Even toys like to dress up for Halloween! Redditor OdoWanKenobi took his collection of Hot Toys Avengers action figures and converted them into Star Wars characters -just for Halloween costumes, you know. Some are head swaps, some are wearing clothes from Star Wars figures, and the Hulk has Photoshop ears to make him look like the only green main Star Wars character, Yoda. Excellent casting choices! Too bad he doesn't have a Fury action figure. -via Geeks Are Sexy
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Some three-year-olds don't talk much at all, while others talk all the time, regardless of whether anyone is listening or not. This little boy is of the latter variety. He's going to the potty by himself, but he keeps up a running commentary, scolding himself for eating so much yesterday. He even goes over in his mind all the things he ate!
Meanwhile, his parents are outside the door, recording the monologue -and trying their best not to roll in the floor laughing. This one not only made me laugh, but I had to drag my husband in to hear it. -via Viral Viral Videos
The plot of the new movie Gravity is about the worst thing that could happen to an astronaut floating in space. Space travelers have been performing spacewalks, or EVAs (extra-vehicular activities) since Alexey Leonov emerged from the Voskhod 2 spacecraft for a few minutes in 1965, and not all of them have gone as planned.
The real-life close calls are just as tense as any movie, except that we often learned about them after they were over. Popular Mechanics has a slideshow telling the stories of ten EVAs in which something went wrong -and for a while, things were really tense among those who were in the know. -via the Presurfer
Benjamin Burch at Dark Matters helped his nine-year-old son Devin with a science project that will double as a Halloween costume prop: they made a light saber! In two posts (that may be further updated), you'll see the process in text, pictures, and video.
The project started out with a quick light saber for five-year-old James. But the whole project only an hour or so of assembly and about $15 in components. The tube is fluorescent light cover, the base is some PVC pipe rigged with a battery, electronic connections, and four super bright LEDs. The results are awesome! -via Boing Boing
Today's featured costume is from Neatoramanaut Nalini Asha.
Last year I fulfilled what was one of my life goals: I fashioned a medusa head-piece for Halloween. She's one of my favorite characters/icons/women and I love representations of her... so for this I used clear plastic tubing with thick wide inside, wrapped in iridescent cloth and tipped with snake heads made out of clay painted with nail polish. The whole thing weighs a ton and I had a bruise on my scalp for days from the strain that the combs inside put on my braided hair underneath, but it was totally worth it!
She got one thing wrong, though. Medusa was supposed to be very ugly, and this costume is anything but ugly!
The baby crawls, and the dogs crawl, too! Are they imitating the baby, mocking the baby, or trying to show the baby how it's done? Even if they are just well-trained and following orders from behind the camera, it's still cute. But look at the face markings of the malamute on the right. Who gave him the KISS makeup treatment?
The banner image at videographer Kenji Chen's YouTube page shows two dogs, with the second one displaying the same, but fainter, markings. His most recent video shows the dogs talking a walk with the aid of leads, a skateboard, and a GoPro camera. -via Daily Picks and Flicks
The controversy over the debt ceiling is related to, but not the same as, the federal budget and government shutdown. The concept was created 115 years ago, and a look into the history of U.S. government debt can give you a better idea of what it's all about.
Writer Mike Duncan and illustrator Jason Novak put the short version into cartoon form, which makes it much easier to get through. In the small portion shown here, most Americans of a certain age would recognize President Lyndon Johnson even without the hat because of his colorful language, but relevant figures are labeled anyway, because the timeline starts at the beginning of the Spanish-American War. -via Digg
Science is always fun, but it's even more fun with Muppets! Grover joins the hosts of 5 facts to present some easy science experiments even kids can do. Bringing back the dinosaurs will have to wait for another day. Today we make a rainbow, float an orange, do the oobleck dance, and more! The video is part of the new Sesame Street initiative called LIttle Discoverers, to promote STEM (science, teechnology, engineering, and math) interests in young children. Find the details of each experiment at Mashable. -via Uproxx
Azerbaijan held a presidential election on Wednesday, but before the first ballot was cast, the Central Election Commission released the election results by mistake. President Ilham Aliyev, who has been in office for ten years after succeeding his father, won in a landslide with 72% of the vote. Jamil Hasanli came in second with 7.4% of votes cast -even before the polls opened. Oops.
The data were quickly recalled. The official story is that the app's developer had mistakenly sent out the 2008 election results as part of a test. But that's a bit flimsy, given that the released totals show the candidates from this week, not from 2008.
No one in Azerbaijan was particularly surprised by the "results," but it was bad form to make the rigged vote so obvious to the world. After going through the motions of the election, the updated results show Aliyev now with 80% of votes cast. -via Daily of the Day
(Image credit: Flickr user World Economic Forum)
Louise is a Toulouse goose that lives on Laura Grace Weldon's farm. She was a rescue goose, abandoned in a nature preserve. Louise led a relatively peaceful life on the farm with her friend Al the duck, until the day she fell in love with Weldon's Honda Accord.
Louise spotted a distant glimmer. It was so alluring her wide orange feet quickly pitter pattered up to the front yard. There she saw Honda for the first time, his shiny surface and tempting shape alluring in ways only a goose of her caliber might recognize. She hurried up to this vision, this Honda of her dreams, and there she stayed. All day she strolled around the car, sometimes making quiet murmuring tones, sometimes tapping gently at it with her beak.
How long will Louise insist on fidelity to the Honda before the bitter sting of unrequited love breaks her little goose heart? Read about Louise and her devotion to the Honda, as well as Weldon's attempts to distract her or break them up. After all, she'd like to drive the car sometime.
The characters of Breaking Bad will live on in music. Composer Sung Jin Hong, aritistic director of the One World Symphony, will write a mini-opera inspired by both the "Ozymandias" episode of the AMC TV series and the Percy Bysshe Shelley sonnet it was named for. Breaking Bad - Ozymandias will premiere January 26-27, 2014, presented by One World Symphony in New York.
Cancer became an allegory for evil for the protagonist in Breaking Bad. When Walt White was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, we the audience emotionally supported him and forgave some of his actions, as they may have appeared to be justified. When the cancer went into remission, an intangible cancer was growing — his hubris and lust for power. Our sympathy began to slip as he transformed into the destructive Heisenberg. At this very moment, the details of Breaking Bad — Ozymandias (2014) may not be confirmed, but I hope to explore the question that the drama obsessively and hauntingly asked: "are we all breaking bad?"
Hong is taking suggestions for the content of the opera. He'll get some really imaginative ideas from internet users! -via Geekosystem
How well do you recognize color? Or, to put it another way, how well do you recognize brand colors? Blue is used so much in the internet, that Colin Gourlay constructed a quiz that asks you to identify shades of blue that are associated with these internet companies. The quiz never ends, as far as I know, but it keeps a running score. Try it out yourself, but be aware that they may all start to look alike after a while. Quit while you are ahead. And don't be embarrassed that you've never heard of a lot of them -I haven't, either! -via Metafilter (which is not included has now been added)
The sun, if it follows the usual life cycle of stars, will get hotter and expand before it burns out. We've got a lot of time before that happens, but is there anything we can do about it? Strangely enough, yes. According to AsapSCIENCE, a billion years from now, we just might be in the middle of a scheme that sounds like it would only make sense in a movie. By then, though, we might actually have the knowledge and technology to pull it off (not to mention the money). Not that you and I will ever know… -via Digg
It happened in Pennsylvania, it happened in China, and now it's happened in Germany. Around 70 volunteer firefighters in Saterland, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, responded to a fire call and arrived to find their own station burning down!
But by the time the volunteer fire fighters arrived at their station, which was just five years old, the blaze had already consumed the building, making it impossible for them to enter.
Despite their best attempts to control the flames from outside, the 70 volunteers were forced to watch on helpless as the entire building was destroyed.
No one was injured. The damage is estimated at about five million euros.
-via Arbroath
In the latest movie supercut from Slackstory, we see a string of scenes in which tension builds until something jumps out at you, screaming like a banshee! It's just a cat. Never mind that cats sometimes harbor murder in their hearts and can mess you up more than a ghost or gremlin ever will.
The cat trope is a way to add more tension and more scares to a story without having to reveal the actual evil entity too soon. Read more about it at TV Tropes, if you don't mind diving down the TV Tropes wormhole. -via Laughing Squid
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