The 10 Geekiest Pieces of Furniture in the Universe
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Geoff Shakespeare
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- July 19, 2009
So you're a huge geek and have some cash to spend. You're not going to settle for some memorabilia to hang on your walls and some costumes to wear to ComicCon. No, you're going to trick out your whole freaking house with some awesome geek-themed furniture.
Unfortunately, in the world of geek obsessions, practicality and style are often mutually exclusive. You'll have to decide which you want when shopping for a...
10Frozen Han Solo Desk
As a reminder of the coolest scene in the coolest Star Wars movie, the Han-Solo-Frozen-In-Carbonite desk is straight up awesome. Having this beauty in your office would leave even the most tangentially geeky person in awe of your furniture owning prowess. How could anyone say no to a person sitting across from them at this table? One look down at Han's frozen scream and they'd do whatever you want.
The Downside:
But then the thrill of owning Han encased in carbonite dies down a little and you actually have to sit down at your desk and start filling out those TPS reports again. Just try to concentrate while Harrison Ford's ghostly visage, twisted in rage and fear, stares permanently up past your keyboard.
Now imagine trying to eat a quick office takeout dinner on this thing, with Han Solo's gaping maw silently demanding a bite of each nacho you lift off your plate. And then there are those extended fingers, that your imagination will surely see wiggling desperately out of the corner of your eye.
Also, there are no drawers so that seems really inconvenient.
9Captain Kirk's Chair
Ah, now this is better. Having a Captain Kirk chair makes even the most mundane of tasks an action-filled adventure in the 23rd century! Whether you're ordering pizza, changing channels or just masturbating gloomily, you'll feel like Captain Kirk ordering pizza, changing channels and masturbating gloomily and have all the confidence of a man who humped his way across the galaxy.
The Downside:
At some point in this setup, the Starship Enterprise stops and your sad little apartment begins. And while that chair looks awesome in the middle of a space-age bridge and blinking computers, sandwich it between the charcoal grill up there and your cat's litter box, and you have a recipe for instant clinical depression.
And the garbage men just will not take it.
Honestly, we're not sure if the full-on Starfleet uniform hurts or helps that cause. Sitting in this in your old "Federal Breast Inspector" t-shirt and a pair of Bud Light sweats would seem to dishonor the proud tradition that chair represents, but dressing up like an aging William Shatner just makes it look like your own schizophrenic delusion has come to life. It's kind of a no-win situation.
8H.R. Giger Coffee Table and Chairs
H.R. Giger's aesthetic is unmistakable, his black leather dong-inspired creature from Alien is one of the most original and terrifying monsters ever to later be ruined in a retarded crossover movie.
Giger, for some reason, then felt the need to branch into home decor. For instance we have these high-backed chairs, made for the film Dune, which would be perfect for some living room activities like passively observing an orgy while petting your white Persian cat and wearing your blue alien Sting speedo.
Meanwhile, this coffee table, also inspired by Giger's work, would definitely be awesome for scaring the shit out of your dog.
The Downside:
No matter how awesome your geek cred is, at some point you're going to wind up hosting your grand parents, or in-laws. You'll create many an awkward moment as Aunt Maria comments on how lovely the funeral service was as she sits daintily in a chair seemingly crafted entirely out of Xenomorph spines.
You'll come to regret your coffee table purchase when you stumble home drunk in the middle of the night and trip on it; the teeth of its alien jaws tearing open your scrotum.
7Periodic "Table"
Do you know what's awesome about chemistry? Fucking everything, that's what. Argon? Lead? Molybdenum? Hells yeah, bitches. Back in the day being a geek wasn't just about video games and a shrine to Megan Fox, you also had to be the kid with thick rimmed glasses who carried a pocket protector and actually knew what the fuck calculus was good for.
Now that everything nerdy is ultra cool, it's time to embrace that genius heritage with the Periodic Coffee Table, which has a sample of all 88 naturally occurring elements embedded in a replication of the Periodic Table. Why put your feet up on some pressboard IKEA hunk of junk when you could be resting your dogs on sleek, sexy cadmium? They even found a way to include the toxic ones!
The Downside:
At $8,550, it ain't cheap, but keeping it real never is. And while the table is a guaranteed conversation starter, each element comes in its own individual cube, meaning if you ever throw a party, you're going to wake up the next day with a table containing only shit elements like calcium and fucking xenon gas with a busted thorium cube leaking small amounts of radiation. Meanwhile some jackass is trying to pawn the chunks of gold, silver and platinum you like to rest your coffee on.
6Dragon End Table
It's Friday night and you're wrapping up another rousing session of D&D. The goblins have been slain, the maidens have been won. Good job, Dungeon Master. Kick back, and set your fine drink upon a glass tray held obediently by your stone "Subservient Dragon."
If you're not into D&D, it also works great for displaying your Harry Potter books or He-Man action figures.
The Downside:
Once more, what's awesome on its own becomes sad in context. The misleading photo up there portrays our noble dragon table in a palatial room serving goblets of gold. That sucker takes on a whole new light when it's offering a 32-ounce Mountain Dew from Taco Bell in a Transformers 2 cup, next to a wrinkled bag containing bits of Cheetos dust.
5Rubik's Cube Coffee Table
Rubik's Cubes were once a huge part of our culture, and back in the 80s everyone had one. The fact that most people "solved" it by breaking it apart or rearranging the stickers didn't matter.
But for some puzzle geeks, the Rubik's Cube remained the exemplar of cool. In a masterstroke of unnecessary and inexplicable inspiration, someone gambled that those people might need a table to keep coffee on, or to toss out some copies of Wired magazine when friends were coming over. And thus, the Rubik's Cube Coffee Table was born.
The Downside:
We know what you're thinking. Get a bunch of friends together to try to solve this huge bastard, and you'll have a great time.
Sorry to spoil your fun, but retailing for $600, this table combines all of the function of a table with none of the fun of the Rubik's Cube, since it doesn't actually work. So really it functions as a table in much the same way any object of a similar size would, including the box the table comes in.
4The Scrabble Couch
For anyone with even a smattering of nerd genes somewhere inside them, Scrabble was the awesomest of board games for one simple reason: it made you look smart. Sure, if you walk around all day spelling difficult words at people, you'll eventually get shot. But do it in the context of a Scrabble game, and suddenly you're the life of the party.
So it only makes sense to give us the game in furniture form!
The Downside:
"Does anyone have enough letters to spell 'this party blows?'"
Oh, wait. No. That actually doesn't make sense at all. What do you do, have each player sit on the floor behind their sofa with a stack of letter pillows? The novelty of that will wear off about three seconds before you finish suggesting it to your party guests.
And what do you do between games? Shaped like the game's tile holders and probably made of the same wood, comfort couldn't have been high on the list of requirements during the design stage. Sure, it looks kind of cool and you could spend hours spelling out dirty words to make yourself laugh in those lonely wee hours of the morning. But who would want to sit on it? Its sharp edges and unforgiving angles look like something from the lab of an evil genius chiropractor.
3The Star Wars Home Theater
For some folks, it takes a little more than one piece of furniture to geekify their domains. They'll turn a whole room into a shrine to some piece of pop culture. Like these wealthy nerds who decided to trick out their home theater to look like the control deck of the Death Star.
For an extra dash of coolness they added a life-size model of badass bounty hunter, Boba Fett, and a life-size model of closet case, C3PO. Throw in a massive flatscreen and a few wicked chairs, and you have the ultimate place to watch Star Wars. Having any kind of home theater is pretty awesome, but a Star Wars home theater is double deep-fried awesome with extra awesome dipping sauce. What we're saying is it's awesome.
The Downside:
It's pretty much only good for watching Star Wars. It might get a little weird having Boba Fett see you cry when Macaulay Culkin dies at the end of My Girl. And forget about porn. Can you imagine rubbing one out under the never-ending robot gaze of Threepio? His cold, robotic stare, observing you. Judging you.
2The Star Trek Apartment
Not enough to just deck out one room? Well, you and Tony Alleyne of England will have a lot to talk about. A big fan of Star Trek: Voyager, he completely stripped his apartment and refitted it to look like the starship.
The Downside:
We like Seven of Nine's futuristic boobies too, and arguably there's something cool about living in an immersive world in which it seems like they're only a warp core breach away, but come on. We're talking about freaking Voyager here. While late at night after binge drinking Yoo-Hoo and schnapps it might seem like an awesome idea to model your entire home after Star Trek, but dressing it up as the second worst Star Trek series ever? Not Star Trek, not The Next Generation or even Deep Space Nine, but fucking Voyager?
This is right above the toilet.
And in the harsh light of day, the fantasy falls apart a bit. For instance, there is no longer the harsh light of day. Lacking windows as the dank starship Voyager did, Alleyne's home, the one that forced his wife to leave him, is a shut-in's dream cave making its owner a little more Gollum-like with each passing day.
1The Star Trek Coffin and Urn
Any claims adjuster with glasses can live the nerd life, but it takes a special kind of geek to die a nerd death. If for some reason you want to be picked on in the afterlife as much as you were here, why not go to Valhalla in style?
The folks at Eternal Image have created two ways for you to spend your eternity safe in the knowledge that you probably were more disturbing to Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner than millions of other ravenous, reality-challenged fans could ever dream of being. The Star Trek coffin and urn can help you carry your love of sci-fi with you as you boldly go to the undiscovered country six-feet under.
The Downside:
On the one hand, it beats the shit out of the standard dollar store urn or pine box most of us will find ourselves in. But really, the funeral isn't for you. You'll be dead.
No, the funeral service is for all your friends and family to get together and celebrate the fact that you could have been a much worse person if you had really tried. But with these, you'll be reminding them that your entire days spent on this mortal coil were devoted to the show that gave us Tribbles and Ricardo Montalban's prosthetic chest.
For more geeky stuff that will make you weep for humanity, check out The 7 Most Impressive (And Depressing) Geek Collections and PathetiCon: 8 Geek Conventions God Never Intended.
And visit Cracked.com's Top Picks to see which columnist owns the Captain Kirk chair.
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