If you by any chance watched The Rise of Skywalker and thought "This would be better as an old-style video game," here you go. No one thought this, of course, except maybe John Stratman who went ahead and made it happen. However, this sequence does show us the slew of Force ghosts we didn't get to see in the movie. -via Geeks Are Sexy

We've linked quite a few articles about 1960s rock concert posters, which might be called the heyday of the medium. However, one young artist is bringing back the art of that medium in a big way- not by copying what was great in the past, but with his own style. Baltimore artist Luke Martin is only 22 years old, but his posters for Dave Matthews Band, Foo Fighters, The National, Eddie Vedder, Phish, and Death Cab for Cutie are already collector's items. Martin's rise has been meteoric.

“When I was in high school,” he says, “my art teacher, Kurt Plinke, who is one of my main mentors, would always take my black and white paints away from me. He’d put them in his desk, and then tell me that I needed to learn how to do what I wanted without the crutch of white or black. It took me a while to learn how to do that, but he was right, especially when it comes to black. To this day, I don’t think I’ve ever used straight black in any of my posters. Usually, I default to a muted brown because it gives the piece an almost vintage feel, like a sepia tone in an old photograph.”

Another self-imposed constraint is how he treats text, the Dave Matthews Band diner being a good example of what he’s striving for. “As much as I can, I try to avoid placing text on top of the illustration. It makes a more interesting gig poster when you can incorporate the text. I want the art to be first and the text to be secondary.”

Usually that art, regardless of the placement of its accompanying text, feels as if it’s from another time, and the places Martin scratches into his boards often resemble parts of Caroline County on the eastern shore of Maryland, where he grew up in a tiny town called Greensboro with two older brothers and a twin sister. “That’s definitely where it comes from,” he says of the retro scenery that fills many of his prints. “I moved away from the shore about five years ago. Now, whenever I go back, everything’s exactly the same. It’s like stepping into a time capsule.”

Read about Luke Martin and his work, and see some lovely examples at Collectors Weekly.

The Battle of the Hornburg at Helm's Deep begins at midnight. pic.twitter.com/3orDjTvwbv

— On This Day In LotR (@onthisdayinLotR) March 3, 2020

Susana Polo is serious about JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings saga. She's done the literary research, and has plotted a timeline of the events LoTR movie fans and those who've read the books are familiar with. 

From what my research can tell, the Breaking of the Fellowship (roughly the end of The Fellowship of the Ring) happened on Feb. 26. Frodo destroyed the One Ring on March 25. Half of the entire story takes place between those two points.

Right around midnight between March 3 and March 4, the battle begins at Helm’s Deep. This is one of the story’s only complete timestamps (along with 10 a.m. on Oct. 24, the moment that Frodo wakes up in Rivendell).

A little less than a week later, on March 8, the Battle of the Pelennor Fields will (have) unfold(ed) in front of Minas Tirith, with the Oliphaunts and “I am no man!” and all that.

Meanwhile, as Helm’s Deep is besieged, Frodo and Sam have not even gotten to the part where Gollum talks to himself, which was why Peter Jackson et al. had to write a large plot detour into The Two Towers, with the side effect of throwing Faramir’s entire characterization under a bus so Frodo would have something to do. Adaptation!

Polo has a Twitter account that follows all those events on the calendar date they happened. It's going to get seriously exciting now that the battle of Helm's Deep has begun.  -via Metafilter 

I gathered that The Witcher was based on a video game, but did not know that it was originally a series of books. Guess no one read them. Anyway, someone described The Witcher as Superman dressed as Legolas in Game of Thrones. Who wouldn't like that? Leave it to Screen Junkies to find the faults and flaws of the most popular Netflix series ever. This video is slightly NSFW.  

It's the season for Easter candy, and the season for the many ways people have altered Easter candies for either flavor or internet points. I once wrote a list of weird ways to enjoy Cadbury Creme Eggs, but now there's a new one-setting them on fire!

As with any other cloying confection (and eggs in general), the best course of action is to set it on fire. The char and caramelization gives your tongue something to explore besides straight up sugar, which is fun. Thanks to the fondant filling and the melt-prone milk chocolate, a torched creme egg has major s’mores vibes. Put it on a graham cracker and be happy.

So what you end up with is a sort of Easter-themed s'more, which not only sounds delicious, but gets you in the mindset for summer campfires. But there's some tricks involved, so get the complete instructions at Lifehacker.

(Image credit: Claire Lower)

Hall and Oates had a string of hits in the 1970s and '80s that made them household names. But it took a strange run of unsavory events to make them a duo. Daryl Hall and John Oates attended Temple University at the same time, and both were in doo-wop groups, but somehow they never met until that one night. Hall sang for The Temptones and Oates was in The Masters. Both groups were recording and trying to break out into the mainstream.

In 1967, both bands were invited to perform at a dance event promoted by area disc jockey Jerry Bishop at the Adelphi Ballroom on North 52nd Street in Philadelphia. According to Oates, the concert was a professional obligation: Bishop had the ability to give songs airtime.

“When Jerry Bishop contacted you, you had to go,” Oates told Pennsylvania Heritage magazine in 2016. “If you didn’t, your record wouldn’t get played on the radio.”

That’s how Hall and Oates found themselves backstage at the Adelphi, each preparing to perform with their respective group. (Oates said Hall looked good in a sharkskin suit with the rest of his partners, whereas he felt more self-conscious in a “crappy houndstooth” suit.) While Oates had previously seen The Temptones perform, the two had never met nor spoken. It’s possible they never would have if it weren’t for what happened next.

It happened that some of the singing groups came from high school fraternities with a violent attitude for their competition. The reason Hall and Oates finally met was the gunfire at the ballroom, but in order for them to collaborate, it also took a war and unpaid rent. Altogether the story of Hall and Oates is pretty wild, and you can read about it at Mental Floss.

ついに立体的に動いて見える錯視が完成しました。
キューブが回転して見えますね？
止まっています pic.twitter.com/nyyWdr5O1E

— じゃがりきん (@jagarikin) February 14, 2020

Go ahead, start the playback, focus on one box, or better yet, one part of a box, and watch it "move," yet not go anywhere. This is an example of the the reverse phi illusion. Sora News explains it further.

In very simplified terms, when our eyes see sudden transitions from either light to dark or dark to light, our brains perceive it as motion happening. Take yet another look at @jagarikin’s GIF, and you’ll notice that the edges of the cubes’ blue frames have a sliver of color to them. Sometimes they’re white, sometimes they’re gray, and sometimes they’re black, and as they’re cycling from one to the next, the video’s background is doing the same thing, and the result is the illusionary “rotation” of the cubes.

-via Boing Boing

Starting a new restaurant from scratch is hard. Most close within the first five years, and many within one year. One of the biggest drains on a restauranteur's up-front investment is real estate, especially in a city. That's also where the competition is strongest. More restaurant failures in the last couple of years have been in dine-in establishments -even before they become established. But people gotta eat, so landlords have stepped in to fuel a rising trend: ghost kitchens. They are just kitchens, no dining area, and they are often shared spaces.  

Similar to food trucks, the appeal of ghost kitchens is simple: They’re a way for people who have dreams of starting a restaurant, but are worried about the overhead costs, to do so without risking losing the entirety of their investment. The idea is that a ghost kitchen, which allows for multiple “restaurants” to produce food using the same physical space while also sharing equipment and ingredients, will cost a fraction of opening up a brick-and-mortar restaurant. “With a ghost kitchen, you rent from a landlord at a facility like Kitchens United or CloudKitchens, usually located in densely populated areas,” reports Roaming Hunger. “From there, you get your brand onto an app like Uber Eats or DoorDash, and (hopefully) start getting customers. Then you send out orders from the rented kitchen space. Ghost kitchens can be used to launch an entirely new business, or to expand the delivery range for an existing brand.”

The question is, how does this affect small eateries that already exist? No one knows yet, but it could be like the way newspapers are going bankrupt now that everyone can get information online. Read about the trend of ghost kitchens at Mel magazine. -via Digg

On the one hand, blaster beams and lasers don't work like they do in Star Wars. You knew that. On the other hand, you can recreate those effects for film without going CGI. Tom Scott explains, or actually, laser artist Seb Lee-Delisle explains.

CGP Grey (previously at Neatorama) can make the most esoteric subject interesting, because he brings us a slew of information we didn't know, and didn't know we need to know. But we do. So what do you know about tumbleweeds? They aren't just an Old West thing; tumbleweeds are an invasive species native to Russia that caused problems for settlers and still cause problems for modern civilization.

Despite being 142 minutes long, The Rise of Skywalker didn't have time explain how the Emperor of the original trilogy managed to survive falling down a bottomless shaft to return thirty years later (I'm of the opinion that it should have been two movies). But now the novelization of the film is ready to hit bookstores, and at least one secret has been revealed.

Although the novelization isn't officially on sale until March 17, Lucasfilm Publishing decided to sell advance copies at this weekend's C2E2 in Chicago and passages have begun appearing online. The book does indeed confirm that the Emperor's spirit has been transferred into a clone body. When Kylo Ren arrives on Exegol and encounters Palpatine, he looks closely at the machinery the Emperor is physically attached to, and recognizes it from his studies of the Clone Wars. He then deduces Palpatine's dark side spirit is too strong for the clone body, and is causing serious degeneration to it.

There's more of an explanation at Screen Rant, although it's not all that satisfying to anyone who wants Star Wars to make complete narrative sense. -via Uproxx

Octolab acquitted a baby Atlantic white-spotted octopus (Callistoctopus macropus), also known as a grass octopus. They became enamored of him because he's just so cute!

When this little Atlantic White-Spotted Octopus arrived at Octolab, everyone immediately fell in love with him. He was the cutest little octopus we ever laid eyes on. We prepared a little habitat for him and gave him a couple days to get acclimated. When he got used to his surroundings, he was immediately drawn to us as much as we were to him.

There's nothing that will drawn in a marine biologist like an affectionate response from a baby.

Maria had worked at Wendy's for a year, but a new set of managers were being really hard on her. One even called her a "lost cause" in front of customers. So she did what we all wish we could do, at one time or another. She lined up a new job, finished her shift with a cleanup out of respect for her co-workers, announced she was quitting, and then climbed out the drive-through window and ran away! Better yet, she got it all on video, which has gone viral on TikTok. Read the story and see the related videos and responses at The Daily Dot.

(Image credit: Maria Kukulak)

Remember when Luke and Laura got married on General Hospital? That was the peak of the 1980s soap opera craze. People were setting their VCRs, gathering for binge-watching parties, and forming discussion groups. ABC's 1984 Olympics coverage was even interrupted to update viewers on their favorite soaps.   

In the early 1980s, soaps became common cultural currency. The 1981 wedding of Luke and Laura attracted the largest audience for a daytime soap episode in US television history. A surfeit of media attention to the wedding was paired with a boom in the merchandising of ancillary products such as soap-inspired T-shirts and board games, celebrities declaring their soap fandom, and large groups of college students gathering in communal campus spaces to watch the daily installments.

That audiences beyond the housewife had become so invested in soap opera accorded it a new level of respect, but this respect assumed that 80s soaps were “better” than the daytime dramas of the past; the soaps’ greater cultural legitimacy was dependent on a distancing from their feminized history.

The rise and fall of the soap opera craze was due to several trends that collided, from cultural shifts to world news to technology. But it reinforced community television, in which people bonded over their favorite fictional worlds. Read about soaps in the 1980s at LitHub. -via Digg

The Robert Peary expedition in 1908 is what most people know as the first to reach the North pole, although that itself is in some dispute. It turns out that Peary wasn't even the first to reach the North pole in his own party! Peary recruited Matthew Henson, a young Black man with years of experience in seafaring and wilderness survival, to head the crews of his various adventures, including the 1908 North Pole expedition.   

Henson was promoted to “first man” and field assistant. He was a skilled craftsman, often coming up with life-saving solutions for the team in the harshest of Arctic conditions. On the final stage of the journey toward the North Pole, it was just himself, Peary and four native Inuit assistants, Ootah, Egigingwah, Seegloo, and Ooqueah.

As they approached the “Farthest North” point of any Arctic expedition until 1909, Robert grew more and more weary, suffering from exhaustion and frozen toes, unable to leave their camp, set up five miles from the pole. Henson scouted ahead on Peary’s orders. “I was in the lead that had overshot the mark a couple of miles,” Henson later recalled, “We went back then and I could see that my footprints were the first at the spot.”

Read the story of Matthew Henson, including his famous descendant you may be surprised to learn about, at Messy Messy Chic.

(Image credit: Library of Congress)