Joe Jonas won hearts and Halloween itself on Saturday night with one of the best one-sided couple costumes we’ve ever seen.

Going as the ultimate stan of his bride-to-be, Sophie Turner, Jonas attended a costume party dressed as Sansa Stark, her Game of Thrones character. Meanwhile, the actress behind Sansa went as… an elephant. Perfection.

SEE ALSO: Maisie Williams will be Sophie Turner’s bridesmaid because Stark sisters stick together

In case the iconic red wig wasn’t a dead giveaway, Jonas even posted a video of his dramatic entrance as Sansa with the Game of Thrones credits music playing in the background of his Insta story. We’re not sure if it was a great idea to also add a GIF of Sansa’s almost-husband, Tyrion Lannister, to the video — but at least Jon looks like he approves.

We’re hoping these adorable antics are only a preview for a very Game of Thrones wedding in the future. Only, of course, with less blood and death than is typical for a Game of Thrones wedding.  

After getting engaged in 2017, the two said they would wait until after the show was over before moving forward with planning. Now that they’ve finally wrapped on shooting the final season, it’s only a matter of time.

Jonas’ love for his fiancée’s iconic character isn’t the only Game of Thrones connection in their coupling. Maisie Williams, Turner’s on-screen Stark sister, will also be a bridesmaid at the wedding — which will likely also have a lot of other Game of Thrones guests in attendance.

So here’s to Joe Jonas for finally giving Sansa Stark the beautiful love she deserves.  

A baby kangaroo is safe, thanks to the quick actions of two Australian police officers who waded into the surf to pull the young marsupial from the waves.

The rescue happened Saturday afternoon at Safety Beach in Victoria, where local police responded to reports of a young kangaroo in the water. 

SEE ALSO: These X-rays of zoo animals are extraordinarily creepy

They said it had already made its way out of the waves by the time they arrived, and they were attempting to contain it while waiting on wildlife experts to show up when it suddenly ran back into the surf. As the kangaroo swam deeper, they could tell it was struggling. 

A video shot by bystanders captured what happened next.

“His head went under a couple of times and when his head popped up he was starting to spew out a lot of salt water which had a bit of blood and some foam in it. And that’s a fair indication that we see also in people that they’re going through a drowning event,” one of the police officers said in an interview with 7 News Brisbane. 

Both officers leapt into action and ran into the waves to pull the kangaroo back to shore. It was unconscious by the time they pulled it out of the water, though the officers were able to revive it with CPR. Though they later clarified there was no mouth-to-mouth involved in the resuscitation, one of the officers said he had learned to give chest compression to dogs from his veterinarian.

As for the kangaroo, he’s now in the care of a wildlife organization and is expected to make a full recovery. 

“The roo is currently being cared for but is said to be in good spirits and lucky to be alive given the amount of salt water he inhaled, thanks to his rescuers,” Rosebud police said in a statement.

We have a hard time imagining the Mother of Dragons doing anything frivolous, between needing to reclaim her throne and save Westeros from White Walkers and all.

But apparently, when Emilia Clarke wasn’t raining down fire and blood in her Game of Thrones auditions all those years ago, she was showing off her dance moves.

SEE ALSO: Emilia Clarke just got the best ‘Game of Thrones’ tattoo

During a speech from showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss’ at the Britannia Awards on Friday, Oct. 26, the two revealed that Clarke did “the robot” during her audition process. And evidently, her moves brought enough heat to impress even the president of HBO himself.

According to a report in Variety, the two described the terrifying environment Clarke had walked into. It was just the two show creators in a dimly lit room, and the president of HBO. “We were smiling. He wasn’t. It was quite possibly the least inviting audition environment we had ever witnessed,” said Weiss.

But Clarke wasn’t going to let the bleak atmosphere put a damper on her fiery charm.

“Emilia asked if there was anything else she could do to lighten the mood and David asked, ‘Can you dance?’ And without missing a beat, Emilia did the robot,” Weiss said. “She did it with commitment and she did it well…and even the president had no choice but to smile. She got the job 10 seconds after she left the room and the two of us ran to tell her before she left the building because letting her get on an 11-hour flight home without knowing seemed like cruel and unusual punishment.”

The silliness of the whole thing is only heightened by the fact that it happened in an audition after the HBO president had watched the very serious pilot for Game of Thrones.

When Clarke went on stage after to accept her award for British Artist of the Year, she returned their compliments in kind, saying they “deserve their own bravery award for hiring someone whose biggest job up until then was catering parties dressed as a Snow White.”

Our hats go off to Clarke for being honored with such a prestigious award.

But now we’re left wondering which kid have the bragging rights of saying Daenerys Targaryen was a Disney Princess at their birthday party.

I first saw Hasan Minhaj, creator of Netflix’s Patriot Act, in the fall of 2015. He was performing the early version of Homecoming King, which would become a groundbreaking Netflix special, at the 179-seat Cherry Lane Theater in the West Village. The audience was half-full, a respectable Thursday turnout, and a house manager came over to me and my friends and asked if we’d like to move up and sit in the front row. 

For the next hour-plus, Minhaj spoke directly to us, as he does to the camera in large swathes of the 2016 Netflix special. To call it standup is to gravely oversimplify; it’s a one-man show, a seamless blend of humor and heart, and an entity unto itself.

It speaks to Minhaj’s unique artistic style, which lies at the intersection of traditional comedy, memoir, and political discourse – he is, first and foremost, a storyteller. Story, not comedy, is the basis for Patriot Act and for an artistic and cultural revolution. 

SEE ALSO: Phoebe Robinson knows the world is trash, but wants you to laugh and then get to work

Homecoming King undoubtedly paved the way for Minhaj’s storytelling style, not only with the fusing of genre elements, but with dynamic stage design, interactive screens, and other visual components Minhaj worked on with production designer Marc Janowitz.

“I like to move around on stage and use my hands and be liberated, and I wanted the entire stage to almost be extensions of my thoughts and my ideas,” Minhaj tells Mashable via phone interview. The desire to elucidate certain points or themes with screens led him and Janowitz to create a “new storytelling language” that carries into Patriot Act.

“I don’t think my story [in Homecoming King] was all that much different from I think a lot of Desi [South Asian] kids I grew up with,” Minhaj says. “A lot of us, we shared sort of similar stories like that with our parents and growing up and identity – but I think what was unique and special about it was it was the first time those thoughts were put concisely into 72 minutes and sort of given this beautiful polish with sound design, art design, and creative direction behind it. It was put on wax in a very concise way.”

In his years at The Daily Show, and in watching its many offspring, Minhaj grew frustrated by what you might call the constraints of genre. Storytellers and stand-up comics don’t necessarily engage screens or use the entire stage; similarly, political satirists, more often than not, sit behind a desk and talk into a camera. 

“You’re either all in the field or you’re inside of the studio,” he says. “But for me I was like ‘What if I’m able to do all of that and the screens and the stage, they serve as extensions of my mind?’ and the stage was actually a character in the show like anything else.”

It’s fitting that Minhaj invented a new style and language for his work, since he’s bringing forth a viewpoint as yet unseen in similar entertainment.

“When it comes to my American identity, I’ve oftentimes felt as an insider and an outsider at the same time,” he says. “I can speak to being an American but I can also speak to being a child of immigrants or feeling like an outsider, and for the longest time in this specific space, political satire, late night, we’ve usually been spoken to or spoken for.”

In the winter of 2018, I see Minhaj again, once again with front row seats. Word has spread through Brown Town that he’s doing new material at the Comedy Cellar, so my friends and I snag tickets for a late show on a weekday. One of his longer segments – and they are segments, not bits – is about refugees, and I imagine it’s the first time a PowerPoint of immigration statistics has ever gone up at the Cellar. 

“There’s a personal limitation to mining stories from my life,” Minhaj says. “A creative graduation for me was to say how can I storytell about things that are outside of my own life. How can I storytell and tell a humanizing story about say, refugees, or a story about Affirmative Action…How can I tell a story with the different characters that are involved in this case?”

He’s well aware – and critical – of the notion that comedians have somehow been tasked with reaching across the aisle in politically divisive times.

“We’ve all argued with family members on Facebook, we know that doesn’t work,” he says. “I’m being candid – I alone cannot change someone’s mind. I think it’s a myriad of things that happen; it’s the art we see, it’s the shows that you watch, the people that you interact with – all of those things can collectively, hopefully change someone’s mind.”

He notes a pervasive idea thrown around since 2016 – that Trump wouldn’t have become President if Jon Stewart had been on the air. “Really? Bush won back to back…Stewart and Colbert Voltron-ed their powers together. They had a whole hour on Comedy Central; still didn’t work.”

“If you’re able to tell a story, things become less about political ideology and you’re just introducing characters and you’re trying to convey a narrative through that,” he explains. “And hopefully, hopefully you’re able to engender some empathy with people across the aisle.”

I see Minhaj again at the final night of Before the Storm, a touring show that was, in part, the pitch for Patriot Act (he calls it “the mixtape” preview to the album). It’s 7 p.m. – a.k.a. start time – and hundreds of faces like mine line the sidewalk and lobby of Carnegie Hall. We’ve turned out in droves to support our boy and we’re still running on Indian Standard Time, with stragglers trickling in well up to half-past the hour as Minhaj takes the stage.

This time I’m up in the dress circle, squinting through dry contacts to get a good look Minhaj, who’s energy permeates the cavernous space as much as it filled cozy Cherry Lane years ago – if anything, his performance is magnified to match the venue. He speaks to the orchestra, the balcony, the “muppet seats” along the side of the stage. He pauses to lament the end of tour, and at one point, chastises the room as if he is every audience member’s big brother: “Stop it, you guys, we’re at Carnegie Hall.” He knows what it took to be here, and though he hasn’t been around long enough to be jaded, he’s seen enough to keep the optimism and the fire alive.

“For better for worse, I really do believe in people’s humanity, and society’s potential, especially in America,” he says. “I do think we have an incredible amount of potential for good and for change…Maybe I’m naive, but I definitely want to do my part to try.”

Patriot Act is now streaming on Netflix, with new episodes every week.

Much of Burning Man‘s art projects — the good, the bad, and the ugly — have the same origin story. Invariably, one of the 70,000 attendees at the noncommercial desert festival start a conversation with the words “wouldn’t it be great if …” 

The Big Imagination project began that way too — and grew into a group that raised and spent just short of $1 million to bring a Boeing 747 Jumbo Jet (or rather, 3/4 of one) to Burning Man this year. But the final execution of its plan was unprecedented in the event’s 32-year history — both in its scale, and the level of controversy it generated. 

SEE ALSO: Burning Man Isn’t What You Think, and Never Has Been

Since this year’s weeklong event ended in September, Big Imagination has had to navigate some serious turbulence, largely expressed in Facebook and Reddit groups. Some of it was driven by a misleading local newspaper report, and a game of media telephone led to even more misleading videos claiming that the plane had been “abandoned” on the playa (Burning Man’s location, an ancient lake bed in the Black Rock desert). 

Bad enough that the 747 managed crowd control with what some attendees perceived as a dismissive, elitist attitude. Now it appeared to be in violation of the event’s sacrosanct principle of Leave No Trace. A tiny minority casually suggested shooting, burning or dismembering the plane. One graffiti artist tagged it with the word “MOOP”, which stands for Matter Out Of Place and is the worst insult in the Burner lexicon. 

For veteran Burners, here was an irresistible story that spoke to larger, worrying trends: entitled Silicon Valley types bring one of the largest, most Muggle-like objects they could find to a magical location, then toss it aside like trash. 

The story was only slightly hampered by being entirely untrue.

‘They put their toys away’

Some of the opposition to the plane is more than warranted. There are real conversations to be had about the direction of Burning Man in the wake of its founder’s death this year; about whether any object, even a Jumbo Jet, can be art; about the increasing number of wealthy Burners and exclusive camps. And Big Imagination deserves to be dinged for poor communication with attendees during and immediately after the event. 

Yet when you talk to the team behind the 747, a more sympathetic story emerges. It’s the story of an ambitious project that was funded by small donors and personal savings as much as by a few wealthy supporters; a camp of 200 people from all walks of life, exhausted by endless work shifts and beset by red tape; a genuine exit plan that ran into some last-minute hurdles; a plane that has been off the playa and sitting on private property for a whole month. 

And it’s the story of a project that has the full confidence of the Burning Man organization, even now. 

“It was out of our permit area on time,” says Marian Goodell, CEO of the nonprofit that runs Burning Man. “They were good citizens. Their timeline wasn’t what they expected, but that isn’t a crime. We’ve had that problem ourselves. They used the community, they used their campmates, and they put their toys away.” 

No one, not even Goodell, knows if the 747 will pass the permit hurdles needed to return to the event in 2019. But Big Imagination intends the Jumbo Jet to be an evolving fixture at Burning Man in future years, and is eager to clear its name. 

Here’s its story. 

‘An ongoing joke’

In 2009, tech entrepreneur Ken Feldman, then part of a Burning Man camp called Robot Heart, saw some playa bikes made out of airplane fuel tanks. That one encounter sparked the project that would later consume his life. 

“It was a ‘wouldn’t it be cool if’ moment,” Feldman says. “Wouldn’t it be cool if we made an actual ‘art car’” — the event’s user-made on-site transports, licensed by its Department of Mutant Vehicles — “out of an airplane?”

The next day, Feldman made a sketch of a Boeing 747 with the roof cut off and shade covering an open-air dancefloor. Imagine it: the only 747 operating entirely within the U.S., and it’s at Burning Man! The ridiculously large art car to end all ridiculously large art cars, six stories tall, filled with dance and art and dreams! 

Like a lot of Burning Man dreamers, however, Feldman refused the call to adventure. The plane plan soon “became an ongoing joke,” he says. 

Instead, two years later and for two years after, Feldman built and brought a popular art car based on a viral YouTube video: Charlie the Unicorn.

Then, on leaving Burning Man 2013, a friend happened to tell Feldman about an airplane boneyard in California’s Mojave desert. For enough scratch, anyone could buy a decommissioned plane and do what they wanted with it. 

Feldman started pricing it out, called an investor friend, plotted fundraisers, and recruited the first of a team that would eventually involve more than a thousand people. Big Imagination was born. 

And still, for two years more, the plane remained an ongoing joke — even within the camp, which was happy to share memes poking fun at their whole bizarre concept, and even create their own. 

Burning Man takes place under the watchful eyes of three separate and somewhat interlocking authorities — local sheriffs, Nevada state police, and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management — and throughout the process of bringing the plane to the playa, “they have been up in our stuff like nobody’s business,” Feldman says. 

At the 2016 and 2017 events, beset by permit problems and logistical nightmares, Feldman and team were only able to truck up a portion the fuselage. The first year, a mere fifth of the plane  showed up in the dust, like a 747 almost completely drowned in quicksand. 

https://player.vimeo.com/video/166773703

Given the full-plane plans lavishly illustrated on Big Imagination’s fully-funded $85,000 Indiegogo campaign, expectations were high — and the 747 suffered the wrath that comes to all products that overpromise and underdeliver. It was forever condemned as playa vaporware. 

An artsy security theater setup for touring the half-plane — including an “emotional baggage check” — had some attendees rolling their eyes. Various pranksters at this most improv-friendly event tried to spruce it up by inserting plastic snakes into the overhead compartments, or “hijacking” the plane until Burning Man founder Larry Harvey met a list of demands. 

Feldman was amused. His overworked crew weren’t always as receptive as they might have been.

There was a good deal of buy-in to help bring the whole thing, however. Feldman says he received hundreds of donations averaging around $1,000 apiece. There were a “handful of five figure donations,” he adds, but “most were under $10k.” (Reported backers include Joe Gebbia, co-founder of Airbnb, Singapore VC Jonathan Teo, Guy Laliberte, CEO of Cirque du Soleil, plus Tesla and SpaceX board members.) 

No matter. Their money wasn’t enough, and Feldman needed to make up the shortfall. “I had to cash in my retirement money,” he says. “It wasn’t much, but it’s gone.”

Rather than being the rich asshole Burners imagine, Feldman says, he lives in a rent-controlled apartment in Venice Beach and drives a 10-year old car. “I would legitimately qualify for a low-income [Burning Man] ticket,” says Feldman, who runs a service that tracks Bitcoin prices. “I’m a starving artist.”

There and back again, a plane’s tale 

For 2018, Feldman and Co. brought as large a plane as they were ever going to bring, its wings and tail permanently clipped. But it did not spring forth entirely from the Mojave’s airplane boneyard.

By June, the team had chopped all the remaining plane parts up into chunks, put the chunks into trucks, and reunited them with the parts that had been stored in the ghost town of Empire, 80 miles north of Reno and 20 miles south of the Playa, since 2016. 

Reassembling the plane at the last possible point removed the problem of escorting a six-story, two-lane behemoth up the two-lane blacktop that stretches up from the I-80, over hills and around hairpin turns. 

But that still left Gerlach. 

The tiny town nearest to Burning Man, Gerlach has long since made its peace with the annual pilgrimage of the 70,000. Every year it transforms itself into a bustling, costume store-filled Burner bazaar boomtown — the last commerce zone before the commerce-free zone. 

Still, that doesn’t mean Burners don’t wince when they see their outsize impact on this tiny, conservative community in northern Nevada.

To get the plane from Empire to Burning Man, Big Imagination had to do the whole road-shutting police escort thing through Gerlach — and also temporarily sever its power lines and phone lines. Which didn’t do much to endear the plane to Burners or to Gerlach. 

Not surprisingly, Feldman was not keen to repeat the experience. But it looked like he was going to have to. He had a fully authority-approved plan in place to do the whole thing in reverse, in order to store the complete plane on the Empire property. 

But that would mean if the plane was to come back to Burning Man in future years, he’d have to slice Gerlach in two every time. Twice. 

It wasn’t supposed to be like that. Feldman had negotiated with the owner of land north of Gerlach to assemble the plane there, and store it there after the event. But as Feldman was on his way up from Mojave, the owner got cold feet. The Empire maneuver was plan B. 

Feldman hustled hard for a plan C, and found one in July — another property to the north, this time one that you could get the plane to through the Black Rock desert itself, removing the need for highway transport after all. Perfect! 

Just one problem. The very private, anonymous family that had owned the property for 80 years had never used it. They’d never even fenced it. They weren’t entirely clear where it began or ended. The last survey of the land in this most desolate corner of the American west had been taken in 1873. Could Feldman organize a new survey? Sure thing, he thought. 

“Just like everything else on this project,” Feldman admits, “I had no idea how hard it was going to be.”

‘What the f*ck?’

Marian Goodell first heard of the 747 project in 2013 — either via email or at a party, she doesn’t remember. She does recall that her response was not unlike that of other Burners. “I laughed and said, ‘you’re fucking kidding me, right?’” says Burning Man’s famously salty CEO. 

But over time, she became impressed with Feldman and the sheer chutzpah of the project. Sure, it was “a bit default world-ish,” Goodell admits. That’s Burning Man lingo for everything outside the Brigadoon-like confines of the event, which is remote from civilization in more than one sense. (It does have an airport, for very light aircraft — the opposite of 747s, in other words). 

Don’t we see enough of commercial jets in our professional lives and default-world vacations? Who goes to Burning Man to be reminded of long-haul flights, things that generally please us most when they end?

On the other hand, some of the playa’s most loved art pieces included “default world” objects — such as 90-ft. oil derricks (‘Crude Awakening,’ 2011) and two 18-wheel tanker trucks welded upright together (‘Big Rig Jig’, 2007). A popular art car named the Christina is basically a redecorated 65-ft boat, transported to the desert from Lake Tahoe for eight years running. 

Maybe the default world-ness of a 747 was a feature, not a bug. It’s MOOP and it’s proud. Maybe that’s what made it art, or a very subtle prank — and in the age of Banksy, what’s the difference? “It’s a ridiculous, amazing, hilarious, over-the-top project,” Goodell says. “It’s so gigantically, obviously out of place. But you ride your bike alongside it and it’s like being under a vast white rabbit.” 

The interior of the plane was “definitely Burner-fied” in the manner of many art cars, Goodall says (technically it was an art piece under the auspices of another Burning Man department, the Artery, rather than its DMV). Most of the seats save those in the cockpit were ripped out and replaced with blue fur benches. 

There was a DJ booth, a piano for the San Francisco Symphony’s pianist to perform on, and space enough for the Preservation Hall jazz band to play on board. But as far as Goodall is concerned, the interior was “just the icing on the cake of having this huge creature out there and saying ‘what the fuck?’”

“It doesn’t make any sense,” says Feldman. “That’s the point.” 

Backlash begins

Nonsense or not, an estimated 5,000 Burners checked their emotional baggage, made it past the Total Self Acceptance checkpoint, and onboarded. The problem is, many more tried and failed to do so. 

Every day the Big Imagination camp — tucked away in a low-traffic outer-ring suburb of Black Rock City, the name Burning Man adopts for the week it exists — would tow the plane out onto the open playa. Every day, long lines would form and require management. Camp members were told they had to take multiple shifts or they wouldn’t be invited back. The plane’s maximum capacity, including the balconies on the wings: around 500. 

Long lines, hot desert sun, and little expectations-setting from the overtime-working crew: this was not a diplomacy-friendly cocktail of conditions. “People complained about waiting in line,” said Nikki Finnemore, the camp’s chief wrangler. “We were like, ‘we’ve been waiting in line for 4 years.’”

Most days, the plane was open for 18 hours. That wasn’t enough for some attendees. Even when the 747 was safely back in camp, non-camp members “would try to climb up over the wings, past the ‘Closed’ sign,” Finnemore says. “They didn’t respect that.” She complained that a few dozen campmates had to miss private dinner on the plane to act as its bodyguards. 

No surprise, then, if a certain kind of siege mentality kicked in. Or that both sides, the old-school Burners and the new-school Big Imaginationeers, began to feel the other was acting in an overly privileged manner.

Feldman, meanwhile, was dealing with a land survey process that was moving so slowly, it would be a month before the plane could move to its new home. And in the week before the event, the Bureau of Land Management asked to inspect the option C property, and required Feldman to apply for a new permit to move the plane there. That was on top of, you know, running a daily 747 service. 

He was running on fumes, and you can feel it in his first attempt to address the 747 controversy on Reddit after the event. The facts are there, but the tone is petulant, arrogant, defiant, defensive — in short, perpetuating the cycle of outrage. 

“If it’s a choice between communicating and getting it done, I choose getting it done,” Feldman says, still a little defensively. 

Still, Feldman left the playa with great memories. For example, the time an unknown camp showed up dressed as air hostesses carrying trays of champagne, and decided to enter a fashion show that was randomly in progress. 

He’s also grateful to two large old-school Burner camps, Distrikt and Mayan Warrior, who dropped everything to return to the playa a month after the man burned and give Big Imagination an assist in the Herculean task of moving the plane north. 

“That’s how it’s supposed to happen, for fuck’s sake,” says Goodell, praising those two camps and chiding other attendees for reveling in Big Imagination’s month of delay. “This is a community of people that looks at the sky and imagines things. Someone trips in their 747 and you get the popcorn? That’s bullshit.”

The imagination level of bringing a 747 to the playa may not ever match its sheer out-of-place physical hulk. But maybe this is what Burning Man has to do next to stay relevant — try our radical new artistic directions, even if they aren’t the aesthetic the event embraced in the past. 

“Let’s not go smaller, let’s go bigger,” says Feldman. “Let’s not get safer, let’s go crazier. Even if you don’t support us, support big projects. Because Burning Man is the only place on the planet where you can really go nuts and share the results with thousands of people.”

Wouldn’t it be great if … that continued to be the case.