• Gifs from Bonniegrrl: two sets of Empire Strikes Back gifs, Metropolis, The Young Ones, Sir Giles of Buffy, and... yeah, I don't know what's going on here.


• Speaking of gifs, here are some unspeakably cute ones of a wombat and a cat and his boy.


• A tiny Santa hedgehog. Eeee!


• Awesome photo of awesome dogs.


• I deeply love this hateful cat.


• Scientists are working on a new RNA-based vaccine that could wipe out the flu forever. Amazing stuff!


• The Max Fleischer Superman cartoons are pretty fantastic, and you can now watch them all on YouTube, legally and everything!


• More cuteness for you, straight from the source (Cute Overload).


• Partly as research for my novel, and partly just because I like them, I've been reading tons of fairy tales and folk tales lately. So I was kind of excited to see that a big-screen, Hollywood adaptation of Jack the Giant Slayer was in the works. But I should have figured that in the process of creating such a thing, they would have added all the typical big-screen, Hollywood trappings to the story. Corny catch-phrases, lame love story, overwhelmingly huge action set pieces, bombastic rhyming prophecies, tons of special effects. Oy. This trailer is just gross.


• Homemade cardboard Star Destroyer!


• I particularly love the second piece in this Super Punch art roundup.


• I really love the sweet and funny Darth Vader and Son by Jeffrey Brown, so it's pretty cool that he's doing a sequel called Vader's Little Princess. There are even holiday-themed downloads!


• I never got into Lemony Snicket, but I've heard great things, and we do have a book we really like written and illustrated by Jon Klassen, so I'm curious about this book that the two of them are collaborating on, The Dark.


• I'm fascinated by devices like this for some reason: a lamp that tells you the weather by recreating it inside your house. (No, it will not actually make it rain.)


• Andrew W.K. has been named the U.S. cultural ambassador to Bahrain. FYI. So they will be partying hard there soon, I assume. UPDATE: Somebody somewhere apparently realized this was kind of a crazy idea and cancelled the whole thing. The world is a sadder place now.


• Ironically, the most frustrating thing about watching this collection of the craziest fake ads from movies is all the real ads stuck in between.


• Holy crap, you guys. NASA is working on a faster-than-light warp drive.


• How to make a fairy room in your house. Awesome idea.

• The resurgence of animated GIFs was funny... at first. Now it's starting to wear on me. Tumblr is just full of them! Full, I say! But this one is funny.


• Some really wonderful pics from The Big Lebowski blu-ray release party.


• Pretty great reimagining of the cover of the classic video game Bad Dudes.


• An interesting post about a book called The Unofficial LEGO Minifigure Catalog.


• Drawn linked to a couple of neat art sites: Spencer Goldade's 365 Abstracts and Graham Annable's website.


• The top 100 sci-fi/fantasy novels, as voted by the readers of NPR. As usual with such lists, there are things on here I like and things on here I don't like. But I definitely approve of the top pick, natch.


• The latest episode of Awesome Hospital is pretty amazing.


• A first look at Pottermore, the new interactive online Harry Potter world.


• I've heard good things about Ready Player One. It's the first novel from a fellow named Ernest Cline, and it's "about a dystopian future where gamers fight to control the future of their virtual world, the OASIS." io9 has the first two chapters free to read on its site.


• io9 also has a list of fun upcoming sci-fi comics, including a Star Trek/Legion of Superheroes crossover book from IDW and DC. Woah!


• Did you see the latest Immortals trailer? Holy crap! Yeah!


• We've got a US release date for the next Wii Zelda game: November 20th.


• I know there are countless altered/parody versions of Edward Hopper's Nighthawks, but... well, here's another one. It's fun! There are monsters!


• Hipster Thundercats.


• Heh.

• This video short which covers what happens between Tron and Tron: Legacy, as well as a bit of what happens after the end of Tron: Legacy, is a bit cheesy, like anything Tron-related, but also rather fun and cleverly done.


• The "Making Game of Thrones" blog has started a series of video features on the various noble houses. First up, naturally, is House Stark. Plus, there's another awesome, awesome trailer for the show as a whole.


• Here's a dude who buys boring landscape paintings at yard sales and then adds monsters to them. Excellent.


• I can't be the only one who thinks this teaser trailer for the new Conan the Barbarian is terrible. Seriously, it's like a parody of bad action movie trailers, complete with a "THIS SUMMER" opening and a ridiculously growly-voiced narrator. Plus it shows you absolutely nothing, and the dialog is terrible.


• In case you haven't seen it yet, the trailer for Super 8 is really worth watching. This looks and sounds like vintage Spielberg.


• A very colorful car crash: a truck carrying 8,000 gallons of printer ink flipped and busted open, spilling various colors of ink all over the road.


• Super Mario Bros. with more realistic sound effects. (Via)


• A couple of sets of micro-scale LEGO vehicles.


• Another amusing Super Punch image roundup.


• The iPhantom Zone.


• Oh hey, Facebook has finally expanded @ tagging to comments (which we all thought it should have had in the first place).


• It only costs $50 to spend three hours in the Batman suite. And you know what hourly rates means! It means Bat-sexy time.


• After I saw Moon, I was really excited to see what director Duncan Jones would do next. I was a little disappointed in the first trailer for his follow-up, Source Code, but this review is promising.


• I absolutely love this idea: adding tiny doors to boring facades.


• Lots of wonderful art is up for sale online to benefit Ghana.


• Stephen King wrote another Dark Tower book! It's called The Wind Through the Keyhole and it's set between Wizard and Glass and Wolves of the Calla.

• Nice painting of Ray Bradbury.


• Here's what the new Thundercats will look like. (UPDATE: There's a better image here, plus a photo of some of the new toys.)


• More fun posters for great movies on Reelizer: The Day the Earth Stood Still, Spirited Away, and Picnic at Hanging Rock.


• Scientists have made the Princess Leia hologram from Star Wars a reality. Thanks, scientists!


• A nice animated gif of the city skyline from Blade Runner. Actually, that site has a lot of cool quotes and animated gifs from a lot of great movies. (Via)


• A rather monstrous, Lovecraftian lamp.


• Breathe easy, folks! The studio says those Matrix sequel rumors are just rumors. Whew.

• A trailer for the new post-apocalyptic BBC series, Outcasts. Looks intriguing, and intense.


• Finally, Smell-O-Vision exists!


• Apparently there is an indie RPG for the Xbox called Cthulhu Saves the World where you play as Cthulhu. If only I had an Xbox!


• Custom-made Alice in Wonderland nesting dolls and Star Trek peg dolls by Ben Rumback. Check out more pictures of these and other works by Rumback on his blog.


• For some reason, multiple tie-in comic books are being created for the marriage of Prince William and Kate Middleton. I doubt any of them will be nearly as good as Neill Cameron's.


• Cinematical has the first image from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 - and it's an exciting photo of a bloody, filthy Neville Longbottom, looking ready to kill a snake, if you know what I mean. Bad-ass.


• A selection of eerie paintings by Carel Willink.

• Gotta love this "Gundam Calling" T-shirt.


• Like only a few other people on Earth, I did not watch the Lost finale last night. In fact, I gave up on the show years ago when they killed off a great character for no other reason than that the plot demanded it. But I always thought if it sounded like the finale really pulled everything together, I might go back and watch the whole series. This analysis of the finale (which contains many spoilers, btw) has me pretty much convinced it's not worth it. I'm seeing other, far more positive responses to the finale from friends and various other commentators, and there's really no way to know how I'd feel about it without watching it myself. But it sounds like just the kind of ending I'd hate.


• This map of the TARDIS is really quite fantastic.


• That artist I really like did some preparatory illustrations for a Green Lantern Elseworlds story that never went anywhere. They're pretty fantastic, naturally.


• I think we're all getting a little tired of Three Wolf Moon shirt parodies, but this Three Ewok Deathstar shirt is quite wonderful.


• A fascinating photo of the surprisingly manual process they used to use for filming the opening crawl of Star Wars movies.


• If Rembrandt painted modern advertising.


• Spirited Away in LEGO, plus a general LEGO roundup.


• Edvard Much's The Scream, now featuring Cyclops of the X-Men.


• Orlando Bloom seems like a natural choice for Paul W. S. Anderson's The Three Musketeers, but I'm rather surprised he's signed on to play the villain, the Duke of Buckingham.

• New remote control Millennium Falcon. (Via)


• A particularly clever Nic Cage as Everyone entry: Nic Cage as Magritte's Son of Man.


• A gallery of sci-fi art.


• A fascinating and disturbing Tumblr blog examining the weird things you see in airports: 5 minutes before the crash. (Via)


• I really rather enjoyed the weird sci-fi musical Western I saw at the film festival a while back, Stingray Sam. Well, now the soundtrack is available!


• Completely sterilize your hand in four minutes by sticking it in a box full of plasma gas! But wait - how can plasma be gas? Isn't that like saying liquid solid? Also, that box looks a lot like the one full of pain from Dune.


• Apparently Chinese gangs are now going around using giant revolvers that fire 12 gauge shotgun shells.


• Star Trek Online fans set a new world record: the most costumed Star Trek fans ever gathered in a single place. Surprisingly, all it took was 99 people. C'mon, they've got to be able to top that at the next Star Trek convention. (Via)


• A clever and disturbing vision of our hyper-branded, augmented reality future. (Via)


• It's a Pope-themed bottle opener! A Popener! (Via poppy)

• I'm thinking a lot more people would use the Microsoft error-reporting dialog if it worked like it does in this video. Although seeing as how I'm a developer myself, the idea of people being punished by remote users for every bug they write into a piece of code is as terrifying as it is amusing. (Via Howard)


• Apparently Frank Miller is on Twitter and tweeted enigmatically the other day that something called "DINOSAUR" is coming this week. I've mostly lost faith in Mr. Miller, but I have to admit this has me a bit intrigued.


• Seven new clips from Wolfman. Some pretty big spoilers here - you see the creature and everything - so maybe don't watch these if you want to stay pure for the movie. For my own part, having watched these clips, I'm not as excited for the movie anymore. It doesn't really look that great. Corny dialog and not very impressive performances; apparently Anthony Hopkins just set himself to auto-creep mode.


• Let's Be Friends Again is not always funny, but this one is pretty good.


• Samuel L. Jackson is creating his own comic called Cold Space, a four-issue sci-fi/action miniseries for Boom! Studios. It's about "an opportunist who crash lands on a planet in the midst of a civil war, discovering a way to play both factions against each other for his own personal gain." Celebrity forays into comics are not often good, but this sounds like fun.


• It seems like you can never have enough USB ports! But maybe you can now with this 80-port USB panel.


• Here's a machine that turns extra office paper into toilet paper. Okay then.


• Yay, the Razzie nominees are out! I stand fully behind the nomination of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen for worst picture of 2009. (Via)


• Sci Fi Wire put together a list of 9 underrated, overlooked sci-fi and fantasy films of 2009. Some of these look pretty fascinating.


• New Diablo III screenshots!


• Some fun fake Garbage Pail Kid sketch cards. (Via)


• Fun with LEGO.


• Every time I give up on Clone Wars, I start hearing great things about it again. For instance, the show recently featured a cubist painting of the Queen of Mandalore, and the Star Wars version of Guernica, which depicts the Mandalorian War against the Old Republic Jedi.


• A site called Little White Lies is running an interesting art contest to promote the movie Kick-Ass: the entrant is asked to reduce his favorite film to six comic book panels. (Via)


• Plush Lion-O.


• Interesting new pics from Alice in Wonderland.


• Okay, the trailer for the Wall Street sequel is pretty good. (Via)

Everyone in the car was screaming. They were saying he was drunk, that he should stop right now. But he could not see any way of stopping; he never could. He had to keep going on, on into the impossible distance, beyond everything that was. So he drove the car into a tree. The tree was a wooden doorway. It led into one of two spaces: one that was empty even of himself, or one where he could perhaps finally speak in a language so fresh and new that it was actually wet, wet on his fingertips. The language of the mind, solipsistic, impenetrable, inevitable, invincible. He was destroying himself in order to destroy the universe, the universe that depended upon his existence. Now there would either be rest finally from the struggle or a new universe, a whole new universe. Nailed against the slender wood by the mangled metal of the still spinning machine, he waited to see which it would be.