Writer and illustrator Lisa Hanawalt snuck into the New York Toy Fair and wrote/illustrated a very funny, very snarky account of it for The Hairpin. My wife used to go to Toy Fair every year for work, and she always made it sound like a cross between a season in hell and Willy Wonka’s toy factory. The Toy Fair isn’t for kids. The show’s held yearly at the Javits Center, Manhattan’s main convention facility (a.k.a. massive gray box), and it’s full of serious adults in business suits with corporate accounts. It’s not supposed to be fun. We’ll see about that! Toy Fair badges are only available for pros, so my boyfriend’s mom generously registered me and my friend Tim as employees of her chia seed company. My badge says “CHIA POWER/Assistant Buyer.” We’ll avoid walking by chia products for fear of having to hold our own in a chia conversation. I want to pretend we’re here for legitimate reasons, so Tim and I work out a cover story, “we distribute chia products, but we’re looking to branch out into toys and athletics.” That totally sounds like a thing, right? The Toy Fair

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Snarky and funny illustrated account of a day at the New York Toy Fair

This electron microscope photograph, published by the Vienna University of Technology, shows a nano-scale model of a Formula One racing car, created using a 3D printing technique being developed there. The BBC has more on the new technique .

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The world’s smallest model car

Besides its taste (and its qualities as the next generation of computer memory ), the greatest thing about Jell-o is how tactile it is. You can jiggle it and wiggle it in all kinds of crazy ways, and there’s now a kit that lets you add some musical accompaniment to all the fun.

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Noisy Jelly turns Jell-o molestation into tasty electronic music

Whether you’re working on the next big Internet startup, or just cramming for university exams, doing overtime in front of your computer can seem like a life-sucking enterprise. Well now you can adorn your desk with the appropriate dcor for such moments.

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LED IV Drip delivers geek life support via computer lighting

Did you read the title? Because that’s what this is . They say a picture’s worth a thousand words , but man, I think I really f***in’ nailed it with that title. With over 4,000 individual pictures, Kyle Roberts and crew wanted to recreate the nostalgic 1987 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon introduction in stop motion. Artist, Nathan Poppe, created over 60 hand-drawn images to establish a bright and vibrant backdrop to complement Roberts’ use of action figures. Sponsored by the Toy and Action Figure Museum, curator Kevin Stark designed many of the pieces in the original 1990 TMNT toy line. Damn, I used to love me some Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle cartoons on a Saturday morning. Also: pounding bowl after bowl of sugary cereal until my mom would have to lock me in a closet to calm down. Fun fact: I tunneled out with my teeth . Just like Master Splinter would have! Hit the jump for the worthwhile Friday time-waster.

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Stop Motion Remake Of TMNT Cartoon Opening

When someone drums their fingers endlessly on the table, it gets annoying pretty quickly. So imagine if each of those taps was accompanied by the sound of a piano. This wrist-mounted electronic piano lets you do that by expressing your inner Elton John without having to carry around a huge keyboard.

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Wrist-mounted finger piano lets you annoy people everywhere

This is a video of a bunch of brobros drifting their trikes /Big Wheels down steep hills in New Zealand. Sometimes with traffic coming. Plus the dude in the front doesn’t even wear shoes or a helmet , so you know he doesn’t give two dicks about living. A hard-ass we call guys like that. Jk jk — future vegetables . “Come on, we’ll just pull the plug for a little bit so we can plug in the mini-fridge to cool our beer” his bros will say when they visit. Hit the jump for the death wishing.

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Not How I Want To Die: Drifting Big Wheels

Before the “Nintendo wars” of the early 21st century, there were these toys, which invited young children to practice accurately releasing atom bombs. I’m not sure that the skills you learned with this gadget would translate into real A-bombing practice, though, which probably disappointed some youngsters. Atom Bomber

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Old toy for teaching children to accurately drop atom bombs

Action Figure Insider’s Jason Geyer has published a second gallery of rejected toy-ideas he and his co-workers pitched to tie in with the launch of Star Wars: Phantom Menace (the first gallery came out four years ago!). There’s some stuff here that’s just plain weird, but plenty that is rather cool. Like the last blog, this group is just a whole bunch of random ideas thrown up against the wall to see what sticks. This project was both fun and frustrating. We had a very limited time to makewhatever is was we were going to make. We were working on many different projects at the same time all this was going on, and we had no clear idea of what the client wanted (mainly because the client wasnt sure, either). So be kind to some of these pieces. The fabric booksock is not our finest hour. Rejected Star Wars Strikes Back! ( via Super Punch )

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Rejected Star Wars toy ideas

NECA and BigBadToyStore have announced a forthcoming line of Portal toys , including this awesome Portal Gun replica. Aperature Studios Portal Gun Prop Replica ( via Super Punch )

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Replica Portal guns coming in May