BioWare has announced the next Mass Effect 2 DLC: Lair of the Shadow Broker, dropping uh, sometime. Apparently the DLC takes place in response to a bunch of hogwash bullshit that took place during Mass Effect 2 that we never saw. But was in a comic book.

Uh?

Isn’t like, some of this essential narrative information?

via kotaku:

After Shepard died in the beginning of Mass Effect 2, his blue-skinned friend Liara T’Soni fought a desperate battle to recover his body from the mysterious Shadow Broker. Now it’s time to settle the score.

Detailed in the Mass Effect 2 comic book series from Dark Horse, Liara went through hell to recover Commander Shepard’s remains from the mysterious information broker known as the Shadow Broker, delivering them to Cerberus, where our hero was eventually reconstituted.

Good god damn. I hate it when important plot points are used as selling points for various cross-merchandising. I would have liked to thank Miss Sexy Blue Skin for her efforts when I met her in one of my nineteen playthroughs of Mass Effect 2 for, you know, capturing my body and bringing it to get revived. Only fuggin’ Bioware didn’t let me know of this, because I didn’t read a comic.

Whatever.

In this DLC, you’ll be teaming up with Liara to storm the Shadow Broker and lay some whup down on his ass. Good. This douche has been a serious pain in Shepard’s ass since he double-crossed Tali back in the original. Let’s do this.

[images & words is the comic book pick-of-the-week at OL. equal parts review and diatribe, the post highlights the most memorable/infuriating/entertaining book released that wednesday]

Spoilers Ahead. Forreal.

Sometime ago, Marvel unleashed an event on the Spider-Man universe called One More Day. This story essentially undid years and years of continuity and character development; in exchange for Aunt May’s life, Peter Parker and Mary Jane agree to allow Mephisto to retcon their lives any way he sees fit. Of course, he makes it so that they were never married.

Fugging hogwash.

For the most part, I feel that rewriting character history is a dangerous endeavor. By saying This and that and the other thing never happened, a writer is basically tossing out the stories that fans have spent years reading. The characters don’t really develop and readers can pretty much count on future tales coming to similar conclusions.

I’m going to pause for a second, to add some counterbalance to my tirade. I’m not opposed to reboots or reimaginings of all sorts. In fact, I think that harnessing fresh perspectives to relaunch franchises can lead to products that are better than the originals (see: Battlestar Galactica, The Dark Knight, etc.). But what I can’t stomach is the constant rehashing of tried-and-true formulas.

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Thor is bringing Nordic Thunder to Marvel Vs Capcom 3, and Amaterasu from Okami is rollin’ up with him. It makes smart fuggin’ sense for Marvel. With the Thor movie dropping next year, they’ve upped his comic book titles to something like as seventyjillionteen. A video game presence is only going to help. And as far as Amaterasu? Gotta put in some genital-scrubbin’ cult favorites.

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I dig. Hit the jump for their character artwork.

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Dildos are awesome. That’s a universal fact. You disagree? Well, fuck you! I have thousands upon thousands of years of humans who think dildos are the Bee’s Knees, the Cat’s Pajamas, and other cool stuff.

Boom:

via livescience:

The carved bone was unearthed at a Mesolithic site in Motala, Sweden, that is rich with ancient artifacts from between 4,000 to 6,000 B.C. The area’s unique features may have allowed bone artifacts, which usually get destroyed over the millennia, to survive.

“It’s an organic object, that’s why it’s special,” Gruber told LiveScience. “Normally when we excavate early Mesolithic sites we never get the organic material. But this site where we’re excavating now is along the shoreline. The preservation is very good here — it’s been lying in the bottom sediments and clay layers of the river, and it’s been well preserved there.”

The dildo-like object is about 4 inches (10.5 cm) long and 0.8 inches (2 cm) in diameter.

It’s not the first time that such a phallic object has been found from the ancient world. Another item strongly resembling a penis was unearthed in Germany in 2005. That one is even older — dating from 28,000 years ago — and made of stone.

As I tumble towards the certainty that I am going to amount to nothing, I’ve come to a new conclusion. I’m going to begin crafting dildos out of melted down Nintendo Entertainment System cartridges, and hiding them. So, god willing, in four to five-thousand years, someone can dig up my dildo. This is my new (hopefully) attainable goal.

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Our brains aren’t built to comprehend this shit, but let’s try. You can fit one million Earths inside the sun. And yet? A recently discovered star is 300 times more massive than the sun.

via io9:

Astronomers have identified the most massive stars known. These objects are millions of times brighter than our Sun and the largest of them all is a whoppin’ 300 times the mass of our favorite star.

The stars were discovered in two clusters–NGC 3603 and RMC 136a–and researchers used a “combination of instruments on the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, in addition to archival data from the Hubble Space Telescope, to study the stellar nurseries.” With this combination of tools, they were able to discover some almost scary details about R136a1, the most massive of the stars:

Its current mass is approximately 265 solar masses, and its estimated birth weight was as much as 320 times that of our sun. R136a1 also has the highest luminosity of any star found to date — nearly 10 million times greater than the sun.

Good lord. I can’t even begin to imagine that shit. This thing needs a way cooler name than R136a1, though.

Thar be some insane muscles!

I always wonder what sort of horse-balls derived, HGH-rich diet Hollywood actors are on, to achieve the physiques of well, Norse gods. Bask in the rippling mountains of Thor’s muscles in this picture. And silently weep (if you’re like me) at your lax, rippling waves of lack-of-tone.

San Diego Comic Con is going to break my back with newsworthy updates. Revealed today in Marvel Vs Capcom 3 were Chun Li, Dr. Doom, Super Skrull, and Trish from Devil May Cry. What an eclectic lot of studs and studettes. Though I have to say, I doubt anyone will come close to the awesomeness that is Deadpool and his 4th-Wall breaking super move.

Hit the jump to see their character artwork.

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[legend has it that Ernest Hemingway wrote a six-word story to win a bar bet — For sale: baby shoes, never worn. leading to the author’s birthday, I’m going to offer a daily post of my own six-word story. readers are encouraged to respond with their own]

Birthday wishes for the dead hero.

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[buy here | click to enlarge]

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For the upcoming San Diego Comic Con, Marvel has dropped two super-ballin’ concept paintings. One for Captain America, and one for Thor. These guys are absurdly bad ass.

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The great irony here may be that the paintings designed to promote the movies may actually show why there’s something about these characters in graphic form that cannot be captured by cameras.