Phil Berge is an artist at the Tattoo Shack in Quebec. He inked 19 different people with Bart Simpson on his skateboard, each one slightly different. When he put all 19 tattoos together, it's an animation of Bart doing a kick flip!
While the project is pretty cool, you have to wonder about all those people who thought, "Yeah, whatever you want to permanently embed on my arm, that's fine." Berge has done several of these tattoo animations; you can check them out at his YouTube page. One is NSFW. -via Boing Boing
Artist Saul Bass is renowned for his movie titles, credit sequences, and trailers, all done in minimalist style that made them artworks able to stand on their own. He also designed posters for movies, 37 of them in all.
Directors were floored by Bass’ ability to distill a story down to its bare essence — how his thick black lines and bold swatches of color seduced and focused a viewer’s attention where other posters would simply try to overwhelm it — and legendary auteurs like Otto Preminger would fight the studios to protect Bass’ creative freedom. His style was so striking and influential that it was widely copied in his own time, and many of the posters that are still attributed to Bass were actually created by imitators (e.g. “West Side Story” and “It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad Mad World”).
This is the 3rd Annual Fastracs game, played in Red Hook, New York, in 2016. It resembles the video game Rocket League, but auto soccer has been around quite a while: Top Gear has been doing it for years, and auto polo was played 100 years ago. The video game came out in 2015. -via reddit
We understand that when a character spends decades fighting crime in the comics, it's hard to come up with something new and different in a story. There's always a reach for an angle that the audience hasn't seen before. When your character is as weird as Batman, that quest can lead to some plots that, while they might make sense at the time, years later they have you wondering how they ever got away with it. Consider the unbelievable methods Batman has used to keep his true identity secret, some of which you may have missed if you don't read all the comics. The weirdest ones are related at TVOM.
Adam Ellis lives in an apartment in Manhattan. Over this story, he's lived in two apartments in the same building, but he is coming to the realization that the building is haunted. In a series of Tweets over the last several days, he tells of some pretty strange happenings. It began with a dream.
He started appearing in dreams, but I think he's crossed over into the real world now.
He spoke to the kid in the dream. Weird happenings in the real world began, and escalated to the point that his cats are involved, and he's even taking photographs through a peephole.
Pandas are cute, but they've never been known for their grace. If you give them an enrichment activity or a toy to play with, they will get so excited they forget how to stand up. So enjoy a supercut of adorable but clumsy giant pandas falling down, from the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding in China.
Is a diamond still a diamond if you can make it in a space-age oven? Inside one company's mission to find out.
It doesn’t look like the entrance to a paradigm-shifting, potentially world-changing start-up, but there it is: an unmarked door, facing out of a low-slung beige building on a street lined with tune-up shops. Inside, the scene is equally unassuming. There’s a man wearing black gloves, seated in front of a box about the size of a passenger van that’s blasting an ominous ommmm.
Welcome to California’s shiniest new diamond mine.
From the other end of the room, Martin Roscheisen, Diamond Foundry’s CEO, is explaining what, exactly, is going on here. That box is called a growth reactor, he says. Basically, it’s an atomic oven. Inside, a tiny diamond, known here as a “seed diamond,” sits waiting to be blasted with hot plasma. The reaction will cause the crystal latticework of the diamond to extend. In other words: From this seed, a new diamond will start to grow.
“They grow slowly, atom by atom, and there’s about one quadrillion atoms per layer,” Roscheisen shouts over the din. “So it’s a slow-growth process.” By slow he means two weeks, which is how long it takes the Silicon Valley–based company to hot-forge jewelry-grade diamonds identical to those the earth takes eons to mete out.
The Internet Archive has a project going in an attempt to save as many old sound recordings as possible. These are songs recorded on 78 rpm records made between 1898 and the 1950s, when 33 and 45 rpm records replaced them. These old records were pressed in shellac, which becomes very brittle after a few decades. The Great 78 Project invites people to digitize the music on these records, so they can be kept in a playable format for posterity. No, we don't know how long digital formats will last, but it's a step in the right direction for preservation. You can help by digitizing old records, sending in your existing digital copies, or donating your 78 rpm records. You can also volunteer to research and catalog the songs in the collection. But the best part is that you can listen to the 25,000 or so recordings that have already been digitized. They range from symphony recordings to political speeches, from Broadway tunes to hymns, from early jazz to novelty songs. Some suggestions:
You have to admit, that will work when everyone you're playing with is right there in the room anyway. How many cats are playing the same game right now anyway? When cats chat, does that make them French cats? And what are they going to say besides "meow"? This comic is by Samantha Whitten, who says,
Personally, I’m in favor of not having voice chat, but it’s fun to tease Nintendo about being so far behind the times.
Dr. Indiana Jones was a well-regarded, if fictional, archaeologist in his day. That is, well-regarded by his colleagues in the movies. In the real world, he's been criticized as a grave-robber, looter, and an all-around disaster as a scientist. His catch phrase "It belongs in a museum!" seems just plain silly, considering the way museums were run in the 1930s and '40s.
Jones is the last great monster of the treasure-hunting age of archaeology. To judge him by modern standards is to indulge the same comforting temporal parochialism that leads us to dismiss post-Roman Europe as a “Dark Age.” Jones may be a lousy archaeologist as we understand the field today. But is he a lousy archaeologist in context?
A lot of people have curly hair that's hard to comb, but this is something else altogether. Shilah Madison Calvert-Yin has "uncombable hair syndrome," which is a real condition. Each shaft of her hair is triangular instead of round. It's caused by a gene mutation, and is very rare. Only about 100 people in the world have the syndrome. But Shilah's family has embraced her awesome hair.
“Shilah loves her unique hair, but that has come from constant positive reinforcement at home from friends and family,” her mom Celeste Calvert-Yin, who lives in Melbourne Australia, told TODAY via email.
“As a little, little girl she often told us she was like a unicorn as they are very special and unique just like her. It brought a tear to our eye.”
In 1895, Marvin R. Clark published the essential cat dictionary, called Pussy and Her Language. The 150-page guide is full of cat facts, stories, and fanciful prose about felines, in an era when cats didn't get all that much respect. You can learn a lot from this book, about cats or, more precisely, about how Clark felt about cats.
11. There are 17 vital cat vocabulary words
12. Cats have French accents
“The word ‘purrieu’… is a note of self-satisfaction and content… give attention to the number of vowels and the Frenchman’s roll of the liquid ‘r,’ so that it comes to the ear like ‘pur-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-rieu,’ with a gradually ascending inflection.”
13. Cats can get very mad
“The word ‘yew,’ when uttered as an explosive, is the Cat’s strongest expression of hatred, and a declaration of war… The word ‘yow’ means extermination from the face of the earth.”
The fictional character Sarah Connor underwent a profound change between The Terminator and Terminator 2, which made sense. She went from victim to badass in order to protect her son and the world he lives in. Actor Linda Hamilton went the extra mile to illustrate that evolution, and impressed us immensely with her athleticism and physique in Terminator 2. In more recent movies, ripped muscles on women heroes have become more common, so that younger audiences might not even notice. Check out some of those heroes showing off their stuff in a video list at TVOM.
Chris Pool made a maze for his cats Cole and Marmalade. Lucky cats! This is a project so simple anyone can do it. And if you have more than one cat, the floor show that ensues will be worth the effort.
What's great about this idea is that it's modular. If you have the room, you can set up all 50 boxes, or 25, or ten, and put them in a different order each time. If the boxes are all square, like these, rearranging them would be very simple. -via Tastefully Offensive
Melting glaciers and ice caps are not good, overall, for the environment and sea levels, not to mention the polar bears that live there. As the ice recedes, we are finding some really strange things that were lost underneath them, some ancient, some as recently as the 20th century.
5. WWI SOLDIERS // NORTHERN ITALY
As the highest settlement of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the small village of Peio in modern-day northern Italy was dragged into the conflict of World War I in 1915. Here, at altitudes over 6500 feet, intrepid soldiers fought in what became known as the White War. Due to the inhospitable conditions and the freezing weather, specialist mountain soldiers were recruited—the Italians had the Alpini, who sported distinctive feathered caps, and the Austrians had the Kaiserschützen. The fierce conflict high in the mountains went largely unnoticed by the rest of the world at the time but today, as the region's ice melts, archaeologists and historians are learning more about the amazing feats of bravery of those involved.
A variety of artifacts have been uncovered from the melting glacier, including a poignant unmailed love letter to a girl named Maria, soldiers’ helmets and guns, and, of course, bodies. In 2012, the mummified bodies of two blond and blue-eyed Austrian soldiers, aged just 17 and 18 years old, were uncovered from the ice—both had been shot through the head and buried in a crevasse on the Presena glacier by their comrades. Locals held a funeral for the pair in 2013, and 200 people from around Peio attended.
