I love The Great Gatsby more than I love Watchmen, and the trainwreck that was that adaptation devastated me. This is only going to crush me worse. Not only does Baz Luhrmann suck, but he just upped his fucking blowitude to the next level. He’s filming The Great Gatsby in 3D.

Fuck.
Fucking.
Fucking shit.

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Billy Mitchell may not be the literal king of Donkey Kong anymore. But that doesn’t stop the enterprising motherfucker from cashing in on the flick that made him the biggest douchebag awesometron Vader motherfucker in the video game world. No sir. Mitchell has opened a King of Kong-themed arcade at the Orlando International Airport. Most amazing part of the entire arcade? According to Joystiq, “there’s not a Donkey Kong arcade machine to be found within the joint.”

As they pontificate, he probably doesn’t want his already-crushed record to once again be usurped within the confines of his own establishment.

Mitchell is awesome. This is only further proof.

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Fuck church, how about some existential masturbation on a Sunday? We are currently on a Blue Rock, floating through the cosmos. This launch photo from the International Space Station underlines such a righteous fact.

The launch photo shows the rising  exhausttrail from the rocket just minutes after blast off of the Ariane booster on Feb. 16 from the ESA rocket base in Kourou, French Guiana, South America. The rocket was still on a vertical ascent  trajectory to orbit.

Outstanding. So say we all.

[The following is a true piece of fiction]

My friend Brad is a strange guy. To say the least. You can tell him apart from the rest of the pack because of his occasional vacations to the psych farm and his penchant for wearing sweatpants in the summer. Also, I can’t recall a time in which we hung out and he didn’t carry around a two-liter bottle of Dr. Pepper.   Hell, he’d always offer those present the chance to take a swig, but with the way he slobbers you’d have to be an idiot to oblige.

Anyways, my friend distinguished himself yet again last week as we were hanging out at Chuck E. Cheese. See, Brad’s actually quite well-off because he inherited his uncle’s entire fortune. Uncle Tommy made his money in 1980’s pornography and 1990’s cocaine, and Brad was the only family member who’d give him the time of day. Whereas most of the relatives scorned Tommy for his professional choices, Brad didn’t have any problems with coke snortin’ whores. So when Tommy croaked, Brad became a millionaire. Feeling as though accepting his uncle’s inheritance would cheapen their relationship, Brad has vowed to donate $1,000 once a week.

So every Thursday, Brad and I go to a Chuck E. Cheese with two hundred five-dollar bills. Once there, we wade through the ball pit and deposit the cash at the bottom. We then sit back and watch as the money is discovered. Some weeks it takes hours for all the cash to leave, each paper-archaeologist keeping mum about their findings. Other weeks, well…let’s just say that we’ve seen more than a few fist fights break out.

It’s glorious.

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[images & words is the comic book pick-of-the-week at OL. // caffeine powered note: I begged rendar to let me write about shield #6. I had such a hard-on I needed to ejaculathink about it. He’ll be back next week.]

The final issue of the first volume of Jonathan Hickman and Dustin Weaver’s Shield came out this week, and it struck me at the very core of my philosophical soul. An imbecile dabbling in impracticality, I spent a good portion of my twenties floundering through school and accumulating credits in various philosophy classes. Modern philosophy, medical ethics, existentialism, Ancient Greek, Medieval, and Social Ethics among others.

I absorbed them all but I did so with a problem lingering in the back of my head. The brightest philosophers, the most powerful thinkers, my very heroes; they were all, to an extent, full of fucking shit.

In ways both gorgeous and clinical, Hickman and Weaver make this argument in the final issue of the first volume of Shield. In a way I never could. I don’t have the components, I lack the wiring. But I know a classic when I see it.

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Man, Princess Peach is getting fucking hefty these days. She’s always cooped up in some fucking dungeon. Stuck in a cell with nothing to do but wait for the Koopa family to run the train on her and then go fight that fucking persistent plumber. No shit she’s going to eat her feelings.

This is Press Start! A lightning bolt of stupidity directly into your thinking-pipes, your winding brain machinery. In this column I give a rundown of five things that caught my attention in the world of gaming this week. The list is half-baked, poorly-constructed, and subject to my whimsy. Don’t see something you dug? Good, hit the comments box. Let us have some constructive dialogue.

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#1: Kinect Hack Creates A Superman VR Simulator.
It has to be at least two fucking weeks since I mentioned a Kinect hack. Two weeks. In the span of the video game universe, that’s practically an eternity. No doubt there’s a plethora of content out there, but nothing has been catching my eye. Until this. A good collection of dudes over at the University of Amsterdam got together and hacked the shit out of Kinect to produce a Superman VR simulator. No doubt they were getting lit in their Fortress of Solitude on some of the goods those Dutch have appropriately liberated and came up with the concept.

This thing doesn’t just come off as Oh Hey Neat Idea!, it actually seems fun to play. With a solid Super Fistpump, you take to the skies. And depending on which side of the VR goggles you tap, you either activate your Frost Breath or Heat Vision.

I know that I’m totally dorking out on my love for this shit. Admitted. Guilty. Throw some spandex on me and send me into combat. However, I can’t be as lame as PS3 hacker Geohot. The same dude who let the world see the PS3 rootkey spent this week conjuring up a white boy diss track aimed at Sony. It’s all fun and games until you’re sodomized by the katana of Sony’s robot ninjas, duder.

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#2: Former Director of GTA Planning Game Based On Iranian Revolution.
Navid Khonsari is a man who knows a thing or two about generating  controversy  through video game narrative. Motherfucker was the director of GTA III, Vice City, and San Andreas. So yeah, the guy has caught some heat in his day. Say what you will about the actual content of the games, the dude has weathered the storm, and persisted in telling his tales. Even with that in mind, I have to ruminate on the thunderously large set of testicles he has for attempting his next game. Khonsari wants to make a game about the Iranian Revolution of 1979, and the hostage crisis that surrounded.

Like I said, brass balls.

Khonsari spoke with Joystiq, and elaborated on his vision:

Khonsari described  1979 as a “social political game” that, in addition to open-world, sandbox environments, could feature “strategy elements with the use of AI combatants.” Once in Iran, additional player-controlled characters would be introduced, “allowing you the ability to play a number of different roles,” he added of the game’s lofty design goals. And he wasn’t finished: “The multiplayer aspect is something I am really excited about, but is still in the works.”

If it was executed well, it could be a concentration of video game rock. If there was a seriousness to it that concentrated on using the facets of gaming to execute framework for telling a unique spin on the tale, it could be something special. Or, it could be the usual hyperviolence nonsense that we got from GTA III. Call me an optimist.

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The final arc of Fantastic Four had some serious fans around OL. Serious. Fans. Rendar threw inter-splooge all over the final issue in I&W, and I dedicated a good five-hundred words to fawning all over it. That ultimate arc paved the way for the forthcoming FF #1, where Reed and the rest of the family along with Spider-Man set up to solve tomorrow.

The Gods at Marvel, or perhaps more specifically the Marketing Gurus, have seen fit to drop the first six pages on our gaping asses. They’re fantastic, and I can’t help but be slightly aroused when Sue Storm calls Peter Parker “young man.”

Hit the jump for the preview if you’re so inclined.

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Shit’s gone gold, Shane Black 3 is going to be the director of Iron Man 3. There isn’t anymore ruminating, you can bite this news without worry of Fool’s Gold. According to Deadline, the Obviously Hooded Cabal at Marvel is in final negotiations with Black to direct the final flick in the trilogy, though it isn’t certain if he is going to write it or not.

RDJ teaming up with the dude who essentially relaunched his career, the same dude who wrote The Last Boyscout makes me a bit more excited about this movie. Hopefully it’s more memorable than the cute but ultimately forgettable second installment.

The Sun’s pissed off this week. It must be a bit angsty regarding the fact that it doesn’t have any binary star to share Fabricated Marketing Event Day with, because on Valentine’s Day it unleashed its largest solar flare in years.

Bad Astronomy:

Sunspot 1158 is an active region on the Sun, with a lot of magnetic energy stored up. That energy got released with a bang on Tuesday, creating a solar flare – essentially a magnetic bomb on the surface of the Sun – and a coronal mass ejection (CME) – a huge eruption of subatomic particles blasting outward from the Sun.

The flare can be seen as the sudden bright flash just below and to the right of the center of the Sun’s disk. At the same time you can see an expanding circle of light centered on the Sun. That last bit is the CME. We see these launching off the Sun quite often; usually headed off to the side, looking like a big loop or light-bulb shape moving off. When they head straight Earth, though, they look like a circle that expands as it approaches. That’s how you can tell we’re in the way!

Hit a jump for this cosmic boom in motion.

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I was first made aware of Paolo Rivera through last year’s Spider-Man storyline “One Moment In Time”, and since then I’ve had a huge hankering for his artwork. Goodness gracious the time I’ve wasted not knowing of his existence! But so it goes. Anyways, Rivera’s artwork is gorgeous, and there’s an insane fuckload of it for free on his excellent blog. Today Rivera revealed an Avengers study he’s doing that’s (according to him) a work in progress:

A new  Thor trailer just debuted, so I thought it would be a good excuse to show a recent study of the cinematic Avengers (they’re mostly based on the  concept art that made its way on-line last year). I haven’t really read any  Thor comics, but I’m still excited for the movie. I like what I’ve seen so far and I can’t wait to see them all on the screen together.

It’s fantastic. Get over there for more of his goodness.