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Can't we all just get a long? Illustrator Scott Campbell (AKA Scott C.) of Pyramid Car shows how all of us can come together and live in harmony in his series The Great Showdowns.

"Since the beginning of time, there has been struggle," Campbell wrote in his blog, "The epic clash of being against being. Tyrannosaurus Rex vs. Triceratops. Giant Squid vs. the Sperm Whale. The Circle vs. the Square." So he decided to chronicle some of the greatest confrontations ... the greatest showdowns, in movie history. Except, instead of anger and violence, Scott depicted these encounters with smiles and cuteness.

The Verge asked Scott why he depicted the characters as happy, even though they are antagonists in the movies. Scott replied, "I suppose that brings them all onto the same level no matter how terrifying or sad the conflict in the film actually is. I like [it] when people are feeling pleased. They all look pleased as if they were all enjoying each other's company at a party and reminiscing on great moments together."

And on that note, here are some neat examples of Campbell's The Great Showdowns. See if you recognize the characters and the movies that inspired them:

If you like that, check out the The Great Showndowns book and its newly released sequel, Great Showndowns: The Return. View more over at the Great Showdowns official website.

Nando Costa's "The New America" is a fantastic animation made from 800+ laser engraved blocks of maple. He had me at the opening shot of an eye in the triangle. Costa is selling the original blocks for $50 each at Etsy.

Tom Simonite on "the decline of Wikipedia":

The volunteer workforce that built the project’s flagship, the English-language Wikipedia—and must defend it against vandalism, hoaxes, and manipulation—has shrunk by more than a third since 2007 and is still shrinking. ... The main source of those problems is not mysterious. The loose collective running the site today, estimated to be 90 percent male, operates a crushing bureaucracy with an often abrasive atmosphere that deters newcomers who might increase participation in Wikipedia and broaden its coverage.

Pierre Chevalier's "EMMA" is a curious online art/code project that grabs random images from Google Street View and juxtaposes them with random text snippets from the DreamBank database of dream reports. (via Waxy)

It's easy to make a mountain out of Facebook's explicit OK to posting videos of people being beheaded. Tabloids see such lowest-common-denominator topical material as a threat to their own product, and their outrage seeks to impose their own limitations upon the competition. But it's also true that Facebook still bans nudity and other sexual content. As the matter is therefore one of editorial judgment, rather than protecting users' free speech, what does Facebook's editorial judgment say about its audience?

A man doesn't need hair on top to be attractive -women know that, but men still have a hard time dealing with losing their hair. A series of illustrations by Brazilian artist Fernando Perottoni shows us only bald heads, but they are famous bald heads. You know who they belong to, or you should! See all 14 illustrations at his site. Can you name them all? -via Everlasting Blort

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Rick, Daryl, Glenn, Andrea, and many other characters from The Walking Dead sing that Halloween classic "The Monster Mash" without even knowing it, because it's an edit. Who knows better about what monsters really do? I don't think this contains any spoilers, but it certainly has a lot of gore, just like the show itself. -via Tastefully Offensive

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The news was announced this week that Mike Myers (Wayne's World, Shrek, Austin Powers) and his wife Kelly Tisdale are expecting a baby. The announcement was carried by many TV stations, and together they will surprise anyone who stills thinks that talking heads write, or even slightly edit, the news copy that comes off the wires.

To be fair, it's a filler story for when the important news is done and there's time left, but take it from me, none of the other wire stories got the least bit of rewrite in the majority of these local outlets. -via Fark

Matthew says: "Here's a YouTube video of three men destroying a rock formation in Goblin Valley, Utah. Geologists estimate the rock formation was approximately 200 million years old, formed during the Triassic Period (Mesozoic Era)."

I wonder if the rock can be replaced? If so, these men should be made to pay for it.

Boy Scout leaders destroy ancient formation in Utah's Goblin Valley

Burgers is a page full of hamburgers, with a few chicken and fish sandwiches thrown in for variety. Mouseover to multiply them, and click to take a bite! This web toy was conceived and built by artist Guthrie Lonergan. Try it out! -via Laughing Squid

The collapse of the GOP-engineered shutdown has the Tea Party in a fury, and they're showing their wrath with a series of vicious posts to John Boehner's Facebook. The Tea Party Insult Generator teases these insults apart and recombines them to make them stronger, faster, better than before.

Lefty fascist RINO.

Cowardly Breitbart-betraying socialist.

Double-crossing establishment socialist.

Cowardly Muslim-loving devil.

Und so weiter...

Tea Party Insult Generator

UK Prime Minister David Cameron has vowed to punish the Guardian for publishing leaks about the campaigns of lawless, reckless spying by GCHQ and the NSA. He's asked Parliament to find a legal rubric for cracking down on newspapers that publish stories of compelling public-interest such as the Snowden leaks. He made a bizarre accusation that the Guardian's cooperation in the destruction of its computers (made under dire threat) was an admission of guilt.

In the end, what Cameron is doing is making it clear that the UK can have no free press. It can only have stenographers. When the government threatens to have you investigated for reporting on the excesses of government, you've created massive chilling effects, and guaranteed much greater corruption and abuse, as you've wiped out a key factor in keeping those things in check. Cameron's statements reflect poorly on the wider UK and its supposed belief in free speech and a free press.

UK Prime Minister Urges Investigation Of The Guardian Over Snowden Leaks; There Shall Be No Free Press [Mike Masnick/Techdirt]

(Image: The Guardian's Redesign - Titlepiece, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from gigijin's photostream)

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8 Bit Cinema presents The Shining as an old style video game! Although yes some of it is 16-bit style. Contains spoilers, on the off chance you haven't seen the 1980 movie and plan to in the future. Yeah, right. Of course, the game has little of the tension and blood that the Stanley Kubrick version has, but that's okay, too. Now, if only it were controllable…  -via Tastefully Offensive

Michael from Public Knowledge sez, "As part of her Public Knowledge/Eyebeam residency exploring remix video, fair use, and takedowns, video remix artist Elisa Kreisinger is asking the remix community to participate in a short survey. The survey's findings will form a remix series and interactive installation where visitors can make their own mash ups, remove other peoples work and defend their own, in a trial of their peers, in real life and in real time."

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Sweep the leg! They may be in training as warriors, but it's hard to be fierce when you have to stop and smile for the audience every minute or so. These twins are having altogether a lot of fun! Someone who understands Mandarin might be able to glean information from us out of this TV report. I'd like to know how old they were when this video was taken.  -via Daily Picks and Flicks

This 2012 video from Politizane does an excellent job of illustrating the massive, well-documented gap between the wealth-distribution that Americans believe they have, the distribution they would favor (regardless of political affiliation), and what America actually has: a system that rewards CEOs at 380 times the rate of their average employees.

Wealth Inequality in America (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

Just because the Disney princesses are royalty doesn't mean they don't enjoy a little Halloween fun and in Isaiah Stephen's fun artworks, these classic characters have some pretty varried interests that leave them dressed up in all kinds of cute pop culture characters. 

While the art is great and the idea is fun, some of his choices are totally fitting for the characters -particularly Mulan as Xena and Belle as Hermoine Granger.

It's particularly nice to see Aurora in control of a dragon version of Malificent while she trick or treats as Daenerys Targaryen -if only because she does so little during Sleeping Beauty.

Via The Mary Sue

Michael sez, "The American Psychiatric Association recently released a new version of its Diagnostic & Statistical Manual - basically a catalogue of the categories into which they divide suffering. This entertaining review treats the text as a sprawling dystopian novel."

If the novel has an overbearing literary influence, it’s undoubtedly Jorge Luis Borges. The American Psychiatric Association takes his technique of lifting quotes from or writing faux-serious reviews for entirely imagined books and pushes it to the limit: Here, we have an entire book, something that purports to be a kind of encyclopedia of madness, a Library of Babel for the mind, containing everything that can possibly be wrong with a human being. Perhaps as an attempt to ward off the uncommitted reader, the novel begins with a lengthy account of the system of classifications used – one with an obvious debt to the Borgesian Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, in which animals are exhaustively classified according to such sets as “those belonging to the Emperor,” “those that, at a distance, resemble flies,” and “those that are included in this classification.”

Just as Borges’s system groups animals by seemingly aleatory characteristics entirely divorced from their actual biological attributes, DSM-5 arranges its various strains of madness solely in terms of the behaviors exhibited. This is a recurring theme in the novel, while any consideration of the mind itself is entirely absent. In its place we’re given diagnoses such as “frotteurism,” “oppositional defiant disorder,” and “caffeine intoxication disorder.” That said, these classifications aren’t arranged at random; rather, they follow a stately progression comparable to that of Dante’s Divine Comedy, rising from the infernal pit of the body and its weaknesses (intellectual disabilities, motor tics) through our purgatorial interactions with the outside world (tobacco use, erectile dysfunction, kleptomania) and finally arriving in the limpid-blue heavens of our libidinal selves (delirium, personality disorders, sexual fetishism). It’s unusual, and at times frustrating in its postmodern knowingness, but what is being told is first and foremost a story.

This is a story without any of the elements that are traditionally held to constitute a setting or a plot. A few characters make an appearance, but they are nameless, spectral shapes, ones that wander in and out of view as the story progresses, briefly embodying their various illnesses before vanishing as quickly as they came – figures comparable to the cacophony of voices in The Waste Land or the anonymously universal figures of Jose Saramago’s Blindness. A sufferer of major depression and of hyperchondriasis might eventually be revealed to be the same person, but for the most part the boundaries between diagnoses keep the characters apart from one another, and there are only flashes. On one page we meet a hoarder, on the next a trichotillomaniac; he builds enormous “stacks of worthless objects,” she idly pulls out her pubic hairs while watching television. But the two are never allowed to meet and see if they can work through their problems together.

Book of Lamentations [Sam Kriss/New Inquiry]

(Thanks, Michael!)

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This trailer is a remix of the film Blade Runner in the film noir style. But that's not exactly it -as the creator Chet Desmond and commenters point out, Blade Runner is already a film noir, just in a futuristic sci-fi setting. Desmond says,

Just wanted to clarify that this isn't meant to be a radical re-imagining of the film or a recreation of a 40's-style trailer. As many have pointed out, Blade Runner is already very "Noir." I just wanted to take those aspects of the film and accentuate them into something hopefully interesting.

As an old movie buff, I thought it was lovely. And fan films like this might interest young people, like my kids, who believe anything from the era of black and white is not worth their time. -via Geeks Are Sexy

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Jerry Montoya is just a struggling comedian trying to climb up the ladder in the underworld. Say hello to his little friends, none of whom will cooperate with his schemes.

Vandelay Industries is still in the export/import business. But it’s not latex that they’re moving around.

Matin Comedy, which previously added the music and laugh track from Seinfeld to Breaking Bad, now brings us Scarface—the show about nothing and cocaine. Surprisingly, there is no profanity in this video. I didn’t think that it would be possible to get two minutes of that from the original Scarface movie.

-via Yababoon