• At the very least, I expect to see more product placement in horror movies as studies are showing that loneliness and fear can boost our attachments to brands. At worst, expect a lot of simulated near-death experiences orchestrated by soft drink and cell phone companies as you go about your business in public.
• Spain may have 99 problems, but not getting a Star Trek theme park isn’t one of them. This is where I remind everyone that in an alternate timeline, Las Vegas built a life-sized U.S.S. Enterprise. It stinks being the dystopian Earth, doesn’t it?
• I would like to add my vote for this being the ending the Harry Potter books should have used.
• Bad news is always easier in interactive graph form, right? Here’s a visualization of the world’s largest data breaches.
• And finally, here’s Pinterest Fail, a blog of unsuccessful attempts to duplicate the crafting & cooking one finds on Pinterest. Mostly, it’s put up by those who had their work go awry as opposed to someone wanting to shame them for trying.
NPR’s “Planet Money” blog has determined that you should always get the bigger pizza and has the math to back it up.
You can read all the stuff about area and all that, or you can scroll down to the chart, push the slider to the right, and then see how much you’d spend buying smaller pizzas (on average) to purchase the much larger pie.
True, pizza isn’t the greatest choice for healthy eating, but if you’re buying one anyway, you’re wasting money if you don’t get one that’ll last you several days (or hours, depending on one’s snacking habits).
In my ongoing attempt to bring everyone’s attention to (my choices for) cultural achievements of note, here’s what I’ve found in the gallery of horrors creativity that is the modern internet:
• The image to the left is just one of this customized Cozy Coupe made to look like Ecto-1 from Ghostbusters.
• Sticking with cinema, how about these birthday treats inspired by Manos, the Hands of Fate?
• Next in our tour is a mashup of classic Disney movies and Harry Potter characters.
• Here we have a video log of the construction of a custom “Mission Control” desk, for which I would have happily committed felonies as a child… and maybe today.
• The conversion of existing architecture is an art form, right? With that in mind, here’s a blog called Used To Be A Pizza Hut featuring… well, you know.
• And finally, our exhibit comes to an end. Please join us for refreshments in the lobby. You’ll need to hand-craft your own Viking beer mug without power tools, though.
EVE Online continues to be one of the most interesting and player-influenced MMOs out there, where tales of corporate sabotage and epic space battles abound. What’s seemingly incredible to those of us familiar with more scripted games is that the really big events in the game are brought about by player actions rather than developer-crafted plot arcs. Now, rather than reading about these events on forums or watching YouTube videos of the cosmic carnage, there’s an EVE: Online comic book in the works, taking its story cues from (if you’ll pardon the expression) real-life events. I’m assuming they’ll tone down the swearing and make the characters sound less like people using a chat client.
I will note that there still is a lot of player-chat flavor to the text, though I’ll admonish the editors for missing one grammatical error visible in the sample pages in the above link: If you agree with something someone is saying, the phrase is “hear, hear,” as in, “listen up ’cause the stuff being said is the cat’s pajamas.” It’s not “here, here,” which is perhaps what you cry when you want the waiter’s attention or you’d like the ball thrown to you. 
Another sci-fi video game thingie I ran across was a game called Space Station 13. There are a few versions of this game which sound phenomenally wrong (which is par for the course as the Goons are involved in this as well), like someone crossed the Paranoia RPG with the worst aspects of being a redshirt on Star Trek. Rather than link to all the wikis involved, here’s a link to (slight language warning, TV Tropes warning) the TV Tropes page for Space Station 13. Just reading about the game’s elements makes me want to see a TV show based on this comically dystopian outpost. Or at least, the time needed to actually play a few rounds.
An Etsy seller going by the name of “PaulMichaelDesign” has some pretty nifty (and plenty pricy) jewelry that tempts the nerdiest parts of your soul. First up, the TARDIS ring:
And, naturally, the U.S.S. Enterprise ring:
I am disappointed his shop takes neither psychic credit cards or gold-pressed latinum, but them’s the breaks for living on a backwater pre-spaceflight planet, I suppose.
