Geeking Out

Mat “Langley” Luschek, Eric Rice and “Starman” Michael Gaines have your latest GIF news, reports on what the internet is complaining about this week ( Xbox, Flickr, and Tumblr) Dan Akroyd is still trying to push for Ghostbusters 3, and a new segment called “Things We Can’t Talk About” * Ghostbusters 3 News * Old Doctor Who

What do you get when you cross the director of Repo Man, the guy who played Dracula and Sirius Black, a notorious dead punk musician and an Italian plumber fond of mushrooms? If you put it all on a shirt, you get this Sid and Nancy/Mario mash-up: Artist Butcher Billy has other inspired musical combos available as well, like Robert Smith as Plastic Man, Bat-Elvis, Smiths video games and Aquaman as Billy Idol. How do you think this mash-up tale ends? Does Mario choke to death on mushroom fragments after swimming too quickly post-meal, or does he save Nancy when it turns out that his princess is actually in another bathroom? Only the fan fiction swirling inside your head knows for sure... h/t SlyDante

Oh, now I get it! This is why all these DVD rental stores are closing one after the other… Somehow, this reminded me of the IT Crowd’s Anti-Piracy ad that aired during Episode 3 of Seasons 2. [SamMacaroni]

The ABCs of Death is loaded with such twisted, sick humor that I think it's a perfect giveaway for all my readers. This is a movie that, at Fantastic Fest, we were all given free beers to shotgun in advance. It tales the innocent concept of learning the alphabet and turns it depraved. And if you want to win one of the four copies I'm giving out, you're going to do likewise. Take a children's book - any classic will do - and imagine it turned into a two-minute short in which at least one person dies at the end, like those included in the film. Describe it in comments below. Remember that this is a pitch for a SHORT - yes, FakeAssName, I'm looking at you. This contest will close end-of-day Tuesday, May 28th, at 11:59 p.m. Enter as often as you wish, with the knowledge that if every other post I see is from you and you're just tossing out every possible thought rather than focusing on one good one, it may not help you. Quality wins over quantity, and those that make like one of Professor Frink's attributes - make me laugh or make me think - tend to do better. As always, feel free to think outside the box. if you want to actually make a short, do it. Photoshop a fake poster? Sure. I award ideas, not technical proficiency, so don't worry if your skills aren't perfect.

In case you aren’t already aware, Gravity Falls is a fantastic animated show, currently airing on Disney Channel, that’s basically an animated version of Eerie, Indiana mixed with the shenanigans from Angry Beavers. It’s great, and Adam WarRock thought so too — that’s why he made a rap specifically about the show. That rap has now been updated, and it’s even more glorious than before. Relevant to your interests WarRock recently released a Hodor rap song We actually interviewed him back in 2010 Here’s a chart of word frequency in TMBG songs

When a mysterious fisherman arrives, the Power Rangers Samurai meet their newest ally – Antonio, the Gold Ranger! But before he can join the team, Antonio must prove he possesses the true spirit of the samurai. Jayden, Kevin, Emily, Mia and Mike are challenged by the Nighlok monsters more so than ever when Master Xandred sends Steeleto to attack the Power Rangers, Antberry and Octoroo attempt to open a portal and Splitface traps human spirits. Their new golden friend Antonio shows the Power Rangers he too can be a samurai with his lightning-fast Barracuda Blade, the ink-spraying OctoZord and the ClawZord's megamodes! The Power Rangers will never be the same after these four epic episodes! And we're giving away a copy! Read more »

Turns out it's robots. And our generation wallows in nostalgia every bit as much as our ex-hippie parents did/do... I honestly hope this is the best "Cornetto" movie yet, because I like what I'm seeing the best. But that could be because I love English pubs more than most things in this world.

An anonymous reader writes "The open-source Intel Linux graphics driver has hit a milestone of now being faster than Apple's own OpenGL stack on OS X. The Intel Linux driver on Ubuntu 13.04 is now clearly faster than Apple's internally-developed Intel OpenGL driver on OS X 10.8.3. when benchmarked from a 'Sandy Bridge' class Mac Mini. Only some months ago, Apple's GL driver was still trouncing the Intel Linux Mesa driver." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

astroengine writes "In a recent batch of images beamed back to Earth from Mars rover Curiosity's MAHLI camera, obvious signs of wear and tear could be seen in the 'skin' of the robot's wheels. Considering Curiosity is only 281 sols (Mars days) into its mission and roved less than a kilometer after landing, surely this doesn't bode well? Fortunately, there's good news. 'The wear in the wheels is expected,' Matt Heverly, lead rover driver for the MSL mission at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., told Discovery News. 'We will continue to characterize the wheels both on Mars and in the Marsyard, but we don't expect the wear to impact our ability to get to Mt. Sharp.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

“Merger” is usually such a dull word. Companies merge. Lanes of traffic merge. But it’s not all bland and boring, because large galaxies can also merge with one another to form what is scientifically referred to as a “super-giant elliptical galaxy,” according to NASA – and apparently it’s happening right now. Or it did 11 billion years ago, at least. Light-years are weird, guys. This event was first spotted by the Herschel Space Observatory, the European Space Agency funded infrared-telescope that ran out of liquid coolant in April. Astronomers at NASA’s Hershel Project Office found images of the merging galaxies in the data that the observatory collected, and follow up studies by the Hubble Space Telescope and Spitzer Space Telescope confirmed the findings. The galaxies in question, now called HXMM01, are located approximately 11 billion light-years from Earth, meaning that they actually merged when our planet was only 3 billion years old and the light from that event is only just reaching us now. Trippy. Mergers between cosmic entities actually aren’t all that uncommon in space, but this one is special because of just how mind-numbingly big it is. To put its size in perspective: Our Milky Way births about two to three new stars every year. These galaxies are cranking out 2,000 a year. Between the two, there are about 400 billion stars in total. This merger is also of particular interest because it was previously thought that larger galaxies grew in size by acquiring smaller ones, but these galaxies were both fairly equal in size before they started to collide. On a side note, we’ve decided that “super-giant elliptical galaxy” should be the name of the next album that the English rock band Muse puts out. It seems right up their alley. (via NASA, image ESA/NASA/JPL-Caltech/UC Irvine/STScI/Keck/NRAO/SAO) Relevant to your interests:  Watch a black hole eat a planet… well, whole Space telescopes team up to find the largest spiral galaxy ever Hubble has spotted the new most distant object in space