Pretend it doesn’t exist or say what you want about it, but Michael Bay’s live-action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles has made over $190 million in the U.S. — so “Cowabunga, dude,” it’s franchise time!
And while Megan Fox is back as April O’Neil, here’s some good news: Arrow‘s own Stephen Amell has signed on to play Casey Jones! He was originally played by Elias Koteas in the 1990 movie.
Amell tested with a half-dozen actors over the weekend, but it was his chemistry with Fox that led to the studio eventually giving the role to the star of CW’s Arrow. Paramount had no comment on the casting.
Are you excited for a TMNT sequel? Are you more excited now that Amell has joined?
It’s that day of the year again when tech and internet firms prank their customers with April Fools’ Day stories. But this year the issue is confused by a couple of far-fetched stories that happen to be true.
Amazon has already had to issue a denial that its new product Dash is a gag. It certainly sounds a hard-to-believe proposition: a series of 18 physical buttons that can be placed around the house, each of which reorders a specific product when pressed.
Each button bears the branding of a particular manufacturer and will order a particular replacement product by sending a signal over Wi-Fi. Examples include Huggies diapers, Tide detergent and Gillette razors. Users select their chosen pack size in advance and the system works in a similar way to ‘Buy It Now’, so there’s no need to enter any passwords or card details. To avoid mistaken orders, once the button is pressed, it won’t work again until the product has been delivered.
While it certainly feels like a gimmick right now (it’s only available by invitation to Prime members), Amazon appears to be playing the long game. It’s reportedly working on getting manufacturers to build a re-order button directly into new appliances and is even looking at whether devices could track the use of consumables such as coffee pods or detergent tablets and automatically re-order when stocks are running low.
Another joke that turned out to be true is the idea of turning Google Maps into a Pac-Man game. If you’ve dismissed reports to that effect on your social media timeline, you were too hasty. Yesterday and today at least, whenever you have the aerial map (rather than the photographic view) enabled, you can click on a Pacman image at the bottom of the screen and play a game, with the maze made up of the local streets — so beware of no-through roads. It’s surely a step closer to my dream of a Grand Theft Auto/Google Street View mash-up.
As for the actual pranks, Dominos jumped on the driverless car craze to announce the Domi-no-driver, an unmanned delivery bike that it refers to as the world’s first auto-nom-nom-nom-ous bike.
Google came up with Smartbox by Inbox, a physical inbox that sends you text alerts when the mailman has been, and includes heating and air conditioning so that touching the metal exterior is never uncomfortable.
Another Google feature is a one-day only addition to the contextual menu in Chrome for Android: you can now ‘Share a reaction’ to any page by taking a self-portrait that’s supposedly then shared with your friends.
Finally from Google, there’s a video of a new product for kids: a talking panda toy that can process search queries. Cute as it is, it’s a little confusing for some web users as ‘Google Panda’ already refers to a 2011 change to Google’s algorithm that dramatically changed the rankings of many websites.
Think Geek has stepped up with a whole range of prank products, with the gag revealed when you try to buy them. My favourites include Groot Beer, a steam-powered console for playing Steam games, and a Game of Thrones-themed edition of Clue with a four foot by two foot board — which is needed to handle the 48 characters and 48 weapons!
Microsoft has supposedly come up with a new mobile phone system, MS-DOS mobile, though you do have to wonder if it would actually get a bigger market share than Windows Phone.
Sony’s offering is PlayStation Flow, a take on motion sensor gaming that allows you to simulate underwater activity in games by actually going for a swim. It supposedly takes advantage of Bluetooth-enabled goggles with motion sensors, headphones and small LCD screens inside the lenses.
HTC is promoting RE Sok, the world’s first smart socks. As well as showing messages on an LCD screen, they contain GPS trackers with a pairing feature to avoid getting odd socks after laundry, and a hole detection feature.
Groupon has supposedly entered the growing taxi app market with Grouber, the first app that lets you order a cab driven by a cat. The service is said to use GPS-based lasers to make sure your feline driver takes the best route.
Speaking of which, Roku’s gag really does sound like a real service waiting to happen. It’s come up with Roku Rendezvous, a service that will bring together single customers who watch the same mix of programming.
This is just a selection as this feels like the busiest April Fool’s Day online so far, so if you’ve spotted any other highlights, post a comment reply and let us know.
Everyone’s favorite irreverent card game launched a new expansion pack on Monday.
The 30-card pack sells for $10 and is science-themed…because the proceeds will help fund a scholarship specifically for women who want to pursue careers in STEM.
“Everyone at Cards Against Humanity was fortunate enough to receive a great college education that helped us find a job that we’re passionate about, and our goal with this scholarship is to make that opportunity available to others,” said Cards Against Humanity community manager Jenn Bane. “Several of the co-creators of Cards Against Humanity earned degrees in science, whereas I got a degree in journalism. Now look at where I am. Writing this press release for them.”
Cards Against Humanity co-creator Josh Dillon, who will defend his thesis on astrophysics at MIT next month, said, “Women are underrepresented in science, tech, engineering, and math, and we felt like the funding from this pack could have the greatest impact by making it possible for more women to get an education in those fields, and by giving them a platform to share their work and their passion for science.”
Science Ambassador Scholarship board member Veronica Berns, PhD. said, “We desperately need diversity in science because the alternative makes no sense. So often girls are told in both overt and subtle ways that they aren’t able to be good at math and science. With this scholarship, I’m excited to get to tell a passionate girl out there, ‘Yes! What you are doing and dreaming is really great, and here’s some help to get you where you want to go.’”
Scholarship applications will be reviewed by a board of over forty women who hold higher degrees and work professionally in science, including representatives from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Harvard Medical School, the Smithsonian Institution, the Adler Planetarium, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, as well as NSF, Huxley, and Hubble fellows.
This Voltron cat condo offers almost 6 feet of sci-fi magnificence for you and your cat(s). Why have a tan carpet cat condo when you could have this? :)
While a zombie apocalypse probably won’t happen, there is enough zombie saturation in the media right now that if you were ever gonna start planning on how to survive one, now would be the time. So what do you think you would do? Who would you team up with? Where would you go? The Walking Dead gets us thinking, can you tell?
i09 has some pretty solid ideas on where to start when faced with a zombie apocalypse. Think weapons, people:
As for ranged weapons, you may want to reconsider that sawed-off shotgun you’re so fond of. Bolt action rifles are both powerful and accurate, without the ammunition restrictions of the close-range shotgun.
That’s definitely worth noting for those of you with an arsenal nearby. For me, it’s cricket bat, Shaun of the Dead style.
Haunted by his turbulent past, Mad Max believes the best way to survive is to wander alone. Nevertheless, he becomes swept up with a group fleeing across the Wasteland in a War Rig driven by an elite Imperator, Furiosa. They are escaping a Citadel tyrannized by the Immortan Joe, from whom something irreplaceable has been taken. Enraged, the Warlord marshals all his gangs and pursues the rebels ruthlessly in the high-octane Road War that follows.
Shadowhunters follows 18-year-old Clary Fray, who finds out on her birthday that she is not who she thinks she is, but rather comes from a long line of Shadowhunters — human-angel hybrids who hunt down demons. When her mother Jocelyn is kidnapped, Clary is thrown into the world of demon hunting with mysterious Shadowhunter Jace and her best friend, Simon. Now living among faeries, warlocks, vampires and werewolves, Clary begins a journey of self-discovery as she learns more about her past and what her future may hold.
The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones was made a feature film back in 2013, and while Screen Gems had hopes of another Hunger Games or Twilight-like franchise, the movie flopped, making only $31 million in the U.S.
“The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones” cast poster, 2013.
This is a project built in Unity 3D, a recreation of Mario 64’s first level, Bob-Omb Battlefield. I originally built this to demonstrate the Super Character Controller, a custom character controller written for Unity, but I got a little carried away. The project is open source and can be downloaded by anybody and used for anything, outside of selling it. Mario, of course, belongs fully to Nintendo, and if you haven’t had the chance to play Mario 64 I’d put it somewhere on your to do list. The game is available on the Nintendo 64, as well as the Wii’s Virtual Console.
Download it here. Requires the Unity webplayer plugin installed.
