People love to flex their life and achievements on social media platforms. If one wanted to flaunt their outings with friends, it’s easily done with a photo uploaded on any social media platform. But what if one doesn’t have people to take photos with? Well, this Japanese company might be the answer to that dilemma! Real Appeal is a company that aims to make its customers appear so popular that they move up in the world. This company’s specialty is to portray its customers in the best light on social media, by providing their customers with people they can take photos with. Potential customers can go to the company’s site to avail their services, as Weird Asia News detailed : 

Customers go to the Real Appeal site. There, they select potential “friends” from a catalog of Real Appeal staff members. Customers can choose based on age, sex, and physical attractiveness. Once selected, a staff member shows up and will pose in social media photos for two hours. The price for the service is 8,000 yen, which is about $70.

You can purchase as many “friends” as you would like. However, there is no bulk discount. Additionally, the customer is responsible for covering all the travel expenses and meals for their new “friends.” If you were planning to try out the service and live outside of Japan, prepare to break the bank.

image credit: via Weird Asia News

In the age of location-based social media platforms, GPS features in the user’s phone are used by platforms such as Foursquare, Gowalla, SCVNGR, Shopkick, and Loopt to publish the person's location and offer rewards in the form of discounts, badges or points to encourage frequent check-ins. While these rewards and benefits are great, the security risks are also a matter to consider, as the US Army warned its soldiers: 

Security risks for the military:

A deployed service member's situational awareness includes the world of social media. If a Soldier uploads a photo taken on his or her smartphone to Facebook, they could broadcast the exact location of their unit, said Steve Warren, deputy G2 for the Maneuver Center of Excellence, or MCoE.

"Today, in pretty much every single smartphone, there is built-in GPS," Warren said. "For every picture you take with that phone, it will automatically embed the latitude and longitude within the photograph."

Someone with the right software and the wrong motivation could download the photo and extract the coordinates from the metadata.

(via Peta Pixel)

image credit: U.S. Army Graphic via Army.mil

In a feat of kindheartedness, a woman saved a bunch of stray dogs from Hurricane Dorian as it hit the Bahamas. The good Samaritan is Chella Phillips, who runs The Voiceless Dogs Of Nassau, Bahamas nonprofit that pairs local stray dogs with rescue agencies in the US and regularly dishes out food and medicines to stray animals. Phillips saved 97 dogs from peril as she took them into her Nassau home, The Huffington Post detailed: 

Phillips told ABC News it was “either leave the dogs on the street to fend for themselves...or do something about it.”

“I just want these dogs to be safe,” she said. “I could care less about the dog poop and pee in my house.”

She did not immediately return HuffPost’s request for further information.

But in a second post on Monday, Phillips wrote, “we are alright after a stressful night.”

“All services are down, all TVs are fried from the lightnings so no more cartoons for the sick dogs until we can purchase new ones,” she wrote.

She added: “I don’t see how any dogs or any living being could have survived outside. My heart goes out to them. Thank you for the outpouring support and heartfelt prayers.”

image credit: via ABC News

Do you have plans to head over to Disney World? With the amusement park’s huge area, along with the abundance of different amenities to try out, navigating through the park can be exhausting and expensive, especially with kids. From their own experience at Disney World, Popsugar’s Katharine Stahl offers some tips to make your Disney World trip more enjoyable (and with less hassle): 

Prioritize and strategize well in advance. For a 3-year-old, the Magic Kingdom is the Holy Grail, so we focused on spending as much time there as possible. That meant getting on the road before the sun came up so we could arrive close to the park's 8 a.m. opening, when ride wait times are much lower.

Book everyone's FastPass+ ASAP. If you're staying at a Disney resort, you'll get one of those nifty MagicBands, which entitles you to score FastPass+ reservations (they let you skip the general line) for three attractions 60 days before you arrive. Use these wisely. Try to make all of your FastPass+ reservations as early in the day of your visit as you can. Once you use all three, you'll be able to hit up one of the FastPass+ kiosks in the park and make additional reservations. 

Tip: if the FastPass+ system overwhelms you, don't worry. Book your online reservations early, and once you get to the park, find one of the countless cast members and ask for help. They're all eager to do so.

Stay on property. For us, this was a big one, since we knew we'd probably need a place to take an afternoon break, which we did from about 3:30 to 5 p.m. (Weirdly, both my husband and I took a catnap while our daughter watched more Disney shows on her iPad.) 

Rent or bring a stroller. Even if your child has long outgrown stroller mode, you'll be surprised at how much time she'll spend in it while at the park. My husband's pedometer logged 22,000 steps on the day we spent at the Magic Kingdom, which is at least seven miles of walking. We rented a single stroller ($15 a day; double strollers are $31), and while parking it for every attraction was a bit of a pain, it was either that or carry our 40-pounder, and we still did plenty of that while waiting for rides.

Download the My Disney Experience app. The app will let you manage your previsit FastPass+ and dining reservations (make them, and — just a tip — Be Our Guest is the only restaurant in the park that serves alcohol), find park amenities easily, and, most importantly, track all attraction wait times. We found that any line with a 20-minute wait time or less seemed to go pretty quickly.

 Remember: for preschoolers, a little Disney is still a lot of fun. Before we left for our crazy Disney day, my mom said to me, "Even if she only goes on three rides, it will still be one of the greatest days of her life." 

image credit: wikimedia commons

Walter Chandoha captured the hearts of the public with his beautiful photos of feline friends. With an archive believed to contain 90,000 photographs of cats over more than 50 years, along with photos that appeared in magazines and pet food packagings, Taschen released a book that featured 300 of his most celebrated images taken between 1942-2018. My Modern Met has the details: 

Chandoha began his career as a combat photographer during the Second World War and an art director postwar, but it was a chance encounter with a kitten during a winter’s night in New York City during 1949 that ignited his lifelong passion for photographing his fluffy subjects. Chandoha adopted the kitten and named him Loco, but little did he know his new pet would become his muse and determine the rest of his career.

“I relished the challenge of making photographs of cats and quickly saw the potential of attempting to capture their naturally expressive personalities,” Chandoha writes in his foreword to the book, just before he died earlier this year at the age of 98.

image credit: Walter Chandoha/Taschen via My Modern Met

A healthy baby girl was born after her mother was declared brain-dead by doctors. The baby was kept alive in her mother’s womb for 117 days, believed to be the longest artificially suspended pregnancy in a brain-dead mother. Czech doctors placed the 27-year old unnamed woman on artificial life support, and regularly moved her legs (to simulate walking) to help with the child’s growth. 

The baby girl was born by cesarean section, weighing 2.13 kg (4.7 lb) and measuring 42 cm (16.5 inches) according to Brno’s University Hospital.

image credit: via wikimedia commons

Florida resident Patrick Eldridge had a light-hearted challenge with his wife, Jessica Eldridge. The challenge was whether or not a smart car can fit into their kitchen. The answer is yes as Patrick managed to park his smart car in their kitchen. His husband wanted to avoid cleaning their garage out and protect his car from Hurricane Dorian, Jessica told AP news :

Patrick Eldridge parked his smart car in his kitchen to protect it from Hurricane Dorian because he didn’t want it to “blow away” and to prove that he can park his car there.

“I said there was no way he could. He said he could,” Jessica said. “So he opened the double doors and had it in. I was amazed that it could fit. He had it in with no problems.”

“I’m hoping he will pull it out pretty soon once the wind dies down,” she said. “There is room and it’s not in the way but my dogs are confused by it.”

image credit: Jessica Eldridge via AP news

The world’s attention is now on the Amazon, the “lungs of the planet,” with wildfires ripping through the forest. The fires are now spurring groups and governments all over the world to call for a boycott on beef, believing that the culprits for the fires are cattle ranchers who want more land. However, cattle ranching is not the only factor in the destruction of the Amazon forest. It’s also the gold mining industry, Buzzfeed details: 

A map compiled by environmental group Amazon Geo-Referenced Socio-Environmental Information Network shows 2,312 illegal mining sites in 245 areas across six countries, which the group called an “epidemic.”

Fueling that demand is not just the world’s appetite for gold bars and jewelry — the largest categories for which gold is used — but also high tech. Tiny electrical currents are constantly running through your iPhone, Alexa speaker, and laptop — and carrying those currents is gold, a fantastic conductor of electricity that’s also resistant to corrosion. While there isn’t much gold inside a single device — an iPhone 6, for example, contains 0.014 grams, or around 50 cents’ worth — in the aggregate, the amount is staggering. According to market researcher Gartner, over 1.5 billion smartphones were sold last year, with 1.3 billion of them being Android devices. It was followed by 215 million iOS devices.

So the tech industry, which consumes nearly 335 tons of gold yearly, will only need more and more of the metal. “There’s a gold rush in the Amazon right now that’s just like the gold rush that happened in California in the 1850s,” said Silman.

image credit: Afp | AFP | Getty Images via Buzzfeed

Long-running game series Fire Emblem took the gaming world by storm just this summer, on its release of the  latest installment for the Nintendo Switch, Fire Emblem: Three Houses. Set in the world of Fodlan, your character plays as a new professor teaching students of the Officer’s Academy in Garreg Mach Monastery. Taking the same concept of a turn-based strategy game from the previous games in the series, Three Houses also incorporates new mechanics and removes some classic concepts from previous titles. The game makes use of the Switch’s power to create massive and well-designed maps, as IGN details: 

Battles take full advantage of the relatively powerful Switch (as opposed to the 3DS) to create some impressive looking maps. With new battalions that you can equip to enhance and support your units, armies actually start to look like armies as the map zooms right into the fight to show the opposing forces slam into each other. 

Fans of the series may notice that the traditional “weapon triangle” of swords beat axes beat lances beat swords has been all but abandoned in Three Houses. Instead, there’s a bigger emphasis on choosing the right weapon for the right person — depending on their skill level and the stats of the weapon itself (swords still have the best overall accuracy, while axes unleash the most raw power, and lances are balanced in the middle).

Fire Emblem: Three Houses succeeds in its ambitious telling of a land at war helmed by captivating leaders, in which no side has all the answers. Its tense battles are made all the more harrowing thanks to new strategy elements, and the colorful cast of troops you send into the fray are incredibly charming. With a new take on training and bonding with your units, and the many activities and options available to sample, it’s absolutely begging to be played multiple times.

In addition to the old mechanic of fighting battles, Three Houses offers a new explorable fortress, alongside an immersive calendar-paced story that differs depending on the route you choose at the beginning of the game (which depends on which house your character decides to teach). The big differences in every available game route, along with a cast of complex and interesting characters, give the game a huge replay quality. Summer’s over, alright - but it’s not too late to give this game a try.

image credit: gameinformer.com

If you’re the type of person to avoid public restrooms at all costs, then you might have considered peeing in an ocean at some point. But is it actually okay for you to pee in an ocean? The answer is, yes! You can actually relieve yourself in the ocean.

It’s safe for the fish living in the system, as our urine has the same components as the ocean. In addition, our urine can also contribute to the ocean’s life cycle, so no fish will be harmed! While you can pee on the ocean, there are some locations that are an exception, as Refinery29 details: 

Never pee near a coral reef. CNN reported that reefs near Mexico’s Quintana Roo province are suffering because of human waste spilled into the ocean by hotels tourists visit in the region. "There are a lot of nutrients going into the ground water caused by treated water from the hotels and municipal waste water treatment plants," environmentalist Paul Sanchez-Navarro told CNN. "They inject the water into the ground and that makes its way into the aquifer... We've found way too many nutrients — nitrates and phosphates — and that comes from human waste, mostly urine.”

Business Insider points out that small lakes are another place you shouldn’t tinkle. You might want to just get out of the water and find a toilet. TIME Magazine reported in 2012 that a lake in Germany had to close because of "an algae bloom that poisoned over 500 fish.” Some researchers blamed this on a ton of urine in the lake.

image credit: via wikimedia commons

Kirsty Elson is a multimedia artist from Cornwall, England, who uses bits of seaside scraps to create unique sculptures. Using bits of driftwood,shells, bottle caps, rusted nails, and metal washers, Elson creates sculptures that imitate surrounding seaside homes. She explains the inspiration for these pieces on an interview with Studio Wallop on her website: 

“I tend to let the materials lead me, rather than having an idea in my head and trying to find a piece to fit my idea… I let the materials do the work really.”

(via Colossal)

image credit: via Colossal

UK photographer Caron Steele took the top prize as Bird Photographer of the Year with her stunning photo of a Dalmatian Pelican. The Bird Photographer of the Year contest, now in its fourth year, saw over 13,500 avian images submitted from 63 different countries. Steele’s winning photo was taken at Lake Kerkini, Greece which had frozen for the first time in 16 years. Steele seized this opportunity as she took the photo of a pelican attempting to navigate the Lake’s frozen surface for the first time. 

The competition, which aims for the public’s deeper understanding of birds worldwide, introduced more awards besides the top prize, as My Modern Met detailed:

The winning shots give the public a deeper understanding of the state of birds around the world today. To celebrate the inspiration that can come from contact with wildlife, BPOTY introduced a new special award for the 2019 competition. With his photograph of Emperor Penguins in Antarctica, Martin Grace was named the recipient of the inaugural Inspirational Encounters Award. In sharing his moving experience with these penguins, Grace celebrates the positive impact of the avian world on humanity.

image credit: Caron Steele via My Modern Met

Meow Wolf, a strong artist collective has opened the doors to a new immersive art environment. The House of Eternal Return is a 20,000 square foot role-playing installation located in an abandoned bowling alley in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The environment serves as a unique combination of art exhibition, fantasy world, jungle gym, and children’s museum where you are allowed to interact with anything and everything! On Meow Wolf’s process in creating this fantasy, open-world themed environment, Colossal has the details: 

“The group has long been inspired by monumental works of art,” Vince Kadlubek, one of Meow Wolf’s organizers, told Colossal. “But I think we are equally inspired by arcades, theme parks, Burning Man, grocery stores, nature—immersive spaces. At the heart of it we are probably most inspired by the forts we built growing up and certainly Nickelodeon, MTV, Jim Henson, Tumblr, and Twin Peaks.”

The creative process for creating such an involved experience took 18 months, in part because the installation and storyline were being built in tandem. “We had a team of six writers who had a specific story arc with specific plot points and characters, but much of the story elements were written from backgrounds of the objects and spaces that were being created,” said Kadlubek. “Our creative process is not top-down. It is lateral.”

image credit: via Colossal

One of the first pairs made by Nike Inc shattered the record for a pair of sneakers at public auction, by selling for $437,500. The “Moon Shoe”, bought by Canadian investor and car collector Miles Nadal (who had previously paid $850,000 for 99 other pairs of rare or limited collection sneakers as well), was designed by Nike co-founder and track coach Bill Bowerman for 1972 Olympics runners. 

The purchase broke the previous record, which was $190,373 in 2017 for a pair of signed Converse sneakers said to have been worn by Michael Jordan. Reuters has the details:

Sotheby’s, better known for selling art works fetching tens of millions of dollars, teamed up with streetwear marketplace Stadium Goods to auction 100 pairs of the rarest sneakers ever produced in a venture that reflects their fast-growing status as collectibles.

The handmade “Moon Shoe,” with a waffle sole pattern, was one of only 12 pairs ever made and the pair that were auctioned on Tuesday are the only ones known to exist in an unworn condition, Sotheby’s said.

Nadal, the founder of investment firm Peerage Capital, said in a statement he was thrilled at his purchase, calling the “Moon Shoe” a “true historical artifact in sports history and pop culture.”

image credit: Sotheby via Reuters

Some people call it “August Anxiety”, some call it “Summertime Sadness” - this feeling of real sadness and uneasiness in anticipation of the end of summer is real and is felt by many. August is the last third of summer, and we really don’t want to curl up into a ball of anxiety when we can enjoy summer to its fullest. Debra Kissen, PhD, explains to Refinery29 that there are things that we can do to re-wire our brain to handle August differently: 

The core skill that you need to develop in order to combat August anxiety is simply mindfulness, she says.  "Gently notice that thought of future distress, and without judgment, just return back to the present moment," 

It's also worthwhile to find ways to be present, whether that's spending time in nature or literally just watching TV without scrolling your phone at the same time. "It's so much harder and harder to be present, because real-life distractions keep injecting themselves," Dr. Kissen says. "Our minds are so used to being given this pace of information that it doesn’t know how to slow down." And if that still doesn't help, the next best thing you can do for the rest of the month is commiserate with other people and blast the Lana Del Ray.

image credit: via wikimedia commons