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Nerdists search for lightsaber stolen from Star Wars charity event

The Course of the Force is a charity run that benefits the Make-a-Wish Foundation; the relay race begins at the Skywalker Ranch outside San Francisco and ends in San Diego, just in time for Comic Con. Alas, this year, the lightsaber used as the relay’s baton has been stolen, but thank the maker Matt Mara,…

Portal-themed bedroom isn’t a lie, is incredible

When Portal fan Lauren moved into her own apartment, she realized that she could decorate it however she wanted, and what she wanted was a Portal-themed bedroom. She came up with a detailed design sure to send Chell running for the exit. Lauren set up a site detailing her process and showing off the final…

Adam West and Burt Ward will go batty on Futurama

Futurama may be coming to a close, but not before Batman TV stars Adam West and Burt Ward stick their heads in the series’ jars. And, judging from the character sketches, it looks like they’ll be channeling their most famous roles. The pair will appear in the episode “Leela and the Genestalk,” which, according to…

Tons of Hackers Are Hanging Out in Old Soviet Cyberspace

The Internet is a huge place. Some parts of it are awesome, but others are…less so. And falling squarely in that latter category is the ancient .su domain, once the cyberhome of the Soviet Union. It’s not exactly well maintained, or well policed, which is why more and more online criminals are using it as…

A highly imaginative webcomic filled with absurdity and astronauts

Anyone who longs for the days when The Perry Bible Fellowship updated regularly would do well to check out Jasper Rietman’s TRI/P. Much like Nicholas Gurewitch, Rietman plays with a classic newspaper strip style to create comics that defy our expectations, forcing us to shift our perspectives as we contemplate them. TRI/P is structured very…

Bloated Tick + Hydrogen Peroxide = A Bloody Disgusting Eruption

From the department of experiments no one ever asked for, these folks decided to inject a blood-filled tick with hydrogen peroxide. The results are distinctly messy. [Obvious Winner] Edit: The ethics of tick-killing in this way are interesting, and I have ignored them. A relevant piece of scientific literature: Do insects feel pain? Second edit:…

How to Conquer Your Inbox Once and For All

If you find a feeling of helpless despair descending upon you every time you open up your email inbox, help is at hand—you can get on top of your messages without hiring a personal secretary, and we’re here to show you how. Offering a prescriptive, step-by-step method that’s going to work for everyone seems a…

Would you upload your aging parent’s consciousness to a nursing home?

In the future of Trevin Matcek’s short film Life Begins at Rewirement, a man struggles with a familiar decision: to commit his mother to a nursing home. But in this nursing home, the residents experience the rest of their lives digitally. Update: The Vimeo video is now embeddable! This short takes the now-familiar trope of…

The Kickass Processors That Will Power Your Next Computer

Bits and pieces of info about Intel’s brand new 4th generation processors have been dripping out for months now. Good graphics, crazy battery life. Exciting stuff. Finally, though, we’ve got a full view of guts that’ll power most of next year’s computers, and they’ll be available starting June 4th. The future looks very, very bright.…

A new Yoda Lego adventure and the premiere of SheZow!

This week in the world of cartoons, we are treated to the premiere of SheZow, an Ice King kidnapping on Adventure Time, and we get the first of three Lego Yoda Chronicles specials! TMNT is delayed for a couple of weeks, while Ultimate Spider-Man and Gravity Falls continue their unusual hiatus. Ultimate Spider-Man is currently…

Security Camera Paintings Are an Art Project for Big Brother

There are security cameras all over the place, and as we creep ever forward into a technological utopia distopia future, there are going to be even more, gazing at you from the street corners, in stores, and who knows where else. But all that footage doesn’t have to be pure surveillance; you can turn it…

The Only Lego Set You Will Enjoy Destroying More Than Building It

I guess this had to happen sooner or later: Lego’s latest and greatest Star Wars megaset is not an awesome spaceship, a short astromech or a moon-sized metal ball that makes death. No, my dear friends, this $250 1,990-piece set is the Ewok Village. https://gizmodo.com/exclusive-the-new-gigantic-lego-imperial-shuttle-5565333 https://gizmodo.com/exclusive-lego-r2-d2-is-the-lego-set-you-must-get-this-5894057 https://gizmodo.com/3-800-piece-death-star-diorama-is-coolest-star-wars-leg-5018137 For that price, you get to build “a…

The Weirdest Thing on the Internet Tonight: Swear Words (NSFW)

God bless America, every mother fucking one of us. Kids & Explosions, the “boy who makes songs by stealing other people’s songs and making them worse,” explores America’s rapidly shifting cultural values—away from apple pie and baseball, towards camel toes and baseheads—through the sampling of everyone from EAZY-E to Cyndi Lauper to Radiohead in his…

The TSA Has Finally Removed All of Its Naked Full-Body Scanners

The TSA has announced that the “naked image” full-body scanners at airports that have caused so much controversy are no more. The scanners have been removed from all of America’s airports. Replacing it are machines that show ‘generic images’ of the human body. TSA Administrator John Pistole wrote in a letter to the Homeland Security…

How Big Would an iPhone Be If You Combined All the iPhones Ever Sold

Very, very big. Like way bigger than the new World Trade Center big. Like almost double the world’s tallest tower big. If you combined all the iPhones ever sold into a single gigantic monolith of a phone, it’d be 5,059 feet tall and 2,846 feet across. Ridiculous! In Animal’s very silly series Stupid Calculations, Josh…

Google won’t approve any Google Glass apps that use facial recognition software. Well, for now. Google said, “we won’t add facial recognition features to our products without having strong privacy protections in place”. Strong privacy protections aren’t in place right now, I guess. [Google]

This Week’s Top Comedy Video: Jon Lajoie’s Get Rich Kickstarter

Kickstarter campaigns can be awesome. Or sometimes be invigoratingly useful like Veronica Mars. Or be revealingly sad like Zach Braff’s. Or what about ridiculously blatant like comedian Jon Lajoie. Lajoie, who stars on FX’s The League, mocks all Kickstarter campaigns by asking people to donate to his cause by making him rich. Because people with…

A Map of Which State Had the Most Electricity in 1921

1921 must have been a weird (read: terrible) year to live in the United States. They were getting out of World War I but not quite in the Roaring Twenties yet. They were beginning to suffer through Prohibition and judging by this map of electricity users, if you didn’t live on the East Coast, you…

This is not an error in your map app — it is a real road

It seems too bizarre to be anything other than a screenshot from your favorite borked mapping app. But this is a real road in Norway, called the Atlantic Ocean Road. It’s five miles of sheer insanity and wave-soaked driving. According to Atlas Obscura: The curvy road dips and arches over the brutal waves of the…

Lauren Beukes’ amazing serial killer novel will become a TV series

We loved Lauren Beukes’ time traveling serial killer novel, The Shining Girls, which comes out next week. Now Leonardo DiCaprio’s production company Appian Way has just acquired it to develop for television. https://gizmodo.com/the-shining-girls-is-one-of-the-best-serial-killer-tale-508274918 According to The Hollywood Reporter: MRC and LeonardoDiCaprio’s Appian Way are teaming up to adapt The Shining Girls, written by Lauren Beukes…