Marvel and LucasArts

This week was pretty big with the only kind of nerd news that seems to really exist anymore: Marvel and Star Wars shit. In order to ensure that the moviegoing public of the future will be utterly lost at the absence of a superhero on their cinema screens, Marvel announced their next five years of endless comic-book movies. In addition to sequels to properties like Captain America, Guardians of the Galaxy, Thor, and The Avengers, Marvel's biggest announcements were the arrival of a Black Panther movie, as well as a female Captain Marvel.

Called into play Black Panther will be Chadwick Boseman, whose recent outings as Jackie Robinson and James Brown (in the equally lukewarmly-received 42 and Get On Up, respectively) should have tipped anyone off to his inevitable stasis in the Marvel universe. More surprising is the reveal of a female Captain Marvel, which may be Marvel's way of responding to criticism that there is a serious deficit of strong women in their movies. Anything to avoid having to make a Wonder Woman movie, I guess.

Also, this week, it was revealed that the beloved LucasArts computer games of your childhood will be coming back, giving you absolutely no reason to engage in anything that has no nostalgic value. GOG.com is re-releasing classics like Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, The Secret of Monkey Island and the Star Wars simulators TIE Fighter and X-Wing. All told, 20 games will be rolled out, making sure that you'll stay in your house forever, with the exception of opening weekend excursions to see a Marvel property.

The struggle is real.

The Flaming Lips

Continuing their career trend of slowly giving less of a fuck about anything that is not a wacky experiment, the Flaming Lips recently dropped their latest blasé mind-fuck: With a Little Help From My Fwends. As you might be able to deduce, the album is a re-imagining of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, featuring guest spots from an eclectic group of contributors like Foxygen, Dr. Dog, Miley Cyrus, Tegan and Sara, My Morning Jacket and Maynard James Keenan from Tool.

Also, as you might expect, it's an interesting mess. Still, when the day comes that the Flaming Lips are no more, and we won't be getting any more zip drives encased in gummy skulls, or 24-hour-long songs, or off-the-wall collaborations that are this close to making sense - something tells me we'll miss the days when we would suddenly get confronted with a beautiful follies like With a Little Help From My Fwends.