Sploid: Where awesome, wild, and breathtaking tech moments burst into view.
This video is a— No, that’s not right… You’re going to feel so much frustration when… You click on this post. What? A screenwriter getting their characters to show what writing is like, is like a— A bad simile? Ugh. Few things suck quite as much as writer’s block. It’s like brain constipation, and no…
I wish I could see more of the build process for artist Koka Nikoladze’s mechanical beat machines, but the little teasers of shaping springs and wires and wood in the video will have to do. In the end, the machines become adorably weird music boxes that are totally programmable and can “produce different kinds of…
The movements in kung fu are so graceful that even when you replace the human with random digital objects, the art of it still shines through. Tobias Gremmler captured the motion of kung fu and then recreated it with different digital variations: as a fabric weaved over time, expanding into emptiness, reconstructing shapes from motion,…
This side-by-side comparison video of 4K HDR Ultra HD and Blu-Ray doesn’t show the true technological difference between the two (because things get lost in translation when it ends up as a video on YouTube) but it does illustrate how there is a visual difference between the two that go beyond just more resolution. 4K…
Here’s a really fun drone ballet performed in front of Mount Fuji in Japan. The drones look a lot like and move a lot like the aliens you shoot down in the classic video game Space Invaders. The whole dancing drone thing is really cool (especially when set against the mountain) but what would be…
Steven Spielberg thinks that superhero movies will go the way of the Western. As in, moviegoers will get tired of them and stop watching them and the movie studios will stop making them. That sounds hard to believe since slapping Marvel on anything basically guarantees a gazillion dollars but how long can this current Marvel…
All I ever want in life is for an ATM to spit out an extra 20 dollar bill one time. This never happens! Vending machines have given me two bags of chips. I’ve gotten an extra chicken nugget here and there. Sometimes even the glorious onion ring in an order of fries. But the cash…
They tend to work better in some cities than others, but we can all agree that using those subway cop-outs known as streetcars to knock down a bunch of giant pins is easily the best use of taxpayer money. https://gizmodo.com/streetcars-are-the-great-urban-gimmick-of-our-time-1759474436 In Europe, where streetcars are called trams, they apparently have an Olympics-like event called the…
If you’ve seen The Sopranos or met someone from Bay Ridge you know Italians love to talk with their hands. Contrary to popular belief, it’s not just a collection of randomized arm flapping and emphatic gestures! Italians have a whole vocabulary of hand movements to quickly (or quietly) convey what they mean. Sergio Solazzo is…
Remember that part in the new Snowden trailer, where Ed sneaks data out of the NSA by hiding a memory card in a Rubik’s cube? Has to be bullshit, right? Not exactly. YouTube geek AntVenom wondered if it was even possible to hide microSD cards inside of a cube. But the question isn’t whether you…
Watch as Matthias Wandel spins a block of wood on a lathe in order to make a Tippe top, a spinning top that can flip upside down and still spin. It’s a pretty fun toy, because when you think the top is about to fall over, it catches itself onto the surface and flips itself…
When a pigeon flies, you can hear it sloppily slap its wings as it makes its way through the air. When a peregrine falcon flies, the flight is powerful and beautiful, but you can still hear the movement. When a barn owl flies? Complete silence. It’s amazing to see. BBC Earth set up microphones along…
I laughed. Pretty hard, actually. Right when the fluffy cloud that is cotton candy started oozing sweet sugary alien blood, I laughed hard. It’s so ridiculous and it disappears so quickly and breaks down in such a balletic way that I can’t even think about turning my head away. In fact, I don’t want to…
The Soviet Union. The USSR. The Iron Curtain. The Eastern Bloc. Lenin. Stalin. The Communist Party. The KGB. The Cold War. And awesomely designed bus stops? Apparently and bizarrely and awesomely, that’s one of the legacies of the Soviet Union. Photographer Christopher Herwig’s excellent photo book Soviet Bus Stops documents the design of local bus…
Breathtaking. This drone footage of Angel Falls in Venezuela is exactly that. Angel Falls is the world’s highest uninterrupted waterfall at 3,212 feet tall and it is totally stunning to see the water make its way down the side of the mountain and disappear into the mystery below. SPLOID is delicious brain candy. Follow us…
Cap’s shield has deflected all kinds of shit over the last few years, but outside the Marvel universe, vibranium is in short supply. So what can Captain America’s shield do when it’s made of titanium? Without breaking the laws of physics, it’s hard to imagine a more accurate test: titanium is a good stand-in for…
Artist Prasad Bhat made this fantastic art series, The Evolution, that tracks the career of famous actors and the iconic roles they’ve played in different movies. It’s great because the expression of each actor never changes (and the expressions are so, so on point), even through all the characters’ costumes and wigs and facial hair…
A few weeks back, you might have seen a video floating around of what appeared to be a Viner Kevin Parry playing catch with his own reflection. It’s hard to look away from, but it’s obviously impossible. That led commenters to speculate on how the trick was done. Theories were split: was it two people…
Forget using a trampoline to up your dunking game like some half-time NBA mascot. Go find yourself a bridge over a lazy river like the Dunking Devils did, attach a swing and a hoop, and you’ll be pulling off dunks like the NBA All-Star game has never seen before.
What superpower would you want to have? The ability to fly? Teleport? Turn invisible? Time travel? Heal? What about to ability to see the invisible? Not exactly the flashiest power you can have especially because we can kind of, sort of do that right now. This lovely animation explainer from Amaël Isnard shows how though…
