If “shit or get off the pot” comes to mind when pondering your long-term relationship, a wedding dress made of toilet paper might be strangely fitting. Or at least a new way to win $2,000, which is apparently what the 1,000-plus entrants into the eighth annual TP wedding gown contest were thinking. (Let’s hope it doesn’t rain.) These wedding dresses will look great with your flower girl’s bread bag tie gown and your maid of honor’s condom frock.

Entrants to Cheap Chic Weddings’ contest got REALLY into it. Whereas I might just go mummy-style, there are poofs and tufts and doo-dahs galore (yes, those are technical terms). But all of these furbelows were made only of toilet paper, tape, glue, and thread:

Endexx Corp.'s Todd Davis wants to make it really easy for you to buy weed. He's imagining a pot vending machine, where all you'll have to do is push a few buttons and a can of marijuana will come tumbling down.

Pot vending machines already exist at medical marijuana dispensaries, HuffPo reports:

Davis's company recently bought two smaller firms that provide vending machines to medical marijuana outlets. One, Dispense Labs, produces a card-reading gadget used by the staff at pot clubs to dole out measured portions of cannabis, streamlining the buying process. (The machine is pictured below.) The other acquisition, CannCan, engineered a modified soda machine that dispenses plastic cans full of marijuana.

After heading off a pine beetle infestation on the 37,000-acre Montana ranch he co-owns, Larry Lipson had thousands of tons of lumber on hand. He decided to make something useful out of it -- these handsome cases for Apple products.

When pine beetles started attacking the forest on their land, the Lipsons had a plan, The New York Times reports:

We all know, in the abstract, that leaving trash out in the world can negatively impact wildlife. But here's a specific case that shows how pathetic that impact can be. Someone left a bag of Doritos out, and a curious Key deer -- an endangered species -- stuck its head in. And couldn't get it out. This is how a sheriff's deputy found the poor creature:

What is it about ducklings that makes them so cute? Is it their distant yet undeniable resemblance to Peeps? The small “cheep cheep” that awakens some seed of evolutionary biology, making us want to smooch them instead of turn them into kabobs? I don’t know; that’s why I’m asking you.

Anyway, this mama duck was all “YO COPS, my kidlets are trapped in this drain!” and the cops rescued them and plopped 'em back in the water, and they swam happily around their mom and all was well in the world. Except maybe the mom duck was really like “HEY humans, get the eff away from my kids! I never asked to be a YouTube star, so PLEASE GO AWAY.” Until Google Translate adds “duck” to its languages, we’ll never know.

Watch:

Sometimes you need a side of whimsy and delight to go with your cynicism.

Dutch designer Thor ter Kulve creates tweaks for everyday city fixtures, temporarily imbuing them with childlike zest. A boring light pole becomes a swing, for instance:

And this fire hydrant becomes a fountain:

The Carbon Buster is a slab of brown amalgamate -- carbon dioxide, sand, cement, water, glass, shells, wood shavings. This is not that different from any other concrete block you use to build buildings. What makes it special, according to the company that made it, is where all that sand and cement and glass and wood came from.

More than 50 percent of the material that goes into the Carbon Buster is recycled. One ingredient begins as residue from waste-to-energy plants. The residue is mixed with carbon dioxide and other ingredients to make small pebbles. Those are then mixed with even more recycled materials and made into something that looks more or less like a brick.

Warm soda is gross. Coke’s latest desperate bid for attention newest packaging idea addresses that in sort of edible-beer-cozy fashion, by creating a bottle made of ice. Currently only available in Colombia, the ice-bottle will theoretically keep your Coke cold long enough for you to mull over the plight of melting glaciers, soda’s link to weight gain, and the depression/diet soda correlation.

“Are Coke and Pepsi the new cigarettes?” you can muse aloud while sipping an icy cool brown beverage on the shores of Cartagena. “Does the melting ice symbolize our shared mortality and the fleeting nature of youth? SHOULD I STOP ASKING RHETORICAL QUESTIONS?”

Amusement parks are large and dramatic. They take up lots of space, on the ground and up high into the sky. Sometimes they feature topless humanoid cows. But at the end of the day, they're mostly just metal, shaped into roller-coaster tracks and ferris-wheel cars.

The Glue Society's James Dive took all that metal and turned it into this:

Each side of this cube measures four meters -- just over 13 feet.

Remember when Facebook co-founder and ex-Napsterite Sean Parker became the poster boy for ridiculously lavish displays of excess by basically recreating a Game of Thrones set for his Big Sur wedding to the tune of $10 million? And remember when he became a real life “Big Yellow Taxi” lyric by adding fake ruins, increasing erosion and sedimentation, and damaging redwoods? According to the California Coastal Commission, the structures caused “immediate physical damage to individual trees” and “impacted the existing redwood forest habitat,” potentially even harming the redwoods’ ability to reproduce. People were understandably pissed.

Well, maybe we should call off the dogs, a little. (Just a little!) Parker himself wrote to the Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal, who originally broke the story, to give his side. Madrigal pulls out three key points that redeem Parker somewhat: