The force is strong with this one.

The New York Times Magazine had a great article about ThinkGeek's Tauntaun Sleeping Bag and the power of a dedicated fanbase. ThinkGeek developed this product with the hopes of getting approval from Lucasfilm, but when they couldn't even get in for a meeting, they gave up and just included the product on their site as a joke on April Fool's Day.

Cue the fans. The product was so popular that ThinkGeek consumers (a few who happened to work at Lucasfilm) managed to stir up enough emails, phone calls, and jedi mind tricks so that the product is now actually in production and offered on the ThinkGeek website. Enjoy, and watch out for those Wampa attacks.

image courtesy of ThinkGeek

Dear Microsoft.

My husband and I just realized that we had our Xbox on all day (approximately 14 hours) yesterday. Only about 4 of those hours were spent on video games.

Microsoft, you have created a one-stop shop for movies, music, video games, and social media where even a non-gamer like me is comfortable to navigate my way through. It's not just a video game console anymore; it's an entertainment hub of which even Apple is probably jealous. So start marketing your product like that. Just a thought.

Thanks.

Losing my religion.

So, yeah, Obama left God out of his Thanksgiving Proclamation. And while middle America reels, the rest of us should take note. God isn't as popular as he used to be in these 50 states. As NPR reported in August, agnosticism and atheism are on the rise in the US with 15 percent of Americans claiming they have "no religious affiliation." That figured has doubled since 1990.

That's not to say God is going anywhere. Christianity is still the heart and soul of the majority, but with the numbers of non-believers continuing to rise (especially in young people and college students), you have to guess that the desire for more like-minded media will rise as well.

2012: Duck and Cover

The end is near, and it happens to be coming in the shape of cash cow. I'm talking about 2012 (!), the end of the world (!), the apocalypse (!).

It's no secret this one is in full swing. Networks like Discovery and History have been striking ratings gold with documentaries about predicting the end of the world for a while now. The movie 2012 was also released in theaters this month with a $65 million opening weekend (and already has a tv spin-off in the works), and Tim LaHaye, co-author of the megaselling Left Behind series, is starting a new series of apocalyptic novels called, appropriately enough, The End.

So what's the news? We all only have to look on the front page of any of the trades to see this one coming. But we've also already been through this hysteria before, and recently. Just 10 years ago, the country was up to their eyeballs in apocalyptic media, fearing the turn of the millenium and Y2K. So how is thing time going to be different? One (hyphenated) word: post-apocalypse. 2007 saw the beginning of this with the release of the hit I Am Legend. Fast-forward to now: the 2012 series being developed for ABC is set after the events in the movie and focuses on humans rebuilding in the aftermath. Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize winning (and best-selling) novel The Road was just made into a feature film. And there's even a trend of post-apocalyptic fiction coming to the children and tween's fiction market, according to Publisher's Weekly.

A new twist on a very old idea, but still slowly gaining steam. As for me, I'm just waiting to see if AMC can take advantage of this trend with their Walking Dead series before that zombie wave jumps the shark. Here's hoping.