Tashirojima (田代島) is a small island in Japan known as “Cat Island” due to the large stray cat population. The cat population is now larger than the human population on the island, and thrives as a result of the local belief that feeding cats will bring wealth and good fortune.
(Source: niuniente)
This year at E3 during the Xbox panel during a scripted “trash talk” bit someone made a scripted rape joke (male gamer to girl gamer who sucks at a game: “just wait, it’ll all be over soon.”) and then they acted like it wasn’t a big deal and then they released an expensive, anti-consumer (DRM on physical games) piece of hardware. And then Sony just released the PS4 which is just the PS3 but better graphics and $100 cheaper than the Xbox. So THAT happened.
But then Nintendo just quietly released a bunch of great looking sequels for all of it’s major franchises (Mario, Pikmin, Donkey Kong, and Smash Bros.) and every single one of those games interestingly features playable female characters who haven’t been seen in decades like Dixie Kong and Princess Peach - and Pikmin now has a new female hero.
One of my favorite things about Peach in the new Mario game is that one of the power ups is a literal “cat suit” and Peach’s “cat suit” doesn’t sexualize her at ALL. You can’t even see her boobs. She just looks like she’s wearing over-sized footie pajamas it’s so cute. Also they added a pink letter to the Mario logo just to accommodate Peach’s re-inclusion into the franchise as a character with actual agency!
So at the end of the presentation they tell you to go to the Smash Bros website to find out about new characters. And then they announced this character, Wii Fit Trainer, on the site. And in an interview the director said he gets thousands of requests for almost every video game character under the sun and he’s gotten absolutely zero requests for this character and he put her in the game to be funny and defy fan expectation. This character is literally “hey fuck you we’re the ones making the games around here, and we’ll be goofy and funny if we want to and also check it out another female character in Smash.”
Also the inclusion of the Animal Crossing villager is interesting because Animal Crossing is VERY popular with girls and even though the villager is male I’m 100% certain his alternate costumes will include the girl default villager character. So that’s neat. The three Smash characters they announced were two girl(ish) characters from two girl(ish) games and then Mega Man.
Also in the new Animal Crossing game boys are allowed to cross dress and all of the animals are explicitly genderqueer in the dialog. Characters say stuff like “Boys can ware make up if they want to, I mean, it’s 2013, who cares?” and just today a jock rhino was looking deeply into my eyes and asking me to hike a football and I asked him if he loved me (which was one of the option out of other options about sports) and he was like “Oh I guess a lot can happen when you look into someone else’s eyes like that, huh?” He didn’t even care that we’re both guys. Also in the new Pokemon game you can be black.
Basically what I’m saying is Nintendo is quietly and systematically making their games more socially progressive and Microsoft made a rape joke and then said “what? it was a joke.”
I love how potato in French is pomme de terre, which pretty much means “earth apple.”
like what stupid frenchman saw this:
and said “zis petite légume looks like a, how you say, APPLE! hmmm… but it grows in ze earth… HON HON HON!…
The World as 100 People: Equally interesting and shocking.
(via Visual.ly)
Graphene Aerogel
— Lightest Solid Material Ever DevelopedBecause aerogels are porous they are ultra-light materials and this one is 100 times lighter than Polystyrene foam cups and can help clean up pollutants like toluene and crude oil (other oils as well) and other compounds like ethanol. Researchers are planning to look at the materials ability for insulating and sound proofing in the future.
Previous records for lightest materials were 0.9 milligrams per cubic centimeter in 2011, 0.18 mg/cm3 in 2012, and now this material at 0.16 mg/cm3.
Prof. Gao Chao // Polymer Science Engineering at Zhejiang University
Published Feb 18, 2013 // Advanced Materials
NY under water.
The eye-catching swimming pool in Mumbai, India, has been built to raise awareness about the threat of sea level rises as a result of global warming.
It was constructed by attaching a giant aerial photograph of the New York City skyline to the floor of the pool.
This is actually amazing
This post has been featured on a 1000notes.com blog.
How the president deals with his daughters boyfriend
Composition of my favourite gifs I’ve posted on That Science Guy over the last few months.
Anyone who thinks Shakespeare is boring apparently missed the greatest stage direction ever written:
I want that to be the final line of my biography.
Look at the center of this image for 30sec, then watch Van Gogh’s *Starry Night* come to life
Even if this is not exactly “science” this is too cool not to reblog.
