If there is one thing we don’t have enough of, it is tactical dinosaurs. Check out this combat-ready velociraptor from Blue Force Gear that was on display at a recent trade show. I would ride this thing into battle in a second. My only requirement is that it is outfitted with twin laser turrets.
Just imagine these things running around on the battlefield, with military riders and lasers pew-pew-ing everywhere. Nothing beats a Tac-Rap!
At some point, should you get separated from your platoon and night time arrives, you may even have to cut it open so you can stay warm while you sleep. Awesome Empire Strikes Back bonus!
If you are as big a fan of crispy, crunchy bacon as I am all you will need to hear is this- Bacon Soap. If you need a bit more explanation, here it is. ThinkGeek has some hand soaps in bars that smell like manly food and drink. The hand soaps are available in three scents; the bacon scent we have seen before.
Made by Outlaw Soaps, the set of three scents include bacon, coffee, and whiskey. I can get behind the bacon-scented soap, it even looks like bacon with the red and white marbling. The coffee soap makes sense too, while I hate the taste of coffee, it smells pretty good.
The whiskey soap is the questionable one to me. I can only imagine explaining to a cop that pulls you over and smells whiskey that you just took a bath.
I am not a fan of Valentine’s Day. My wife always wants something expensive or changes her mind 57 times until I can’t remember what she wanted and I give up. I stopped buying flowers because the evil florists up the price of roses so much during the lead up to V-Day and the things will cut you with thorns and die in two days anyway.
This is just about what it sounds like. You can give your lady nine plush kittens. Being plush they are much more docile than real kittens, which wouldn’t likely appreciate being mounted on sticks, or shipped via UPS for that matter.
The kitties can be removed from the sticks so you still have evidence six months down the road that you actually bought your girl a gift. The kitty bouquet is available now for $49.99(USD), which is cheaper than a dozen real roses in the weeks leading up to Valentine’s Day.
Medicom has released a 400% (11″ tall) Bearbrick of the 60 meter-tall Colossal Titan, one of the giants terrorizing the poor citizens in the world of Shingeki no Kyojin, aka Attack on Titan. I’m not sure if there’s a 1% bearbrick inside.
This horrifying bear is limited to 500 units and is available only to Japanese residents, going for￥7,140 (~$70 USD) each. Bite your browser and breach Bearbrick’s walls to order.
Jimmy aka 6kyubi6 made a working Star Wars-themed pinball machine using LEGO. Aside from its moving parts and different colored lights, the machine also has various minifigs and figures of Star Wars characters, including Luke, Darth Vader, Chewie, Artoo and even Jabba the Hutt.
Jimmy made the machine for a Brickpirate contest. Here’s a shot of the machine all lit up:
There’s a short video of the machine in action below, as well as more images of the pinball machine on his Flickr page.
I’m sure you’ve seen videos of floppy disk drives rigged to play music. Simon Schoar took the hack to the next level with RumbleRail, a modular floppy jukebox that plays MIDI files loaded to its SD card slot. It’s run by an ATMega microcontroller, has a 128 x 64 LCD display and two RGB LEDs for each drive that light up in sync with the music. All of its parts are neatly arranged on a machined aluminum rail.
According to Simon, depending on the file extension of the selected MIDI files, RumbleRail will either map MIDI tracks to the drives, map MIDI channels to the drives or just play as many notes as possible at once. Here’s the RumbleRail playing the Pirates of the Caribbean theme song:
And here it is playing the Ghostbusters theme song in the dark, because it ain’t afraid of no ghost:
They sound like highly organized mosquitoes. Fire up Lynx and head to Simon’s website to find out how you can build your own RumbleRail.
Defend yourself from sword strikes and shark bites in the office with Thinkgeek’s Chainmaille Mail Necktie. It’s made of anodized aluminum, so I guess it will offer some sort of protection from corporate get-togethers.
The funny thing is, it’s the necktie part that isn’t genuine. I think it’s more of a choker with a huge pendant.
Ride to ThinkGeek and get the Chainmaille Necktie for $30 (USD). I’ll wait for the plate necktie.
We usually hear of fictional worlds brought to life in Minecraft, but there’s more than one way to skin a globe. A group called the Middle Earth Digital Elevation Model Project or MED-EM has been using a program called Outerra for the past 5 years to make a realistic model of the world of The Lord of the Rings and J.R.R. Tolkien’s other fantasy books. Redditor and MED-EM member cameni shared some images of their virtual planet online.
Outerra is a 3D graphics engine specialized for creating planets and terrain. It’s been in development since 2008 and is still in alpha, but it seems to have attracted a following already. One of its defining features is that it lets users create a world with “unlimited visibility”, where you can start viewing the planet as a whole and then zoom in and see details of entire hundreds of kilometers of lands, landforms and so on, up to tiny blades of grass. In other words, you can explore every inch of virtual Middle-earth. There’s not much to see, but that’s what imagination is for eh?
If you’re a Middle-earth tourist like me, check out these two annotated images by Redditor coomb. Here are some of the important locations in Middle-earth:
And here’s Frodo’s journey, as told in The Fellowship of the Ring.
That’s one long journey. Even if it wasn’t dangerous I can see why Gwaihir and his homies didn’t join the trek.
Before Tolkien fans get upset, MED-EM knows that their model isn’t perfect. For instance, Redditors and MED-EM members Redrobes and monkschain pointed out that Mordor is a desert and even has a little snow, but that error stems from limitations on Outerra’s biome options.
Monkschain also said that they used several real world locations as inspiration for some of the areas they made: “Parts of NZ were used for the White Mts. The Alps for Misty Mts. Carpathians for Mordor. Chalk Downs of England for parts of the Shire, Africa for Far Harad. Finland and Norway, etc for the far north.”
There’s a banana for scale in there somewhere.
MED-EM is only focused on building the planet, not populating it.
Hence you’ll find no structures, elves, hobbits or monsters.
Here’s a video of the world that monkschain made last year:
Would you name your daughter Cthulhu All-Spark? I wouldn’t. But Stephen McLaughlin might, because that’s the name the Internet has suggested and voted to the top for his soon-to-be-born daughter.
Perhaps the pressure to finding a good name on his own was too much. Maybe he just wanted to have a little fun and do something different in the naming process. It doesn’t matter what his reason is though, because his plight for a name has been heeded by legions of Internet users and trolls who are all too happy to suggest some decent (but mostly outrageous) names.
Got a few suggestions of your own? Head on over to NameMyDaughter.com and send them in! Maybe we can band together and prevent his unborn daughter from being saddled with such a name. Though it’s better than Megatron Doge McLaughlin or Streetlamp Moonshine McLaughlin, I suppose.
If you are an avid gamer on your iPhone or iPad that runs the iOS 7 operating system, you may be in the need of a controller. I think any serious iOS 7 gamer will want one, as touch-based controls suck. We got a bit excited at the prospects of the SteelSeries Stratus wireless gaming controller that we talked about earlier this month. We were excited right up until SteelSeries smashed our testicles with a boot when the price was tipped to be $100.
That is a lot of green for a tiny little controller. The Stratus controller has now officially launched for you to pre-order and the good news is your testes (and your wallet) won’t feel the pain quite as badly. The official pre-order price for the controller in the US is $79.99 (USD).
That price certainly isn’t cheap, but it’s better than $100. Now for the catch, you need to pre-order the Stratus to get it at that price so I suggest you run along and do it right now. Seriously, go do it now. You can pre-order via SteelSeries.
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