We have reached the end of 2015, the traditional time to look back and take stock of the year before plowing into a new one. I went through the archives and found the most-viewed and most viral posts and ranked the top twenty. The raw numbers mean little, because posts from January and February had a big head start over those in December. But it's fun to take another look at the ones that really impressed us long ago as we remember 2015. Click the title to go to each post.

20. Magnificat

Look at him. Just look at him!

19. How To Connect With Anyone

In January, we posted How to Fall in Love, which described a process that tends to make people fall for each other. In February, we got to watch it happen.

18. The Wonderful World Of Wonder Woman Cosplay

Wonder Woman comes in all shapes, sizes, ages, and flavors. Cosplayers can get prett creative intheir interpretations, combining the iconic Amazon with other characters. Zeon Santos found thirty great examples. Shown here is cosplayer Meagan Marie.

17. Women’s Ideal Body Types throughout History

This past year has seen a trend of historical recreations showing how things change over time: fashion, food, toys, and even people. Buzzfeed gave us a video that showed how what was considered the ideal woman's body changed through the ages.

Vimeo user cj uploaded a video from a deaf family friend who encountered a young deer that had fallen into a frozen lake. After pulling the deer out, he pulled out a camera to tell the story -while the deer stood by!

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Redditor ceejface (cj) provided a translation of the sign language.

I was driving along when I see this deer struggling to survive. I felt obligated to help her, so I pulled over, trekked through the woods, and crawled out onto the ice. I used a rope to pull her out. I am so glad she is safe. Now we need to find her mom.

[pets deer] I will call her Miss Ice River. She must be so cold. I am so happy that she survived. Farewell.

That was followed by a discussion on the difference between one-handed and two-handed sign language, as the guy had to use one hand to hold the camera. -via Uproxx

Update: the original video was pulled, and in its place we have embedded a news report.

My new favorite Star Wars female character, Rey with her bengal. #griz #grizandnorm #kittycatclub #starwars #fanart #bengal #cat #kitty #Rey

A photo posted by Griz and Norm Lemay (@grizandnorm) on Dec 18, 2015 at 2:31pm PST

Disney animators Griz and Norm Lemay have a fascinating gallery of their work on Instagram. It’s pretty heavy on Disney characters, which is reasonable, and cats, which is delightful. A recent series imagines Star Wars characters with their cats, following the idea that people select cats that resemble themselves. Above is Rey with her Bengal, and below you see BB-8 with a clowder of calicos.

Fluffy calico kitties really love BB8. Also our holiday sale starts at midnight; everything is 20% off, enter code HOLIDAY2015 (Link in profile) #griz #grizandnorm #kittycatclub #starwars#fanart #cat #kitty #bb8 #calico

A photo posted by Griz and Norm Lemay (@grizandnorm) on Dec 20, 2015 at 6:15pm PST

Continue reading to see more. -via Geeks Are Sexy

Have you made any New Year resolutions? Did you keep any of last year’s resolutions? Do you have any illusions that 2016 will be different somehow? Maybe you should try a little reverse psychology, like Chris at Lunarbaboon. Then you can be proud of your failure!

Simone Giertz built a chopping machine. Just those six words is enough to terrify those of us who’ve seen her other gadgets. She introduced the machine in a video which shows it to be basically two huge knives connected by a motor. Terrifying. And now she’s made a parody commercial ad for the Chopping Machine. Contains NSFW text.

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This video shows us all the features of the Chopping Machine and, if you read between the lines, doubles as a soap opera. -via Viral Viral Videos

You know the story of Joseph Pujol, also called Le Petomane, who made a living by farting on stage. Pujol was only the best known of a raft of fartists who entertained by expelling gas, with a history going back hundreds of years. Of all the minstrels that entertained King Henry II in 12th-century England, only one is mentioned by name.

Referred to variously Rowland le Sarcere, Roland le Fartere, Roland le Petour, and Roland the Farter, Roland really had one job in the court: Every Christmas, during the court’s riotous pageant, he performed a dance that ended with “one jump, one whistle, and one fart”, executed simultaneously.

For this, Roland was gifted a manor house in Hemingstone, Suffolk, and more than 100 acres of land. For farting on cue.

Roland’s career hinged on the king’s sense of humor, and the next king didn’t care much for farting as entertainment. There were also the bruigedoire (farters) of Ireland, Kirifuri-hanasaki-otoko of Japan, Pujol, and Mr. Methane, in addition to many references to artists who remain nameless in the records. Read about them and the future of farting at Atlas Obscura. -via Digg

Walter McDougall was America’s first syndicated cartoonist. He was a newspaper artist from the 1870s to the 1920s, doing caricatures, political cartoons, and other art, but he is especially remembered for his comic strips that featured terrifyingly silly monsters that threatened children. McDougall’s strips ran under many names in different publications at different times. He even collaborated with L. Frank Baum on a strip that ran two years to promote Baum’s second Oz book. 

   

Monster Brains has an archive of many of McDougall’s fantastic monsters from the Library of Congress. While some have prosaic names like dragon, chimera, pterodactyl, and ogre, others get delightful names like moon calf, wamguzzle, terrabilis, glossary, rambillicus, quidnunc, skeewink, spookissimus, colliwobble, and gastritis. The gastritis has a particularly apt name for his appearance and behavior.

The following is an article from The Annals of Improbable Research, now in all-pdf form. Get a subscription now for only $25 a year!

by Csikszentmihalyi Aeiou, Improbable Research staff

Undersea pleasure can be had from either of two devices invented by Charles Williamson and his son John Ernest Williamson. But new levels of pleasure are likely to arise submarinally if the two inventions are used in combination.

Charles created an easy means for viewing — that is, it provides a place from which underwater views can be had by an ordinary person who need not trouble to wear any special diving suit. Details are in his patent: “Submarine Pleasure Apparatus,” U.S. patent 1016808, issued Feb 6, 1912, to Charles Williamson. The document explains:

The submarine pleasure apparatus of my invention consists of a submergible caisson at the bottom of which is provided a chamber of suitable dimensions equipped with observation windows placed at angles to the horizontal and vertical in such a manner that objects on the bottom and above the bottom of the body of water can be readily viewed through them. In its most highly developed form this pleasure apparatus is supported from afloat at its upper end, and provided with means for entrance to and exit from the submarine chamber, this means taking the form of elevators and trackways for transportation to suitably arranged openings, the track-ways, as well as the elevators being arranged in caissons communicating with the observation chamber, and in several embodiments of my invention forming a circuit of ways, such that persons may be transported from a given point down into the observation chamber beneath the water by a certain route and returned to the surface of the water and to the given point by another certain route, after having visited the observation chamber....

I love a list like this. I’ve written about, and blogged about, so many creepy places I was sure they’d all be familiar. And most were. But this list doesn’t rank them -there is one creepy place for each state in the union, listed alphabetically. Before you go read it, try to guess what they designated as the creepy place for your state. Jill Harness would guess California’s right off, and Lisa Marcus would know what Missouri’s is. I guessed correctly for a lot of states, but Kentucky’s was a surprise.

17. Mammoth Cave National Park in Mammoth Cave, Kentucky

This area contains the longest cave system in the world, which means there’s plenty of space for scary happenings. In addition to being mined for saltpeter, the caves were used to house tuberculosis patients in 1842 by a doctor who thought the cave vapors would cure them. So it’s very possible that the ghosts of dead sick people are wandering around, especially since people reported seeing objects move on their own and hearing voices.

I thought for sure it would be Waverly Hills Sanatorium. Oh well. You’re sure to find a creepy spot you might want to go visit, in the list at Buzzfeed.

Did you think adult coloring books were a new thing? No, they’ve been around forever. The difference is that today’s coloring books aimed at adults are for humor, de-stressing, or as a keepsake of your favorite fandom. Fifty years ago, they were a medium of subversive sarcasm and political propaganda.

The first adult coloring book, published in late 1961, mocked the conformism that dominated the post-war corporate workplace. Created by three admen in Chicago, the Executive Coloring Book show pictures of a businessman going through each stage in his day, as though teaching a child what daddy does at work. But the captions, which give instructions on how to color the image, are uniformly desolate. “This is my suit. Color it gray or I will lose my job,” reads a caption next to a picture of a man getting dressed for work. Another page shows men in bowler hats boarding their commuter train. “This is my train,” it reads. “It takes me to my office every day. You meet lots of interesting people on the train. Color them all gray.” The rare appearance of a non-gray color is even more disturbing: “This is my pill. It is round. It is pink. It makes me not care.”

From there, everyone jumped on the bandwagon. Coloring books made fun of political opponents on all sides, as well as occupations, lifestyles, and famous people. Read about the adult coloring books of the 1960s at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: The New York Times archive)

If you hate your co-workers and wanted to drive them crazy, you couldn’t do much better than this. RocketJump changed the password on their WiFi and now everyone is trying to get it right just once. That’s all it takes. Just once. Getting there isn’t going to be easy. 

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Why doesn't someone think of just writing it on a note? Maybe they've all forgotten how to write by hand. In case you can’t figure it out, this is their password.

fourwordsalluppercase

Genius, huh? But now that the video has gone viral, they’ve had to change it again. Probably to something even more nefarious. -via Daily of the Day

Lemmy has passed away. Truly one of a kind. Much more to him than many knew. RIP. @RollingStone @ClassicRockMag pic.twitter.com/d1izWStIii

— Paul Stanley (@PaulStanleyLive) December 29, 2015

Earlier this year, we reported that Lemmy Kilmister, the lead singer, bassist, and songwriter of Motörhead, was having health problems and had switched from whiskey to vodka. He had been experiencing increasing physical problems for the past few years. An aggressive cancer caught up with him today, and Lemmy has died.

Kilmister — who legendarily survived diabetes and implantation of a heart defibrillator — was diagnosed with the disease just two days ago, the band said in a statement.

"There is no easy way to say this," Motörhead said. "Our mighty, noble friend Lemmy passed away today after a short battle with an extremely aggressive cancer.

"He had learnt of the disease on December 26th, and was at home, sitting in front of his favorite video game from The Rainbow which had recently made it's way down the street, with his family," the band said. "We cannot begin to express our shock and sadness, there aren't words."

Lemmy was 70.

The beginning of world travel had a great influence on art. When Japan started to open up to the West, Europeans were enamored with the culture, including art. But influence also traveled the other way. You can see the influence in a collection of Japanese postcards from the early 20th century. U.S. postcard collector Ken Reed shares them with us.

According to Reed, who cautions that he’s “not a scholar,” the European Art Nouveau aesthetic found its way to the Land of the Rising Sun via a group of Japanese artists who attended the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris. “They brought Art Nouveau back with them and incorporated it into what was happening in Japan.”

As a former postcard and stamp dealer, Reed the collector could have gone down the latter path, but he chose postcards instead. “You don’t have to have perfect perforations and rare cancellations,” he says of the exacting standards of stamp collecting. “With postcards, you get to focus on the art side of the card instead of where it went and how it got there. That’s what I like about them.”

See a selection of Reed’s beautiful postcards at Collectors Weekly.

I’m not sure why they thought they needed to do this, but these workers are testing a hard hat. How best to do it? A whack on the head with a broom handle! Why in the world would this guy volunteer to wear the hat?  

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This was not a test by professional quality control experts under laboratory conditions. At least I hope it wasn’t. I laughed before even watching the video, just from reading the description. -via Tastefully Offensive

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For the last episode of the mental_floss List Show this year, John Green turns to making us feel old. Things you believe are fairly recent are old enough to drink in all 50 states. Then again, if you already considered these things ancient, that means you are pretty young. That includes movies, TV shows, toys, albums, songs, inventions, news events, and even words.