Geek this Week: Mercury Rising

Plus: Your vote keeps counting, Legend of Skrillex and great faces for radio

Ice, Ice Baby – Get your refreshing beverages ready. While the Mars Rover Curiosity has potentially found simple organic compounds (it’s possible they hitched a ride on the rover), the Messenger spacecraft which was sent to Mercury, the closest planet to the Sun, has discovered something much cooler: ice! Though Mercury is only about 36 million miles from the Sun (compared to Earth’s 93 million) and can have a surface temperature of close to 800 degrees Fahrenheit, the planet’s axis is so slight that there are portions of the surface which never catch any rays, being cold enough to have frozen water. This raises a ton of questions, not the least of which is when we’ll see our first glimpse of a Mercurian penguin.

Weapon of Choice – You hold fate in your hands or, to be more accurate, you push fate with your fingers. Machinima‘s Inside Gaming Daily is gearing up for its yearly awards ceremony on December 8th and they’re giving some of the power of choice to you. For their Gamer’s Choice Award, gamers like you are selecting the winner. The decision will not be an easy one as the deck is stacked with ten killer titles including Assassin’s Creed III, Halo 4, Mass Effect 3 and New Super Mario Bros. U. If you game, make your voice heard by going to their site and voting. It’s your civic duty; or at least that’s what we assume we were being taught in Civics class.

Scary Ganons and Nice Triforces – Growing up, who didn’t wish they could have been a character in their favorite adventure video game? For electronic musician Sonny John Moore, known the world over as Skrillex, that wish is fulfilled in a big, bad way. Entitled Skrillex Quest, the Flash game takes players into an 8-bit, Legend of Zelda-type fantasy environment. Of course, given his predilection toward digital media, the player, called “P1,” is forced to fight glitches and corrupt codes in a forgotten video game cartridge in order to save Princess Keys. It’s delightfully meta and old-school to the max.

The Voices of London Below – Have you ever wanted to hear what the pitch-blackness of Night’s Bridge sounds like? Well, you’ll soon get your chance, with some very famous voices to go along with it. Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, formerly a TV miniseries, novel, comic and stage play, will be adapted into a radio drama for UK’s BBC 4. The most exciting part comes from the cast, which will consist of, among others, Benedict Cumberbatch, James McAvoy, Anthony Stewart Head, Game of Thrones’ Natalie Dormer, Bernard Cribbins and the one and only Christopher Lee. The play will hit airwaves in early 2013. Can this cast be transposed to movie screens? Please? For more of the great cast, read our breakdown on Nerdist.com.

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