Whenever real life intrudes on my blogging time like it did last week (yay for funerals!), I always come back home to an email inbox full of starred items from my RSS feeds, favorite tweets, and URLs to check out. Last week I found all kinds of awesome stuff online, but these new Marvel Reebok shoes may take the cake.

Marvel is collaborating with Reebok on a whole line of shoes inspired by their comic characters. Sneakers inspired by Wolverine, Sabertooth, Spider-man, Deadpool, Black Widow, and my favorite, Captain America, are going to be coming out sometime soon and will no doubt be very expensive.

Most of them are ugly as sin, but being a sucker for Reebok classics and primary colors, I think I’m going to seriously keep an eye out for the Captain America shoes.

You can check out SlashFilm for more photos, and hopefully we’ll find out more details like release date and pricing sometime soon.

If you’ve tried clicking on an episode of our podcast in the last couple days, you might be wondering why you were redirected to a new site. Well, it’s been a long time in the works, but this week we opened up BubblePipe.net, the home to our very own geek Podcast Network. After doing our show for a while we realized that we had a lot more ideas and people than could ever be fit into Bubble Pipe Theater, so we started brainstorming and Bubble Pipe Network was born.

We have a vision for the site being the home of all kinds of awesome podcasts for geeks, whether you’re a movie fan, gamer, collector, or crafty person. Right now we’re launching with three shows but more are on the way. Bubble Pipe Theater will be the catch-all, flagship show of the network, along with:

• Watching the List – Rob Lammle’s companion podcast to his new project Watching the List, where he is watching his way through the entire National Film Registry.
• Handmade Alley – Andrea Lammle and Holly Schroeder bring you the latest news, views, trends and tutorials from the growing indie craft community, as well as special interviews with fellow creatives, to entertain, inform, and inspire you to get your craft on.

We’re also going to be launching a pretty cool thing soon called Bubble Pipe Pilots that will let you help us decide which ideas are worthy of being their own podcast. When we have a new idea for a show, we’ll record a pilot episode and it will go up in the Pilots feed, and you’ll be able to provide feedback. If we get a good enough response for a particular pilot, we’ll launch it as a standalone show.

I have to mention that our awesome logo was done by Alex Deligiannis, and without it I wouldn’t have had the inspiration to finish the design of the site. Thanks Alex!

Check out Bubble Pipe Network and let us know what you think!

I hope you all are into LEGO in a big way, because my love for the plastic bricks has come back with a vengeance lately, and I expect to be fully obsessed in 2012. As you heard in episode 10 of Bubble Pipe Theater, LEGO goes hand-in-hand with Christmas in my book, and so I thought it would be a great fit for our latest Instagram Roundup.

With two Advent Calenders out this year (regular flavor and a Star Wars version), I knew there would be plenty of Christmas LEGO goodness spread around Instagram. I got the Star Wars calendar for my nieces for Christmas, and today was the day that the Santa Yoda minifig was unveiled. I hope that set goes on sale after Christmas because I wouldn’t mind having a Santa Yoda for myself.

Today’s Instagram Roundup featured photos by steviebay1, mymeltingbrain, hosshina, mattapp, jijipunch, y_yuki, victoriiakate, ndangwp, and my sister patternpatti.

Have an idea for an Instagram Roundup? Tag your photo with #tophatsasquatch and we’ll see it!

Time is running out to order your holiday gifts online so they arrive by Christmas. But, honestly, who are we kidding? This is just an excuse to showcase some cool Nintendo gear you can actually buy for yourself. These picks will serve as a perfect Yuletide diversion.

Nintendo Geek Gift Guide

Celebrate the Mario’s 25th anniversary with the Super Mario All-Stars collection. This single Wii disc brings together Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels, Super Mario Bros. 2 and Super Mario Bros. 3. It’s a reissue of the All-Stars set made available in 1993 for the NES except with updated graphics and sound. There’s also a CD soundtrack and 32-page book on the history of Super Mario. $50.00 is a small price to pay for some of the best-ever video games.

NES a little too old for you? Try the amazing Supaboy from Hyperkin that shrinks down the Super Nintendo Entertainment System console to the size of a controller. It features a 3.5-inch LCD screen and rechargeable battery for hours of mobile game play. Even better, you can hook it up to a TV and connect two SNES controllers for big-screen play. Alas, it doesn’t come with any cartridge but you can take your pick in the game section of many used media retailers. Supaboy is a steal at just $100.

Need some quiet time around the holiday? Try Jeff Ryan’s book Super Mario: How Nintendo Conquered America. Get the history of Japan’s biggest game company and it’s U.S. invasion. We even discussed it on an episode of our podcast.

Just in time for Christmas, our good friend Alex Deligiannis created a holiday version of our logo for Top Hat Santa Hat Sasquatch. He’s hanging out up at the top of the site for the next few days, but I thought I would also whip up some wallpapers in case any of you wanted to deck your halls with a cute, furry sasquatch. I tried to make sure I covered the most popular desktop and mobile wallpaper sizes, but if I missed one let me know.

• 1920 x 1080
• 1366 x 768
• 1280 x 800
• 1024 x 768
• 320 x 480 (iPhone)

We’ve got a lot of Christmas content coming over the next week or so, including a holiday episode of Bubble Pipe Theater, so stay tuned!