Board games are so much fun I've been hooked on them for most of my life and still wake up craving that cardboard BG crack every day- which is why I'm always trying to get my friends hooked on them as well.
Because board games aren't as fun when you play them alone, but it's also not very much fun to be the designated rulebook reader and rule monger either- which is why I demand my friends pay attention when I explain the game.
But as this comic by Jacob Andrews shows explaining the game to my friends almost makes me want to go in to rehab for gamers, because with friends like Dan the distracted and Mac the "wait, that doesn't make sense" guy playing board games can be a real pain!
The Jaegers are back to kick kaiju ass in Pacific Rim Uprising, so it's only fitting that we follow up the MetaBallStudios comparison of giant movie monsters with their size comparison of movie robots.
And while some will argue that Jaegers, AT-ATs and the AMPs from Avatar (as well as others in the lineup) aren't technically robots, since they're piloted by humans, the distinction between mecha and robot isn't well known to the general public.
So if their inclusion in this lineup fills you with nerd rage then I apologize, and I implore you to look past the miscategorization and just enjoy seeing how all your favorite robotic characters, vehicles and mecha measure up to each other!
Some people think an alien invasion is imminent, and that we're not doing enough to prepare for the little green or gray invaders who want to conquer our planet.
Others believe aliens have already been here, and that these extraterrestrial visitors left some of their DNA behind to infiltrate humanity from within.
Of course, both theories are silly because anybody who knows anything about aliens knows they only share their DNA with their own species- and if they want a planet they'll exterminate every life form on that planet to acquire it.
Our only consolation is that these aliens will inevitably exterminate each other at some point, leaving our planet free for the taking!
Invageddon is a cutesy looking yet totally twisted animated series by RiggXAnimation, presented here in its entirety so you can see the whole crazy story from out of this world beginning to ridiculous end!
You know that ZZ Top song "Legs"? Well Ariel the mermaid has legs now and she knows how to use them, only she forgot to specify what kind of legs she wanted so Ursula the sea witch stuck her with some sexy crab legs.
She seems to be fine with it, and Eric sees her sexy crab legs as a form of life insurance, guaranteeing he'll have a crab leg buffet waiting for him when Ariel dies.
But, as this Electric Bunny Comics strip shows, the townies aren't as open-minded as Eric so they ran poor Ariel out of town. Maybe if Eric had told them there was a possibility of all-you-can-eat crab legs they would have let her stick around...
Nobody is born shy, but as we grow older we find more and more reasons to be bashful and insecure, and for some that shyness can be downright crippling.
But it's hard to imagine a monster dealing with a crippling case of shyness because they're usually portrayed as such savage creatures, and yet even monsters who were made to be fearsome brutes can experience bouts of bashfulness.
Shyness was created by Les Drew and released by The National Film Board of Canada back in 1996. It's drawn in a sketchy style that reminds me of John Kovalic's artwork and the groovy shorts they used to show on Sesame Street.
The story of Sleeping Beauty was such a big hit that it left very little room for other sleeping dudes and damsels to receive their due recognition, which is a shame because Beauty's story was booooooring.
Now if you wanna watch an exciting animated story about a sleeping gal, one starring kooky characters full of visual verve and a sketchy animation style that's outta sight you've gotta watch Sleeping Betty- a totally hand-drawn animated short by Claude Cloutier, released by The National Film Board of Canada in 2007. It's anything but a snoozefest!
Some people say the parents are to blame for what happened in Stranger Things because they didn't keep a closer eye on their kids, but the weird events in Hawkins would have happened no matter how strict their parents had been.
And you can't blame single mother of two Joyce Byers for what happened to Will- she just gave him the freedom every kid wants, and she did help save him from the Upside Down after all.
That being said Joyce Byers probably won't be teaching a class on parenting anytime soon, but if some adult school were foolish enough to let her teach her class would probably look something like this Nerdist parody- only with less students.
Most Emo kids are misunderstood by their parents, who see Emo as nothing but a moody phase they're going through, but Emo Dad feels their angst and totally gets what they're going through- because he's going through the same thing himself.
His approach to parenting is clearly "if you can't cheer them up then join them in their sulk", but for some strange reason his Emo son doesn't dig having an Emo Dad to share his guyliner with- go figure!
Superheroes often have bizarre and mysterious origin stories that involve freak accidents, alien rays or latent mutated genes that allow the character to manifest super powers.
These origin stories can take a single issue or an entire story arc to explain, but the crafty artists as Pop Chart Lab were able to reduce the origin story of 36 Marvel superheroes to just a few minimalist panels each.
Marvel Origins: A Sequential Compendium is an infographic like none you've seen before, and while it's wordless save for the name of each character there's plenty of POW! BANG! ZOOM! in each powerful panel!
Foxes and whales are two creatures that are extremely unlikely to ever meet, but foxes do love to eat fish so they might go wandering down to the shore to satisfy their curiosity and search for an easy meal.
Since foxes are used to life in the forest this oceanside environment might throw them for a loop, but in the end it's the fox's curiosity that got him into trouble and it's his curiosity that will save him.
Fox And The Whale is a slow moving but beautiful "independently produced and self-financed Animated short film" by Robin Joseph and Kim Leow from Patch Of Orange studio, an animated tribute to curiosity and nature's magical ways.
I constantly run into two problems when I discover a new animated series I like- the series is hard to find online, much less on disc or streaming service, and the series was inevitably cancelled after a season or two.
Flapjack lived for three seasons but had to die so Adventure Time could live, Sym-Bionic Titan was cancelled after one season and only two episodes of Mission Hill aired before the WB cut it from their lineup.
These shows were all criminally underrated but didn't make it onto WatchMojo's list of Top 10 Underrated Cartoon Series, but Duckman was number 1 on their list and that was one of the greatest cartoon shows ever made!
The characters who star in Disney movies tend to look nothing alike unless they're siblings like Elsa and Anna in Frozen, and the diversity of the cast is a big part of what makes Disney movies so visually appealing.
So considering how different Belle and the Beast, Merida and the mama bear and Aladdin and Abu look it's surprising how well their faces go together in these two-faced mashups by Instagrammer dada16808.
Dada16808 is really good at adding detail to her character portraits without dramatically altering their original Disney look, and the split face effect looks cool no matter which two characters she puts together.
Sitcoms are formulaic by design, and even though the cast, types of characters and settings change the situations that lead to the funny bits stay the same.
Situations like main character falls in love with other main character, main characters have a housing crisis on their hands or main character feuds with neighbor are all commonly found in sitcoms- and so are crazy situations like kids crashing cars into houses.
This sort of thing hardly ever happens in real life, but for some reason virtually every sitcom ever made has an episode where a character (usually an unlicensed kid) crashes a car into a house.
This situation wouldn't be funny in real life, but do you know who are funny in real life yet rarely seen outside of a zoo but can be found in a ton of sitcoms too?
Chimpanzees, that's who, and it's no wonder writers include chimps in so many sitcoms even though nobody ever gets to hang out with them in real life- because the on-screen moments are priceless.
Han Solo and the Beastie Boys don't have anything in common other than their connection to 80s pop culture, but when you bring these two forces of freshness together they make a pretty good pair, err I mean quartet. Quintet? Yeah, that one.
Anyhoo, the Solo: A Star Wars Story trailer felt a bit lacking on its own, but when Chris Galegar of War Starts At Midnight recut the trailer to the Beastie Boys song Sabotage the fans were like "I love you" and Chris was like "I know".
I've always wondered how two of the most popular characters in the world of video games, Mario and Donkey Kong, found themselves at odds, considering most of the DK games cast him as a hero and Mario is a good guy too. So how did the gorilla and the plumber end up bitter enemies?
It turns out the enmity started in the 1984 Game & Watch title Donkey Kong Circus, in which DK is imprisoned by Mario and forced to perform for his amusement:
This makes sense given the little-known narrative of Donkey Kong (1981) was confirmed by Shigeru Miyamoto himself in a 2016 interview: “Mario kept Donkey Kong locked up, so he escaped with his girlfriend.” Thus, the original Donkey Kong arcade game gets recontextualized. Instead of kidnapping Pauline (or “Lady”) for seemingly no reason, Donkey Kong is seeking vengeance against Mario for his wrongful imprisonment.
So Mario ain't such a good guy after all, which explains why he's one of the bad guys in Donkey Kong Jr., but when it comes to the Kong family the biggest mystery is this- what happened to Donkey Kong Jr.?
While DK Jr. is conspicuously absent from the Country games, early Nintendo Power coverage of Donkey Kong Land—the Game Boy adaptation of the DKC series—suggests he was not entirely forgotten. In a pre-release article from issue 69 (1995) of the magazine, several renders of characters appear who would not be included in the final game. One of these characters is a Kong sporting a fedora. We have no information on who this character is, but we can speculate based on his appearance.
Aside from being the sartorial equivalent of a condescending “m’lady”, the fedora can be used to denote a kind of classic American fatherhood—think Finn and Jake’s dad in Adventure Time. Is it possible, then, that this Kong was meant to be the lost Donkey Kong Jr.? Maybe, or maybe not. But regardless, what happened to Donkey Kong Jr.? If he isn’t the modern tie-wearing Donkey Kong, then where did he go?
