Daniel

Welcome to the Shirk Report where you will find 20 funny images, 10 interesting articles and 5 entertaining videos from the last 7 days of sifting. Most images found on Reddit; articles from Digg, Kottke, WITI, Facebook, Twitter, and email; videos come from everywhere. Any suggestions? Send a note to submit@twistedsifter.com

20 IMAGES

– Friday!
– This camera angle
– Teamwork makes the dream work
– Can you imagine?
– Dad jokes at the Doctor’s office
– This is the greatest idea in cinematic history
– Even birds know you enter slow and exit fast
– When the teacher calls you in from recess
– How to scale a fence
– It be like that
– Try to understand
– RIP Neil
– Alright, who got into the catnip
– Nature finds a way
– The mesmerizing thousand-hand Bodhisattva dance
– The strength of a chimpanzee
– Charlize rocks
– Dinner is served
– Real friends
– Until next week

10 ARTICLES

– The Scramble to Pluck 24 Billion Cherries in Eight Weeks
– How the Hell Has Danielle Steel Managed to Write 179 Books?
– Inside the hidden world of competitive lockpicking
– A Tiny Nation in Outback Australia
– The Bawdy Graffiti of Pompeii and Herculaneum
– Why Do Tennis Crowds Have to Be So Quiet?
– The Strange, Short-Lived British Trend of Hiring Ornamental Hermits
– Can you hug a robot?
– Love you to death: how we hurt the animals we cherish
– The Unraveling of America (thx for sharing cdub)

5 VIDEOS + bane

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The reverse made this look crazy. [via @logan_walczak]

A post shared by COMPLEX (@complex) on Aug 1, 2020 at 12:20pm PDT

anexperimentallife:

ryan-cicak:

MADEMYTHOS.

by Edward Kwong.

Ceryneian Hind.
Alkonost.
La Tarasque.
Ramidreju.
Loki’s Brood (Jormungandr, Hel, and Fenrir).
Minotaur.
Griffin.
Unicorn.

Hong Kong neon in the 1970s/80s. Part of this brilliant archive from the era. Photos by Keith Macgregor.

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Looking at you, 2020.

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Somewhere out there, there's a never-ending minor conflict fetishist who's just absolutely in tune with modern life.

Henry Cavill knows exactly how you imagine him: bulging muscles, epic chin, movie star grin, sitting alone in his man-cave playing PC games all day because that’s what he told GQ he likes to do best.

Yes, your Witcher (and Superman) is an avid PC gamer, and today he’s taking advantage of the COVID-19 pandemic to prove it to fans by fulfilling last year’s promise to build his own custom gaming PC in the most seductive way a chiseled man without a proper cinematographer can.

OH GOD, THE MUSIC:

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Later, she goes maaaaaaaaad.

Ashraful Arefin is an incredible fine art photographer from Dhaka, Bangladesh. On Behance, he has shared a number of amazing photo series.

His most recent project, ‘From the streets of Kathmandu‘, really caught my eye for the amazing lighting and processing. The end result are cinematic street shots of daily life in Kathmandu, Nepal.

Below you will find a small selection from the photo series but you can find the complete project on Behance! You can check out more from Ashraful at the links below.

At first glance, Hogewey, a small community situated about 20 km outside of Amsterdam looks like any other Dutch town. Residents go about their lives normally, picking up groceries, going to the movies and catching up with friends. But unknown to them, they are leading an orchestrated life, a false reality. There are surveillance cameras everywhere, and residents are watched every hour of the day. From the shopkeeper to the gardener, from the hair stylist to the dentist, every one is part of the deceit.

Hogewey is a nursing home disguised to look like a village. It was designed to house people suffering from severe dementia. Unlike typical nursing homes, where patients live in drab buildings, with long hallways and polished floors, and nothing but the television for company, Hogewey attempts to create a livable society for these helpless people. Inhabitants live in shared houses, they have a theater, grocery stores, a post office, gardens and clubs. Every shopkeeper, every waiter, and every housekeeper is a Hogewey employee playing their part, in Truman Show-style. Hogewey has around 150 residents, and 250 caretakers.

Hogewey’s supermarket. Photo: Hans Erkelens/Flickr

And more revenge.

A fantastic comic by artist Weiman Kow explaining how coronaviruses, including COVID-19, spread and how we can prevent community spread through simple everyday actions.

[Source: Weiman Kow Art | Weiman Kow Art on Facebook | Weiman Kow Art on Instagram | Weiman Kow Art on Twitter]

The post How Coronaviruses Spread [Comic] appeared first on Geeks are Sexy Technology News.

Amazon is making a new Fallout TV series based on the popular post-apocalyptic RPG games from Bethesda.

There are virtually no details on the project, except that it’ll be an Amazon Prime original produced by Kilter Films. A report from The Hollywood Reporter adds that the project is coming from Westworld creators Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan as part of their overall deal with Amazon. Bethesda Game Studios’ Todd Howard and Bethesda Softworks’ James Altman will also serve as executive producers on the project, which is still in the development stages.

“Fallout is one of the greatest game series of all time,” Joy and Nolan said in a...

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Credit: Parque de las Ciencias Andalucía-Granada

In this incredible model, we get an appreciation for the complex circulatory system of a human arm. This particular model shows the arterial system in a right upper limb.

The human circulatory system carries blood around an extensive network of vessels, totalling 100,000 km (62,000 miles) in length, which is equivalent to a journey 2.5 times around Earth!

For those curious, the model was made using Vascular corrosion casting, which uses resin to capture the 3D structure of blood vessels within human and animal tissue. It is widely used in research as a technique for obtaining the volume and surface area of the blood vessel network within an organ. The earliest known use of corrosion casting was by Robert Boyle in 1663. [source]

Vascular corrosion casting requires the use of a solidifying material such as a resin. The most common resin used for vascular corrosion casting is Batson’s 17. The process begins with the draining of blood from vessels to prevent blockage from clotting, this can be achieved by perfusing blood vessels with a physiological fluid such as phosphate buffered saline. Subsequently, the blood vessels of interest are filled with resin (or alternative solidifying material). The resin is allowed to cure resulting in the blood vessel network containing a solid plastic material. Surrounding tissue is dissolved away using a corrosive chemical, commonly potassium hydroxide. Corrosion should not affect the resin, only dissolving tissue. The final product is a 3D network of blood vessels. [source]

Microsoft showed off the future of mobile home screens a decade ago with Windows Phone. The key to the vibrant interface was Live Tiles, animated widgets that felt alive. Nothing has lived up to it ever since.

I’ve always wanted Apple to bring these Live Tiles to the iPhone. Apple’s overhauled iOS 14 home screen finally does that, enabling lively widgets for apps that sit on the home screen. It’s the final addition to the iPhone that I’ve been missing from Windows Phone, 10 years after Microsoft first introduced Live Tiles to the world.

Live Tiles were one of Windows Phone’s most unique features. They enabled apps to show information on the home screen, similar to the widgets found on Android and iOS. You could pin almost anything useful...

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iOS 14 is here, and it brings a bunch of big new features to Apple’s operating system — including a few that should look pretty familiar to Android users who have had similar functionality for some time.

It’s the eternal cycle of software platforms: Google’s good ideas will almost always end up on iOS at some point, even as the next version of Android will, no doubt, crib some ideas from Apple.

Home screen widgets

The big one: after years of keeping the iOS home screen static, Apple is finally allowing users to add widgets to their home screens. Widgets have been one of the core differentiating features between Android and iOS going back to the very first iteration of Android, and it’s a feature that Google would continue...

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See, computer science DOES have philosophical implications.

V1 Analytics put together this fascinating video timeline of Blockbuster Video US store locations between 1986 and 2019. On YouTube they explain:

Between 1985 and 2010, Blockbuster Video opened thousands of stores across the US. This map shows the locations of US Blockbuster Video stores over time.
 
Blockbuster opened their first store in Dallas in October of 1985. They weren’t the first video rental company, but they did have the largest selection of movie titles, over 6,500, which was more than any of their competitors at the time. Their first store was a huge success and throughout 1986, they opened three more stores in Texas.
 
While Blockbuster’s store concept worked really well, it wasn’t unique enough to be patentable. They knew that other companies would likely start copying their business model. To overcome this, their strategy was to grab as much market share as quickly as possible to stay ahead of any potential competitors. Throughout 1989, they purchased another four established rental chains and by 1990, they had opened over 1000 stores.
 
Through 2005, Blockbuster began closing their most unprofitable stores while they struggled to return to profitability. By this point, in addition to Netflix, they were also facing competition from Redbox which pretty much offered the same product as Blockbuster, just as a vending machine instead of an entire store.
 
In 2010, they continued downsizing and closing stores and by the end of the year, they filed for bankruptcy. Blockbuster was eventually acquired by the television provider Dish Network. Dish initially had plans to keep around 1,500 stores open and launch their own streaming service to rival Netflix, but these plans never ended up happening.
 
The last surviving store is located in Bend Oregon, it’s not only the last store in the US, it’s the last one left in the entire world. They’re a small owner operated store which is supported by loyal local customers as well as tourists stopping by to experience the nostalgia of visiting a Blockbuster store.
 
In the end, Blockbuster’s competitors simply had a better product and Blockbuster was just too slow to innovate.