This sounds depressing, but hear me out. If you start thinking about your death, it can help you reverse engineer your life and create a plan. New York Times bestselling author Donald Miller, the man behind this morbid advice, told Inc that "if you start with the end in mind, then you can reverse engineer your life in such a way that you keep putting something on the plot to try to get to that place."

This, according to the writer, is the key to a more meaningful life. Planning your life creates a better story. Writing a eulogy is like willing yourself to live your life a certain way, which leads you to be more intentional about what you do each day. "It's helped me so much in terms of basic practicality, to help me know what my story's about so that I can actually get it done--or, at least die trying," Miller further explained. "The other thing has been even more beneficial. By processing my own death and thinking about it a little every day, it has increased two things: a sense of urgency in my life to get things done. And it's been the number one tool in my life to give me the gift of presence."

Image credit: lilartsy

Turville is a picturesque English village about 35 miles from London. It was there that Ellen Sadler was born in 1859, the youngest of ten children. Ellen was hired out as a nursemaid when she was eleven years old, but a mysterious illness put an end to her employment. The doctor noticed an abscess on her head he called a glandular swelling. Ellen spent four months in the hospital, but was sent home as incurable. She then had a few seizures, laid down to rest, and didn't wake up for nine years.

Naturally, this became village news, and the story spread further. Ellen Sadler put Turville on the map. Scientists, journalists, and the general public wanted to see the sleeping girl, and her parents obliged. The visitors often left small donations, which added a substantial amount to the poor family's earnings. Ellen's mother explained how she fed the girl with a small teapot of port wine and another of milk. As the years went by, some had their suspicions about the girl's condition. The climax of the story came when Ellen's mother died, and she was put into the custody of her older sisters. Within just a few months, Ellen woke up, by then a grown woman, and recovered completely.

There are conditions that can put someone in a coma for years, but no doctor ever had a diagnosis for Ellen Sadler. It seems unlikely that she would have survived, much less recovered completely on the life support her mother described. Read the story of Ellen Sadler at Amusing Planet.

One of the more distinctive features of a house cat is its weird vertical pupils, which don't seem all that weird to us because we are really familiar with cats. Maybe that's why the Pallas' cat seems so strange to us with their round pupils. But pupil shapes vary all along the spectrum of the animal kingdom, and each shape has a purpose for the lifestyle of its owners. In the TED-Ed video, we learn about pupil shapes in a variety of animals, including the extremely weird rectangular pupils of a goat. I was familiar with the shape, but I didn't know goats kept their pupils at the same angle when they moved their heads! And if you think that's weird, wait until they get to praying mantises. -via Laughing Squid

Here's a serious time sink for history nerds, but you don't have to be a history nerd to enjoy it. The Wiki History Game is a free browser game in which you are challenged to place historical events in chronological order. They range from carbon-dated prehistory events to movie premiere dates, but the more of them you get, the harder it is. After you've placed an event, you can turn the card over to get a link to Wikipedia for more information about the event. Win or lose, you are liable to learn something. A few people who've tried it note that 1. you don't have to be good at this game to enjoy it, and 2. you can't get any better at it by playing more. But it is addictive. I once managed to get a string of 15 events before missing one, but I've had a lot of failures, too. 

The game is fairly new. Developer Tom J. Watson asks that any cards that don't make sense be reported to Github. -via Metafilter

🌎 This is a true story about a fake country: A con artist named Gregor MacGregor (yeah, his actual name) sold the dream of moving to a new country named Poyais in South America to hundreds of would be settlers. Problem was, Poyais never existed.

😷 We don't talk about COVID No No No: A parody song and a catchy tune by The Holderness Family.

❤️ Think your blind date is uncomfortable? This Chinese woman met a blind date for a home-cooked dinner, and during the date, the government announced a sudden Covid lockdown. So her dinner date turned into an extended quarantine date for days on end.

🎨 Psst, got $547 million? You can buy this Italian villa with the only Caravaggio painted mural on the ceiling.

🐈 If you think sleeping with cats is tough, try sleeping with cheetahs. Dolph C. Volker did and lived to tell all about it (they're just large kitties!)

🎬 Film writer Kevin L. Lee asked a question on Twitter: "What is the best an actor has ever looked on screen?" He got thousands of replies, and compiled the most popular answers. See if you agree with the actor/actress and movies combo.

🎃 Love Halloween? If you think that every day should be Halloween, then you'll like our new site: Spooky Daily. We're adding new Halloween and horror-related content there regularly all year long. Like this one: A List of the Greatest Horror Comedies.

Featured art: Everybody Thinks I Suck by indie artist Edu Ely.

Current special: Save up to 20% on all Sci-Fi T-Shirts, Fantasy T-Shirts and Horror T-Shirts.

Dana Carvey and Mike Meyers! pic.twitter.com/LsIarT7y8E

— 𝘒𝘝17 (@kris417) January 17, 2022

Saturday Night Live has been running for 47 years now. The regular cast turns over every few years to feature a new generation of up and coming comedians. You'll find a list of 159 of them here. Who your favorite is likely depends on your age, whether you prefer John Belushi, Al Franken, Eddie Murphy, Phil Hartman, Chris Farley, Will Ferrell, Tina Fey, Leslie Jones, or Kate McKinnon.  

📺THE "FAVORITE
SNL CAST MEMBERS"
BRACKET📺

✍️Fill one out, tweet picks
🏆Final 4 & champ?

Created by @scottb804 & me

Drafted by @Jallyne @CastleShore @KevinPNavarro @TopShotYoda @scottb804 @LiseSFG22

Design by @kuhan

⭐️Round 1 begins Saturday night⭐️#snlcastbracket pic.twitter.com/8eiyupiCEQ

— Joe Manniello (@joe_manniello) January 15, 2022

On Friday, Joe Manniello launched a tournament to determine the best SNL cast member, with a bracket of 64 contenders. The replies to that Tweet have a lot of people filling out the entire bracket, but there is actual voting going on, which you can participate in by using the #snlcastbracket hashtag to find the polls. Voting is still in the first round, so there are inevitable blowouts.   

Elsewhere on Twitter, Eric Alper asked, "Who is the best SNL cast member of all time?" The replies in that thread are brimming with videos and gifs of classic skits featuring favorite cast members, so there is plenty to browse and relive the memories.

Gilda Radner and Bill Murray pic.twitter.com/idYKiSigNK

— Carol Layne (@keddle01) January 16, 2022

Eddie Murphy

SNL would have been canceled long ago if he hadn't become a cast member. pic.twitter.com/NrH735KmLB

— Jesse (@littleBIGman185) January 16, 2022

Which cast member is your favorite?

Here we see a collection of ten physics simulations in which balls are released to bounce around. The astonishing part is the point in the middle of each sequence where the balls arrange themselves in a pattern. That can't really happen, can it? It's really nice to see anyway, and if you want to know how it's done, click on the spoiler quote.

Spoiler Quote

As soon as I saw the latest xkcd comic by Randall Munroe, I had to look up "spinthariscope" to see if it was a real thing. And it is. William Crookes invented it by accident during his nuclear experiments in 1903. He spilled a tiny amount of radium bromide (a radioactive salt) onto a thin screen of zinc sulfide. Since radium bromide was a very expensive material, he carefully picked up every speck, using a magnifying glass to see them. He noticed flashes of light, produced by the radium bromide throwing off alpha particles. This was a pretty neat discovery, so Crookes fashioned an enclosed device for observing the effect. That's how the spinthariscope was born.

As a scientific instrument, the spinthariscope soon became obsolete, but it was still impressive to non-physicists and kids. In 1947, you could order one from the back of a cereal box. In the 1950s, a small spinthariscope was included in the Chemcraft Atomic Energy Lab for children.     

(Image credit: Theodore Gray)

What's more, United Nuclear still sells spinthariscopes, although their modern version uses thorium instead of radium bromide.

🐄 Technically, Ollie the calf is a micro mini cow, but from the looks of it, this cow thinks he's a dog and part of the family. He swims, watches TV, and even goes on a jet ski ride. What an a-moo-sing pet!

💀 19th century house painter John Renie was a pious man who didn't want the devil to steal his soul upon his death, so he devised a puzzle on a gravestone to "confuse the Devil."

🏠 This is nifty: Habitat for Humanity built the first-ever owner-occupied 3D printed home in the world. Amazingly, the main structure of the house was built in just 12 hours (instead of 4 weeks of construction of a typical house).

👻 In 1984, Dan Aykroyd and Bill Murray made a promotional film to promote Ghostbusters to a bunch of theater owners telling them that they should show the movie because it appealed to kids, and kids buy a LOT of candies and snacks which would translate to big profits for these businessmen. You can tell that Aykroyd and Murray basically bullsh-tted through their intro, but they seemed to have a great time doing it!

More neat posts over at our new sites: Supa Fluffy, Pictojam, Pop Culturista, and Homes & Hues

Love cats and fantasy movies? These four tees by indie artist Tobe Fonseca are for you: Brave At Heart, Wisdom is Power, Honesty Before Glory, and Great Ambition.

It's such a natural idea for a Quentin Tarantino movie- the life stories of Vic Vega (Michael Madsen) from Reservoir Dogs and his brother Vince Vega (John Travolta) from Pulp Fiction. Don't get too excited, The Vega Brothers is not a real movie, but a mashup from Luís Azevedo. Both Madsen and Travolta have plenty of film clips showing them being violent at different ages, now woven into an almost believable narrative. Well, let's say it makes about as much sense as any Tarantino film. The Vega Brothers also features Samuel L. Jackson, Bruce Willis, Joe Pesci, Harvey Keitel, and a slew of other stars. This trailer contains NSFW language. -via Kottke

(Image source: louiseverard)

Creative plating now means getting rid of plates completely. We've brought you images from We Want Plates before, but it's been some years. Since then, the trend in trendy restaurants has only gotten worse. In addition to the website and the Twitter account, there's also a subreddit dedicated to the phenomenon of serving food on random objects instead of plates.



(Image source: nonsonosvizzero)

This is supposed to be a salad, but it more resembles the parts I'd end up throwing away. But that's secondary to the "tree" it's served on. Are you supposed to eat it with your fingers? That gives a whole new meaning to Salad Fingers.

Check out 30 of the more egregious submissions in a ranked list at Bored Panda. The list contains a disturbing number of foods served directly on the table.

Atari held its first arcade world championship tournament on Halloween weekend 1981 in Chicago. Video games were becoming hotter by the day, even though to play them, you had to go to an arcade and feed quarters into a console weighing hundreds of pounds. The hottest of the arcade games that year was Centipede, the first arcade game that appealed to women as much as it did to men. Centipede was the game chosen for the tournament. But that 1981 tournament had a lot more going on than gameplay, and you don't even have to be familiar with Centipede to be sucked into the shenanigans of that weekend.

The tournament story is actually five stories. First, it follows three women who came to dominate the competition. They had very different backgrounds and very different motives. And after the tournament, they went on to very different yet fascinating lives.

Another story concerns the inventor of Centipede. Game developer Dona Bailey was a fish out of water in the male-dominated Atari company, and she designed a game that appealed to her own taste. That it became Atari's hottest game and the tournament choice that year was gratifying, but on that very weekend, she was called out to court to defend her creation from pirates hoping to cash in on the tournament. One of the challenges of that case was a judge who didn't quite understand what an arcade game was.

The final story concerns the organizer of the event, who bluffed his way into the job and hoped to make enough money on the side to cover his house of cards financing before Atari found out they had hired the wrong organizer.

Read all those stories together at Truly Adventurous, or you can listen to it as a podcast at the same link. -via Damn Interesting

What in the world would inspire a Hollywood studio to spend $100 million on a comedy? Sometimes it's because they think they have a sure thing, like the biggest box office star of the era, in the case of The Adventures of Pluto Nash, or maybe a parody of another franchise, which shouldn't cost that much. Or it's a beloved cartoon character getting the live-action treatment, which can work, but it's never a sure thing. Or it's a sequel to a big hit, so of course it will work again, right? Again, there are no guarantees.



The thing is, just because an idea worked once, doing it again is just as risky. It's not the stars, or the familiar characters and setting, or even the special effects that make a good comedy. But those things can add millions of dollars to a movie that should have spent more money on an original idea or a funny script. See 15 comedies where the producers' calculations went completely wrong at Cracked.

The violent eruption a few hours ago of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Haʻapai volcano captured by satellites GOES-West and Himawari-8. pic.twitter.com/PzV5v9apF6

— Wonder of Science (@wonderofscience) January 15, 2022

The Hunga-Tonga-Hunga-Ha'apai volcano near Tonga has been erupting occasionally for the past month. After a break in the action since January 5, it erupted again Thursday and Friday, but the biggest eruption was on Saturday (January 15), with an explosion that was heard 800 kilometers away in Fiji. A resulting tsunami hit Tonga's largest island Tongatapu, and tsunami advisories went out for parts of Japan, New Zealand's north island, and the US west coast this morning. Here's a video of the tsunami rolling in to Tonga.  

BREAKING: Tsunami hits Tonga as nearby volcano erupts pic.twitter.com/TRM1iKtAft

— BNO News (@BNONews) January 15, 2022

Tonga's next challenge is falling ash and acid rain. Let's see that eruption from another satellite image.

I have never seen satellite imagery of a volcanic eruption quite like this. Incredibly powerful eruption of Hunga Tonga volcano in the South Pacific. Tsunamis impacting nearby islands. Reports of people feeling and hearing the eruption in Fiji, 800 km away! Wow. https://t.co/EG2EYdssBX

— Elizabeth Leitman (@WxLiz) January 15, 2022

The shock wave generated by the recent eruption of Hunga Tonga #volcano is even visible on satellite imagery. Unbelievable. pic.twitter.com/5Hih2mPePs

— CyanideCN (@CyanideCN_) January 15, 2022

To understand how big the eruption was, this one shows the curvature of the earth.

Different perspective shows the waves propagating outward from the eruption. pic.twitter.com/fetNumZnYs

— Dakota Smith (@weatherdak) January 15, 2022

CNN is providing continuing updates on the effects of the eruption. -via Fark

anatolian shepherd dog puppy in training pic.twitter.com/KkGBSP89W3

— theworldofdog (@theworldofdog) January 11, 2022

Actually, I get this. My Pomeranian puppy thinks that she’s a guard dog just because that’s what adult Pomeranians do.

Likewise, this Anatolian Shepherd puppy is following her heritage. They’ve been sheepdogs for hundreds of years and she’s already in training for the profession that she was born to.

Some redditors point out that the puppy looks a lot like the sheep—at least by coloration. She blends in so seamlessly that some may think that she’s a lost baby lamb. They certainly aren’t the least intimidated by her, nor are they deferring to her for guidance. That will come later.

-via Boing Boing