This Week in Geekdom

What's this? Two posts in one week? At this still semi-early stage in the year you guys have seen a couple new features on the blog and this latest tidbit is the last in this crop of experiments. Over the next few months the new features will be tweaked and adjusted as I get an idea of how popular/useful they are. The major post types (the ones that get their own subheadings at the top of the page) will continue as before. As always, if you guys have strong opinions about how the blog is constructed, or would like to contribute to this new features, feel free to let me know on any one of our social media pages or via nerdycare@gmail.com.

This Week in Geekdom is essentially a round-up of events that fall within the purview of nerdery and occurred or were released within the past seven days. Makes sense right? The idea is to cover both pertinent posts from major news outlets and interesting pieces from smaller publishers, crowdfunding proposals, or blogs. It's less a litany of breaking news and more of a "hey, you may have missed this."  And, without further ado...

Games

Obviously, one of the biggest stories of the week was the kerfluffle surrounding the disastrous release of the newest edition of Sim City. You couldn't even open a muggle/normie news source without hearing about it. Though we already discussed this a bit, Forbes put together this commentary framed around a rare public outburst from an (alleged) EA employee. Aside from its general disregard for its customers, EA is also notorious for squelching any and all dissent within both its current and former ranks. I don't think this will be the last we'll see of this sort of backlash, but it will be interesting to see if this frustration actually fosters any change.

In what I'm sure is a wonderfully-backhanded coincidence...ok, it's totally a ploy to capitalize on EA's colossal failure, Steam is offering massive discounts on the excellent city-building game Tropico 4 by Kalypso Media Digital. Tropico 4 and its expansions have controls that are simple to grasp, but a deep and complex gameplay that will satisfy fans of strategic simulation games. The sale lasts until March 15th.

Given all the attention that's been thrust at EA, it's easy to overlook one of the other major recent releases.

It's already reached its funding goal, but if you haven't seen the trailer for the proposed Shadowrun Online game, you owe it to yourself to go check it out.

Comics

Disney and Stan Lee are on the brink of an enormous legal throwdown. I'd say this would have been a titanic clash a couple decades ago, but, with Mr. Lee suffering from several health problems and Disney being...well, Disney it doesn't bode well for the comic mastermind.

Feel good story of the week: a group of college buddies are banding together to honor a classmate whose life was cut short by an aggressive brain tumor by getting the latter's writings turned into a comic book series. Best of luck to these guys.

Movies

Because JJ Abrams apparently never sleeps, he worked as a consultant on the script for Iron Man 3. You know, when he's not producing multiple TV shows, putting the finishing touches on the upcoming installment of Star Trek or laying the groundwork for Episode VII of Star Wars.

Science

Though Sim City may be drowning in its own heinous publicity at the moment, digital city planning still has enormous real-world applications. Check out this so-called "City of Tomorrow" built almost entirely on algorithms and simulations.

Dutch airline KLM announced that it will be using biofuels, specifically fuels derived from cooking oil, on its transatlantic crossings.

Nearly two years after the horrific earthquake and resultant tsunami that caused Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant to meltdown, a small cadre of journalists were permitted to inspect the clean up efforts. This amazing video shows what's being done to decontaminate the stricken facility.

Conventions

Some fans of the A Song of Ice and Fire series were treated to this art exhibit at SXSW.

That's it for now! Hope everyone has a great week!