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Wherever you go there’s a fast food restaurant lurking around the corner, waiting to fry up pounds of delicious fatty foods for you to stuff in your gob, and yet these ever present restaurant chains are surrounded by secrecy and mystery.

They all claim to be number one, but who’s telling the truth? Where do Subway sandwich shops get all of their avocados, and what’s the farthest distance a pizza chain has ever gone to delivered a cheesy pie?

These tasty factoid nuggets and more can be found in BuzzFeed’s low calorie video 9 Fast Food Facts You Won’t Believe Are Actually True, winner of the 2014 award for Most Exaggerated Factoid Video Title.

The guy in this video took the phrase “skate or die” way too literally when he decided to jump across the 145^th Street subway station tracks in Harlem, but it’s a good thing he captured the whole thing on video because you rarely get a second chance at a deadly stunt like this:

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The daredevil who completed this leap of faith for Colin Read's skate video Tengu: God of Mischief-Subway Skating is Koki Loaiza, and he was able to pull off this trick on his second attempt, without the aid of antigravity boards or self lacing sneakers.

It’s unlikely that anyone will be trying to follow in Koki’s footsteps anytime soon, especially because MTS officials were probably put on red alert when they witnessed this stunt, but it’s a sure bet that Koki is super stoked that he's alive to skate another day!

-Via Sploid

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Former Disney artist Glen Keane has contributed his incredible skills as an animator to classic features like The Little Mermaid, Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast, and it appears he hasn’t lost his touch since he left the studio that Mickey Mouse built.

He recently released a hand drawn short film called Duet as part of Google's Advanced Technology and Projects Group, one of three short films "designed to explore the possibilities of interactive animation on mobile devices", meaning you'll be able to explore content in three dimensional space on tablets and smartphones.

Glen's ethereal short celebrates the power of imagination, and the joys of sharing life experiences with someone you love.

-Via Cartoon Brew

It’s summertime, so people are going to be stripping down and hanging out in bodies of water way more than usual, and with the act of swimming, or in some cases floating,  comes the inevitable conclusion that some people are going to drown.

Drowning people tend to look an awful lot like swimming people, so how are you supposed to tell when someone is a drowning person and not a swimming person?

Consult this handy infographic, brought to you by The Art of Manliness, so you’ll never wonder again whether that person flopping around in the water is a swimming person or a drowning person, and you’ll know which facial expression is the appropriate response to their predicament!

All kidding aside- the point of this infographic is to illustrate that drowning people don't always look like they're in distress, so keep your eyes open for signs of danger and swim safe this summer.

-Via Lifehacker

Visual effects artists have a wide variety of jobs to do, from simple Chroma Keying to making extreme weather look as real as possible, but there’s one viz fx job that looks like a whole lotta messy fun- the destruction supervisor.

It’s their job to make sure the destruction we see on the big screen looks as realistic as possible without sacrificing visual appeal, plus they make sure the whole thing is understandable and doesn't become one big blurry mess to the audience.

Industrial Light & Magic's Michael Balog is one of these lucky artists who gets to spend his days destroying stuff for feature films, and he has torn all sorts of virtual environments down for all four Transformers films and Pacific Rim, just to name a few.

Michael shared all kinds of secrets with io9 about how he makes digital destruction look good for the big screen, and revealed some of the challenges he faced when plotting the destruction contained within each film.

The conversation is accompanied by some fantastic concept art by Wesley Burt, Robert Simons and John J. Park, which shows not only the destructive side of these films but also the characters who cause the chaos.

Fans of the seminal sci-fi TV show The X-Files haven’t lost any love for the far out adventures of Mulder and Scully even though the show went off the air nearly twelve years ago.

However, The X-Files superfans aren’t making animated shorts, or live action YouTube videos, because they’re too busy writing fan fiction featuring ridiculous pop culture crossovers and the obligatory romantic moment between Fox Mulder and (insert another popular main character's name here).

There's a fun tale about the time when Mulder and Scully met the apartment dwelling gang from Seinfeld, one about the totally plausible idea of Scully & Mulder being sucked into the Hunger Games universe and forced to compete in the games without any backup from Skinner or the Lone Gunmen, and the timeless tale Scully O'Hara meets Rhett Mulder.

The X-files crossovers only get stranger from here folks! Read all about these mind bending X-Files fan fic crossovers at Vulture.

Disney has chosen to keep their animated content light and family friendly, which is why some legendary female characters will never make it onto the big screen under the Disney monicker.

Characters like Mai Bhago, the Sikh warrior-saint who led forty fierce women against the Mughal army and lived to tell about it, and Pasiphae, the immortal daughter of Helios who was cursed with desires to couple with a bull and gave birth to the Minotaur, are the stars of tales way too explicit for a general audience:

Illustrator, history/mythology buff and former DreamWorks animator Jason Porath is giving these hardcore heroines their day in the sun through his site Rejected Princesses, which is full of fun Disney inspired illustrations and a fairly comprehensive backstory on each character, so you can see what you're missing when Disney chooses some G rated gal over these fiercely capable femmes!

-Via io9

Philip Pullman as Long John Silver from Treasure Island

Neil Gaiman as Badger from Wind In The Willows

Terry Pratchett as Just William

The Story Museum in Oxford, England approached photographer Cambridge Jones about contributing to an exhibition called 26 Characters, and Cambridge immediately came up with an extremely novel idea for a photo series- famous authors dressed up as their favorite characters.

The 26 portraits in the series show authors such as Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett, Philip Pullman and Malorie Blackman having a great time all dressed up and playing a role, and for many the simple act of putting on a costume seems to have brought out the kid in them.

Cambridge borrowed the costumes from the Royal Shakespeare Company and National Theater, which explains why they all look so fabulous, and each portrait is accompanied by "audio of the authors reading extracts from their books and interviewed about their chosen character."

See many more portraits in the series, as well as some insightful comments from Cambridge Jones, over at BBC News

H.R. Giger is generally known for his paintings, his concept art work for the Alien film franchise, and more recently for his amazing biomechanical sculptures, but when Giger wasn't working he was snapping Polaroids that reveal the man behind the ghastly machines:

Antennae Books recently released "Polaroids: H.R. Giger", featuring dozens of Polaroids from Giger's private collection, portraits which have somehow become more poignant, and insightful, since his passing:

Giger's photographs are just as sexy and experimental as his paintings, which can be seen in the background in many of these candid photos, and they share a side of Giger known well by his friends but relatively unseen by his fans.

(Some images may be considered NSFW)

-Via Boing Boing

The lyre is a distant relative of the modern day guitar, yet it’s not really considered the type of instrument a heavy metal band would want to play onstage, but maybe this morbid instrument will change their mind.

This is a lyre made from a human skull, as well as antelope horns, guts, skin and hair, and it’s probably the most metal instrument I’ve ever seen!

It dates back to the 19^th century, and is currently part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection, at least until some extremely wealthy rock god snatches it up for their own wicked purposes...

-Via io9

(Image Via Cute Animals)

Humans naturally assume that animals don’t understand cameras, or get what we’re doing when we point that box thing with the big glass eye at them, but these adorable pics prove they know all about how cameras work:

(Image Via Sad And Useless)

These pics are so perfectly timed you’d think the photographers caught their subjects unaware, but these blooper shots are considered the height of fashion in the animal kingdom because animals know that life is too short to take a boring picture:

(Image Via izismile)

Maybe these critters are on to something, maybe we need to take less duck faced selfies and stop taking ourselves so seriously in photos!

See more pictures at Pleated Jeans.

Sonic earned his nickname by running really, really fast, just like his buddy Tails earned his name by having two tails, and Dr. Robotnik earned a PhD in robotics and a nickname to boot, but how did SEGA settle on a hedgehog as the main character instead of a rabbit, armadillo or a chicken wearing overalls?

And as for Dr. Robotnik, did you know he was initially going to be the star of the game? The original concept design for the character looked like Teddy Roosevelt, which SEGA felt would be a great way to appeal to Americans:

Okay, now I really want to see a Dr. Robotnik in Dreamland game!

Read Gamma Squad's Fifteen Fascinating Facts You Probably Don't Know About Sonic The Hedgehog

(Image Via Seriously For Real)

There’s a fun new personal grooming trend aimed at guys with lots of body hair, those lucky(?) guys with a thick coat of shag growing out of their torso.

Some call it the Redneck Bikini, others the Macho Mankini, but I like to think of it as the Curly Crop Top:

(Image Via Pinterest)

It's a classic look that will make your less hairy friends turn green with envy, as you strut around town looking like a total boss in your hairy bikini top:

(Image Via Tumblr)

Do you feel like the Mankini isn't manly enough to get you a date? Turns out ladies love the look of a hairy Mankini too, just ask this guy:

(Image Via WeirdNutDaily)

He's livin' large with six pack abs and a Mankini, and wherever he goes the Mankini party is sure to follow!

The Macho Mankini look is sure to be all the rage at your local (place where people take off their shirts) this summer, so if you've got the chest hair to spare why not try one on for size?

Bonus points if you can shave the straps going all the way around into your backhair.

He started his social experimenting days with a mushy video called FIRST KISS, featuring total strangers kissing each other for the first time, now filmmaker Max Landis is back to take his experiments even further- by getting random people to slap each other.

There’s something delightfully voyeuristic about watching a bunch of people slap each other across the face, and I can’t help but wonder if some of the participants became friends, or bitter enemies, after sharing a slap:

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Max insists that "none of the participants were pressured to do so and all of them were “hit as hard as THEY asked to be hit”, but a few of those slaps look like they really hurt!

-Via Beautiful/Decay

It’s unclear whether the guy in this photo was trying to be ironic by wearing a necklace adorned with fake doggy doo to some (I’m guessing) fashionable event, or if he’s simply the proud owner of a novelty company that specializes in realistic looking dog mess.

Hopefully he’s just the proud owner of a gag gifts company, happily displaying his wares so the world can see how versatile rubber poop can be, but he's probably just some fashionable fop who thought he was being "edgy" by slinging rubber crap around his neck.

Well, if you see a new line of clothing called Crapay (or something equally odious) you’ll know who’s behind the label!

-Via Cheezburger