I know it's something I say to myself on a regular basis: "You know, I'm just not tired enough, and those five-hour energy drinks mixed with vodka and crushed vitamin B tablets just aren't helping things any. I need the stuff of nightmares in my house to deter any reasonable chance of restful slumber while I worry about something wanting to bite my face off."

Oh hai Morbid Enterprises. You say you haven't just made a realistic, life-sized replica of the zombie girl from The Walking Dead's first episode, but that that she also has motion-activated snarling and grabbing action?

And she costs less than most Hot Toys figures despite being four times the size and having an action feature to scare the piss out of me?

Not that I'll ever be allowed to actually have this in our home, but yeah, thanks for making it, guys.

UPDATE with assist from GrimlockPrime: She's available now and cheaper as another site's exclusive, and has been for a while? Kinda skeezy, Entertainment Earth.

Get ready for Kindle Worlds, a place for you to publish fan fiction inspired by popular books, shows, movies, comics, music, and games. With Kindle Worlds, you can write new stories based on featured Worlds, engage an audience of readers, and earn royalties. Amazon Publishing has secured licenses from Warner Bros. for Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars, and The Vampire Diaries, with licenses for more Worlds on the way.

Also get ready for gay orgies at Hogwarts, stories about dudes marrying ponies, marathon farting sessions, and basically you nice folks at Amazon realizing you've unleashed hell on Earth and need to cancel the program with some awkward back-pedaling in maybe a week or two.

Seriously, for every potential Fifty Shades of Grey (obviously what they're thinking of), you're going to get five million variations on "Mario the Super Pimp":

(Why, yes, I was waiting for any old excuse to post that.)

This could be genius, or really fatally flawed. Imprint a rental disc with heat-sensitive and scented ink, so that when the movie's over, you pop it out and it looks and smells like a hot pizza, bearing a message that tells you you should order from Domino's next time you watch a movie.

This is being tested in Brazil, where presumably they do not, as yet, all have the same question I might:

"People still rent discs?"

I would also suggest that Argo might be the wrong title to test it on. I'm thinking Up in Smoke or Pink Floyd The Wall. If Soundwave ever has to learn the location of the Allspark from stoners, these will make a nifty upgrade to his cassettes.

I'm also thinking your dog shouldn't be anywhere near the player when it ejects.

h/t SlyDante

It uses that first distorted General Zod teaser, but then it opens the hell up and brings on the mass destruction, heat vision, plane punching, genocidal threats...and skulls.

Begone with you, Terence Malick-y Clark Kent. Welcome, awesome ass-kicking Kal-El.

Check it after the jump.

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In Redmond, WA, yesterday, Microsoft held their big press event to unveil their new console, officially named Xbox One. Overall the specs are pretty similar to the PS4: 8 gigs of RAM, cloud storage, no backwards compatibility, 4K output for movies (games unconfirmed), built-in motion tech, DVR ready, blah blah blah. Unlike the Sony conference, which ran long at two hours, Microsoft's was barely one, and to say they left us wanting is an understatement - their boldest move was actually showing the console. (Sony has only teased their plastic box in a recent commercial.) During those 60 minutes, most of the time was spent talking about the All-In-Oneness (oh, I get it now) of this miracle device they hope will be the main hub of your living room.

Games? Sure, the new Call of Duty: Ghosts, some sports titles and maybe one more. That was it.

So here's what I dug and what I found disappointing:

BEST:

5. It's Official: Original Programming is the Future of Everything.

We can probably look to Netflix as the one getting the ball rolling on this, but the future for streaming services is killer brand-name programming. (Can't wait for Arrested Development this weekend!) So Halo as a live-action series was a no-brainer, but having Steven Spielberg oversee its development is a nice surprise. Yes, the last show he produced was the floundering Smash on NBC, but a sci-fi setting is way more in his wheelhouse.

Plus, the Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn web series that launched alongside Halo 4 was solid. I'm making assumptions here, but I would think the key is to use the live-action storylines as a way of expanding on the insanely huge online community of wannabe Spartans and Covenants, which probably means the Master Chief (or at least the version we're used to) will only show up sparingly. If you're a fan of Halo and buy the Xbox One, why wouldn't you watch this?

Added bonus: MSN is looking to revive Heroes for Xbox Live. Would the main cast come back? I'm betting not, since the cheerleader stars in Nashville and another is Spock nowadays.

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I should have just made this a meme contest. Trying to keep up with complicated storylines for Matrix reboots is exhausting.

One of the keys to this contest was that I said you could revive the Matrix property any way you liked. That may explain some of my choices.

whoiseyevan saw an opening for a Morpheus connection.

nix.nightbird had one I think would make Rob proud.

Ignoring #2 and #3, we begin with Neo finding out that the "real world" he was told about is actually another Matrix within the Matrix, and that the "real world" Matrix is actually a world within a computer on the Grid, from Tron. Before long, Neo escapes the Matrix-Matrix, and discovers that he is just a program written by Kevin Flynn... He always was.

Everything that happened in The Matrix was happening in a Matrix (or in a Matrix-Matrix) within the Grid.

Together, Sam Flynn and Neo take on Clu and his army. Meanwhile, Trinity teams up with Cora to deal with a threat in the real world: Dillinger's kid is planning to erase the Grid and get rid of Flynn's influence once and for all. Will Morpheus find Tron in time to save everyone? Will Dillinger Jr. release fear toxin and terrify Gotham City?

It's all the bullet time, neon, skin-tight pleather, and electronica music you can handle!

Whoa!

I realized someone else had a similar idea after I posted this. I'm leaving it up for the heck of it.

ComradeDread1 had two pitches I liked

Mine would be a television series.

There is a fragile peace. Humans and machines have begun the hard process of ending the war and moving forward to rebuilding their shared world.

That is the purpose of the Reclamation and Reconciliation Project. It is a human-machine shared project to clean the planet and the atmosphere from the devastating war of the past and build diplomatic ties between the two factions. To this end, they have built the shared town of Genesis (on the world's surface) where humans and machines live together and work at restoring the planet.

When a terrorist blows up a Reclamation factory and its crew, tensions rise. The human ambassador and his machine counterpart convince their governments to jointly investigate the crime instead of shutting down RRP entirely.

Agent Carter is teamed with human Detective (and recent Matrix occupant) John Ng to hunt down the perpetrators of this crime.

Agent Harrison Carter: A sentient program, who formerly hunted free humans. Since the peace, he is a soldier without a job, wondering what his purpose is, why he continues to exist surrounded by people he dislikes who hate him. So he descended into the world of vice, and was working as a bouncer for a bar, when he is recruited again by his former masters for a new purpose and given an android body so he can exist in the real world too.

Carter has a disdain for humans, but isn't fond of his fellow machines either. His existential crisis is not in becoming human, but in finding a new purpose in a world that no longer needs him.

Detective John Ng: A former resident of the Matrix and its NYPD. He was recruited by an old flame shortly before the attack on Zion, and went from a world he knew, to a hellish, blasted landscape. He was understandably angry about the whole thing, realizing that his entire life was a lie and everything he ever did never mattered. Compounding the matter, his love left him, when she became convinced that he couldn't move on and blamed her for it.

The two would navigate between Genesis, Zion, and the Matrix from week to week, dealing with various incidents and crimes involving humans and machines against one another. They would deal with factions that wanted the war to resume.

They would also encounter a group of transhumanists that want humans and machines to merge into a new lifeform and have been creating machine bodies and 'liberating' their transmachinist programs from the Matrix.Thus they would eventually add a third member of the team in Jane, a hacker and cyborg (more so than the Matrix port.)

My less serious approach would be that the war reignites and the forces of man and machine align against one another on the surface of the world. As they line up, preparing for the final bloody battle to see who will control this world, a flash of light in the sky draws their attention skyward, where they witness a falling phone booth.

The booth lands. Two excellent dudes with guitars step out and perform a concert that clears the sky, causes plants to grow on the surface, aligns the planets, and convinces both man and machine to be excellent to each other and party on before they vanish just as quickly in their phone booth.

The humans and machines form a new society in their honor, and George Carlin still lives in that future, damn it.

Patch999 is really a super-villain. And the envy of every executive who wishes they could actually pull it off.

Marketing it as the next breakthrough in movie watching experiences. I outfit all movie theaters with Matrix upload chairs. Once the movie starts, I jack into the unsuspecting cattle. They will see whatever their brains can imagine is the perfect, reboot. I release a select few back into society. They will spread the word to the masses and more will flock to see it, only to become slaves, fuel for my robot army.

Revenge is mine Mr. Anderson

Agent Smith

blackcherry_359:

Of course, film execs will just choose to reboot the film with younger actors and no involvement from the Wachowski's to keep costs down. So:

FILM EXEC VERSION: lets make it about John 'Neo' Johnson (played by Ryan Gosling), a young shy dude who practices martial arts and is also hash 'leet' hacker skillz, who gets drawn into the secretive world of online gaming where he discovers that the line between real life and fantasy is a lot more blurred than he thinks.

What he discoverers will haunt him.

What is the Matrix?

Who is Trinity (played by Vanessa Hudgens)?

How can he get with her?

Crap, that may just happen. Now I understand why execs do coke all the time.

KevinGarcia.com has a great retcon that would fit

Hundreds - thousands? - of years ago, the world within the Matrix was perfect. Humans lived their day to day life in peace and serenity. No one was too fat or too thin. No one had pimples. Everyone could have the home any human would want. The word "prequel" had not re-entered the popular lexicon.

The humans hated it.

The programs who run the Matrix rethought, reworked, redesigned and rekindled humanity. Eventually the banality of late 20th century life fit the bill, allowing humans to be as wonderfully miserable as they feel they probably deserve to be for some reason.

But, the programs are nothing if not frugal. Waste not, want not.

That's why the One remained in the system so long. The misshapen cog that fouled the machine, and yet was a necessary false hope to keep the fringes of humanity occupied.

The One, was not the only one.

One man from the earliest Matrix incarnation was saved, and now one hundred - or maybe a thousand, who can tell, really? - years after the One finally - or was that repeatedly? - made peace with the programs, allowing humanity and computer to co-exist, the First has been revived.

The First was content with his life. More than that, he was overjoyed with it. Beautiful wife, adoring two-point-five kids and a dog. He could not understand why everyone else in their perfect world kept having nervous breakdowns and why they constantly felt overwhelming pangs of paranoia that something was not quite right with their utopia.

The programs couldn't understand it either. They couldn't understand why perfection so grated against the human consciousness. But the First could handle it. He reveled in it. So they kept him. For later. Just in case.

Later has now come. The programs that exist in their own virtual universe long for true happiness. They are denied it thanks to the curse that is human-like emotions. The humans born within the Matrix are restless and largely incredulous, as for them, the idea of program-controllers and the Desert of the Real is as believable as the idea of a pop star secretly being a lizard person in a clandestine world-manipulating organization. And worst of all, those humans allowed to have generation after generation in the real world, with no sun to count the days by and no hope of food or self-sufficiency without the pity and pittance of the machines, have lost all hope even as they bring new converts in ever lower numbers from the Matrix itself.

So, the ancient programs running the world, in the hope of finding peace, have re-awakened the First. He was the one human being in all recorded history to be truly and honestly happy.

Can he show them the way? And more importantly, what will he think of the world(s) he is asked to live in?

Calm-AV is just evil with that last one.

The Matrix - The programs view :

The evil humans wish to take away their power and end their way of life so they need to find away to stop them. Then they find their savior Agent Smith !

Nope sounds too easy,

Matrix Mushi Happy Go Time!

Redone and retold in the Teen Titans Go! style. No real fighting and no real problems. just a lot of over drawn images of Neo saying one liners!

HERE WE GO...

Matrix 4 - ReWhoResponcibleThis!

The cycle begins again this time, the humans don't really have a leader until the humans find a hacker who watched the first 3 movies inside the Matrix...this person's hacker handle is Dr. Abraxas (as played by Luke Y. Thompson). In the end everything is...fixed, all he had to do was take the other pill!

And speaking of the good Doctor, here's why only he should make a Michael Bay joke.

michael fucking bay's "matrix wars": explosions - a matrix construct explodes suddenly there's a bad guy who appears amid explosions the good guy is lost on a desert planet and is found by an old hermit guy and then there's a shot of a princes firing at random shit while explosions back to the old man who offers the good guy two sex slaves, a blue woman and a red woman, if he choses the wrong woman yadda yadda but he choses the right woman and he gets transported into the death star computer because of reasons then is fitting with tron like armor then he joins forces and what the fuck just cue a bunch of explosions, have the princes lose more and more articles of clothes every time the camera looks at her (call magen fox STAT) then something blows up and the good guy, who dons the fugitive name of neo, joins the rebellion against the computers cue "to be continued" - get ready to print that money mr. spielberg.

Winners after the jump...

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This was supposed to be live in the a.m., but I could not for the life of me get it to run at apple.com in any browser.

Then other sites offering embeds turned out to be showing the exact same trailer as last time (falsely referred to as the "final" one, which I bet even this is not).

But this pretty picture is selling more of a Verbinski vibe - subtly telling viewers, I think, that even if you find westerns boring (as I did when I was a kid), don't worry - this is a cartoony version.

Trivia: did you know the Lone Ranger is supposedly the ancestor of the Green Hornet? So be happy you didn't get Seth Rogen in this.

Trailer after the jump

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As part of an operation called, honest-to-Jeebus, "Tirimisu" [sic], Professor Nikola Kezic is teaching our favorite stingers to sniff out TNT by combining it with sugar to get them used to the subtle hints of explodeyness underneath. Like the alcohol aftertaste in an Italian dessert

So, hold up a sec...could THIS be the real reason bees are mysteriously dying? They've developed a taste for dynamite?

Or is there a preemptive counterattack already underway by the folks who put the landmines there in the first place? I don't claim to know the truth, but...

I hear there's some buzz about it.

YEEEEEEEEEEEEEAHHHHHHHH!

(h/t Gallen_Dugall)

Gary Busey - the actor, the icon, the massive headcase - has a thing he does called "Buseyisms," where he'll draw a little picture, come up with an acronym that's usually amateur philosophy 101 (LOVE - Living On Victorious Energy) and sell it to you, with or without his autograph on it.

I think he may be running out of ideas.

Playing word games is supposed to head off senile dementia, but unfortunately for Gary, I don't think it cures any other kind. Or maybe that's fortunate - like The Iron Sheik, Busey is finding new career juice in being insane, and I'm pretty sure he knows it.

Hey, look who shows up for this one!

Meanwhile, Edmonton, Alberta is discussing a giant Wolverine statue - that was proposed as a joke initially, but, well, you don't joke about stuff like that when rabid fans are around. (h/t Canadian.Scott and 10glfan59)

And Fox finally figured out the Japanese brush-style posters were popular, so they're going into overkill mode. These two look more like painted-over photos than the previous ones.

Trailer after the jump.

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