geekosystem

A 33-year-old British man has been arrested after leaving a severed deer head at the checkout counter of a Tesco grocery store in England earlier this month. He also left the innards of a deer -- presumably the same one, though we can't be positive -- in one of the store's aisles, prompting what was likely the store's least pleasant page for a cleanup.

Storied New York mayor Ed Koch had his funeral planned down to the last detail when he passed away this February at the age of 88, even going so far as to visit his own grave site and pen his own epitaph. Unfortunately, it seems he didn't leave anyone in charge of proofreading the final inscription on his tombstone. NBC New York reports that the tombstone marking the three-term mayor's plot in Manhattan's Trinity cemetery contains one minor error -- it lists Koch's date of birth as December 12, 1942, when Koch was actually born on December 12, 1924. So close...

Ready for the cutest Good Deed For The Day you'll see all week? This fox in Russia presumably found something tasty at the bottom of a mason jar and went in for a closer look...only to have that brilliant plan backfire on it in pretty grand fashion. With its head firmly tucked within the jar, the fox then took the rather unusual step of seemingly coming to humans for help, and was lucky to find a pair of gentlemen willing to remove the jar from its head...and with a minimum of laughter at the situation, no less.

The picture above shows Socks, the Internet famous Shetland pony known for his sweet dance moves like moonwalking. He's in the middle of a paternity battle at the moment with a claim that he sired little Scamp. It turns out Socks isn't Scamp's father, but this all-pony Jerry Springer episode doesn't end there. Further testing found out who the father was, and Socks is reportedly not happy about it -- even though he's a pony.

I've been thinking about getting the critically acclaimed post-apocalyptic game The Last of Us for a couple of days now, but now I know I'm getting it. Apparently all I need to be interested enough to buy a thing is for someone to explain it to me in Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World references. Luckily Reddit user philtomato is looking out for the Pilgrim-obsessed people like me and put out this spectacular "Joel and Ellie vs. The World" mashup poster. Yes. Yes, this pleases me.

After promising he wouldn't be a jerk about Community's fourth season, the comedy's once and future showrunner Dan Harmon spoke out on his Harmontown podcast about what he thought of the Harmon-less season. Spoiler alert: He wasn't too happy with it, and wasn't afraid to say it with some backhanded and profane responses. He's since apologized, but the damage's already been done.

Internet, we need to have a serious talk about spoilers. It's gotten out of hand -- both hands. People are simultaneously being too sensitive about minor details, but also printing T-shirts ruining the endings of children's books. It's a divisive issue that comes up a lot here at the Geekosystem office, and I think it's high time we sat down and hashed this thing out. What's a spoiler, and when is it okay to let one out? Fair warning, I'll be using a few classic spoilers as examples, like The Sixth Sense and The Usual Suspects.

If you haven't seen Howl's Moving Castle by Studio Ghibli, you've really been missing out. Luckily, you can solve that here and now with the most definitive home release yet. Sporting both DVD and Blu-ray with a list price of $39.99, the combo pack for the film dropped on May 21st, and it's the first time the film's been made available on Blu-ray. Even if you've seen the movie a million times before, it's worth seeing it one more time just for that.

It's come out recently that the NSA is keeping records of America's phone calls, which has led some people to conclude that they're also listening to and recording those phone calls as well. There's no evidence to that at the moment, but it hasn't stopped Brewster Kahle from estimating the cost of storing all that data in the cloud. So what's the Government shelling out to hold on to all that data? Let's take a look at Brewster's (estimated) Millions.

Thanks to Edward Snowden's leaked documents, everyone in the world can learn a lot about what the NSA was up to with the PRISM data mining program. Except the people who should have been overseeing it in the first place, as it turns out. Both Congressional staffers and Department of Defense employees have been instructed to not look at the documents and basically pretend they were never leaked in the first place.

Ever had a day where you just don't want to have to deal with other people? Ever taken a different path than usual because there's someone you really don't want to run into on the way? Good news, an app developer has leveraged social media to direct you along routes where your friends aren't. The app, called Hell Is Other People, is an experiment in anti-social media. It monitors your friends' check-ins on Foursquare to figure out where they might be and then creates a map with "optimally distanced safe zones" to decrease the chances that you might cross their paths.

Researchers at French tech powerhouse Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) have posted a video glimpse of their latest robot, and the "cheetah cub robot" -- inspired by house cats -- has everyone in this office wondering when they can trade in their real life cat for a Robo-Kitty, which is the best of all possible pets, because it is both a robot and a cat. I don't believe I even have to explain this. Take a look at the robot -- which is inspired by everything about the domestic cat but its laziness -- in the video after the jump. 

If there's anyone better at mashing things together than Butcher Billy, I'm almost afraid to hear about them, because this is about as much awesome as I can stand. In his latest round of mashups, Billy pulled from a lot of different sources. Each one is centered on a video game, but some include actors while others include musicians, movies, or albums. They're all tremendous.

I was walking through the Phillipsburg Mall in Phillipsburg, New Jersey the other day with my family and stumbled across the single greatest doghouse ever to exist in history. I present you with "Bow Wowser's Castle" by artist Sam Boglioli. There were a bunch of dog houses around the mall, but none of the others were geek-themed, so I didn't bother taking pictures of them.

If the overwhelmingly negative critical reception of Duke Nukem Forever wasn't punishment enough for developer Gearbox Software, they are now being taken to court over the game. 3D Realms was the first company to work on DNF in the game's sordid 14-year development cycle. During the development of DNF, in addition to not making a remotely good game, Gearbox did not pay 3D Realms the over $2 million in royalties that they had agreed to upon picking up the license. Naturally, 3DR sued them in response.

Conan O'Brien isn't much of a gamer, but damn it all if he's not going to review your favorite video games anyway for his "Clueless Gamer" series! This time he's taken a look at the hit new DC game Injustice: Gods Among Us with Team Coco's resident nerd Aaron Bleyaert. His many insights include judging Superman for the Fortress of Solitude's alien Zoo, noting that Zod would probably make a pretty good pope, and introducing us to a (hopefully) playable version of the superhero he co-created with Bruce Timm, The Flaming C.

Great news for gender and race equality! The new class of NASA astronauts is 50% female for the first time in history. The class of eight astronauts are an equal mix of men and women, but is also made up of a variety of racial backgrounds making it the most diverse astronaut class in history. Let's take a look at the new astronauts.

Space flares are so friggin' cool. Well, not literally, because they are giant eruptions of heat and light, but you get my meaning. Case in point? Astrophysicists at the University of Santiago do Compostela in Spain, along with the Byurakan Observatory in Amernia, detected a low-intensity star letting out a flare so strong it became almost 15 times brighter in a matter of minutes. You know that feeling you get when you wake up in the middle of the night and almost blind yourself with your phone while checking the time? Imagine that, but, like, times a billion. In space.

Big Bang aside, most of us non-scientists tend to not to think for very long about how exactly it is that planets are formed nowadays. Well, I certainly don't, at least, because most of the time I'm too busy deciding what food I want to eat at any given moment. But thank God for the Hubble Telescope, through which astronomers have found compelling evidence of a planet forming billions of miles away from its star. Even cooler, this might serve to completely change all of the current theories about planet reformation. 

Why didn't Yogurt see the merchandising potential of Spaceballs, the robotics competition? Students from the U.S. and Europe can sign up to be challenged in what is described as "the ultimate robot game" to navigate floating spheres through the International Space Station in culmination of the Zero Robotics programming competition. I'm not even allowed to compete, and I'm excited about this.

Anyone with siblings -- any number, younger or older, take your pick -- has thought at some point that the person with whom they share parents (and toys and meals and sometimes, God forbid, a bedroom) is out to do nothing on this planet but drive you mad. It turns out, that might be closer to the truth than anyone is comfortable with. A recent study at the University of New Hampshire suggests that sibling-on-sibling violence can have the same detrimental effects on mental health as every day bullying. 

Come on, admit it -- we've all fantasized about having superhuman strength at one point or another. Having the sort of car-tossing, Mjolnir-swinging, evildoers cowering before your might sort of strength we've all seen in comic books may be out of the question, sure, but science is helping us learn more and more about how we get strong, and that understanding could help us get better at getting stronger. In their latest video, AsapSCIENCE explains what it takes to reach that goal, why some people naturally have greater muscle mass than others, and how new technologies could make super strength a reality in the future. You won't even need to be bitten by a radioactive spider.

Bee warned: Researchers at Washington State University are starting a frozen semen bank to store the genetic material of honey bees. In addition, they will use crossbreeding from various colonies to create new generations of bees that are more diversified and resilient to environmental threats. There's probably room for another bee joke here, but I'm drawing a blank.

In 2003 my mother said, "There's this new show you'd probably like. It's got people doing science and explosions to test myths." She was of course talking about Mythbusters, and she was absolutely right about my liking it. I love it when people do science and explosions, and I'm pretty confident most folks that read Geekosystem do too. That's why I jumped at the chance to interview Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage for Gillette's How Does He Shave? campaign.