The history of beer is almost as old as human history, and it would be quite true to say that our love affair with the stuff has only grown with modern brewing practices. Given beer’s pervasive place in human history, it’s not surprising that the geeky pastimes of drinkers would eventually rub off on the beers themselves. The result is a veritable cornucopia of nerdy beers, from Star Trek, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, and a few others that fit in quite nicely with your nerdy lifestyle. Like Pizza Beer — it’s more efficient than eating both separately! So sit back, crack open a cold one, and enjoy this astounding and some times mouthwatering collection.

Serving both the transforming robot fan and delicate flower fan in us all, this Tomoo Yamaji sculpture begins life as a blue dragon 1,630 millimeters in length, and transforms to become a wreath of blue flowers, measuring in with a width and height 750 millimeters. Check out the transformation steps after the break.

GoBots Transformers, everyone’s favorite robots in disguise, have found a new way to become even more unsuspecting. Made out of plastic canvas, magnets, cross-stitching yarn (or whatever it is you make cross-stitching things out of) this Optimus Prime can not only masquerade as a truck but also chill with all your other knickknacks. That’s right, this guy can still transform.

This awesome interpretation of Optimus Prime comes from Lord Libidan who’s fondness for Transformers and cross-stitch could not have found a cooler point of intersection. If that weren’t enough, Lord Libidan has also designed patterns for Jetfire, Starscream, Skywarp, and Thundercracker, with Soundwave and Blaster coming soon. Now just the patterns are for sale on Etsy, so if you want these, you’ll have to learn cross-stitch. But seriously, what better reason could you possibly find?

Check out longjie0723‘s amazing wii-mote operated beer-can robot. This little guy can skitter around and roll away like any good beer that’s got a mind for self-preservation. Probably not the most functional Transformer you can imagine, but I’m sure it does a great job startling dinner guests and really, what’s more important than that? Aside from teaching your son that beer cans are actually small robots that are trying to escape.

(via LaughingSquid)

The above video depicts a hauntingly beautiful scene over in Forth Worth, Texas Tuesday night when lightning struck several transformers and caused a chain reaction of transformer explosions. The National Weather Service reports that between 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. Tuesday night, around 330 cloud-to-ground lightning strikes took place. Though they aren’t sure if any of the bolts directly hit a transformer, they state that a bolt of lightning can carry enough electrical charge to blow a transformer if it strikes nearby ground. Police received reports of a transformer on fire, and as one can see from the video, the reports were most likely legitimate.

(via reddit and Star-Telegram)

The first official trailer for Transformers 3, a.k.a. Transformers: Dark of the Moon, has just hit the Internet. As Rob Bricken points out, it contains a grand total of one Transformer very far in, and an obscure, mustachioed one at that. There’s a lot of Neil Armstrong, and apparently some sort of Transformers-on-the-moon conspiracy. Transformers 3 is due to hit theaters on July 1, 2011.

(via Topless Robot)

“It was a miracle of rare device / a 26-foot tall statue of Optimus Prime made of ice.”

–Samuel Taylor Coleridge, slightly edited

Artists Antti Pedrozo and Michel de Kok created this giant ice Optimus Prime; more pics here. [Warning: autoplay dub music.]

(Antti Pedrozo via TDW)

Based on some clever sleuthwork, some Transformers fans may have uncovered the full title of the third movie in Michael Bay‘s big-robots, bigger-budget trilogy: Transformers: The Dark of the Moon. Amazon.com has listed three books for release in May of 2011, presumably to tie in with movie; moreover, TransformersTheDarkoftheMoonMovie.com was registered by an proxy registrant on September 13. Nothing has been confirmed, however.

The Dark of the Moon is the title of a Howard Richardson stage play about “a witch boy who seeks to become human after falling in love with a human girl.” Could this be a movie about an Autobot falling in love with Megan Fox Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, or something like that? That would be dumb.

The only plot points we really know at present are that the villain is Shockwave, that the U.S./U.S.S.R. space race is involved, that this is (probably) really the end of the trilogy, and that Shia LeBeouf is, in Michael Bay’s words, “taking his first tenuous steps into adulthood while remaining a reluctant human ally of Optimus Prime.”

(Seibertron via Topless Robot)

Alexander Vladimirovich Semenov shot this Transformers-inspired short film in two hours; the editing took a month, though, and you’ll see why. Come for the battling, rocket-launching cell phones, stay for the epic car transformation at 2:05.

(TDW via Laughing Squid)

Between Two Ferns. Steve Carrell. Watch. (FoD)

Why do people want the Kindle to be the iPad? They’re different for a reason. (TechCrunch)

Toast defibrillator (Geekologie)

How Apple maintains its divinity (The Atlantic)

KITT as Transformer (Toycutter)

These talking GlaDOS Curiosity Spheres probably want to kill you (Joystiq)

“We Have Learned Nothing from the Genome” (Spiegel)

(title image via Reddit)