Your daily WTF: bananas edition

Yea, I challenge you to come up with an explanation.

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Post-halloween creepy photo

Yea, make of this what you will. 5 points for a decent caption.

[Source: Knuttz.net]

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Today’s WTF image: soccer team

Ten points to whoever can spot what’s wrong with this pic… and then caption it.

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Prince of Persia movie: I was there before Jake

Spot the likeness….this is a pic of me at my brother’s fancy dress up birthday party back in 2007. I don’t have a better pic lying around, unfortunately. For comparison, below, is the poster of the new Prince of Persia movie. Whaddayathink? Did I predict the new movie?

Anyhow…I’m looking forward to seeing this movie when it hits next year! And unlike good ol Jake, I at least have a little bit of Persian blood in me!

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If Matt Groening drew “Naruto”…

I’m a huge fan of both Naruto and The Simpsons, so this drawing (I don’t know who the artist is, but I’d love to give credit!) is worth about +30 geeknesses. Click thru the pic for a full size version. Many more comic style mashups here. Enjoy!

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Bizarre optical illusion

The two pictures are of the same face, with just the contrast adjusted a little. However, the face on the left looks female, while the face on the right looks male. Anyone want to hazard a guess why?

[Link: Awesome Optical Illusion - Twins]

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Today’s image caption challenge – flight!

Give your best caption or explanation of what’s going on in this pic.

[Picture from Knuttz.net]

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42 essential 3rd act plot twists

I’ve been following the Dreden Codak webcomic for a while, and occasionally something really funky comes out of it. In this particular case, it’s a list of 42 3rd act plot twists that can, and often does, happen. The twists are arranged on a matrix, so along the top you have peripeteia (your standard plot reversal), anagnorisis (realization of things as they actually are; see the link for deeper explanations), petard hoist (done in by your own machinations), reverse macguffin (reverse driving plot element), Shyamalan (plot twist as written by M. Night Shyamalan), Double Shyamalan (double the fun of a standard Shyamalan), and deus ex machina (literally, God from the machine, where a plot device appears from nowhere to solve all the problems). Along the side, are the standard genres of fiction: tragedy, thriller, science, horror, fantasy, and mystery.

I dare you to come up with a work of fiction that fits each plot twist.

[Link: Dresden Codak - 42 essential 3rd act twists]

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Today’s image explanation challenge

Nope…I have no idea either, really.

[Link: i am bored.com]

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Video game addiction experiment: day 4

Night Noises by Fayyaad Hendricks is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

I apologize for the overimagification, but that’s the result of two days of challenge. It’s actually left me a little on the drained side, but…it was actually fun. It’s weird how much I can accomplish when I’m not actually playing video games! Don’t get me wrong…I miss playing them, but I’ve discovered activities and parts of me that I’d forgotten about. And I think that’s the most important lesson I’m taking away from all this–life DOES exist outside of games. The Darling Wife is impressed enough at this little book I’ve written that she’s actually at the moment in the process of trying to find it a publisher. I’m going to clean up the artwork and layout a bit, and then we’ll see if there’s a chance I can get this, and perhaps a few other stories into bookshops. Is that too ambitious for something I wrote and drew over the course of two nights? Probably…but it’s fun and exciting, even if nothing comes of it. Anyhow, enjoy the story and illustrations, as raw and un-refined as they are. If you can’t read it, my apologies; I’ve shrunk it down quite a bit so that I don’t overload anyone’s browser. If there’s a call for it, I’ll post the finished, reworked, cleaned up product at Flickr or Picasa. Just to get an indication, does anyone think they’d actually pay money for a story like this?

Back to the story of addiction. I don’t know if it’s just a case of information synchronicity, or…er…that psychological phenomenon where you only start taking notice of things because they’re relevant to you (argh, can’t remember what it’s called!!), but I’ve suddenly noticed an awful lot of articles popping up in my RSS reader about video game addiction. This statistic comes to us via Switched.com, and states that almost 1 in 10 US children are addicted to video games; 8.5% to be a little more precise. It’s an alarming number if you’re going to label it “addiction” vs “compulsion”. The sample size is significant: 1,178 adolescent children, with 8.5% of them exhibiting addictive behavior:

(Researcher, Douglas) Gentile looked for symptoms like becoming irritable when gameplay was cut short, avoiding homework to play, stealing money to buy gaming paraphernalia, and escaping reality and avoiding problems through games.

That sounds about right for “addiction”, and with kids of my own, I’m beginning to feel as though this hasn’t received enough attention till now. The article goes on to state that Dr Gentile has touted the benfits of video games before, so he’s not exactly a completely biased voice in this matter.

Gentile doesn’t necessarily think games are bad. He would just like to see game manufacturers use the significant influence games have over children for good instead of evil — for creating powerful educational devices.

[Link: Switched.com - Almost 1 in 10 Children Addiction to Video Games]

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