Not the superhero we deserve, but the one we need right now.
If you could choose a mutant power, would it be one that allows you to overwhelm your enemies, or one that causes other mutants to love you and protect you at all costs? Dami Lee's newest comic is based on a Tweet from IT'S ME, PETER!!! See more of her humor at As Per Usual.
Jody Foster and Anthony Hopkins star in the most romantic movie of the year! She's an ambitious young FBI agent, just trying to make it in a tough profession. Then she meets him, and everything changes. What's not to love about that?
Cinefix once again shows us how selective editing and mood music can shape a film into anything you want it to be. -via Laughing Squid
A couple of years ago, we were treated to Biisuke Ball’s Big Adventure from the Japanese TV show Pitagora Suitchi (Pythagoras Switch). The bad news is that video has been erased from the internet, but the good news is that we now have part two of Biisuke, Biita, and Biigoro's adventures. In this story, Biisuke becomes trapped and must be rescued by his brothers Biita and Biigoro. In case you don't remember, the three brothers are balls who race around on some amazing chain reaction courses. In Japanese with English subtitles.
What a world we live in that a Rube Goldberg machine can have a plot, victims, bad guys, and heroes. -via Digg
Do you remember Harley-Davidson perfume? Bic For Her? TwitterPeek? Probably not, as they were all immediate flameouts. Crystal Pepsi and Zune were better known, but mainly known as failures. They are all exhibits at the new Museum of Failure in Helsingborg, Sweden. The museum, scheduled to open this June, was founded by organizational psychologist Dr. Samuel West. He didn't archive these business ventures to make fun of them, but to learn from them.
“Innovation requires failure. Learning is the only process that turns failure into success.”
In that sense, his is a museum about psychological flaws made visible. Bic’s “For Her” pens, for instance (elevator pitch: “A range of pens with floral patterns on them”), took a useful idea (“market segmentation”) and over-extended it to an embarrassing degree.
Often, the mistake is in taking two useful things to create a useless thing. The jaw-droppingly dismal TwitterPeek took 2009’s emerging Twitter-mania, and a thirst for handhelds such as the Blackberry - and created a machine that could do nothing but look at Twitter. Despite its monomania, it still couldn’t display an entire Tweet in on a single screen.
All these products would have benefitted from having a devil's advocate around to question their very existence. Read more about the Museum of Failure and its exhibits at the Guardian. -via Metafilter
(Image credit: Samuel West)
Real crime fighters might not have superpowers, but these tactics are the next best thing.
Back in 2010, would-be terrorists could download Inspire, a magazine produced by al-Qaeda. The publication ran essays on betraying America, interviews with leading jihadis, and DIY guides to crafting homemade explosives. But when readers opened the article “How to Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom,” they found a list of cupcake recipes previously published by The Ellen DeGeneres Show. (British intelligence forces took credit for the ruse.) That wasn’t the only time terrorists got “cupcaked.” In 2001, reporters in Kabul combing through debris left by the Taliban found so-called plans for a thermonuclear bomb. The text came from a 1979 piece in the humor magazine Journal of Irreproducible Results. Step 1: “First obtain about 25 pounds of Plutonium 239 at your local supplier.”
While wandering through South Delhi, India, in 2014, Ranjani Iyer Mohanty noticed something odd: exterior walls and fences, adorned with Hindu deities. Was it an expression of piety? A celebration? Nope. The gods were there to watch you pee. Specifically, as Mohanty revealed in an article for The Atlantic, locals were using the images to discourage men from urinating on walls. In some places, the images were multicultural, with depictions of Jesus as well as Sikh iconography. Whether it worked, God only knows.
(Image credit: Alex Eben Meyer)
Want to topple a politician or inspire a nation? We’ve got (beauty) tips for you.
In the early 1940s, a government procurement officer approached Charles Revson, the founder of makeup company Revlon, with a question: What did he know about powder? Revson’s reply: “Everything.” Revson meant face powder. The officer meant gunpowder. Despite the mix-up, Revson agreed to help produce hand grenades in addition to the first-aid kits he’d already been manufacturing. Other icons pitched in too: Max Factor created camouflage makeup, and Helena Rubinstein supplied kits with sunburn cream and face wash.
At the height of World War II, Winston Churchill sat down with an unexpected crop of advisors: women’s magazine editors. He had a specific agenda. Though material supplies were limited, Churchill—an impeccable dresser—understood that feeling stylish was integral to buoying national morale. To keep spirits up, officials supplied high-profile female munitions workers with enough face powder to maintain appearances. But when they saw that magazines were urging readers to stretch cosmetics during wartime using tricks like melting lipstick ends and mixing them with almond oil, they realized a new ally was at hand. The government’s textile conservation program—the Utility Clothing Scheme—was a hard sell. It mandated that designers ration materials by using fewer pleats and seams and shunning ornamentation. Churchill asked the magazine editors to frame the changes as stylish and patriotic. Whatever misgivings they might have had, they obliged. Dressing dowdily in the name of patriotism cemented a marriage between personal style and national pride.
Millennials know that hoarding is bad, and can lead to dangerous conditions in your home. But they live in a different world, and some suffer from a different kind of hoarding disorder.
Do you know any digital hoarders? Yeah, I'm guilty of this myself. Not videos, but notes and URLs. I have documents in folders within other folders going back to 2005, stuff I jotted down that I thought might be useful in my work someday. I might get around to abandoning that stuff sooner or later. After all, most of it is in a format I can no longer open, anyway. -via Boing Boing
Neatorama is proud to bring you a guest post from Ernie Smith, the editor of Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail. In another life, he ran ShortFormBlog.
How the Nintendo Times, a Nintendo fan site, is covering the release of the NES in real time—three decades after its original release.
It sounds like an odd thought exercise, but in reality, it’s a whole lot of fun, based on the website Nintendo Times. Since 2015, the writer and blogger Craig Majaski, who cut his teeth at the long-running gaming site Gaming Age, has been editing and putting together a site in which 30-year-old discussions and interviews about the early days of the Nintendo Entertainment System are published as if they’re happening in real time.
For example, this post about a Nintendo press announcement at the Consumer Electronics Show has a publish date of January 11, 1987—as well as forward-thinking statements like “Nintendo is going to continue its aggressive marketing campaign for 1987.”
So how does one come up with an approach like this? Majaski cites an interest in preservation, one shared with other folks like historians Steve Lin and Frank Cifaldi, the two principals of the Video Game History Foundation who he cites as being very helpful to his cause.
The Zymoglyphic Museum in Portland, Oregon, is full of fantastic exhibits from fictional worlds. There are mermaids, eyeball plants, and clams wearing eyeglasses. But there are also specimens of Xenophora, a genus of mollusks that are very real -and very weird. These sea snails decorate their own shells with other shells! Well, some species prefer rocks for accessories. It's a method of camouflage, but you can see why each shell can be seen as once housing an artist of sorts. See lots of Xenophora shells from the Zymoglyphic Museum at Atlas Obscura.
(Image credit: Philippe Alès)
Based on a non-fiction account, the 1995 mob movie Casino reeked of danger and violence in every scene. The actual filming of the movie was difficult in several ways, not the least of which was adhering to the true story while changing many details. Characters were combined into a smaller cast, real places in Las Vegas were used and disguised (except when they weren't), and the plot was shortened. And there were so many details that 22 years later, the movie is still generating trivia lists.
Find out more of the behind-the-scenes details of the production of Casino, at TVOM.
The legal drinking age in the U.S. is 21. The age is set by the states, but the federal government enacted "incentives," like highway funds, to get all states on the same page. In this video, bartenders, some more experienced than others, show how they can tell if someone is over 21 and legal to serve.
Turns out they aren't as adept as they thought. That's why you get asked for your ID, even if you are 35. To be honest, people between puberty and middle age can be any age if you don't know for sure. -via reddit
We first met The Simpsons in 1987, and they've had their own show since 1989- 28 seasons now! There are those who would argue that only the first ten years were any good, while there are millions of fans who weren't even born when the show began. With that much material, it takes some hard work and audacity to rank the best 100 episodes. But the Ringer did it, and now everyone is arguing over the list, as was to be expected.
To compile this list, I sought feedback from both hardcore Simpsons fans and former members of the show’s creative staff. Still, it was an inherently subjective undertaking. “You could choose every other episode from the first 200 episodes for your top 100 and you wouldn’t be too far off,” one Simpsons writer told me. I don’t claim to be a scientician, but I tried to be meticulous. So crack open a Duff and enjoy.
You'll want to skip to the top ten and see if your favorites are there, then backtrack and read about the entire 100 Best. Episodes. Ever. -via Metafilter
In this dash cam video, we find that a light has gone wonky on the streets of Kemerovo, Russia. A passerby thinks he can give it a whack with a stick and maybe it will straighten up and work right. What could possibly go wrong?
You'll have to watch the video to find out. Let's just say he makes things much worse. -via Tastefully Offensive
Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.
Our 18th U.S. president, Ulysses S. Grant was, like so many of our presidents before and since, a fascinating person in real life. Not only was he one of our most famous presidents, but Grant was also a very celebrated and distinguished military leader. Okay, let's take a look at a few things you may not have known about Ulysses s. Grant.
1. Grant's real name was Hiram Ulysses Grant, but he so hated his initials -H.U.G.- that he began using Ulysses as his first name.
2. Ulysses S. Grant's father bestowed the nickname "Useless" on him. Nothing like a little negative reinforcement to set a kid off on the right path, eh?
3. While president, Grant was once arrested for speeding in his horse-drawn carriage. He insisted on paying the fine and wrote a letter to the cop's boss complimenting the officer on his respect for the law- regardless of who the lawbreaker was.
ProBoyNick is Russian street artist Nikita Golubev. One of his chosen media is dirty vehicles. He uses paintbrushes and his fingers to selectively remove grime to reveal a work of art! It's just another of the several experimental art project he has going. See a selection of his best "dirty work" at Boing Boing, and all of his creations at Facebook.
