This horror story idea generator is based loosely off of John Atkinson’s most recent Wrong Hands comic. Just click the “Scare Me Again!” button below and voilà ! You have your own brand new horror movie plot.
Scare Me Again!
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Do you have any good ideas for horror story plots? Put it in the comments below and I’ll try and get them added to the generator.
In celebration of its 20th anniversary of archiving the web, the Internet Archive has released GifCities. It’s an animated GIF search engine that has indexed millions of animated GIFs from the obsolete GeoCities websites.
Geocities was an early web hosting service, started in 1994 and acquired by Yahoo in 1999, with which users could create their own custom websites. The platform hosted over 38 million user-built pages and was at one time the third most visited site on the web. In 2009, Yahoo announced it was closing down the service, at which point the Internet Archive attempted to archive as much of the content as possible.
Mining this collection, we extracted over 4,500,000 animated GIFs (1,600,000 unique images) and then used the filenames and directory path text to build a best-effort “full text†search engine. Each GIF also links back to the original Geocities page on which it was embedded (and some of these pages are even more awesome than the GIFs).
Head over there to relive a classic era of the World Wide Web. And please, go notify all your readers that your site is still under construction.
Image via â€@msbreeezyyy
Are these pair of thighs covered in oil or painted? I see both (though I admittedly saw oily legs for long before I saw the paint). Once again the internet finds itself divided over an optical illusion.
Earlier this week NASA released this dazzling image of NGC 362. It is one of about 150 known globular clusters on the outskirts of our own galaxy, the Milky Way. Globular clusters are giant spheres that contain hundreds of thousands of stars and reside in the outskirts of galaxies. The ESA says NGC 362 is unusual:
By studying the different elements present within individual stars in NGC 362, astronomers discovered that the cluster boasts a surprisingly high metal content, indicating that it is younger than expected. Although most globular clusters are much older than the majority of stars in their host galaxy, NGC 362 bucks the trend, with an age lying between 10 and 11 billion years old. For reference, the age of the Milky Way is estimated to be above 13 billion years.
This image, in which you can view many of NGC 362’s individual stars, was taken by Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) If you want a new desktop image, here’s the 42 MB full-size original (it will automatically download).
The very enjoyable Atlas Obscura website has recently hit the monolithic milestone of 10,000 listed locations. To celebrate the occasion they have created a handy map that contains all 10,000 of the world’s most obscure and extraordinary sites.
Places as far-reaching as The Lucifernum, the Tallest Filing Cabinet on Earth, the Huanglong Travertine Terraces and Bo Kaap are mapped out for your convenience.
Have fun exploring!
The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has just announced new policy recommendations and resources related to children’s media use and screen time. The recommendations include the following:
It comes as no surprise to me that the key ingredient to the right media diet for our kids hinges on parental involvement. A parents’ role in managing the media diets of our children has never been greater because problems can begin when media use displaces physical activity, hands-on exploration and face-to-face social interaction in the real world. At our house, we have a pretty strict media rules. However, I need to work on ways to teach my children to use media in a more positive way.
If you have a children age zero to five years of age, you may want to check out the AAP policy statement which focuses on infants, toddlers and pre-school children called “Media and Young Mindsâ€. If you have school aged children you can get more helpful information from the AAP policy statement “Media Use in School-Aged Children and Adolescentsâ€.
In addition to these new media use guidelines, the AAP launched an online “Family Media Use Plan†tool that could help parents establish a healthy media diet that is appropriate to your family’s unique needs.
Good luck parents, we all need it!
Youtube user QuintemSSB/Number2Vaderfan created this entertaining video of 48 simultaneously playing infomercials of the late Billy Mays. Listen for long enough and it sounds like a swarm of bees.
Also see Billy Mays Is A Sad Robot and Billy Mays Is A Sad Robot – Part II
Wow! This video of four skydivers who drop from a hot air balloon on a 125-meter long swing gave me the heebie-jeebies. According to Redbull:
“You have this acceleration in another direction, unlike anything you’d experience with a normal BASE jump or skydive,” says Roithmair, who came up with the idea. “You jump, freefall, waiting for the moment when the line goes tight, then suddenly there’s this non-motorised acceleration. I can’t think of a freefall that had such different patterns of movement.” The idea behind Mega Swing was to realize that childhood dream we all have, says Lettner. “It’s the dream of everyone,” he says. “To swing higher and higher, and finally jump off and fly.”
I admit, I’ve had the dream he describes above. Have you? I think that’s why this video struck me so.
The above image was created by Reddit user DannyBoy7783 using NASA and ESA photos. It shows horizontally aligned slices of landscapes from every celestial body that human-made robots have landed on and photographed. What a dreamy composition. In recent news, The Rosetta probe recently landed on comet 67P.
