geekosystem

Futurama has been cancelled before, but it looks like this time it might really, truly be over. Comedy Central has decided not to order any more episodes of the show, and will just it march slowly to its death on September 4th as it closes out its seventh season. The news will no doubt upset fans, but the show's executive producer David X. Cohen isn't surprised.

A great many things were said on Twitter last night as the Boston-area manhunt wore on into the early morning. Lots of them were interesting. Many of them were true, and lots of folks on social media did kind of an amazing job covering it live in real time. Many of them, though, have ended up being more interesting than they were true in the cold light of day. I'd like to think there's a lesson in there about withholding things like names of suspects -- especially the names of oh, say, missing people whose families are worried about them -- until you're sure they're actually the names of suspects. I wonder if it will be.

It's just about over, folks. You're one day away from not having to see another political ad for nearly 24 months. Now that you've made your voice heard -- you did vote, didn't you? -- for the candidates of your choice, take a moment to sit back and reminisce about some of the Presidents that the world of geekdom has given us. After all, participating in a democracy is tiring work, and you've earned a break today of all days. If you're not done telling people how you think things should be done, though, by all means, let us know what Commanders-in-Chief you think should or shouldn't be on this list, either in the comments or on our Facebook page. It may not be your civic duty or anything, but we always want to hear what you think.

As windows are boarded up and down the eastern seaboard, we're taking shelter, too. A triple batch of mac and cheese is on the stove, the bathtub is full of water, and we're playing with the idea of one more run to the store for ALL OF THE CANNED TUNA!!! As we prepare for the fall of Western civilization as we know it, please join us in recalling some of our favorite shelters for waiting out the end of days.

A study by psychologists at the University of Illinois suggests that measuring brainwave oscillation could predict how quickly someone will get good at a video game. The study, published today in the journal Psychophysiology, is simultaneously heartening to people like myself who are bad at video games. On the one hand, there's nothing we can do about it, and it doesn't mean we appreciate the medium any less. We're just not wired that way, which is a very freeing thing. On the other hand, we're bad at a fun thing because our brains our broken, which is a hard statement to paint in a flattering light.

If the Internet is good for anything that isn't porn or playing video games online, it's that if something is conceivable, someone probably already thought of it and you can find a community with which to discuss it. Anyone who visits any online social community is probably already aware how much love the Internet has for the hilarious but consistently sad comedy Futurama, and one of Squaresoft's better video games before they lost touch with their industry, Chrono Trigger. It probably won't be surprising to know that there's a Futurama-Chrono Trigger mashup out there in the wilds of the Internet, but did you it doesn't stop at just one?

Sure, widespread electronic voting would make the process of tallying and processing ballots exponentially easier, but can it ever really be secure? Maybe someday, but certainly not right now, as evidenced by a little experiment in Washington D.C. that ended with everyone's favorite robo-sociopath Bender Bending Rodriguez being elected as the head of the Washington D.C. school board. Needless to say, there was a little bit of hacking involved.

No one is going to argue that Futurama has any illusions of being even remotely realistic. Between the energy beings, the wide cast of bizarre aliens, mutants, and anthropomorphic robots, you can't really argue that anything in the show is trying to mirror anything remotely close to "real life" at all. That is probably why these realistic busts of Futurama characters by deviantART-ist artanis-one are so awesome and, let's be honest, disturbing.

Can you imagine if Zoidberg actually looked like that? It's hard to picture him as the clown of the crew when you're staring into the face of a realistic lobsterman. Imagine what his claws look like. "Woob woob woob" suddenly gets a little more sinister. I'm not even going to bring up Nibbler. You can see that for yourself.

Inspired by the above illustration by Kate Yampolskaya, a bunch of creative (and anonymous) people on the Internet Photoshopped some more awesome Futurama/Simpsons crossovers in the same vein.

77 years after Charles Guthrie amputated a dog's head and sewed it onto the neck of another dog and made everyone really depressed after reading that bit of sentence, scientists patented a device to preserve severed heads. Yep, just like Futurama.

Good news, everyone! Someone has made a Futurama wedding cake. Alan Teo, who snapped the photo, writes: Attended my friends' wedding over the weekend. Both the bride and groom are über-Futurama fans. So naturally, they had to incorporate their favourite show into the wedding somehow. Needless to say, it's easily the most awesome cake I've ever seen. Check it out fully sized after the jump.

It's been a rocky road for everyone's favorite soon-to-be-retro-futuristic prime-time cartoon show, what with the cancellation, the network changes, the semi-return, and then the full return. But Futurama is finally coming up on its 100th glorious episode, and, as you can see, someone's planning a party. (The rest of this post contains plot spoilers for this week's upcoming Futurama episode. On the other hand, if you click through, you'll be able to grab a desktop-sized version of the image above. Choose wisely.)

LG Display has submitted a filing to the US Securities and Exchange Commission indicating they're going to start producing a 9.7 color e-paper display and a 19 inch flexible e-paper display.

Companies tend to pump out neat prototypes that get shown off at events like the Consumer Electronics Show, but this is one of the first times in recent memory that "futuristic" technology familiar from film, such as the newspaper in Minority Report, will actually be put into production (and by the end of the year!).

We all knew the writing staff of Futurama was brainy but this is something else. To work out the ridiculous brain switching plot line from last night's hilarious episode, writer Ken Keeler (who also just happens to have a PhD in mathematics) ended up writing and proving an entirely new theorem. This is probably the most impressive bit of side work from a TV writer since a writer of Desperate Housewives discovered a new species or the staff of Full House developed a vaccine for a specific strain of syphilis.

Bouletcorp has winningly mashed up Futurama with the animation style of Studio Ghibli's Hayao Miyazaki.

The wide-eyed cat-bus from My Neighbor Totoro + the lush leafiness of Princess Mononoke + Bender Bending Rodríguez = some shiny metal grass.