Giant Freakin Robot

Over two years ago, a random Twitter user showcased his genius by calling out Detroit’s mayor, Dave Bing, to get a RoboCop statue up in their city. “Philadelphia has a statue of Rocky & Robocop would kick Rocky’s butt,” said the tweet. “He’s a GREAT ambassador for Detroit.” Bing tweeted back that Detroit had “not any plans to erect a statue to Robocop,” but thanked him for the suggestion. An Internet outcry then got this successful Kickstarter fund in place, which raised over $67,000 on a $50,000 goal. So where are they now?

Over 90 percent of the foam elements have been completed in full detail, as new photos show us. According to Imagination Station’s director of development Brandon Walley, the foam will be completed at the British Columbia company Across the Board Creations before moving over to Detroit’s Venus Bronze Works to get the bronze molding and pouring. There is no real time frame for the project’s completion, but it’s more an issue of quality rather than being delayed for any reason.

“We’re looking at it hopefully being put in place by the end of summer next year,” Walley said. “We’re not so concerned with the end time right now. It’s just making sure it’s perfect in terms of look.” Check out the pieces below.

The subject of Star Trek Into Darkness spoilers has been a hot topic for months, and it certainly hasn’t been helped in recent days that the movie opened a week early in the U.K., meaning you’ve had to make a concerted effort to stay the hell away from internet comment threads if you wanted to go in unspoiled. It turns out that Conan O’Brien’s TBS show recently included what at least one website interpreted as a major spoiler bomb during a funny Trek-related video last week. We’ll explain the situation in full below, but first we’re going to focus on the way O’Brien addressed the subject after being called out on it by ComicBook.com. That response is the video above, which proves true that time-honored wisdom: one good accidental spoiler deserves a half-dozen fake ones.

At the bottom you can see the original Conan video that stirred up this ruckus, but be warned: unintentional or no, it may contain one great big giant

SPOILER!!!

John Carpenter’s The Thing is a certified genre classic, and at least some of the credit for that comes down to its bleak, ambiguous ending. It leaves audiences — and its two surviving characters — without any answers or resolution, a brave choice given that Hollywood likes a lot of things, but complexity and ambiguity aren’t generally on that list. It shouldn’t surprise us, then, to learn that Universal, the studio behind The Thing, tried to talk Carpenter into leaving audiences with a more traditional — and much less interesting — final scene.

Speaking at the CapeTown Film Festival a few weeks back, Carpenter revealed that Universal put up “big time” resistance to the director’s vision of The Thing’s ending, and instead wanted to basically just chop off the last part of what we saw in the finished film. Here’s how Carpenter recalls it:

The studio asked me to cut the movie, drop out the final scene, have Kurt Russell do what he does with the dynamite, blow it up and then walk out, and the movie ends. It didn’t test any differently. I said, ‘We’re not gonna do that. We’re gonna do my ending.’

When it comes to the fabricated world of virtual reality, we often picture being able to explore a vast, pixilated world — as in a first-person video game — or being able to study and examine things in a three-dimensional way that would be impossible with just our hands and eyes — such as what the CAVE2 is proposing. But a recent program put to use by the futuristic VR headset Oculus Rift will take you out of the world entirely, at least digitally.

Unicorn7, a creative team composed of Erkki Trummal (Estonian), André Berlemont (French), and Morten Brunbjerg (Danish), put together the program “Disunion – The Guillotine Simulator” for the Exile Game Jam. In case the name didn’t completely give it away for you, this “game” will put its users through a virtual beheading, complete with a somewhat historical backdrop which you’ll be able to get a peek at just before the blade drops.

Through the goggles, users face the basket that their detached cranium will soon fall into, but they can look around first. The below video shows friends putting each other through the beheading process, complete with karate chops to the back of the neck, just as the blade would come down. If these guys were anything like Steven Seagal, those neck chops would be even more dangerous than the blades. Check out the video below and make a list of your enemies most susceptible to motion sickness.