Portland’s iconic indie bookshop Powell’s Books is selling a unisex fragrance that smells like old books. “Powell’s By Powell’s” has hints of violet, wood, and biblichor (old book smell) and costs $24.99 for a one ounce bottle.

Like the crimson rhododendrons in Rebecca, the heady fragrance of old paper creates an atmosphere ripe with mood and possibility. Invoking a labyrinth of books; secret libraries; ancient scrolls; and cognac swilled by philosopher-kings, Powell’s by Powell’s delivers the wearer to a place of wonder, discovery, and magic heretofore only known in literature.

So everybody loves the smell of old books but somehow my bed of old newspapers repulses everybody who sees it. Look, not all of us can afford fancy mattresses and blankets. Plus newspapers and books are basically the same thing, right? It’s all just paper. My aroma should be irresistible and yet everybody who smells me throws up.

Source: Geekologie – Powell’s Books creates unisex fragrance that smells like old books

A helicopter transporting a donor heart crashed last Friday on the Keck Hospital of USC helipad. Rescuers were able to recover the heart from the crashed helicopter, but it was immediately dropped after being handed to a doctor. The heart ended up being transplanted, but this is just Mr. Bean-levels of failure. I imagine the heart donor is looking down from Heaven with their hands in the air wondering if they should’ve donated their body to one of those weird museums that displays people without their skin instead.

Keep going for the full video. I feel okay laughing about it only because the heart actually did end up being successfully transplanted.

Source: Geekologie – Donor heart immediately dropped by doctor after being recovered from crashed transport helicopter

Alex Trebek, the host of Jeopardy!, died yesterday after a two-year battle with pancreatic cancer. And here’s him reminding us that you can be a kind soul and still make fun of nerds.

“Awkward” is a short film by Nata Metlukh highlighting many of life’s awkward moments. It has great animation, great sound design, and an abundance of all those situations that remind you you’re stupid human surrounded by other stupid humans. My own solution to when you think somebody is waving at you but they’re actually waving at somebody else is to just never ever acknowledging a wave from anybody. My own mother could be drowning in a pool trying to wave at me and I’d just turn around and pretend I didn’t notice. It’s just not worth the embarrassment if I’m wrong.

Keep going for the full video.

Source: Geekologie – A short film starring social awkwardness

MSNBC analyst Steve Kornacki had a short circuit live on the air as he struggled to find an alternative to saying “very big dump” of votes while describing the large tranche of mail-in votes from Nevada before giving up and just saying it. And all the power to him. If anything, he should’ve tried to work it in even more and make even more poop puns and then eventually just take an actual dump in his pants because ratings, baby!

Keep going for the full video of Kornacki experiencing a glitch in The Matrix in real-time.

Source: Geekologie – Steve Kornacki breaks his brain trying not to say ‘Big Dump’ of votes

The New York Times put together a stress-relief site to help ease the anxiety being caused by the current elections. It’s a combination of calming music, random video clips, and the occasional interactive page. It’s actually pretty effective, though I prefer my normal stress-relieving routine: eating as much ice cream as humanly possible while refreshing the news and screaming into a pillow. Oh, and a lot of pharmaceutical drugs.

Source: Geekologie – Election-distractor site to relieve stress

The 2020 Aerial Photography Awards have been announced and I guess they’re pretty good. I’m assuming they were all shot with drones since they’re all way less shaky than my submissions which were taken the old school way: tying my camera to a bird and then frantically trying to chase it down after the photos are taken. That’s right, I was doing aerial photography before drones were even invented. I was also losing a ton of cameras before drones were even invented. What can’t I do?

The above is the 1st Place winner in the Landscapes category. Keep going for some more winners and check out all of the photos here.

Source: Geekologie – 2020 aerial photos of the year

Klein Vision completed the maiden voyage of it’s flying AirCar prototype last week, finally making a reality what no actual person wants to be a reality.

The latest generation of flying car developed by KleinVision company transforms from road vehicle into air vehicle in less than 3-minutes. Useful for leisure and self-driving journeys, and also as a commercial taxi service.

It’s the kind of thing that has always sounded good in science-fiction stories, but would be a nightmare in real life. Nobody wants our skies looking the way our roads do. There’s also no way this thing could be good at either thing, since the engineering requirements are so different. Now can people please stop working on these wacky solutions and focus on the real problems that need tackling? Namely build me a car that is also a toilet.

Keep going for the full video of Klein Vision’s AirCar both driving and flying, which is exactly what a flying car should do.

Source: Geekologie – Somebody built an actual functional flying car

Soccer club Inverness Caledonian Thistle FC recently announced they were moving away from using human camera operators to cameras controlled by AI that had build-in “ball-tracking technology”. Well apparently their fancy new AI camera system kept mistaking the referee’s bald head for the soccer ball during a recent match.

The AI camera appeared to mistake the man’s bald head for the ball for a lot of the match, repeatedly swinging back to follow the linesman instead of the actual game. Many viewers complained they missed their team scoring a goal because the camera “kept thinking the Lino bald head was the ball,” and some even suggested the club would have to provide the linesman with a toupe or hat.

Keep going for the highlights video which also highlights how poorly the AI camera did its job. One can only imagine what it would do if any or all of the players were also bald. Would it just bounce back and forth around the field until it decided to put itself out of its own misery and jump off a bridge?

Source: Geekologie – AI camera mistakes referee’s bald head for soccer ball

Ever wondered what Tetris would look like if the pieces were soft? And also covered in hair? Of course not, because nobody has, but here it is anyway. This was originally done as an animation test to see what problems can arise when animating hair on soft bodies, but the result is either the most satisfying or most disturbing video you’ll see today. Or if you’re anything like me, the most arousing. I mean, wait, what?

Keep going for the full, fuzzy video.

Source: Geekologie – What if Tetris pieces were soft and fuzzy?

This is a video of a toddler getting mowed down by a Nerf machine gun in slow motion. Oh, the horrors of war. I still remember my time spent in the bush. I used to laugh and joke about things too until a water balloon took out my best friend. Now I don’t laugh so much anymore.

Keep going for the full video, as well as the original unedited source video.

Source: Geekologie – Toddler getting mowed down by Nerf machine gun

The New York Times has put together a weird quiz seeing if readers can guess the politics of a person based on the contents of their fridge. I didn’t even know this was a thing, but quality reporting is quality reporting:

We wondered if it was possible to identify Trump and Biden voters based on what’s inside their refrigerators, on the theory it might say something about our similarities and our assumptions about one another. So we teamed up with Lucid, an online survey platform, to ask a representative sample of U.S. residents whom they’re planning to vote for — and whether they’d open their refrigerators and take a picture of the contents. Hundreds did.

You can take the quiz for yourself here, but first you should ask yourself if this is even a thing you thought you could do before you heard the proposal. I mean, does The New York Times think Trump supporters are eating MAGA hats? Or that Biden supporters store NPR podcasts next to their eggs? I’ll admit I took my crack at the quiz, but what kind of lunatic even came up with this? The only thing you can tell from my fridge is that I’m this close to having a heart attack and may or may not believe mayonnaise is a food group.

Source: Geekologie – Can you tell a ‘Trump’ fridge from a ‘Biden’ Fridge?

In season one of The Mandalorian the showrunners broke the fourth wall by making jokes about stormtroopers having bad aim. Now The Auralnauts take the conceit even further, exploring what it would look like if these simple bike scout troopers noticed the joke itself and began questioning everything. I mean, how long could you live life as a trained soldier who can’t even hit a stationary can before you begin questioning your very existence? I saw two dogs that looked pretty similar and I’m already convinced nothing is real. I mean, two dogs? That look the same?! What are the odds?!?!

Keep going for the full video as well as the original scene from The Mandalorian making fun of their aim.

Source: Geekologie – Stormtroopers contemplate their existence

YouTuber Joseph’s Machines spent four months building a Rube Goldberg machine to assemble a sandwich as well as vote in the process. Okay, it’s actually five separate machines.

One puts down bread, the next puts on peanut butter, then a machine for jelly and so on. The last machine feeds it to me bite by bite! Spent almost four months on this machine. Oh, and remember to vote!!!

They’re all pretty intricate, especially the final one that feeds him the completed sandwich. That one has the precision of a watchmaker. Watchmakers have hands like baseball gloves and only use hammers in their work, right? And they just smash watches? With hammers? Because his last machine is like that and it’s great.

Keep going for the full video. The voting mechanism occurs during the “More Bread” segment at 2:30 and the feeding machine starts at 3:08.

Source: Geekologie – Guy makes Rube Goldberg machine to make a sandwich and vote at the same time

This is a video of Italian F1 driver Riccardo Patrese taking his wife out for a lap in a Honda Civic Type-R. It goes about as expected when somebody who is not prepared to be in a car with an F1 driver is suddenly in a car with an F1 driver. It’s one of the most charming videos I’ve ever seen, and a testament to how good F1 drivers are seeing how steady and smooth he is while his wife is being thrown around her seat. Also, I had no idea Italians actually yelled out “Mamma mia!” The only way the wife could be any more Italian is if she was eating a plate of spaghetti during the drive and maybe sipping an espresso.

Keep going for the full subtitled video. It works on mute but it’s much better with audio.

Source: Geekologie – F1 driver Riccardo Patrese takes his wife out for a lap

In a brilliant move, Kazakh tourism has embraced Borat’s caricature of their country and flipped it for their marketing, adopting “Very nice!” as their new official slogan. From Kazakhstan Travel:

Kazakhstan? Very nice!

It’s a place you may have heard of, that’s nicer than you ever imagined. Where you can find endless steppe, sand, and epic mountain peaks just a short drive from a modern metropolis. Where garlicky Kazakh horse sausage meets spicy Uighur noodles. Where shopping malls have sandy beaches and glass spheres dot the horizon. Where people are so friendly, you might just end up at a Kazakh toi (a traditional wedding) after a few salams (hello!). How can you describe a place this surprising in just two words? As a wise man one said, “Very nice!”

It takes a very brave marketing team to hitch their ride to Borat but I applaud their decision. When the first Borat film came out, Kazakhstan lost their minds and tried to run a massive publicity campaign against the movie and Sacha Baron Cohen. They went so far as to take out a four page ad in the New York Times and announced a press conference at their Washington DC embassy, to which Sascha Baron Cohen showed up outside their gates and gave a press conference of his own pretending to be their spokesperson. You can’t win against something like that, so obviously embracing it is the way to go. It’s just too bad their tourism video didn’t highlight how they have the second-cleanest prostitutes in the region.

Keep going for the full Kazakh promotional video, as well as the video of Borat giving a press conference outside the Kazakhstan embassy.

Source: Geekologie – Kazakh Tourism adopts ‘Very Nice!’ as official new slogan

This is a video of a lead compositor from Industrial Light and Magic breaking down the technology they used on The Mandalorian to replace green screens. It’s basically a giant wraparound LED screen displaying CGI backgrounds that respond to the camera’s movement. It’s one of the coolest innovations in the film industry, though not exactly something the average person has access to. I bought 50 TV’s and stacked them all around my living room to try to make one of my own but the results were terrible and now I owe $100k across fifteen different credit cards and it’s stressing me out. I can, however, watch every episode of Breaking Bad at once now so…worth it?

Keep going for the full video, as well another one going into further detail about the technology.

Source: Geekologie – The virtual set technology that’s replacing the green screen

This is a timelapse of artist Steven Richter sculpting Freddy Krueger from A Nightmare on Elm Street out of crayons and then melting it. It reminds me of the face melting scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark. I just wish he had more frames in his timelapse so we could get a smoother more detailed face melt. In my experience, when melting a face you really want to make sure you can savor all the little details. I mean, uh, there’s nothing buried in my backyard.

Keep going for the full video and check out his Instagram here.

Source: Geekologie – Freddy Krueger made out of crayons and then melted

This is the world’s largest air cannon which was made in cooperation with Czech TV show Wonders of Nature. There’s definitely a missed opportunity to use it directly on a person. What’s the worst that could happen? They fall over? Also they’re clearly going by size and not force, because I would beat this thing any day of the week after having some Taco Bell.

Keep going for the full video of them basically just knocking over a bunch of cardboard boxes with this thing. 5:30 is the closest they get to actually hitting anybody with it, but nobody gets seriously injured so it’s not entirely satisfying.

Source: Geekologie – The world’s largest air cannon