Spend The Evening Learning About The Making Of Your Favorite Movies

Here’s a three-hour documentary about the making of Aliens in 1986, called Superior Firepower. Made in 2003, it features insane amounts of behind-the-scenes footage that reveal quite how ambitious a project this film was, and how much bigger it was than Alien. But that’s not the only “making of” featurette on Youtube. Here are a…

Take The Northbound Whale Bus Uptown

After the sea levels rose, the bus lines remained more or less the same, although it was difficult to keep the whales from veering off the route through a krill swarm. “Northbound Whale” is part of Tim Doyle’s The Sea Also Rises series of prints, which are available from Nakatomi. Doyle is selling 200 limited…

Tomorrow People Shows Why You Should Never Let The Villain Monologue

Seriously, if you have the villain at a disadvantage, don’t let him or her start monologuing and trying to explain stuff. For most of the last 10 minutes of last night’s Tomorrow People, I was yelling “Just shoot him already!” at the screen. Spoilers ahead… The crux of last night’s episode seems to come down…

This Zombie Cologne May Just Save Us All

What do you think of when you hear the words “zombie cologne”? Probably that it’s some kitschy perfume with a gross smell, likely to be given as a gag gift, made to capitalize on the zombie craze right? Understandable… but wrong. Now watch and learn if you want to live. Chemist Raychelle Burks of Nebraska’s…

How Does A Word Make It Into The Dictionary?

Every year a handful of new words make it into the dictionary, but how do they get there and who chooses them? Kory Stamper, a lexicographer for Merriam Webster, explains to us just how our dictionaries get made. Stamper joined us today to answer all our questions about the definitions and origins of words, ranging…

It Seems More and More Certain That We Live in a Multiverse

Last week, physicists announced that they’d discovered evidence of gravitational waves in the early universe, which makes it more likely that our universe began with a bang and inflated from there. But that also means a whole host of other things, including possible multiverses. https://gizmodo.com/have-physicists-detected-gravitational-waves-yes-1545591865 Image via Hubble, with processing by Bill Snyder Physicist Sean…

Scarlett Johansson Becomes Superpowered And Kills Everyone, In Lucy

Forget a Black Widow movie — Luc Besson just has made a totally insane ass kicking spectacle called Lucy, starring Scarlett Johansson as an all powerful superhero. We’ve seen a few minutes of footage, and so far, so good. At Universal’s presentation of CinemaCon, the studio screened a whole collection of pretty spectacular films. One…

The Genius Who Killed Himself Trying to Become Immortal

Alexander Bogdanov wasn’t much of a big name in America, but in the Soviet Union he was famous. A science fiction writer, doctor, and pioneer of cybernetics, he was curious about everything. Including the thing that killed him. Above, Bogdanov playing chess with Lenin Alexander Bogdanov was a communist before communism was cool. In 1916,…

Centuries Ago, Legendary Painters Made These Revealing Selfies

Selfie was the Word Of The Year in 2013, but the self-portrait thing is much older than smart phones. Here are 22 old-fashioned self-portraits by the creators of some of the most amazing artworks in art history. https://gizmodo.com/selfie-is-2013s-word-of-the-year-now-pick-a-bette-1467274642 Portrait of a Man in Turban, by Jan Van Eyck, 1433 (via Wikimedia Commons) Self-Portrait as the…

Should Science Fiction Writers Ignore Advice To “Write What You Know”?

Beginning writers are always advised to “write what you know” — but what does that even mean? Does it mean just writing really thinly-veiled autobiography? And what if you’re writing about events on distant planets? Top image: Star-Maker by Olaf Stapledon. Over at the New York Times Sunday Book Review, there’s a great pair of…

​Your Wait For the Long-Awaited Sandman Overture #2 Is Finally Over

Yes, the second issue of Neil Gaiman’s already fabulously-popular-despite-having-only-one-issue-out is finally here! Let’s hope #3 manages to arrive in less than four months. Plus, G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero hits the big #200, Marvel tries to Survive, and Image presents the superhero version of Galaxy Quest! New Issues Dark Horse: • Serenity: Leaves on…

It’s the Number We Were Wondering About on Person of Interest

Remember the name we didn’t recognize that popped up on the Machine’s “danger” list on last week’s Person of Interest? Well, we’re about to find out about the mysterious “Maria Martinez” this week, and we’ve got a sneak peek clip for you. https://gizmodo.com/the-machine-is-on-the-warpath-on-person-of-interest-1547339799 Shaw and Fusco are outside the UN, surveilling Maria, their number of…

A toxic and deadly week in landscape reads. We learn how, remarkably, tourist poop is flown by helicopter out of national parks, how Silicon Valley exports toxic waste all over the country, how poison lurks in our old televisions, and how the land can just fall away in the form of Washington’s deadly mudslide. A…

A Pregnant Babysitter Faces A Boogeyman Who Eats Children’s Eyes

Like so many gory slasher flicks, the short film Child Eater involves a local legend, this one about a creepy figure who eats children’s eyes to keep from going blind. But when Helen loses track of her babysitting charge, she’s forced to face the truth behind the myth. Child Eater was written and directed Erlingur…

Forget the Mystery — Resurrection‘s All About Closure

Looks like Maggie an Marty are trading in investigating the mysterious return of the dead for actual crime. And they’re weirdly better at robbery and murder than they are metaphysical questions. But the true star of Sunday was the different expressions of failed closure. Sunday’s episode broke down into Henry and Jacob and Marty and…

Star-Crossed Suffers From The CW’s “Terrible Love Triangle” Disease

Star-Crossed, in general, is a pretty fun show that deals with some interesting issues around xenophobia and paranoia. The alien world-building shows some promise, too. But jeez, this show is the worst victim of the CW’s need to put a dreadful love triangle into everything. Spoilers ahead… The CW’s love triangle-mania has paid off pretty…

Exclusive Final Member Clip Reveals The Penis That Started It All

The Final Member is a cute little documentary about a sweet little Phallological Museum in Iceland, and their journey to acquire the last piece to their collection: a human penis. And all the wacky hijinks that follow. We’ve got an exclusive clip from the movie, so you can see for yourself. Here’s the official synopsis:…

Why Hasn’t Hollywood Made a Movie About This Myth Yet?

Some of the greatest fantasy and science fiction movies are based on stories from myth. But there are so many great mythological tales that Hollywood hasn’t tackled yet. What’s the one mythical story or creature you are dying to see in a giant CGI mega-blockbuster? For our purposes here, let’s define “myth” as broadly as…

The Psychological Effect That Explains Why You Suck at Parties

Have you noticed a little problem at parties? You get introduced to groups of people and immediately forget all their names. There’s an effect that explains why things like this are such a problem. Here is a social problem so pervasive that Eddie Izzard has a famous routine about it. You have undoubtedly experienced it.…

It’s Launch-Day (Update: and it didn’t go as planned.)

Soyuz TMA-12M launches today, carrying Expedition 39 to the International Space Station. Watch the live coverage on NASA TV. Update: Hooray for another successful launch, and a great rocket-photo to go with it! https://gizmodo.com/sunrise-on-the-soyuz-rollout-1550522610 Update 2 (Tuesday PM): The third Soyuz thruster burn did not take place as scheduled. As a result, the spacecraft will…