A homeless man finds a portal to a parallel world… and gets greedy

A homeless man with sticky fingers encounters a mysterious mirror in Daisuke Kaneko’s ECIRAVA, a clever little animated short about… well… the title kind of says it all. Complement with “Symmetry,” a live-action short film and audio/visual palindrome.

This mesmerizing kinetic sculpture turns wood into water

Drawing inspiration from the captivating kinetic sculptures of Reuben Margolin, this beautiful handmade automata by designer Dean O’Callaghan mimics the ripple effect of a droplet making impact with water. If you’ve never seen it, the motion that the sculpture conveys (of a single droplet perpetually bouncing) bears a close resemblance to the fantastic-to-behold cascade effect.…

How to solve the problem of NSA surveillance

Leave it to the folks at Abstruse Goose to deliver one of the most tragicomically honest observations on the current state of NSA surveillance. Sad but true. I especially appreciate Ann Finkbeiner’s commentary on this comic over at Last Word on Nothing, especially the bit I’ve emphasized, which is pretty amazing/unsettling: I’m pretty sure if…

Read E.B. White’s poignant explanation for writing Charlotte’s Web

One of the greatest children’s books ever written, E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web is notable not just for its lovely prose but for its masterful handling of themes on death and dying. In a letter written to his editor a few weeks before the book’s publication, White explains why a peculiar truth about farms makes them…

​The episode that proved that Wu is indeed the true hero of Grimm

Here’s all you need to know about the last episode of Grimm: The show made the bold choice of venturing into preggo tentacle porn. Also, Wu is awesome and Nick and Hank are assholes. It begins when Wu’s pregnant ex-girlfriend Dana gets attacked by the Aswang, the Wesen o’ the Week. As it turns out,…

Watch a surprisingly stirring short film about mountains

We don’t usually think of mountains as having life spans, but these colossal geologic entities live and die in cycles like countless other forms of matter (albeit on much larger time scales). The Weight of Mountains is a short film by Temujin Doran that explores this process through stunning geophysical imagery. Via Doran: This is…

Hawkeye and Hulk fight for their lives in the Mojoverse

Saturday Morning Cartoons is back this week, bringing you a Mojo-rrific episode of Avengers Assemble, a baby shower from an episode of Archer that aired earlier in the week, and the season finale of Defenders of Berk. If you missClone Wars, don’t forget to check out the Netflix exclusive season six offering. As always –…

It’s what all the cyborgs are wearing this season

All the cyberkiddies are wearing 3D-printed 18th century military styles this season. They sew LEDs into strips of soft spikes, turn them into epaulets, and power them with their nuke batteries. Photo by Andrew Tingle We love these 3D-printed cyberpunk spike fashion accessories created by Adafruit’s Becky Stern. She’s even created a video for you,…

National Geographic recently sat down with McKenzie Funk – author of the new book Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming – to learn about how businesses hope to make money from climate change. “Basically,” says Funk, “the more north you are, the more likely some of the effects are going to be positive.” Read…

What kind of kaiju would attack Paris? How about a giant pigeon?

A quiet Paris day is interrupted by the sudden appearance of a massive feather that floats down into the streets. But that’s just the herald of a greater threat: an enormous pigeon strong enough to topple the city’s most famous landmarks. Ludovic Habas, Mickael Krebs, Florent Rousseau, Yoan Sender, and Margaux Vaxelaire made Douce Menace…

It takes 13 minutes to explain everything wrong with Indiana Jones 4

Hell, I’m surprised that CinemaSins managed to get their assessment of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in under 20. I figured they’d need to spend at least six minutes on Shia LeBoeuf turning into the King of the Monkeys alone.

Texans get set to kill thousands of rattlesnakes in annual festival

Thousands of snakes will be killed in the 56th Rattlesnake RoundUp this coming weekend in Sweetwater, Texas. It’s a barbaric and environmentally reckless festival that’s also startlingly reminiscent of a classic Simpson’s episode. It’s the world’s largest rattlesnake roundup (yes, there are others), and it was started as a way to control the over-population of…

The Last 2 Vampire Diaries Characters You Expected to Break Your Heart

The Vampire Diaries is still good for a ton of wacky plot twists, betrayals and reversals, but the actual story has gotten more and more muddled this season. And yet, sometimes, the show still serves up moments like this one — an unexpected jolt of total insane heartbreak, from the two most unexpected characters. Spoilers…

Why King Tut’s DNA is fueling race wars

We’ve all heard stories of the miraculous tomb of King Tutankhamun, son of the rebel king Akhenaten who believed in monotheism. Trying to learn more, Egyptian scientists recently sequenced his DNA. Here’s how their discoveries became racially and politically charged events. Over at Medium, science journalist Jo Marchant has an incredible essay that will take…

The elevated city could only be reached by airship

Dahlia grew up in the Low Levels, the electric lights dangling from the underside of Arratha forming her night sky. She trained for years to be an airship pilot so that she could rise above the city skyline and marvel at its shining buildings. She was never allowed past the landing dock, but that view…

This cyberpunk thriller about deadly robots looks slick as hell

Check out the first trailer for the British thriller The Machine, about two researchers who develop an intelligent gynoid — only to have the British government try to turn her into a weapon. And you know how well that usually turns out. And yes, that’s Arrow’s Caity Lotz as the robot as well as one…

Terrible Halloween costumers rejoice: Once made the Jabberwocky SEXY!

This was a very good episode of Once Upon a Time in Wonderland — except that it was marred by a very bad Jabberwocky. Now that Alice and Cyrus are together, they are basically insufferable — so I’m keeping this review short and sweet and close to the highlight and the lowlight of the entire…

Louisiana’s giant sinkhole showed up in radar data before imploding

Since 2012, a monstrous sinkhole in Bayou Corne Louisiana has been swallowing up land in giant, tree-sized gulps, growing to a whopping 25-acres. Now, analyses of NASA radar data indicate the land showed signs of collapsing before the sinkhole opened. This raises a pressing question: Could sinkholes like Bayou Corne’s be predicted before they happen?…

Will the shift to digital destroy movies as we know them?

Digital movies are becoming more and more popular, but some people are saying the move could destroy movies as we know them. But it’s not issues of film quality that have them worried — it’s film preservation. In response to this post on the remake of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea that almost was, a…

Some of the weirdest and most beautiful church decorations of all time

Not every church repainting job turns out as badly as the “Ecce Homo” fresco in Spain. In fact, these churches all became far more fascinating after people added sometimes bizarre, sometimes beautiful paintings to them. The Voroneț Monastery, Southern Bukovina, Romania, constructed by Stephen the Great in 1488 to commemorate a battle victory. The exterior…