Awesome Leisure

Finnish skiing channel Real Skifi created this clever short film as a tribute to the filmmaking tool known as the transition. Using a mix of edits, fades, and split screens, skiers are transported seamlessly between locations and times of day and swap places in the middle of rail grinds and other tricks.

Those of us who feel the need to fidget are always looking for different ways to keep our hands and minds occupied. ZenMech’s TK01 is a unique fidget toy that moves like a tiny tank tread. Roll it along your desk or flip it around in your hand for a cool tactile sensation. Available with plastic or stainless steel tracks.

Made in Scotland with infusions of rose and cucumber, Hendrick’s Gin is unusually smooth and much more than just juniper berry flavored. Hendrick’s 10 other botanicals are chamomile, elderflower, lemon peel, orange peel, caraway, coriander, cubeb berries, angelica root, yarrow root, and orris root. To make one gin, they actually make two.

Keep your Star Wars book collection organized with these AT-AT bookends from MokuShop. Each walker is hand-assembled from layers of laser-cut wood and painted in a shiny metallic silver. As a bonus, they include a Darth Vader figure with a leash for his Imperial pet. Just keep its legs away from Rebel snowspeeders.

The blasters in Star Wars supposedly fire bolts of plasma energy held together with a magnetic field. This sounds like pure science fiction, but Jake Makes wanted to see if he could create the same effect with a real-world weapon. While he came up with an approach that looks pretty accurate, it’s not technically the same idea at all.

This amazing scene played out in Turkey’s Cappadocia region. Watch as mountain bikers Nikolaj Juhlsen Rasmussen and Korbinian Engstler ride along a gorgeous stretch of trails on hilly terrain as dozens of hot air balloons float in the skies above. The POV footage was captured with the Insta360 Ace Pro action camera with photography by Luke Maximo Bell.

These unique dice from Aether Objects are made from cassette tapes. Each die has strips of vintage cassette tape preserved forever inside see-through resin. Their embossed numbers are painted with a vibrant yellow inspired by ’80s cassette graphics. Sold in a set of seven dice and packed in a cassette-style storage box.

When we were kids, we loved making little LEGO cars. Thanks to Travis Pastrana and the gang from Nitro Circus, we now have life-size LEGO race cars. As part of their Life Size Toys series, they assembled giant LEGO bricks atop go-karts and raced them around an indoor track until bricks started to fall off. At least they’re easy to snap back together.

Wheatus revisits their 2000 pop-punk hit Teenage Dirtbag with this special holiday edition. Christmas Dirtbag updates the lyrics to be about a kid who doesn’t think he’s getting any presents from Santa. Though, in the animated music video, it’s a dog who feels left out. From the EP Just a Dirtbag Christmas, which also includes a string quartet version.

An ordinary music box only plays a single song. The Muro Box can play any song. It uses computer-controlled wheels to flick its metal forks and can be programmed using a mobile app or a MIDI device. It has a 40-note chromatic scale, and more than 50,000 songs in a downloadable library. They also make a less-expensive N20 model with 20 notes.

Arctic Zone’s soft-sided cooler is ready for all your outdoor activities. Its main section holds up to 50 cans, and its front compartment is great for sandwiches (or up to 10 more cans). Both sections are wrapped in high-performance insulation. It rolls on rugged all-terrain wheels and is collapsible for storage.

Members of the Tesla Club Finland parked their cars and put on a synchronized light show using their vehicles’ headlights and taillights. In all, 687 of the electric vehicles were on hand, and automotive channel Harri Salo posted this aerial footage of the festivities. The light show was put together by Simon Pollock. Watch the ground view here. (Thanks, Olli!)

This unique jigsaw puzzle from In a Flash Laser is made from a 5″ x 5″ sheet of 304 stainless steel, laser-cut into 20 pieces. With no images on the pieces, it’s trickier to solve than it might look. You can also have it custom-etched with an image of your choice for an added charge.

Do you find yourself vegging out on the couch too much? Tayto won’t judge! This jumbo couch potato is happy to hang out with you while you lounge. This huggable tuber measures about 13″ tall, and is filled with soft and squeezy polyester stuffing. Just don’t give in to the temptation to slather him in butter and sour cream.

This wonderfully soothing video provides a close-up look at some of the teensy scale model submarines, boats, and ships floating in the water tanks at Miniatur Wunderland. If you’re ever fortunate enough to be in Hamburg, Germany, you must visit this incredible tiny world.

DoodleChaos imagines what it might be like if Minecraft was a rhythm-matching game like Beat Saber or Guitar Hero. This crazy, mashed-up world is filled with fanciful voxel art characters and sees blocks and objects popping up for players to hit with their tools as they roll along the rails and fly through the air. The track is Fly Away by TheFatRat f/Anjulie.

Ahead of the 2023 Las Vegas Grand Prix, Oracle Red Bull Racing drivers Max Verstappen and Checo Perez challenged Scuderia Alpha Tauri teammates Yuki Tsunoda and Daniel Ricciardo to some desert racing in hovercrafts. While their fan-powered vehicles only make 26.5 horsepower, they look like the most fun you can have under 30 mph.

Yippee-I-aye, Yippee-I-o… the Melodicka Bros. took the oft-covered western staple Ghost Riders in the Sky and transformed it into a synth-heavy cyberpunk jam. The track is accompanied by an appropriately neon-lit, smoke-filled music video that imagines a cybercowboy riding his steel horse to round up some cybercows.

The hardcover book is filled with 100 Star Wars illustrations for you to embellish with crayons, colored pencils, or markers. The images include fanciful scenes inspired by classic movie moments, along with mandalas and other repeating Star Wars patterns to color in.

Here’s a fun family project if you live somewhere the temperature stays below freezing for days on end. The ABC Allred Family shows us how easy it is to build your own backyard igloo from blocks of ice and a dash of food coloring for extra flair. You can make the ice bricks in aluminum foil trays and then cement them together with a mixture of snow and cold water.

Leo Moracchioli turned Britney Spears’ 2000 hit Oops!… I Did It Again into a shockingly good heavy metal track. Leo is at the top of his guitar game while wearing a blue bodysuit which seems like it would be a good canvas for applying visual effects. And for more unexpected Britney covers, check out Toxic on toothbrushes.

The upcoming life simulator game inZOI takes the idea of The Sims and updates it to take advantage of modern hardware. The 4K gameplay trailer shows incredible detail in its virtual worlds and sees its avatars going grocery shopping, cooking fried chicken, watering plants, and going to the gym. Its character- and world-builder tools look incredibly deep.

We’ve come across some weird musical instruments over the years, so why not add another to the collection? Artist Philipp Läng’s spring-loaded Flötenkreis makes its music by pushing air through a dozen plastic recorders, each set to play a single note. The sounds it produces are more annoying than melodic.