This past week, Mike Powell and Juergen Horn suddenly came across the opportunity to become urban explorers in Macedonia. They were staying at a resort hotel near Lake Prespa and saw Hotel Evropa, built during the Communist era when Macedonia was part of Yugoslavia.

We spotted the Evropa while driving along the coastal road. It would have been impossible not to, because the building is monstrous. And at least for us, it was irresistible. When I say this place has been “forgotten”, I mean it. The Evropa is not “under new management” or “scheduled for demolition” or under any sort of protection, private or governmental. It’s simply there, totally deserted.

With nothing prohibiting us from doing so, we explored. The Evropa has been ransacked, everything of value stripped and stolen. We went up to the upper floors, into the hotel rooms, out onto the balconies, down to the lounge, and into the basement. I’m not given to panic, but while exploring this hotel, I felt the clammy hand of terror on my heart. Every time I turned a corner, I did so half-expecting to discover something gruesome. If I had been captured and subsequently tortured by some disfigured Macedonian maniac… it would have been awful, of course, but not all that surprising.

Of course, they took a ton of pictures of the crumbling resort. See the best of them at For 91 Days.

The hit HBO series Game of Thrones films in Belfast, Northern Ireland and Dubrovnik, Croatia. For the show’s upcoming fifth season, scenes are also being shot in Spain, which is a stand-in for the kingdom of Dorne, the homeland of House Martell. Filming began at Alcázar palace near Seville, then moved to Osuna where a large battle will be staged. The opportunity to be an extra led to a response that shows how popular the production is in Spain.

When the local production company Fresco Film put out a casting call for roughly 600 extras for a key battle Thrones scene, fans responded with an incredible 86,000 applications. The company needed to add more server space to accommodate the load. Many applicants needed the work, but one hired extra told the production he took a vacation from his high-level banking job to be on the show.

Meanwhile, others have clamored to get a glimpse of the show’s cast, with one even asking a random production staffer to post for a photo merely because he was wearing a Thrones badge.

Learn more at Entertainment Weekly, but be aware there are spoilers if you’re not current on the series through season four. -via Warming Glow

Did you know that an instance of cosplay back in 1910 led to a man being arrested for “public masquerading”? What made that costume different from the usual fancy dress was that it was designed to resemble a well-known pop culture character, instead of animals or literary characters. In 1939, the first costumed characters showed up at a science fiction convention. We didn’t yet have the term “cosplay,” or even “sci-fi” for that matter, but the hobby itself is a lot older than you thought.

These are things you’ll learn in the new book Cosplay World by Brian Ashcraft and Luke Plunkett of Kotaku. Ashcraft and Plunkett talked to writers, historians, photographers, and costume builders about the history and culture of cosplay, but the book is also packed with profiles and pictures of top cosplayers from around the world. Neatorama is proud to present an excerpt, featuring cosplayer Julian Checkley.

(Image credit: Julian Checkley)

‘I’ve been cosplaying almost all my life, ever since I made my first Darth Vader costume at the age of seven,’ says cosplayer Julian Checkley. ‘It was one of those papier mâché jobs plastered onto a balloon, and I had to steal my grandfather’s sunglasses so I could pop the lenses out and glue them on to complete the helmet eyepieces.’

This boyhood love of papier mâché developed, and Checkley decided to pursue an education and a career in making costumes.

(Image credit: Kamil Krawczak)

But he may have thought he’d made a mistake when he found himself studying hair and make-up alongside fashion industry hopefuls in London. A job in TV creating monster suits and special effects would soon follow, however, where he would not just learn how to develop visual effects and make fantastical creatures, but gain experience performing inside them as well.

The following is an article from Uncle John's 24-Karat Bathroom Reader.

They may be gone, but they’re not forgotten. Come to think of it, are they really even gone? Ghost lovers claim that many of the famous dead are still among us …in spirit.

KURT COBAIN (1967-94)

In the days after Cobain committed suicide at his Seattle home, a handful of fans who gathered there for a vigil claimed to have seen the spirit of the Nirvana frontman in the window and on the roof of the house. In August 2000, a bartender in Essex, England, told reporters that Cobain’s ghost had taken up residence in her laptop. She claimed Cobain’s face materialized on the screen one night, begged for her help, and then asked her to kiss him. She kissed the screen, and the image vanished. The laptop crashed and never worked again.

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN (1706-90)

Franklin helped established the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia in the 1740s. His papers are housed there, along with, according to some staff members, his ghost. Employees claim that Franklin hangs out in the library and likes to peruse its shelves. Aside from one nasty encounter with a cleaning lady, who claims he attacked her after hours, he’s usually in high spirits.

BUGSY SIEGEL (1906-47)

Mobster Siegel helped build Las Vegas …and he seemed determined to stay there. Guests and staff at the Flamingo Hotel, which he’d opened in 1946, reported seeing Siegel’s ghost, dressed in a smoking jacket, lingering in the Presidential Suite.

Tom Burns and his young daughter have a tradition of coordinating their Halloween costumes. When she talked about dressing as Hermione Granger this year, he expected to don a costume from Hogwarts. But then Burns showed his daughter Star Wars. The first movie. She loved it.

“Do you think I could be Han Solo for Halloween?”

Immediately, I responded “Yeah, why, of course, you could. That would be amazing. Why couldn’t you be Han Solo?” And, even though I didn’t want her response to come, it did. “Welll…. I’m a girl.”

There’s no reason a girl can’t be Han Solo for Halloween. It’s been done before. And if she’s going to dress as a male Star Wars character, it only made sense to her that Dad dress as Princess Leia. And that’s just what he did. The two wore their costumes to an event at the zoo.

All in all, I think my daughter and I will make a great pair for Halloween. We got nothing but smiles at the Halloween event we attended last night and even got a few laughs when I came face-to-face with a mom dressed as Princess Leia and said “Well, this is embarrassing…”

Read the whole story and see another picture of the pair at The Good Men Project. -via Metafilter

For many of us, just the mention of the name Jack Bruce makes the ten note bass line of “Sunshine of Your Love” play in one’s head. The bass player/singer made up a third of the band Cream, along with Eric Clapton and drummer Ginger Baker, and co-wrote many of their songs with Clapton. The band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993. After Cream disbanded in 1968, Bruce had a successful solo career and collaborated with many other musicians.

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Jack Bruce never retired, and released a studio album titled Silver Rails in 2014. Bruce passed away today at his home in Suffolk, reportedly from liver disease. He was 71.

(Image credit: Heinrich Klaffs)

Maybe the cake decorator should have stopped after “We can’t spell s-cces” or even after “We can’t spell.” The misspelling draws attention away from the unnecessary quote marks (the beginning quote is hard to see). And how they made “without” into two words. Honoring someone with a cake is a lovely gesture, and it’s even better when it comes with so many laughs. This picture is from the ever-entertaining Cake Wrecks.

Before we had the many tools of forensic science we employ in crime investigation today, it was easier to get away with murder. At the same time, it was easier to be convicted of a crime you didn’t commit. Over the years, but by bit, scientific ways of determining what happened were developed, and each are tied with its “first use” case. Consider Spanish scientist Mathieu Orfila, who was forced to solve a problem he himself identified.

Mathieu Orfila determined that, in cases when the victim had been buried for some time, the body might become contaminated with arsenic from the ground. The accused might then be executed for the death of a "victim" who had actually died of natural causes.

His philosophy came back to bite him in the 1830s, when he was called in to argue for the prosecution in the case of a man who was accused of poisoning his own son. The body had been exhumed, and tested positive for arsenic. The defense was insisting that it came from the ground in which the body was buried. Orfila fought back, first doing tests on exactly how a body in the ground picks up arsenic, and then testing the ground around where that particular body had been buried for traces of arsenic. He proved that, although a body might absorb arsenic from the ground, this one hadn't. The man was convicted, and from then on, those who exhumed bodies collected soil samples as well.

There are nine other stories like this, and a bonus, at io9 covering the use of fingerprints, ballistics, lie detectors, and more. -via the Presurfer

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The migration of mullet takes place every year off the east coast of Florida. The small fish are like a buffet for big fish, so look out for tarpon, jacks, sharks, snook, and other big fish to step up to the table. I would presume that quite a few fish are left behind on the beach, which will be nice and fragrant by the next day. -via Daily Picks and Flicks

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Gav and Dan, the Slow Mo Guys (previously) were challenged to illustrate internet memes in super slo-mo video. The memes they selected are actually just internet slang terms, and whether you are familiar with them has little bearing on how enjoyable the vignettes are. You can bet your bottom dollar that this will be made into animated gifs that will be used on reddit and other forums for eternity. Some of these stunts were really difficult to get right, but my favorite was the easiest: flipping the table. The biggest mess they've ever made! -via Viral Viral Videos

Shen’s Startup Ideas from Owl Turd are, in order, 1. useless, 2. dumb, and 3. incomprehensible. But hey, those qualities (or lack thereof) never stopped a startup from making a ton of money. What really makes the difference in whether a startup idea ever comes to fruition is how much venture capital you can raise. Then you need the appearance of heading for success for just a little while, and you’ll either be bought out by someone with more time and money than you or someone who wants to eliminate their competition. Of course, that part about the appearance of heading for success is the part where so many startups fail.   

How can we misspell “yard sale’? Let me count the ways -because there are a lot more than two. Oh, I can’t count because after a few, I just giggled too much. And they go on and on, in a picture post at Buzzfeed that includes some non-yard sale misspellings and miswordings that are just as funny. Too bad there's no spellcheck for poster board! Everyone makes mistakes, but when this many people don’t catch their mistakes, it becomes entertainment.

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In 2012, Felix Baumgartner set a world record for skydiving from an altitude of 128,100 feet. We followed his quest to achieve it for years before it actually happened. in contrast, we heard nothing about another man's quest to break the record.

Early this morning, Alan Eustace, a senior vice president at Google, went upon a helium balloon to a height of 135,890 feet above the earth -that over 25 miles! He then cut the balloon away and fell to earth. It took two hours to go up and only 15 minutes to come down.

“It was amazing,” he said. “It was beautiful. You could see the darkness of space and you could see the layers of atmosphere, which I had never seen before.”

Mr. Eustace cut himself loose from the balloon with the aid of a small explosive device and plummeted toward the earth at speeds that peaked at 822 miles per hour, setting off a small sonic boom heard by people on the ground.

The life-support equipment Eustace used was developed by Paragon Space Development Corporation. Google had offered support when Eustice first revealed the project to them, but he didn’t want the jump to turn into a marketing event. Read more about the jump at the New York Times. -via Laughing Squid

In March of 1876 in Bath County, Kentucky, pieces of meat started falling from the sky. Not just a little bit, but enough to have all the neighbors gathering to figure out what happened. The meat was dropped over an area 100 yards long and 50 yards wide.

The shower drew plenty of attention, and curious neighbors and newspaper reporters flocked to the Crouchs’ farm to see the mystery meat and offer their opinions on it. Many locals said it looked like beef, but one neighbor who was a hunter, “on being shown a piece of the flesh, declared it to be bear meat, and stated that it had ‘that uncommonly greasy feel’ peculiar to the flesh of that animal.”

Others took it upon themselves to taste it, and two men said it was “either mutton or venison.” A local butcher who tried a piece “declared that it tasted neither like flesh, fish or fowl. It looked to him like mutton, but the smell was a new one.”

With no one able to identify the meat by sight or taste, the St. Louis Globe-Democrat reported, “a great deal of the flesh was sent to chemists and others in various parts of the country, and analyses were made by several well-known scientists.”

The scientists came up with several possibilities, but the most likely explanation is one you won’t want to read while eating. The rest of the story is at mental_floss.

(Image credit: cjohnson7)

This game works a bit like Dance Dance Revolution or Guitar Hero, in that you have to play an instrument at the right time in the music in order to score. That said, the score is the least of your concerns because you are playing the cymbal and the cannon for the 1812 Overture! There are certain points during which you can fire the cannon and cause a massive explosion whether or not the song calls for it. That’s the fun! I scored 45 or something, but also managed to wreck the opera hall quite a few times. Play it yourself and see what I mean. -via b3ta