Sploid: Where awesome, wild, and breathtaking tech moments burst into view.
How to win your first Best Actor Oscar? Simple. Star in a movie that actually wasn’t that great and give a performance that wasn’t nearly your best. And! Just scream a lot. At bears, at pain, at people, at everything. That’s basically what Leonardo DiCaprio did in The Revenant and it worked out nicely for…
Making crafts? Nice. Got a glue gun? Awesome. Only one? Crap. When you have a lot of glue sticks but only one gun to load ‘em in, just grab some soda cans, some tape, and a lighter to make your own homemade glue gun. MrGear shows how in the video below. From the looks of…
There’s no such thing as useless knowledge—only knowledge that relies on very specific situations. Which is why, in the event of a horrible Mad Max future, you might want to learn how to make a bow and arrow using no modern tools whatsoever. Sure, making weaponry with access to a bandsaw, a lather, or hell,…
Here’s some truly frightening footage of airplanes landing at Birmingham Airport in the UK. “Landing” actually might not be the best term for these though because the airplanes look more like they’re spinning sideways and tilting out of control and praying that their wheels touch the ground instead of bouncing off like a basketball. These…
Filmmaker Tyler Fairbank spent two weeks in Paris last summer but instead of snapping a bunch of random photos, he captured a series of glorious 4K hyperlapse videos that when edited together let him relive and share his visit to the city of lights—and its most popular landmarks—in just two frantic minutes. [Vimeo via Laughing…
Here’s time lapse footage of a garden orb spider building out its web. It’s really interesting to see the process from the start when it seems like a few random strands are connected to each other and especially cool to see it at the end when it’s all completed and ready to catch its first…
Hitchcock is the unquestioned master of suspense. But what is it about his scenes that makes them so gripping, and why do they stand up to repeated viewings, even when you know the twist? To answer this, the Nerdwriter turned to blocking—how you position stuff and people in relation to each other—specifically, the blocking in…
Mix a little dirt and mud, shape it with your hands, and out pops a beautiful shiny mud ball that’s actually the Japanese art of Hikaru Dorodango. It takes so much more work than that, of course, but it really looks like a person is just (skillfully) playing with mud. And then you see the…
Nintendo may not ever be on the leading edge of gaming, but it writes some bangers. Even the Wii shop song—which is essentially the home console version of hold music—is fertile ground for mashups. Soundcloud’s obsession with the Wii Shop jam also intersected with many of its other memes (“Bonfire,” Smash Mouth/Shrek, Space Jam, etc.)…
Some days, you just need a reminder on how truly beautiful this world of ours is. Today is your lucky day. Christian Grewe’s AIRTime, filmed using a DJI Phantom 3, gives an aerial world tour that spans from Dubai to Hawaii to Hong Kong to Europe and South Asia and more. It is totally gorgeous…
Any shop doing good work demands an equally good workbench. And if this build is any indication, Jesse de Geest AKA The Samurai Carpenter will be fashioning some wooden works of art in the very near future. Geest designed the bench himself, and then built it using a combination of power tools and hand tools.…
Quentin Tarantino is a master filmmaker who loves to cite old movies in his work and even reference his own work in his films, it’s a wonderful cycle that adds another layer inside a movie for film buffs to appreciate. Here are those references he made in his latest movie, The Hateful Eight. SPLOID is…
Here’s a perspective you rarely get to see: the underside of animal as they stand and walk and just generally be cute all around. Wakaleo filmed various animals underneath a glass sheet and we get to see how they move around. It actually makes for a really cool view. SPLOID is delicious brain candy. Follow…
The third act of Swan Lake is considered one of the most difficult in the balletic cannon, requiring a dancer to twirl around 32 consecutive times. How its accomplished is as much a feat of physics as it is athleticism. Staying in momentum for a full 30 seconds takes a couple of small but important…
One of my life dreams as a child was to be able to fool a vending machine with quarter-like objects. I mean, how smart could a vending machine be, right? Wrong. More like how dumb a kid I was. Vending machines use light sensors to measure the size of a coin and electromagnets to detect…
Any number of forces can mess up a spacecraft’s flight path on its way to where it needs to go—but spinning helps average those torques to add stability to the trajectory. But when a satellite does successfully reaches orbit, how does it stop spinning? There’s lots of ways to change the momentum of an object…
To turn a plate of metal into something you can actually use takes so many different tools and so much time to do. Even for something as simple as a bottle opener, you need to figure out a way to pierce the metal, to hammer the hole wider, to bend it to create a usable…
It’s absolutely no surprise that blockbuster movies rely so heavily on special effects and CG all the time now. When the effects are good, it just makes more sense for the fictional world they are building and the shots they are making. But it will forever be hilarious to see the actors act out in…
Shot using a DJI Osmo stabilized camera to ensure buttery smooth footage, Rufus Blackwell’s hyperlapse video of Saigon, Vietnam, somehow makes the city more beautiful even though you feel as if you’re racing through it at the speed of sound. If all vacation videos looked this captivating, you’d be happy to visit your friends after…
Hockey pucks get put through a lot in the name of internet views. We’ve seen then burned, frozen, and shot at, and they manage to survive unscathed. But the indestructible puck has finally met its match under a hydraulic press. The vulcanized rubber disc starts looking like a thumbprint cookie pretty quickly, and just as…
