Awesome Death

This grim but funny card game challenges players to act out unusual ways of dying. One team chooses who died and how they died, and the other team must draw or act out their demise for their teammates to guess. For example: Who: Air Tube Dancing Man; How: Lawnmower Accident. It’s basically Charades or Pictionary but in a cemetery. For 4 to 6 players.

Nobody wants to think about death, but it’s something that we eventually have to deal with. Wired interviewed licensed funeral director and mortician Victor M. Sweeney and handed him questions from Twitter about the details of his business. We now know the difference between caskets and coffins and how cemeteries never seem to run out of space.

These days, the leading causes of death in the U.S. are heart disease, cancer, and COVID-19. MinuteEarth explains the most common ways people perished around the globe in the past. While we’ve improved our life expectancy in many ways, there are still some long-standing killers we have yet to defeat.

When you think of pop music, it’s usually pretty upbeat stuff, but back in the 1960s, a strange trend emerged – pop songs about tragic accidents and death. Yesterday’s Papers offers an intriguing look back at this unusual fad and some of most popular “splatter platters”. It’s worth watching for Wayne Cochran’s epic hair helmet alone.

(Gore) Caitlin Doughty of Ask A Mortician takes on the “experts react to” genre of videos by evaluating the quality and realism of the way dead bodies are portrayed in movies and TV shows, from The Goonies to Weekend at Bernie’s. If you’re squeamish, you’ll probably want to skip this one.

During his recent visit to the West African nation of Ghana, Conan O’Brien visited an artist’s studio where they handcraft unique “fantasy” coffins, which are part of the nation’s way of celebrating its dead. Naturally, he went with something near and dear to his heart.

(NSFW, Spoilers) Demo reels are good. Death reels are better. This one from Youtuber hh1edits kind of makes us wonder how many of our favorite actors have stared death in the face… again… and again.

A cutthroat little business woman doesn’t let anyone get a freebie in this cleverly crafted animation from student Kyu-bum Lee. The only bad thing about the cartoon is just how short it is.