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Watch how a Japanese villager is replacing the dead with real-life NPCs

Take a moment and watch this micro-documentary on a 64-year-old Japanese woman who is sewing elaborate dolls, leaving them in the place of departed neighbors from her dying village in the valley of Shikoku. For the past decade, Ayano Tsukimi has been repopulating the remote village of Nagoro with arts-and-crafts people, sewing buttons on their eyes and coiffing their hair with yarn, because her home is becoming a ghost town. Why? Well, because, as we learn in the video, her village has dwindled down to 36 residents and doesn’t even have a general store or local school, though at one…

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Adulthood means swirling your cognac while appreciating these awesome toy guns

These hyper-exotic plastic firearms by Mattel aren’t just kids’ toys. They’re also toys for grown-up kids, thank you very much. As anyone who plays a fair amount of videogames can vouch, it’s only natural to develop a fetish for wickedly exaggerated weapons of destruction that are far too impractical to exist in real-life.  That is, unless they are produced as toys that fire darts, like these magnificent creatures in the BOOMCo line, coming this summer, just in time for that family reunion where you can pass it off as quality family time. Looking at these magnificent creatures, you can clearly…

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The not-so-adorable toy RQ-1 Predator drone, now sold out on Amazon

The sad fact of the matter is, like the AR-15, the RQ-1 Predator and “drones” in general have achieved a notorious cachet. That’s why you are reading this article about a 1:97 scale, die-cast toy version of the winged death-machine — currently out of stock on Amazon. That’s why I’m writing it. And that’s why two hundred facetious reviews can be found on the product page. It’s our own glass bead game. – – – It’s unclear whether the tiny unmanned aerial vehicle is intended as a toy for children or as a model for cretinous adults who would place…