The motion picture industry has ironically had a very negative impact on the movie theaters that show their films, and as a result ticket prices keep going up and fewer people are going out to the movies.

In an effort to "fix" this problem some Hollywood filmmakers are backing the Screening Room, a home viewing service which would allow people to watch a movie at home the same day it comes out in theaters.

Viewers would have to buy a set-top box for their home (which costs around $150) that would make new movies available to rent for 48 hours through the anti-piracy equipped box for $50 per flick.

Many big name directors are backing this "bold new vision" of a home based Hollywood movie experience dreamed up by Napster founder Sean Parker, with Peter Jackson being the most vocal in support of the service so far.

But Screening Room is truly dividing audiences and talent alike, and just as many directors, actors and movie fans have come out against the service, saying it will cause even more theaters to close even though theaters will get a cut of the profits.

Read more about how the Screening Room will work here

-Via Gizmodo

Tarot decks are the stuff of mysticism, but they don't need to be dark and foreboding. As artist Ariel Hart demonstrates to us, even the vivid, brilliant artwork from beloved 80's and 90's artist Lisa Frank can make for a delightful tarot card deck.

It's sure a lot easier to hear about death when it's illustrated with a beautiful white unicorn. Finally you can predict your future with the rainbows, puppies and smiley faces of your past! 

Via Huffington Post

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When an actor really nails a role, making us believe the character they're playing truly exists, audiences don't really think about how the actor prepared for the role, they just enjoy the show.

But even great actors need a little help now and again to get really in touch with the role, and for some method acting means they're actually drunk as a skunk while playing the role.

It makes sense to drink up before playing a character like Tyler Durden in Fight Club or Willie Stokes in Bad Santa, but it's surprising to find out Daniel Radcliffe struggled with alcoholism while playing Harry Potter.

I bet the booze made everything seem that much more "magical" during filming!

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But Daniel is in good company, because some of the most iconic performances of all time were delivered by drunk actors.

Martin Sheen got nice and saucy before "acting" out during the opening scene of Apocalypse Now, and his drunken fit was so compelling to watch Coppola kept the cameras rolling even after Sheen sliced open his hand when he punched the mirror.

Read 13 Times Actors Were Drunk On The Job And Delivered Iconic Performances here

When you work retail you encounter a large cross section of the general public, from the people who give you hope for humanity to the absolute dregs, and you really get to see how diverse people can be.

But bad customers tend to be pretty similar, easily broken down into, say, twelve different archetypes. Hey, whaddya know!

Jacob Andrews of For Lack Of A Better Comic fame has created an illustrated guide to the 12 Terrible Customers At Every Retail Job for CollegeHumor, how convenient!

Now those lucky folks who've never had a retail job can see why the retail workers they know are always complaining about customers. Because we're all "The one normal person you'll see all day" type, right? *wink*

See 12 Terrible Customers At Every Retail Job here

So much of what you know about the Star Wars universe was actually learned after the fact. A lot of details you take for granted were never mentioned in the original movie or the original trilogy. Those details were filled in as Star Wars fandom grew to a population who craved documented information on everything.   

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Personally, I’m glad to find this out, because even though I’ve been a Star Wars fan since 1977, I felt really out of it for not knowing those things were called Ewoks until later. And that’s not the only example. Now I feel vindicated of my ignorance. -via Laughing Squid 

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The Force Awakens introduced us to the Sith wannabe Kylo Ren, who could have been a Jedi but decided to turn to the dark side. Why? Childhood trauma? Psychopathology? Greed? No. It’s because the dark side is just way cooler. Here he explains that reasoning to Luke Skywalker, courtesy of Dorkly. -via Tastefully Offensive 

Felicia Day is a geek goddess, a force for good who has helped nerd kind crawl out from behind their computers, comic books and consoles to be embraced by mainstream society.

Therefore she deserves a wardrobe befitting a woman of her lofty stature, something that is both regal and totally geeky, and that something is this amazing suit of 3D printed Dreamer Regalia armor.

The armor was created by New York based artist Melissa Ng of Lumecluster, who used 3D software to design the dress and had the whole thing printed up by Shapeways, which Felicia graciously modeled for photos by Eric Anderson.

Melissa's 3D printed armor is being called "the future of cosplay" with good reason- if cosplay artists are able to use 3D software to model elements of their costume, if not the entire costume, then print the whole thing out the future is now!

Read more about Melissa's amazing 3D printed armor at Geek & Sundry

Now that Disney owns the Indiana Jones franchise, we can take it as gospel that the next movie in the series will be ready by December 2019. But cinematic history is littered with unrealized Indiana Jones projects since Raiders of the Lost Ark came out in 1981. This was because each story idea had to be approved by three people: George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Harrison Ford. And you know how hard it is to get three people to agree on anything. For example, take Indiana Jones and the Haunted Mansion.    

We'll start with the one we know the least about. One of George Lucas' suggestions for a third Indiana Jones movie was to send Indy into a haunted house ride. Full details of this never really came to light, but a screenplay was written for it. That was done by Diane Thomas, who had penned Romancing The Stone.

Spielberg resisted this approach in the end, however, feeling that it went too close to one of his earlier films, Poltergeist. It wasn't that Indiana Jones movies hadn't done ghosts and the supernatural to some extent before. But for Spielberg, it just felt like retreading old ground. The haunted mansion idea was nixed.

The majority of the unrealized projects were rejected by Lucas, though, and his input was eliminated when Disney purchased Lucasfilm in 2012. Read about several other Indiana Jones adventures that didn’t make it to the screen at Den of Geek.

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Around the same time as the folks at NASA were faking the moon landing with a little help from Stanley Kubrick (sarcasm) the mighty Led Zeppelin was becoming one of the world's most popular rock bands.

A few years later (1973 to be exact) Led Zeppelin started making a movie called The Song Remains The Same that supposedly contained live concert footage from the band's three night gig at Madison Square Gardens.

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Only that was a great big lie, because while the band did play three consecutive sold out shows at the Garden in July of 1973, and director Joe Massat was there filming the show, his footage turned out to be mostly unusable and he was fired.

New director Peter Clifton came on board and discovered Massat's footage couldn't be properly synced to sound or edited so he decided to reshoot the live footage, in the same running order, at Shepperton studio in Surrey, England.

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It's pretty easy to tell which parts were reshot when you watch the film armed with this knowledge, but Jimmy Page didn't actually reveal this secret reshoot until he was interviewed by Uncut magazine in 2008:

“I’m sort of miming at Shepperton to what I’d played at Madison Square Garden, but of course, although I’ve got a rough approximation of what I was playing from night to night, it’s not exact. So the film that came out in the ‘70s is a bit warts-and-all.”

Read Led Zeppelin Did Fake Playing Madison Square Garden, 1973 here

There's an episode of the X-Files that is so disturbing Fox promised they'd never show it again, and yet this dark and dangerous episode actually has an interesting origin- Charlie Chaplin's My Autobiography.

The standalone episode is called "Home" and finds Mulder and Scully investigating the murder of an infant, which leads them to the home of three deformed brothers who are keeping a dark secret.

It's later revealed that their quadruple amputee mother, who supposedly died years ago, is alive and had given birth to the murdered infant, making an already dark episode even more cringe inducing.

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Co-writer of the episode Glen Morgan says the episode was inspired by a peculiar section of Charlie Chaplin's My Autobiography, in which Chaplin describes an incident that took place while staying at a miner's house in a British town called Ebbw Vale.

The miner invited him into the kitchen to see something spectacular, and to Chaplin's surprise a man with no legs crawled out of the cupboard where he'd been sleeping.

The miner then convinced the legless man to dance and do some tricks:

A half man with no legs, an oversized, blond, flat-shaped head, a sickening white face, a sunken nose, a large mouth and powerful muscular shoulders and arms, crawled from underneath the dresser … "Hey, Gilbert, jump!" said the father and the wretched man lowered himself slowly, then shot up by his arms almost to the height of my head. 

"How do you think he’d fit in with a circus? The human frog!"

I was so horrified I could hardly answer. However, I suggested the names of several circuses that he might write to.

Read How Charlie Chaplin Influenced The Most Disturbing Episode Of 'The X-Files' here

We go through our lives wearing the personally chosen wardrobes we feel suit us best, but just because the individual garments in our wardrobes look good together doesn't mean they get along.

And while we're out wearing a few pieces the rest of our garments are back home having fantastic fabric adventures.

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"Shiny" was created by Daniel Cloud Campos and Spence Susser of Blue-Tongue Films, two guys who should really think about replacing all the hoodies in their wardrobes with pin striped suits!

-Via Fashionably Geek

By the time superhero flicks became the box office smash hits they are today audiences had come to expect more from the costuming department than a simple spandex getup, and thus the updated supersuit was born.

Fawnia Soo Hoo of Fashionista spoke with veteran designer Alexandra Byrne, who created the super new looks you see in Guardians of the Galaxy and The Avengers, and Oscar nominated costume designer Michael Wilkinson, who created the updated styles seen in Man Of Steel and Batman V Superman, about what goes in to designing today's supersuit.

They were all too happy to discuss the process at length- from conceptual and research stages to materials they've used in the suit's construction and why to how many people it takes to get Ben Affleck in the new Batsuit (apparently it's a six handed operation).

Read How Superhero Costumes Are Made here

(Images: CBS)

Most of the female Starfleet crewmen on the original Star Trek wore very short minidresses. This was not Gene Roddenberry's original plan. But the network axed the professional, non-titillating uniforms that the female crewmen on the first pilot episode wore, along with the female first officer.

As a generation grew up watching Star Trek and its depicted gender roles, some critics called for greater equity when the franchise was developing The Next Generation in the mid-80s. One of the results was that, for a few episodes, a couple male background characters wore minidresses. Nigel Mitchell, About.com's Star Trek expert*, traces the lengthy history of the Star Trek miniskirt:

When people began to complain, the Trek community's response was, "Nuh-uh! The mini-skirts weren't sexist! Because, uh, men wore them, too! It was unisex!" This seems to have been most clearly stated in 1995's The Art of Star Trek. In it, the book says "the skirt design for men 'skant' [a combination of "skirt and pant"] was a logical development, given the total equality of the sexes presumed to exist in the 24th century."

Of course, this is easier said than done. The next question would always be, "So where were all the men in mini-skirts on the original series?" The answer would be that there were some, but you just didn't see them, which left uncomfortable stares and raised eyebrows. That gap is what Star Trek: The Next Generation tried to fill.

When the pilot episode "Encounter at Farpoint" aired in 1987, the "skant" is worn by both Deanna Troi and Tasha Yar (briefly). But we also get our first glimpse of the male skant in the background in this episode. Overall, the men wearing skants appeared in five episodes of the first season ("Encounter at Farpoint", "Haven", "Conspiracy", "Where No One Has Gone Before" and "11001001"). They also appeared in second season episodes "The Child", "The Outrageous Okona", "The Schizoid Man", and "Samaritan Snare." Their final appearance came during flashbacks in the series finale "All Good Things..."

*And Nigel really does know his stuff. I saw that clearly a while back when he and I were brainstorming ideas for a Worf sitcom.

Gamers who enjoy the feel of dice, miniatures, boards and cards often become avid board gamers, and these days board games run the gamut from insanely difficult and time consuming to easy to learn and quick yet fun to play.

Many board game enthusiasts are akin to the eager little Puppy when they first get the gaming itch- they dig the whole scene and are eager to play again.

But when addiction has fully set in, and playing is no longer just about having fun, that's when  a gamer's dark side comes out and playing a board game becomes a very serious affair.

Dorkly's Tony Wilson and Jake Young created this illustrated guide to board gamers a few years back, which helped me identify a few gamers in my group who might be hiding their sinister side from the rest of us...

See The 6 Types Of Board Gamers here (NSFW due to language)

Marvel Comics has been with us a long time, giving us superheroes of all sorts that we know and love. We also have the movies, some of which are produced by Marvel Studios. Then there are other movies with Marvel superheroes, licensed from Marvel but produced by someone other than Marvel Studios. If you know which movies are which, you can see the difference. The X-Men series is part Marvel, part non-Marvel. So is Spider-Man. And some of those outsourced movies aren’t half bad.

The rest of Marvel’s out-sourced movies have been nothing short of disasterous. Between three (technically four) Fantastic Fours, three Punishers, three Blades, two Ghost Riders, two Daredevils, one Hulk and a smattering of odds and ends (including, infamously, Howard the Duck), there has not been a single good movie.

The Blade movies all overly rely on poor CG and the tiresome acting prowess of Wesley Snipes (even if Guillermo del Toro made the second film more than just passingly forgetable). Each Fantastic Four is more artistically inept than its predecessor (and that’s saying something, given that the first was made by Roger Corman). The Ghostriders are comically inept, the Daredevils painfully angsty and the Hulk features protracted fight scenes with a Gamma-irradiated poodle.

Read more about which is which, and why those characters should all come home to Marvel, at TVOM.