Awesome Leisure

Author Jon Morris wrote this series of comic book history books, including silly superheroes like Doctor Hormone, freakish villains like Animal-Vegetable-Mineral Man, and stupid sidekicks like Frosting the Bear. The books are packed with vintage art, backstories on the characters, and amusing commentary.

It’s hard to top the original Sonic the Hedgehog games for their sheer sense of speed, excitement, and iconic level design. Sonic Superstars aims to freshen up the 2D platform action with modern graphics, all-new zones, new Chaos Emerald powers, and the ability to play side-by-side with friends as Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, and Amy Rose. Drops fall 2023.

Those Kenner Star Wars AT-AT toys were awesome to play with, but we had to use our imaginations to get them to walk as they did in The Empire Strikes Back. For engineer James Bruton, that wasn’t good enough, so he got to work rebuilding a version of the imperial walker with a servo-powered drivetrain that lets it really walk.

Musician João Fuss arranged and performed this fantastic classical guitar version of the Marilyn Manson track The Beautiful People. It’s still got the great staccato sound of the original but with a stripped-down fingerstyle approach. His acoustic covers of Black Hole Sun and Otherside are similarly wonderful.

Ubisoft’s Star Wars Outlaws is an open-world game that puts you in the role of Kay Vess, a mischievous young woman attempting to start a new life against the backdrop of Imperial rule. Taking place between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, she and her companion Nix must elude the Empire and contend with galactic crime syndicates.

The eyes on Spider-Man’s mask typically have a fixed expression. But Sean’s Crafts took on the challenge of giving Spidey more visible emotion by making his eyes change shape. He started by making a mask from poster board, fiberglass cloth, resin, and wood filler. Then he rigged it with mechanical eye shutters controlled by a bike cable.

Have you ever thought it might be cool to be a bartender? This GoPro video from Fallow Restaurant bar managers Markus and Chris provides a first-person view of life behind the bar during a sunny summer day at the popular London dining and drinking spot. We can only imagine what it’s like when it’s really busy.

The steampunk world of Clockwork Revolution bears more than a passing resemblance to BioShock: Infinite, but it’s the start of a new game franchise. The first-person RPG has you traveling through time to witness key moments in the history of Avalon, and your decisions and actions can have profound effects on the city’s future.

This collection of four books from wilderness expert and author Dave Canterbury includes everything you ever wanted to know about thriving in the wild. The combined reference guides include over 1000 pages of techniques for building shelters, trapping, gathering, and cooking, along with first aid and survival.

A standard Rubik’s Cube has six faces, each with a 3×3 grid of colored blocks. But there are dozens of other Rubik’s variants, ranging from a single block to hundreds of blocks. Hafu Go got together with puzzle-solving expert SoupTimmy to work through progressively more challenging versions of the cube, all the way up to the $1000+ Impossible Cube.

Enjoy hot meals and beverages while camping with Arnaud’s lightweight rocket stove. The FireTower breaks down to the size of a small book, and is engineered for optimal airflow and efficiency. It’s fueled by adding sticks, twigs, or other biofuels to its side feeder. Made from durable stainless steel and weights just 1.1 pounds.

Core Equipment’s saucer-shaped chair offers a cozy, oversized seating area, along with a quilted seat and a padded headrest. Its fold-up steel frame can hold up to 300 lb, and it includes a built-in cupholder, and a carrying bag. Available in grey or wine red.

Artist Duane Perera is a master at his craft. He makes playful miniature scenes inspired by pop culture. Each diorama features characters enjoying everyday life, like playing video games, listening to CDs, or record shopping. His making of video for his Scarface plays NES diorama is priceless. Duane sells prints of his work on Redbubble, and we want all of them.

Nicolas Cage and Joel Kinnaman star in this low-budget drama about a man who finds himself held at gunpoint by a strange and trigger-happy passenger who ends up taking him on the ride of his life. Expect plenty of scenery chewing in this one. In theaters and on-demand 7.28.2023.

Handy Geng’s brother loves to fish. But when he’s out on the water, he doesn’t come back to land for hours on end. To help his bro, he engineered a crazy homebrew recreational vehicle that can drive into the water and has a living room, kitchen, and bedroom. He built its frame from steel pipe, then added PVC pipes for floatation. Turn on English captions.

Originally known as Setris, the puzzle game Sandtrix is a unique Tetris variant where the blocks are made out of sand, so they crumble on impact. It adds a new dimension to the classic puzzler and is surprisingly fun to play. There’s a web version, or you can download it for Windows or Linux on Itch.io.

Think Flight wanted to see how much they could scale up the design of a standard rubber band airplane. Besting the record recently set by Project Air, this single-engine rubber band flyer has a 16-foot wingspan. It took him roughly seven months of experimentation and flight testing to achieve his final lightweight design.

The Domino King has made numerous domino displays inspired by pop culture characters. This video compiles some of his many impressive displays, built from more than 800,000 dominoes in total. Along the way, you’ll visit Bikini Bottom, Gravity Falls, Rick and Morty’s multiverse, and much more.

Each slice of Stellar Factory’s pizza puzzles is a smaller puzzle indicated by patterns on the back of its pieces, making them great fun for cooperative puzzle parties. Each 550-piece, 8-slice puzzle features a wavy edge and is loaded with toppings ranging from delicious to downright disturbing. Choose from pepperoni, veggie supreme, or meat lover’s varieties.

For many, the 1960 and 1970s are considered the golden age of Saturday morning television. The era gave us weird, wild, and memorable shows like H.R. Pufnstuf, Scooby Doo, and the original Spider-Man cartoon. Johnnyboy792 shared this time capsule of TV shows and commercials that’ll bring back fond memories to Gen-Xers and younger Boomers.

Some LEGO astronaut minifigs go their whole lives only dreaming of space travel. Now, 1000 lucky minifigs have traveled to the edge of space courtesy of LEGO and Kreativ Gang. Three crews of 335 plastic astronauts flew to a height of roughly 35,500 meters aboard a carbon fiber and stainless steel space shuttle carried aloft by a weather balloon.

Jean-Baptiste Chandelier and a very skilled camera crew take us on a wild ride through the mountains, as the paragliding pro flies over moving cars, chases down motorcycle riders, bicyclists, and skateboarders, and gives the cops a run for their money. The accompanying track is Ca Plane Pour Moi by Plastic Bertrand.

When a problem comes along, you must whip it. Super7 pays tribute to the founding fathers of de-evolution with its first-ever Devo ReAction figure. The retro-style 3.75″ figure features the likeness of a young Mark Mothersbaugh donning his Devo Dome and ready to crack that whip. It even comes with a tiny bowl of whipped cream.