In 1947, Kurt Vonnegut developed a theory of storytelling that could be illustrated with shapes on graphs, which is called the Shapes of Stories. The theory was rejected as his master's thesis subject, and only became famous after he did. The Shapes of Stories was the inspiration for Grant Snider’s latest comic called Story Lines. While Snider is an artist and Vonnegut was a storyteller, each incorporates elements of the other to make us think.
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Stormtroopers need to do their Christmas shopping, too! Or do they? Whatever they’re doing, a couple of Stormtroopers appear to have fun checking out the merchandise in a department store.
Everything is fun and techno and carefree until the boss shows up! -via Tastefully Offensive
With hundreds of cable channels, a fragmented audience, and competition from cheap reality series, it’s harder and harder to get networks to take a chance on an original idea for a TV series. So what are they doing? TV producers are falling all over each other to adapt ideas from successful movies and rework them into continuing series. Do you think these will have a chance?
Tremors
Kevin Bacon vs. goo-filled giant worms known as “Tremors,” round 2. It can’t be any worse than The Following, so the second TV adaptation for Tremors gets the Den of Geek stamp of approval. Bacon will reprise his role as Valentine McKee and the series will be set in the fictional town of Perfection, Nevada, just like the original 1990 film. After four straight-to-video sequels, Syfy brought Tremors to TV for a 13-episode run in 2003.
There’s currently no network attached as the project is in its infancy, but we do know that Universal Cable Productions and Blumhouse Productions are developing the series reboot, with Andrew Miller (The Secret Circle) to write the adaptation and Bacon to produce.
Taken
When Taken hit theaters in 2009, few would have dared to guess that it would ultimately turn into a franchise that grossed nearly $1 billion at the box office. Yet here we are, with French filmmaker Luc Besson’s Taken franchise responsible for earning Liam Neeson millions of dollars and what will go down as an iconic role for the Irish actor. Taken may take another unlikely step (though as this list continues to grow, we can’t say that anymore), crossing over to the television world. NBC is interested in the story of former CIA operative Bryan Mills. So much so, the network is willing to push forward with a prequel following Mills before he was married and had a child that would eventually be kidnapped and rescued. As of now, Liam Neeson is not involved in the project.
Den of Geek has synopses for 42 such projects, some only in discussion, others with a budget for a pilot or even a network deal already. And some of the movies are decades old. Read about them all.
Jeff Wysaski created a mockup Black Friday circular and posted it at some poor Target store. The items offered are obviously fake if you take a minute to think about them: a tent with an angry possum in it? A free falcon with a $75 order? You have to look closely to catch all the jokes.
But then there are these “exclusive Star Wars toys.” Who wouldn’t want a C-3P Fro? Or an Episode VII hot dog blaster? Personally, I want the Luke Skymopper. See several more pages of these at Obvious Plant.
Roger is back- the guy who was honest with us about weddings, insurance, and cars for sale. This time, he wants you to participate in the Black Friday Christmas shopping melee.
At least he’s honest about it. I think I’ll stay away from stores this weekend, as I always do after Thanksgiving. I don’t want to buy something just because you want to sell it to me. I’ll buy what I want, just as soon as I win the lottery. -via Cracked
I haven’t read The Hunger Games, not have I seen any of the movies, so I didn’t really know the plot besides hearing that it’s a remake of Battle Royale. Imagine my surprise to find out today what it’s really about!
It is literally about a hungry young woman, Katniss Everdeen, except that she's not hungry enough to accept just any old food. She wants what she wants, and her favorite thing to eat is pita bread. -via Viral Viral Videos
Thanksgiving is all about tradition, and one of those traditions is a round of articles on the internet, a few days before the holiday, about how to get along with relatives who insist on discussing sensitive subjects, or else how to put them in their place. Read them at The New York Times, Buzzfeed, Vox, Medium, Saturday Night Live, and The Onion.
If none of the tips offered work, you can read about some extreme family drama stories that will make you feel better about the one you have. From the response to these articles, you’d think that no American family can agree on politics, religion, or limits on sharing personal information.
So many Thanksgiving family feasts resemble this 1898 cartoon by Caran d'Ache. the caption to the top image reads, "Above all, let us not discuss the Dreyfus Affair!" and the lower image is captioned, "They have discussed it."
Let’s hope your family can hold off discussing whatever "it" is this year at least until the pie comes to the table. -via Metafilter
Ask Americans what they’re eating on Thanksgiving, and the overwhelming majority (82% here) will say turkey, usually with dressing and gravy. Sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie are pretty universal, too. But there are regional differences in what people select to put on the table, especially in side dishes. FiveThirtyEight held an online poll, crunched the numbers, and came up with a map showing which side dish is disproportionally popular in various regions of the U.S. These aren’t the only dishes that show regional variance.
Going deeper, the Southeast is the definitive home of canned cranberry sauce; respondents from the region are 50 percent more likely to pick that over the homemade variety. The Middle Atlantic states disproportionately have cauliflower as a side — 17 percent in the region versus 9 percent nationwide — while Texas and central Southern states see cornbread as far more necessary than the rest of the country, with 40 percent of respondents from those regions having it at dinner, compared with only 28 percent of the nation.
It makes sense to me, because Thanksgiving is all about food tradition. Cornbread was once a staple of every meal in the South, whereas fresh cranberries were hard to find down here before modern food transport methods were in place. So we eat what our grandparents ate 50 years ago, more so on Thanksgiving than other days. That said, I only serve macaroni and cheese at Thanksgiving when there are little children around. Read more about the various regional Thanksgiving side dishes at FiveThirtyEight. -via Marilyn Terrell
What’s not to love about snow? It’s deep, and cool, and slippery! It can be hard or it can float on air. You can jump on top of it or dig underneath it. And best of all, the kids are playing in it! The drawbacks are that it’s cold and hard to drive in, but if you’re a dog, you have a fur coat and nowhere to drive anyway. -via Tastefully Offensive
The following is an article from the magazine The Annals of Improbable Research.
Doug Zongker
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
University of Washington
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The following is an article from The Annals of Improbable Research.
Research looking at looking alike
by Alice Shirrell Kaswell, Improbable Research staff
Do Dogs Resemble Their Owners? Yes.
“Do Dogs Resemble Their Owners?” M.M. Roy and Nicholas J.S. Christenfeld, Psychological Science, vol. 15, no. 5, May 2004, pp. 361-3. (Thanks to Richard Wassersug and numerous others for bringing this to our attention.) The authors, who are at the University of California, San Diego, report that:
Forty-five dogs and their owners were photographed separately, and judges were shown one owner, that owner’s dog, and one other dog, with the task of picking out the true match.… The results suggest that when people pick a pet, they seek one that, at some level, resembles them, and when they get a purebred, they get what they want.
Do Dogs Resemble Their Owners? Maybe Not.
“Do Dogs Resemble Their Owners? A Reanalysis of Roy and Christenfeld (2004),” D.W. Levine, Psychological Science, vol. 16, 2005, pp. 83–84. The author, at the University of South Carolina, reports:
Roy and Christenfeld’s (2004) recent article claimed that student judges were able to match purebred dogs with their owners. The analyses reported fail to support this claim, however, because they rely on statistical assumptions that cannot be met with the experimental design.... the analyses and results presented here demonstrate that it is premature to conclude “dogs resemble their owners.”
Do Dogs Resemble Their Owners? Yes.
Cooking is always a science lesson, whether you let your kids know it or not. And it can often be a history lesson, too. Sometimes you can throw geography in there, or genealogy if you play your cards right. But most of all, it’s a way to combine family time, learning time, and best of all, eating time into one glorious celebration. If he learns nothing else, Moishe will be able to make his own pancakes one day. This comic is from Lunarbaboon.
The internet is like everything else: you invent something new, and soon others will exploit it for nefarious ends. And I’m not just talking about cable internet providers. Both existing organized crime syndicates and new players wasted no time in figuring out ways to exploit the world wide web to steal money, scam the unaware, and attack enemies. And that’s just the beginning. There’s a lot of everyday global trade in contraband, especially drugs.
While most of us might turn to Amazon or eBay as our go-to for ordering just about anything, there’s an entirely darker layer to the internet, where organized crime has moved the sale of all manner of contraband – especially drugs. It started in 2011 with Silk Road, named for the famous trading route of the Han Dynasty. Silk Road is surprisingly similar to eBay – except in what you can buy there.
According to Pursuit Magazine and journalist Kevin Goodman, who infiltrated the cybercrime network, once users got past layers and layers on encryption, they found what was essentially Etsy for narcotics. After creating a user name and password and supplying payment information, buyers could place orders for an astounding array of illegal products. The site held the payment until the buyer confirmed they’d received the product, and, just like other, more well-traveled marketplaces, buyers could rate sellers and provide feedback.
Silk Road reportedly banned the sale of some illegal activities – murder-for-hire, stolen credit card numbers, child porn and weapons. But using bitcoin as the currency of choice, Silk Road quickly became the place to go for practically any drug under the sun. In October of 2013, Forbes reported that the FBI had taken down Silk Road and seized around $4 million in bitcoins.
But you know as soon as one method of illegal trade goes down, others spring up in its place. There will always be people who consider the profit to be worth the risk, no matter what the collateral damage is. Learn about ransomware, information theft, money laundering, and other cybercrimes at Urban Ghosts.
You know how photographers can take a scenic view or a cityscape and make it look like a miniature by using the tilt-shift effect? What if you did that to a picture of something really, really big, like a galaxy or nebula, or even a supernova? Berlin artist St. Tesla did just that, and the results are adorable. Things that are bigger than we can even imagine end up looking like something microscopic. See more of these images at St. Tesla’s Behance page. -via Metafilter
While Americans are usually introduced to figgy pudding by way of the song “We Wish You a Merry Christmas,” few ever actually consume it, much less make one. You might be surprised to find that it’s not even what we know as pudding.
It’s really not pudding, at least by American standards. The cake—which contains figs and is topped with brandy—has been an English Christmas dessert since the mid-1600s. Around that time, it was banned by English Puritans because of the large amount of alcohol content. Some believe that a Medieval custom dictated that pudding could only be made on the 25th Sunday after Trinity Sunday and that it was originally comprised of 13 ingredients to represent Christ and his 12 apostles.
Now you know. You might be more familiar with holiday dishes like sweet potatoes with marshmallows, green bean casserole, gingerbread, latkes, etc. but you might not know where they came from or why we eat them during the winter holidays. Find out by reading The Origins of 15 Holiday Foods and Drinks at mental_floss.
(Image credit: Flickr user Meal Makeover Moms)
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