When the folks at the Anime Appreciation Society prepare for tea time they don't just pull out some old chipped and cracked ceramic tea set and pour cups of bland tea- they get help from their favorite characters and make every tea time one to remember! Sipping on a cup of tea in Totoro makes the brew taste like a fantasy forest adventure, complete with earthy undertones of tree bark and fresh rain with just a hint of catbus. Those who are looking to relax can really taste the zzzzzs in their cup of Snorlax sleepy time tea, with that mossy monster taste kids love. But what's with the Saotome Genma tea pot? He's just there to make sure nobody walks off with his scones!
Add some refreshingly sweet silliness to your geeky wardrobe with this Tea Club t-shirt by Earwen Felagund, it's good to the last drop!
Are you a professional illustrator or T-shirt designer? Let's chat! Sell your designs on the NeatoShop and get featured in front of tons of potential new fans on Neatorama!
Samus may not be the most famous bad girl of the 1980s, but her rebellion against Mother Brain and her misfit nature has made her the most enduring role model for girls who aren't content to sit by in silence while men run their lives. With her weapon array and awesome abilities Samus became the character both boys and girls wished they could become, even if only so they could wear her sweet armor and fire her blazin' hot arm cannon. But like many 80s pop culture icons Samus Aran has gone from household name to novelty character gamers bring up when they want to prove they're from the old school. However, those of us who remember how her adventures spiced up our otherwise boring lives, and that cool helmet removing reveal at the end of Metroid, will always think of Samus as the raddest!
Get your old school swagger on with this 80's SAMUS t-shirt by MRCLV, it's the fashionable way to take your geeky wardrobe back to the good old days of gaming.
Are you a professional illustrator or T-shirt designer? Let's chat! Sell your designs on the NeatoShop and get featured in front of tons of potential new fans on Neatorama!
Divas sing, dance and wear outfits that scream "look at me, love me, pay attention to me!" but D.Va doesn't need to rely on her moves or her voice to get attention- she has a badass mech to do all the talking for her! Watching D.Va and her mech in battle is a thing of beauty, as Hana does her dance of death while fusion cannons blaze away, but her opponents don't have time to watch the show- they're too busy trying to stay alive!
Get geared up for the game with this D-Va t-shirt by Carterson, it's the stylish way to show love for your favorite over powered video game character!
Are you a professional illustrator or T-shirt designer? Let's chat! Sell your designs on the NeatoShop and get featured in front of tons of potential new fans on Neatorama!
The technology of the future seems to be designed to make us paranoid, and technophobes are often terrified when they discover what artificial intelligence software can say and do nowadays.
But the new Adobe audio software VoCo isn't artificial intelligence software- it's an editing suite designed to help people warp and modify audio tracks in any way they can imagine.
It just so happens to have one very cool, very AI feature that can simulate a person's voice after listening to them talk for about 20 minutes, allowing users to type out whatever they want that person to say.
This software seems like a good idea that will inevitably be used for evil, but Adobe tech Zeyu Jin says they're working on ways to tell the real voice apart from the fake:
“Don’t worry,” Jin said. “We actually have researched how to prevent forgery. Think about watermarking detection. As we’re getting the results much better, making it so people can’t distinguish between the fake and the real one, we’re working harder trying to make it detectable.” He then gave a thumbs up and grinned.
We all know Hogwarts has very little in common with the average high school, but when the differences between the two are spelled out for you Muggle life pales by comparison.
High school students are picked on, sorted into dozens of cliques and stereotyped according to their differences and style of dress by their fellow students.
Meanwhile at Hogwarts students are required to dress the same, but they're only sorted into four different cliques, so that's different.
Oh, and every meal at Hogwarts is a mouth-watering feast, while high schoolers wash down bread with cartons of milk.
But there are some similarities between Hogwarts and Muggle high school- students get bullied in both places, and jocks tend to rule the school.
Contrary to popular belief police officers and detectives don't want to solve every case they work on, but the reasons why they'd rather leave some cases unsolved would surprise you.
Sometimes they're trying to protect the killer:
I had been alerted to a well known local philanthropist, turned up dead. These were the days where physician assisted euthanasia was illegal in most of the developed world. This man, I had known him quite well and he had been suffering from a very serious terminal illness that was going to kill him before his 40th birthday, shattering his family... Especially his 2 young children. An autopsy had determined that he had been murdered, intentional overdose of morphine. The Health Authority and Department of Justice wanted us to investigate and bring the person who essentially murders him to justice. We chalked it up that there was no way we could ever determine who it was that killed him. Years later, his wife sent our department a letter saying she gave her husband the lethal dose to put him out of his misery. I wish I had never known.
And they'll even turn a blind eye to a killing if the victims were criminals themselves:
Ex cop, NSW - Australia. 7 years. I really never wanted to find the answer to two particular murders in my area. 2 known sexual offenders were killed in the space of 8 weeks. One was a rock spider (pedophile), the other used to drug women. The 2 issues were unrelated. Only one of the alledged offenders was caught (also a scumbag 1%). He was released after a week due to lack of evidence. I know it's bad to wish death on people but these two blokes were just rancid. As a cop it was my job to find the offenders but as a human I had no interest in solving the issue at all. Luckily I was never in charge of the investigations.
They responded by discussing the cases they hate to deal with, and they all agreed on one thing- the cases involving children and animals are the absolute worst:
Responded to a 4 year old who was unconscious and vomiting. Without getting into the details, it didn't take long after my arrival to realize it was a cover up. My partner and I already knew where this incident was headed, but you keep your head down and try and do the job without getting emotional. Mother and father were both adamantly lying that the child had just eaten some junk food and had gone to sleep before he started vomiting. Without getting into the details, investigation revealed that the father was mad at the child for eating some junk food. So he grabbed the child by the ankles and swung him around the house into furniture all over the home, nearly killing him. It's one of those cases that you don't want to investigate, because you know ahead of time what the outcome is going to be how bad it's going to get.
Fruit always looks delicious even if it's sliced, chopped, crushed or otherwise mangled, and watching someone cut a piece of fruit tends to make my mouth water.
But it turns out color has a lot to do with produce appeal, and when a piece of fruit is sliced open to reveal flesh that's a different color than expected it triggers our WTF response rather than our salivary glands.
For this UV video, the subject is illuminated directly by UV emitting lamps . UV filter is placed on the lens, which allows ultraviolet light to pass and which absorbs or blocks all visible and infrared light. UV filters are made from special colored glass and may be coated or sandwiched with other filter glass to aid in blocking unwanted wavelengths.
Ever since Disney started making tons of money with their theme parks they've been funding research in the field of robotics in order to improve the animatronics and effects they use on their rides.
And all of that money and research has led to the creation of the most realistic animatronic robots to date- the Na'vi characters which will appear in the Pandora attraction at Disney's Animal Kingdom in Florida.
Character designers know a character's basic shapes, silhouette and the overall use of smooth vs sharp shapes help give the character personality, but color scheme is (arguably) the least important element of a character.
Color schemes can be messed with during paintovers as designers see fit without "breaking" the character, and the proper application of shading and highlights can give a flat character a bit more appeal.
Cartoon paintovers are also a fun practice exercise for artists, challenging them to enhance the look of the original characters while keeping their personalities intact underneath the digital paint job.
Humans have always had an uneasy relationship with ravens, and for every civilization that thought of them as pure evil there was one who saw the raven as a powerful deity or nature spirit.
But despite what some bird haters will have you believe ravens don't want to watch the human world burn- they want to be a part of it.
Ravens are one of the smartest animals on Earth, they can imitate human speech much like parrots, and scientists believe they communicate by using nonvocal signals and may even feel empathy for their fellow ravens.
Ravens also roam around in gangs during adolescence, love to trick other animals out of their food and roll around on ant hills, so perhaps their bad reputation isn't pure superstition after all.
When the world was given a glimpse of the previously unseen North Korean "internet" we didn't know what to expect, and some still don't understand what the hell they were looking at.
It was easy enough to tell the Air Koryo site is meant for travel and another site featured pics of food, but beyond that the screenshots people shared didn't really tell us much about these sites.
According to their research there are only 1,024 IP addresses (Los Angeles has approximately 15,000 IP addresses) and only about 18 different websites appear to be active, including:
Korean Central News Agency: this was the first website to launch in North Korea. It came online using a Korean server in October 2010, and uses Star Joint Venture’s IP block. It was previously served from a Japanese datacenter.
Air Koryo: the North Korean state airline. The country is thought to have a handful of commercial airports, with the primary one being Pyongyang Sunan International.
Parents just don't understand why kids go crazy for Pokémon, but when the card game first came out parents found one element of the game made perfect sense- the high cash value of certain cards.
These rare cards were randomly placed in booster packs, giving every kid the chance to score big when they opened up a pack, but those cards are worthless compared to the rarest of them all- the Japanese promo Pikachu Illustrator card.
The Pikachu Illustrator card was given to winners of the CoroCoro Comic Illustration Contest in Japan back in 1998, and since only 20-39 of these cards were ever made they sell for a small fortune.
When a daredevil gives herself the nickname "Batgirl" she's setting the bar really high for herself, but Russian daredevil Kobzarro has truly owned the name.
She didn't own it by fighting crime or swinging on a rope high above the city- she owned it by surfing and "flying" atop trains while wearing a cool costume.
Kobzarro is clearly a more theatrical version of Batgirl, but to her credit it does take nerves of steel to surf on top of trains, and just a touch of madness to do so in the middle of winter in Moscow.
Arguing about fictional franchises is a great way to jaw about the media we love and prove we know the franchise inside and out, but an arguer should always do their homework first so they don't lose face in front of their fellow fans.
Because imagine how embarassed you'd be if you claimed Groundhog Day was purposely written without an explanation of how Phil got stuck in the time loop, only to find out about the second draft of the script.
The second draft spells out that Phil's ex girlfriend Stephanie Decastro put a curse on the poor guy and that Phil is actually supposed to be stuck in the time loop for 10,000 years.
And speaking of things that are spelled out in the script but never made it onto the screen- the contents of the mysterious FedEx box in Cast Away was originally supposed to be revealed to be this:
In the third draft of the script Chuck decided to open the box after he'd been on the island for 1,000 days, and inside he discovered two bottles of homemade salsa verde and a note from a woman begging her husband to come back.
Beloved author, fighter pilot, spy and all around interesting guy Roald Dahl may be best known as the creator of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda and The BFG, but he also wrote macabre adult stories that would scare the wits out of a kid.
Most of the short stories Dahl wrote in his parallel writing career were perfect for anthology TV, since they're often cautionary tales with a surprise ending.
So when CBS network producers were under the gun to fill the spot left behind by Jackie Gleason's epic failure of a talk show You're In The Picture they called Roald Dahl.
Roald naturally jumped at the chance to bring his strange and creepy stories to life on a TV show, and thus the series Way Out was born.
It aired right before The Twilight Zone for one season in 1961, and Roald provided the intro and epilogue much like Rod Serling or Alfred Hitchcock did on their shows, only smokier.
Strangely, only the first episode "William & Mary" was written by Dahl, even though the producers initially wanted to base every episode on one of Dahl's macabre short stories.
