Link roundup

1. "Wildlife experts and California Highway Patrol officers were in the midst of daring rescue in the North Bay Monday afternoon after a truculent elephant seal tried to cross a highway and was resisting attempts to get it to go back into the water"

2. In The Force Awakens, _______ is found at Skellig Michael:

A Christian monastery was founded on the island at some point between the 6th and 8th century and remained continuously occupied until its abandonment in the late 12th century. The remains of the monastery, along with most of the island itself, became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1996.

3. Brian Krebs:

My PayPal account was hacked on Christmas Eve. The perpetrator tried to further stir up trouble by sending my PayPal funds to a hacker gang tied to the jihadist militant group ISIS.
...
I then called PayPal and asked how the perpetrator had gotten in, and was there anything else they could do to prevent this from happening again? The customer service person at PayPal said the attacker had simply logged in with my username and password, and that I had done everything I could in response to the attack. The representative assured me they would monitor the account for suspicious activity, and that I should rest easy.

Twenty minutes later I was outside exercising in the unseasonably warm weather when I stopped briefly to check email again: Sure enough, the very same rogue email address had been added back to my account. But by the time I got back home to a computer, my email address had been removed and my password had been changed.

Discussing rejected plot ideas for The Force Awakens

EW:

The trouble was a simple case of upstaging. “It just felt like every time Luke came in and entered the movie, he just took it over,” Arndt said. “Suddenly you didn’t care about your main character anymore because, ‘Oh f–k, Luke Skywalker’s here. I want to see what he’s going to do.’”
...
Some of the early MacGuffins of the movie – the thing that drives a movie’s plot – were a search for Darth Vader’s remains, or a quest to the underwater wreckage of the second Death Star to recover a key piece of history about sacred Jedi sites in the galaxy.

The Force Awakens pet toys

Petco's Star Wars toys.

Knights of Ren

Force Awakens spoilers.

Instructions for making your own rolling BB-8

Make:

With BB-8, I pushed myself to make it in a day. As a result, the surfacing and paint is less than perfect, which I’m serendipitously calling “weathered”. But I was able to stick to my goal, and was able to make the whole thing in a matter of hours. I wanted to capture the character and personality of the real robot as simply as possible, and I’m really happy with how it turned out.

The Force Awakens trailer sweded

John Boyega's response to racist comments on the trailer

"To whom it may concern...Get used to it."

Stabilized views of the Falcon's maneuvers in The Force Awakens trailer

Millennium Falcon gifs courtesy of two Redditors.

*Buy die cast Millennium Falcon toys at ebay.