Tentacle Bento, a MUCH spicier niche game than Magic: The Gathering or Yu-Gi-Oh, made its way onto the crowd-funding project site, Kickstarter. Within one week, Tentacle Bento rocketed past its $13,000 goal by over $17,000!

The game’s objective is to “get your slimy tentacles on as many of the students as you can before time runs out” by assuming the role of a tentacled monster. This has not set well with some critics of both the game and Kickstarter for allowing this project to even be available for funding.

On the other side of the fence are the games creators who included this on Bento Tentacle’s Kickstarter page:

In the long history of horrible combinations of tentacles and school girls, we have taken a cheeky satire look at the genre to create a silly, if not innuendo rich, product. We are firmly against the depiction of violence against women in any regards.

Currently the Kickstarter page simply states, “Funding Canceled”.

Soda Pop Miniatures, the creators of the game, have moved the project to a another site to be privately funded and have already accrued the $13,000 they needed to complete the project.

Mike “Gabriel” Krahulik of Penny Arcade also chimed in on Twitter saying that “It’s okay for things you don’t like to exist.”

While everyone is up in arms about this whole mess, it sounds like Tentacle Bento is going to be about as horrendous and shockingly graphic as that deleted scene from Goonies.

Which is to say, not at all.

[The Daily Dot]

Elon Musk got his close-up beauty shot last night on CBS’ venerable newsmagazine 60 Minutes. His company SpaceX was the subject. Here was our favorite impression.

The biggest geeks about SpaceX work at SpaceX.

Every employee interviewed shared the same Big Sky optimism. They are doing what they are doing because this is a pivotal moment in the history of space and… well… they’d like to go to space and this is the best way to do it.

Which is why we root for them.

The organization really has a dot com start-up vibe to it. Not a shock considering Musk’s background but it is awesome to see in action.

The money quote from Garrett Reiseman, an engineer and astronaut who spent time on the International Space Station now working with SpaceX as a consultant.

“If you had a chance to go back in time and work with Howard Hughes when he was creating TWA. If you had a chance to be there at that moment when it was the dawn of a brand new era, wouldn’t you want to do that?”

Watch the full segment above.

So Penn & Teller create their own show on the Discovery Channel debating the legitimacy of various claims. Now, Jamie and Adam of MythBusters fame are invading P&T’s turf with a live stage show.

See how these things escalate?

The pair begin a 31-city tour this Sunday in Los Angeles’ Nokia theater.

Explains Adam…

We worked hard to port what we like about “MythBusters” onto stage without doing something that was just a big boring science demonstration show. And what we decided to do was to spend a couple of hours messing with the audience, with the way they see things, with the way they see themselves. We’ll demonstrate something where A plus B equals C, and bring an audience member up and show them that even though it looks like that might be the case, we can demonstrate situations in which it’s not. We have a sketch in which we physically manipulate the way people see and their ability to complete actions onstage — so in addition to the general idea of perception as the way we think through things, we’re going to be messing with actual perception.

Hmmm… live on stage, messing with perception. If they end with a bullet catch, things might get ugly.

Andrew Smith was commissioned by Ripley’s Believe It Or Not to create this moving sculpture constructed from found items including railroad lanterns and an old bicycle.

Really amazing looking piece of art.

[YouTube]

Okay, it’s not bigger on the inside but this TARDIS themed door to a DVD closet is the coolest DIY project you’ll see today.

Thanks to Steven Lauren on G+ for tipping us off to it.

Find a few more pictures AFTER THE JUMP…

[TheRPS]

(more…)

What I wouldn’t give to be in this car.

A Missouri mom was taking her children out trick or treating when she saw what looked to be an unidentified flying object. She followed the craft around for well over an hour with her excited kids cooing in the background.

UFO Casebook has the full video.

Here is her description:

When we first saw it, it was as if it was approaching us with its bottom facing us, (as if on a vertical orientation, and as it retreated, it turned flat (or horizontal), at times moving very slowly, then accelerating very quickly.

It would completely disappear from time to time. We followed it, both of us taking turns videotaping it with our phones. It at times acted as if it was playing a game with us, hiding, then appearing very close so we could see details, including a dome-like appendage on the bottom-center.

Then it would speed off, eventually making a complete circle over our area and winding up hovering over the neighborhood where we had originally been headed. It disappeared again, as we got out of the car to go tell our friends, and many people in the neighborhood came running up asking if we saw it, too!

Check out the full video at Casebook…

[UFO Casebook]

We’ve all heard horror stories about domestic abuse. Husbands hitting wives, and wives hitting husbands. Its a terrible thing, and we aren’t going to make fun of that today.

However, we are going to make fun of this: In Andhra Pradesh, a region of India, a bounty is being offered on spouse abusers. To quote the minister that came up with this brilliant idea…

“Beat your drunken husband blue and black if he touches you. I will pay you a Rs 1,000 reward per slap. The more you beat him the better, because you can win up to Rs 10,000,”

Basically, he’s saying that if your husband hits you, you can beat him 10 times back , and get Rs 10,000 back, which is comparable to about $200.

“Once you do this, your husband will come home early instead of visiting the toddy shop and will also respect you and spend time with the family,” he added.

The minister advised women to carry out the act in front of as many people as possible so that their husbands would be shamed that much more.

This is insane. Its telling people to start brawls for payment, kind of like the Wild West. If you are beaten by your husband, you have the right to hit him back, and get paid Rs 1000 for each slap, up to ten slaps. You’re also told to beat them in public, which is quite frankly, terrifying. It should deter people from spouse-abusing, but to be honest, its a little depressing that its so necessary for this measure.

To get the Rs 1000, you have to make sure that you are beaten with an eye-witness insight, so they can verify that you deserve the bounty. This means that you need to make sure you’re abusing spouse hits you while people can see.

[Telegraph India]

Men are funnier than women, according to a new study out of UC San Diego.

But only barely, a scientist quickly added realizing he still has to go home to his wife.

And men mostly found other men funny which accounts for the slight advantage, added a young lab tech whose blind date arrived awkwardly while the announcement was made.

Although those qualifiers are not true (nor funny) the facts remain that men tested funnier on average than women, if just barely.

…the study’s first author Laura Mickes, a postdoctoral researcher in the UC San Diego Department of Psychology and a Ph.D. graduate of the same department, “The differences we find between men’s and women’s ability to be funny are so small that they can’t account for the strength of the belief in the stereotype.”

Men edged out women by 0.11 points out of a theoretically possible perfect score of 5.0, while about 90 percent of both male and female study participants agreed with the stereotype that men are funnier.

So how do a pack of intellectuals measure what is funny and what isn’t? Why a controlled version of a New Yorker cartoon caption contest, of course! (tea cups cling as pinkies arise) Each volunteer wrote captions for the legendarily erudite scribbles and then had they rated by other test takers. The study also tested to see if funny captions were more memorable.

[Science Daily]

Today, a couple of members of the 4chan forum /b/ pulled a fairly impressive, albeit highly illegal stunt. Due to a use of cross-site scripting, some members of /b/ were able to steal a few hundred passwords off of different computers. Some of these passwords were bank accounts. Now, when bad people get access to other peoples bank accounts, they commit theft. One of these accounts had 22,000 Euros in it, and somebody decided to steel 5,000 Euro of it. Another one of these accounts contained 522,000 Euro, which another /b/ member decided to steal and buy 22,000 copies of Wario games and a unicycle, which he then sent to the White House. This will (hopefully) end up with a life sentence for the thief, and some photos of President Obama riding a unicycle while playing Wario.

Of course, the transaction could end up being stopped by the bank, as it has been flagged for inspection, and the thief would end up paying for this out of his own pocket.  Hopefully cyber-police will be getting onto this case soon, so that it doesn’t happen again.

[Reddit]

Here is world famous mentalist The Amazing Kreskin on why he wasn’t sweating all the Rapture talk by Harold Camping one week ago:

“I immediately checked my predictions for this year, and finding nothing regarding such, went on with my life.

“Of course, if we are to respect for even a fleeting second the pronouncement of this holy man and his conviction, we certainly would expect that he turned over every single solitary penny of his possessions to a charity by the day before the end of the world. Not doing that would label his pronouncements as phony as a $3 bill.

“Of course this holds true as well for all the individuals who were ‘passionately certain’ that the end of the world was definitely coming. Unless they relinquished all of their life savings, the question becomes, ‘Why haven’t they entered politics, where lying through one’s teeth is clearly one of the basic skills of the profession?’”

Someone is predicting the end of the world. Let me open by Trapper Keeper of yearly predictions. Hmmmm…. Hines Ward wins Dancing With The Stars, The Hangover II is boring, Sarah Palin announces she is running for president. Nope, nothing in here about the ascension of all God’s children into heaven. Case closed.

Thanks to Dylan for passing this along.

Weighing in at over 6 billion times the mass of our solar system, astronomers have found the most massive black hole yet at the center of galaxy M87. Three times large than Pluto’s orbit, it’s very, very big.

Not to be outdone, chubby loving astronomers have their eyes on one that may even be even bigger than that one at 19 billion times the mass of our solar system. Woop woop.

Astronomers calculate mass of largest black hole yet

Listen to the WeirdThings Podcast gang talk about this story as well!

If you were discovered in Beirut, as the center of attention making everyone around you laugh it up only to be found by some new friends who insist you travel with them to Brazil, you might think yourself a pretty lucky jet setter.

If you are Omega the chimpanzee, it’s even more impressive. Sure he was nabbed by animal rights workers who were revolted by the idea of him blowing buts in a Lebanon zoo. But still, free trip to Brazil!

“The chimp still regularly smokes … if someone will throw him a cigarette he’d pick it up and go for it straight away,” said Jason Meier, executive director for animal rights group Animals Lebanon.

Organizers of Omega’s evacuation say it marks the first time a chimpanzee has been rescued in Lebanon, a country with virtually no animal rights protection laws.

In his younger years, Omega was used in one of the local restaurants to entertain people and was made to smoke cigarettes and serve water pipes to customers. After he grew stronger, he was locked up and taken to a zoo where for the past 10 years he has lived in a cage measuring 430 square feet (40 square meters).

Hopefully, they packed some Nicorette. Quitting smoking could be quite the monkey on Omega’s back.

[AP]