World’s tallest elephant toothpaste volcano
That’s one way to win a world’s record
Little Big at Eurovision 2020
That….was certainly unique. Russian band Little Big singing a Spanish song at Eurovision.
They should have sent a poet
I saw this while watching a Japanese Twitch streamer. It’s pretty incredible this was invented in Japan and not the US, but someone could make a fortune selling them here. So far I haven’t seen any US distributors.
Witness the wonders of the Dulton Snack Tub with Tumbler! You can fill the bottom solo cup with your beverage, then put all your chips/snacks at the top and drink your drink through the straw that runs up through the snack holder.
A truly American item where you can drink the beverage poured into the tumbler while enjoying the food on the large-capacity tab.
The geometry of fair dice
It turns out that the geometry behind fair dice is more interesting and complex than you might first guess.
Professor Persi Diaconis discusses all kinds of interesting properties of fair dice as well as his interesting paper on the topic.
Getting fair dice for any number is very hard, if not impossible. But it turns out level-up dice have a unique ‘unicorn dice’ that you change the end cap and then roll in a circle. They’re pretty overpriced at $110 for a whole set – when a regular set will cost you $5, but a dice in this configuration can get you a fair roll for any value range.
Make a Netflix documentary on $70
Paul E.T. shows us how easy it is for anyone to make a Netflix quality documentary. How cheap and how easy? Using just a few basic photography tools, some stock footage, and basic editing skills on software available to almost everyone – Paul shows us how you can make your own documentary that rivals anything you’ll see out of Hollywood and Netflix.
With such a low bar of entry one should be very critical of documentaries as a information source – no matter how slick it looks.
I’ve sure notice more documentaries – is it because they’re becoming the reality shows of today? One of the biggest reasons reality shows caught on may be the same reasons you are seeing more and more documentaries. Namely, they’re now super cheap and super easy to make (orders of magnitude cheaper than a regular TV show).
Blurring the walls between games and film
PAX 2021 was an online event for me as COVID cases keep rising. One of the better streamed sessions was about the Blurring Lines between Games and Film. Definitely worth a watch as they cover a number of topics: difficulties in embracing the immersive nature of VR/AR, using VR/AR in advocacy work to immerse viewers into environments or as an alternative to zoos/animals in captivity, digital character design, virtual production with LED stages and Unreal engine, massively evolving digital production pipelines, and interactive VR environments. While these are some well known topics in the field, it’s still worth giving it a listen to hear how production folks are dealing with the massive upheaval of changing pipelines.
I still find LED stages instead of greenscreening with post-shoot CG one of the most amazing recent developments – something I’ve written about before with the Mandalorian.
Some panelist links:
- Louisa Spring @ Sami-i
- Neville Page – Concept Designer
- AJ Wedding @ Orbital Virtual Studios
- Jason Parks @ ROTU Entertainment
- Emir Cerman @ ROTU Entertainment
On their topic of AR/VR environments, it was noted that COVID has decimated many in-person VR/AR experiences. One casualty was the VOID – and even their website is now gone. the VOID had interesting setups mixing VR, haptic feedback systems, and real-world props. Sadly, their setups in Las Vegas an other places are no more (like Venetian Las Vegas). Still, their legacy lives on in YouTube footage and some installations still hanging on through COVID.
Footage from the now defunct VOID:
Fight with some zombies in Zero Latency at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas.
As well as overseas, such as some of the interesting installations in Japan.
AI interprets Street Fighter faces
Siberian_644 uses an AI to figure out what Street Fighter characters might look like in real life – and it’s pretty trippy…
Peak Fall Foliage Tool
My favorite season is fall. The air turns cool, there are hay rides and pumpkin patches, one curls up with a good book in front of a fire, reading scary tales, and, of course, watching the leaves change.
Japan has some very good, live updating of fall colors on a few websites.
The folks over at this website have a nifty little tool that predicts when fall colors will change this year. How do they predict the trends this year? With a little bit of data (and possibly a touch of pretentiousness):
The company uses a model that ingests a multitude of data sources including historical precipitation, NOAA precipitation forecasts, elevation, actual temperatures, temperature forecasts, and average daylight exposure to develop a baseline fall date for each county in the continental United States. Next, the model consumes hundreds-of-thousands of additional data points from a variety of government and non-government sources and layers this data over its own historical data from past years and, finally, with a high degree of accuracy, the algorithm produces nearly 50,000 date outputs indicating the progression of fall for every county in a graphical presentation that is easy to digest.