geekosystem

Even well into our adult years, we never appear to break out of that desire to seek out venues that in some way emulate our fond childhood experiences spent at Chuck E. Cheese's or ShowBiz Pizza restaurants: Food of dubious nutritional value, arcade games, and enough light and sound to overload the senses of even the most hardy of human beings. With plenty of establishments such as Jillian's and Dave & Busters catering to modern society's rampant case of Peter Pan Syndrome, Namco Entertainment Inc. -- the arcade game division of video game publisher/developer Namco Bandai Games Inc. -- is going forward with their plan to open a chain of restaurants in a similar vein to the aforementioned competition, which will hopefully allow the company to stake a claim in this lucrative market.

To all those people who scoff at video games and see them as nothing but wastes of time and a way to lose brain cells, here's some well-deserved egg on your face: By March 2013, The Museum of Modern Art is planning to present a gallery showcasing select video games that have left an indelible mark on popular culture in addition to other qualities that make them artistic pieces in their own right. At last, someone out there has discerning taste!

In 2010, which is about three millennia ago on the Internet, NASA's Cassini Probe found perhaps the most important and relevant scientific discovery in the history of humanity: The heat signature of one of Saturn's moons, Mimas, looked just like Pac-Man. Today, we can all pay attention to what is clearly the most important things that will be said today, which is that another moon of Saturn, Tethys, has a similar heat signature. There's no word yet on whether this moon is a Ms. Pac-Man moon or not, but obviously we'll stay with this one all night if we have to.

You see this about 2 minutes in, but when once it could have been disturbingly perplexing or gloriously revelatory, it is now elicits a mere "Ah." and a brief moment trying to remember what those white spherical things are called.

Pac-Man has been ported to a lot of different systems. Now, it seems like he's been ported to the coffee table. Designed by Kiran Hungin, this Pac-Man coffee table mosaic features a detailed close-up, sacrificing the lion's share of the maze's empty space to focus on more critical features, like the misproportioned ghost pen and a non-canonical yellow ghost. If these little inaccuracies don't bug you, you can actually purchase the table from the U.K. version of Etsy, Folksy. It's not exactly cheap though, at a price of around $360. Still, it's certainly unique, that is of course, unless you just go and make your own.

Got your eyes on a Pac-Man world record? Well, your already unrealistic dreams just got a little more unrealistic. Dave Race of Ohio just recently blew the old world record out of the water by completing a perfect game in 3 hours, 33 minutes and 12.69 seconds. That's almost a full minute (55.31 seconds) faster than the previous record, also held by Race. Basically, if you're not Dave Race, good luck.

This neat-looking Pac-Man watch, entitled Pac-in-time, is a concept by Benedetto Papi. So, although it doesn't actually exist, we can sure hope that it might. It's an extremely stark thing and I'm really digging the simplicity. The only problem is that I can't exactly figure out how it works. Obviously it tells time by the Pac-Man death animation, but beyond that, I don't get it. You can tell which is the minute hand and which is the hour hand by where the yellow is, I guess, but do Pac-Man's daily deaths just correspond with the arbitrary times that the hands cross, like 5:37-ish or 9:48ish? It seems like it'd be cooler if he died on the hour or something, but it's just a concept, so who knows how it'd work if it ever actually gets made.

Come on Namco. It's pretty hard to pass up another opportunity to monetize Pac-Man.

The World's Biggest PAC-MAN website is operating under a fairly descriptive moniker. It allows people to play what can only possibly be described as, you guessed it, the world's largest game of Pac-Man. As we often find with neat browser games, web design team Soap Creative used HTML5 to get World's Biggest PAC-MAN up and running. The game connects user-created Pac-Man levels--ranging anywhere from ridiculously easy, to extravagantly difficult, to the obligatory genitalia-themed mazes--and allows users to dump all of their workday productivity into a Pac-Man world so large that it requires a world map.

Thomas Edison's Predictions for 2011 in 1911 (Paleofuture) 3DS games will cost between $40 and $50 (Kotaku) Cover your iPhone in LEGO brick (Amazon) Bones producer involved with Julian Assange biopic (Variety) Brand New Women in Comics Wiki Needs Wiki-ing (Women in Comics) Pac-Man getting animated, will stop at nothing to be relevant again (AnimeNation) This link is about whale sex (Discover) (Photo via Steotch)

This is a paramecium. You probably haven't thought about it since 7th-grade biology, but as a refresher, it is a one-celled organism akin to the amoeba. And now scientists have started playing with them. Like pets. But while inserting them into old school video games like Pong and Pac-Man. How exactly have they made this happen, pitting microscopic creatures against each other in Atari games? Click through for the explanation and the video:

They couldn't have warned us? Seriously, when you have a stupid idea for a TV show, doesn't it usually make the Internet rounds for a little while before we find out it's being produced? Because apparently, Merv Griffin Entertainment is producing a Pac-Man reality show, and nobody bothered to ask us our opinions. Here are my issues with this:

World Wildlife Fund Invents PDF That Can't Print to Save Trees (Adverblog) If Dr. Seuss Did Star Wars (Adam Watson) Understanding Pac-Man Ghosts (GameInternals) Most Impressive Long-Exposure Light Video You Will See Today (Flavorwire) 10 Classic Science Fiction Novels as Word Clouds (Brainwavez.org) Denver: Saving Us From Cylons, One Tiny Robot Toy at a Time (Blastr) Steampunk Superheroes (Chet Phillips) (pic via Reddit.)

Spain Holds National Siesta Championship (CNN) Keith Richards Will Be in Pirates of the Caribbean 4 (ScreenRant) Together At Last: Scooby-Doo and Cthulhu (Nerdvana) 5 Times The US Almost Nuked Itself (io9) Pres. Obama Endorses American Comic Series Re: Islamic Superheroes. Right Wing Flips Out (Bleeding Cool) Old Video Game TV Shows (GameInformer) Awesome Pac-Man Halloween Decoration (Joystiq) (pic via Reddit, rebuttal pic below.)

Inspired by Ashley Browning's "Minimalist Street Fighter," Alexander S. Shen has designed a series of low-resolution video game characters, restricting himself to 5x5 pixel grids. More here. (Low-Resolution Video Game Characters via Rampaged Reality | Artist's page)

We know that this is a video made by Moleskine in order to advertise their Pac-Man 30th anniversary edition notebooks. But... it's stop motion, and has all the right sound effects, and reminds us of this dude, and... Wakkawakkawakkawakka? (via Kotaku.)