Your Daily Cosplay

I'm not much into anime, but I've watched a bit. Its worlds upon worlds upon worlds of cool stories (and bad ones too I'm sure). So not sure about this bunch, but that last one reminds me of Lilly after Darkness has dress her in the movie Legends.

From Life's Little Mysteries....If you fall into a lava lake you won't fall through, you splat on the top of it. Instantly catch on fire and then burn to death. However, you might actually be able to leave an impression on the lava flow itself...Read about it.

This video is just darn cool.

Armor Porn

From Toysoldiersclub.com

Salt In Your Eye...Pink Salt

Lake Retba lies in Senegal is  a salt water lake. It has so much salt in it that it sustains a small salt harvesting industry. The lake is also home to an small algae called dunaliella salina; this little guy lives in water that has high salt contents. But old Dun Sal tends to cause a discoloration in the water. It turns the water pink. Of course this might be the giant plant where they make pepto bismal

Conan and the Apeman

How in the same hill did we get from here:

To this:

Now This is a Queen

From Snow White and the Huntsman!

Armor Porn (Greek Hoplite)

 

All these from the Michigan Toy Company. Check 'em out!

Your Daily Cosplay

TLG has Amazing Adventures coming out. And we have begun work on Victorious. Neither of these are quite steam punk...though Victorious comes the closest methinks. Its a pretty cool genre...

Magic of Mirrors

The mirror is a magical thing. It captures the soul or so some say. Other believe that it brings bad luck. When you fell ill the ancient Greeks placed a mirror in a basin of water in order to determine the severity of the illness. If your image was distorted you would die, if not you would live. The Romans didn't like that apparently, it Rome the distorted image only gave you 7 years of misfortune. Thus out own little ditty....

Origins of 9 superstitions....Read More

Don't do it Conan!

 

Jack the Giant Killer

Okay, stumbled across this over the weekend. This looks really good. Snow White and the Huntsman was so good I have high hopes for this. Love the revisit Hollywood is doing on the classic faerie tales. Jack the Giant Killer.

Armor Porn

(Michigan Toy Soldiers)

(from Warlord Games)

Your Daily Cosplay

Black Canary is an interesting super-hero. Much more grounded than many of them. Her on again off again romance with Green Arrow was an interesting twist as well. Taking two very human super-heroes and putting them together. Plus if you like to get kicked in the head, it might as well be with some fishnets!

The mostly aptly named planet is Neptune of course. The true blue marble, it drifts through the crowded waves of space in majestic silence, though a gas giant, it seems to be a world of water.

This is a true realm for the god of the seas! Here Neptune plunges to the limitless gulfs and wages battle against the dread kracken! 

(As a side note this is why the Greeks and Romans conquered the world. They woke up in the morning to get water from the communal well, rubbing their eyes, scratching themselves and were greeted every day by THAT STATUE! I wake up and see a fire hydrant. They see the eternal struggle between man and nature. I see man's fear of fire. They see themselves plunge the iron spear of their destiny into the mindless eyes of the kracken! Victory! Triumph! I still see the hydrant. If I look hard, a speed-limit sign further up the street.)

Just in case you missed it.

Your Daily Comic Con

Assassin's Creed. One of the few video games that annoys me. Its much like the assassin in the RPG, they just murder folks! (I know I know that's a short sighted approach I have, but I'm short and have glasses).

Good lord is a Replicant jellyfish. Scientists have taken a silicone construct, seeded it with rat heart cells and let it go. The cells replicated and made a thick muscle tissue. When set loose the little bugger started moving, muscles contracting automatically.

This is just bad ass...and not in the cane salesmen sort of bad assery.

Read More.

All we need now is a 4 year life span...

Armor Porn

Space Camp

Old Man Odyssey, lounging around our sister planet Mars since 2001, has been nudged awake to help the newcomer keep up the interplanetary chatter. Odyssey agreed to relay cat calls from Curiosity as she plunged into the atmosphere of the Red Planet. All this is on schedule for August 6.

I would like to think its quiet up there, in the atmosphere of Mars, but I'll bet that poor SOB picks up all the jibber jabber from Earth. Wonder if he can turn himself off!

Read more from Nasa!

Your Daily Comic Con

Super Boy and Super Girl are interesting incarnations of the Super Man mythology, they don't quite seem to fit. But Superman is such a cool hero, you can't not replicate him. Of course Super Girl is a little sexier...

Armor Porn

When in Rome . . . Run

So apparently an Italian Scientist got tired of getting wet in the rain and tried to figure out whether you should run in the rain or walk. Does the act of running force you to encounter more rain drops than if you were walking.

To quote Mac Golden..."Oookaaaayyyyy."

He's decided you should run. Unless the wind is blowing in the direction you are traveling. In that case you should jog the relative speed of the wind. If the wind is hitting your back at an angle then you should run slightly faster than the wind speed.

The physicists says its rather complicated. Read More.

Note: This picture is from Danny Santos II, an amazing photographer. Check his site and blog out here.

Gods of the Underworld Unite

Hades called and he wants Pluto to get his planetary status back....

Pluto

So they stripped this poor planet of its planetary status some years ago (Todd says they may have given it back, but I've yet to confirm that), but now they've discovered that the little rascal has another moon. That makes 5! Five moons. What do you have to do in this solar system to get recognition from those ego-centric bastards at space camp!

Read More.

Cool Mythology

Mermaids have to be one of the coolest concepts the human mind has concocted. I'm not sure why. But here's one from Comic Con:

Armor Porn

The Eyes Have It

I'm a little freaky when it comes to my eyes. I've had a few injuries over the years. A cat scratched my cornea (and yes I did get a fever, so you can say I had the Cat Scratch Fever); a stick poked me in the eye; got some glass in one eye and older brother was always accidentally poking me in the eye. So reading this article actually made me flinch. I'm not sure why, its really cool because the Japanese have done it again...they think they've created a eye in the lab and something about a liver.

Now that is almost as cool as selling canes!

Read More!

Great Empty meet Deep Quiet

I've always referred to the Void of space as the Great Empty (though truthfully it is utterly filled with crap!) and the oceans as the Deep Quiet. Scientists have discovered a huge cloud of water vapor surrounding a quasar "a way out yonder ways." The article gives a humorous analogy about how much what it is. But in situations like this I like to quote Monty Python's the Life of Brian:

"To join the PFJ you have to really hate the Romans!"
"I do! I hate the Romans!"
"Oh yeah? How much?"
"Ahhh ALOT!"

Its ALOT of water. A whole lot of water. Apparently made by atom smashing.

"The water is in a cloud around a huge black hole that is in the process of sucking in matter and spraying out energy (such an active black hole is called a quasar), and the waves of energy the black hole releases make water by literally knocking hydrogen and oxygen atoms together."

Read more!

My Little Pony

A Frazetta tribute by THIS GUY!

This is Bad Assery

On August 5th of this year Curiosity lands on Mars . . . or so we all hope. Its a geological mission whose over-riding purpose is to find out if Mars had life on its crusty soil at one time or not and an ancillary mission to better understand whether we can colonize the planet (we'll do that eventually of course, its only a matter of time).

NASA released this video about the space craft, it is worth 7 minutes of your time on this Monday morning.

post script: I think I would have named this something a little different, like God Stomp!

Man of Steel Trailer

Okay, this just looks cool! I didn't care of the latest version, but this one looks like something to watch out for. And who better than Kevin Costner??

Here's a great cos-play from this year's Comic Con! I think I may have to dredge up the Trolls to head out there next year!

We've just released Part 3 of Adventures on the Powder River! River Walk pits your characters against a one-eye giant on the Powder River. His lair is cleverly set up and offers wholly unexpected challenges! This follows up Part 1 To the Damenheit Bridge and Part 2 Thorns for Beer!

Cue the Vikings!

Sliasthorp discovered! That ancient town of the Vikings that, according to documents from the Carolingian times, served as the seat of power of one of the southern Scandanavian Kingdoms and the Viking Kings. Sliasthorp probably controlled a great deal of the trade moving from east to the west as this went through the town of Hedeby.

Read More.

Ruins

Here's some interesting shots of washed out/drowned buildings. Anyone of these would make a great adventure!

 See More.

Robert Downey Jr. proved himself a pretty cool dude at Comic Con this year by showing up to the Iron Mans kid's costume contest. So many actors seem to resent rolls like this, but he seems to have embraced it and in doing so made himself a permanent part of another generation of the viewing public.  Kudos to him.

Read More.

The Great Empty

Astronomers have pinpointed scores of stars that have planet-making dust clouds circling them. They are seen as young orbs crossing the threshold. But last year, star TYC 824126521 that had had a huge healthy cloud of dust hurling around lost its cloud. Whether the star devoured it or sent the dust hurling into the deeps of space we don't know.

Read More.

Image Caption: Artist's conceptualization of the dusty TYC 8241 2652 system as it might have appeared several years ago when it was emitting large amounts of excess infrared radiation. Credit: Gemini Observatory/AURA artwork by Lynette Cook.

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Castles & Crusades

The Castles & Crusades Players Handbook is at press. We should have a ship date by Monday I would think...assuming there are no problems, which, well this is Troll Lord games.

I cannot listen to Debra Harry of Blondie without thinking of one of the best fantasy books I've ever read. A Spell for Chameleon by Piers Anthony was captivating with a wholly unexpected ending and theme. Utterly different than what I was used to.

A Spell for Chameleon.

Apparently these dancing star partners move much, much faster than we ever thought possible. Most scientists believed that two stars, when the got very close would collide much like two ... star-crossed lovers. Anyway, poor metaphor aside.

This is pretty cool. Stars swinging around each other in a couple of hours! The square dance from hell.

Read More. 

Frank's Boy Gets Around

Move over Shelly it seems you weren't the first! Archeologists have discovered the skeletal remains of two people whose bodies consist of several different people. Seems they were assembled before burial and set in the earth. I suppose this would be Frankenstein's monsters beta addition.

Pretty cool read here. Reminds us the we aren't the only unique homo sapiens; our ancestors were just as interesting (and maybe a little more so!).