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Concept Art Writing Prompt: The Girl Who Was a Giant Eyeball

As we are drawing closer to Halloween, this week’s writing prompt is inspired by a rather bizarre costume. What sorts of stories does this dancing eyeball in a dress stir up? Collector’s Weekly posted this photo in their roundup of 20 Halloween Costumes So Unsexy, They’re Downright Scary (via Neatorama), but doesn’t list a source.…

Nibbler is Cousin Itt in the Futurama Addams Family

Bender’s selfish. Fry is lazy. Zoidberg’s shellfish. Farnsworth’s crazy. Their business plan is hazy. Clay Yount dresses the Planet Express crew as the Addams Family and makes us realize that Charles Addams original comics needed more brain slugs. All it needs is Thing. Maybe Bender has an extra hand lying around? Futurama/Addams Family mashup! [Clay…

Stratospheric Space Jumps, Reasons to Not Pre-Order Surface, Incoming iPad Minis, and More

If you haven’t been living under a rock, you know a lot went down this week. If you have, well boy do I have a treat for you. We’ve got jumps from edge of space, face transplants, insane desktop computers, an impending Apple apology, the dish on pre-ording Microsoft Surface, and did I mention a…

Ponies and Pikachu are blown up in the name of art

We’ve been in love with Alan Sailer’s high-speed photographs ever since he first fired a bullet at a strawberry. When he’s not aiming ballistics at fruit, Sailer is blowing up beloved childhood toys, from Play-Dough to Pinkie Pie. https://gizmodo.com/this-is-what-it-looks-like-when-a-bullet-shatters-a-str-5804488 Sailer sometimes fills his inanimate victims with gelatin to capture the shape of the explosion, but…

What if H.P. Lovecraft wrote the Fantastic Four?

If they weren’t outfitted in brightly colored spandex, the Fantastic Four might come off as creepy: a man who can slither and snake his stretchable body parts, a woman who can appear out of nowhere, a fellow who can summon fire with a thought, and a pile of living rocks. Comedian Mike Sterling applies a…

Watch These Dry Ice Bubbles Turn Into Swirling Alien Planets

It doesn’t take a genius to realize dry ice is awesome, and with Halloween right around the corner, you’re bound to be seeing a lot of it. But did you know dry ice bubbles can be used as a practical effect to make whirling, churning alien planets? https://gizmodo.com/if-you-build-one-thing-this-week-make-it-a-shoulder-la-5339419 Like all good practical effects, the premise…

Surface pre-orders have now sold out, despite our sage advice. [Engadget]

A haunting animation of Italo Calvino’s tale of would-be lovers stranded on the moon

As we’re learning more about the strange, explosive birth of Earth’s moon, let’s return to a more fanciful version of lunar history. This short film animates Italo Calvino’s short story “The Distance of the Moon” about a love quadrangle involving two men, a woman, and the moon. https://gizmodo.com/new-evidence-that-the-moons-explosive-birth-was-weirder-5952497 The story, from the 1965 collection Cosmicomics,…

This Crazy-Looking Spaghetti Monster is a Heart Made Out of Glass

Think you’re prone to heartbreak? Be glad you don’t have one of these glass ones. Models like this, which show the heart and its surrounding tendrils that reach out to the lungs, as well as all kinds of other vascular maps of brains and other body parts, are made by Farlow’s Scientific Glassblowing in a…

Andy Serkis is directing a family-friendly, motion-capture version of Animal Farm

Andy Serkis’ stunning grasp of motion capture acting is one of the reasons Peter Jackson made him a second unit director on The Hobbit. Now the Gollum actor plans to apply those directing skills to a motion-capture project of his own: a new adaptation of George Orwell’s political fable Animal Farm. The Hollywood Reporter has…

Saturday Webcomic: The Not-Quite Historical Adventures of Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage

Tuesday was Ada Lovelace Day, a day when we celebrate women in science and remember the contributions of Augusta Ada Byron, later the Countess of Lovelace, who wrote devised an algorithm for Charles Babbage’s analytical engine. Cartoonist Sydney Padua celebrates Lovelace in her webcomic 2D Goggles, or The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage, imagining…

Get a Liberal Arts Education for Free on the Internet

Just getting a job in this economy is difficult enough. Getting one with a liberal arts degree is simply masochistic. Don’t spend half a decade and thousands of dollars only to join the rest of the English majors busking in a subway. Instead, educate yourself with these valuable, respectable, and totally free online resources.* MIT…

Watch Groucho Marx try to stump Ray Bradbury on You Bet Your Life

In 1955, two very different media luminaries, Groucho Marx and Ray Bradbury, met on Marx’s game show, You Bet Your Life. Bradbury already had a couple of science fiction classics under his belt, and stayed on his toes as Marx quizzed him on his biography and then tried to stump him with a little movie…

Concept art reveals the gruesome chestburster that didn’t make it into Prometheus

If there was something missing from Prometheus aside from logic and quasi-competent scientists, it was an alien creature bursting from a human chest. An earlier version of the movie’s script involved a particularly bloody encounter with just such a critter. Spoilers ahead. If you’ve seen Prometheus, you’ll remember that Logan Marshall-Green’s none-too-bright archaeologist, Charlie Holloway,…

LG Optimus G Review: A Speedster That Gets in Its Own Way

Say this for the Optimus G: it doesn’t skimp. LG went for broke to shake off its mid-range reputation, cramming its latest flagship Android phone full of goodies. But specs don’t always equal performance. What Is It? LG’s best attempt at a high-end phone. It runs Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) with LG’s custom UI…

A new hero is born in the Star Wars Universe and check out this David Bowie impression from Adventure Time!

This week in the world of cartoons, rebel Saw Gerrera becomes a major player in the Star Wars Universe, Starscream begs for mercy on Transformers: Prime, and we see three tales of Halloween terror on Regular Show! Ultimate Spider-Man and Gravity Falls are off this week, while DC Nation continues it’s unusually timed hiatus. As…

Too Bad This Apple-Samsung Fanboy Peace Treaty Isn’t Real

The smartphone fanboy wars seem both ridiculous and eternal. It’s like everywhere you go on the Internet, a simple statement of preference—even one that isn’t pig-head and disparaging—can serve as the flash point for a fanboy skirmish. Isn’t it about time we signed a peace treaty? https://gizmodo.com/the-apple-vs-android-fanboy-wars-in-one-gif-5951243 This agreement was written up for CNN by…

A Couple’s Wedding Photos Were Found Inside a Camera That Was Buried Under an Earthquake

This is incredible. 18 months after an earthquake hit Christchurch, New Zealand and buried a just married couple’s camera, the camera pops up on their driveway containing all the wedding pictures they thought they would never see again. It’s seriously amazing. Martin Burley and his wife Fen Jeremias were married on February 20th and when…

Watch This Robot Dance Gangnam Style

Though this CHARLI-2 Robot doesn’t do the sexy legs of PSY quite as well, it can pretty much do every other move of PSY’s hit Gangnam Style. The horse riding, the little lasso twirl, the crowd pumping, it’s hilarious. Watch it. CHARLI-2 is a five-foot tall robot from Virginia Tech that has incredible balance (and…

The Stoner Channel: Meat Planets, Cheese Monsters, and Muhammad Ali: Mars Boxer

Muhammad Ali Wanted to Whup Some Ass on Mars Muhammad Ali is regarded as both one of the most dominant heavyweight fighters of all time and as one of the most prolific and gracious envoys boxing—or really any sport—has ever seen. For example, in 1966, 17-year-old reporter Michael Aisner approached the champ for a interview…