Nerds Amalgamated

Christopher Nolan, we need to talk. A group of fellow film workers have sent a letter to Christopher Nolan telling him nobody can understand his movies because of the poor audio mixing. He completely missed the point. If you ordered a Playstation 5, you might have gotten cat food instead. Which is going to be useful since you spent all your food money on a PS5. Nintendo have chosen to target The B...

It's time to vote for the 2020 Game Awards. There's a lot of categories and nominations and we'd probably stay here all night talking about them, but we picked some of our favourites including Best Multiplayer and Best VR/AR. If you have a gaming problem, EA's new tool might help. Yes, I feel just as bad as you do acknowledging that EA has done something at least a little right. FIFA Playtime will...

Our recurring guest Dev-i-Boy has returned from witness protection. It's time for the new consoles to be released, and on paper, they sound pretty powerful. The Nerds discuss the weaknesses of the hardware and why they might not be as powerful as they seem, including tiny hard drives and giant games. An atomic scale 3D printer has been used to create a model of the Voyager from Star Trek. It's tin...

Old games never die. They just get removed from storefronts and put on abandonware sites. But if you want to know the latest news on which games are staying and which are going, it would be helpful if someone kept track. Well they do. Professor and DJ discuss what delisted games actually mean for gamers, and why the industry takes them away. DC has a new series of comics for young teenagers. The N...

Bringing a fungus eating plant back from near extinction sounds like a bad idea. But it's actually pretty cool. The Bussells Spider Orchids has a special relationship with a fungus that it allows to grow then digests. And if you think mushrooms are gross you can fight me. HTC's FCC filings leaked a new Vive headset. It looks like a possible replacement for the Vive Focus line. More VR competition...

ALERT - THIS IS A DRILL. Tatiana Maslany is not She-Hulk. Or at least that's what she tells us. Wallenius Marine is building a sail ship to carry cars. The Oceanbird is predicted to produce less than 10% of the emissions of the Wallenius Wilhelmsen HERO class carrier, with only a small decrease in carrying capacity. Hopefully we'll see these sailing the seven seas soon. 2K have screwed up. Again....

The Osirix Rex mission is about to reach Bennu where it will pull samples from the surface to return to Earth in a few years. Nothing happens quickly in space, but landing on an asteroid, even momentarily, takes some serious skill. Alan Moore has joined the ranks of comic authors who take issue with the state of the industry. We can't blame him, but it would be nice for all the authors to make a s...

Kids these days aren't having a punt on the horses, they're betting on esports. The problem is, they're literally kids. Shady gambling companies are preying on underage children. A scarily close supernova might have caused an extinction event. Luckily, it wasn't completely aiming at Earth and it happened 2.5 million years ago. Which is good, because I was worried it would cause movie delays. Wait,...

A UQ student has shown that paradox free time travel is technically possible. Dr Fabio Costa and Germain Tobar have published a paper showing how the universe will reprogram itself to account for a time traveller's actions. In other words, whatever action you take, the universe will find a way of making sure that in the end, the same results occur. So much for killing Hitler, then. You've heard ab...

It's past your bedtime, somewhere. A new paper from UCLA collates all the reasons why we sleep. So if you get in trouble for sleeping at work just tell your boss science told you to. Facebook is coming to lock down your Oculus Quest 2, but this isn't the only issue with the Quest 2. House Atreides is being adapted into a graphic novel. Meanwhile, She Hulk is being adapted to TV with the excellent...

Take a look at the phosphine, clouding in the atmos. Oh man, wonder if we'll ever know, It's the craziest news, is there life on Venus? It's been a long time since Sid Meier first put keyboard to code, but these days he thinks he wouldn't even play his seminal work, Civilisation, if it hadn't been created nearly 30 years ago. Is he a boomer saying kids have no taste, or does he have a point? Rick...

First I was afraid, I was petrified. Thought I'd never be carbon sequestered. But the scientists don't care. They don't need a basilisk (or catchy disco songs) to petrify CO2 in industrial waste. The technological singularity wasn't supposed to happen like this. TF2 bots have decided they don't need us meatbags anymore and are going to war against hackers. It's only a matter of time before the bot...

What do you do with your food waste? Hopefully, you can compost it and grow new food. But if you had industrial amounts of orange peel, what would you do with it? Recycle lithium batteries This sounds like a fake life hack, but it's real. Resident Evil is adding a third alternative timeline to the plot, with a Netflix series. DJ hates the sound of it, there's a lot of odd character decisions comin...

What metal based wind instrument can DJ play better than he can pronounce? It also doubles as a fire detection method, but that'll all make sense later. The Five Nights at Freddy's developer Scott Cawthorne is joining the small, but dedicated, ranks of creators to open their franchise to community development. The Fazbear Fanverse initiative introduces projects by community members with the full s...

Once more unto the breach... We finally have a cast list for Del Toro's Pinnochio, featuring some huge names like Tilda Swinton, Finn Wolfhard and David Bradley, AKA David Bowie, the kid from Stranger Things and the first Doctor. How do you stop kids from seeing things they shouldn't on the internet? How does Roblox maintain one of the highest child safety ratings of an online community? Lots of m...

You can call us whatever you want, just don't call us late for dinner. Although late for releasing the episode, yeah, that's fine. Epic are going to war against Apple and Google. Microsoft and Stadia are joining the battle against Apple. Only the courts can decide if Apple should be allowed to control everything on your phone. Stallman was right. The 9th Doctor is back in Big Finish for a series o...

Deviboy has gone missing. What nefarious act has the DJ performed? Where is our co-host? Don't worry, he isn't dead, just busy. It's enough to make your butthole clench. Or it would be, if you were a frog. A species of beetle has been discovered that used predator defecation in order to escape being lunch. It's a bit gross, but points for style. It's time to enter the future and go entirely digita...

It has happened. The DJ kept within the time limit. This week the Professor took a sabbatical and its Dev-i-boy’s last episode before he takes his own sabbatical. We saw some big big leaks from Nintendo which might have some massive reveals such as a Luigi in Mario 64. Could this help or hurt Nintendo, who knows but one is for a certain we might some leaks from other companies in the near future....

Has Professor finally found a way to keep DJ in the time limit? Some say yes. Can a smile really make you think better of someone? What if it would make you think worse of them? This study looked at the perceived trustworthiness of people with various disorders, but the Nerds think it's not particularly rigorous. Microsoft Flight Simulator will come with a physical edition including a lovely hardc...

First, Dev-i-boy found a list of Valve games that never came out. These games were created in the dark times before Half Life: Alyx was announced, and include some interesting looks at what Half Life 3 could have been. You can't go to Comic-Con this year, but you can watch it online. There's a great program with tons of shows including comics, television and gaming news. It's also probably the mos...

Flash is dead. Long live Flash. Kongregate has decided to shut their doors to new releases. This is truly the end of an error. Let's move on to something more secure now. After decades of trying to get around the web filter at school to play weird indie games, kids will have to find something else to do. The Atari VCS is due to come out soon, and it's a horribly overpriced set top box. The hardwar...

The Nerds Amalgamated fishing trip is coming up, and we'll be going to Pluto for some ice fishing. Could Pluto have underground oceans with alien fish, and will they taste good with chips? Unfortunately it'll take a really long time to get there to find out. Maybe we'll have FTL by the next fishing trip. Metal Slug is back, again. SNK have plans to make some new Metal Slug games and not just work...

This week, Deviboy returns from his exile, and Stephen from Comics2Movies and XCT joins us to discuss a new comic. Devi brings news from the far off land of Nintendo. It's time to get your cameras out for the New Pokemon Snap. Apart from Nintendo's hopeless naming, it's shaping up to be an expanded photography game for the new generation. We all hope they fit in the fun easter eggs and interaction...

Finally, a way to read comics in class without your teacher complaining! Real life scientists are producing educational comics to teach cool science stuff. And they're FREE! Check them out, they have some pretty good explanations for a bunch of different topics. The FDA has recognised the ability of video games to help with therapy and greenlit a game for treating ADHD suffers. I can't wait for a...

Never look at a solar eclipse. Unless you're wearing badass solar eclipse glasses and taking cool photos. Night Sky Pix sent us an article about photographing the upcoming solar eclipse, and it's so in depth we'll need to get it back from the Challenger Deep. So, if you live in the right places, get your camera and your solar filters and get snapping. SimRefinery is the least well known Sim game o...