Jonathan Stryker is a cosplayer who transforms himself into all kinds of characters, but last month, he staged his "Disney week" on Instagram. With the proper costumes, makeup, and wigs (and sometimes contact lenses), he turned himself into a realistic version of nine different animated Disney characters. Tap the video below to see them.
See more of Stryker's cosplay at Instagram. Some images may be borderline NSFW. -via Geeks Are Sexy
(Image credit: J Stryker)
There's still no official announcement of an Obi-Wan Kenobi movie, although people connected with the project have talked about it. The idea is that it will take place on Tatooine in the time between the prequels and A New Hope. Despite no existing film project (yet), merchandising has begun. Sideshow debuted a new 1/6 scale Obi-Wan figurine at San Diego Comic Con this summer. The Star Wars website has a set of pictures, and an interview with Sideshow's Kevin Ellis. The new figure is based on a previous statue that imagined what Obi-Wan would look like during his exile while he waited for Luke to grow up. That statue was a limited edition, and sold out quickly. Ellis says,
I work with a great team of artists, who have an incredible eye for realism. I’m very proud of the team. With our Mythos line, we have the honor and privilege of telling our own small Star Wars stories in figure form, so we asked the same questions any storyteller would. How long has Obi-Wan been on Tatooine at this point? When was the last time he wore his Clone Wars armor? Where did he get that backpack? What would he carry with him to each new adventure? Answering these questions then informs our design. It’s storytelling on a micro scale, and we’re so proud that Lucasfilm once again gave us the opportunity to delve into their rich universe for inspiration.
For the face, sculptors used images of Alec Guinness in his younger days, and then added details from Ewan McGregor's face. The Mythos Obi-Wan Kenobi figure will go on sale September 21. -via io9
(Image credit: Sideshow)
(Image: @Sarahsumbrella)
There seems to be a problem with wildlife in Britain, with ducks invading, and even scarecrows getting in on the action. But there are brave people fighting back.
(Image: @GullOfBrighton)
But it's not just ducks. Mayhem has been caused by squirrels, snakes, spiders, goats, swans, cats, dogs, and other critters. It's as if Mother Nature is seeking revenge on humans -if you go by the headlines. The violent headlines are the kind that attract people in the UK to buy a newspaper. These are from the Buzzfeed list called 24 Pictures That Prove British Animals Are The Most Dangerous On Earth. Taken one by one, they are kind of silly, but when you put them all together, it shows a ridiculous revolution underway that may remind you of George Orwell's Animal Farm.
As we approach the autumnal equinox on Friday, the Southern Hemisphere is approaching the spring equinox. Redditor sky-entist, an astronomer and photographer, watched the sunrise at the South Pole station in Antartica this morning and caught this image. He gave us the conditions:
Current temps are -62.2 °C, -80.0 °F. Flying time was eight hours from Christchurch to McMurdo and another three to pole, both in a ski-equipped Hercules aircraft.
If you recall, the sun moves in a spiral and skips around in a circle along the horizon as it rises and sets in Antarctica. Once it is up, it stays up for half a year, and when it sets, it's gone for months.
1925 Tri-State Tornado Damage, NOAA Archives
Neatorama is proud to bring you a guest post from history buff and Neatoramanaut WTM, who wishes to remain otherwise anonymous.
In the early afternoon of March 18, 1925, there occurred over the Ozark Mountains of Missouri a mysterious weather phenomenon that had never before been observed and has not been observed since, this being the genesis of a one-of-a-kind (thus far) monster of a storm that was to become known as the Tri-State Tornado.
It was the very end of winter, but temperatures in Missouri were unusually warm for mid-March, a balmy 65 degrees. Although each spring brought the threat of tornadoes to Tornado Alley, severe weather usually wasn’t a concern at this latitude until May, and after all, it was technically still winter. No one in the immediate area knew it, but a confluence of three independent weather systems had recently taken place overhead, an event that was soon to have the severest of ramifications. A low-pressure cyclone from Canada had brought cool dry air, a warm front drawn from the Gulf of Mexico by this low-pressure cyclone had brought warm moist air, and another warm front drawn from the desert southwest had brought warm dry air.
The confluence of the three weather systems intensified the cyclone which had by then centered over the midwest, in which then developed unseasonable squall lines of severe thunderstorms, among them a massive type of mesocyclonic (rotating core) thunderstorm known as a supercell. Supercell thunderstorms are one of nature’s danger signals, like rattles on a rattlesnake, for they invariably produce severe weather such as torrential rain, golfball-to-grapefruit-sized hail, hurricane-force downbursts – and tornadoes. One ignores a supercell thunderstorm at one’s own peril, as thousands of people across three states were about to discover.
Manik n Ratan is an artist in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Some his works are whimsical drawings of little people and little monsters that incorporate real-life household objects. The drawings are able to interact with the objects, which are oversized to them, in humorous ways, some that are different from the intended use of those objects.
See a collection of Manik n Ratan's hybrid drawings at Doodlers Anonymous. -via Nag on the Lake
The Princess Bride was released on September 27, 1987, which means it will soon be 30 years since it hit theaters. In honor of the occasion, Cinefix tells us seven things about the movie. Not just tidbits of trivia; these are more like seven stories behind the making of The Princess Bride. As you wish.
The filming was one problem after another. After watching this, you'll be amazed that the movie was ever completed, but they overcame those obstacles with hard work, perserverence, and creativity. It was a difficult production that ended up looking effortless. Inconceivable! The result was a comedy/romance/fantasy/fairy tale/action film that became a classic. -via Tastefully Offensive
We've seen several artists sketch out floor plans for the homes and apartments in our favorite TV shows. Now we get to see how some TV workplaces are laid out. After all, some shows revolve completely around the workplace and the bizarre cast of characters who have little in common besides working together.
Bizdaq presents the floor plans of Dunder Mifflin from The Office, Moe's Tavern from The Simpsons, Central Perk from Friends, Paddy’s Pub from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, the office of Sterling Cooper from Mad Men, and the comic book store from The Big Bang Theory. There's also a bonus in the floor plan of the Mos Eisley cantina from Star Wars, which is not a TV show and only appeared in one scene in a 40-year-old movie, but still feels familiar to everyone. See all the enlargeable fictional workplace floor plans here. -via Digg
Astronaut Mark Watney survived on potatoes when he was stuck on Mars in the movie The Martian, but that was fiction. The Great Famine in Ireland came about because of potato blight, and although lack of potatoes caused starvation, they weren't the sole food eaten by the Irish. Andrew Taylor ate a potato-only diet in 2016, but he flavored them with other ingredients and took supplements. Could someone live off only potatoes of they had to?
Technically, the traditional white potato contains all the essential amino acids you need to build proteins, repair cells, and fight diseases. And eating just five of them a day would get you there. However, if you sustained on white potatoes alone, you would eventually run into vitamin and mineral deficiencies. That's where sweet potatoes come in. Including these orangey ones in the mix—technically, they belong to a different taxonomic family than white potatoes—increases the likelihood that the potato consumer will get their recommended daily dose of Vitamin A, the organic compound in carrots that your mom told you could make you see in the dark, and Vitamin E. No one on a diet of sweet potatoes and white potatoes would get scurvy, a famously horrible disease that happens due to a lack of Vitamin C and causes the victim’s teeth to fall out.
But there are drawbacks to potatoes as a life-sustaining food. Personally, anytime someone asks the question, "If you could eat only one food, what would it be?" the answer is supreme pizza. However, that is technically more than one food, which is what you need. Read about the nutritional bang for your buck in potatoes at Popular Science.
For much of history, children were dressed in relatively simple garments that allowed for the fact that they couldn't yet dress themselves. As clothing became more structured, both boys and girls were dressed in skirts and dresses, which allowed for easier diaper changing and toilet training. The day a boy began wearing pants was a momentous occasion, and signaled that he was now a man-in-training.
With the power of pants came an understanding of manly responsibility, writes Jennifer Jordan in an essay on 17th-century masculinity. “The breeching ceremony stands out as one of the most significant milestones in a boy’s journey to acquiring manhood.” This seems to have been understood by even very little boys. Samuel Coleridge, the English poet and philosopher, described his five-year-old son Hartley being breeched in an 1801 letter. “He did not roll and tumble over and over in his old joyous way,” he wrote. “No! It was an eager & solemn gladness, as if he felt it to be an awful area in his Life.” These parties were usually held over a weekend at home, with relatives invited to stay. The pockets of Hartley’s breeches jingled with “a load of money,” Coleridge wrote, likely gifted to this fledgling man by visiting family members.
After his "breeching," a boy would spend his time in the company of men and other boys, while girls stayed near their mothers and learned the gentle arts of the home. Read about the historical tradition of a boy's transition to pants at Atlas Obscura.
Merriam-Webster has added 250 new words to their online dictionary. Their selections say a lot about the times we live in. Cultural trends are represented with terms such as "sriracha" and "froyo" for food and "troll" and "ransomware" for tech. Politics made it into the dictionary -not the word itself, which has been there for a while, but new terms like "alt-right" and old terms terms like "dog whistle," which has been used for decades, but is now understood more widely.
And sometimes a biological term develops a second life as something analogous and less specific, as we see in the case of hive mind; what began as a way to talk about the coordinated ways that colonies of social insects like bees and ants behave has come to be applied also to the collective thoughts, ideas, and opinions of a group of people seeming to function as a single mind.
Read more about the new words at Merriam-Webster. -via The A.V. Club
(Image credit: MikePhobos)
Liam Neeson has 118 acting credits on IMDb. He recently announced he was retiring from action films, citing his age He's 65). No need to mourn just yet, because he has already filmed several movies that haven't been released, and he didn't say he was retiring from acting completely. However, he leaves a huge catalog of action roles behind him, many you probably haven't seen. Check out some clips of Neeson's best action scenes in movies you may or may not know at TVOM.
I managed to get all of these right by picking out the ailments and leaving the rest to Greek philosophers. I just know the ailments. But you can see how it would be confusing to those who don't know the words. This is the latest from John Atkinson at the comic Wrong Hands. He also did an earlier quiz with Renaissance artists and coffee orders, but I couldn't guess any of them because they are all just Italian names. -via Geeks Are Sexy
Big LT is an amputee who has been living on disability payments. He saw a Navajo blanket on the TV show Antiques Roadshow and realized he had a family heirloom that was like it. Watch him find out how much it is worth.
So he started out thinking he might get $5-10 thousand for it. Then the appraisers come out. This story might lift those Monday blues for you by the end. And the kicker is that LT might even be able to go visit his blanket in some museum somewhere. -via reddit
The following is an article from The Annals of Improbable Research, now in all-pdf form. Get a subscription now for only $25 a year!
Salient points from research on or about skunks
by Alice Shirrell Kaswell, Improbable Research staff
History of Skunk Defensive Secretion Research
“The History of Skunk Defensive Secretion Research,” William F. Wood, The Chemical Educator, vol. 4, 1999, pp. 44–50. The author, at Humboldt State University in Arcata, California, explains:
The striped skunk (Mephitis mephitis) is widely known for the highly odoriferous defensive secretion it uses to repel predators. Chemists have sporadically investigated the chemical composition of this secretion for many years. In this research, a number of chemicals have been incorrectly attributed to this secretion and the errors incorporated into the chemical literature. The major component in skunk spray was erroneously believed to be 1-butanethiol, until it was later shown that the actual compound was (E)-2-butene-1-thiol. More recently, two studies identified the third major compound in the secretion as either (E)-2-butenyl methyl disulfide or (E)- 2-butenyl propyl sulfide. These structural assignments were incorrect and the compound was later shown to be (E)-2-butenyl thioacetate.
Folklore asserts that tomato juice will neutralize the odor of skunk spray, but human olfactory fatigue can explain the apparent disappearance of the odor on sprayed pets. The odoriferous thiols in skunk spray can easily be neutralized by oxidation to sulfonic acids.
Details from Wood’s study “The History of Skunk Defensive Secretion Research.”
Skunk Spray Maliciously Deployed
“GC/MS Based Identification of Skunk Spray Maliciously Deployed as ‘Biological Weapon’ to Harm Civilians,” Robert Wennig, Serge Schneider, and François Meys, Journal of Chromatography B, vol. 878, nos. 17–18, May 15, 2010, pp. 1433–16. The authors, at the Université du Luxembourg, report:
