Not sure if it’s foretold any doom yet but this one time cryptozoological creature is a real thing. What's fascinating and cool about this, besides being the discovery of a previously unknown species, is that this creature was once considered an outlandish rumour and has now been confirmed and authenticated. Most moths that fly towards me, despite my full knowledge that they’re completely harmless, cause me to make tiny flails in front of my body with my arms, draw one leg up like a stork and press eyes and mouth tightly shut lest the beast fly into my mouth and make love to my oesophagus.

If this moth flew towards me I think I’d probably open my arms to hug and rub it like a winged kitten.

SHIELD the show! Hurray! Disney and ABC have gone into immediate production, with Avengers director Joss Whedon as part producer and cowriter, on a SHIELD television show. Whedon’s  also bringing along a number of the people who worked on Buffy, Angel and Dollhouse to flesh out the writing and producing team on the show that fits in with the current canon of Marvel films. And that’s all we know, will Sam Jackson and Colbie Smulders reprise their roles of Nick Fury and Maria Hill for the show? Will any of those big time Hollywood actors drop by in character? Will Luke Cage and Iron Fist become the beloved buddy cop duo of super hero TV shows? The answer to all these questions is holy pants I really hope so.

There’s been a number of DC animations on Cartoon Network over the last few months, but so far this series of short films (all embedded below for your delight) are the best so far. Anime inspired alternative universe Batman awesomeness at its finest. The people behind this short series also created the excellent but NSFW Kung Fu Cooking Girls which you can see here after seeking your mums permission.

The second bit of Skyrim DLC has been officially announced after an early leak, and yes it is titled  Hearthfire. But wait a sec, this isn’t a whole new quest line for you to follow. This is something different.

Hearthfire is, for want of a better world, a Sims add on for Skyrim. You can now build your own little house, or towering castle, or stately manor or whatever the hell you want. Personally I’m thinking spooky manor house with werewolf butler for my new Vampire Lord character.

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Unboxing videogames is a guilty pleasure of mine. I insist that my fiance let me unwrap blu-rays and my cats love to play in the boxes. Unwrapping things is just one of those childhood experiences that I choose to relive again, and again, and again.

This is an unboxing for the Collectors Edition of almost the only game that I have time to play these days - Call of Duty. This time around it's Black Ops II.

Hit play, ya dig?

The constant picking over the corpse of 38 Studios is equally frustrating and fascinating, especially as Project Copernicus really looked like it might have been a contender in the MMO stakes. If it was even half as good as Kingdoms of Amalur I know I would have bought it.

I’m guessing the steady leak of these videos are an attempt to try and keep attention and interest high in the project ahead of another party stepping in to buy up and revive the project. Stranger things have happened to worse abandoned projects, APBs revival springs to mind.

The videos aren't embedding properly but you can see small crappy versions below or click through on each for the HD versions.

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They all originated from the blog of developer Steve Danasur which you can check out here. The videos are all very eerily beautiful and well worth checking out. Project Copernicus really might have been an amazing game, the people working on it were clearly dedicated and had a passion for the project.

Ron Howard’s ambitious plan to create three Dark Tower movies with two television series bridging the plots between each film was a dream come true for fans. Unfortunately it’s turning out to be a slightly too ambitious dream for studios. Warner Brothers, speculated as the most likely studio to take on a project of this scope, have passed on it. While the project isn’t officially dead, making a successful pitch to any other studio is going to be a stretch. It's not entirely unexpected, anyone familiar with the Dark Tower series knows it's a uniquely complex, bizarre and dense series to adapt. It's not the sort of text you can skim of the top, drop some peripheral stuff and keep the core identity of the text, thinks would unravel fast and you'd end up with a huge mess of a half assed film. The film/TV series hybrid seemd like the only way to go, and that proposal also seems to be a no go. But speaking to the fans, do we really want to see an actor trying to fill the boots of Roland Deschain? Could we bare it? Would we every be satisfied with the casting decisions? Probably not.

Still, I had a dream, like a literal dream, that Marvel studios might pick up the project with all their spare cash after their mega success at the box office as a side project alongside their super hero films. Not a foolish hope as Marvel publishes a number of comic adaptations and expansions of the Dark Tower universe. But it was only a dream, and dreams in the shadow of the Dark Tower are evil dreams indeed...

How are close are we to zipping through the trees of Endor on speeder bikes Return of the Jedi style? Pretty mother flipping close people. I was impressed and slightly terrified a year ago when I read about Australian amateur inventor and engineer Chris Malloy and his backyard hover bike, who claims his bike can do well over 100km an hour and cruise up to 10,000 feet (see more here http://www.hover-bike.com). But Malloy’s prototype has serious competition in the form of the Aerofox.

The draw of the American Aerofox are two knee level pars that intuitively control the pitch and yaw of the bike based on the pilots leaning keeping the hover bike stable. Unfortunately the company don’t have the creation and commercial sale of this vehicle lined up. They see it more as a prototype for the development of boring unmanned drones to airlift equipment.

Laaaame.

I want something for zipping over terrain. Where I live there are few roads and plenty of beautiful but difficult to access locations. We actually have an almost impassable offroad trail called The Jump where dozens of people literally wreck their four wheel drives trying to get out the isolated beaches. A vehicle like this would be ideal in regional and rural areas for getting around. Fingers crossed Chris Malloy can get the corporate backing to get a commercial version of his hover bike available soon.

Most Zodiacs have me pop up as a snake or a water carrier (which is actually an air symbol, because astrology is completely retarded in every sense). This proposed geek zodiac system is something I could get behind. Click to make biggerer.

Also, just to be an annoying knob, did you know every single English speaking paper in the world has a horoscope section, but less than half have even a single column on science? Our world makes my brain hurt some times.

So almost a year ago now DC rebooted their whole universe. For some characters the changes were pretty minimal, such as Batman, but for DC’s other major character Superman the universe was very changed with Grant Morrison’s take pulling the character back to basics. This meant that a lot of his recent comic history, marrying Lois Lane, getting killed by Doomsday and killing off the Clark Kent alter ego, all got chucked out. Since then we’ve watched Superman slowly pick up familiar story elements, discovering he’s an alien, becoming a target of Lex Luthor, getting a job at the Daily Bugle and so on. One thing he’s not done though, is hook up with Lois Lane.

Well don’t hold your breath on that one.

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