If you've been thinking about going on a cruise but have been waiting until you found one that was best suited to your geeky interests, then I have good news for you -you now have two different nerdtastic options. Option #1 is this year's Comic Con At Sea, which will be taking place in June. This floating convention will offer guests from Star Trek, Supernatural, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Battlestar Galactica, Stargate, Justified and more as it arrives to an array of famous European destinations including Rome, Barcelona and Naples.
For those who prefer their travel to have a little more levity, Musician Jonathan Coulton has just announced plans for his sixth annual JoCo Cruise. This Caribbean cruise will depart next February and while most guests have yet to be announced, travelers are promised a bevy of comedic, musical and geeky entertainment -including a 24-hour tabletop gaming room. Via Laughing Squid
So my nerdy travellers, which one would you prefer to board?
For most people prank calling means ordering a pizza for an unsuspecting neighbor or calling a bar and asking for Amanda Hugginkiss, but for one little Minecraft obsessed prankster crank calls simply aren't enough.
This kid likes doing two things above all- playing Minecraft and swatting his foes, meaning he got SWAT teams to kick in the doors of those he felt had wronged him in real life and in the Minecraft universe.
The targets were a classmate and teacher from his school in Ventura County, California, and a player he considers his arch-enemy in Minecraft, who lives in Ocean City, New Jersey.
Two questions come to mind after reading this story- how does a Minecraft rivalry become so overblown? and can you really get the SWAT team to show up at somebody's house with a threatening phone call?
Earlier this week I wrote a list of 10 cool ways to decorate your eggs this Easter, but if none of those seemed up your alley, perhaps you're looking for something a little more... heavenly. Well then these eggs from Dream A Little Bigger are sure to help. These beautifully spacy eggs are filled with stars, nebulas and more.
The process is surprisingly simple -though quite messy, and the results are absolutely striking.
Webster was a family sitcom in the 1980s. It was sentimental fluff, starring tiny precocious actor Emmanuel Lewis, with a seemingly nonstop laugh track. So it was a surprise to hear that an episode of Webster featured an appearance by Lt. Worf of Star Trek: The Next Generation. In the episode titled “Webtrek,” Webster is magically transported to the 24th century, to the bridge of the Enterprise where Worf is on duty.
Worf is standing at his usual station, and he calls Webster an “intruder” and asks in a surprisingly laidback tone how he got aboard the ship. Webster blames it on his joystick, and another Starfleet extra takes it away for repair.
Worf recognizes Webster as an “Earthling”, but finds his “style of dress” peculiar. Webster insists that this is what all the cool kids will be wearing in 1990, and Worf tells him, “That was more than 300 years ago. You’re in the 24th Century!”
Over at a side console, another Starfleet officer -- regular stand-in and extra Lorine Mendell -- pulls up an animated scan of Webster rotating around like he’s the Genesis Device, and soon declares him to be “unarmed.” Webster thinks the bridge of the Enterprise is “cool”, and Worf replies, “The temperature on the Enterprise never varies!” Cue laugh track.
Tom Hanks would love to star in every movie ever made (including the ones with an all female cast) but he’s just too busy being Tom Hanks to play every single role being written.
Instead, we’ll just have to enjoy an accelerated performance by Tom, and new host of The Late Late Show James Corden, as they reenact every Tom Hanks movie ever made in less than seven minutes.
Once Tom’s done being the big cheese in Hollywood he should consider rebooting Bosom Buddies with James Corden at his side! Too bad Tom’s paycheck alone would bankrupt the network…
Disney's 2006 animated movie Cars was a huge hit, so it's no surprise that the company has turned it into a franchise that includes 2 sequels and 2 spin-off movies featuring not Cars, but Planes.
What other vehicles should Disney's Pixar unit tackle next? Pedal boats? Zambonis? Street sweeper trucks? Those might work. But since Disney now owns Star Wars, it might as well produce a movie showing living X-wing fighters.
Big Bee Studio produced this parody of Cars showing Rebel Alliance X-wing fighters cracking jokes, singing songs, and, most importantly, destroying the Death Star. Opposing them is a TIE fighter with the voice of Darth Vader.
Professional wrestlers are paid to play larger-than-life roles that read well no matter how far away from the ring the fans are sitting, and their characters wouldn’t be complete without a signature style of dress.
WWE NXT's Finn Balor is no stranger to playing big roles, and he enjoys sporting "war paint" into the ring to make a big impression on both his opponent and the audience.
He has donned a variety of superheroic looks, from Carnage to the Joker, but when he saw the amazing bodypaintings being created by Emily Anderson he just had to go under the brush.
In the early 1980s, the fairly new Channel 4 in Britain wanted to show music videos like MTV, but they didn’t want to copy the music video channel. Maybe they could come up with something different from the veejays who hosted MTV. Maybe graphics? Maybe a boring guy in a suit? Maybe an artificial intelligence rendered in computer graphics? Ha! It was a ridiculous idea, because in 1985 computer graphics couldn’t render a character. But what a great idea! The fact that it was impossible didn’t stop Max Headroom’s creators. They went ahead with a show called 20 Minutes Into the Future, which became a phenomenon. Max Headroom, the character, was a computer-generated avatar of a television personality who was in coma, glitches and all, but to get that character to TV, the computer graphics were faked by makeup and lighting.
Matt Frewer ACTOR For a time it was... I won't say it was infuriating, but it was frustrating — you wanted to go, "That's me, that's me, it’s not a computer-generated man." But of course they wanted to swear me to secrecy because otherwise anybody could make a computer-generated man if they knew that it was as easy as putting on all this make-up.
John Humphreys PROSTHETICS DESIGNER I have to say, it was being presented as computer graphics, and I had people even say to me, who worked in some big companies in Britain, "Oh, you'll soon be out of a job, look at this, it's all done with computer graphics!"
Peter Litten VISUAL EFFECTS ARTIST It was very galling. It won a BAFTA for graphics, and of course other than a few lines, there weren't any graphics. A few wobbly lines. And they refused to enter us in the make-up [category] because they didn't want anyone to know it was make-up.
I'm trying to remember how long the make-up took. Probably four hours of make-up? When you get into the swing of it, we probably got it down to three hours or so in the end.
By 1987, the show had crossed the pond and was now called Max Headroom. Although American actor Matt Frewer still played the title character as he did for Channel 4, the show was so Americanized that viewers had no clue as to its British roots -although they already knew the character from his ads for Coke and other products. The show was revolutionary, not only in its style, but in that it was quite critical of the television industry. Max Headroom burned bright and quickly, and left a mark on the history of TV. Read a fascinating oral history of the concept and character by its creators and producers, at The Verge. -via Digg
Kids who grew up in the 80s were exposed to a lot of cool flicks, many of which had plots that revolved around kids like us overcoming any obstacle to become the awesome hero they were meant to be.
These movies were inspiring, empowering, and made you feel like kids could conquer the world, but no movie delivered the awesomeness along with the kid power message quite like The Goonies.
It had everything a kid could want- an (almost) all kid cast, adventure and exploration in search of treasure, pirate themed bad guys, and a crazy monster dude that ended up being everybody's friend.
Speaking of Sloth, did you know the guy behind the makeup was a first overall pick in the 1973 NFL draft, and went on to win two Superbowls with the Oakland Raiders? His name is John Matuszak, and he gave a nod to his former team in The Goonies by wearing a Raiders t-shirt in the beginning of the film.
Quite a few of the pranks revolve around making prouducts for pets, which is pretty typical of the internet. But I still kind of wish Groupon's transportation service that uses feline drivers was a real thing.
That being said, there were far too many "pranks" that seem more like things that will exist in a short period of time -like the KINDLR dating service that will match you based on the books you like or the muscle business shirt above. Perhaps most depressingly is Twitter's selfie stick that promises to auto-post your selfies to Twitter -I think every teen I've seen over the last year would love that.
Fans of The Simpsons are a dedicated bunch, which isn't surprising since many of us grew up watching wacky stuff happen on the mean streets of Springfield. As fans grow up they look for more adult ways to express their love of that colorful cartoon show, and the most popular adult way to show love for The Simpsons is with a totally boss tattoo!
Some feel that sporting a sexy Milhouse tattoo on their calf will totally change their life
And a tattoo of stunt triking Homer will inspire all who see your ink
And if you're a cartoon loving badass you might as well get a killer Sideshow Bob tattoo
All of these amazing Simpsonian tattoos and many, many more can be found at an Instagram account called The Simpsons Tattoo, where the tattoo ink flows like cartoon blood and the collection seems to grow by the day.
Once she was a big star--a hero who saved the world many times and fought alongside other famous heroes, including Superman and Batman. But Wonder Woman grew old and gradually lost her powers. Now she's Retired Wonder Woman, a performer at fan conventions.
Wonder Woman is not in good health. Part of that comes from some bad habits, particularly her chain smoking. She now has to walk with a cane. But she gets along pretty well for her age and is available for hired appearances.
The nerdy crew at ThinkGeek have an annual April Fool's Day tradition that's both fun and a bit frustrating- they release images of fake products, complete with links to fake product pages in their shop, then laugh like maniacs as fans go crazy for that shiny new product they'll never get to own.
People got wise to their ways and stopped believing in their April Fool's Day product releases, and then they went and changed the game again- by actually producing some of their most popular fake products.
This year ThinkGeek went big and feline friendly with their April Fool's Day product release for 2015- The Voltron Cat Condo:
With a $190 price tag the Voltron Cat Condo isn't going to be one of their best sellers, and frankly looks like a pretty easy DIY project, but the cats look pretty pleased with their epic robo condo!
I don't know about you guys, but ever since watching Despicable Me, I've dreamed of having a Minion of my own. I don't mean a traditional minion that helps me acheive my evil goals -(though that would be nice too), but a cute yellow Minion that loves bananas and talks in non-sensical gibberish. While that may be an impossibility for now, at least I can settle for the next best thing thanks to Etsy seller SleepingPalace, who makes full-sized minion beds for geeks like me to snuggle in.
For those that instead have a soft spot for a certain friendly neighbor, SleepingPalace also offers Totoro beds for you to cuddle up with. As for me, I think I'll take one of each.
Nintendo has created their own signature brand of strange during their thirty plus years in the video game business, and yet even they have cancelled games because they were just too strange to sell.
Games like Donkey Kong's Fun With Music and Super Mario Spikers had all the right faces, and yet they didn't properly fit into the mainstream Nintendo universe, deemed too weird to sell.
And then there's Mike Tyson's Intergalactic Power Punch, a game that sounds like a great follow up on paper but actually stunk worse than Venusian slime when playtested. It's a shame Intergalactic Power Punch never got off the ground, because we finally could have played as Tyson!
