Anime Maru is a satirical website. Think of it as The Onion, but for anime fans like me. Today, it offered practical advice that may save my life during this pandemic:

The CDC stated that in several initial trials, wearing an anime shirt in public was shown to cause significantly reduced public interaction. Those who wore a shirt with an anime character printed on it claimed they noticed far fewer people approaching them than usual. Shirts with large graphics of underage characters in suggestive poses or attire were found to be the most effective. Shirts which featured only logos or less pronounced imagery had limited effect on distancing the wearer and were only recommended if nothing else was available.

“The idea is to create a feeling of immense awkwardness around the wearer,” stated CDC Director Robert Redfield. “To be effective, the shirt should cause others to worry about accidentally being associated with you should they stand too close for any period of time.”

If you don't have an anime t-shirt, then an anime hug pillow--a dakimakura, as we otaku call them--will do just as well. In fact, it would probably be even more effective and also permit you to take your waifu out in public.

Then & Now Movie Locations is one of the great, hidden treasures of the internet. The resident blogger, Paul S., travels around the US, photographing locations of iconic scenes from famous movies, most commonly horror movies.

Most recently, Paul traveled to Georgia, South Carolina, Utah, San Francisco, and Washington, DC to track down shots from the 1994 film Forrest Gump.

Where does Forrest wait for the bus at the beginning of the film? He's at Chippewa Square in Savannah, Georgia. You can see more at Then & Now Movie Locations.

If you're hearing impaired and rely upon reading lips to understand what other people are saying, then face masks are a huge obstacle. That's why Ashley Lawrence, a college student in Kentucky who is studying to work with hearing impaired people, designed a mask with a clear plastic covering. News station Lex18 quotes her:

"For anyone who uses speech reading, lip reading, anybody like that," Lawrence said about the purpose of the masks. "And people who are profoundly deaf who use ASL as their primary mode of communication. ASL is very big on facial expressions and it is part of the grammar. So I don't know if you have seen Virginia Moore on Andy Beshear's things at five o'clock, but she's very emotive, and if half of that is gone because you're wearing a mask then half of what you're saying is being missed, so even if it's not physically talking and just using ASL, then you need to have that kind of access." [...]

"I'm not charging anything for them because I think that if you need them, then you need them and I don't think that you should have to pay for them," Lawrence said. "So we are sending them out for free whenever we have people asking for them and if they're foreign, then maybe we'll charge shipping, but other than that they're completely free."

-via My Modern Met

Are you sick of this virtual meeting? You can click on an option in the app to close the meeting. Or you could also physically slap this button unit developed by Jules Ehrhardt.

Question: how much force can the button unit withstand? I don't want to hit mine so hard that it breaks.

The button might, though, need an upgrade of the kind seen in Richard Matheson's famous short story "Button, Button."

-via Super Punch

Inspired by the Tower of Babel from the Book of Genesis, artist Bob Vershueren built a huge birdhouse in Annecy, France. Implantations, as he calls it, was exhibited at the Jardin de l’Europe in 2017.

It's not the most efficient of designs. But it looks more organic this way--as though families of birds have gradually built houses on top of each other as time passed on. You can see more photos at Colossal.

Photo: Annecy Paysages

We are a constant source of embarrassment and disappointment to our dogs. Fishing around in a toilet, especially in public, is something that no decent creature does. They Can Talk reminds us to try to live up to our dogs' hopes for us.

The government of Leon County, Florida implores you to engage in social distancing in order to reduce the spread of the coronavirus. Stay at least six feet apart from each other.

But how much is six feet? Floridians need a guideline that they can readily understand. Alligators are an ordinary part of Florida life (I proposed marriage to my wife next to an alligator pond). So it's sensible to tell Floridians that they should keep an alligator's worth of space between each other.

-via Dave Barry

Cosplayer Jojo says that quarantine hasn't changed her crafting routine. She's always making one cosplay or another. A few days ago, her choice was to send Mary Potter to Hogwarts. But will she be a teacher or a student?

Joanna Wood, an Etsy seller in Chester, UK, dyes skeins of yarn so that they resemble famous works of art, such as Vincent Van Gogh's Starry Night, which is pictured above. Other featured artists include Claude Monet, Wassily Kandinsky, Mark Rothko, and Hokusai.

-via So Super Awesome

Guess Who? is a two-person game that shows a variety of people with different physical traits. One character on each side is selected as the target. Each player takes turns asking if the selected person has a certain appearance until one player correctly guesses the identity of the target.

Etsy seller Bored But Cozy makes versions of Guess Who? that show the characters from popular TV shows, including Friends, The Office, Grey's Anatomy, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and more.

-via My Modern Met

Okay, it can't actually fly, but the Learmousine looks like it's ready to soar off the ground.

Dan Harris of Bend, Oregon began building this beauty in 2005, starting with a custom frame that would support the body of the Learjet. Autoblog describes the extraordinary combination of components that make up this engineering and artistic marvel:

The driver sits in front of an aftermarket four-spoke steering wheel, an instrument cluster from a first-generation Chevrolet Silverado, and four screens that display views from various cameras. Four vertical rows of red toggle switches mounted right above the lone front seat control the lights and the music, among accessories. The rest of the interior is pegged at the unlikely intersection of private jets, limousines, and night clubs. There's everything you'd expect to find in an 18-seater party bus including a 42-inch flat-screen television, a minibar, a 17,000-watt sound system with speakers inside and outside, an infinity floor, plus a lot of neon lights.

Power comes from a mid-mounted, 8.1-liter V8 engine sourced from the Chevrolet parts bin. It spins the rear wheels, but there's no word on what the Learmousine is like to drive. All we know is that it doesn't have to sound like a pickup truck, because the giant speakers embedded in the nacelles can play the sound of a jet engine.

-via Stuff | Photo: Mecum

In American folk history, during World War II, soldiers might find themselves getting free meals at restaurants. "Your money is no good here," a manager might say. Americans knew who their heroes were then, and we still do now.

Allan Marshall of Detroit, Michigan exemplifies this spirit. He had saved up $900 for a personal purchase, but decided to do something better with it. WDIV reports that Marshall held up a sign for two days in front of an Exxon station, offering to pay for gas for nurses, who are among the heroes on today's front lines.

But it gets better.

When Marshall ran out of money, a woman approached him and paid the gas station $200 for additional fuel for the nurses' cars. She said that she felt inspired by Marshall's generosity.

-via Super Punch | Photo: WDIV

Some men just want to watch the world burn. But not Bear. Bear cares. So this Carebear, while on his morning walk in Denali National Park in Alaska, fixes a fallen traffic cone, then continues on his way. The Daily Mail reports on this video by Michael Mauro that dates back a few years:

Mauro wrote on his Instagram account that two bears were actually in the area on a nearby road. He knew the bears (at least one of them) would wander off the road, so he set up a tripod to capture the action. 

'As you saw this bear must have been the responsible older brother and he cleaned up the mess. It just goes to show that you never know what’s going to happen in nature,' Mauro wrote.

-via Geekologie

Ben Afquack began his journey to fame at a farm store in the small town of Anoka, Minnesota. There he met Derek Johnson, a human who discovered Afquack's musical talents and brought them to audiences in the Twin Cities.

You see, Ben Afquack is a prodigious drummer. He has become internet famous, which will hopefully transition into a deal from a major record label. Meanwhile, he's going on adventures with Johnson. The Star Tribune interviewed Afquack's manager, who said:

We take him hiking a lot, and we take him to beaches. He went kayaking with me. I brought him paddleboarding. He rides on the back of my mini motorcycle in the summer, in a pet carrier. We go everywhere on that, exploring different places. [...]

He likes to cuddle, believe it or not. I’ll scoop him up and put his back to my chest and lean back, and he falls asleep on my chest while watching movies.

He’s very playful. He was raised with dogs, so he’ll jump in and play with the dogs.

-via Swiss Miss

Michael Reid, an art dealer in Sydney, Australia, expresses the existential angst that many of us are starting to feel while in quarantine. Like Edvard Munch's inner voice, he screams. Let us all make food art from our stash. But beware: once the cookies are used up, they're gone for food.

-via Lustik