18,000 people live in Kiruna, Sweden’s northernmost city. It’s a mining town in the Arctic Circle. There’s a lot of interesting things to learn about Kiruna and its charming people, but the big move is the most interesting. Iron mining has turned the ground under the city to Swiss cheese, so to speak. To avoid the entire downtown falling into a sinkhole when it collapses, they are moving the town square and the surrounding buildings two miles away.

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Although the move is still a couple of years away, preparations have been going on for quite some time. It won’t be easy, but there’s really no alternative. The mine is too profitable to close down, the huge operation needs the town to sustain it, and the people who live there love their town. -via Digg  

It’s a familiar tale, with a coda that may leave you a bit sad over the "happy ending." Sometimes one person’s great fortune is a tragedy for the next person. This comic is from Pedro Arizpe of the webcomic Port Sherry. -via Geeks Are Sexy

You only have to look at a still image from the HBO series Game of Thrones to know that it’s an expensive production. The cost per episode in 2011 was estimated at about $6 million. But episodes for season six are up to $10 million! Where does the money go? We can assume that the actors are paid well, and it’s a huge cast. Location expenses are understandably high. And as the series goes on, there are more and more special effects. You might think that computer-generated effects are a bargain, but that’s only in comparison to practical effects. There’s no way that practical effects could replicate what Game of Thrones is doing now, no matter what you spend on them. And CGI is not exactly cheap.

The CGI industry acts as an assembly line with a team of 10-12 who processes shots through several stages: Modeling, Tracking, Animation, Dust Busting, BgPrep, FX, Compositing, Lighting, etc. The average time for this process within the team is at least four weeks if not more. This equates to around 1,600 man hour at a minimum without overtime. At $50 per hour, per person, that equates to a minimum of $80K per shot. If a Game of Thrones episode has 10-minutes of CGI, which equates to $800,000.

But that cost pales in comparison with computer resource time, which can take 12 hours per frame. Read about the expenses involved in the production of Game of Thrones at Money, Inc. Meanwhile, you might want to tell your kids about those $50 an hour graphics jobs.

I asked my 3yo daughter to guess the names of 80s and 90s @WWE wrestlers pic.twitter.com/KXC8xrKgpT

— Sean Leahy (@thepunningman) December 2, 2015

Children’s book author Sean Leahy introduced his three-year-old daughter to the world of professional wrestling a few months ago. He asked her to name wrestlers from the Golden Age of wrestling in the US, the ‘80s and ‘90s. She came up with some gems! The last two made it clear that eight is enough of this game.

I asked my 3yo daughter to guess the names of some more 80s and 90s wrestlers pic.twitter.com/vR4B4OuVby

— Sean Leahy (@thepunningman) May 19, 2016

He tried it again this month. Yeah, it’s obvious that there was some creative license taken between daughter and father and Twitter, but the end results are still funny. These names are at least as good as the nicknames they got from the WWF, and more memorable to those outside the wrestling world. -via With Spandex

There are some people in the world that have a gift for spreading happiness. Candace Payne is just sitting in her car, talking about a purchase she just made. The purchase will make you laugh, but Candace will make you laugh even more.

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She streamed this slice on life on Facebook live yesterday, and it has 25 million views already! Mark my words, she'll be on The Ellen Degeneres Show next week. -via reddit

Oh, by the way, if you want to make the same purchase, it's available online.

The following article is from Uncle John’s Funniest Ever Bathroom Reader.

At the top of the superhero list, you’ve got your Superman, your Batman…and then way, way down the list, you’ve got these.

Shamrock

In 1982 artists at Marvel Comics—tasked with creating an Irish superhero—came up the most stereotypically Irish lass possible. Shamrock (Molly Fitzgerald) is the daughter of a militant IRA member and has long red hair. Her superpower: extremely good luck.

Madame Fatal

In this 1940s title, Richard Stanton is a famous actor whose daughter is kidnapped. To get her back, he dresses up like an old lady and uses his “acting skills” to fool the kidnappers into complacency before beating them up and rescuing his daughter. Thus was born Madame Fatal, the butt-kicking old lady who is really a man.

Zsazsa Zaturnnah

By day, Ada is the meek owner of a beauty salon in a small town in the Philippines (where the comic originates). At night, he eats a piece of “magic rock” (whatever that is) and transforms himself into Zsazsa—a muscular, curvaceous, crime-fighting woman.

The Cooper Review explains the realities of work with a flow chart, pie chart, scatterplot, and a couple of other graphs that are mainly about how nothing gets done because we have too many meetings. The meetings are to get updates, so you better get an update ready for the meeting. Maybe that’s why Neatorama functions so well, as we never have meetings. In fact, I’ve never “met” anyone who works here. We tried updates, but they didn’t get many pageviews, so that’s history. See the rest of the charts at The Cooper Review.

Cats love boxes so very much, just ask Maru. Simon Tofield has four cats, so he knows that well. In this episode of Simon’s Cat Logic, Nicky Trevorrow from Cats Protection explains the allure of the simple cardboard box.

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This includes the Simon’s Cat cartoon called The Box. -via the A.V. Club

JBreezyBaby fulfilled a lifelong dream by attending the 2015 Star Wars Celebration and paying to have photos taken the the Star Wars actors. He says he spent his entire tax refund doing it. But these aren’t just fan pictures. He’s re-enacting scenes from the movies! He posted a story for each actor in the gallery at imgur.

Anthony Daniels is the man! The most friendly and gracious actor I had my photo with. He was totally on my level...
Anthony : That's a great shirt
James' brain : oh my god oh my god oh my god oh my god!!!
James' mouth : Mr. Daniells it's a pleasure to meet you. For this picture can I be your counterpart?
Anthony : excuse me?
James' brain : f***, you're blowing it
James' mouth : can I be R2D2 and you C-3P0?
Anthony : nobody has ever asked that before, why not!
As I knelt down I wanted to ask him to put his hand on my head in the classic droids pose, but I got too nervous. But then he just did it! No prompting. We shared a laugh about it after, and we'll share a dream about it forever.

The picture with Carrie Fisher and her dog Gary is the best one of all. You have to read the story behind it. And what did JBreezyBaby do with all these photos? He framed them all to display in an honored spot of his home.

See his photos with Mark Hamill, Billy Dee Williams, John Ratzenberger, and Ian McDiarmid as well at imgur.  -via reddit

A photo posted by Sarah Andersen (@sarahandersencomics) on May 18, 2016 at 7:29am PDT

Sometimes you feel like you’re on top of the world, like maybe you’ve got this whole “life” thing finally figured out. But that doesn’t last long, and soon you’re in the depths of self-doubt and misery. By the time you reach rock bottom, things start to get a little better, but you know by now that any confidence or pride will be temporary. There's always something around the bend ready to smack you back down.  Sarah Andersen knows those feelings well, as she illustrates in her latest comic.

Atlas Obscura is highlighting trees all this week in what they call, appropriately, Tree Week. Among posts about living trees and historical trees, they also pay tribute to trees in fiction. It’s only natural, as literature has been dependent on trees for a thousand years. They bypassed the most obvious choices (The Giving Tree) and introduce us to some literary trees you might not have thought of, like the Tree of Heaven from the book A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

The so-called Tree of Heaven grows outside the window of Francie Nolan, a second-generation Irish-American girl coming of age in Brooklyn at the turn of the century. Just as Francie and her family struggle against the odds to make a life for themselves, the tree too manages to prosper without water, light, or care. Francie grows from a girl to young woman under the harsh conditions of tenement life, enduring poverty, assault, loneliness, and betrayal. Through it all, she maintains a deep and abiding inner strength. Like Francie, the tree that grows out of the cement in Brooklyn is tough, tenacious, and blossoming against all odds. It’s the kind of tree you root for.  

Read about six other literary trees at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit:  Tao Tao Holmes)

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The annual auto race known as the Indianapolis 500 takes place on Sunday during Memorial Day weekend. The race is 500 miles long, and it’s in Indianapolis, which means it was named properly, because the best names confer important information. Otherwise, there’s a lot about the famed race you don’t know. John Green is here to fill you in on the less-important but still interesting information about the race in this week’s episode of the mental_floss List Show.

People who never went camping with their parents are at a disadvantage when they try it on their own, or with other people who’ve never done it before. You don’t know what to expect, or what to take (hint: mosquito repellant), or what to do. These folks are lucky that they knew where to go!

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Nevertheless, they will consider it a success if the pictures look good on Instagram. Later, they will realize that the memories of all those screwups will make great stories for the rest of their lives. And they’ll take their kids camping, so that the next generation will be better prepared. This video is from the Vancouver comedy group IFHT. -via Tastefully Offensive

Mark Rober (previously at Neatorama) decided it would be cool to add water balloons to a trampoline. It was! He and his nephews jumped along with hundreds of small water balloons, which looks really cool in slow motion. Notice that a body will depress the trampoline surface while the balloons "jump" and stay at the same level.

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There’s also a couple of really big water balloons that proved to be super-tough. But even a super-tough balloon can only take so much! A good time was had by all.  -via Viral Viral Videos

In the west African country of Benin, 17% of the population follows the voodoo religion. An annual voodoo festival brings out the fanciest fashions used in voodoo rites.

The idea of the festival is to strengthen the bond that unites families and communities with departed ancestors known as Egungun, a Yoruba word which means, ‘the souls of the dead who have returned to earth for a short time to pass on specific advice to the living’.

To represent these ancestral advice-giving spirits, members of the community masquerade around town in elaborate veiled costumes made from velvet, silk, damask, Indian madras; the best fabrics money can buy. Veils are often made of cowry shell screens to avoid the bad luck of seeing the dancing masquerader’s eyes.

See a collection of photographs of these elaborate costumes at Messy Nessy Chic. -via the Presurfer

(Image credit: Flickr user David Stanley)