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Turns out that some of our new-in-box Sega Dreamcasts delivered to us magically via unicorn are a little love-worn. You might have seen the Gizmodo, Destructoid, and Consumerist posts about it. 'Cause, see, we don't really know where these Dreamcasts came from--could've been a liquidator, a Circuit City that had closed shop, or a 7-11. We just don't know, and it looks like returned merchandise is in the mix. So now we've decided to QA/QC all the incoming Dreamcasts to ensure fresh and crispy game play. Behold Hans working through a pile of consoles and slapping them with "QC PASSED" stickers when they meet muster, just like in the movies! He takes his job very seriously, hugging each console before snuggling it back into its box. But not really. That would be creepy. 
Stardate -313650.56941273477. The ThinkGeek monkeys traveled to the far reaches of the galaxy to watch the newest Star Trek to grace the viewscreen. Despite our red shirts, we found the theater inhabitants friendly and most of our team returned to the ship unscathed. Our field report follows. Please be aware you may find slight spoilers, both real and imagined.  Staff reports:"A genuine Trek, despite having too much Star Wars influence (Delta Vega monsters, Scotty's sidekick, etc), unnecessary exposition, action sequences chained to ridiculous lengths, and not enough time spent on character (re-)development. I'd love to see this Star Trek slowed down for the small screen." --Jacob "Not enough red shirts slaughtered. But I liked how everybody died in the end." --Willie "I honestly enjoyed it much more than I thought I would. The opening scene was very moving. The only thing I didn't like was the music. It was just kind of movie lame, rather than being anything grand and special. But all in all, not the Star Wars prequels disaster I thought it could be." --Chris "Loved it! The nods to the character quirks were brilliant, and it had the perfect balance of action, tech and humor. The new love story was a little weird, but I'll let that one go." --Jen "Nothing more (or less) than what I expected: a wild, non-stop action ride through space. The poorly written script bounces from one not-so-subtle reference to the cliches of its predecessors while Captain Kirk hangs off the edge of one thing or another. Still, lots of things go boom, bam, and zoom with undeniable eye-catching fun. So, if that's what you're looking for (and, really, who isn't?), you can't do better than Star Trek." --Ken "I thought Kirk got all the chicks! I wanna see the Chris Pine/Winona Ryder scene on the cutting room floor!" --Fraize "As a non Star Trek fan, I loved it. I was especially fond of the mocking of Kirk and Simon Pegg as Scotty. I <3 Simon Pegg. As expected from J.J. Abrams and his people, there were a lot of quick references, so keep your eyes peeled. Its definitely FTW. I'll go see it again." --Andrea "I'm more of a TNG fan than TOS, but I loved it. Also, assigned seating on opening day FTW." --Regan "Slickly produced with plenty of TOS-esque cheeseball. My favorite characters were Dr. Cameron, Sylar, Lydia, and Lens Flare." --Carrie Reviews via the Twitterings:@upsidedowndog: Hull integrity at 95%. @LycoLoco: JJ Abrams did for the Star Trek series what Ronald D Moore did for BSG. It was a series reboot/reinvention at its finest. @HugoMunsterberg: New Star Trek movie is like if Kirk and Picard had a baby. And that baby turned out to be a high-grossing summer blockbuster. @Daffydil: Hallo, my name is James T Kirk. You killed my father, prepare to die! @MattAlgren: The kid in front of me said it was "Awesome. Better than Star Wars III." I think that's good.
 ThinkGeek HQ is ground zero for the first-ever biological virus to make the leap to computer hardware. That's right--today we had an outbreak of H1N1 in our database, and it caused our monkeybots to go crazy and give away some orders for free! Ok, so we didn't really have swine flu, but we definitely had a glitch that caused some orders so go out at zero cost. You can bet that for a few minutes, the ThinkGeek staff were hoping to jump on the free product train, but we thought better of ourselves and decided to actually fix the problem instead. :) Since we've always said that our customers are t3h awesome and we love you all so much, we let a bunch of the free orders go through. Heck, you deserve it, you had a rough day too, right? So enjoy your free--nay, priceless--goodies if you were lucky enough to get here in time. Since we plan on not letting that happen again, we hope you enjoyed our one-time only Swine Flu sale. And since we did such a good job today both breaking and fixing the site, we're going to treat the staff to Star Trek tomorrow afternoon, though the database plans to stay at home to recuperate.
The Internet can be a scary place. Which sucks when you're at work and you want to visit those scary places! We've developed this handy flowchart to help you keep your job.
You're welcome. :)
Unless you're from bizarro world, you probably realize by now that ThinkGeek enjoys fooling you all with impossible products on April Fools Day. We always try and make our ideas funny yet plausible, which tends to get us in trouble. Why? Because every year we seem to come up with something so weird and fantastic that you actually really really want it. This year it was the Tauntaun sleeping bag, an idea cooked up by Christian, the ThinkGeek designer monkey. The concept was made perfect by Hans's suggestion to make the zipper pull a lightsaber. Brilliant! To make the joke as realistic as possible, we actually had a prototype made by our uber geeky and crafy friend, Misty. Be sure to check out her blog post on how she made it. As you can see from our before and after, we had to tweak it a little in Photoshop, but Misty's prototype was amazing even before we modified it.
Some other fun April Fools tidbits: #1) The Squeeze bacon was actually made from frosting! We wanted something that would hold up well under photography and video conditions and not go rancid. A combo of shortening, powdered sugar, food coloring, wheat germ created the bacon-looking goo, while the bottle was from a product called 'Coco Real' which we just spray painted and labeled up. It was edible, but it wasn't bacon. #2) Our unicorn chaser was made using pink body wash and lots of glitter, and was decidedly not edible. #3) Those portal shirts took a long time to prototype well, and in our case, the cake was not only not a lie, but delicious!!
We hope you guys had as much of a blast as we did and if you haven't yet, be sure to take a gander at all of our 4/1 goodies. Also, if you are interested in actually owning a Tauntaun sleeping bag, get details here on signing up to get emailed if and when it's released.
The Sci-Fi Channel's Battlestar Galactica re-made the world and the mythos of Starbuck, Apollo, Adama, and their quest for Earth. There were early surprises, like putting women in the roles of Starbuck and Boomer, and the revelation of humanoid Cylons. There were the set design surprises: They still use cassette tapes and curly phone cords? Isn't this the future? Yeeeaaah, about that...is it too late to say 'spoiler alert'?  To see how our house-brand Galactica fan monkeys took the ending, we followed the unscientific research method of just asking them. Our preliminary findings indicate that:
Fraize thought, "Nice finale, but the whole thing felt like one big writing exercise to me - except he kept writing himself into a corner, and could only awkwardly and poorly work his way out." Jen claimed, "I liked it. It was wrapped up with a nice pretty bow. Of course, it would have been great to have everybody live happily ever after, but then it wouldn't be 'cool' would it?" Carrie sighed, "It felt like watching a funeral, and not in a 'celebration of life' kind of way. Very dirgeful." Jacob griped, "In a setting where people can be fabricated and programmed, it was incredibly lazy to wrap it up with a lot of cape-and-top-hat-wearing magic. I still have the old theme running through my brain, tho'" and Willie admitted, "Stopped watching the series towards the beginning of season four when Baltar headed up that monotheistic cult. Just got dis-interested. Unlike most though, I can still watch the finale for the first time!"
We know our viewpoints might just be Cylon programming, though, so we checked with the greater Twitterverse to gain some objectivity:
@jenxdigital:
The Bill/Laura ending was the saddest, I think...his love was gone, and
he was all alone. Everything else, honestly made sense. @ripetomato: Wish there was resolution re:Starbuck. Sad that mains who lost someone had to be alone-Adama, Tyrol, Lee to some extent. Epilogue was cheesy @CarolynLindeman:
The only thing that puzzles me is the blatant social commentary at the
end. The other social issues were woven into the story line well. - @thebrassbunny: I think the fact that not a lot of people are talking about this "grand finale" speaks volumes.
What did you think of the finale? Will Dollhouse fill the void in your Friday nights? Are you planning to tune in to The Plan this fall? Are you taking a vow of silence until Caprica is eventually released? Tell us in the comments!
Like most geeks out there, we've wanted to see a live space shuttle launch for many years. Well, we finally got the chance, and I was the lucky monkey to be able to do it! This shuttle launch had been scrubbed several times due to a leak in a liquid hydrogen vent line, but luckily, the Sunday evening launch had an on-time liftoff. The rocket booster fire trail was so bright during the first minute that it was almost too bright to even look at. We were far enough away that there was some rocket noise but not too much, mostly between 1 and 2 minutes in. I was surprised how quickly the whole event happened, with the final high point being the solid rocket boosters separation about 2 minutes after liftoff. It was an amazing sight and well worth the drive from my secret TG Megaplex Offsite Location and a few hours of waiting. If you ever have a chance to see a live launch - go! You will be forever thankful.
If there is a more perfect foodstuff, we have yet to find it. Perhaps astronaut ice cream? Nah. Has to be pie. There is also the perfect irrational number - PI! Timmy has memorized the digits of this blessed ratio of the circumference of a circle to its radius out to 193 digits. Well, he used to know it out to 350, but forgot 157 of them after having a few too many cocktails with famous people at SXSWi.
While Timmy was rubbing elbows, the rest of the monkeys at ThinkGeek World Domination HQ celebrated Pi Day - marked on your calendars as 3/14 at 1:59:26am. With this year's Pi Day being a bleary Saturday morning, it was decided to celebrate a half-day earlier with a Pie-ron Chef competition featuring pies of all sizes and fillings. Staff monkeys brought in their favorite pies, including fruit pies, custardy pies, pecan pie, savory pies like spinach pie and pizza pie, and even whoopie pies! It was a delicious way to celebrate.  If you've got 45 minutes to spare, be sure to watch the video of us making a mess of the kitchen with an explosion of pie!
These last few days have been exciting here at geek HQ, with many of the staff atwitter (in both senses) after having seen Watchmen. The reviews have come pouring in of course, and we thought we'd distill some of them for you in easily-digestible Twitter-like chunks. (Wow, two Twitter references in 2 sentences!) So check out what the monkeys at ThinkGeek are saying about Watchmen:
- Danny says, "Watching the movie feels just like reading a comic book, although I've never read the original story"
- Jacob's thoughts were "Flame me if you want, but the new ending is so much better. When I read the book, I thought Alan Moore was just trying to see how far he could stretch the geekly suspension of disbelief."
- Fraize summarized: "The world's smartest man has super-ninja-monkey-moves, the biggest badass wears a fedora, and the superman exists - and he has a great big blue swinging... ego."
- Carrie told us "The first scene was rhythmically filmed and paced just like a drawn page from the book, but the editing went downhill from there."
- Shane raved "Visually stunning, captured the feel of the comic perfectly. Acting was top notch, and frankly I loved the movie - even though I'm positive Alan Moore would hate it (provided he ever watched it)."
- and Rob sums things up by saying "Action packaged and anatomically correct!"
So what did YOU think of Watchmen? Let us know in the comments!
Our resident T-Shirt girl, Regan, turned another year older today, and in her honor and to further proclaim our collective love of all things bacon, we whipped up a collaborative birthday cake. She loves cats. She loves bacon. And since we're also fans of Scalzi and his BaconCat, we came up with this delicious combo of cake, kittehs, buttercream and bacon fantasies. We present to you "Giant Bacon on Tiny Kittehs".  NOM. Happy Birthday, Regan!
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