly a relatable joke, with the expense and time involved in taking clothing to a dry cleaner. But sometimes you can clean garments labeled "dry clean only" at home, if you are careful.

Sure, the label on your blouse might say “dry-clean only,” but is there any wiggle room? According to Gwen Whiting, cofounder of The Laundress, there is. “The instructions found on care tags aren’t necessarily the best way to clean an item but are instead a way for manufacturers to avoid getting blamed for irreparable damage when instructions aren’t followed,” she told Glamour. “When manufacturers default to dry-cleaning care instructions, it’s to push the responsibility to the dry cleaners rather than themselves.”

There comes a point when the risk is worth it, when the garment is too dirty to wear and too old to justify the expense of a professional cleaning. I once threw two leather jackets in the washing machine since otherwise I would have to pay more than their original prices to be cleaned, and they came out fine. Your mileage may vary. But you might be able to squeeze some more wear out of your dry-clean-only clothing with some laundering tips from Lifehacker.

(Image credit: Carrielwilson)

In a new episode of The Watcher’s Top 5 Beatdown, Hoai-Tran Bui joins the boys to rank her top five Pixar films. Bui is a writer at Film and host of the Millennial Falcon podcast. Do you agree with her or the boys’ top five? Do you have a ranking of your own? 

Touchwood Design Inc. were inspired by World War II government public service announcements to create posters to address the current situation. The series of posters, called Repurpose With A Purpose, reminds people to wash their hands, observe a 14-day quarantine after travel, stop hoarding food, and to practice social distancing. Plain Magazine has more details: 

The multidisciplinary design studio adapted the simple, visual and straightforward style of these recognised posters to our address our current situation. It’s a visual campaign that effectively gets the message across, taking the firm stance of its past purpose into the present. “We recycled them and gave new meaning to help educate, inform and remind us that we’ve faced terrible things before, and we’ll get through this together,” the studio says.

image via Plain Magazine

Recycling in ancient times? Pompeii had it! New discoveries revealed that the ancient city sorted rubbish into different piles. Large piles of ancient garbage were found outside Pompeii’s fortification wall,  and in and around the tombs of the city. Professor Allison Emmerson of Tulane University interpreted these piles as sorting systems, as Hyperallergic detailed: 

“Since the earliest excavations of the eighteenth century, large piles of ancient refuse had turned out outside Pompeii’s fortification wall, in and around the tombs that Roman law relegated to the same area. Past interpretations had viewed these waste mounds as akin to modern landfills, signifying the separation between the zone outside the wall and the city within it, even going so far as to see nearby tombs as abandoned and no longer visited by friends and family of the deceased.”

Garbage turned up in association with monuments that were still in active use, where the living continued to bury their dead and return for regular commemoration. Discarded materials like mortar and plaster, and crumbled tiles and amphorae, were utilized to build walls; the piles of abandoned material were intended to be resold within the city.

“I began to realize that ancient attitudes towards garbage must have been quite different from our own,” said Emmerson. “That point became even clearer as I continued excavations in the city center (with the University of Cincinnati’s Pompeii excavation, directed by Steven Ellis).”

image via Hyperallergic

Savannah-based Bethany Bickley breathes life into fiction through her creative paper sculptures. Bickley uses torn pages from books and magazines to create her sculptures. Her work represents imagined visuals in fiction, as Colossal details: 

Among her bookish sculptures are the iconic pear tree from Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, a seated Esther Greenwood from Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, and an amalgam of weapons and detective objects to symbolize the thriller genre. In a statement, Bickley said she merges narrative and imagery “to tell a story with impact and purpose. If there are no visuals, I create them.”

image via Colossal

The Shrek movies have their own quirks that can only be accepted in a fictional universe. With that being said, there’s one aspect of the franchise that still bugs me to this day: how did the dragon and Donkey procreate? Even if it is somehow possible for them to have their children because it’s fiction, the science behind it is still something you can think about. Are there other aspects of the Shrek movies that’s weird to you? Or does this take the cake? 

image via Buzzfeed

The long-awaited sequel to the 1982 film Blade Runner finally came out in 2017. Blade Runner 2049 was praised by critics and received five Oscar nominations, but audiences weren't all that enthused. The box office take was disappointing, and the film ended up losing money. Maybe that was because it was more than two-and-a-half hours of slow dialogue punctuated by occasional violence. Screen Junkies gives us many other possibilities in this Honest Trailer.

Would you like to drink a tapeworm?

Me, too!

The legendary blogger Minnesotastan of TYWKIWDBI introduces us to the tapeworm shot. The Tipsy Bartender says that you'll need vodka, black pepper, tabasco sauce, and mayonnaise. You could, I suppose, also add an actual tapeworm for realism. But I won't.

This knitted blanket took only two hours to knit. With modaknit’s huge tools and yarn, they were able to create a huge knitted blanket! The project took them two years to start, twelve hours to prepare the yarn, and two hours to knit. The dedication, time, and effort is truly admirable

image screenshot via Tumblr

It’s edible glue! Japanese designers have taken things to the next level with the honey liquid glue stick. The special-edition glue sticks are filled with honey, You can now spread your honey on your toast or pancake like glue! The makers of the product pointed out that the tube is made of food-grade plastic, unlike the typical plastic glue tubes. Don’t get any ideas on filling your glue sticks with honey! 

image via soranews24

A woman driving a red minivan ran over some graves at the Houston National Cemetery. She was seen by people who went to the cemetery to attend the Lone Star Flight Museum flyover, which commemorated the end of World War II in Europe. The bizarre incident outraged families attending the ceremony and visiting their relatives’ graves, as abc13  details: 

Amanda said a woman driving a red minivan was in a hurry to leave as soon as the flyover ended.

"She tried to back up, and then went up on the curb of the section where my grandparents are buried," she explained. "[The woman] couldn't get around some cars, and then she started running over the graves."

Hill said in all, the driver tried to get around the traffic jam three times.

"She went over dozens of graves by the time she finished," said Amanda.

By then, onlookers were yelling at her to stop, and 19-year-old Jeremiah Johnston was recording it on his cell phone.

"I was shocked, and never would have expected that to happen," he said. "This is Houston, and there are crazy drivers, and I never would have expected to see them going through a cemetery. Especially when everyone was there to pay their respects during a patriotic flyover."

Amanda said the driver's window was down.

"She heard us yelling at her to stop, and just kept doing it. My mother approached the van, and the driver told her she had to get out."

image screenshot via abc13 

In a series of short comics, Nic Koller showcases some imagined scenarios between famous artists and their parents. His comics include Pablo Picasso and Jean-Michael Basquiat. Can you name all the artists Koller included in his comics? 

image via The New Yorker