geekosystem

After a long day at work, there's not much more therapeutic than a round of blasting terrorists or aliens or zombies whatever your bad guy of choice. But if you're looking for a video game to cure something a little more substantial than the frustrations of your cubicle, you might think you're out of luck. Not if you suffer from a lazy eye, though! It turns out that can be treated with Tetris.

I've been skeptical of the Pebble smartwatch. As far as watches go, yes, it looks like a very useful watch, but I stopped wearing a watch when I started carrying my phone with me everywhere. That said, nobody told me we'd be able to play Tetris on these things. Now I kind of want one.

Tetris is hypnotic. There are few things more satisfying to the human brain than stacking up falling bricks into neat little piles. It scratches just the right itch. If building real-world objects out of Tetris blocks were an option, then that's what my house would be made of. That does raise the question of how many Tetris bricks it would take to build a house? Don't worry. Movoto's got you covered with a new calculator to figure it out.

This should give typewriter-toting hipsters something to envy. Scientists in England have restored a computer built in 1951 to working order. The Harwell Dekatron, or Wolverhampton Instrument for Teaching Computation (WITCH) is now the oldest original working digital computer. That's all really impressive, but does it run Tetris?

Groundbreaking news in the world of graphing calculators! Tech Powered Math is reporting that the rumors of a Texas Instruments TI-84 graphing calculator with a color screen are true! Can you believe it? A handheld device that does math and has a color screen! We truly live in the future! Who would have imagined such a thing was even possible. Oh, excuse me, I have a call coming in on my mobile telephone that has a color screen, and does math, and is with me everywhere I go. OK. Back. Where was I? Oh yeah. Calculators!

In a world where big huge alien blocks haven't fallen from the sky and decimated mankind, big huge alien blocks fall from the sky and decimate mankind. This parody trailer for a gritty, disaster Tetris movie depicts the devastation of tetromino invaders. This is an extinction level event.

These tired and weary Internet eyes have seen some fun versions of Tetris in their day, from xkcd's Tetris Hell, to Tetris being played on the side of a building. This time, from an old Japanese sketch comedy show, we see a probably not actually playable, but still pretty hilarious version of the famous puzzler. The sketch covers a wide range of Tetris-based comedy, from each individual piece clearing whenever it drops, to the game dropping down a bunch of regular tetrominos, but then following them up with a piece from Puyo Pop. Possibly even funnier: The actor's narration.

Over the weekend, a group of MIT students performed a feat that isn't exactly unique, but generally impressive when coherently completed: They turned the outside of a building into a large game of Tetris. The students performed the feat on MIT's Green Building, which is home to the MIT Earth and Planetary Sciences department. Players could move, rotate, and drop blocks, but there was a twist as the player progressed through the levels.

This officially licensed desk lamp is not only Tetris themed, but each tetromino lights up when stacked on top of one that is already lit. That also means you can be a lunatic person and rearrange the pattern every single day you sit down at your desk, being the centerpiece of your boring office's only fun. The desk lamp is slated to release toward the end of this year in September 2012 for $50, so you'll have to wait around until then to intricately stack terominos on your desk, but have them light up instead of clear.

YouTube user Shuey187 is too good at Tetris. It's not enough to beat the games and record better high scores, but Shuey187 makes pretty pictures with the tetrominoes, not by hacking them together in some editor, but by actually playing Tetris and aligning and clearing the pieces accordingly until they form the desired outcome. Shuey187's channel showcases various pictures and patterns, from hearts to a space invader to a double helix, but Shuey187's newest creation, the green-clad Mario brother Luigi, is a pretty impressive sight, as it comes fairly close to the top of the container, and Shuey187 had to continually deal with blocks that were otherwise inappropriate for the build.

(via Joystiq)

Battling the issue of pushover alarm clocks that simply give up attempting to wake their owners whenever said owners smash the snooze button, Instructables member nolte919 created an alarm clock that is not only persistant in attempting to get one out of bed, but does not allow an infinite cycle of hitting snooze and falling back asleep for a few minutes, and requires the snoozer to pass a test of Tetris before it shuts off.

The clock's alarm has a user-defined snooze limit that, once reached, will not turn off until the snoozer clears four lines in a round of Tetris. The snoozer can silence the alarm for thirty seconds while playing Tetris, but if the game doesn't detect input for thirty seconds -- a period of time that isn't long enough for a successful snooze -- the alarm will sound and the process will start over. The alarm is clever in that it is persistent and also requires a snoozer to prove they are coherent before shutting off, something a snoozer probably wouldn't be able to do if they're stuck in the infinite loop of napping and smashing the snooze button. Head on past the break to see a video of the alarm clock in action.

YouTube user olilord, gives us all a New Year's treat, playing the Korobeiniki, otherwise known as the Tetris theme song, on Link's ocarina in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. The creepy look on his face probably stems from him reading the button combination to play the song, and not from being possessed by a Poe.

(via reddit)

The folks at Devastator Quarterly have given us the early '90s Tetris animated series that we never knew we wanted. It's got it all: A hip-hop theme song, an obligatory human sidekick named Zack, and a wonderfully unnecessary backstory for the anthropomorphized Tetris blocks. In this biting political allegory, the Tetris blocks fled an "evil czar" named Time Limit from an unnamed "frozen land," and he wants them back to rebuild his magic, sinister wall. Also, the blocks are named "Tom, Lance, Sam, Steph, Reversula S-Block, and schemin' Lex," in case you were wondering. (via BuzzFeed | Devastator Quarterly)

The Dictionary By Kurt Vonnegut (Flavorwire) World of Goo Hats (Rock, Paper, Shotgun) Mmmm, T-Shirts... (That's Nerdalicious) Cuba is Upset with Call of Duty: Black Ops (Kotaku) Tetris: PTSD Vaccine? (Ars Technica) Cats And Darth Vader, Match Made in Heaven (Geeks are Sexy) Supersoaker Inventor Invents High Efficiency Solid State Engine (TDW) (awesome wedding invitation pic via Kotaku.)

Tetris gets the inevitable (?) big budget blockbuster film treatment. It's in French, but you're probably not missing too much in the way of rich, intricate plot setup. (Technabob via Neatorama)