Abandoned Soviet Space Shuttles: Exploring The Unbeaten Path

I think I posted a link a while ago about the abandoned Russian Military base that still houses one of their space shuttles. If I didn't I apologize because this is kind of a cool history thing. Essentially the Soviet shuttle program was abandoned decades ago and the base was just shuttered but a lot of stuff was left in it, including an unfinished shuttle.

The base is pretty well knows but I guess it's not the easiest thing in the world to get to, there's still active Russian security keeping people out of the site. These guys from this YouTube channel I've never heard of made the trek out there and took a ton of cool footage of the base. Apparently they lost a lot of their footage but what they have is well worth taking a quick break from TPS reports.

Smell Ya Links

Steam Gauge: Measuring the value of the Steam Summer Sale. This is one of those long form articles that keeps me coming to ArsTechnica. Every year I drop about $20 on the big Steam Summer sale, I think this year I really blew out my budget and dropped $25. I got Lego Hobbit, Lego Batman 3, Scribblenauts Unleashed, Baulders Gate II, and like 3 other games I can't remember. Fall out New Vegas maybe? Anyway the point is I'm a big fan of picking up games for $4.99 and less.

Here are all the Spider-Mans I can name. These are all pretty funny.

Building Seattle Literally Meant Moving Mountains. It's funny, Seattle is FULL of hills, big steep ones too, not the kind of piddly ass hill you see in the midwest. Can you imagine it even hillier? What did they do when it snowed?

Smell Ya Later Forever, KSK. A few weeks ago the groundbreaking sports blog Kissing Suzy Kolber closed up shop. They're still there in name but the editor left and so did all the writers. This article from their outgoing editor Christmas Ape Mike Tunison is well worth the read even if you never visited the site. It provides fantastic insight as to why most internet sites kinda suck. I link to a lot of uproxx (owners of Kissing Suxy Kolber) articles but man has the quality of that group of sites really gone downhill.

It used to be a site like WithLeather would post 3 or 4 articles a day but they would be good articles. Now it's top 10 tweets about Don Mattingly's long sideburns, or Which 5 Simpsons episodes would you start against Michael Jordan and the 97 Bulls, etc. The only reason I stick around is because they still employ 3 or 4 really fantastic writers. What's worse is some writers I used to really enjoy have started writing really hacky clickbait articles like "Here's why the Fantastic Four sucks forever and is a terrible property and no good movie could save it and all the things you like are stupid because I need to pay the bills with clicks".

Every few years I sort of shift around what sites I look at on a daily basis. 2 years ago I was spending a ton of time on Tumblr, now I'm spending most of that time on reddit. 5 or 6 years ago I used to LOVE Buzzfeed of all sites. It's sort of the nature of the internet, one site, or group of sites, gets popular for their unique content and viewpoint and once the money starts flowing it's a race to the bottom to see who can cash out the quickest. I don't even know anymore man. I guess SBNation has some good content.

Magneto Killed JFK, because why not?

The producers of X-Men: Days of Future Past have been doing a bit of viral marketing lately. First up was a fake website from the supposed makers of the Sentinels that was quickly followed by a youtube commercial for the Sentinels, now there's a website (with accompanying youtube clip of course) TheBentBullet.com that presents the case against Magneto being the mutant on the grassy knoll.

I'm not sure if this is poorly timed or not, seeing how last week was the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination. Until I see a story on buzzfeed on the 11 ways this advertising campaign is insensitive, I'm going to go with not.

Abandoned New York

Ok so this is hella long, and not really about Zombies or robots but it's cool anyway. This guy (Steve Duncan) took a camera crew underneath New York City to show off some of the abandoned train stations, tunnels, sewers, basically everything you'd see in a Cloverfield 2; Rise of the Hipster Urban Historians.