The Legend of Zelda franchise has released a lot of games. With the re-release Skyward Sword for the Nintendo Switch, new players have a chance to play older games and appreciate the aesthetic and gameplay that led to the 2017 hit, Breath of the Wild. Part of the franchise’s charm is the small villages or towns that the player encounters along the way during their adventures. While I haven’t played all the games in the series, my personal favorite village is Lurelin from Breath of the Wild. The fact that the area is like a secret location you may or may not ever encounter during your gameplay is nice. Alexandria Gribble lists her top ten villages from all Zelda games. Check her full list here!
Dave Raymond initially worked as a mascot for the Philadelphia Phillies, an American baseball team. Raymond used his 17-year experience portraying the lumpy, green birdlike creature that is known as the Phillie Phanatic to establish the mascot industry and the industry standard for handling, creating, and portraying sports mascots for publicity and entertainment:
Raymond told the Flyers this at the outset. It was the very first thing he said: “You guys know we’re going to get creamed, right?” He said they could roll out the next Phanatic, and it wouldn’t make any difference — a team like theirs needed to prepare for a reaction that could last up to three months. But Joe Heller, then the Flyers’ vice president for marketing, said the team was ready for it, and Raymond knew right then that it was going to work, because the only projects he has worked on that have ever failed, he says, are the ones that didn’t have the full support of their organizations. That’s his first principle: complete commitment to the initiative.
The second is building a back story. That’s the best way to combat the criticism you’re going to get. “It will always be Why,” Raymond says. “We hate it. It looks terrible. Why did you make it look like that?” Your story is your answer. The one that the Flyers came up with was about a monster that they discovered beneath their stadium while doing renovations. Upon finding his lair, the team invited him up for a game. Not a polished tale, not a polished character, but polish is not what the Flyers wanted.
The biggest question, of course, was what this creature would look like. It had to convey the brand’s image, Raymond explained, but more important, it had to look unlike any other mascot out there. The ones with the most distinct appearances are the ones that make the most memorable impressions. That’s Principle No. 3. The Flyers, Raymond says, are the personification of hockey itself: “plodding and big and hulky and weird.” So the team’s designers gave their monster a massive, bulging body and a severe underbite. They gave him an excessive orange neck beard and swinging, deranged eyeballs. They gave him a bellybutton that could change colors. And then they gave him a name — a name that might have been a bit too on the nose, had they given him a nose. They named him Gritty.
Image credit: Victor Llorente for The New York Times
Well, this is strange. The bodies of some Tibetan monks remain fresh after their death. To be more specific, when these monks died, their bodies remained in a meditating position without decaying. This phenomenon, which lasts for two or three weeks, is being investigated by experts:
The scientific inquiry into just what is going on with thukdam has attracted the attention and support of the Dalai Lama, the highest monk in Tibetan Buddhism. He has reportedly been looking for scientists to solve the riddle for about 20 years. He is a supporter of science, writing, "Buddhism and science are not conflicting perspectives on the world, but rather differing approaches to the same end: seeking the truth."
The most serious study of the phenomenon so far is being undertaken by The Thukdam Project of the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Center for Healthy Minds. Neuroscientist Richard Davidson is one of the founders of the center and has published hundreds of articles about mindfulness.
Davidson first encountered thukdam after his Tibetan monk friend Geshe Lhundub Sopa died, officially on August 28, 2014. Davidson last saw him five days later: "There was absolutely no change. It was really quite remarkable."
For every film produced by a major Hollywood studio, there are several that didn't get made. Sometimes it's just a rejected idea, sometimes a film lingers in development hell for years, and sometimes the project burns through millions of dollars before being abandoned. We often don't even find out why a movie doesn't get made. But quite a few of these unfinished projects became legends anyway.
2. Superman Lives
The names attached to this would-be Superman movie have made it notorious among film fans. Tim Burton was set to direct, with Nicolas Cage starring as the title hero and Kevin Smith co-writing the script. The project was eventually killed, but not before the studio burned $30 million on it. The most that survives of it today is test footage of Cage in the iconic suit.
16. Sylvester Stallone’s Poe
Prior to his days as an action star, Sylvester Stallone came close to portraying a literary icon. Stallone had planned to write and star in an Edgar Allan Poe biopic—titled Poe—early in his film career. He eventually accepted that he wasn’t the right person to play the macabre writer, but he got far enough to do some costume tests.
Even with the establishment of different social networking sites, we can’t deny the charm Tumblr provides for its users and viewers on other platforms. Tumblr is a social networking site that was established in 2007, and it’s still active today! The website has been a treasure trove of hilarious posts, and even older posts still circulate around the platform, gaining new likes and reactions. Following the trend of current websites stealing-- I mean, borrowing content from Tumblr, Buzzfeed’s Kelly Martinez’ shares 18 Tumblr posts that are extremely funny. Maybe it’ll convince you to hop in and browse through Tumblr!
Motor World introduces us to the Kurogane Model 1 Fire Trike, a Japanese-built firefighting vehicle designed in response the devastation of the region of Kanto in 1923 by an earthquake that triggered a tsunami, then a massive fire. Over 100,000 people died. This tragedy inspired a more systematic firefighting system, including emergency response vehicles that could navigate the often narrow confines of cities.
At the time, the Japanese motorcycle industry was booming. In 1941, the Kurogane company unveiled this design. Very few such trikes survived World War II, but a Russian museum came into possession of one in Malaysia. With an 1100-cc engine and leaf spring suspension, it was fully capable of hauling heavy equipment over difficult terrain.
Have you ever thought about taking up cartooning? Or maybe you already do, but would like to expand your horizons. The Center for Carton Studies is offering a free One-Week Cartooning Workout, a free, self-directed course in stretching your creativity and making your cartoons better. The exercises for each day provide structure and tips without judgement or competition. You can even space the days out or spend several days on each exercise, if you prefer. Spoiler: there are actually eight days.
"The awful comic you make is always going to be better than the perfect comic you never make." -Inky Soloman, CSS Legend
Even if you've never considered making cartoons or comics, this could be a fun way to stretch your brain. And who knows, you might change your mind and take up a new creative outlet!
The word "jumbo," meaning big, didn't exist before the elephant named Jumbo. He was a star in his day, although he did not live the kind of life an elephant should. Tufts University has the biography of the world's most famous elephant. Actually, this is more than a biography, because Jumbo had quite a story even after he died. -via Kottke
Make way for the long-lost piece of Stonehenge! Hell, I didn’t know the iconic location had some pieces missing until now. The missing piece was taken by Robert Phillips in 1958 while performing restoration work on the monument. Phllips took the cylindrical core after it was drilled from one of Stonehenge's pillars. Now, after 60 years, scientists have a chance to study the inside of the monument through the core:
They found that Stonehenge's towering standing stones, or sarsens, were made of rock containing sediments that formed whendinosaurs walked the Earth. Other grains in the rock date as far back as 1.6 billion years.
"We haveCT-scanned the rock, zapped it withX-rays, looked at it under various microscopes and analyzed its sedimentology and chemistry," said study lead author David Nash, a professor of physical geography at the University of Brighton in England.
"With the exception of thin-section analyses and a couple of the chemical methods, all of the techniques we used in the study were new both to Stonehenge and the study of sarsen stones in the U.K.," Nash told Live Science in an email.
Stonehenge's central circle of pillars was erected during the Neolithic period, about 4,500 years ago,according to English Heritage, a nonprofit organization that manages historic monuments in England.
"Sarsens were erected in two concentric arrangements — an inner horseshoe and an outer circle — and the bluestones [smaller monument stones] were set up between them in a double arc," English Heritage said on its website.
Jason deCaires Taylor is a British artist known for his underwater sculpture installations, such as the Molinere Underwater Sculpture Park, the first underwater sculpture park in the world, in Grenada, as well as the Cancun Underwater Museum in Mexico. Now, he has a new underwater sculpture installation, this time located in Mediterranean waters. His new installation, the Museum of Underwater Sculpture in Cyprus, features 93 sculpted figures, each made with materials that attract marine life. Taylor hopes that his work will “bring people closer to the marine environment and the conservation and protection of our marine ecosystem.”
His installation apparently cost €1 million (about $1.17 million).
Some of the figures featured include huge trees weighing up to 13 tons as well as children pointing cameras at shapes depicting the human race while playing hide and seek.
"I tried to incorporate as many references to climate change and habitat loss and pollution as I could, because those are really the defining issues of our era," Taylor tells CNN Travel.
"I'm kind of hoping that it leaves the visitor with a sense of hope along with a sense that the human impact isn't always negative. That we can reverse some of the things we've done.
(Image Credit: MUSAN/ Jason deCaires Taylor via CNN)
The quest for breaking the world record of the most accurate value of pi continues to this day. In 2019, a Google employee from Japan named Emma Haruka Iwao calculated the number to 31 trillion digits. In 2020, a man from Huntsville, Alabama, USA, named Timothy Mullican calculated 50 trillion digits of the number. This year, a new challenger for the world record arrived.
Swiss researchers said Monday they had calculated the mathematical constant pi to a new world-record level of exactitude, hitting 62.8 trillion figures using a supercomputer.
"The calculation took 108 days and nine hours" using a supercomputer, the Graubuenden University of Applied Sciences said in a statement.
Its efforts were "almost twice as fast as the record Google set using its cloud in 2019, and 3.5 times as fast as the previous world record in 2020", according to the university's Centre for Data Analytics, Visualisation and Simulation.
Unfortunately, the team will not reveal the whole number until the Guinness Book of Records confirms their achievement.
The number pi is one of the most interesting numbers in the world of mathematics. Because of the non-repeating nature of its non-terminating decimal numbers, computer scientists can use it to test the capabilities of their computers (while trying to set a new world record in the process). What’s more...
The Swiss team said that the experience they built up calculating pi could be applied in other areas like "RNA analysis, simulations of fluid dynamics and textual analysis".
Yup. You’ve read the title correctly. There are spiders who prey on snakes, which could be up to 30 times their size. And not just any snake, mind you; these arachnids prey upon the most venomous snakes in the world.
Take the Australian redback. Not including legs, a female of this species of spider is only about the size of an M&M candy. But she can take down relatively big prey such as juvenile eastern brown snakes, which are among the most venomous serpents in the world. A snake that gets trapped in a redback’s web — a messy tangle of long, sticky silk threads that dangle to the ground — is quickly set upon by the spider, which subdues the struggling victim with more sticky silk before delivering a toxic bite that eventually kills the snake.
Biologist Martin Nyffeler describes this finding as “very fascinating and a little frightening”, and it really is what he describes.
But it’s not just the Australian redback spider that is capable of killing (and then eating) snakes, as there are at least 11 different families of spiders capable of doing the same thing.
Meditation is a great activity for clearing up the mind, which helps oneself to focus on what is necessary. Those who practice it claim that it helps their brains. Scientifically speaking, however, the effects of meditation have been very difficult to prove. A new study from Binghamton University’s Thomas J. Watson College of Engineering and Applied Science just filled this knowledge gap recently, and they found out that meditation does, indeed, benefit the brain.
The results, recently published in the journal Scientific Reports, show that meditation training led to faster switching between the brain’s two general states of consciousness.
One is called the default mode network, which is active when the brain is at wakeful rest and not focused on the outside world, such as during daydreaming and mind-wandering. The other is the dorsal attention network, which engages for attention-demanding tasks.
Learn more about this exciting research over at EurekAlert.
Ruin your friendships with class with the Monopoly Glass Edition made by the WS Game Company. This edition of the beloved (and hated) board game comes with a 16” x 16” tempered glass game board instead of the regular game board. It also comes with translucent houses and hotels, instead of the regular opaque ones.
This edition indeed looks gorgeous. However, you might have to control your emotions while you play with this glass edition, as the board is really fragile.
Get ready for heavy metal harp! Harpist Emily Hopkins got the heaviest distortion pedal she could find, normally for guitars, and used it with her harps. The resulting sound is like an electric guitar, but still different because of the way a harp is played. Hopkins tries different tunes with different settings, producing sounds ranging from rock 'n' roll to summoning demons from the depths of hell. -via reddit
