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

Wealth, shown to scale is an incredible visualization showing just how much $1 billion is and then how much $200 billion is (Jeff Bezos’ net worth). I think most people who defend billionaires and the .01% don’t really understand how much a billion dollars is because our monkey brains aren’t capable of dealing with numbers that large. It looks like nothing when you just write 1 billion, but this site really helps illustrate how big that number is at scale. It’s kind of like when I tell people I’m good looking and they just don’t truly understand the staggering magnitude of my looks. You can’t just hear about how good looking I am, you have to see me in person and fall to the floor in amazement yourself.

Check out the site here. If you’re on a PC I recommend just holding down the right arrow. If you’re on mobile just get ready for a finger workout.

Source: Geekologie – Visualizing what Jeff Bezos’ net worth really looks like

Apparently there’s been some drama in the Super Mario Bros. speedrunning community because only weeks after a world record speedrun was set, another speedrunner tied the time. The only problem is that speedrunner has been caught cheating at another game and also he mysteriously couldn’t figure out how to film cables connecting his system to his TV. Karl Jobst examines the situation and why the world record speedrun may be illegitimate, unlike my claim that I’m actually the world’s fastest human. Look, nobody has actually seen Usain Bolt beat me in a race so why is it so hard to believe that I’m faster than him?

Keep going for the full video. It’s 18 minutes but interesting if you’re into super specific hobby drama.

Source: Geekologie – This Super Mario World Record speedun is causing some drama

As if making a melodramatic Lifetime movie about Colonel Sanders wasn’t weird enough, KFC is now releasing a gaming console. Called the KFConsole and made in partnership with Cooler Master, it boasts what might be the most incredible feature I’ve ever heard of: a built in chicken chamber that uses the heat generated by the system to keep your chicken warm. I mean…I…there are no words. IT HAS A CHAMBER TO STORE YOUR KFC CHICKEN INSIDE THE CONSOLE. Also, it’s shaped like a KFC bucket. I don’t know what’s going on at KFC corporate, but they need to be giving everybody raises and also slightly lower doses of acid.

Keep going for more photos of the KFConsole as well as the announcement video. There’s no price or release date yet, but there is a website with all of the specs.

Source: Geekologie – KFC has made a gaming console. Seriously.

David Weiller took this incredible footage of a monkey slug caterpillar mimicking a tarantula spider. Here’s his description of the video:

Monkey Slug Caterpillar (Phobetron Hipparchia, Limacodidae) from the Amazon Rainforest of Puyo, Ecuador.

This mesmerizing caterpillar mimics a hairy tarantula spider with its oddly long hairy arms curling out.

When looking at the underside, it looks like a slug with its suction cups prolegs and its tiny legs.

This caterpillar is the larvae of the hag moth.

Literally every sentence of that description made me want to throw up. Keep going for the full video. It’s every bit as weird and disgusting as it sounds.

Source: Geekologie – Caterpillar mimicking a tarantula spider

Brazilian EVO Superbike racer André Veríssimo started celebrating his victory too early during the last race of 2020 and obviously I wouldn’t be posting this unless he ended up losing to what should’ve been the second and third place racers. How is this even still happening in the year 2020? Haven’t we all watched enough videos on YouTube to know never to do this? The hubris of man. As long as there are races, there will be men who celebrate winning them too early and end up losing.

Keep going for the full video. Even though he’s wearing a helmet you can see his face change from happiness to panic to dying inside.

Source: Geekologie – Motorcycle racer celebrates too early and you know exactly what happens next

This is a video of a hamster named Mr. Hamster making a daring prison escape and it might be the best action movie of the year. From the creator:

Scorpion maze with Traps for Hamsters. Today’s story is sure to be very dynamic. Above is Mr Hamster, he was imprisoned. The hamster police ignored him, he broke the toilet, escaped several dangerous traps and ran away. Mr Humster was quick, brave and lucky. The Hamster police could not catch him.

Obviously the person who made this is insane, but also possibly a genius. With all this training it’s just a matter of time before Mr. Hamster escapes his actual captor and no longer has to put up with these ridiculous mazes.

Keep going for the full engrossing video.

Source: Geekologie – A hamster makes a daring prison escape

This is vocalist Elise Roth doing a rendition of Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” but in the style of a 1940’s race caller. It works so well I’ve decided I now need all of my rap done in a transatlantic accent. Preferably by the original artist. Keep going for the full video.

Source: Geekologie – Eminem’s ‘Lose Yourself’ but as a 1940’s race caller

Researchers have figured out a way to navigate a swarm of drones through randomly spaced trees while maintaining formation:

The approach builds on a single-drone navigation technique, which rapidly maps routes around obstacles as they come within view using only the drone’s onboard camera and computer. The team, which was also behind the earlier strategy, adapted it for swarms by getting drones to broadcast their trajectories over a wireless network. That allowed the other drones to choose routes that avoided collisions while staying in formation.

I’m sure it works, though the publication’s definition of “heavy forest” is a bit generous. The video is basically the drones navigating a few trees behind a building. They get the job done in the video, but who knows how well this would work in an actual heavy forest. I’m hopeful though, since this technique might be our best shot at finally finding Bigfoot.

Keep going for the full video.

Source: Geekologie – A swarm of drones flying through heavy forest while staying in formation