Setting a world record must be pretty cool. Then again, after you reach that sort of apex, I imagine you find yourself on everyone’s hit list who is gunning for that position. And so is the case for Pac-Man pimp Dave Race, who recently set the new speed record for attaining a perfect score on a standup Pac-Man arcade machine. Believe it or not, Dave actually already set the speed record back in 2009, but his new time trumps his old by 55.31 seconds.

For those who don’t know, a perfect Pac-Man score is reached when players eat every single pellet, enemy, dot and fruit, without losing a single life, within the game’s first 255 levels -at which point the game offers one last split-screen level, before it glitches out completely. The first dude to ever achieve this feat was hot sauce master Billy Mitchell in 1999. It took him around 6 hours to achieve.

RecordSetter.com features a lengthy home recording of Dave Race’s Pac-Man achievement, which we’ve included after the jump for you. Because, come on, let’s be honest: neither of us is going anywhere for the next few hours. Say, did you know Pacman was originally called Puckman? They changed the name because they were worried people would change the P to F…

*Ramona Flowers walks off*

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For brothers John & Justin Grosjean, experiencing the adventures of Skyrim doesn’t just mean battling dragons out in the middle of the damn woods. According to these two, even a visit to your local convenience store can offer an excuse to chug down a Potion of Haggling or two.

Even in 2012, the lessons we’ve all learned in Whiterun are still completely applicable: speechcraft, pickpocketing, fast traveling and, yes, even buckets over the head are still welcomed.

Check after the jump for the full video and admire the fact that even Dovahkiin need snacks sometimes.

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Video game retailer Glyde.com has a personal vendetta against cheapskate stores ripping people off with high game costs/low return prices. So what better way to advertise their frustration than to demonstrate that not even a kick to the old nuts is more painful than dealing with GameStop?

Aaaaaand, that’s all there really is to this one. So check after the jump for the full video and let us know how painful your own experiences have been. More painful than taking a size 9 to the brain? Sheesh, we sure hope not…

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So, I’m really not sure how to handle this news. I don’t know if I should be relieved that there’s still one subject out there that I know as much about as a genius person. On the other hand, it’s incredibly frightening that even the brainpower of Mr. Stephen Hawking can’t crack this windtalker code.

Hawking recently sat down with New Scientist Magazine to talk about, well, physics and sh*t. After the mandatory explain-the-universe-to-me questions, Mr. Hawking was thrown an easy layup…which he slam dunked as hard as he could.

[New Scientist Magazine] What do you think most about during the day?

[Stephen Hawking] Women. They are a complete mystery.

Hmmm, well, that…that was mildly disheartening. Not to mention that Mr. Hawking will be turning 70 this month, too, so this really proves that no amount of intellect or wisdom can ever help Adam understand watching The Notebook with Eve. Great.

banner pic via [Geekologie]

Good news today: everyone’s favorite gaming elder, Old Grandma Hardcore, has returned to the limelight. This time around she’s busy trying to become the ultimate Dovahkiin while exploring Skyrim’s endless dungeons. And no, sorry, Old Grandma Hardcore has nothing to do with porno. As far as I know.

This newest video spans a couple of weeks as OGH attempts to complete the Dark Brotherhood quest challenges, from Skyrim, so don’t get all pissed off at me if you catch a spoiler or two. I mean, spoilers are a very small price to pay for the opportunity to hear someone’s grandmother call a bunch of undead “a**holes”.

Video after the jump (language is technically NSFW):

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Eff me. Well, I’m pretty sure that nothing else is going to top this for the remainder of the year, so after this post I’m going to bury myself in the ground until 2012 hits. Behold cTrix, an Atari programming mastermind and inventor of the nerdiest musical instrument ever: the gAtari. Yes, I said gAtari. Just let that set in for a moment. I’m not even the one deciding that gAtari should be in bold letters, that’s just the way the word comes out when you type it into a computer. gAtari. See?

Anyway, cTrix is an Australian brainiac who has a particular knack for taking apart computer bits and pieces. Utilizing his strength and fusing it along with his love for music and the Atari 2600, created a behemoth of a device that can play both.

The “gAtari” was my excuse to do something a little silly after I discovered that the Atari 2600 was more limiting than I realized! (31 pitches, minimal waveforms and only 2 channels!) I needed an EQ which could take a high voltage and drop it down to line level (Boss bass EQ) plus a way to hold loops between tracks and parts (Boss delay). So rather than have it “DJ” style config, I thought I make something a little more creative. It uses my atari-x-mod converter software which compiles binary files for Atari. [source]

More info can be found over at cTrix’s website here. After the jump we’ve got footage from one of his musical performances at Blip Festival Tokyo 2011. I think the crowd really enjoyed themselves. I think.

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Now I’ve never actually seen a Nepalese yeti finger before, but I like to think it’d look like some kind of withered, giant Jaquita banana. By no means am I a professional, but apparently scientists over at Edinburgh Zoo in London share the same instincts. Recently they were asked to determine via DNA testing whether or not a suspected Abominable Snowman finger was in fact a trinket from the mythic beast. Turns out it was only a human finger. Man, I hate human fingers.

Primatologist Ian Redmond said: “From what we know of accounts of Yetis, I would have expected a more robust and longer finger and possibly with some hair on the back.

“Human was what we were expecting and human is what we got.” [BBC]

The finger had been hiding out at the Royal College of Surgeons, where it was recently rediscovered, since the 1950s. Apparently, as the story goes, an American explorer stole the finger from a Nepalese monastery, where he replaced the artifact with a fake human finger. Concealing what he thought was the real yeti finger, the explorer then handed off the suspected relic to Hollywood star James Stewart, who then smuggled the finger back into the United States with help from his wife. Sixty years later and here we are: testing old candy bars to determine what the hell they are.

So, bad news today for any yeti fans out there, however it’s a great day for everyone who enjoys human fingers. Party on.

[thedailywh.at]

If you’re anything like myself, then you constantly wake up in the middle of the night with nosebleeds, screaming and mumbling about the eventual robot apocalypse. That said, I think we should all book our plane tickets now and head on down to Mr. Lucky’s Used Chevrolet the University of Miami School of Law for their upcoming conference to discuss the legal status of robots. I am not messing with you. Yes, I did say “robots”.

The conference, taking place in mid April, is currently accepting proposed topic discussions via email. They’re asking that a synopsis up to three pages long be sent to robots@law.miami.edu by January 12th, so if you’re still sitting on that term paper you wrote about the legal ramifications of that Mr. Machine toy marching like a Nazi, I suggest you finish that puppy up and send it on in.

Our pals over at io9 posted a list of sample topics for the roundtable, which we’ve included after the jump. You can either check that out -or be like me and just pop Terminator 2: Judgement Day back into your parent’s VHS deck and do some more pushups.

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For those of you unfamiliar with the Spanish horror flicks [REC] and [REC]2, I highly suggest you rush out and rent these two fine (and foreign) zombie movies. In the United States, we remade these films under the title Quarantine -which sucks because, well, those remakes sucked pretty bad and in no way do the original Spanish versions any justice.

Well the good news today is that there’s a [REC] 3 Génesis coming out soon and we’ve got the trailer after the jump. The bad news is that the entire trailer is in Spanish, without any subtitles, although I would argue that people eating other people at a wedding probably sounds pretty similar in an y language. For anyone who feels like translating the trailer, please do so -because I’m someone who opted out of taking Spanish classes in high school and instead thought that learning German would be beneficial. So glad I live in Southern California now…tons of Germans who I get to communicate with.

Check the [REC] 3 Génesis trailer after the jump:

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