Happy 2015! Wow, it seems like we were just marveling in the new shininess of 2014 (or 2013 for that matter) and somehow we're already in Back to the Future territory. I don't know about you guys, but I get a kick out of comparing the cinematic predictions of the late 80s-early 90s once the dates featured in the films actually roll around. And hey, we may actually get hoverboards!

While we wait for this potentially excellent way to commute, we can distract ourselves with other goodness that's a bit more likely to make an appearance this year. As in previous years, all of the forecasted awesome presented below is divided by media type. Projects and titles are included in this post only if they have at least a specified month for their release. There's none of this vague "sometime in late 2015 business." So if you look below and don't see a certain game or movie, it may be because that project doesn't have a release date yet.

Before we tackle individual titles, there'll be some (hopefully) fun new goodness right here on the Care and Feeding of Nerds in 2015.

New Site Stuff in 2015 (and some old, but still exciting stuff)!

First up, there will be at least 2 contests between now and March. We won't disclose the details of the contests just yet, but the prizes for these will be a copy of XCOM: the Board Game and Star Wars: Armada respectively. Stay tuned for these!

Speaking of board games, we're very pleased to announce that we've become the official media partner of the Game Makers Guild. This should translate into more reviews and more Developer Dialogues among other things. All the board games! (Important Note: you definitely don't have to be a member of the Guild to take advantage of our Playtesting Lab!)

We're in the very early stages of this, but we're in the process of building what we hope will become a video channel on YouTube. We're hoping to feature gameplay of various board games, tutorials on costume components and recipes, and, just maybe, some fantastically snarky video game play from the GIR and Elder Gias. This whole process is very new to the three of us, so we'll see how this goes.

The Care and Feeding of Nerds will have a presence at at least three different conventions in 2015: PAX East, Gen Con, and Boston FIG. At the very least, we'll be giving you live coverage from the floor of each of these. More details for each convention will be forthcoming!

There'll also be plenty of new reviews, recipes, tutorials and general musing. As always, feel free to give us a shout if there's something you'd like to see or if you have any other feedback about what we're doing.

Comics

Image Credit: DC Entertainment

2014 was chock full of gargantuan changes for a number of major comic franchises and, if all goes accordingly, we should continue to see plenty of new comic material as a result of these changes.

Thor #4 is slated to hit shelves on January 28 and promises some serious Thor versus Thor action!

Marvel took over the licenses for all Star Wars related titles today and their first act of publishing business is to release the remastered graphic novel versions of the screenplays for the original trilogy. A New Hope is already at your local comic shop and Empire will be available in March.

DC, still trying to play catch-up, is banking heavily on the success of the all-digital Batman prequel series, Batman: Arkham Knight. The comic will be available for purchase in February and a companion video game by Rocksteady Studios and Interactive Entertainment will go on sale on June 2.  

TV

Agent Carter - Tuesday, January 6.
Archer - Thursday, January 8.
12 Monkeys - Friday, January 16.
The Musketeers - Saturday, January 17.
The Walking Dead - Sunday, February 8.
Better Call Saul - Sunday, February 8.
Vikings - Thursday, February 19.
Once Upon A Time - Sunday, March 1.
Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. - Tuesday, March 3.
Outlander- Saturday, April 4.

Movies

A little bit of fun news before we kick off This Week in Geekdom: The Care and Feeding of Nerds family got a little bit bigger today with the addition of Serenity. The GIR and I have been considering pet ownership for the past few years and earlier today Serenity selected us as her new owners. We look forward to many cat-assisted rolls in future gaming sessions.

Science/Technology

Interstellar space travel just got a little bit closer to reality thanks to a 19-year-old Egyptian physics student. The student, Aisha Mustafa, has patented this quantum propulsion system. 

Microsoft has confirmed that they will be publicly discussing the next generation operating system, currently known only by its codename 'Threshold', during its 2014 BUILD conference in April. 

 Ok, it's 2014 and we don't yet have a hoverboard. But, we're reasonably close with this. 

Cheap renewable energy. At present, the best you can feasibly get is a combination of two of those three things. This team of Harvard researchers aims to change that with their quionone-powered organic battery.

A lot of interesting, eyebrow-raising things came out of this year's CES. We had Michael Bay having a full-on meltdown, we had insanely gorgeous gaming rigs, and we had renewed claims that the death of the PC is at hand. Do you agree?

Comics

Sometimes playing around with narratives to create alternate timelines is a fun, interesting way to expand a franchise. For Dark Horse, there are definite limits to this sort of recombination when you're working with something as weighty as Star Wars. Read here for a description of the graphic novels that almost were, featuring a Sith Leia and Luke ruling the galaxy together.

Movies

This past week was chock-full of news (or as close as we can get to news during this early developmental stage) concerning the upcoming Star Wars films. Leland Chee, the so-called Keeper of the Holocron for all things LucasFilm, confirmed that a 'story group' had been formed to determine once and for all what pieces of the Star Wars universe will be canon, and which will be shunted out the proverbial airlock.

Speaking of Star Wars movies, it is official: there will be an all Boba Fett spinoff movie. 

Is the upcoming Superman vs. Batman movie going to wreak even more havoc with comic canon? Actually, it seems like the response on that is probably not.

TV (Special all Dr. Who Edition)

As Whovians prepare to move on to the 12th incarnation of the Doctor, Den of Geek drew up this list of questions that have gone unanswered during the reign of Matt Smith.

A double-dose of fun for Whovians this week. Here are all 50 years of space-time travel in one handy, interactive infographic. 

And last, but not least, here are the first production stills and notes from the set of Dr. Who and our first glimpse of Peter Capaldi in the title role.

Games

Were you one of those burned by the recent rash of technical bruhaha maligning the game CONSORTIUM? Well, Inspirational Games and Steam would like to apologize for that with this, one of the most sincere mea culpas to have graced the internet to date.

General Awesomeness

Earlier this month, seven-year-old Sophie wrote to the researchers at the CSIRO asking why they had not been able to produce any dragons with their efforts. Initially, the scientists sent their apologies at this grievous oversight. On Friday the CSIRO sent her this.

Oh infographics, how we love you. Click here to see such an illustration that captures all zombies across all canons. Want a copy of your own? Visit the artist's Kickstarter page.

Fans have waited over two decades to see this, but the first official Simpsons Lego playset will soon be available for sale.

And 2014 is off and running! It's been a very snowy start to the year, but these Hoth-like conditions have provided ample opportunity to catch up on quite a bit (not least of which being a return to a regular posting schedule). It's not quite a resolution, but I'm determined to not let all the purchases of the recent Steam Winter Sale sit uninstalled and idle in my library and being snowed in is a perfect excuse to game with impunity. Next week will kick off the cosplay posts for 2014 but, for now, This Week in Geekdom!

Comics

To say Wolverine is well-known in the world of comics would be just a bit of an understatement. But, was the concept for this infamous member of the X-Men stolen and the creator left unaccredited for the past 4 decades? Bleeding Cool sought to find out.

2014 is shaping up to be a pretty big year for the Merc with a Mouth. On Thursday Marvel released these teaser images from what appears to be Deadpool's upcoming wedding. Whether this legitimately part of the overarching Deadpool story arc or an elaborate prank on readers (given the character and the non-specific April release date) remains to be seen, but we'll learn the truth soon enough.

It was only a matter of time. The proclamation came down on Friday afternoon from Disney/LucasFilm that the license for Star Wars comics was being withdrawn from long-time publisher Dark Horse and given to the 'in house' producer of graphic novels: Marvel. Marvel will start releasing Star Wars comics beginning in 2015 to coincide with the release of Episode VII.

Science/Technology

Antarctica has gotten quite a bit of press recently, but the frozen continent has yielded up more than ship-entrapping ice in the past week. Technicians associated with the New Zealand Antarctic Heritage Trust have processed and carefully restored an unearthed (or un-iced) set of 100-year-old negatives. Click here to glimpse some of the results.

Speaking of the frozen bookends of Earth, let's transition over to the opposing hemisphere for a moment. The newest edition of the journal Nature describes the work of researchers in Greenland who discovered a colossal aquifer 'lake' within the world's second largest ice sheet. 

The parliament of the United Kingdom is close to enacting legislation that may change the makeup of human DNA forever. The bill in question would essentially allow for a new type of in-vitro fertilization (IVF) that utilizes genetic material from three parents. Read here to see how such a process is even possible.

As mentioned last week, 2013 was a pretty significant year for many scientific fields. Archeology was no exception to this trend and the BBC has compiled this synopsis of the year in excavations.

While it's widely known that, 14 billion years after the Big Bang, the universe is still expanding. However, the fact that this expansion is taking place at an increasing rate has long been a source of consternation to physicists. Researcher Craig Hogan may have solved at least part of this mystery. Read here for his conclusions, which may delineate where quantum physics ends and cosmic physics begins. 

It may not look like any gecko that traipses this planet, but the European Space Agency has adopted the nomenclature for Abigaille, their new horizontal-to-vertical 'gecko-bot'.

Ford made waves in the auto-making world this week with their announcement that they will be engineering and releasing a hybrid concept car that will be at least partially powered by photovoltaic cells. Additional details on this would-be solar car will be released in the next few days during the International CES.

Pancreatic cancer is incredibly challenging both to effectively detect and to treat. However, these difficulties may soon be a thing of the past. The latest edition of the journal PNAS details the potentially groundbreaking findings of scientists at the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute.  

General Awesomeness/Feats of Nerdery

It took DeviantArt user Unrellius 14 months to create this poster-style depiction of every character to ever appear on Futurama. Bonus: the image is 100% free to print!

When it comes time to tender your resignation you could compose  a letter or go outside standard protocol. Avid Trekkie David Waddell chose the latter, announcing his departure from the local legislature of a North Carolina town with an announcement in Klingon. 

Artist Luke Jerram's latest collection is a unique blend of stunning visuals and harrowing pathology. Jerram re-created some of the deadliest and most virulent microorganisms in delicately hand-blown glass. The results are more than a bit surreal.  

The snow on the ground right now is too light and fluffy to make snowmen, but nerds in other cold weather locales are not so afflicted. Check out these 30 snowmen based on characters and scenes from Calvin & Hobbes.

I leave you all with this smile-inducing image of Sirs Ian McKellan and Patrick Stewart celebrating the new year together. As always, best wishes for an awesome week ahead!