If you’re looking to get rid of old books, there are plenty of places to donate them. Unfortunately, a man in Florida didn’t know that and has destroyed between 10 to 15 homes in a fire that’s still raging in Nassau County.
Joining the absurd list of games coming out soon is Shiness: The Lightning Kingdom, a pleasant-looking action-RPG with a combat system not unlike what you might find in an arena fighting game.
Previously penciled in for a 2016 release, Shiness is now gold at last and gearing up for a PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One launch on April 18, 2017. It's a tough time to stand out, no doubt about that.
In a message to backers, developer Enigami explained the prolonged development schedule: "As you may remember, when the Kickstarter campaign ended, the console Stretch goal was almost reached but not quite. We decided to validate it anyway. We are glad we did it because Shiness will be available to a wider audience. However, this decision cost us a great deal of energy, since Shiness is the first game we have developed. It is also the main reason why the game was delayed and we apologize for this."
Oh, sorry, I was just typing out the theme from the classic Nicktoon Doug. Remember Doug? It was that show about a boring middle schooler, which was somehow really compelling.
Well, one of the things that gave that show its charms was the sound effects. From the scatty theme song to all those nasally characters, Doug was just as well known for its sound as its look.
Great Big Story sat down with the man behind it all. Fred Newman is a voice over artist who made all those sounds with his mouth. He asl odid voices for Harry and the Hndersons, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, and, everybody's favorite movie, Gremlins.
by Beth Elderkin on io9, shared by Sophie Kleeman to Gizmodo
In the not-too-distant future (next month, to be exact), the new Mystery Science Theater 3000 reboot comes to Netflix, and the first epic trailer has arrived.
'Brixo,' a startup created by physicists, created chrome-coated bricks that can conduct electricity and breath life into your old Lego constructions. It has already raised over $1,300,000 in one of its crowdfunding campaigns. Read more...
It might sound hard to believe, but it’s been 10 years since Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim brought Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! to Adult Swim. To celebrate the milestone anniversary, the duo are heading out on the road for a North American tour this summer with 18 live shows spread out across the country over the span of a month.
Get details on the Tim and Eric 10 year anniversary tour after the jump.
Here’s the video with plenty of kisses being blow and trademark absurdity from Tim and Eric:
Having caught them on the road for their 2014 tour, I can tell you the show is ridiculous fun. They even brought along John C. Reilly as Dr. Steve Brule, which was an absolute riot. There aren’t any specifics on what the show will entail, but previous live shows featuring the duo have included never before seen clips from their shows, live sketches with fan favorite characters, and even sneak peeks at upcoming projects. Here’s what Tim and Eric had to say about this new tour:
“It’s been 10 years. We are heading out to see our chips across the USA and celebrate this incredible decade of Tim and Eric with a number of new spoofs and goofs, riffs and bits, songs and dances and hope to create memories to last a lifetime.”
If you’d like to catch the Tim and Eric 10 Year Anniversary Awesome Tour, here’s all the dates with links to buy tickets:
Tue. July 11 – Portland, ME @ State Theatre [Tickets]
Wed. July 12 – Boston, MA @ Berklee Performance Center [Tickets]
Fri. July 14 – New York, NY @ The Town Hall [Tickets]
Tue. July 18 – Washington, DC @ Lincoln Theatre [Tiickets]
Thu. July 20 – Philadelphia, PA @ Merriam Theater [Tickets]
Fri. July 21 – Chicago, IL @ Vic Theatre [Tickets]
Sun. July 23 – Royal Oak, MI @ Royal Oak Music Theatre [Tickets]
Tue. July 25 – Milwaukee, WI @ Pabst Theater [Tickets]
Wed. July 26 – Minneapolis, MN @ State Theatre [Tickets]
Fri. July 28 – Atlanta, GA @ Variety Playhouse [Tickets]
Sat. July 29 – Austin, TX @ Paramount Theatre [Tickets]
Mon. July 31 – Dallas, TX @ Majestic Theatre [Tickets]
Tue. Aug. 1 – Denver, CO @ Paramount Theatre [Tickets]
Wed. Aug. 2 – San Francisco, CA @ The Warfield [Tickets]
Fri. Aug. 4 – Vancouver, BC @ Orpheum Theatre [Tickets]
Sat. Aug. 5 – Seattle, WA @ Moore Theatre [Tickets]
Sun. Aug. 6 – Portland, OR @ Revolution Hall [Tickets]
Wed. Aug. 9 – Los Angeles, CA @ Theatre at the Ace Hotel [Tickets]
Anyone out there planning on going to see this tour?
The next game by Castlevania mastermind Koji Igarashi is coming to the Nintendo Switch. Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night was pitched on Kickstarter in 2015 as a spiritual successor to the beloved gothic adventure series. With Igarashi at the helm an...
Random Headcanon: That Federation vessels in Star Trek seem to experience bizarre malfunctions with such overwhelming frequency isn’t just an artefact of the television serial format. Rather, it’s because the Federation as a culture are a bunch of deranged hyper-neophiles,
tooling around in ships packed full of beyond-cutting-edge tech they
don’t really understand. Endlessly frustrating if you have to fight
them, because they can pull an effectively unlimited number of bullshit
space-magic countermeasures out of their arses - but they’re as likely
as not to give themselves a lethal five-dimensional wedgie in the
process. All those rampant holograms and warp core malfunctions and
accidentally-traveling-back-in-time incidents? That doesn’t actually
happen to anyone else; it’s literally just Federation vessels that go off the rails like that. And they do so on a fairly regular basis.
So to everyone else in the galaxy, all humans are basically Doc Brown.
Aliens who have seen the Back to the Future movies literally don’t realise that Doc Brown is meant to be funny. They’re just like “yes, that is exactly what all human scientists are like in my experience”.
THE ONLY REASON SCOTTY IS CHIEF ENGINEER INSTEAD OF SOMEONE FROM A SPECIES WITH A HIGHER TECHNOLOGICAL APTITUDE IS BECAUSE EVERYONE FROM THOSE SPECIES TOOK ONE LOOK AT THE ENTERPRISE’S ENGINE ROOM AND RAN AWAY SCREAMING
vulcan science academy: why do you need another warp core
humans: we’re going to plug two of them together and see if we go twice as fast
vsa: last time we gave you a warp core you threw it into a sun to see if the sun would go twice as fast
humans: hahaha yeah
humans: it did tho
vsa: IT EXPLODED
humans: it exploded twice as fast
I love this. Especially because of how well it plays with my headcanon that the Federation does so much better against the Borg than anyone else because beating the Borg with military tactics is nigh-impossible, but beating them with wacky superscience shenanigans works as long as they’re unique wacky superscience shenanigans.
Yeah, I love this.
Reminds me of the thing I wrote a while back about Humans in high fantasy realms - they’re basically Team Fuck It Hold My Beer I Got This.
Impulsive, passionate to a fault, the social structures they build to try and regulate this hotheadedness ironically creates even greater levels of sheer bull-headedness. Even their “cooler” heads take action in months or weeks.
All their great heroes of the past were impossibly rash by galactic standards. Humans Just Go With It, which is their great flaw but also their greatest strength.
klingons: okay we don’t get it
vulcan science academy: get what
klingons: you vulcans are a bunch of stuffy prisses but you’re also tougher, stronger, and smarter than humans in every single way
klingons: why do you let them run your federation
vulcan science academy: look
vulcan science academy: this is a species where if you give them two warp cores they don’t do experiments on one and save the other for if the first one blows up
vulcan science academy: this is a species where if you give them two warp cores, they will ask for a third one, immediately plug all three into each other, punch a hole into an alternate universe where humans subscribe to an even more destructive ideological system, fight everyone in it because they’re offended by that, steal their warp cores, plug those together, punch their way back here, then try to turn a nearby sun into a torus because that was what their initial scientific experiment was for and they didn’t want to waste a trip.
vulcan science academy: they did that last week. we have the write-up right here. it’s getting published in about six hundred scientific journals across two hundred different disciplines because of how many established theories their ridiculous little expedition has just called into question. also, they did turn that sun into a torus, and no one actually knows how.
vulcan science academy: this is why we let them do whatever the hell they want.
klingons: …. can we be a part of your federation
Humans: so, uh, funny story
Vulcan Science Academy: Let us guess - you’re not here to return the two warp cores we loaned you for experimentation, and you’re here to tell us that both of them were destroyed at once while you were trying to turn a sun into a torus again
Humans: well, half right
VSA: Wait, what is this
Humans: This is sixteen warp cores
VSA: How is this
Humans: Turns out that at the center of the stellar toroid there was a subspace anomaly that—
VSA: PLEASE don’t
Humans: —caused a refractive tachyon emission that—
VSA: This is literally impossible in every sense of the word
Humans: — depolarized the warp fields and in short—
VSA: Just no
Humans: — the warp fields got cloned and we ended up with four.
VSA: But you brought back sixteen
Humans: We had to repeat the experiment a couple of times to make sure it wasn’t a fluke
Just kidding, guys. These birds are just trolling the hell out of ants. I really, really wanted to show you this clip of a Galapagos finch or something harassing the shit out of formica ants and then being all “Yes, yes, bathe me in your fury! Your chemical defenses are now my own! Mwahahahaha!”, but the closest thing I could find is this video of David Attenborough pissing off some wood ants. It was basically like that, only instead of an Englishman with a stick, it was a bird stomping around with its wings spread just being an absolute asshole about everything.
This behavior is actually called anting, and there are two types of anting that birds can engage in. One is just anting, where birds will rub ants all over themselves to get that precious, precious formic acid all up in their feathers. They’ll also do it with mothballs, cigarette butts, and certain sorts of beetles and millipedes. The other one is passive anting, where a particularly lazy bird will find an anthill and just flop down on it with all their feathers spread and puffed and annoy the ants until they hop to and try to make them leave, at which point the bird rubs its wings together and goes “Yeeeeeess.”
They do this to get rid of external parasites, because external parasites are annoying. Ant-eating birds who do this are getting a two-for deal out of it, because they get the ants to empty their acid sacs in a beneficial location (the bird’s feathers) and then get to eat them without having to deal with the acid in their crops, so it’s basically like if your bug-spray or deoderant came in a bacon bottle.
Formica ants get the brunt of this, because they’re super-common and quite frequently spray the acid instead of trying to inject it, so the bird can get itself doused and then preen it into its feathers. Considering the spraying of acid is like the ant way of saying “Oh my god go away you dickhead I hate you we all hate you why are you still here jesus christ what is wrong with you,” we can be reasonably sure that they’re not super-thrilled by this bird behavior. Since the birds keep doing it, we can be reasonably sure that they don’t care about the ants’ feelings.
I can’t stop laughing at the text Why can’t every science book be written like this?
My sister and I see pigeons do this all the time too, we were kind of freaked because I was afraid the ants were hurting the pigeons.
But now I know. They were doing to to get rid of those nasty parasites.
Google has a long history of introducing, then forgetting about, and finally officially killing off its products. Most recently, that included Google Spaces, a service that most of us never knew existed to begin with. Let’s take a tour of some of our favorite services Google’s killed off over the years.
"Sending and receiving attachments is an important part of email exchanges," quoth the announcement on the official Google blog. The only downside is that the search engine is quite heavy-handed with attachment sizes, capping both incoming and outgoi...
As usual Mr. Krebs has some great images of a credit card skimmer found in the wild. This model uses Samsung phone parts and lays right over the Ingenico card scanners you’ve probably seen in stores. The interesting thing is that these scanners also support chip and PIN technology but, as evidenced by the photo, it looks like the retailer disabled it essentially sending the scanner back… Read More
Nintendo must be rubbing its brow right about now. Or laughing. The company had a hard enough time trying to convince people not to blow on cartridges; now people like Giant Bomb's Jeff Gerstmann and Kotaku's Mike Fahey are trying to eat them. They along with many others discovered that the cartridges taste absolutely rancid.
Turns out Nintendo has decided to intentionally apply a bittering agent called denatonium benzoate to cartridges. This is safety measure to deter people, specifically children, and perhaps pets from chewing on or eating the bite-sized carts. Although denatonium benzoate is "the most bitter compound known," it is non-toxic. Still, you might want to rinse your mouth out afterwards.
The TurboGrafx-16, or PC Engine as it was known in Japan, is a Japanese home console developed by electronics giant NEC and Hudson Soft. It was released in late 1987 in Japan, and two years later in the U.S. and France. Despite the success of the console in its home territory, the TG-16 wasn’t a breakout hit with western audiences. That means there are probably a whole heap of games from that era that many of us have never even heard of, let alone played. While much of the system’s catalog consisted of cross-platform releases, we’ll focus primarily on exclusives for this list. Check out...
why would they shut down reader to do this then shut down spaces too
Google's oh-so-brief Spaces experiment didn't even last a year before the company decided to shut it down. According to a note from the Spaces team today, they've made a "tough decision" and the group-sharing social network will lock down in read-onl...
NASA’s discovery of seven Earth-sized planets in a solar system not too far away has space enthusiasts buzzing with excitement. Google has joined in on the celebration with a new animated doodle featured on its homepage.
In the Google Doodle, Earth and its moon discover their friendly space neighbors through a telescope.
Image: GOOGLE
The solar system called TRAPPIST-1 consists of at least seven planets similar to the size of Earth. Three of them reside in the "habitable zone" — the area in orbit around the star where planets could conceivably host water on their surfaces given the right atmospheric conditions. Read more...
With the Switch launch only eight days away, Nintendo has finally broken its silence on what online features gamers can expect at launch. Disappointingly, the gaming giant revealed that early adopters won't be able to dip into the game company's vast...
So I was in the waiting room of my shrink’s office and someone sent me an email informing me that some guy invented a lipstick that you’re supposed to use to glue your vagina shut so that you don’t have a … Continue reading →
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The next game by Castlevania mastermind Koji Igarashi is coming to the Nintendo Switch. Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night was pitched on Kickstarter in 2015 as a spiritual successor to the beloved gothic adventure series. With Igarashi at the helm an...
"Sending and receiving attachments is an important part of email exchanges," quoth the announcement on the official Google blog. The only downside is that the search engine is quite heavy-handed with attachment sizes, capping both incoming and outgoi...
As usual Mr. Krebs has some great images of a credit card skimmer found in the wild. This model uses Samsung phone parts and lays right over the Ingenico card scanners you’ve probably seen in stores. The interesting thing is that these scanners also support chip and PIN technology but, as evidenced by the photo, it looks like the retailer disabled it essentially sending the scanner back… Read More
Google's oh-so-brief Spaces experiment didn't even last a year before the company decided to shut it down. According to a note from the Spaces team today, they've made a "tough decision" and the group-sharing social network will lock down in read-onl...
/https%3A%2F%2Fblueprint-api-production.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fuploads%2Fstory%2Fthumbnail%2F37680%2F53a13081-9c5a-4807-b479-c22f155fbd9d.jpg)
With the Switch launch only eight days away, Nintendo has finally broken its silence on what online features gamers can expect at launch. Disappointingly, the gaming giant revealed that early adopters won't be able to dip into the game company's vast...
