User micah made a bot that turns Reddit comments into scenes from the video game Ace Attorney. You can add !objection-bot to any Reddit comment thread and the bot will automatically create a Streamable video with the Ace Attorney results. It’s pretty great, and for some reason people having dumb internet arguments becomes much more tolerable when it’s in the form of Ace Attorney. Now somebody just needs to somehow apply this to real life, maybe transcribing everything that comes out Washington DC into Ace Attorney scenes.

Keep going for the a video explaining the bot and showing some examples.

Source: Geekologie – This guy made a bot that turns Reddit arguments into Ace Attorney

I submit to you Exhibit A of how you know the pandemic has been going on for too long. This guy built an incredible Portal themed maze for Captain Hamster to escape and it looks like it was built with more care and craftsmanship than my house. Also, it’s clear this hamster has better problem solving skills than anybody in my gaming group.

Keep going for the full video. It’s as impressive as it is adorable. Also, I guess there’s a whole trend on YouTube of people building elaborate mazes for their pet hamsters.

Source: Geekologie – Hamster escapes Portal-themed maze and the cake is not a lie

The finest known copy of 1940’s Batman No. 1 sold for $2.22 million at a Heritage Auction on Thursday.

The issue, the sole copy ever to receive a 9.4 grade from the Certified Guaranty Company, was already a record-setter before the start of Heritage Auctions’ four-day Comics and Comic Art event. A week before the Jan. 14-17 auction even began, Batman No. 1 crossed the $1.53-million mark, besting the previous world record set for a Batman title in November when Heritage sold 1939’s Detective Comics No. 27 for $1.5 million.

The book shattered estimates and expectations long before it was sold during the first session of the four-day event. It has seen more than two dozen bids since Christmas and accrued tens of thousands of pageviews worldwide; more than 700 Heritage clients also kept close tabs on its progress as it made its way toward the auction block.

This issue of Batman No. 1, featuring the debuts of the Joker and Catwoman, is now the most expensive comic book ever sold by Heritage Auctions.

The current record for a comic book is Action Comics No. 1 (the first appearance of Superman) which sold for $3.2 million on eBay in 2014, so at $2.2 million this issue of Batman is a total bargain. At this price I can only assume the buyer is purchasing it to use as toilet paper since supermarkets have put a limit on how much can be bought.

Source: Geekologie – Finest known copy of Batman No. 1 sells for an insane .2 million

Because LEGO knows I’m both losing my mind and terrible at taking care of plants, they’ve released a LEGO Bonsai tree as part of their LEGO Botanical collection. The set costs $49.99 and includes 878 pieces. Now all somebody needs to do is design a LEGO therapist for me to talk to. I drew a face on a broom but it’s just not cutting it. Mostly because I started dating Broomy and it would be unethical for her to stay my therapist.

Keep going for a video of the LEGO designer Niko explaining his creation. He looks 100% like the kind of guy that would design a LEGO Bonsai Tree. I mean, except that he’s not Japanese. So, uh, he looks 100% what you’d expect a white guy who designed a LEGO Bonsai tree to look like. I’m pretty sure if the camera panned down under the table you’d see him kicking a hacky sack.

Source: Geekologie – LEGO has a calming Bonsai Tree set for people who suck at plants

The VOC-25 is a 25-note sampler synthesizer made out of chattering teeth by Swedish artist Love Hultén.

VOC-25 is a conceptual vocal synthesizer based on the Axoloti Core and 25 sets of plastic teeth, each set representing a unique note on the keyboard. The three-part wooden setup echoes the look of a classic desktop computer including monitor, main console and keyboard. RAW vocal audio samples are fed into the main console via USB, creating a personal voice bank. There are two built-in effects, reverb and delay. The Axoloti board inputs MIDI via the 25-key keyboard, but it also outputs MIDI. These signals are converted to DC current via control boards located inside the monitor segment. The custom-built boards direct the “choir” – 25 individual solenoids, each one connected to a set of hinged teeth. The setup can be used standalone with its built-in speakers, but it also outputs mono in the back, and using external monitors is a good way to reduce mechanical noise.

I, too, am a fan of instruments made out of body parts. It’s why my music teachers deemed me too avant-garde for my time and also why I’m typing this from jail.

Keep going for the video of the VOC-25 in action, as well as the original design by Simone Giertz that inspired the creation.

Source: Geekologie – A conceptual vocal synthesizer made out of chattering teeth

In the first episode of Jeopardy! without Alex Trebek, guest host Ken Jennings said a few words in honor of the late host. Ken Jennings always seemed like the obvious choice to take over the hosting position after his legendary run, but this just solidifies it. Clear, concise, and just the right amount of sincerity to get me choked up without crying himself. And then the absolute perfect segue to actually get the game going. I’ll take, “What is the perfect way to honor Alex Trebek for $1,000.” And then I’ll take an actual $1,000 because I’m poor.

Keep going for the full video.

Source: Geekologie – Ken Jennings honors Alex Trebek in his first episode as guest host of Jeopardy!

This is a 7 minute compilation of first-person POV shots from professional parkour team STORROR. They get bonus points for the smooth transitions and extra bonus points for the running and jumping over things and then even more extra bonus points for the stuff that isn’t even parkour, just standing around really high, scary places.

Keep going for the full video. I have vertigo now and have to go throw up.

Source: Geekologie – Compilation of insane first-person POV parkour

The folks at Google used the power of AI to create a cakie (cake/cookie) and a breakie (bread/cookie) recipe.

We started off by collecting hundreds of cookie, cake and bread recipes. Then we converted all of their ingredients to ounces and whittled them down to a few essential ingredients (yeast, flour, sugar, eggs, butter and a few other things). Next we did a bit of reorganizing, since according to Paul Hollywood, treats like banana, zucchini and pumpkin bread are really more cake than they are bread.

Then we used a Google Cloud tool called AutoML Tables to build a machine learning model that analyzed a recipe’s ingredient amounts and predicted whether it was a recipe for cookies, cake or bread.

Our model was able to accurately tag breads, cookies and cakes, but could also identify recipes it deemed “hybrids” — something that’s, say, 50% cake and 50% bread, or something that’s 50% cake and 50% cookie. We named two such combinations the “breakie” (a bread-cookie — “brookie” was already taken) and the “cakie” (a cake-cookie) respectively.

This seems like an awful lot of work when they could’ve just used my personal recipe for a cakie: buy a cake, buy a cookie, and then eat them both at the same time. I don’t have a breakie recipe, because why would you eat bread when you can eat cake?

Keep going for the full recipes and a video of their results.

Source: Geekologie – Using AI to create baking recipes

Nick Martinelli spent 6 months building a functioning Wunderwaffe DG-2 from Call of Duty. Well, “functioning”. It doesn’t behave like a Wunderwaffe DG-2 actually does because then he’d probably be in jail, but it does have a built in flame thrower and taser. It’s also one of the best looking props I’ve ever seen so it’s only a minor complaint that it can’t actually electrocute/murder groups of zombies at a time.

Keep going for the full video of the build.

Source: Geekologie – This guy made a functioning Wunderwaffe DG-2 from Call of Duty

Researchers at OpenAI have created a neural network called DALL-E (named after Pixar’s WALL-E and artist Salvadore Dali) that creates images from text captions. As long as the concept is expressible in natural language, the AI can spit something out.

DALL-E is a 12-billion parameter version of GPT-3 trained to generate images from text descriptions, using a dataset of text-image pairs. We’ve found that it has a diverse set of capabilities, including creating anthropomorphized versions of animals and objects, combining unrelated concepts in plausible ways, rendering text, and applying transformations to existing images.

It’s worth taking a look at the site and checking out their examples because this is impressive and insane. You basically throw in a prompt like “A crocodile sitting in a car drinking boba” and the neural network will generate exactly that. Or at least an approximation of that. It’s obviously not perfect, but the generated images are amazingly accurate. If I told you to picture “the exact same cat on the top as a sketch on the bottom” you’d be a little confused, but then you see what DALL-E spits out and it seems obvious:

This damn thing is better at creating images from the prompts than my own imagination. I don’t even know what the intended purpose of this technology is, but I guarantee within 24 hours of its release it’ll be used for porn.

Source: Geekologie – DALL-E is a neural network that generates images from text captions

This is a video from a Korean show of the happiest hamster on Earth that not only has a hamster-sized penthouse, but a personal chef that cooks handmade hamster-sized dishes.

Golden Hamster who lives in a penthouse her first sister built for her,
eats handmade dishes her second sister cooks for her. (Jealous..)

Not 100% what that translation means, but the hamster gets handmade banana pasta and mini macarons prepared by a personal chef. Obviously this is adorable, but it’s also disheartening to see a hamster living so much better than me. Although to be fair, a person living under a bridge who eats out of a garbage can is also living better than me. My life decisions have been…bad.

Keep going for the full video, as well as the video that probably inspired this: SIMI making a mini bowl of pasta for a hamster.

Source: Geekologie – The happiest hamster on Earth living in a penthouse

A bright blue UFO was spotted crashing into the ocean near Hawaii.

Multiple videos show the object flying in the night sky near Haleakala Avenue in Nanakuli.

Her investigation ended three miles later when the blue light, which she described as being larger than a telephone pole, appeared to fall into the ocean. It crashed through the water without making a sound.

That’s when Sape and her husband called 911. When officers arrived, they all spotted a second light in the sky.

The FAA said it did not have any aircraft disappear off the radar nor any reports of overdue or missing aircraft.

As usual, the footage is blurry and it’s impossible to make out what we’re looking at, though the most convincing evidence that it isn’t extraterrestrials is that it’s glowing bright blue. If you want to spy on somebody you generally wear camouflage, not glowing LED lights.

Keep going for the full news report which includes the video footage of the UFO.

Source: Geekologie – Bright blue UFO filmed crashing into ocean near Hawaii

This is a soothing 10 minute timelapse of a water transport from Rotterdam to Amsterdam, giving a view of the old Dutch waterways from 30 meters high. The camera was attached to the ship pictured above.

Images were shot with a Canon 550d at an interval of 3 seconds, totalling around 30.000 pictures taken. In 2013 the film couldn’t be published right away due to restrictions. After a few years it was forgotten. Till now.

The most satisfying part is seeing how all the different drawbridges work. Each time the ship approached one I pretended I was using my mind to lift it the same way I do whenever I approach an automatic door. Does my mind operate like that of an 8-year-old? Yes. Yes it does. It’s also why my diet consists exclusively of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.

Keep going for the full relaxing video.

Source: Geekologie – Timelapse from Rotterdam to Amsterdam in 10 minutes

This is a video clip from Antiques Roadshow of Travis Landry appraising a complete 1993 “Magic: The Gathering” beta card set. Watching the wife’s face you can actually see her husband’s growing look of smugness. If you went frame by frame you might be able to pinpoint the moment she realizes she’s going to go home and be hit with an “I told you so” so brutal she might have to go to the hospital.

Keep going for the full video.

Source: Geekologie – Wife finds out her husband’s ‘Magic: The Gathering’ collection is worth 100k

This is a video of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving Autopilot driving from the SpaceX headquarters in Los Angeles to San Francisco with zero human intervention.

Tesla Autopilot FSD Beta drives from Los Angeles to Silicon Valley with zero interventions. Started at SpaceX headquarters in Los Angeles (Hawthorne) and made one charging stop in Kettleman City before arriving in San Jose. Absolutely 0 human driving for the entire 6 hour trip. Only thing the driver had to do was charge the car — about 1 minute and 15 seconds of human control over a 6 hour drive. The fact that it made it all the way down to Los Angeles and then back up with zero intervention suggests that this is more than just luck. The software is getting better. This drive was even better than the last one, although there were still many mistakes and areas for improvement that didn’t require a disengagement. Can you spot them? Will try and post raw 1x footage if I can as well.

He also previously posted a video of the drive from San Francisco to Los Angeles, which was almost perfect but required one intervention when a car suddenly moved out of the way and there was a large piece of debris on the road. We’re getting closer and closer to the dream of getting in your car, pushing some buttons, going to sleep, and then waking up at your destination. I already do that now, but my destination always just ends up being the side of a building or a ditch. Turns out I’m already living in the future!

Keep going for the full video, as well as his first drive from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Autopilot isn’t perfect yet (and probably never will be), but this is still hugely impressive.

Source: Geekologie – Tesla Autopilot drives from Los Angeles to San Francisco with no human intervention

2020 has been rough, so here’s a compilation of one year’s worth of wildlife that crossed a beaver dam just south of Voyageurs National Park in northern Minnesota.

This video was literally a year in the making! Beaver dams can be wildlife highways in boreal environments like the Greater Voyageurs Ecosystem, allowing all sorts of wildlife to easily cross wetland habitats which might be otherwise difficult to get across.

While the wildlife is undoubtedly neat, we particularly enjoyed watching the changing of the seasons on this beaver dam! It summarizes life in the Northwoods: cold snowy winters and hot, humid summers with lots of vegetation!

This is such a relaxing watch that I can’t help but wonder how quickly all these animals’ lives would turn to shit if you introduced them to smartphones and social media. How long before we could get them to stop leisurely going about their day and instead get them to obsessively check their status updates and likes? Which is just a roundabout way of saying I’m jealous and I should throw my phone in a river.

Keep going for the full 6 minutes of peacefulness.

Source: Geekologie – One year of animals crossing a beaver dam in northern Minnesota

To celebrate the upcoming New Year, the folks at Boston Dynamics released this video of all of their robots dancing to “Do You Love Me”. I’m sure they meant for this to be in good fun, but obviously everybody is just imagining that this is what the robots will be doing over our corpses after the upcoming robot apocalypse. Maybe the next video they release will be of their robot holding a finger up and then drawing it across their neck. Or holding up a sign that says “I know where you live”.

Keep going for the video. Like all things that come out of Boston Dynamics, it’s amazing but also terrifying.

Source: Geekologie – The Boston Dynamics robots can dance now

This is a video of Big Clive showing us how to shave the perfect goatee in one minute using clippers and a funnel. He actually made a video six months back that got some attention and then recently made another one on Christmas Eve. You can actually see the six months of beard growth because for some reason his goatee has bands like a Neapolitan ice cream. If he ever loses his birth certificate I’m pretty sure you could figure out his age by counting the rings in his goatee like a tree trunk.

Keep going for both of his goatee trimming videos. I’m not going to pretend they’re anything more than they are, but I will guarantee you will get a guy shaving a goatee using a funnel.

Source: Geekologie – Guy shows us how to shave the perfect goatee using a funnel

If I said “Totino’s Fortnite Training Room” obviously that would be a nonsense statement that makes sense to nobody. And yet here we are, in the year 2020, where such a nonsense statement is not only not nonsense, but a real place where real people actually go to. This is a video of videogamedunkey introducing us to the 100 Thieves Cash App Compound (which also sounds like a nonsense sentence), a 15,000 square foot compound for esports training and video game livestreaming.

Look, this is peak internet nonsense, but it’ll make more sense after you watch the video. Or it won’t, because none of this makes sense. I like video games as much as the next person, but I think it’s safe to say we’ve gone too far. No society should have a thing called a Totino’s Fortnite Training Room.

Keep going for the full video or just head straight to the YouTube page where the top comments deserve their own post.

Source: Geekologie – Taking a look inside a ridiculous esports training and streaming compound