If you were to visit France, you'd certainly want to see the hot spots, but you might also want to take in lesser-known but fascinating abandoned places. These are buildings no longer in use, a combination of beautiful and sad, where nature and entropy is reclaiming what man built. They all hint at an intriguing history, like Fort D’Arches.

Fort D’Arches (also known as Boulanger Fort Berwick) is a military base in Pouxeux, northeastern France. It was built between 1875 and 1877, and was a part of a chain of forts known as The Curtain of Upper Moselle, which protected the area between Epinal and Belfort. These days, it’s cloaked in plants, trees and (of course) spray paint. Inside, it’s a long, winding network of eerie tunnels, whilst the exterior, enveloped in greenery, is proof of the power of nature over that which is man-made. A fort is the toughest of structures, but this one is no match for curling branches and fast-spreading moss.

There are quite a few pictures of Fort D’Arches, and six other abandoned facilities in this post.  -via the Presurfer

(Image credit:  Flickr user Thomas Bresson)

Vor zwei Stunden am Strand von #Langeoog ... die Ü-Eier liegen zu zehntausenden am Strand.… https://t.co/aDXNU1Siia pic.twitter.com/UPXvu7gu0y

— Daniela Skrzypczak (@Reiseknipse) January 5, 2017

The Easter bunny came early for the residents of the German island of Langeoog. Residents woke up Wednesday to find the beach full of colorful eggs! They were Kinder Surprise Eggs, or to be more precise, the inner plastic egg that holds the surprise toy. A Danish cargo ship carrying the eggs from China lost five shipping containers in a storm, and thousands of the colorful plastic eggs found their way to the beach of Langeoog. The children of the island had plenty of surprises.

Atlanta's Stone Mountain Park has an attraction called Snow Mountain in the winter. It gives Georgia residents, who often go all winter without seeing snow, a chance to play in snow and ride an inner tube down a snow-covered hill, all on artificially-made snow.

The park, which features man-made snow, is located just outside Atlanta in Stone Mountain Park. The winter wonderland exists thanks to a snow-making machine that generates roughly 360 tons of snow daily.

But the park was closed on Saturday, due to a snowstorm. Colorado is still laughing at that. The park will be open Sunday. -via Fark

Debbie Barber's horse Kruzah is a comedian. Here he is, out in the pasture, practicing his routine for his next standup gig. He has a rubber chicken, and he knows how to use it!

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I hope you get a few horse laughs out of this. -via Tastefully Offensive 

The United States bought 828,000 square miles in 1803 when Thomas Jefferson agreed to the Louisiana Purchase. The U.S. had only sought to buy New Orleans, but was offered a bargain on the whole thing. Still, New Orleans was a very important part of the deal. The mouth of the Mississippi River would become the country's busiest trading port. When Americans started to move into New Orleans, they found the small town to be very foreign. The few thousand French creole residents were very different from the folks back home.    

There were two main areas in which the entrenched French creoles made the incoming Americans crazy. The first was infrastructure: when the U.S. bought the Louisiana territory, New Orleans had no paved roads, no street signs, and no colleges. Much of the population was illiterate, and justice was dispensed according to the French legal code: Tregle calls the place “a colonial backwash of French and Spanish imperialism.”

The second was the permissive culture: Sunday in New Orleans means sitting at a café and going out dancing or perhaps to a horse race. In this city, black and white people mingled more freely than elsewhere in America, and even slaves had more leeway to move freely than in other cities.

All this shocked the Protestant, Puritan-minded American settlers, many of whom came from places in the South where the movement of black people was highly restricted and regulated. (Meanwhile, the native creole population was appalled by the crude Americans, who they called Kaintucks and vulgar Yankees.) The Anglo-American settlers tried to change everything from the city’s laws to the looser culture, but even as they gained power of New Orleans’ commercial life, they did not have enough political power to mold the city as they would have liked.

That changed in 1836 when the "Yankees" finally had the political power to persuade the state legislature to split New Orleans into three separate municipalities: one American and two French. Read how that worked at Atlas Obscura.

Sometimes I think the world's problems all boil down to the struggle between "the right thing to do" and "what works." While the righteous may get their reward in the afterlife, the bullies, trolls, and strongmen get theirs immediately. This is the latest comic from Alex Culang and Raynato Castro at Buttersafe. 

Sanrio made bank with Hello Kitty, the ubiquitous Japanese princess of adorableness. But now they've got a character who's just as cute, but has more in common with real people. Aggretsuko is a cute red panda. But she commutes to her Tokyo accounting job every day, where she must deal with stupid co-workers and an obnoxious boss. In her off hours, she relieves her work frustration with heavy metal karaoke and alcohol.

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In other words, Aggretsuko is the kawaii depiction of …everyone. Read more about Aggretsuko at The Verge. -via Fark

An elite crew of tacticians have an hour to free their comrade Sarah before certain death. Like any such group you see in the movies, they each have a particular talent they bring to the group. But one of the members is struggling with a sense of inadequacy.

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The new comedy sketch from Chris and Jack goes fast, so pay attention. -via Laughing Squid

Married archaeologists Jack Davis and Sharon Stocker wanted to explore the grounds in Pylos, Greece, near the site of the palace of King Nestor, a Mycenaean king described in the Iliad. Denied their first choice of site, they started digging in an olive grove. What they found was astonishing: a grave dating to around 1500 BC, containing a warrior who was very wealthy, or at least very respected, considering the treasure he was buried with.

Over the next six months, the archaeologists uncovered bronze basins, weapons and armor, but also a tumble of even more precious items, including gold and silver cups; hundreds of beads made of carnelian, amethyst, amber and gold; more than 50 stone seals intricately carved with goddesses, lions and bulls; and four stunning gold rings. This was indeed an ancient grave, among the most spectacular archaeological discoveries in Greece in more than half a century—and the researchers were the first to open it since the day it was filled in.

“It’s incredible luck,” says John Bennet, director of the British School at Athens. “The fact that it hadn’t been discovered before now is astonishing.” The spectacular find of priceless treasures made headlines around the globe, but what really intrigues scholars, says Stocker, is the “bigger world picture.” The very first organized Greek society belonged to the Mycenaeans, whose kingdoms exploded out of nowhere on the Greek mainland around 1600 B.C. Although they disappeared equally dramatically a few hundred years later, giving way to several centuries known as the Greek Dark Ages, before the rise of “classical” Greece, the Mycenaeans sowed the seeds of our common traditions, including art and architecture, language, philosophy and literature, even democracy and religion. “This was a crucial time in the development of what would become Western civilization,” Stocker says.

Dated to the time when Minoan culture was giving way to Mycenaean culture, the grave gives us new clues as to how that happened, which may change the way we look at the development of Greek civilization. Read about the dig, the warrior, and the Mycenaean culture at Smithsonian magazine. -via Digg

(Image credit: Myrto Papadopoulos)

A Brazilian grandmother has an icon in her home that she prays to every day. Gabriela Brandao noticed and asked about it. The elderly woman said she was praying to St. Anthony. Brandao took a close look at the figure and thought it looked familiar. St. Anthony isn't supposed to have pointy ears, is he? She checked on the internet to confirm what she thought, and found an exact duplicate of the figure for sale -a figure of Elrond, Lord of Rivendell, a character from The Lord of the Rings. Brandao's relative had been praying to an elf! Since Brandao posted the pictures, the grandmother has received a new figurine -one depicting St. Anthony.

(Image credit: Gabriela Brandao)

Working with flowers sounds like a lovely way to make a living, but it's not all lollipops and roses. Or, at least not all lollipops. Making beautiful arrangements is the fun part, but running a business based on fragile, short-lived, emotionally-charged products can be quite stressful. But those who stick with it love the work. Here are some of the everyday facts about the floral business.

4. TIMING IS EVERYTHING.

Because flowers only last so long before they wilt and die, florists are in a perpetual race against the clock. They must properly time purchases and deliveries, making sure that buds have bloomed by the time they arrive at a client’s door. To speed up or slow down the blooming process, florists use a variety of tricks. They may condition flowers (get them ready for display) by cutting or splitting the stems (trimming them at a 45-degree angle increases the surface area for water absorption) or dunking the blooms in cold water. Storing the blooms away from direct sunlight is also key. To ensure that flowers for weddings look fresh and open, Ghani keeps them in a refrigerated environment and makes the centerpieces the day before the event.

13. THEY GET TO PARTAKE IN YOUR EMOTIONAL MILESTONES.

Whether they arrange and deliver flowers for weddings, funerals, births, anniversaries, or proms, florists often work with clients who are emotional about recent (or imminent) life changes. And florists aren't immune to the impact—conscious or subconscious—of the heightened emotions surrounding weddings and funerals. One florist writes about how creating floral arrangements for a funeral sparked a recurring dream: “In the dream, I woke up the woman that died to ask her if she liked the flowers. Her answer was no. She informed me that she had always hated flowers … I remember feeling silly and spooked at the same time.”

That's only a couple. Read more behind-the-scenes secrets of florists at mental_floss.

If you recall the Disney movie Mulan, you'll love this recreation of the "preparing for the matchmaker" scene from a Chinese TV production, shared by the Disney Power Facebook page. The young actresses are excellent, and the scene looks just like the Disney film. But the real show-stopper is when Grandma comes in.

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To show how spot-on the production is, here it is side-by-side with the Disney version.

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-via Boing Boing

Photographer Marcel Heijnen became charmed with the many cats who live in the retail shops of Hong Kong. He's taken portraits of many of them, collected in his new book Hong Kong Shop Cats. 

Heijnen regards the small stores where the cats lounge and doze as “beautiful photogenic subjects in their own right.” They are places where, says Heijnen, “time seems to have stood still, devoid of branding and all the other modern-day retail trickery we’ve grown accustomed to”.

See a selection of Heijnen's images from the book at Atlas Obscura and more shop cats at his Instagram gallery Chinese Whiskers.

Do you trust modern technology? All I really know is that the more complicated a system is, the more things can possibly go wrong, and my luck will be that at least two things will fail at once so that no technician will be able to understand the problem. But the newest, latest things should be reliable, you think. You probably know what kind of rigor is used to test these things. Maybe that's why you don't trust modern technology. But you can trust the latest comic from CommitStrip.

Matthew Villegas took his GoPro camera and a selfie stick with him as he free dives in Morrison Quarry in Quebec. That water's gotta be cold. How cold is it? It's covered with ice -and he has to go up and get a breath of air!

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We can assume that he found a place in the ice to get some air, since he came home with this lovely footage. This video is being used to publicize the GoPro awards, which is looking for nominations.   -via Viral Viral Videos