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I’m a big proponent of making practical things interesting. Why have a regular Apple keyboard when you can have an Iron Man keyboard? Why drive a car without a Batman steering wheel cover? Why eat a sandwich without onions? Why keep your data stored on little grey sticks when your data can have a face?

Designers occasionally try to push through the homogenization of computer peripherals, fighting against a significant part of the working world that takes computers very seriously. A tall, black computer tower becomes the beginning and end of the conversation, and in some offices, this is an inevitability. If I ever end up in one of these places, please kill me quickly. Paperclip to the brain or something.

Mimobots actively fight against practicality being unaesthetic while they serve an impressive dual purpose. They fit excellently into the designer toy aesthetic and work as killer display items alongside your Dunnys and Peecols, but they also provide a whole lot of quick data storage, doubling as handy little flash drives which hold between 2GB and 16GB of data in various increments.

Over the past five years, Mimoco has explored a wide range of art on their flash drives, including licensed properties like Star Wars, HALO and Hello Kitty, and original art by notable creatives like Gary Baseman and tokidoki.

A personal favorite of mine is the Darth Vader Mimobot, which incorporates a removable cap that reveals Vader’s scarred face beneath. Mimoco even thought to utilize the notorious ‘variants’ which blind box designer toys employ by making one in every six Darth Vaders don the classic Return of the Jedi pale Anakin, instead of the fleshy prequel Vader face. Also excellently appropriate are the R2-D2 and C-3PO Mimobots. If they ever make an Admiral Ackbar, I’m sold. I have three external hard drives and a dozen various flash drives, but I’ve never been one to deny myself an Ackbar.

I was given the chance to play with a Mimobot in the form of a Blue Spartan from HALO – a video game property which has an incredible reach into pop culture. When your video game has comics, action figures, costume replicas and prints based on it, you’ve arrived. When your video game has a board game based on it, you’ve entered meta territory and there’s no turning back. There’s definitely a kind of loyalty which players dedicate to different hues of Spartan warriors, or else McFarlane’s line of action figures wouldn’t be able to crank out so many different variations of the same sculpt in different colors. The same is true for the Mimobots.

Even better is the fact that the XBox has recently added support for flash drives just like these, and the Playstation 3 has offered this compatibility for a while, so the uber-nerd in me is excited about the possibility of keeping various game data on video game themed drives.

They’re a lot of fun, and it’s worth a few extra bucks to have a genuinely fun USB drive to fulfill whatever USB needs you have. You can’t leave all of that porn on the family computer anyhow, and it’s silly to burn a CD of music for your friend when they’re just going to pop it right onto their MP3 player anyhow. This is the coolest possible way to handle these situations.

Any Bat-fan who knows anything is aware that Neal Hefti composed the legendary and recognizable Batman theme song. Even if you’re not a fan of Batman, or know that he’s actually millionaire socialite and business magnate Bruce Wayne in disguise, you can probably sing the Batman theme song from the 60s.

While we are still not allowed to own the original show on DVD, countless Batman theme song albums have been released. There was a small but powerful surf rock mini-industry based around various bands recording and re-recording the Batman theme song during the 1960s, and as a result, there are more ‘Batman Theme’ albums than I can count.

The soundtrack works of Neal Hefti extend beyond his work with Batman, however – but not as far as one might expect. Hefti spent much of his time as an accomplished jazz trumpeter and composing for big bands.

During a recent trip to a Westchester, NY Salvation Army location, I patiently waited while a portly, grey-haired man reached and strained himself around the considerable record collection, revealing his lacy, pink underwear in the process. The Salvation Army is always an interesting, marginally frightening place to visit.

Once I started leafing through the albums, I picked out a couple of James Bond soundtracks, anything with attractive or half-naked women on the cover, and the score to ‘How to Murder Your Wife’, because I recognized Hefti’s name.

Later investigation revealed that this particular album was never released as an individual CD. It had made its first digital appearance in The MGM Soundtrack Treasury, a limited edition boxed set of 20 CDs released by Film Score Monthly which currently sells for around $400, and also includes Hefti’s ‘Duel at Diablo’ soundtrack alongside 18 other albums.

Later, this soundtrack was remastered by Kritzerland and released paired with Hefti’s ‘Lord Love a Duck’ score. This was released in an edition of only 500, and now sells on the secondary market for around $40. Surprisingly, this limited availability has not significantly increased the value of the original LP, which is easily available on eBay – and apparently, rummage sales.

Very few of Hefti’s soundtracks have made it to CD, so if you ever see one at a tag sale, it’s probably worth picking up. While ‘Duel at Diablo’ and ‘Lord Love a Duck’ seem to be the most valuable Hefti soundtracks, owning them on vinyl might be the only chance you ever have to hear them – even if they’re not worth much.

I was one of those kids who played Dungeons & Dragons in junior high, memorized the Monster Manual II (the only one I had inherited), and kept a notebook full of drawings and statistics. Some might say that it was all downhill from there. I came back to D&D during high school, and once again in college – so the feel of a 20-sided die in my hand is always comforting and familiar, even if I never really fit into the game itself.

Countless misfits have also walked this same weird path, and ‘The Dungeons Masters’ chronicles three of these people, revealing a beautiful, bittersweet tale.

If you’ve never played Dungeons and Dragons, don’t expect an introduction to the game. While the game mechanics are briefly outlined and discussed in nebulous terms, and the depth of the game is made apparent by the sheer dedication of these players, ‘The Dungeon Masters’ is just as much a portrait of quirky, desolate middle-America as it is a portrait of people who like dragons and elves – all while remaining completely uncritical of either. At the end of it all, you’re left with a few questions : do these people really love gaming, or do they genuinely need it to be able to survive? Do these creative obsessions actually begin to destroy them?

Director Keven McAlester has created a deep, effective documentary of his subjects and what the game means to them, all without forcing the game itself on the viewers. While there is plenty of discussion of what enriches the lives of these people outside of gaming, it all comes back to the game : their successes, their failures, their relationships, and ultimately, their discomfort with fitting into humanity, and how a rich fantasy life can normalize their functions as people. The subjects are fairly centered between completely unassuming and full-on geek, but there are a few brief excursions into both ends of this pool during small interviews with cursory characters. The weirdness is unapologetic, but it doesn’t need to apologize, and no one is portrayed as someone you wouldn’t like to know in some (small) capacity.

Much of this hit close to home, as I was a kid who had a rough time both in and out of the classroom. I consciously ended my Dungeons & Dragons adventures because I saw the appeal of allowing it to completely envelop my unhappy life. I informed my fellow gamers, who probably saw this as an excuse to not show up anymore, or as a sure indication of my own crazy, but I slipped out of gaming before it was too late. This is not to say that my life turned out any better for it, but it wasn’t too difficult to abandon fantasy and deal with my real life.

The same cannot be said for many gamers. McAlester’s subjects range from well-adjusted but passionate nudists, to a woman who regularly dresses up as her character – a process that includes deep black makeup covering every visible inch of skin. This costume is a subtle, excellently captured metaphor for what all of these gamers do by entering their fantasy lives, and the difficulty they have by leaving them behind.

Ultimately, it’s one of the best documentaries I’ve seen, simply because of how intelligently and beautifully it’s been filmed and edited. The subject matter is dense, but simplified enough for anyone to appreciate. If you’ve ever gamed in any fantasy world, you’ll immediately feel the complexity of this work, and might even feel a little homesick.

The DVD edition includes a handful of outtakes and casting tapes which are equally entertaining, and nothing is so cringingly awkward that you wouldn’t enjoy this with your geek friends. In terms of subculture documentaries, it’s a must-see.

While most of us collect large quantities of smaller objects, collecting life-sized replicas requires more dedication than your average collecting hobbies. This week, as Sideshow Toys unveiled a large number of collectibles during their San Diego Comic Con 2010 celebration, the life-sized bust has received some special attention.

Life-sized replicas and busts are sometimes denoted as “1:1” scale, as opposed to a fractional percentage, and they rarely come cheap, whether they are replicas of movie weapons, props, or even characters.

If there is an inspiration for this post, it’s the full scale C-3PO bust which Sideshow has just announced, constructed from polystone and fiberglass, and completed with light-up eyes – for the fair price of $650. The amount of space it might take to store a human head and shoulders is more significant than you may think, unless you spend a lot of time trying to fit victims into freezers.

Sideshow has created an impressive array of life-sized collectible busts in this price range, recently adding Marvel Comics’ Thor, Boba Fett, a greyscale Creature from the Black Lagoon, and even an original zombie to their collection. If you can find the room to display these things, they’d make for an incredible setup. Many collectors will opt for at least one giant bust to serve as a centerpiece for a character or property-centric display. I’ll lust for the life-sized Darth Vader and his Humpty Dumpty head quietly.

Toynami, who is known for their anime and Futurama action figures, has also created a Terminator bust with light up and sound features. I can’t vouch for the awesomeness of Toynami as I can for Sideshow, but there’s nothing wrong with owning a giant robot head in any form.

Also hovering in this price range is Hollywood Collectibles’ Bruce Lee bust. It’s limited to 500 pieces and weighs in at 35 pounds, which might also be an accurate weight for Bruce Lee’s actual torso. Surprisingly, there are countless figures and replicas surrounding Bruce Lee, and most of them are shirtless and ready to strike – which is an anomaly in a collectible world which is dominated by characters is costume and monsters.

The limited number of life-sized busts out there has caused a number of collectors to sculpt and paint their own, often with incredible results. For now, I’m sticking with the 1:2 scale, or half-sized, busts for my own collecting needs – though the lure of the actual-sized is a powerful one. Often, the effect of being in front of a human-sized face is actually quite visceral, as any patron of a wax museum already knows, so a life-sized bust genuinely adds an amazing amount of punch and nerd-cred to a display.

I began playing around with tarot cards in high school, like most kids who dressed in black and decided to not fit into social norms like gym class and raising your hand when you knew the right answer or caring about pep rallies.

While most kids will pick up tarot cards at some point because it’s presumably hip and scares their parents, I actually didn’t have an interest until DC Comics released The Vertigo Tarot, a $100 set that featured amazing artwork by Dave McKean and based on DC Comics characters, but barely recognizable as such. Beautiful photomontages and drawings covered each card, and they inspired me to try and understand more about the tarot.

All of this eventually evolved into whatever my high school version of divination was, making me a hit at parties and with goth chicks. Is there really a greater purpose in life than being attractive to goth chicks? I submit that there is not.

As much as I’d like to have an assortment of decks to work with (though I haven’t attempted to do anything with them in a decade), collecting tarot cards should be a very, very specific exercise. Unlike most material collectibles, one should feel a significant connection to the cards that are in a collection – especially if you believe that they can be used for divination. If you do not feel connected to your tools, you can’t effectively form a conduit to anything beyond the Earthly plane – or so the theory goes. I can collect a weird-looking Iron Man action figure because I aim to collect Iron Man in quantity, but tarot collection needs to be based entirely on quality. If you’re collecting tarot cards just to have more of them, you’re not necessarily wrong – just don’t expect to actually use them.

My personal problem with collecting tarot cards is that a vast majority of them are hideous. ‘New Age’ artwork is one of the worst things that’s ever happened to the illustrative arts, because it seems to presume that ineptitude with composing an image is ‘folksy’ and ‘organic’, and that all one really needs to create a tarot card or illustrate a book on the magical implications of moon cycles is ‘good intentions’. As a person who is excruciatingly particular about the art I enjoy, it took a very long time to be able to find a second set to truly enjoy. After 15 years, I’ve only found one more.

Years after my first set, I found a second deck which was visually stimulating : The Tarots of the Golden Dawn, released by Italian publisher Lo Scarabeo, drawn by artist Giacinto Gaudenzi. Gaudenzi has actually illustrated a large number of tarot decks for this publisher, all of them stunning and exploring many different themes, from erotic to scientific. At the time, I picked up this deck due to a large number of fairies, Tolkein-esque designs, and topless women. Years later, I’ve discovered that this set can fetch around $200, even in poor condition, and was later re-released as the ‘Tarot of the Hidden Folk’. Sure, fairies have nothing to do with the tarot (even if people who like one tend to like the other), but the art style itself is what connected to me.

It’s a good starting point for a collection which can always expand, even if the potential collectibles are fraught with poor artwork. My distaste for most tarot designs was so prominent that throughout high school and college, I was compelled to sketch out entire decks that were more suited to my own ideas. Years later, the sketchbooks still hang around, waiting to be realized. Perhaps that’s the most effective tarot of all is one that you create yourself, after all. If someone can make a goofy vampire tarot and an unattractive unicorn tarot, there’s certainly nothing stopping you from making one that you like.