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Nerdy cousins Clarence (Keegan-Michael Key) and Rell (Jordan Peele) try to act like gangbangers to rescue Keanu, the preternaturally adorable kitten. (credit: Warner Bros.)

There's a whole subgenre of nerd comedy out there like Big Bang Theory that's about laughing at nerds, poking fun at them for being on the spectrum, asexual, or both. But now, thanks to comedians like Key & Peele, John Oliver, and writer/director Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead), there is another kind of nerd comedy—a great kind, where we laugh with the nerds, and those nerds have personalities that go beyond stale stereotypes. Key & Peele's first feature film, Keanu, is a perfect example of this kind of comedy. It's not perfect, but it will crack you up just like a good Internet meme does.

Though the sketch comedy show Key & Peele airs on Comedy Central, it found an audience on YouTube. There, clips from the show racked up millions of views and popularized the comedians' sharp blend of dork pop culture references and satirical takes on racial weirdness in America. Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele are both biracial, and their resulting insider/outsider experiences are often fodder for their sketches—and fuel many of the jokes in Keanu, too. The premise of the movie, like a lot of the bits on their show, is that they're two geeky, middle-class guys who talk like white people (or, as Key says to Peele in Keanu, "You sound like John Ritter all the time.") And this can get awkward for all kinds of reasons.

In Keanu, the problem is that movie-loving stoner Rell (Peele) must drag his wonky cousin Clarence (Key) into an LA gang war to rescue his kitten (the eponymous Keanu). Turns out that all the people who couldn't make it into the Crips and the Bloods have formed a new gang, the Blips. And their leader, Cheddar, has kidnapped Keanu. Why? It's a long shaggy-dog fluffy-kitten story that involves turf wars, two scary gang ninjas from Allentown, and a new kind of super-drug called Holy Shit. To get the kitten back, Rell and Clarence infiltrate the Blips by pretending to be gangsters, dropping N-bombs and doing their best to act ghetto in chinos and pastel shirts.

(credit: Comcast)

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler is a fan of Comcast's plan to bring its TV service to customers without traditional set-top boxes. Comcast putting set-top box functionality into Samsung smart TVs and Roku devices without charging a monthly set-top box fee "points the way forward" and proves that industry complaints about proposed FCC rules are misguided, Wheeler said in a press conference after yesterday's FCC meeting.

In February, the FCC took a preliminary vote on rules requiring pay-TV companies to make their content and programming information available to makers of third-party hardware or applications. Cable companies blasted the FCC proposal, but last week Comcast launched a program to make its TV service available on other set-top boxes.

"I think that what Comcast just did is proving our point that you can take a third-party device, put set-top box functionality into it, and protect copyright, protect the economic ecosystem, not have to rebuild the network, and all these other horrible things that the industry has [claimed would happen]," Wheeler said yesterday. "That is the essence of our proposal, that you can safely move content to a third-party device."

It's like an alternate universe where Sega and Nintendo merged in 1992.

Less than 24 hours after the rollout of official mod support for emulated Steam versions of dozens of Genesis/Mega Drive classics, the Steam Workshop listing for Sega Mega Drive Classics Hub is a Wild West-style grab bag of total overhauls, useful gameplay, and graphical tweaks—along with legally questionable uses of other companies' copyrighted content.

Of the 163 Steam Workshop Mega Drive mods currently listed on Steam, the vast majority are revisions to the Sonic the Hedgehog series. Those run the gamut from minor gameplay modifications (adding knuckles to Sonic 1 or a homing attack to Sonic 2, for instance) to complete reworkings of the entire game (Sonic 3 Complete, Sonic Thrash), silly sprite swaps (Ring the Ring), and at least somewhat offensive jokes.

Outside of the Sonic series, Japanophiles are using the mod support to offer fan translations of the original Japanese versions of certain games as well as palette swaps that replace Americanized characters and backgrounds with their original Japanese counterparts. Other popular mods include early prototype versions of existing games (as well as unreleased titles) and "Chill Editions" that grant unlimited health and power. There are also a few completely silly mods that are difficult to categorize.

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An overhead shot of the Airlander 10, inside Hanger 1 at Cardington Airfield

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Airlander 10, the world's largest and longest aircraft, is preparing to gently glide out of its gargantuan shed—which is incidentally the largest hangar in the UK—at Cardington Airfield in Bedfordshire.

Earlier this month Airlander 10, which is being built by Hybrid Air Vehicles (HAV), was officially named Martha Gwyn by the duke of Kent. HAV is now in the "final stages of testing" before it can exit the hangar, which will be a "matter of weeks" rather than months.

The Martha Gwyn is an odd beast. At its most basic, it's a 92-metre (302ft) blimp filled with 38,000 cubic metres of helium. There are four propellers—two at the back, one on the front left, one on the front right—that provide vectored thrust from four V8 turbo-diesel engines. But in addition to those rather mundane elements, the envelope (the bit that holds all the helium) has an aerofoil silhouette that reportedly increases lift efficiency by 40 percent.

(credit: Getty Images|Akio Kon/Bloomberg )

Everyone wants a slice of the self-driving car market, and we can now add electronics giant Panasonic to that list. Tom Gebhardt, head of Panasonic's US automotive division spelled out the company's plans in an interview with Automotive News. He said that Panasonic has ideas about the way we interact with autonomous cars, which the company will develop out of its expertise with infotainment systems.

The company is also working closely with Tesla on the battery "Gigafactory" in Nevada, which will be key to Tesla's ability to deliver almost 400,000 Model 3 electric vehicles to those in that gigantic queue of preorders. Gebhardt wasn't able to put a number on Panasonic's contribution to the factory—apparently that's down to Tesla—but he said that the company would "do what we need to do to assure supply."

As we've discussed previously, government regulators and the auto industry are hoping for great things from autonomous vehicle technology. In the US, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is extremely bullish on self-driving cars, which it sees as the answer to reducing the 33,000 deaths on US roads each year.