Awesome Weird

This hilariously weird clip of bats set to techno reminds us of the dark basement clubs we used to hang out in listening to industrial and new wave music. Das Kraftfuttermischwerk created this charming bit of internet goodness by inverting black-and-white footage of bats as they hung out upside-down.

It’s not often that you encounter a musical instrument that you’ve never heard of. Well, here’s your chance to see and hear 72 of them, all played back-to-back by musician and inventor Nicolas Bras, who created each of these unusual instruments from scratch, mostly using things you can find at your local hardware store.

Now that the guys at Russia’s Garage 54 are done with their headlight-covered Lada, they decided to remove the bulbs from the compact car. Of course, now they’ve got a whole bunch of holes in the sheet metal, so they decided to go all-in on the look, resulting in a car that looks like a block of Swiss cheese on wheels.

When you’re working on construction projects, you could always use an extra hand. Developed by Createk, Université De Sherbrooke, and Exonetik this waist-mounted robot can do things like use a paint roller, squeegee, a gripper hand, or even a metal fist to break through walls. It’s all a bit silly looking if you ask us.

Musician and street performer Zeroelectrodrum introduces two honorary members of his one-man band, Mr. Green and Mr. Pink, a pair of rubber chickens that he uses to add an extra layer of sound when playing his Blue Man Group-esque PVC pipe xylophone.

After years of piling up garbage and other nasty waste in London, England, the city was overwhelmed with a horrific stench. Weird History looks back at this terribly nasty part of the 19th century, and how it led to major improvements in the city’s hygiene and waste disposal infrastructure.

When computer geeks want to show off, they try to make DOOM run in unlikely places. In this case, Max Holt took the game and used Windows Task Manager’s multicore view to show off a version of the classic FPS, using a ridiculous 896 CPU cores. It also plays PONG.

While computer graphics are becoming more and more realistic, we appreciate when artists use the medium to create things that are simply outlandish and impossible in the real world. Take, for example, this ridiculously-long and flexible bicycle-built-for-five from Cool 3D World.

Filmmaker Robert Findlay transports us to a dystopian underground world where a network of robots and vending machines work together to deliver products and services, and tells the tale of two men who attempt to abuse the system. The sound design by Andrew Findlay really helps to build dramatic tension.

A cartoon crustacean finds himself out of water, and can’t seem to get anyone to help keep him from drying out at the grocery store. Animator Robert Bohn’s silly short clip for Adult Swim SMALLS has a wonderfully weird vibe, with a sprinkle of down-home Louisiana spice.

Love food? Why not give it a hug? Not So Subtle Plushies sells giant, photorealistic foods you can use as throw pillows. From baguettes and croissants, to grilled meats, to ramen noodles, there’s something for every food fetish. Grab a couple of slices of bread, bacon, and a fried egg, and you can even make a plush sandwich.

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.