An image of a cinematic for Halo 4. Photo by SpicaGames on flickr.

Welcome to the This Week in Geek Fun Time Variety Hour! Today: Angry Birds in TIE fighters, bacteria that make gold and a live action video-game-based web series! All this and more! (Not actually guaranteed to take an hour.)

Around Town: Return to Ravnica, the latest Magic: the Gathering expansion, is now on sale, after posting record prerelease attendance across the country. Head to Valhalla’s Gate, Magelings, Rock Bottom, Slackers, or any major shopping center to get some booster packs!

Coming Soon: A Star Wars-themed Angry Birds game, or at least a level pack for Angry Birds Space, according to the game’s official Tumblr. I suggest a new strategy: let the pigs win. Nobody cares if you upset a droid bird.

Dropped: Part one of Forward Until Dawn, a live-action web series set in the Halo universe that will set up Halo 4. The next four parts will be released before the game drops too; no word on if they’ll be the epic 20 minutes that the first installment is.

Way too thin: The Hobbit film, which after already being stretched into three movies, has been revealed to have an Extended Edition coming sometime next year. Not confirmed; the percentage of extra movie that is completely fabricated and not based on any part of the book at all.

Pathetic: Maine Republicans, who are using a Democratic Senate candidate‘s World of Warcraft hobby as the focus of a campaign against her. The kicker? It might actually work. Because no decent senator plays a Horde-aligned race, obviously.

Not Science Fiction: A bacteria that produces a waste product of 99.9% gold, recently discovered by a laboratory from Michigan State University. In other news: nature is amazing.