HalfFury

  Bat Kitty | Image: Imgur

Bored Panda invited submissions for pet costume idea photos and users are voting for their favorite. So far, the collection is ridiculously cute, as you can imagine. While I'm no fan of dressing pets in costume on a daily basis, à la Paris Hilton, I think once in a long while the animals seem to at least tolerate it. Some pets are ham enough to relish the extra attention they get while in costume, thus looking forward to their dress-up days. One of my dogs has a football jersey that says "Quarterbark" on the back, which he sometimes wears on Halloween. This simple and goofy getup has him practically strutting around the house when he wears it. Of course, the treatfest he expects after the costume comes off doesn't hurt his level of enthusiasm, either. 

See the rest of this great pet costume photo collection here.

 Freddy Krueger Guinea Pig | Image: Flickr
 Gentleman Crab | Image: Tumblr
  Vampire Hedgehog | Image: Imgur

Batpug | Image:Flickr

Image Via Hard Rock Live Hollywood

There are usually two schools when it comes to magic. People who hate it, and people who enjoy it. There rarely seems to be anyone who is in the middle of that. But even for the most jaded non-magic fans, there has to be a certain allure to Penn and Teller and just how they satirize exactly what they do so well. The thing is, we are all used to hearing Penn do the talking, and Teller be the silent one (please note the irony in names). Well, The Smithsonian has an amazing article about magic written by Teller himself, in his own words.

While the article itself may be a few years old, safe to say most missed out on this little gem of an article written by one of magic's better halfs (so well known for never saying a word). It is nice to read some of his idealogies on magic and finally get some insight into how the quiet half of Penn and Teller thinks.

Heck, I'd even recommend those not into magic check the piece out. It just might give you a new apprecation for just what these guys do. They are the anti-magic magicians. That pretty much makes them the most punk rock magicians who ever existed.

Not a man, a Time Lord.

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Surely one of the benefits of being a villain is that you can be as jolly or silly as you please, as if anyone pokes fun you can simply fill their throat with wasps. But no, how very brooding villains tend to be, scowling and wearing black not for the perfectly acceptable reason of because they think it makes them look ‘cool’ and ‘artistic’ (not to mention ‘badass’ if I’ve got my leather jacket on too).

Quest for Infamy is happy to be a bit daffy in its blaggardry, probably because it takes a heavy dose of inspiration from Sierra’s classic Quest for Glory games with a dastardly reversal. And lo, the adventure-RPG now has a release date of June 26 and a new trailer.

… [visit site to read more]

It was announced he was going to be in the show, and he said that he'd finished his filming in a few days in Belfast, but we didn't know who he was cast as until now. The answer's below the cut for those who don't want to be spoiled.

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What do the tallest buildings in the world have in common besides their height? According to a new report, a great deal of the vertical space in the world's supertall skyscrapers consists of non-occupiable "vanity height."

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The Book of Bad Arguments is a great primer for anyone looking to understand logical fallacies and become a better debater. It helps that each logical fallacy is accompanied by a comic featuring funny animals.

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Misfits creator Howard Overman turns his talents toward swords and sandals in BBC One's upcoming series Atlantis. A guy named Jason teams up two fellows named Pythogoras and Hercules, and we can only assume legendary deeds ensue.

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Guest starring the actual Julian Assange as Julian Assange, belting out his own rendition of John Farnham's You're The Voice

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Yesterday, a woman dislocated her jaw while eating a mere tripple patty burger. Just imagine if she instead tried to eat this monstrosity that looks like a sandwich from Scooby Doo instead.

This YouTube user BeauCh ordered this amazing disaster-waiting-to-happen from Jack In The Box. The modified Jumbo Jack features 19 extra patties (making a total of 20), ample bacon, every cheese available on the menu, fried eggs, onion rings, ham, turkey, sour dough buns and chicken patties. The total price for the sandwich came out to a whopping $38.23.

Link 

You use who for a subject and whom for an object. Matthew Inman explains at length using delightfully horrifying examples. You can read them all at the link.

I like Mr. Jenkins. He's a man after my own heart. Whom could object to his actions?

Link

Artist Mike Boon, who designed the cute Dr. Seuss alphabet and other neat alphabets featured on Neatorama a while ago, is back with this clever Periodic Table of the Muppets. See if you can identify your favorite characters!

Apparently Taco Bell has decided that everything needs to be a taco. Case in point, their chicken and waffle taco and very berry waffle taco. Unfortunately, the chicken and waffle one might be one of the most appetizing items on their breakfast menu, but they aren't even testing it any more. If you're interested in a very berry waffle taco though and happen to live in one of their test markets, you're in luck -but you better hurry.

Link Via Eater

Deep breath. Take it right in. Expand those lungs, fill them with air until you feel like you’re going to burst. Now exhale. Feel your body contract as your breath heaves out of it. Remember that feeling of clean air, because it was taken in a pre-Space Hulk world. In about an hour the game unlocks on Steam (6pm UK time), and from then on each breath will be tainted with the smell of oil, death, burning Genestealer flesh, and if you live anywhere near a Lush shop, the lingering aroma of boutique soap. Not even death and war can cover that smell up.
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It’s election time again and what better way to add some life to the seemingly endless parade of clapped-out hacks that the electorate clearly despises than by dusting off the usual comedians and commentators to make the usual comedy and comments? Seriously, what better way? There’s got to be a better way, people. Here’s a suggestion: maybe get Shaun Micallef to handle things next time?

Of the two shows returning to the ABC tonight, Gruen Nation continues to be the one of no use to anyone. The tone was set with the opening with the audience laughing at an old Country Party promotional film, which was funny because… people in the past are funny? Because they weren’t as media savvy as we are today? And then we zoned out for a while imagining a show where old people heaped shit on Wil Anderson for not being able to do sums using a slide rule. So much shit. And when we zoned back in Anderson said “same as last time…” and we zoned back out again.

You know the drill by now: wacky opening monologue, here’s the panel, let’s look at a few ads, the TV screen suddenly shatters under the force of our boot because Jesus Fuck, these smug bastards talk about everything but the one thing that actually matters: how what we’re seeing will affect people in the real world. It’s sooo cool to look at political commercials with a disinterested eye and pretend that there’s nothing beneath them, isn’t it? Caring about actual policy is for losers, right guys? Let’s get some ad agencies to write some funny songs, that’ll be hilarious.

Our griping about that stuff might seem beside the point: it’s still a comedy, right? Well, it’s a shit comedy for starters: you want to gut the running time, maybe five full minutes of Anderson’s opening monologue / clip fest is four minutes too long. The panelists laugh at each others jokes, then we cut to Anderson laughing, then we cut to the audience applauding; why again does this needs to go for 45 minutes? Ha ha, they edited Kevin Rudd to make it look like he’s wanking! Then Russel Howcroft says “in marketing, we know that-” and another television bites the dust.

This veers wildly between lame clip comedy – seriously guys, leave this to the Chaser – and borderline dull analysis of political marketing. They show clips, then they restate what we just saw in their own terms: “it’s the most positive negative ad I’ve seen” “we have two opposition leaders here – they’re both running against the Labour Party” and so on. Which tells us what exactly? Who cares, time for more kak-tastic attempts to out-do each other describing Kevin Rudd’s hand gestures. All this is painful enough when it’s regular Gruen, because at least then the marketing they’re promoting is peddling trivial crap; here it’s-

Look, forgive us for noticing that everyone on Gruen Nation‘s panel is either a straight-up millionaire, someone just a regular shitload richer than you and I, someone connected to one of the political parties or someone who makes a living in the media commentating on politicians: in short, people from the well-off end of the spectrum. Who gives a fuck what they think? These are people with enough money to cushion themselves from the excesses of government policy: they have no skin in this game. Having them talk about politics in Australia is like having a bunch of high-paid architects sitting around discussing the designs of housing commission flats. Sure, you can do it and you can even call it good television, but it’s kind of offensive to the people who have to live under those conditions.

This has an effect on the comedy side of things because there’s a big difference between people making fun of a system that treats them poorly and people who are part of the system having a laugh amongst themselves. For a show that’s meant to be informative, there’s zero attempt – via either comedy or analysis – to get at the real heart of the political system, because this show purposely isn’t about that. It’s just forty five minutes each week of wealthy people who have minimal interaction with the pointy end of government policy – it’s doubtful they use many services with “public” on the front – chortling amongst themselves about what a good or bad job their professional peers are doing selling life-changing policies to the little people.

Gruen Nation is a cynical embarrassment, a show that pretends political messaging can and should be divorced from the political message. It’s a show made by an elite condescending to the masses, patting them on the head and saying “here, let us explain this to you” about a subject that for them means little more than who’s going to be signing their next massive pay check. Fuck this show.

As for The Hamster Decides… eh, it was okay.

Telltale seem to have a bit of a swagger about them now. The Walking Dead was pretty good, and they know it. They’re taking that swagger over to The Wolf Among Us, which has a confident new trailer, below. In case you missed the excitement, it’s a new episode series based on the Fables comic book series – with you playing as Bigby Wolf – and it’s coming up towards the end of this year. Perhaps not my sort of thing – I never did truly respect a point and clicker – but I do like a man with sideburns.
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Tor.com's posted a long excerpt from Dead Pig Collector, Warren Ellis's forthcoming novella about an assassin who is being hunted. It will be published in full on July 30.

Mister Sun was almost forty thousand seconds behind the moment when he finally emerged from the shiny, sad pens of LAX into the wet heat of the late afternoon. It takes forty thousand seconds, more or less, to fly from London to Los Angeles and then negotiate the boxes and runs of the airport. That’s how he thought of it. Eleven hours would be a sleep of exhaustion and a leisurely breakfast. It didn’t carry a sense of urgency. Forty thousand seconds sounded to him like time running away without him, leaving him stuck in a dim and disconnected past. A lot could happen in forty thousand seconds.

Mister Sun put his shades on. It had been winter in Britain for the previous eighteen months or so, and he only saw authentic daylight when he traveled, or on television. Los Angeles light, stinging as it was, had a familiar quality to him. It was a strange thing, he reflected, to recognize a certain flavor of daylight from afternoon films in the Sundays of his childhood.

Dead Pig Collector

You are the one they call homeowner? I see you are practiced in working in the kitchen. Rise before Zod. Now, kneel before Zod ... in this beautifully appointed kitchen filled with modern conveniences.

Zod should know. He's been designing kitchens for 30 of your Earth years. And in that time, Zod has developed a reputation for quality service and superior workmanship at a price to suit any budget.

Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] to watch this bit of comedy by Shaun Micallef of Newstopia - via Boing Boing

Well, I say it's an entirely understandable course of events. She did wave at a man dressed as a Snickers bar - a SNICKERS bar - and if that doesn't deserve a fit of rage, I don't know what does:

A fancy dress party in one of Dublin's best known gay bars took a sinister turn when a woman attacked her ex-girlfriend Adrienne Martin in a row over a dress-up sumo wrestler's suit.

After a year of acrimony following their bad break up, Sandra Talbot (32) assaulted Martin with a bottle hidden under her costume in a fit of rage at the George pub.

A Dublin court heard that Talbot lashed out at Martin in a row that began over the wrestler's suit that Talbot was wearing. The row escalated as the victim waved at a man dressed as a Snickers bar, the court heard.

Irish Central has the story: Link

There's not many times in my life I'll be able to reference Game of Thrones and Boyz II Men in the same sentence, but this is one: The GoT panel at Comic-Con opened with this fantastic "In Memoriam" video, paying tribute to every character that's died in the show so far, set to the dulcet tones of Boyz II Men.

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Ramin Shokrizade's "Top F2P Monetization Tricks" shows how the free-to-play world deploys practical behavioral economics to convince players to spend more than they intend to, adapting to players to hook them and then pry open their wallets wider and wider. I was very interested to learn that some games look for behaviors that mark out "spenders" and convert themselves from "skill games" (win by being good at them) to "money games" (win only by spending):

A game of skill is one where your ability to make sound decisions primarily determines your success. A money game is one where your ability to spend money is the primary determinant of your success. Consumers far prefer skill games to money games, for obvious reasons. A key skill in deploying a coercive monetization model is to disguise your money game as a skill game.

King.com's Candy Crush Saga is designed masterfully in this regard. Early game play maps can be completed by almost anyone without spending money, and they slowly increase in difficulty. This presents a challenge to the skills of the player, making them feel good when they advance due to their abilities. Once the consumer has been marked as a spender (more on this later) the game difficulty ramps up massively, shifting the game from a skill game to a money game as progression becomes more dependent on the use of premium boosts than on player skills.

If the shift from skill game to money game is done in a subtle enough manner, the brain of the consumer has a hard time realizing that the rules of the game have changed. If done artfully, the consumer will increasingly spend under the assumption that they are still playing a skill game and “just need a bit of help”. This ends up also being a form of discriminatory pricing as the costs just keep going up until the consumer realizes they are playing a money game.

The Top F2P Monetization Tricks (via O'Reilly Radar)

(Image: image, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from 76969036@N02's photostream)

Belgian artist Adrien Noterdaem has "Simpsonized" characters from many different fictional worlds. His latest project is the characters from Game of Thrones, which he is adding to his blog Draw The Simpsons. See a gallery of the characters at Uproxx. Link

You may remember Jeff de Boer's suits of armor for dogs, squirrels and cats. Since we last caught up with him, this Canadian artist has expanded his line of classical body armor for animals. Now even mice can suit up in armor appropriate for a joust, gladiatorial combat or just ceremonial occasions.

Link -via Visual News

Today sees the release of White House Down, which is the most Emmerichian film ever produced. But meanwhile, you could also enjoy Europa Report on VOD or Byzantium in select theaters. Tons of low-budget science fiction and fantasy movies are more exciting than your average big summer blockbuster. Here are 25 of them.

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