At least one sneaker containing a human foot washes ashore in the Pacific Northwest every year, and while this sounds like the premise of a murder mystery it's actually a fairly normal occurrence and not the result of foul play.

In December, 2017 human Mike Jonz and his dog Taz discovered a left foot wearing a white sock inside a black sneaker with a Velcro closure on a beach in British Columbia, the tibia and fibula still attached. So more of a leg than just a foot but a creepy find nonetheless, the kind which is so common on these coastlines there's a Salish Sea Human Foot Discoveries Wikipedia page.

So where are all these feet coming from:

“The BC [British Columbia] Coroners Service has been able to identify eight of the previous 12 feet, belonging to six individuals,” the agency said in a statement. “In none of the cases was any foul play involved.”

For starters, there are simply a lot of corpses in these waters. Kathy Taylor, a forensic anthropologist at the King County Medical Examiner’s Office, which has jurisdiction along the Seattle-Tacoma coast of Puget Sound, explained that this is a consequence of having a densely populated area on the coast.

Suicides and drownings are somewhat regular events around any body of water, and sometimes people who die of natural causes on the shoreline also get swept into the ocean.

Why do they wash up so often in this particular area?:

As for why body parts so often end up on the shore in the Salish Sea and not around other metro areas bordering water, like the San Francisco Bay Area or New York City, Parker MacCready, an oceanography professor at the University of Washington, said the story is simple. “Things that float at the ocean surface move with the currents, but also are pushed a bit by the wind, and this can be significant in getting them to shore,” he wrote in an email. “The prevailing winds here [around the Salish Sea] are west to east, and so floating stuff in this part of the Pacific gets blown to the coast effectively.”

Read The Human Feet That Routinely Wash Ashore in The Pacific Northwest, Explained here

Finding out humans are the real monsters is one of the saddest discoveries we make as we grow up, well, that and the fact that monsters of myth, legend and the movies aren't real, because at least then they'd even the score.

Instead we are faced with humans who hide behind masks, pretending they have our best interest at heart when all the while they're just trying to imprison us and drain us dry.

(YouTube Link)

No Monsters is a scary little animated short by David James Armsby of Dead Sound, a sequel of sorts to Armsby's previous Autodale short Being Pretty. They aren't exactly what you'd call feel good animation!

Lumber usually goes through a few stages of refinement before it's considered worthy of being used to craft furniture, but in England there's a forest where wooden lamps and chairs aren't just growing on trees- they are the trees.

Or more precisely the trees in this forest in Wirksworth, England are the furniture, because their trunks are trained into the shape of tables, chairs and lamp shades by furniture farmer Gavin Munro. (previously featured on Neatorama)

Gavin started his visionary furniture company Full Grown back in 2006 as a way to change how people think about furniture manufacturing, knowing his business would take at least a decade to get off the ground:

It might take a day to assemble enough flat-pack furniture to fill a house, but the timber cut down to make it all needs decades to grow. Even the cheapest wooden chairs require a wealth of time to create. Munro’s big idea was that he would guide trees to grow into chairs, tables, and lamps that could be harvested right out of a field. The trees, selected for their ability to grow new sprouts from their stumps, would regenerate. His forest would yield furniture the way an orchard yields apples. ...

The chairs grow upside-down, their four legs stretching up toward the sky. Lound grabs hold of one that’s almost ready for harvest. “It’s thickening up at the right level,” he says, as if describing a prized farm animal. “It’s just level and sturdy. If you do that”—he shakes the branch—“the whole tree moves.”

We’re looking at one of the most promising chairs in the field, which represents years of trial and error. According to Munro’s original plan, the first crop of chairs should have been harvested by 2016, but most of the pieces, more than 500 in all, are still in the field, including a row of squat, spiral lamps planned as a quick cash crop. “Making trees do what they don’t want to do is really bad, and see how shallow we’ve laid these branches?” says Lound, pointing at one of the lamps. “That’s not what a tree wants to do.”

Read A Forest Of Furniture Is Growing In England at Atlas Obscura

People usually take selfies when they think they're looking good, showing off their look on social media to get likes which make them feel good, but what kind of selfie do you take when you feel invisible?

That's where Japanese app developer Kazuya Noshiro comes in, because he's working on an app that uses the iPhone X's face-tracking capabilities to create a therm-optic camouflage effect, rendering your face erased:

The brief, ten-second video shows Noshiro moving his transparent face around to reveal the contents of his home through his head. The effect is like a creepy, see-through beauty mask — similar to Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak. According to Noshiro’s tweets, the app was made on game development platform Unity, and uses a fixed camera position to shoot a background in order to create the illusion.

iPhoneXで顔だけ光学迷彩っぽくなるやつできた pic.twitter.com/aPXJcHi8Y4

— のしぷ (@noshipu) December 27, 2017

-Via The Verge

Everyone I know who has traveled to South Korea says it's an awesome country full of ultra-modern cities, amazing natural wonders, and people who are happy to have visitors in their country.

On the other hand everyone (but Dennis Rodman) who has visited North Korea says it's a stark, concrete s#%thole where visitors feel like everything is staged and they're followed by secret police who don't bother to hide their presence.

Lithuanian world traveler Jacob Laukaitis went on a "strictly guided 7-day tour" of North Korea in 2016 and found the experience to be as surreal as you'd expect. He then swore to visit South Korea a year later and compare the two trips, and let's just say it was like night and day.

(YouTube Link)

-Via Laughing Squid

Gamers used to be part of an exclusive club that made references to characters and spoke a language  only gamers understood, but gaming is now such a normal part of our lives that these days everybody is doing it.

As you can see in this comic by JHALL it's really hard to be a young non-gamer, because when everyone including your mom is an avid gamer you're now part of a much sadder and lonelier club full of bored kids with weak thumbs.

-Via Dorkly

The Creature from the Black Lagoon made audiences fear the strange and monstrous creatures living in lakes, swamps and lagoons where they'd once only feared the creatures that live in the sea.

And after the original Creature emerged from the Black Lagoon more scary swamp creatures followed, creating a need for a new kind of monster hunter who knows their way around these murky waters.

The guy in this animated short is supposedly one of those hunters, but he's really bad at his job...

(YouTube Link)

Creature From The Lake is a fun animated short created by students from ISART DIGITAL, and apart from the lack of dialog it's a pretty great short that's sure to make fans of the Creature gurgle with delight.

Some people don't have a clue what IT professionals do for a living, and whenever these employees have any little problem with their work computer they call in someone from the IT department to fix their station.

According to The IT Crowd they start with "have you tried turning it off and on again?" then work from there, but if you don't know the difference between email and snail mail then you need more help than the IT department can provide.

Solarwinds asked IT professionals to share the most ridiculous and hilarious help requests they've ever received, and forget about knowing what the IT department does- these people don't even understand how a computer works!

See Hilarious IT Requests Part 1 here

There are situations in life that make us wish we had a bubble around us, to shield us from physical and emotional pain.

And if we all had magical abilities we'd probably cast a spell of protection on ourselves from time to time, just so we know there's a shield between us and the source of our pain.

But in the end no bubble in the world is thick enough to protect us from one of the most terrifying things in life- true love!

(YouTube Link)

The Boy In The Bubble is a wonderful animated short from 2011 that features the voice talent of Alan Rickman as the Narrator, created in a style reminiscent of Tim Burton that makes it a visual delight!

A Russian fisherman named Roman Fyodorov has been making a splash online simply by sharing pics of his catches because they look like a prop from a sci-fi movie, and many of the fish he has caught are so rare few have ever seen them.

But therein lies the problem with Roman's Instagram shares- commenters claim many of the fish he catches are rare and endangered species, and they implore him to stop killing these fish for the sake of social media entertainment.

Other commenters have pointed out that Roman's fish look fake, but if they are props they're incredibly well made and that would make Roman a special fx wizard posing as a fisherman.

So as far as anyone can tell Roman's catches are real, revealing that there are some really strange fish swimming around in the Black Sea.

-Via New York Post

Video game tournaments and the ESL are big business these days, with huge corporate sponsors and millions of dollars in prize money on the line, and yet they still don't attract a very diverse crowd.

No matter how many video game tournaments you attend you'll always see the same cast of characters hanging around, taking the whole thing way too seriously while their "ride" impatiently waits for them to finish up so they can go home.

This comical lineup created by JHALL pretty much covers all the bases, although he forgot the "backseat gamer" who doesn't compete but thinks he's better than everyone who does and sits there criticizing how they play the entire time. I hate that guy!

-Via Dorkly

Vac-Man may sound like the name of a door-to-door vacuum salesman but it's actually the name given to Stretch Armstrong's nemesis, who is pretty boring as villains go and therefore didn't sell very well.

But on paper Vac-Man's toy action sounds pretty sweet:

Unlike the Stretch dolls which contained a syrup-like liquid inside a rubber sheath, Vac-Man (and associated models like the Vac-Pac which were the heroic enemies of Vac-Man) contained a grainy solid, produced from ground-up corn cobs. By attaching the provided pump to a socket on Vac-Man's head, air could be sucked out until the body became rigid. It could then be stretched, but unlike Stretch Armstrong, it would retain its stretched shape until air was let back in. -Via Wikipedia

His name and his cool vacuum power made him highly requested by The Action Lab's viewers, and they discovered the vacuum chamber had an oddly satisfying effect on Vac-Man's corn cobby body.

(YouTube Link)

-Via Laughing Squid

Native Americans have a close relationship with both the natural world and the spirits all around us, and where the European invaders settlers saw nothing but plants and animals to kill the Indians saw life everlasting.

When you live that closely with the natural world you become sensitive to the slightest changes in your environment, but it's really hard to miss those brightly glowing visitors from the spirit world, especially when they lure you deep into the forest...

WAKAN is a poignant animated short created by students from ISART DIGITAL, the video game and 3D animation/VFX school in Paris.

Every fall and winter college students prepare to enter the educational wars once again, battling their professors for the best grades possible while figuring out who they can trust to fight alongside them and who wants them to fail.

But if students prepared for the new school year like they prepare for a boss battle in a video game they would easily crush their coursework, avoid unnecessary battles and earn more grants and scholarships with their new heroic attitudes.

Just keep in mind that you earn student loan debt instead of XP during the quest for higher education... (Comic by Julia Lepetit)

See Why Starting School Is Like Preparing For A Boss Battle here

Escobar Ski School by Gualda Trazos

The weather outside is frightful, but underneath your winter gear you're wearing something that looks  delightful, so you can let it snow, let it snow, let it snow yet keep spirits warm and bright with visual delight.

And nobody does wearable visual delight like the NeatoShop, where you'll find thousands of designs that keep the geeky fire alive, most of which are available on longsleeve t-shirts and hoodies too!

And from now until January 14th all shirts and hoodies in the NeatoShop are on sale, so you can get the shirts you love for less!

The snow transforms the landscape into an endless field of white

Boule à Neige by Tobe Fonseca

A field of white that is occasionally dotted with patches of yellow and crimson

The Donner Party by Scott Sherwood

Feel free to use any and/or all of the above when waging snowball wars with friends

Snow Wars by djkopet