As our sister site The Mary Sue pointed out, there are already some trailers for The Avengers floating around the real live world, but this new trailer does its best to convey some actual plot — something the previous trailers didn’t seem to care much about because explosions. Like with porn, caring about the characters having sex makes said sex all the better, and that notion applies here — caring about why there are explosions makes the explosions all the better.

Even though the Zone of the Enders series came from Metal Gear Solid mastermind Hideo Kojima, the series was largely overlooked after the first entry in the series ended up being nothing more than an okay game featuring repetitive missions, mechs, and large energy blasts. However, the bland first installment nabbed a sequel, Zone of the Enders 2: The 2nd Runner, and for some reason, the game was leagues better than the first, secretly ending up as one of the best games on the PlayStation 2, a console widely regarded as being the best video game console to date due to its amazing library of games. If you happened to miss Zone of the Enders 2, starting this fall, you’ll be able to hop in the seat of Jehuty, the series’ main mech, and catch up on one of the PlayStation 2′s best secrets, but in HD remake form, because someone out there loves you.

The Pirate Bay made the switch to magnet links, removed all torrent files (TorrentFreak)

Six ways Congress could fix copyright, right now (Ars Technica)

Blizzard lays off 600 employees (GameSpot)

10 biographies every geek should read (GeekSugar)

Why does the sound of running water make you have to pee? (Mental Floss)

Gamestop might be trying to buy U.K.’s GAME (Eurogamer)

The T. rex had the strongest bite of any animal ever (Business Insider)

(title pic via reddit)

Apart from pants, redditor ihatepants probably hates her mother for keeping these packaged giant water bugs frozen in the freezer, ready to eat at a moment’s notice. Ihatepants claimed Mom put them in the freezer simply for a scare, so this led me to the Internet, where all things become known. Yes, giant water bugs are food sometimes, because everything is food to something, I guess. Giant water bugs eat baby turtles, and we eat giant water bugs. The circle of life. If you want to see what a properly prepared dish of giant water bugs looks like, head on past the break and make sure you aren’t currently eating actual food.

There’s something about Nerf that just screams to be steampunkified. While dials, pressure gauges, and brass accessories look awesome when you bolt them to just about anything, the pneumatic nature of a Nerf gun just makes them fit extra perfectly. Modder vansbangerburger seems to agree and took the time to steampunk up his own Nerf rifle not only with the standard valves, dials, and accessories but also with the ingenious, subtle addition of spray-painted K’nex gears which just makes so much sense now that I’ve seen it in practice. I’ll bet you want to play a steampunk FPS now, don’t you?

The James Bond theme is pretty well iconic, so it’s not surprising that it’s been subjected to nose flute covers, or mashed up in a video of all 22 James Bond film openings. Now the iconic song has hit another theme song milestone; it’s been played by an army of quadcopters. This quadcopter symphony, performing the piece at the TED2012 Conference in California is quite good, and as amusing to watch as they are to hear. Unfortunately there is not, however, and army of humans with remote controls sitting in front of a conductor. This is all preprogrammed. None the less, it sure is noteworth accomplishment in, uh, music copter-sition.

Today is leap day, the extra day inserted into the calender every four years (usually) to prevent seasonal shift. So what? Nothing you didn’t already know. But isn’t a day a pretty big unit of time, in the grand scheme of things? It’s amazing that shifting things by an entire day can keep everything in working order. Well, it actually can’t, which is part of the reasons we have leap seconds, and you’re in luck, because we’re getting one of those this year on June 30th at 23:59:60 UTC

The coming changes to Google’s privacy settings were announced a while ago, but they’ll be taking effect tomorrow, so it’s worth a reminder. The new settings will allow Google to share your data between apps, something it never did before. This means that your web-browsing history may start influencing the ads you see in Gmail, or that the items on your Calendar might start influncing the ads you see on Google Maps. There’s nothing you can really do to stop this, but you can, however, limit the information shared if you remove your Google web history today, before it starts getting shared around tomorrow.

The Monopoly mashup trend continues. When we last left out board game hero, someone made a Skyrim version of the classic game, complete with Skyrim coin Monopoly money. This time around, we have an officially licensed Street Fighter version of Monopoly set for release. Along with the usual themed spaces that allow players to further the evil landlord style play of Monopoly, the famed pieces will be Street Fighter characters — something a little more visually interesting than a thimble.

Everybody knows that you don’t say “bomb” at an airport. It’s just a bad idea. But how about social media? You can say anything you want there, can’t you? You should be able to figure out the answer to that question. The answer is, yes, technically you can, but if you say certain things, the Department of Homeland Security is going to take notice. We’ve known for a while that the government has had its eye on social media and after Leigh Van Bryan was arrested for tweeting the words “destroy” and “America” in that order, it became clear that tweets can be taken very, very seriously, but how many words could possibly be on the DHS’s watch-list. A bunch. A whole bunch.