There’s a lot of Lego video games available for different consoles. As a casual player myself, I wonder if there’s an audience for these games, as they keep getting new releases. From Lego Star Wars to Lego Knight’s Kingdom, the appeal in these games is the nostalgia and letting two people play at the same time, as Ryan Fan explains: 

You’re constantly making progress and helping each other figure out where to go, what blocks to hit, which characters to talk to, and which items you need. You’re sharing triumphs as well as struggles with someone else, and I don’t know if I would like the games as much without playing with my brother or my girlfriend.

To be fair, the appeal of Lego video games is not their story. The plot follows pretty closely after a movie franchise like Star Wars, The Incredibles, or Lord of the Rings, but people in these games rarely talk. They may tell you about an item they need, but the story is often more lightly comical than it is profound in a Lego video game.

For adults too, the Lego video games are funny. According to Keri Honea at The Playstation Lifestyle, the miming, drawings, and gestures of the Lego games often parody the seriousness of the movies. In Lego Lord of the Rings, ​one of the main characters is killed with a banana and a broom in his chest. Serious events that the survival of the entire world is contingent on, such as Gollum and Frodo fighting over the ring, are treated with meme-like dancing and faux-outrage.

The director for ​Lego The Incredibles​​, ​Peter Gomer, calls the process similar to building a giant Lego set, where developers have components, ideas, and mechanics, and then proceed to modify them, mix them together, and use their imagination to make whatever they want.

After you get through the story of each Lego game, it’s an open world. You’re on a quest to 100% completion of the game, even if there’s no one set, linear path to get it. And then there’s the element of fantasy, imagining that we are all also ourselves building our real buildings or climbing our own elaborate towers ourselves.

image via Medium

In a new episode of The Watcher’s Top 5 Beatdown, Hoai-Tran Bui joins the boys to rank her top five Pixar films. Bui is a writer at Film and host of the Millennial Falcon podcast. Do you agree with her or the boys’ top five? Do you have a ranking of your own? 

In a series of short comics, Nic Koller showcases some imagined scenarios between famous artists and their parents. His comics include Pablo Picasso and Jean-Michael Basquiat. Can you name all the artists Koller included in his comics? 

image via The New Yorker

The Shrek movies have their own quirks that can only be accepted in a fictional universe. With that being said, there’s one aspect of the franchise that still bugs me to this day: how did the dragon and Donkey procreate? Even if it is somehow possible for them to have their children because it’s fiction, the science behind it is still something you can think about. Are there other aspects of the Shrek movies that’s weird to you? Or does this take the cake? 

image via Buzzfeed

A woman driving a red minivan ran over some graves at the Houston National Cemetery. She was seen by people who went to the cemetery to attend the Lone Star Flight Museum flyover, which commemorated the end of World War II in Europe. The bizarre incident outraged families attending the ceremony and visiting their relatives’ graves, as abc13  details: 

Amanda said a woman driving a red minivan was in a hurry to leave as soon as the flyover ended.

"She tried to back up, and then went up on the curb of the section where my grandparents are buried," she explained. "[The woman] couldn't get around some cars, and then she started running over the graves."

Hill said in all, the driver tried to get around the traffic jam three times.

"She went over dozens of graves by the time she finished," said Amanda.

By then, onlookers were yelling at her to stop, and 19-year-old Jeremiah Johnston was recording it on his cell phone.

"I was shocked, and never would have expected that to happen," he said. "This is Houston, and there are crazy drivers, and I never would have expected to see them going through a cemetery. Especially when everyone was there to pay their respects during a patriotic flyover."

Amanda said the driver's window was down.

"She heard us yelling at her to stop, and just kept doing it. My mother approached the van, and the driver told her she had to get out."

image screenshot via abc13 

Sushi master Masayuki Komatsu learned how to appraise the quality of his ingredients. Komatsu looks for four qualities : cut, color, clarity, and carat. He learned to look for these qualities from his father, a diamond appraiser. Watch as the former head sushi chef at Morimoto NYC tells Buzzfeed his plans to open his own restaurant along with how he crafts his dishes with care. 

A proud and doting parent would celebrate any milestone of their child. This dad did just that. Head to CNN to see the full video of a dad going crazily happy over his 4-year-old son’s first home run! 

image screenshot via CNN

A mother bear in South Lake Tahoe, California saved three of her cubs to safety, and she continuously swam each of her cubs to safety. The mama bear deserves a great award for Mother’s Day, as The Huffington Post detailed: 

“The mother bear was determined to save all three of her cubs herself and ensure that they see tomorrow by continually swimming each one to safety!” the South Lake Tahoe Fire Fighters Association captioned footage of the impressive rescue mission on Facebook.

The association said it was called to the scene to aid a cub that had been separated, but the determined mother was ultimately able to coax the little one into the water and swim it across.

Video shows the mama bear piggybacking her cub as she swims and climbs onto the opposite shore.

image screenshot via The Huffington Post

The environment is different when you're working from home. There are sounds that might be caught by your coworkers during work. In a Supreme Court hearing, someone flushed a toilet during an oral argument. The Supreme Court was hearing a case via teleconferencing. During the Barr v. American Association of Political Consultants case, and an attorney was making his argument when someone flushed the toilet. The identity of the mysterious toilet flusher remains unknown! 

image via wikimedia commons

How did the girl step into the moving background and not fall? How did her body distort as she moved towards the moving background? It’s all thanks to French artist Francois Vogel using slit scan photography! 

View this post on Instagram

seagull girl . #distortion #slicetime #slitscan #spacetime #bird #fly #videoart #videoartist #newmedia #newmediaart #newmediaartist #digitalart #contemporaryart #contemporaryartist #digitalartist #digitalartwork #art #artist #artwork #animation #visualeffects

A post shared by Francois Vogel (@francois.vogel) on Apr 19, 2020 at 8:24am PDT

In a new episode of “Chef Out Of Water,” Alexis is challenged to make a three course meal with power tools. Yes, you’ve read that right. Alexis is tasked to make meals with two saws, a drill, a heat gun, and a hammer. Watch the video to find out if she succeeds! I know I won’t!  

A man was clearing out his deceased mother’s apartment in Manhattan when he found something gruesome. He found a decomposed human body in a chest freezer that was sealed with duct tape! The body appeared to have been stored for over a decade, according to investigators. An autopsy is planned, and authorities are investigating the incident. 

image via wikimedia commons

Asian giant hornets could establish themselves in the United States after being spotted in Washington state. These murder hornets can injure and worse, kill humans, and they wipe out bee hives. The Huffington Post has more details: 

“They’re like something out of a monster cartoon with this huge yellow-orange face,” Susan Cobey, a bee breeder with Washington State University’s Department of Entomology, said in an April news release from the university.

Though they aren’t usually aggressive to humans unless their nests are disturbed, their stings are venomous enough to kill someone who gets stung multiple times. According to the Times, the hornets kill up to 50 people a year in Japan and folks on the receiving end of the sting have compared it to the feeling of being speared by hot metal.

They’re also devastating to honey bee populations, wiping out hives and partially consuming the occupants. Last November, a beekeeper in Blaine, Washington, was shocked to discover thousands of his bees with their heads ripped off ― the murder hornet’s signature move.

image via wikimedia commons

Alan Lane is the artistic director of Slug Low, one of the UK’s most innovative theatre companies. With the current crisis, not only does he and his company try to find ways to stage epic community theatre shows, they have to make sure hundreds of people have the resources they need during the lockdown. BBC has more details: 

"Today we find ourselves with a Transit van full of crisps," he says on the phone from Leeds. "Which is amazing.

"But yesterday we didn't have any vegetables. And tomorrow we're not going to have any eggs.

"So constantly I'm on the phone doing deals. The other day, I swapped a load of tote bags that I got from the university for some face masks, which I split in half and swapped the other half for a lot of cream.

"It's constant creative thinking, constant problem solving."

Six weeks ago, Lane and his company Slung Low were asked by Leeds City Council to co-ordinate the community response in Holbeck and Beeston, meaning any requests for help from the 10,000 households in the area have been passed to them.

image via BBC

A wine glass used around 1600 CE made drinking wine a challenge. The wine glass was from Venice, Italy. It looks like a cake stand. Is that supposed to hold wine? Apparently, the difficulty of drinking from it is the point. People who attended banquets in Italy were supposed to be good at doing everything effortlessly, as Atlas Obscura detailed: 

You’d be expected to lift it by wrapping three fingers around the base, and raise it to your lips without spilling a drop. The whole process should look effortless.

Courtiers were expected to embody the ideal of “sprezzatura,” a hard-to-translate word that combines the senses of elegance, sophistication, and nonchalance. In other words, you were supposed to be good at everything, without ever seeming to put any effort into it. What could be a better demonstration of sprezzatura than casually raising one of these sloshing, top-heavy goblets and taking a sip?

Even at the time, these bizarre glasses mystified visitors to Italy, such as the Englishman Richard Lassels, who wrote that “the Italians that love to drink leisurely, they have glasses that are almost as large and flat as silver plates, and almost as uneasy to drink out of.” But to those in the know, even subtle distinctions in how you held your glass could reveal your place in the social hierarchy. At least, that’s what the 17th-century artist Gerard de Lairesse implied in his best-selling manual for painters—he writes that a princess should be depicted “drawing warily and agreeably the little finger” from the glass, while her lady-in-waiting “fearful of spilling, holds the glass handily, yet less agreeably than the other.” The difference between royalty and mere gentility is the lift of a pinky.

image via Atlas Obscura