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As we watch the hordes of moviegoers heading out to see the final film in The Hobbit trilogy, The Battle of the Five Armies, we can’t help but rejoice a little that this endless epic journey is about to end.

In this parody trailer for the previous installment, The Desolation of Smaug, you can “Rejoin Middle Earth’s other, shorter, less interesting fellowship as they continue their slow journey to Scrooge McDuck’s vault,” as the gravelly-voiced narration actor says in the hilarious trailer.

Check it out below.

It’s hard to believe that the holidays are already upon us, with Christmas arriving next week and Hanukkah already in full swing.

Our very own Leander Kahney weighs in this week with a fantastic gift guide for all those crazy Apple users in your world. This clever gift guide will help you find that special stuff your fanatic probably doesn’t have.

That, plus a fairly tasty gift guide for the cooks in your family or friend group from resident foodie Lewis Wallace, a quick and easy How To on reformatting your Mac’s hard drive from video and graphics whiz Stephen Smith, and some news on the recent spotlight aimed at Apple’s continued problems with Asian labor conditions.

Be sure to see below for these engaging stories and more. And Happy Holidays!

Can you truly find yourself in a video game? Canadian filmmaker and professor Ramona Pringle thinks so. After her mother got sick and she broke up with her New York boyfriend, she spent a year playing World of Warcraft, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game.

During that time, she found many pearls of wisdom, which she’s condensed into 10 “avatar secrets,” which inform her app-based documentary film of the same name.

Video games are an unlikely place to find wisdom, yet, within them, we can find camaraderie, experience the sting of defeat, and help each other become our best selves. Rather than simple time-wasters, social video games like World of Warcraft and Second Life mirror the human condition.

While Pringle doesn’t log in to WoW much these days, the game had an undeniable impact. “This project very much changed my life, my career and my perspective,” she said during a telephone call with Cult of Mac.

Grab your diamond pickaxe and get ready to delve once more into massively successful indie-hit Minecraft, only this time, it’ll be within an episodic, story-based game from Telltale Games, purveyor of such fine episodic video game content as The Walking Dead, The Wolf Among Us, and Game of Thrones.

Titled Minecraft: Story mode, the game will launch on iOS, Android, PC, Mac, Xbox and PlayStation in 2015 and will release episodically, with new characters and typical Minecraft themes, which we assume will be “mining,” and “crafting,” two major components of the in-game world.

Apple just posted a video on its YouTube channel to explain how they made the most recent TV ad for the holidays, “The Song.”

In the ad, a young woman uses GarageBand to sing a duet with her grandmother’s recording from the past. It’s a touching video that strikes a sentimental chord for many of us with grandparents who came of age back in the 1940s, as well as audio geeks who might remember the technology back then to create records: the audio booth.

Check out the video below for the full story from Apple, including the cool fact that they made an actual record using one of these old audio booths, The Voice-o-graph, for the young woman to sing along with.

This deep sea snail is covered in spikes, has purple blood and lives in the most extreme ocean environments. So of course the scientists that discovered it had to name it after their favorite punk rocker, Joe Strummer of The Clash.

In a study cleverly named “Molecular taxonomy and naming of five cryptic species of Alviniconcha snails (Gastropoda: Abyssochrysoidea) from hydrothermal vents,” researchers at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute detail five new species of snails, one of which gained the scientific name A. strummeri to honor The Clash frontman.

If there’s one thing we humans like to do, it’s make music. Seriously, we’ve been doing it since prehistoric times, so it’s no big surprise that we’d find many ways to bring music to our latest tool: the iPhone and iPad.

While there are a ton of different ways to play or make music on your iOS device of choice, here are nine rather weird ones, plus some fantastic videos to hear and see just how its done.

We’ll admit it: we were all squeeing like fanboys when we saw the official trailer for the upcoming sequel, Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

We may have watched it quite a bit more than once, but the YouTubers below have taken their fandom to another level, with some really well crafted remixes of the official short film.

Check out trailers below starring the cast of (and scenes directly from) the original trilogy, the trailer as Wes Anderson would do it, and a bizarre rendering of it all with pets in place of human actors. Oh, and there’s also the obligatory Lego version, as well, so be sure to scroll all the way down.

This week, we’ve got an amazing bunch of content for you, all cleverly bundled together into one fantastic high-quality digital magazine. It’s like all the best Cult of Mac stuff you might have missed crammed into a delicious metaphorical pastry that’s just brimming with sweet goodness.

Check it out below, and enjoy!

In a delightful little video from Microsoft founder Bill Gates, the tech billionaire and philanthropist talks about the favorite books he’s read this year. It’s an eclectic collection: Thomas Piketty’s volume on income inequality, Capital in the Twenty-First Century shares equal space with fiction novel The Rosie Effect as well as a book from the late 1970s, Business Adventures, by John Brooks. It’s a rare insight into the mind of one of our biggest business and cultural leaders of the last several decades.

Check out the video below for the whole list, and a charmingly presented stop-motion Lego film starring Bill Gates himself.

Classic adventure game Grim Fandango is getting a brand new coat of paint, with a newly restored version of the noir/Day of the Dead mashup coming to Mac and other gaming platforms in January.

The game will have all-new advanced lighting effects, high-resolution textures, and remastered audio for today’s high-end gaming devices. It wall also have all the charm and cleverness of Tim Schafer, the designer who created many other classics of the genre first at LucasArts, and later at his own company, DoubleFine Productions.

Grim Fandango is one of the more influential games of the late 1990s, with 3D environments and a high quality level of writing and plotting that is rarely seen in video games. This new version will bring the legendary title to a whole new generation of gamers, letting them experience the genius alongside those who just want to re-live the joy of the original game on a machine that they currently own.

What does the bacon above have in common with The Amazing Spider-Man 2? Both were created with 3D animation software called Houdini by Toronto-based Side Effects Software.

The newest release is coming next month, and, as you can see in the stunning video below, it’s going to further revolutionize the world of 3D animation in movies, TV and video games.

Check the video out below, and try not to lick your screen when the bacon shows up.

Just like The Force, the Internet has both dark and light sides. How you see the possible spoilers for Star Wars: The Force Awakens that just leaked is mostly a matter of perspective.

If you read on, you’ll be exposed to an embarrassing wealth of spoiler-y plot and character details about J.J. Abrams’ upcoming film. But be aware: Whether true or not, the sheer volume of close-up detail and conflicting information will change you.

If you want to go in unspoiled, read the following rumors at your own risk.

As for the supposed insider who leaked the information? Who knows their motivation? Even the Sith think they’re doing “the right thing.”

In what seems to be a new pattern of movie promotion, the next entry in the Terminator film series, Genisys, got a teaser trailer Wednesday for the official trailer coming the following day.

Take a look at this tiny trailer, which features a liquid-metal Terminator that looks a lot like ex-Governator Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Well, that didn’t take long.

It’s only been four days since The Force Awakens trailer appeared on all of our computer and iPhone screens, and here we have the entire thing recreated with the ubiquitous plastic building toy.

Why did this YouTuber build his stop-motion homage?

“Made this out of boredom,” he says, “… enjoy!”

In George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series, anyone can play the Game of Thrones, including little-known House Forrester.

Telltale Games, the house behind video gaming hits like The Wolf Among Us and The Walking Dead, have brought this more obscure Westeros family to the forefront of a brand-new game set in Martin’s Game of Thrones universe, and it looks delightfully dramatic.

Check out the trailer below, which includes some fine voicework from Natalie Dormer and Peter Dinklage as their respective characters from the show, wily Margaery Tyrell and diminutive Tyrion Lannister.

We’re a bit early this week, but wanted to make sure you got all the Cult of Mac goodness in one fine compilation in time for your four-day weekend. Dig in and enjoy a whole slew of gift guides, including those for the women in your life, that special college student, and outdoor adventurers. Plus? Pro tips on surviving that modern ordeal of American culture: Thanksgiving. All that and some of the week’s biggest Apple-related news are ready for you right now. Just download and enjoy!

Dig into Cult of Mac Magazine November 28 Edition, Free on iTunes

You think you know Peter Pan’s story? Guess again, because director Joe Wright (Anna Karenina, Pride and Prejudice) has got an entirely new tale to tell.

Pan is the origin story of the boy who never grows up. He’s an orphan, left on a doorstep with a mysterious note from his mother. He’s secreted away to Neverland, where he mixes things up with Tiger Lily, Blackbeard (played by an almost unrecognizable Hugh Jackman) and a young, idealistic Captain Hook.

Check out the gorgeous trailer below for the full details.

The fourth movie in the Jurassic Park series is slated to terrorize movie screens a full year from now. In order to drum up some excitement for Jurassic World, then, Universal has created this tiny trailer to advertise yet another trailer for the upcoming blockbuster.

The new trailer for a trailer shows very little, with some dinosaurs, a bubble car, an inquisitive Bryce Dallas Howard, and megastar Chris Pratt looking determined. Check it out.

Now that Universal Studios has decided to go the Marvel route and create its own cinematic universe built around its classic monsters like Frankenstein and The Wolf Man, we thought it might be a good time to reach back into the archives and re-watch the originals.

As the new Universal monster movies will likely be more action-adventure-oriented, it’s good to look back to see what made the original features so great, and which of the old oeuvre were just stinky cash-grabs meant to pad the studio’s bottom line.

With that, let’s get into the best and worst of the genre.

“So, what do you cosplay as?” asks this geek girl in the comic book shop. “Slutty Hawkeye? Slutty Thor? Slutty Iron Man?”

The video below is one of those “funny because it’s true” situations, as many women who love superheroes and comics hear the same kinds of questions and face the same sort of dismissive candor from geeky men who can’t seem to realize that everyone loves comics and superhero movies.

Check it out and see how annoying it would be to face this kind of discrimination.

Another week, another full docket of great stories at Cult of Mac, so we’ve put together yet another special Newsstand issue just for you, with all of the best news stories and features compiled in one place to easily read on your iPad or iPhone. This week we’ve got some great stuff: Jony Ive’s design secrets, some sexy slim cases for your iPhone 6, quick tips for OS X Yosemite, the best Black Friday deals (so far), and a hot tutorial on making GIFS on your Mac. All that and more, like we do, in this week’s Cult of Mac Magazine.

Dig into Cult of Mac Magazine November 14 Edition, Free on iTunes