DECEMBER

Hello 2013! Nice to meet you. But before we get ourselves acquainted, I have a little bit of unfinished business with 2012. Let me share my favourite things from the last month of last year!

1) LEGO Helm’s Deep

A production team called Brotherhood Workshop made this rather amazing LEGO animation piece for the Machinima Interactive Film Festival. It’s a slightly different take on the Helm’s Deep battle sequence as you’ll see (Legolas goes on a quest to find a box for Gimli) but definitely worth your time. Twice.

2) Isaac Newton vs. Rube Goldberg

2dphotography made what is a pretty mind blowing machine. If you don’t know what a Rube Goldberg machine is, just think of the OK Go video for “This Too Shall Pass”.

This one, while not as large as OK Go’s, is even more impressive. Why? Gravity. Trust me, when you see it, you’ll freak out.

3) The Best Astronomy Images of 2012

Phil Plait is a friend of the site here. I got to meet him at Dragon*Con this past year and he’s the nicest guy you can meet. Add to that, he’s a fricken astronomy genius, and you have someone who I can listen to talk about space for hours.

As I’ve mentioned here previously, I love some space photography and Phil has gathered his favourite astronomy images of the year together in a great article on Slate.com.

You can read that article by CLICKING HERE. But to give you a taste here is the first picture and his description:

“On Aug. 31, 2012, the Sun had a major hissy fit: A vast arch of material was lifted up off the surface by the Sun’s powerful magnetic field. Sometimes these arches collapse back down, but this one erupted, blasting literally hundreds of millions of tons of superheated plasma into space at a speed of 1,400 kilometers per second (900 miles per second)—over a thousand times faster than a rifle bullet. The scale of this is crushing—the arch was 300,000 kilometers (200,000) miles) across, 25 times larger than the Earth. As we near the peak of the Sun’s magnetic cycle, we’ll be seeing even more activity like this in the coming months.”

Pretty cool huh? And that’s just the first one.

4) Break The Wall Down

A team of mad scones called Sinners Domino Production attempted, and completed, a Guinness world record breaking 30m long, 31,405 domino wall last July in Germany.

The video below shows the whole domino set, which features flags from around the world, but the particular record breaking wall will not be hard to miss. It’s huge!

The whole thing (not just the wall) involved 128,000 dominoes, of which 127,141 toppled. There is even a massive pyramid in there too, just for laughs.

I was a massive fan of these growing up and it’s still bloody impressive when you think of the time and patience it takes to set something like this up.

5) Doctor Who Puppet Adventures

Alisa Stern is the master of a rather wonderful Matt Smith Doctor Who puppet. She runs a tumblr, blogging his exploits. Recently she made a stop motion video for Christmas and it turned out uncannily similar to the new BBC Christmas special (in some aspects at least).

Here is her description:

“A few months ago I decided to go a step further and create a Doctor Who stop motion Christmas special in my free time. I wrote the script and made the snowman puppet weeks the BBC announced that the official Christmas special would be called “The Snowmen.” I promise that no real TARDIS was used during production.”

It’s only a very short video, but it’s quite sweet and I think young Who fans will especially love it.

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And that’s it! My favourite things of the last month.

– Aaron Poole is the creator of pretzel spoons. He is also more accurately an internet whore and rarely leaves the house. If you like what you read here check out his blog http://aaronfever.blogspot.com

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