Amazing Classic Masters of the Universe Art!

I am absolutely in love with this gallery of classic Masters of the Universe paintings by clearly the most epic trifecta of artists ever: Earl Norem, William George, and Esteben Maroto. As a child MOTU was my next big toy obsession after Star Wars so it's amazing to see the original, untouched artworks that were used in both packaging and promotions. Let me share with you six of my favourites and tell you why I want to have their babies in my non-existent womb!

OHHH YEEEEAAAAAAAAAHH!!

Genius Space Bastards at NASA Shoot Lego into Space!

When I was a child my mother would constantly threaten to vacuum up all the Lego in our Lego strewn house. It was an idle threat, of course, because Lego is expensive, but the devil-may-care space-geniuses at NASA are taking it a whole step further by shooting some Lego into space.

You can read the whole exclusive (not so exclusive now!) report at Wired, but if you prefer my paraphrased and possibly factually inaccurate summary, then NASA are essentially affixing three specially manufactured aluminium minifigs to a rocket that will study -and then crash-land on - Jupiter. FOR SCIENCE! You epic magnificent space-bastard egg-head maniacs are capable of ANYTHING.

But cooler still, the three minifigs in question are exclusives themselves and represent the god Jupiter, his sexy sister Juno, and voyeur Galileo who is going to observe the whole thing. I would have added a Lego Yoda and Harry Potter just to be sure.

As awesome as all this is, I will say that this is a dangerous game that NASA is playing because this is exactly how rumours start. Some advanced alien civilization is going to find these buggers and naturally assume that humans were all noseless, earless, flat-faced Danes with pegs on our heads. Embarrassing NASA!

Harry Potter gets his groove on

So guess what? Pint sized boy wonder Daniel Radcliffe can sing. And dance. And look dapper in a tweed suit. God I love that kid. Here he is, showcasing all these abilities at the 2011 Tony Awards:

Download Free Album of Nirvana Covers to Celebrate 20th Anniversary!

20th Anniversary!? Holy shit, I am old! I was in the heady throes of high school 20 years ago when Nevermind first hit. And I had a horizontally striped shirts and dirty long hair. And I played in a terrible band, and yes, we even did a terrible cover of Smells Like Teen Spirit. (And no, I can't upload it. It was on cassette!) The memories are flooding back and I am slowly going foetal.

But you can have happier memories by downloading a free 13 track tribute album from Spin right NOW! It features covers by artists such as: Amanda Palmer, Meat Puppets, Midnight Juggernauts and The Vaselines, and you'd be nuts to miss if if you've ever dabbled in some Kurt. I'm just listening to it for the first time now!

Boards and Beers - Ascending Empires

Up until recently I had never heard of a dexterity game. The concept of playing a board game that involves a bit of the ole flick of the wrist never occurred to me. Then, in one fell swoop I played a massive amount of them (well, three, but still). I've become a Crokinole master (though no one would agree with that statement), a racing mastermind in PitchCar, and most recently the commander of an ever expanding empire.

Ascending Empires from ZMan Games is part conquest, part exploration, part resource management, and is driven through flicking wooden spaceships around the board (on purpose). Within the game, humanity has moved on from Earth and has colonized the the galaxy with mini-empires, but now need to expand. This is where you come in.

Read more at Boards and Beers

Skyrim Collectors Edition Contains Expensive Plastic Dragon. Plus Batman!

This is a day old, but hey - we're new to this. The full details of the Skyrim (Elder Scrolls V) collector's edition have been officially announced, not the least of which is a large plastic dragon (excuse me - high quality PVC) that looks spiky and heavy enough to club a burglar to death with.

The extremely-limited-and-won't-be-marked-down-during-the-post-christmas-sales-like-that-extremely-limited-version-of-Black-Ops-I-bought-with-the-remote-control-perv-mobile Collector's Edition contains:

- A 12 inch plastic dragon. This is particularly apt as the developers have been boasting that Skyrim will contain "unlimited dragons" as a direct response to games by other developers that had "limited dragons", "severely limited, bordering on scarce dragons", or "absolutely no dragons at all"

Dice Soccer - A Sports App For Indoor Kids

I've been playing this app all morning.

It's called Dice Soccer and it's free for iPhone and iPad. You create a soccer team (football for some folks.. probably most folks), and each player is represented by a unique 6 sided die. Instead of moving your players around like most iPhone sports games, you will just roll the dice and let the numbers take over. It's as far from physical activity as humanly possible. You'll roll the dice by shaking the phone, or for the ultimate in laziness, you can just tap the screen. (my preferred method of playing).

Get Your Hands on David Tennant's Package

Of DVDs! DVDs, you sickos!

As everyone with ovaries knows, David Tennant's bespectacled, Converse-wearing, pinstriped Tenth Doctor is by far the One True Doctor (of the modern series, don't want to start any arguments here). Clearly the BBC agrees, recently announcing their plans to release a box set of 'The Tennant Years'. I hear even people without ovaries will be able to buy one.

The release date has been set for October 11, but I'm yet to find any word confirming if that is just in the US or worldwide. The set will include seasons 2, 3, and 4 or Doctor Who, plus all the 2009 specials AND the animated stories 'Dreamland' & 'The Infinite Quest'. With a retail price of $199, and assuming it will have a reasonable heft to it, the 26-disc collection will leave international fans having to decide between waiting for it to come out in their region, or shouldering the postage costs.

Will I buy it? Absolutely. Despite the fact I own all the DVDs already, and despite the fact it will likely spend most of its days as a display piece on the shelf, I just won't be able to resist. Allons-y!

KOTOR: Jedi Consular Video is Bald and Beardy!

Elusive MMORPG Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic still doesn't have a release date, but that hasn't stopped the shifty folk at Bioware from releasing more video content. This time it's footage of the somber, rigid, humourless, sexually ambivalent Jedi Consular:

I'm super excited about this game (when it finally arrives) (and is actually available in my "region") (I'll punch you in the "region") but I don't think I'm going to be playing a Jedi Consular. I think I want to play a badass bounty hunter with flamethrower breath and jet-packs on every part of my body. And when I sneeze my helmet lights up red and shoots shurikens.

The big question that I have about this video though, is why would you choose to play a bald man with a beard? Isn't that something that real life thrusts upon you? Why would you want to incorporate that into your escapism? I've probably got that to look forward to in ten years anyway. No, no, no. When I play my Star Wars I want a giant seventies bouffant and amazing sideburns. When my bounty hunter helmet comes off there'll be so much hair spilling out of it you'll think I'm a wookiee. ARRRRROOOOOWRR.

What class are you going to play?

Dead Reckoning Makes me a Touch More Southern and a Whole Lot More Stupid

So we come to book eleven of the almighty Southern Vampire series – i.e. the True Blood books. And it occurs to me that this series probably won’t end. I mean sure, Harris might stop writing them (she’d be mad, but you know) but there isn’t really an overarching story anymore. Each book has become an episodic little adventure instead of a series of events driving towards one final battle/conflict.

24 Hour Comics People

Fantasy Flight Games gets the Star Wars License

Tuesday it was announced that Fantasy Flight Games (FFG) now has the license for board games, card games, miniature-based games, and RPGs for Star Wars. This is pretty big news as, well, Star Wars is awesome. If you didn't see the announcement, you can find it by clicking here

Why this is good

FFG has been around for quite a while, like 1995 a while, and have been putting out games since '97. They've also have been publishing top quality games that people like consistently, which is very tough to do, and they have managed to do it with both original concepts as well as pre-established licensed products such as Battlestar Galactica, Call of Cthulhu, and both Warhammer Fantasy and Warhammer 40k. As a result, they are currently (as of this week even) the 3rd largest publisher of games in the world. These people produce games they want how they want them, as well as how many others want them too.

Thor 2 Meets Game of Thrones?

I really dug well-spoken fancy-pants Kenneth's Brannagh's comic/dramatic take on Thor but sadly he revealed a month or so ago that he wouldn't return for the sequel - already scheduled for July 2013. But dry away those tears, lil' guy because apparently Brian Kirk is in talks with the evil masterminds at Disney to take over the (winged) helm! Who is Brian Kirk? He goddamn directed 30% of swords, snow and titty epic Game of Thrones! 

"You hang up!"  "No! You hang up!"

A Few Acres of Snow - An Illustrated Review

Project Runway Recaps: S09 E02

Project Runway happened again this week! But this time, I watched it for you. I saved you an hour!

Everything Explained Through Flowcharts

Doogie Horner is a Philadelphia comedian and author. He performed at a comedy show that I co-produced a few years ago and totally killed. It was one of the best performances we had there, but he still insisted that it was one of his worst.

The Coolest Video About Cutting Hair in a Long Time

Just cool
Trim from Petey Boy on Vimeo.

Sneak Peek at Lego Minifigs Series 6!

I don't even think series 5 of Lego's blind-packaged minifigs has hit stores yet, but Brickpedia already has pictures of half of series six up. Those cunning Danish bastards at Lego have their enslaved Oompaloompa workers pumping out the best, most detailed, and creative Lego sets we've ever seen, and it looks like the series six figures are continuing to lift the bar so high you won't even know it's there.

Highlights from Series 6 include:

This bitchin' Minotaur. (No America. It's pronounced minoTOR not "tar", you freakish minotards. And there's no such word as "Legos". Double punch!).

But that's not all! There's more after the jump!

Let's Talk About the Superman Reveal While We're At It.

Old news already (yesterday) but why not weigh in on the reveal of Henry Cavill as Superman in plucky Zack Snyder's Man of Steel. I don't know what the original source of this image is but I stole it from a site who stole it from someone else:

I'm optimistic about this image even though Superman clearly has a lot of obstacles to conquer in terms of his audience. Firstly there's the ponderous Superman Returns where a dazed Bryan Singer painted Supes into a colossal corner by gifting him a bastard child. Hopefully this will be ret-conned at the beginning of Zack's flick as Superman wakes from a fever dream, relieved that he imagined the entire last movie after eating bad clams.

Dark Knight Rises Catwoman Revealed! Apparently.

So apparently the very first picture of Anne Hathway as Catwoman in next year's Dark Knight Rises. (I would have called it Dark Knight Rises, Yawns And Groggily Requests a Coffee). Supposedly it's been revealed at the official site. Except that site, much like everything Nolan touches, is a baffling, difficult -to-navigate, mostly-encrypted set of largely unsolvable riddles. No. Wait. You just click on the white wing-tips of the bat. She looks like this:

Contrary to reports on other sites, my guess is that that's not really the Catwoman suit at all, just her alter ego Selina Kyle. There's also the fact that the file is called "Selina Kyle". So Batman's not the only detective!

Welcome to Fruitless Pursuits.

I have no idea if this is going to work.

The concept is pretty simple: a site where an eclectic collection of semi-like-minded creatives will be sharing their work, as well as sharing their thoughts/likes/dislikes/reviews/commentaries and passion for pop-culture in general. Our group encompasses: fine artists, photographers, comic book creators, writers, game designers, musicians and we're enthusiasts of all these things. And we represent both halves of the globe.

The idea stems from us all following and admiring each other's work, working together on various projects, and sharing many of the same interests and discussing them ad nauseum - and yet we were scattered all over the Internet among our various individual sites. It was beginning to feel that we were spreading ourselves a bit thin. If only there was a catch-all site that would tie all of this (and more) together. And what if we just wanted to dumb things too like relay and discuss a bit of movie news, or share the newest painting of an artist we love, or an image of a cat that genuinely made us lol? Where could we go to just hang out and do that? Huh? Answer me, damn you!