Awesome Weird

Abandoned Films imagines what a Super Mario Bros. movie might have looked like as a movie shot in Super Panavision 70 back in the 1950s. The surreal take on Nintendo’s iconic plumbers is made extra trippy courtesy of generative AI tech. The images are by Midjourney, video by Runway, voices by ElevenLabs, and the script by ChatGPT.

We’ve seen some unusual shoes thanks largely to the art collective MSCHF. But artist Canyaon has them beat in terms of variety and creativity. His Instagram page is packed with wild and impractical shoe designs, including ride-on off-road sneakers, steel welder’s boots, BBQ shoes that hold hot dogs and spatulas, and cocktail-dispensing winter boots.

The mighty Dog of Wisdom is back. A year to the day since his last appearance, the all-knowing canine is here to school a chihuahua on the value of a good bone. Then, our favorite animated wiener dog turns up to grant the Dog of Wisdom a wish.

We stopped counting tires at 19, but it’s possible that this crazy looking homebrew go-kart has more than that. We’re not sure why this guy built such a ridiculous vehicle but it’s entertaining to see him driving around on it. It’s probably has mad oversteer with all of those rear tires so it could be a fun drift machine.

North of the Border and Studson Studios both like to make weird, creepy, and nerdy sculptures. For fun, they recorded voiceovers for each other, with Adam reporting on Studson’s literal Mario Kart build and Studson voicing Adam’s wonderfully demented McDonaldland official Mayor McCheese. Those thin layers of clay really do look like Velveeta.

Most guitar players use their fingertips or a single guitar pick to strum. After “accidentally” 3D printing a triple guitar pick, engineer Mattias Krantz thought it might be fun to play with even more guitar picks at the same time. His compound guitar pick looks like it would a pretty good back-scratcher too.

North of the Border just won’t stop making things creepier than they should be. Adam’s latest nightmare fuel is an oversized clay and wire scorpion with human features like nipples, chest hair, fingernails, feet, and flesh-colored skin. Goopy black eyeballs, Tighty-whities, and mouth-arms bring it all together.

Adam from North of the Border likes to make tiny, nerdy things. He forgot to mention the word “creepy.” His take on tough, but adorable Powerpuff Girls is just plain wrong. Instead of sugar, spice, and everything nice, his cursed versions of Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup are made from clay and wire and clearly didn’t get enough Chemical X.

Lay’s teamed up with IHOP to bring breakfast flavors to potato chips. These special edition snacks blend natural and artificial flavorings to make them taste like pancakes with strawberry topping, maple syrup, and smoky bacon. Walmart had them on sale for a limited time for just $2.99 a bag, but prices are already rising on eBay for the things.

How do you stop a bear from attacking? Take away his right to bear arms. Adam from North of the Border imagines a way to make a grizzly bear more deadly: by arming it with a high-capacity, rapid-fire weapon. After sculpting the bear’s body, head, feet, and hands, he imparted a fur texture before building a mini minigun and ammo pack.

Getting all the snow off your car when you park it outside can be a pain. Chinese automotive company NIO shows off an unconventional use for its SkyRide active suspension system: making its flagship ET9 sedan shake off a thick blanket of snow like a cold puppy dog. Just don’t do it inside the garage, ET9. Good boy.

Artificial intelligence has become a major subject of today’s technology conversations. In 1983, one company marketed an early smart home product designed to control home appliances via voice control like Siri or Alexa. Kevin from Popular Science got his hands on the costly Butler in a Box to explain how it worked without Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, or the Internet.

A machine sold by her dad’s company somehow turns a young woman into a chicken nugget. The story gets crazier as her dad and an intern who has a crush on her team up to undo her delicious dilemma. Renowned comedy filmmaker Lee Byeong-heon directed this upcoming Netflix adaptation of a popular Korean webtoon. Premieres 3.15.2024.

This impressive yet creepy AI tech can take a single still image and make it appear to speak or sing any audio. Developed by researchers from Alibaba’s Institute for Intelligent Computing, EMO: Emote Portrait Alive’s model was trained on more than 150 million images to work its magic. The video is peppered with examples of the convincing deepfakery.

The Boston Typewriter Orchestra is hoping to score a spot on NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert. Their 2024 submission to the popular show is this mechanical tour de force titled Selectric Funeral, a rhythmic and enigmatic track performed on four vintage typewriters, bells, and effects pedals. It’s also their first song to incorporate an electric typewriter.

In 2004, editor Matt Bucy chopped up The Wizard of Oz and rearranged every sound and word into alphabetical order. The result is the nonsensical but oddly compelling Of Oz the Wizard, or as commenter Jenny Reiswig put it even better, The Wizard of A to Z. Despite the task’s apparent complexity, he says most of the work only took about 20 hours.

This fidget toy from Humango Toys is made from interlocking plastic ovals, which can stretch and squeeze from an oblong shape to a palm-size puck. Its tactile interactions help provide sensory stimulation and can reduce boredom and stress. It comes in small and large sizes. Beware of knock-offs. This is the original.

Inline skating expert Ilia Savosin previously showed us how he gets around on office chair wheels. Now, he’s back and rolling on some other office equipment. In this brief but entertaining video, Ilia grinds some rails with computer keyboards, an LCD screen, and a laptop beneath his feet. Here’s a closer look at his keyboard skates.

If the internet is to be believed, kitty cats are cute furballs who like to knock things off of tables and star in memes. WVW’s educational video shows us the truth, revealing the never-before-seen inner-workings of a feline. They’ve also posted a How a Bird Works video.

Vegans will want to skip this video. After feasting on a shellfish dinner, Minimaus Crafts took the leftover shells, cut them up, and reassembled them into the crab’s ultimate form – a horrifyingly awesome armored character known as Crabman. We felt so wrong watching this, but also couldn’t look away.

(Gore) It’s not easy to come up with unique ideas for a horror film, but the short Rhyme or Die has done just that. The premise – a madwoman kidnaps five strangers and forces them to rhyme to her beats or face the ultimate punishment. Director Max R Lincoln and writer Alex Moran cooked up one of the most brutal reality competition shows yet.

There are electric guitars, and then there’s this thing. SamuraiGuitarist Steve-san Onotera got his hands on one of the weirdest guitars ever, the MCI B-35 Guitorgan. This late 1970s oddity combined a guitar with an electric organ. The hollow-body instrument packs a large circuit board and plays keyboard sounds using sensors between its frets.

Emily the Engineer, proves yet again that just because something CAN be done doesn’t mean it SHOULD be. She recently got a bee in her bonnet about 3D printing a toilet. Before printing the full-size version in pieces, she made a working scale model. After she got the real deal working, she started adding a bunch of unnecessary features.