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If you're wondering how the last remnants of humanity are circling the globe on a train in Bong Joon-Ho's Snowpiercer, this short animated prequel movie explains it all: A failed experiment to stop global warming caused the Earth to freeze over (which I guess means it didn't fail as much as it worked far too well).

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The Lampiones by Violaine d’Harcourt are a series of blown glass lamps that form a family of three.

A sort of modern interpretation of a street lamp for your home’s interior, each Lampione is hand-crafted by French craftsman our of turned ash or pear tree wood and blown glass, molded plaster, and leather—a rich combination of materials. There are no fixtures holding the lamp together—it simply works with gravity to stay intact.

Photos by Victoire Le tarnec.

Have you ever wanted a home aquarium, but were afraid your fish would end up dead due to neglect (or the cat?) Well, now you can have a little robotic swimmer who never needs anything more than a change of batteries.

Made by the guys behind the creepy, crawly Hexbug robots, Aquabots are little robotic fish which wriggle realistically through the water. Just drop them in the water, and they’ll swim around on their own. They automatically turn on when they come in contact with water – though they’ll only swim for five minutes at a time to conserve battery.

While the video below shows several Aquabots swimming in harmony, it’s not advised because big fish eat little fish their electromagnetic propulsion systems can interfere with one another. Though what’s the worst that could happen?

They come in either a shark or clown fish designs, in a wide variety of translucent colors, so you can see into their robotic guts as they swim around. You can find Aquabots over at Red5 for £7.95 (~$12 USD) each.

Before the Internet, computer enthusiasts needed to get their cat pictures, image macros, and animated gifs somehow. If only [Nate] was writing code back in the 80s: he created a video player for the Apple II, essentially turning the classic computer into a machine that can play one or two animated gifs.

Vintage microcomputers aren’t especially noted for a huge amount of RAM, or being very fast, so [Nick] needed to bring in some extra hardware to give his recently acquired Apple II+ a 64k RAM disk to store the gifs.

The gifs are loaded off the floppy drive after being converted on a PC with a Python script, reducing the resolution and colors to 280 x 192 pixels and an amazing rainbow of four colors. For some gifs, seen below, it’s actually slightly impressive an Apple II can pull off this trick. It’s amazing  [Nate] got this thing to work, as well.

If you have an Apple II set up, you’re awesome. You should go peruse [Nate]‘s git and make your own animated gifs for your awesome classic computer.

Note: You may reprint this cartoon provided you link back to this source. To see more Legal Insurrection Branco cartoons, click here. Branco’s page is Cartoonist A.F.Branco

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Here are a bunch of reasons to laugh at Hitman: Absolution, both intended and unintended by the game's creators.

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Yeah, it's just a movie logo, but it was also arguably the biggest moment of this year's Comic-Con. I hate to admit it, but even knowing what's coming it's still shockingly powerful to actually see. Of course, watching a single image drive 8,000 people in a lunatic ecstasy is also pretty cool.

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(I’m checking out my items at the front of a store, when a couple bursts in. The girlfriend is clearly upset at her boyfriend.)

Girlfriend: “You really expect me to be all right with you hanging out with your friends on our one-year anniversary?!”

Boyfriend: “It’s been a tradition of my friends to do this for over six years! I can take you out any weekend, but [name of his friend] only gets his brother’s VHS copy of the original Star Wars movies once a year, and so we have a marathon! Come on! It has all the original scenes and characters before Lucas screwed it up!”

Girlfriend: “You all are such nerds! Who cares about the changes! If anything, it made the movies better!”

Boyfriend: “You haven’t even seen the movies!”

Girlfriend: “No real girl has! I haven’t, and…” *points at me* “…she hasn’t! Fine! Go ahead with your stupid marathon! I don’t care anymore! Do whatever the h*** you want!”

(The girlfriend storms down an aisle.)

Me: *imitating Admiral Ackbar* “It’s a trap!” *imitating C-3PO* “Let the girlfriend win.”

(Not only did the boyfriend crack up, but the check-out guy gave me his number!)

“I’ve heard of food porn before, but these girls take it to another level. Maybe Food Network can replace Paula Deen with these chefs.” — Break

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