Awesome Weird

Guitar maker Artem Mayer of Copper Guitars created this crazy custom instrument using 36 packs of instant ramen noodles. After casting them in polyester resin – and adding some delicious seasoning packets – he shaped the body and added a maple wood neck, hardware, and strings.

Danger near, danger here! Animator Cyriak is known for his outlandish and trippy visual collages, and they serve as the perfect visual complement to this offbeat track about the end of the world by the enigmatic art rock band Sparks. From the album A Steady Drip Drip Drip.

While stuck at home under quarantine, Dylan Woodley decided to put the time to good use and teach himself how to create 3D computer animation. The result of his efforts is a ridiculously primitive, anatomically-incorrect, but somehow still charming character named “Bimpson.”

Given all of the horrible news and doomscrolling these days, it’s our pleasure to bring you something a little more cheerful here on The Awesomer, like this guy who sits in the forest dressed like sasquatch, and plays cover songs on the saxophone. We’ve assembled a video playlist of a few of our favorite tunes.

After ignoring phone calls about his satanic ways from his brother Ben, musician Sam Seeger was greeted by an ominous voicemail, and rather than just delete it, he added some music and doodled up a little animation to go with. The result is simply internet gold.

Typewriters have gone the way of the dinosaur, rarely used by anyone but the most hipster of writers these days. But the Boston Typewriter Orchestra continues to get use out of these mechanical office relics, even when forced to work from home due to their in-person concerts being canceled.

Russian car modding channel Garage 54 has done some pretty wacky things over the years. This time, they took an old beater and covered the entire car with 300 high-output LED headlight bulbs. There’s no missing this thing on a dark road, though it might blind its operator and every other driver on the road.

Japanese electro-punk group Electronicos Fantasticos is known for making music with unusual instruments. In this clip, musician Ei Wada shows off an electronic guitar known as the “CRTelecaster” that uses feedback created from the screen of an old CRT television set to produce sounds. More CRT goodness here.

“The toilet flushing felt unrealistic.” Bathrooms seem to be a staple of level design in first-person shooters – especially in the horror genre. Over the last several years, Curious Reviewers has compiled a series of video tours of these facilities, and reviewed their visual quality, amenities, and realism.

The core of the Scientific Method is the experiment. But not every hypothesis pans out, and failure is always an option. The Mental Floss List Show looks back at 14 times when tests failed spectacularly, including McDonald’s bubble gum flavored broccoli, which surprisingly isn’t the grossest thing on the list.

We honestly have no idea what to say after watching Quentin Smirhes‘ absurdist music video about a guy who thinks he’s a “chooka” train, but all we knew was we had to share it with the rest of the world immediately. Perhaps we’ve been hypnotized into doing it. Enjoy the source material here.

Disproportionately big eyes, a sailor’s outfit, brightly-colored hair… these are but a few of the trademark characteristics of girls in anime. Over at MakeGirlsMoe, machine learning algorithms can generate a seemingly endless set of anime characters, as seen in the video here.

Musician and YouTuber Dan Mace likes to make sounds using mundane objects. After a viewer bet he couldn’t make music using bricks, he rose to the challenge, using the blocks to create all kinds of noises for a cover of The Weeknd’s hit Blinding Lights.

The idea of a pork patty “restructured” into the shape of ribs is just wrong to us, but that didn’t stop McDonald’s from doing it, nor did it stop millions from craving this boneless fast food oddity. Weird History dives into the origins of the McRib sandwich in this lighthearted lesson.

Buddhist monks are often associated with a quiet and reserved lifestyle. Kossan shows how popular music can also be part of their world too, with an unexpected, percussion-heavy cover of The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine. Kossan also likes The Ramones and Queen.

With people wearing all kinds of improvised protective gear these days, an outing to the grocery store can be a strange and surreal experience. But Pouff’s trippy grocery shopping video was created back in 2015, using neural network technology which attempted to identify animal faces in places where they didn’t actually exist.

Actor Burt Reynolds famously turned down the role of James Bond after Sean Connery stopped playing the character. But thanks to the wonders of machine learning tech, we can now see what that might have looked like, courtesy of deepfake expert Shamook, who inserted the actor’s visage into scenes from Dr. No.

LEGO builder Baron Julius von Brunk created this deranged stop-motion short which envisions an alternative universe version of The Simpsons, in which Bart, er Bort likes to sniff gasoline fumes and burn down lemon trees. Can Milhaus stop him before he destroys Sprungfeld?

While stuck home on lockdown, VFX artist Anselm von Seherr-Thoss decided to experiment and see what kind of visuals he could come up with by manipulating digital skull models, assembling them from unusual materials, and distorting them into new shapes using particle simulation tools from the TyFlow library.

This crazy video loop shows what happens when grass grows on top of boggy marsh. Basically, the water forms a large bubble underneath the turf layer, which can actually be ridden like a wave – at least until you fall through it.

Sushi Ramen Rick is a tough guy, like it really rough guy. At least that’s what we got out of his goofy cover version of Billie Eilish’s hit that he made primarily using sounds produced by smacking himself about, and a weird musical instrument that looks like something from a Blue Man Group x Dr. Seuss collaboration.

Being in a car crash can be quite terrifying. But what might crashes be like if other cars were invisible? With a little visual effects trickery, Donato Sansone created this surreal sequence of car crash footage, in which one of the involved vehicles was digitally removed from the scene.

This off-the-wall animation from Devin Flynn and Jon Vermilyea follows the travels of three ice cubes and their passengers, as they descend into the stomach of a bar patron and compete for a frozen gem that grants them special powers. If that sounds weird, that’s because it is. Thanks for the trip, Adult Swim.