Sploid: Where awesome, wild, and breathtaking tech moments burst into view.
In the mid 20th Century, hard-boiled detective stories and moody crime movies made Los Angeles, its scheming people and its endless decaying sprawl the main characters. The upcoming Grand Theft Auto V takes over “sunshine noir” by making the crime-ridden and corrupt boomtown of Los Santos the star of a video game that’s supposedly just…
308,745,538 color dots, each representing one inhabitant of the United States of America. The color is the race: blue is white, green is black, red is asian, yellow is hispanic and brown is native american, multi-racial or other races. Zoom in and see if you can find yourself. https://gizmodo.com/the-entire-racial-distribution-of-the-us-person-by-per-1118626554
A baseball fan died after falling 65-feet from a concourse at the Braves’ Turner Field stadium in Atlanta, Georgia. Another one died when he fell from a stairwell in the same stadium in 2008. And a student was killed in another fall at the Georgia Dome in 2012. There was a common element in these…
The latest rumor on the next episode in the Star Wars saga seems crazier than Princess Leia running away with Chewbacca: Emperor Palpatine may have not died thrown by Darth Vader at the end of Return of the Jedi. Ooooh-Kay! https://gizmodo.com/reports-of-emperor-palpatines-death-may-have-been-exag-1118232106
Do you have problems sleeping, then feel like a zombie the next day? If you’re reading this at 1:35AM, the answer may be yes. io9’s Annalee Newitz explains why you aren’t sleeping right, and gives some simple advice to hopefully solve your problems. https://gizmodo.com/this-is-why-you-arent-sleeping-right-990453669
The best Star Trek episode never filmed was created by Vince Gilligan, who put it in the mouth of Badger—one of the meth heads in Breaking Bad. The brilliant monologue appeared yesterday, during the first episode of the final run of the series. Never an ending had a better beginning. Here it is, animated. Don’t…
At $250, this special Lego Breaking Bad set is only for die hard collectors. It’s not official—Lego doesn’t sanction violence or drugs, naturally—but I don’t care: it looks great. The only drawback: it doesn’t have a Jesse minifig (but has Walter, Gus and Mike.) https://gizmodo.com/finally-a-breaking-bad-lego-set-that-you-can-actually-1115406010
Cable TV is very expensive and mostly a giant disappointment. There’s never really “anything to watch” and those 700+ channels seem to be the same couple of dozen channels in various aspect ratios. It’s crap. But it’s also the only thing people talk about in 2013, what they see on the TV. https://gizmodo.com/confessions-of-a-cord-cutter-why-im-back-after-2-5-ye-1059563449
What’s this handful of feces? It’s a half-eaten “Waffle Taco” from America’s fast-food innovator, Taco Bell. There is no taco involved. Instead, it’s a frozen waffle around some slaughterhouse-runoff “sausage” and a glop of reconstituted eggs. Yum, save some for the rest of us! https://kotaku.com/taco-bells-waffle-taco-the-snacktaku-road-trip-review-1112561590
Look at these three kids, Harry and his super friends. But are they really the best super friends of the fictional worlds of magic and science fiction, or are they actually at the very bottom of a very long list? Only you can decide, using the magic we like to call “Kinja commenting.” https://gizmodo.com/whats-the-most-epic-friendship-in-all-of-science-ficti-1113135023
These are first images and details of the system that may one day take you from downtown Los Angeles to downtown San Francisco in 35 minutes, all using passenger capsules traveling through tubes at the speed of sound. It’s called Hyperloop and it does look like the train from the future, both in terms of…
Hacking your house, your gadgets, your car or your life to save precious time or make things better is great. But if you’re spending more time than what you’re saving, you’re doing it wrong. In his In Defense of Life Hacking, Whitson Gordon explains why life hacking is awesome—as long as you don’t get obsessed.…
Douchebags! What are they? T hey are people you do not like at all. And if you’re the kind of person who likes to pick up a sex partner at the bar after work, a good rule of thumb is to completely avoid anyone wearing any kind of retro hat, such as a fedora or…
The Cold War was a very good war for tanks, despite the lack of wars requiring tank battles. Now some of these old Soviet-era tanks have been spruced up and taken out for a day of tearing up the Earth. If you’re going to do this, at least do it in a tank. https://roadtrippers.kinja.com/prepare-for-wwiii-and-test-drive-this-soviet-tank-1109442870
Most people treat an Internet outage as some kind of massive crisis, instead of what it really is: A break from your dumb work! But if you just “have to get that report finished” so you can email it to somebody who doesn’t care, then by all means become an Internet Outage Prepper with these…
Whether there is a ghost inside pro football player Aaron Dobson’s phone or his Twitter account has achieved sentient intelligence, there is definitely something bizarre going on with this guy’s Twitter account. It’s a good thing we got these saved before his celebrity manager found out! https://deadspin.com/something-weird-is-happening-with-aaron-dobsons-twitte-1109524692
According to soon-to-be-overturned Tennessee Child Support Magistrate Lu Ann Ballew (bottom left), you can’t name a kid Messiah (right). Not because it’s a really stupid name—says the guy named Jesus—but because it can only be our Lord and Savior’s “title.” Lady, Messiah is not the Messiah. He’s just a very naughty boy. https://jezebel.com/jackass-judge-rules-that-baby-cant-be-named-messiah-1105510166
First the black birds landed unsteadily in the treetops of Winnipeg, thousands of them. The birds acted so strangely, as they staggered on rooftops and cars, and then they began falling dead, the streets littered with corpses. https://gizmodo.com/dozens-of-dead-and-disoriented-birds-fall-like-rain-o-1107774584
After Sandy struck in 2012, New York City has been looking for ways to protect itself against the next hurricane flood. One of them is the East River Blueway, a plan to line part of Manhattan with beaches and marshes—and hopefully make the river clean again (doubtful!) Crazy? There are two other plans that are…
To be a dog and do nothing all day but eat, sleep, pee and poop anywhere you want to, get scratched, and listen to music. The next best thing: Enjoying these photographs of old school dogs rocking at Paleofuture. https://gizmodo.com/dogs-listening-to-the-radio-will-cure-your-case-of-the-1107119470
