It's completely counterintuitive to take a hilarious comedy and strip all the funniness out of it. But that's exactly what Testudo Aubreii did with Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
It works for several reasons. First off, it was only the Pythons' droll, deadpan delivery that made this project possible. The incongruity of the original film recut with the pompous hyperbole of the modern trailer format is just ridiculous. Then, for the many of us who are very familiar with the movie, each clip reminds us of the scene it's from, so we have to laugh anyway. -via Digg
I've heard about parents using a spray bottle of "Monster Repellent" to protect their young children from fear of the dark, but this guy has a completely novel scheme: bore the monster to death! Or at least piss him off enough to make him leave. Next, the second problem, getting the child to sleep, might be accomplished in the same way. The monster was infinitely more interesting. Yet, some children may lose sleep just thinking about how meaningless all our prepositions are. This comic is from Zach Weinersmith at Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.
Jetpack Cat is a concept character from the video game Overwatch that was never a part of Overwatch. However, as a concept, he was quite popular. Game director Jeff Kaplan talked about why Jetpack Cat never got off the ground during a panel at BlizzCon.
“We tried a robot monkey. We tried a crocodile!” said Tsang. That led to Jetpack Cat, who—despite being one of the most popular early hero designs at Blizzard—was scrapped because, Kaplan explained, it was “not Overwatch at this point.” A gorilla scientist from the moon, however, was fine.
But Jetpack Cat was not forgotten. YouTuber To Binge gives him an origin story in this fan film.
Hey, if Jetpack Cat doesn't fit into the Overwatch world, maybe he can have his own cartoon series. Surely I'm not the only one who thinks that could work. -via Metafilter
Washington, DC, has plenty of ghost stories. The most well-known is that of Lincoln's ghost, but close behind is the Demon Cat, known as DC for short. For most than 100 years, tales of the Demon Cat have been told, especially when people see the cat's paw prints in concrete in the Small Senate Rotunda of the Capitol Building. It's too good of a story to not pass along.
“The story probably goes back to the post–Civil War era. The main thing is that the people who would see it particularly were the night watchmen,” says Livengood. The most common version of the legend goes that a guard was on patrol one night when he saw a black cat approaching. In those days, cats were not an uncommon sight in the building, introduced to control the rodent population. However as the cat came closer, it grew in size until it was as large as a tiger. The monster cat pounced on the guard, who fell down and tried to protect himself, but the creature vanished in mid-air.
Like most ghost stories, tales of the Demon Cat have a number of variations. Later sightings are said to have scared people to death. The cat’s appearances have also been linked to national tragedies and presidential transitions.
One of the more attractive alien species featured in The Last Jedi were the vulptex, foxlike creatures with crystal fur on the salt planet Crait. The finished products were the result of puppetry, animatronics, and CGI. To develop the vulptex, animators wanted to see how such a creature would move, so they put a crystal critter costume on a dog. A very patient dog.
British theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author Stephen Hawking died peacefully at his home Wednesday morning. Hawking had suffered from a rare form of ALS from the age of 22, and had not been expected to survive more than a few years. But he not only survived, he went on to propose a unified theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. Hawking also studied black holes, and theorized they emit radiation, which is called Hawking radiation. His 1988 book A Brief History of Time set a record at the top of the British Sunday Times bestseller list for 237 weeks. Despite being confined to a wheelchair, Hawking worked at the University of Cambridge since 1975, rising to the position of Director of Research at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology. Since 1985, Hawking communicated with the use of a computer-generated voice. He continued to teach and lecture throughout his life. Hawking also wrote numerous books, including children's book, and made many appearance in movies and TV.
In his 2013 memoir he described how he felt when first diagnosed with motor neurone disease.
"I felt it was very unfair - why should this happen to me," he wrote.
"At the time, I thought my life was over and that I would never realise the potential I felt I had. But now, 50 years later, I can be quietly satisfied with my life."
Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.
In January of 1964, the Beatles were in Paris, staying at the five-star hotel, the famous Georges V. They were staying there during the 18 days of concerts they were giving at Paris' Olympia Theater. This was to be the last concert residency of the Beatles before they made their legendary first trip to America to appear on The Ed Sullivan Show in early February.
John and Paul had an upright piano sent up to their room for them compose new songs on. In these early days of Beatlemania, John and Paul still pretty much composed together. "Eyeball to eyeball, nose to nose"-type composing, as John would later call it.
But the new song the two composers came up with was not to be the usual Lennon-McCartney collaboration. This was no joint effort, this song was Paul's baby. It would also become one of the first McCartney "classics." It was to be very rare in the early canon of Beatle records, in that it is completely sung by just one person- none of the legendary "Beatle harmonies" or any background vocals whatsoever. No, this one was Paul's and Paul's alone.
Andy Candy (Andy Karandzieff) runs Crown Candy Kitchen in St. Louis, as his family has for 100 years. Easter is a busy time for molded chocolates, and when one of his chocolate bunnies or chicks or human figures breaks, he keeps the parts and puts them together in odd formations, resulting in mutant sculptures he calls "misfit chocolates."
It's close to impossible to do this with hollow chocolate from the discount store, because it tends to shatter. Since Easter is on April Fool's Day this year, a solid chocolate mutant is perfect for anyone's Easter basket. -via Boing Boing
Angel Giuffria attended SXSW going on now in Austin. At a tech conference, you'll always see people charging up their phones, but Giuffria needed to charge up her bionic arm.
People at this SXSW panel refused to give up charging their phones so I could charge my arm.
But I found an outlet in the back of the room so CHARGE ME UP.
Y’all I’m not mad at them! I thought it was funny (bc there was another plug nearby.) For all I know, they were confused by the entire situation since everyone here at #SXSW seems to think my arm is a video game fashion statement or fancy lit up glove not a prosthesis ¯\_(ツ)_,
It takes about two hours to get a full charge. Giuffria's arm does not use an external battery, but at home she removes the arm and charges it overnight. Her Twitter feed is full of great posts and links about robotic prostheses.
While hackers from Russia used social media to create havoc for the US elections, they aren't limited to politics. Russians and their bots took some time to influence Rian Johnson's plot of The Last Jedi, too. Whether it was practice for bigger things, or maybe just a side project by fanboys, who knows. But Johnson tells the story of how a coordinated campaign from Russia tried to control the destiny of the character of General Hux.
What did these highly coordinated Russian Twitter accounts want from the director of the new Star Wars film? To not kill General Hux, says Johnson. Coordinating around the hashtag #HuxLive, Russian accounts flooded Johnson’s mentions early in the production to ensure that their favorite oppressor made it through the new trilogy. Why the Russians bots love Hux is clear now — they are way into authoritarian regimes — but at the time, it appears to have been perplexing for Johnson and his collaborators on The Last Jedi.
It's one of the tidbits Johnson revealed in the documentary The Director and the Jedi, a 90-minute feature on the home version of The Last Jedi. Read about about it at Film School rejects. -via io9
Cats are like that. You think they are just being persnickety, but they are plotting to lead you to your doom. If it's not yet time, they'll just chalk it up to practice. OR... if you are a cat lover and prefer to think of this in more benevolent terms, the cat is trying to warn you that there could be something dangerous behind the door. Thank you, kitty. He did his best, and since you aren't using the chair anyway... This is the newest comic from Chris Hallbeck at Maximumble.
Psychopaths are commonly seen as people who do not consider the thoughts and feelings of others. Or when they do, they don't care about those thoughts and feelings. Arielle Baskin-Sommers of Yale University has been studying psychopaths for ten years. She works with inmates in a maximum-security prison, where 106 volunteers were divided into psychopaths, non-psychopaths, and those with some psychopathic tendencies. What she found was that psychopaths can and do put themselves in another person's place, but that is a deliberate decision for them, while normal people learn to see other people's perspectives automatically as we mature.
Most of us mentalize automatically. From infancy, other minds involuntarily seep into our own. The same thing, apparently, happens less strongly in psychopaths. By studying the Connecticut inmates, Baskin-Sommers and her colleagues, Lindsey Drayton and Laurie Santos, showed that these people can deliberately take another person’s perspective, but on average, they don’t automatically do so to the extent that most other people do. “This is the first time we’re seeing evidence that psychopaths don’t have this automatic ability that most of us have,” Baskin-Sommers says.
The researchers found this out by doing innocuous experiments that pinpoint how difficult a subject finds separating their own viewpoint from another person's viewpoint. Those experiments are explained at The Atlantic.
I never tried online dating. I looked at Yahoo Singles once many years ago, and found quite a few guys I knew. I also knew why they were single, because their ex-wives had already told me. That's life in a small town. It's probably better for younger people. Redditor keongmanja, who is from the UK but lives in Indonesia, tried Tinder for a month and kept stats on how it worked for him. Then he turned his data into a chart. He doesn't tell how many times he swiped right to get 53 matches, but the consensus of commenters is that four actual dates in a month is pretty good. There were a few quibbles about his terms.
Gianni A. Sarcone designed this star illusion, using the Müller-Lyer Illusion principle. The length of a line stays the same, while its appearance can stretch or shrink because of its context, meaning the arrows attached to it. Check out this star. The blue and black radials seems to stretch and shrink, but they actually remain the same length.
Best illusion I've seen, maybe ever. The blue and black lines are NOT moving. Insanely good. pic.twitter.com/gHGx5u3vTO
Okay, maybe they got a little help from the editing powers of YouTuber Smoothes. And some backing tracks from Chunk Funko. But they are still very good dogs. -via Digg
