The Bathtub: Nerdish Leanings: AAAAAAAAAAAAART

Sure, we've all heard of sculpture, painting, collage, and cake-baking, but what of the unsung forms of art? The enterprising nerds of today have come up with some rather "neat" media in which to work. After the jump, a survey of some of the nerdiest methods of creative expression in the world (not including decopage).

Medium: Giant Robots
By 2000, the world was sick of "No Holds Barred" movies and ready for some no-holds-barred robot-fighting. What better way to welcome in the 21st century?

Of course, it turned out that "Battle Bots" was relatively crappy, with weak commentary and generally uninteresting matches. The problem? The robots were too small and not deadly enough.

This is the winningest Battle Bot, "Biohazard":

This is an actual killer robot:

It weighs 5000 pounds, has a giant flamethrower, and will destroy you and everything that you hold dear. Christian Ristow is, as far as I'm concerned, at the cutting edge of nerd art.

Medium: Post-It Notes
Hey, do you like video games? How about endlessly repetitive tasks? Why not combine the two?

Medium: Computer Cases
There are tons of sites (links become NSFW after a few pages) dedicated to "Case Mods," the art of creating elaborate cases to house your computer. Some of them really are pretty incredible pieces of sculpture. However, none express the ideals of nerdy art more than those that immortalize dedication to a particular science fiction genre or work.

For example, this steampunk laptop:

Or this "Borg" PC:

Medium: Tattoos
Obviously tattoos are not exclusively for nerds (or even generally for nerds), but there's a simply astonishing amount of people out there that are getting inked with their favorite video game characters. My favorite:

I loved Super Mario Bros. 3 as much as the next guy, so long as the next guy is not this guy. And seriously, what the hell is a tanooki, and what is the deal with its testicles (sfw)?

Summary:
So, rather light on the humor this week. But I did work in a reference to raccoon-dog testicles, which I've been trying to do for MONTHS.

Justin Douglas writes "Nerdish Leanings" for The Bathtub on Monday afternoons. You can e-mail him at j.d.bathtub@gmail.com.