This is a video of a girl playing around on her dad's time-locking container after her brother jokingly puts her phone in it, not understanding that by rotating the lid she is actually increasing the duration of the timer. She eventually realizes what she's done when the timer shows 2 days and she breaks down in a combination of laughter and tears. Her reaction is actually kind of amazing and I don't think I've ever seen anything quite like it. I imagine it's the reaction you would have if somebody was tickling you while simultaneously murdering your family.
Filmmaker and radio/podcast guy Andrew Norton edited scenes of people wearing headphones in movies but replaced the music with podcasts. They're all pretty good, but the Baby Driver (Serial Podcast) mashup is clearly the best. Personally, I can't wait for the inevitable future where music no longer exists and only podcasts remain. Nothing says tension and excitement like Tom Cruise reaching the climactic scene of a Mission Impossible movie only to have The Joe Rogan Experience swell in the background.
Every year for the past five years, Demi Adejuyigbe has put out a video on September 21 in honor of Earth, Wind & Fire's song September. He somehow manages to top himself every year and they're always weirdly delightful in a way that makes you forget the world is a dumpster fire of misery. Apparently he's fought the desire to make the video each year but keeps getting sucked back in. He tells Vulture:
It kind of feels like a prison I've built myself. September 22nd is a very nice moment when I don't have to think about that. Then, as I get closer and closer to September, I start feeling like, I guess I should figure out what I'm going to do this year. And I get lucky, because for a lot of time I won't think about it. Then I'll just have this idea, and build from that. Or I go to a craft store and just see a bunch of things and just let my mind go.
But it's a strange experience to feel it coming on. Every year, for the last three years, I've thought, I should not do it this year. Or else I risk setting myself in a perpetual cycle: I guess I'm gonna do this until I die. So every year, I think, I won't do it this year. I tweet, "I won't do it this year." And then I come up with an idea and I go, Okay, that might be fun. Maybe I'll do that. That's the cycle every year.
This year he put the fate of the video in the hands of viewers, saying he'll only make a video next year if he manages to raise $50,000 for charity through sept21st.com. Although as of this publishing he's already raised $253,012.55 so we should be good to go. I personally pitched in a stack of coupons and I think that's really what pushed the amount over the edge so you're welcome.
Keep going for the full video and the rest of Demi's 9/21 videos from the past five years. They're all great and a beacon of light in these trying times.
In sad news, Longcat, the infamously long cat, died in Japan yesterday at the age of 18. The cat, whose real name was Nobiko, was posted to the imageboard 2chan between 2004 and 2005 and became popular in 2006 for his longness (he was apparently 65 cm).
Hong Kong-based pro-democracy website Stand News reported that Longcat had been rushed to the vet after being found in a weak state on Sunday morning. The cat eventually passed away at around 2pm local time.
Looks like 2020 isn't done with us yet. One can only hope Longcat is continuing to be long in heaven. I just wish there was another long cat to replace Longcat so that I could say, "Longcat is dead, long live Longcat." Because long.
Working with CGI artist Jan Koudela, TheToyZone created these ultra-realistic Polly Pockets from the fictional worlds of television and movies. The above is the Simpson's residence from The Simpsons, but they also made one for Stranger Things, Friends, The Lord of the Rings, The Shining, and The Royal Tenenbaums. They're all pretty great and worth checking out. It'd be cool if they could've made one for my home, but I guess nobody would be interested in a Polly Pocket that was just a cigarette box filled with trash and bed bugs. Realistic, yes. Fun, not so much.
Recent advances in image-based 3D human shape estimation have been driven by the significant improvement in representation power afforded by deep neural networks. Although current approaches have demonstrated the potential in real world settings, they still fail to produce reconstructions with the level of detail often present in the input images. We argue that this limitation stems primarily form two conflicting requirements; accurate predictions require large context, but precise predictions require high resolution. Due to memory limitations in current hardware, previous approaches tend to take low resolution images as input to cover large spatial context, and produce less precise (or low resolution) 3D estimates as a result. We address this limitation by formulating a multi-level architecture that is end-to-end trainable. A coarse level observes the whole image at lower resolution and focuses on holistic reasoning. This provides context to an fine level which estimates highly detailed geometry by observing higher-resolution images. We demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art techniques on single image human shape reconstruction by fully leveraging 1k-resolution input images.
I'm all for the progression of science and technology, but I honestly have no idea where all this research is heading. If things keep progressing the way they are, eventually researchers will be able to recreate the entire Universe using somebody's Instagram profile picture.
Keep going for a video detailing the project and showing how it renders 2D video.
This is a side by side comparison of what it's like to land an Airbus A320 at Los Angeles airport in real life compared to Microsoft Flight Simulator. It's one of those instances where the simulator looks more realistic than reality. If it wasn't labeled I think most people would have a tough time figuring out which was which. The textures on the runway in real life actually look worse than the simulator, like God needs to upgrade the graphics card or something.
This is a video of a guy trying to feed a squirrel some pine nuts but then he somehow accidentally hits the reset button on it. It's the cutest, weirdest thing you'll see today unless you're subscribed to some sort of puppy breakdancing video channel. At 1:30 he starts just putting the nuts in the broken squirrel's arms and it's so adorable I almost passed out. Actually I did pass out, and then woke up with a bunch of pine nuts in my arms. I hate when this happens, but also, hey, free pine nuts.
