Click to viewFor all its confectionery imagery, Christina Ricci scene-stealing and the few other things Speed Racer gets right, it still faces a box-office false start that could make Leatherheads look like a hit in comparison. We sketched a few of the hurdles here yesterday (number one being its own studio's resignation to its underachievement), but at this point there's only one that counts: Larry and Andy Wachowski need to climb out of their hole.

Grand Theft Auto IV is not so much the apotheosis of modern console entertainment as the first post-modern video game. While it provides the usual bloody entertainment, the latest installment of Rockstar's hit title is also a fully-imagined alternate world-complete with a witty satire of 21st century media. Serbian hardman Niko Bellic, the game's central character, can browse a self-mocking version of photo sharing site Flickr ("perfect for hopeless losers who like to spend days categorizing, alphabetizing and organizing their online galleries") and scour the missed connections on Liberty City's craplist.net ("sorry for checking out your 13-year-old daughter"). Most absurd of all are the mock cable shows-though they contend with their real-world equivalents. The newscasters of Weasel News are even more rabid than Bill O'Reilly and his colleagues at Fox News. If you have a friend with a Playstation, get them to show you I'm Rich, a celebrity show which in this episode profiles a cocaine heiress called Chloe Parker and as absurd as Paris Hilton. A campy British narrator-resembling that of the Daily Show's John Oliver-provides the voiceover.

Silicon Valley startup Robotex, which has won the endorsement of Pentagon mercenary suppplier Blackwater, already manufacturers robots with guns. How long until they or anybody else building an army gets their hands on the creepy robocritter featured in the clip embedded below? Watch as a modular robot made by scientists at the University of Pennsylvania reassembles itself when kicked apart.

The movie-going public is experiencing an endless continuum of superhero summers, a trend that doesn't look to be abating any time this decade. The occasional comic-cum-movie is an artistic success, but generally the final product is nothing but a debacle, the latest of which is Sin City creator Frank Miller's mission to ruin comics legend Will Eisner's classic The Spirit. As bad as The Spirit with cell phones might well be, it pales next to the specter of forthcoming adaptations of the already troubled The Incredible Hulk, and the rest of the in-production or planned films ripped from comic book pages: Wolverine, Watchmen, Iron Man, Atlantis Rising, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, Nick Fury, Madman, Hack/Slash, Largo Winch, Luke Cage, Whiteout, Wanted, Magneto, Superman: Man of Steel, The Sub-Mariner, Punisher: War Zone, Hellboy 2, Sin City 2, and Spiderman 4, just to name a few. There are absolutely worthy properties here, but the majority of these features will fade away like so many Daredevils. But fear not, Hollywood. Here are four comics tailor-made for the screen that may eventually be needed to bring the genre back to life.

These mock newspapers are props from Clockwork Orange, Stanley Kubrick's long-banned 1971 movie, starring Malcolm McDowell as a psychopathic gang leader in a dystopic 1990s England. The Ludovico cure touted in the headlines is a brutal and experimental aversion therapy. Science fiction site io9 has a roundup of other futuristic newspapers from the movies. Enjoy the imagery: before print newspapers disappear from circulation, they'll disappear from movie-makers' vision of the future.

Photo by Nick Poteri

The most compelling thing about Battlestar Galactica's Cylons is that some don't know they are biomechanical creations, not human beings. That makes them the perfect metaphor for sweetly unbearable videoblogger Robert Scoble, says TV by the Numbers. Scoble, a microcelebrity in the Silicon Valley for his hyperactive social networking, subscribes to an inhuman number of Twitter users — 19,684, to be precise. The obvious conclusion: He's gathering data about humanity in preparation for some nefarious scheme beyond our understanding. We have met our overlords, and they are armed with videocameras. (Photomontage by Richard Blakeley)

Jericho, CBS's excellent postapocalyptic drama set in rural Kansas has been cancelled. Again. Jericho drew a large following among the tech demo. Besides the obvious sci-fi draw, Jericho explored themes of government intervention and self-sufficiency, which are passionate topics among the more tinfoil-hat Libertarians of the Web. But shows that please netizens aren't moneymakers.

High dynamic range imaging, a technique which amplifies the tonal range in a photograph, is particularly effective in capturing cityscapes. This panorama, New York City at Night, by Paulo Barcellos, gives the midtown skyscrapers an ambience that looks borrowed from the computer generated imagery of the Batman movies. Click the image to enlarge.

When I was a lot younger, I taped — onto VHS! — all of the original Star Trek episodes when they aired at 3 a.m. on Friday nights, so I could watch them later. If only I had waited 13 years. CBS has put all three seasons of Star Trek online for anyone to view, along with a number of other old shows to the Audience Network, including The Twilight Zone, Hawaii Five-O and MacGyver.

The science fair: a traditional rite of passage for all American schoolchildren. The nerds who do it well, the losers who do it at the last second, and everyone in between. Add in the fact that science fair projects get assigned in middle school—when all of us are at our most disgustingly awkward—and you have all the ingredients for some of the most hilarious pictures you have ever seen. After the jump, the ten greatest science fair project photos [from a longer list at Photo Basement] on the Internet, or anywhere else in the universe.

The Valley, despite the pretensions of some tech bloggers, has no influence on national politics. Candidates swing by, mutter "network neutrality" and other shibboleths, collect buckets of cash, and return to Washington richer but otherwise unchanged. This sad reality explains why we indulge ourselves in fantasies that we're run by aliens or robots. Those are politicians we could actually relate to. That's right: If Ron Paul supporters believed Obama was a Borg drone, they'd be more likely to vote for him.

Holographic TV? Restaurant recommendations from Google via your car? In today's paper, Wall Street Journal technology reporters guess what 10 years into the future will hold for shopping, games, TV, films, social networks, search, news and privacy. It's been 10 years since the last time the Journal tried to predict the future. In 1998, they predicted electronic books would win "sweeping acceptance" and that online bill payment systems wouldn't gain much traction. Oops. Those errors, it seems, led the Journal to make all-too-cautious prognostications for the near future.

I've always been oddly fascinated by datacenters — the rectilinear racks of servers, the curving twists of cabling. Turns out I'm not alone. Royal Pingdom has assembled a collection of creepily organic, eerily beautiful shapes of datacenter cabling. (Photo by tim_d)

If you're sick of exploring the big empty known as Second Life, NASA plans to open a virtual frontier for cybernauts. Convinced the only way to get kids to do anything these days is to shove a game in front of them, the Learning Technologies Project Office is developing a multiplayer online game that will simulate the space agency's real science and engineering missions. Will the game indoctrinate the next generation into signing up with NASA's moon colonization recruiting office, too?

In the future, poor people will never win at video games. A new edition of EA's popular Battlefield game series will be free online, unless you want to buy weapons and other upgrades. Just as in World of Warcraft (where busy players sometimes hire people to level up their characters), people who can pay more will have a better chance of winning, except this time the cheating is officially sanctioned. (Naturally, South Korea has been doing this for four years.) Sorry poors, but gaming is now like the real world, where winning means having the most money.

Last night was the premiere of Cloverfield on Paramount's lot, an event they were kind enough to invite us to. Without getting too deeply into the what and the how of it, we'll only say that the movie was the rare release to receive a unanimous thumbs up from Defamer HQ: short, slick, and ferociously sweet.

After enjoying the dulcet tones of Steve Jobs at the keynote earlier in the day, we slam-danced to the nerd-rock stylings of '80s new wave band Devo. Decked out in our red energy dome hats, very special correspondent Paul Boutin and I headed to the historic Warfield club in San Francisco for Macworld Blast. The event doubled as the launch party for Microsoft Office 2008 — the new, Mac-only version of Office. Devo, though they're getting (more than) a little gray in the head, definitely rocked the house, performing at the Warfield for the first time since New Year's Eve 1991. Here's our spud's-eye view of Devo.

Gavin Newsom, San Francisco's freshly reelected god-mayor, descended into the bowels of Second Life for a quaint fireside chat with Philip Rosedale, CEO of Linden Lab. What lofty matters could a city mayor and the chieftain of a seamy virtual world possibly have to discuss? Why, the parallels between the "two famously diverse and tech-savvy communities with global profiles," of course. As Newsom said during their discourse, "We're all geeks." But the comparisons don't stop there. San Francisco is exactly like Second Life.

I'll admit it, I'm jealous: While Valleywag remains stuck with a logo that looks like an IBM monitor from 1982, io9, Gawker Media's newly launched sci-fi site, has gotten a wickedly cool illustration. The future is coming, and it is diabetically adorable. I quizzed site editor Annalee Newitz on the origins of the logo.

Valleywag dwells on sex, greed, and hypocrisy. That leaves little room for the merely quirky, edgy, and unprofitable. For that, we present to you io9, a new sci-fi blog published, like Valleywag, by Gawker Media. All of our colleagues are dutifully saying nice things. There will be none of that from Valleywag, thank you very much. Don't get us wrong: We are grateful for the existence of io9, run by surly media nerd Annalee Newitz ("sparkly-crap mobile circuit-board garbage gizmo mass-produced by machines").