Tablets, iPads and eReaders are so ubiquitous, nerdy owners are employing extreme acts of graphic personalization to imbue their devices with unique geek chic.

Faaaalkooorr!! Almost every child of the Eighties holds a special place in their heart for The NeverEnding Story. The 1984 film spawned a pair of sequels and a TV show, cementing its hold on once-youthful imaginations and imbuing all who watched with the urge to ride a giant flying dog – OK, “luckdragon”, whatever.

Fans of the endearingly clunky, West German-produced fantasy film have grown into jaded adults but as Falcor famously advised, “Never give up and good luck will find you.” Yeah, tell that to Artax. Anyway, you can look up that and more on your tablet, ideally if its encased by a NeverEnding Story iPad / Tablet / EReader / Kindle Cover. Note the faux Auryn medallion affixed to the cover. Hey, it’s better than Nothing.

Hit The Button, Frank

Designed ideally for an Apple product like a Macbook or iPad and size-customizable by the seller, this MST3K adhesive vinyl decal features the familiar – to those in the know – silhouettes of Tom Servo, Mike Nelson and Crow T Robot in full-on movie-riffing mode. Now that Mystery Science Theater 3000 has been revived for a new run on Netflix, your robot roll call is as timely as ever.

Ultimate Zelda

The Legend of Zelda is one of Nintendo’s most successful gaming franchises though considering it debuted way back in 1986, it’s had plenty of time to accrue legions of devoted fans. This “Ultimate Zelda Fan Package” from Etsy seller SkinzNhydez includes a Zelda book cover, Zelda wallet, Zelda iPad case, even a Zelda belt buckle. All you need now is a girlfriend named Zelda… oh, wait.

Time McFly’s

Channel your inner Biff Tannen with this Back To The Future 2 iPad case, featuring the cover of Gray’s Sports Almanac 1950-2000: the book that brought our heroes from BTTF2 so much Griff, er, grief.

Seller Firebox kindly advises potential purchasers that while “this book tells the future,” it’s “not to be used to create a series of paradoxes that destroy time.” Besides, since November 8th of 2016 we’ve already been living in the darkest timeline, amiright?

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Cover Ups Geeky Ipad Tablet Ereader Case Covers

Almost everything we once kept at our desks is now packed into our personal computers, but rarely is this phenomena so brilliantly illustrated as in the beautiful video below.

This decades-long transition from the tangible to the digital is shown by the Harvard Innovation Lab as a migration of individual physical items into their corresponding virtual equivalents, desktop icons replacing their counterparts one by one, “demonstrating the steep shift from cork boards and fax machines to pinterest and PDFs.”

Lest you think it is all misdirection or illusion, “the scene is set with actual vintage items sourced by the team of photographers and entrepreneurs: the Macintosh classic, corded phone, fax machine, globe, corkboard, Polaroid camera, and Rolodex were all purchased through individual sellers on ebay, while the rest of the items were found abandoned an unused in basements and at garage sales. While some argue that technology has made our lives more complex, the video below demonstrates the current clarity from clutter, and the ways in which technology encourages productive and social behavior.”

Whether the conclusions match the experiment is subjective (some of us might miss our stuff), but what prompted this ambitious exploration of technological revolutions? The project creators “wondered what it would be like to recreate the desktop from the 1980s and then emulate its transformation through the computer age, to illustrate how technology has changed our world, un-cluttering our desks and simplifying our lives. While gradual change from year to year is often hard to perceive, a longer snapshot gives us a much more dramatic view of the technological progression we have experienced.” The video was produced by Momchil Filev of BestReviews.com with photography by DougThomsen.tv and engineering by Anton Georgiev.

If abandoned spaceships weren’t so hard to find (please don’t look for any in Antarctica), we wouldn’t have to make them for movies, TV, art or just for fun.

Pitch Black Spaceship

(images via: No Fixed Address and RPF)

Even if you’ve never visited Coober Pedy in southern Australia, you probably have seen it via your movie or TV screen. The inhospitable desert wasteland lies in the heart of OZ’s opal mining country and the otherworldly setting has been featured as a film location for Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, Red Planet, and Pitch Black to name just a few. The latter flick featured the above wrecked spaceship, bought about a dozen years ago by a local shop owner after filming was completed.

(image via: RPF)

While the Pitch Black spaceship prop has held up remarkably well thanks to the Outback’s arid conditions, those who feel tempted to have themselves photographed in front of it should advise their camera-person to ensure the “SHOWERS & TOILETS” sign doesn’t photobomb the shot.

Oklahoma Cement Mixer Space Capsule

(images via: Two Wheel Oklahoma, viewAt.org and NewsOn6)

Construction crews hard at work building a bridge over Oologah Lake near Talala, Oklahoma in 1959 couldn’t believe their eyes when the driver of a cement mixer loaded with liquid cement lost control of the massive vehicle. As he swerved off Winganon Road, the truck overturned and it wasn’t long before the cement inside began to harden. The truck was salvaged, mostly… the now solid cement-filled bell was too heavy to shift and has remained in place for over a half-century.

(image via: Arkomas)

Pranksters have painted and otherwise decorated the mixer a number of times over the years; a recent redo occurring just after 9/11 when it was painted patriotically in the American flag’s stars and stripes. The latest extreme makeover dates from late September of 2011 when Barry & Heather Thomas used canning lids, garden hose and other household items to transform the mixer into a NASA space capsule as a way of celebrating their 5th wedding anniversary. Kudos to Flickr user Arkomas for posting the above cool pic.

Buran Buran

(images via: The Living Moon c/o English Russia)

In post-Soviet Russia, Earth crash on spaceship! On May 12th of 2002 the hangar housing Buran, Russia’s only space shuttle to be launched into orbit and land successfully back on Earth, collapsed during a severe storm. Eight workers lost their lives in the accident and the shuttle was destroyed. Not many know, however, that Buran was only the first of FIVE Soviet shuttles completed or under construction when the program was cancelled in 1993. The second shuttle was named Ptichka; the third was named Baikal.

(images via: The Living Moon c/o English Russia)

In October of 2004 Baikal, estimated to 30-50% completed, was moved from its hangar at the Tushino factory to an open-air car-park where it spent the next 7 years protected only by flimsy tarpaulins.

(image via: The Moscow News)

The curious image above dates from late June of 2011, when the fuselage of Shuttle 2.01 Baikal was floated down the Volga river by barge. Its ultimate destination was the MAKS 2011 international air show, which took place from August 16th through 21st at Zhukovsky town near Moscow. We don’t think that’s Russian president Vladimir Putin in the image above, returning from a bathroom break to resume towing the barge downstream, but we could be wrong (and we wouldn’t be surprised).

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Landing Stripped 8 Grounded Abandoned Spaceships

After an intensive month-long residency in America’s biggest city with daily updates, street artist Banksy is leaving behind a strangely mixed legacy of his trip. Here are some of his last works from the stay, from a thrift store painting hacked and re-donated and an unpublished op-ed piece to a free t-shirt to anyone who wishes to download and print it.

‘The banality of the banality of evil’ is a second-hand shop art conversion purchased, adapted and given back to a local store on 23rd street. It features a World War II Nazi officer added to the otherwise bland landscape, easy to overlook in the serene scenery.

Meanwhile, in Greenpoint, a kind of meta-tag (not in the internet sense, though certainly a reference to webpages) speaks to already-covered graffiti painted over below it.

His controversial message aimed to be published in the local press (submitted to the New York Times but rejected) gives his stance on One World Trade Center, which he sees as an insufficiently bold tribute to the falls towers of the city.

Other odds and ends from his final days in town include: a cheetah lounging on the side of Yankee Stadium, a robot spray-painting a bar code on a brick wall in Coney Island, a gentleman waiting for a date outside the Hustler Club and the Grim Reaper riding a bumper car in Bowery.

Before spray-painting his name in simple bubble letters on a wall in Queens to end his October run, Banksy reminded New Yorkers to ‘save Five Points’ and added his iconic bandaged heart to the iconic white I Heart NYC t-shirt. The latter he offers for ‘free’ as a download, complete with an ironic registered trademark symbol and graffiti-style lettering. Given the controversy caused by some of his projects and their aftermath, some will no doubt be sad and others glad to see him go from the Five Boroughs.

To the uninitiated, used to seeing it but not to reading it, graffiti scrawl can seem illegible. In a play on both tagging and technology, this artist turns traditional tags into computer-style tag clouds, among other geeky street art projects.

Mathieu Tremblin could be criticized for stripping the soul out of the works he modifies, but that is too narrow a reading of his art. He is really not suggesting a better way to graffiti, just commenting on what is there, and making what is right before our eyes already a bit more visible.

In another work, he spoofs the ubiquity of digital watermarks by photographing a physical equivalent straight-on. We are so used to seeing these as after-print overlays on pictures, it takes conscious effort to realize it is part of the actual landscape.

Then, a complete reversal but in much the same mindset: a series of images where he has digitally stripped out graffiti by overlaying patches of Photoshopped color. In this case, it takes some time to recognize this is not just another case of painted-over graffiti removal.