Awesome Weird

Ukranian folk-rock cover band Sedo i Ludy offers their unique spin on the Bon Jovi track It’s My Life, with a rollicking cover version that combines bluegrass with traditional Russian folk sounds. About halfway through it turns into a Haircut 100 version of the James Bond theme song.

This insane commercial takes us inside the imaginary grocery store “Omega Mart,” where a deepfaked Willie Nelson will try to sell you products. The trippy ad was created by art collective Meow Wolf to help promote their Las Vegas-based combination theme park, art exhibit, VR game, and shop.

If you had to pick the most simultaneously annoying and disturbing thing you can buy, it would have to be Big Mouth Billy Bass. Simon the Magpie modified one of these singing fish novelties and incorporated it into a bass guitar. Billy not only can slap the strings with his tail but has been circuit bent to produce some insane noises.

Often copied, never duplicated, The Beatles were arguably the most influential pop band of the 20th century. With a little help from their friends OpenAI Jukebox, Broccaloo conducted an experiment to see what kind of music it would come up with if you fed it a bunch of the Fab Four’s classic tunes. The results are downright weird.

Guinness World Records introduces us to Gary Duschl, a man with an obsession for Wrigley’s chewing gum. Over the last 54 years, he has folded more than 2 million gum stick wrappers to create a woven paper chain. Each day he’s added more than five feet to his chain, which currently measures more than 20 miles long.

Love Hultén has designed and built many wonderful things over the years. His latest creation is a synthesizer that moves 25 sets of mechanical teeth in concert with its keyboard. It’s both disturbing and fantastic at the same time. If the idea seems familiar, that’s because he was inspired by Simone Giertz’s toothy instrument.

Dan is a man on a mission to find his match while in space. After searching relationship sites, he finally managed to score a date. But it’s not what he had hoped for. Austen Reeder’s short clip is every bit as weird and warped as we’ve come to expect from Adult Swim SMALLS. Take more Star Boat journeys here.

And the 2020 award for creepiest Kickstarter goes to… Neon Culture’s What’s Your Face LED Mask. This programmable costume lets you replace your face with another with the tap of your phone screen. It has over 2,000 individual LEDs which can be used to display one of a number of digitized faces or animated effects.

C4D4U seems to have an obsession with Tetris. A while back, the CG artist showed us what the game might look like with puzzle pieces made from Jell-O, and now we get to see what happens when those same pieces get moldy and covered with hair. They remind us of Sully from Monsters, Inc.

Animator Zohar Dvir’s short film takes us inside the mind of a perplexed millennial who seeks answers to life’s questions. When she turns to her Magic 8 Ball, she ends up pulled deep into a hallucinogenic dream world that starts between her couch cushions.

Could you use an extra kid in the house? Caleb and Kegan’s incredibly bizarre clip from Adult Swim SMALLS offers up the most peculiar digital baby since the dancing baby meme. We wonder if they used a 3D printer instead of a 2D one if things would have turned out better.

The 1991 Nirvana track Smells Like Teen Spirit is considered to be a classic by many. But we didn’t know it was this classic. The Miracle Aligner posted a cover of the breakout grunge hit with its lyrics translated into Latin. If you think that’s strange, try their ancient Norse cover of Led Zeppelin’s Immigrant Song.

Increasing frame rates in games is usually a good thing, but the same can’t be said for animation. Someguy14201 shows how strange and unappealing things can look when upscaling an old 24 fps Tom & Jerry cartoon to 60 fps using AI interpolation tech. We wonder if an original 60 fps animation would look so weird.

Last time we checked in with musician Mezerg, he was playing the watermelon. This time, he performs on a more conventional instrument – though Voël Martin rigged up this upright piano with an electronic circuit and pumps that dispense a variety of juices and liquor to make a custom cocktail based on the notes he plays.

Boutique rental company Lodgewell offers the coolest properties in Austin and the Texas Hill Country, and nothing keeps Austin weird like The Bloomhouse. Built in the ‘70s as a hippie dream – and renovated by ex-mayor Dave Claunch – the whimsical white meringue is 1,100 square feet but nothing else about it is square. Nothing.

Simone Giertz has built some strange and wacky devices. Her latest creation is a wall of fake teeth that she rigged up with motors and a MIDI controller so she can use them as a musical instrument. Along the way, she plays amateur dentist, chats with Andrew Huang, goes house shopping, and has a good cry.

As we previously saw in Fest, filmmaker Nikita Diakur has a trademark “ugly” CGI style, which replaces normal characters with blobby-looking humanoids with exposed wireframes and scraggly bits of hair. His latest animated short takes to the skies with a particularly unattractive group of parachuting enthusiasts.

Jason Shron loves trains. In fact, he loves them so much that he built a perfect replica of one in his basement. Based on a 1980 Canadian VIA commuter rail car, it has every detail, from the original red passenger seats to the cheap plywood storage locker doors to the branded litter bags in the seatbacks.

Diver and underwater photographer Catrin Pichler introduces us the costasiella kuroshimae, also known as the “leaf slug” or “leaf sheep.” These tiny and unusual marine creatures bridge the gap between plant and animal, as they perform photosynthesis by storing the chloroplasts in the algae they feed on.

For no reason other than to say it could be done, Coby from Michigan’s 545 Lawn Care took an old 1985 GMC van and flipped its body 180º. Not only does it drive upside-down, but it also drives in reverse, stupefying everyone it passes on the road. It’s built on a custom chassis and its roof-mounted wheels even spin as it rolls along.

Tired of people wandering into your cubicle and swiping your office supplies? Put a stop to that with Archie McPhee’s Office Possum. With its beady little eyes, gnashing teeth, and tendency to hang out in trash cans, it’s sure to deter anyone who dares to cross the threshold into your personal space.

Today we learned how in the 1800s, entrepreneurs in London, England built a special railway strictly for the dead. With the big city overflowing with corpses, the Necropolis Railway was born, hauling bodies out to the countryside on one final train ride. Infrequently Asked Questions shares more of this strange history lesson.

Nate from The King of Random steals a page from Kiwami Japan’s book, and attempts to make a knife out of an unconventional material. Using an actual piece of flank steak, he honed a full-tang blade, along with a strip steak handle. The trick was freeze-drying the meat, then saturating it in resin. But will it cut?