Things We Saw Today: This Giant Gollum Sand-Sculpture Might Just Haunt Your Dreams

Every year, the British town of Weston-super-Mare hosts a sand-sculpting competition, and… look, screw context. Here’s a half-completed sand sculpture of Gollum. Visit the A.V. Club for sliiiightly less scary sand sculptures of Yoda, King Kong, and Captain Jack Sparrow and Davy Jones. Have fun sleeping tonight.

• The Frisky introduces us to our new favorite Tumblr, Fairy Tales for Twenty-Somethings. A sample: “Sleeping Beauty kept turning off her alarm and falling back to sleep without even noticing it, so she put her phone on the other side of the room so she’d be forced to stand up to turn it off. But then she just woke up lying on the floor across the room.”
• Kate Mara has joined Johnny Depp, Paul Bettany, and Rebecca Hall in Transcendence, the directorial debut of Wally Pfister, Christopher Nolan‘s Oscar-winning cinematographer of choice. (ComingSoon.net)
• Sad news today: Don Payne, the self-described “superhero geek” who wrote Thor and Thor: The Dark World in addition to writing and co-producing many episodes of The Simpsons, has passed away after a battle with cancer. (Deadline)

Tumblr user bucketofrhymes knitted this Ood mask, complete with a secondary external brain. Don’t say bad things about it. That’d be very rood of you.

• Kansas State University has made Ernest Cline‘s excellent gaming-themed novel Ready Player One required reading for all of the 2013-14 school year’s freshmen and transfer students. Good call, KSU. Good call. (The Collegian)
• SpoilerTV is reporting that the title of Doctor Who‘s upcoming Neil Gaiman-penned episode has been changed from “The Last Cyberman” to “Nightmare in Silver.”

Here’s a Bonsai tree with a bonus Bag End, created by Chris Guise. io9 has more pictures. I may or may not be drooling.

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