The Academy Awards Ceremony is this coming Sunday. To get us ready, Screen Junkies gives the mini-Honest Trailer treatment to all nine nominees for Best Picture, with a glimpse at the movie itself, the hype surrounding it, and a punny alternate title for each one. Then there's a look at the trends and similarities among them. Only one of these nine films will win the Oscar, but it won't make a bit of difference for anyone who wasn't involved in making those movies.  

Many stamp collectors love finding stamps from small, faraway nations to add to their collections. But there are only so many nations on earth. A serious philatelist might wrinkle their nose at a stamp from Molossia, Bumbunga, Tui-Tui, or Sealand, because these are micronations that have no real legitimacy. Molossia, for example, is a neighborhood in Dayton, Nevada. However, there are collectors who love these stamps for what they are.

Laura Steward, curator of public art at the University of Chicago, who organized an exhibition of stamps from micronations and other dubiously defined places, believes that these tiny squares are more than a toss-off: They’re art, proof of imagination, and rather sophisticated bids for public recognition. “A postage stamp is a small but mighty symbolic emissary from one particular nation to the rest of the world,” Steward writes in text accompanying the exhibit. “A functioning postal service, made visible in stamps, is an unmistakable expression of national legitimacy…. As a result, the postage stamp is an excellent vehicle for spurious, tenuous, or completely fictitious states to declare their existence.”

Steward even has stamps from Celestia, which is outer space. Read the story of those stamps and others in an interview with Steward at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Laura Steward)

Multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) games have had their roots in the late 90s and the early 2000s. One of the games that heavily influenced the development and the definition of the MOBA game genre is the Defense of the Ancients, which is more commonly known as DotA. It wasn’t a stand-alone game in its first incarnation, however, but rather a mod of the real-time strategy game Warcraft 3, which was developed by Blizzard Entertainment.

Dota was indirectly birthed by Blizzard, which is why they weren’t too happy when rival PC juggernaut Valve put out a game called Dota 2 to massive ongoing success.

In order to prevent the DotA history from repeating itself, Blizzard decided to add new policies alongside the release of the remastered version of Warcraft 3, called Warcraft 3: Reforged.

Users can’t use copyrighted third-party content, so no more bootleg Dragon Ball Z games. Blizzard can delete any custom game for any reason. And all custom games created in Warcraft 3: Reforged automatically become Blizzard copyrights, a policy that would have drastically altered the history of Dota had it been around during the company’s pre-Activision days.

Fans of the game are understandably not too happy about these new policies.

What are your thoughts about Blizzard’s move?

(Video Credit: IGN/ YouTube)

The latest pictofacts article at Cracked gives us plenty to argue about. While most of the cooking tips are fairly good advice, some of them go on to explain the reasoning behind them, which vary from sensible to something totally made up for the show. And the comment section reminds us that people have very particular opinions on cooking.

This one requires more explanation. You should grate your own cheese for sauces instead of using packaged shredded cheese. The packaged stuff has extra ingredients to keep it from caking. The package I have contains potato starch, corn starch, dextrose, and something hard to spell, all to prevent the shreds from returning to solid form.

Maybe you'll learn something, or at least be ready to experiment, by reading all 26 pictofacts at Cracked.

"He was way ahead of his time." Ashley Boone Jr. was the first black president of a major Hollywood studio and helped make George Lucas’ quirky space opera #StarWars a hit — and chances are you’ve never heard of him https://t.co/4XEo9pETgb

— The Hollywood Reporter (@THR) February 6, 2020

Ashley Boone worked his way up the ladder at United Artists to become the head of overseas promotion. He was hired away by various studios until he found himself at Fox in the 1970s, working to promote movies that others had trouble believing in. Boone was innovative: it was his idea to resurrect the failed feature film The Rocky Horror Picture Show by staging midnight showings, and he was the first to open a film at many theaters nationwide on the same weekend. Then came Star Wars.

The film had to sell $32 million ($135 million today) worth of tickets for Fox to recoup its investment, though it secured only $1.5 million in guarantees from theaters. But Boone started thinking outside the box. The summer movie season had always begun in late June, after schools let out. Lucas and Boone argued for opening Star Wars a month earlier, around Memorial Day, on just a couple of screens in big cities, betting that it could attract young people who would spread word-of-mouth while they were still in school. John Krier, then president of Exhibitor Relations, would recall: "Ashley was an astute judge of pictures. He said Star Wars would do over $200 million before anyone had seen the picture."

On May 1, about three weeks before its release, a test audience was assembled in San Francisco, and Ladd, Boone and other Fox execs sat in the back row to monitor reactions. Boone Isaacs — who was working on another 1977 sci-fi film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind — also was there as Boone's guest and, 43 years later, recalls the crowd's reaction: "By the time that Millennium Falcon got across the screen, everybody was standing and screaming. I remember the guys — Laddie, Ashley and all of them — were kind of huddled together and hugging."

Star Wars debuted May 25 in 32 theaters nationwide. According to Pollock, "Boone gambled by opening it on a Wednesday rather than the weekend and began shows at 10 a.m. in New York and Los Angeles. By 8 a.m., when the theater doors opened, there were long lines in both cities."
 

Star Wars was only a part of Boone's legacy, as many other films owe their success to his marketing ideas. Yet today few people know his name. Read the story of Ashley Boone at The Hollywood Reporter. -via Digg

How gross could you get?

An unidentified passenger was spotted drying a shoe through the plane’s overhead air vent. The video, which was submitted by a man named Dylan Miller, and posted on the Instagram account Passenger Shaming on January 16, was viewed over 344,000 times and grossed out many people online.

It was not specified which airline the incident occurred.

I wonder how the plane smelled like during the incident, though I guess it’s a scent I wouldn’t like to smell.

YUCK!

(Video Credit: Toronto Sun/ YouTube)

I would never be a good lip reader, because everything in this Bad Lip Reading compilation looks infinitely plausible to me, yet it's a string of pure nonsense. Good job!

Just when you thought you knew all dog breeds, here comes another breed which was recently discovered. Introducing the platypus dog, which, well, looks more or less like a dog, except for its bill, which looks identical to your missing shoe. These bills vary in shape, size, and color.

See photos of platypus dogs over at Sad And Useless.

(Image Credit: Sad And Useless)

A team of researchers from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and Georgia Tech attempted to trick Tesla’s autopilot system into seeing “phantom objects” and taking them as real images. What they found out was it was really easy to pull off.

A cheap projector system displaying false speed limit signs in trees or shining a Slenderman-like figure onto the road can actually force Autopilot to change behavior, adjusting speed to the "road signs" and slowing down for what it thinks might be a pedestrian (nevermind the fact that the car still runs over the projection).

This would mean that computer vision still has a long way to go to improve their perceptual capabilities. Those who have cars equipped with the Tesla autopilot system, or a similar system to it, however, are prone to danger.

"We show how attackers can exploit this perceptual challenge to apply phantom attacks ... without the need to physically approach the attack scene…

More details about this study over at Popular Mechanics.

(Image Credit: Cyber Security Labs @ Ben Gurion University/ YouTube)

This tiny owl was spotted lying in a ditch near Saxmundham, England. The passerby who spotted her assumed that she was injured, and when she didn’t fly away, it would seem that the assumption was correct. But apparently, that didn’t seem to be the case; there was something else keeping her on the ground.

The Good Samaritan called the Suffolk Owl Sanctuary for help. During an examination, staffers were shocked when they placed the little owl on a scale and discovered that she was roughly a third heavier than they expected.

The owl weighed a little over half a pound — healthy adult little owls tend to weigh closer to a third of a pound. 

“We found her to simply be extremely obese!” Suffolk Owl Sanctuary wrote on Facebook.

The owl, which was aptly nicknamed Plump by the sanctuary, apparently overindulged herself over the holidays. Thankfully, in just a few weeks, she had successfully trimmed down to a more natural weight, and she was released back to the countryside at the end of January. Her carers only wish, however, that she does not overfeed herself again.

(Image Credit: Suffolk Owl Sanctuary/ The Dodo)

You know what they say: time flies when you're having fun. Forty years ago should be ancient times, but it was only 1980. That was the year Mount St. Helens erupted. The year you could buy Apple stock for $22 (or if you had way more money, an Apple computer). The year that angelic child star McCaulay Culkin was born. Some of the things that arose in 1980 seem like they happened just yesterday, while others really do seem like ancient history. Take a nostalgic look back at 1980 and the things that will turn 40 years old in 2020 at Considerable.

Who knew rubber bands could be this elegant and stylish?

A graduating art student from Japan’s Tama Art University, Rie Sakamoto decided to use this lowly stationery item to create a line of garments, which were displayed last week at an exhibition in Tokyo. The results are fantastic!

In her studies of the rubber band, Sakamoto, who is part of the department of Integrated Design, says she realized that the rubber band does in fact have more functionality than immediately meets the eye. In addition to its texture, flexibility and opacity, the rubber band is actually an aesthetically beautiful object. Sakamoto became acutely aware of this when she knitted several together and allowed the sunlight to shine through them.

Check out the photos over at Spoon & Tamago. You can also follow Rie Sakamoto’s Twitter if you want.

(Image Credit: Spoon & Tamago)

This is the rope chair. As its name implies, some parts of this chair are made of rope. These parts are the arms and the back rail of the chair. But why sit on this one? It is because this chair welcomes creativity in your posture, and it adapts to whoever is using it.

This chair, which was unveiled alongside a tupla (“double” in Finnish) wall hook, was announced by Finnish brand Artek. Both products were designed by Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec.

Intriguing.

(Image Credit: DesignBoom)

Whenever a montage of a person working out is shown in a film, I usually hear rock music or upbeat music in the background. Why is this the case? It seems that science holds the enlightening, but unsurprising answer. In a study published in Frontiers in Psychology, it was shown that listening to high-tempo or upbeat music “reduces the perceived effort involved in exercise and increases its benefits.”

These effects were greater for endurance exercises, such as walking, than for high-intensity exercises, such as weightlifting. The researchers hope that the findings could help people to increase and improve their exercise habits.

Find out how upbeat music affects our bodies during exercise, over at Neuroscience News.

(Image Credit: Pixabay)

Most likely once a member of a binary star system, Zeta Ophiuchi had a companion star. Unfortunately, its companion star was more massive, which meant that it was shorter lived. The companion star exploded as a supernova, and Zeta Ophiuchi, which was blown away by the explosion, became a runaway star.

Zeta Ophiuchi is a star about 20 times the mass of our Sun. Found 460 light-years away, it moves toward the left at a speed of 24 kilometers per second.

Zeta Oph is 65,000 times more luminous than the Sun and would be one of the brighter stars in the sky if it weren't surrounded by obscuring dust.

This image was captured by the Spitzer Space Telescope, which retired recently after 16 years of aiding us in the exploration of the cosmos.

(Image Credit: NASA, JPL-Caltech, Spitzer Space Telescope)