Neatorama

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• An Honest Trailer for <i>Coming To America</i>
• Artificial Intelligence Tries QWOP
• In Which We Learn Where "That Song" Came From
• Dog Goes for a Towed Sled Ride
• Motorized Ice Skates
• Specialized Profession: Luxury Marriage Proposal Planner
• Toy Company Offers Home Office Play Set

An Honest Trailer for <i>Coming To America</i> Posted: 02 Mar 2021 07:34 PM PST Now that we are looking forward to seeing Coming 2 America (the sequel), it's a good time to look back at the original 1988 movie Coming To America. Screen Junkies finds plenty of fun to poke at the Eddie Murphy hit, but none of it makes the movie less enjoyable. While the comparisons between this movie and Black Panther are expected, they could have said more about The Lion King. Not only did James Earl Jones voice Mufasa a few years later, but Madge Sinclair, who played Queen Aoleon, did the voice of the lioness Sarabi. The sequel, Coming 2 America, will be released March 5.

Artificial Intelligence Tries QWOP Posted: 02 Mar 2021 05:13 PM PST QWOP, arguably the most difficult video game ever, was foisted upon us by Bennett Foddy in 2008. The point of the game is to control a sprinter with four keys that move his thigh and calf muscles. A few seconds in, and you're reduced to trying to control your laughter. Most of us gave up pretty early and decided the value in the game was purely comedy. However, in the years since, some gamers took QWOP as a challenge, and became fairly good at getting the runner through a 100-meter dash. The QWOP record as of now is 48 seconds! Could an algorithm trained to play QWOP do any better? Wesley Liao trained one to find out. While his AI learned to make the QWOP runner perform better than I ever will, it could not outdo the best human gamers. Read more on the experiment at Gizmodo.

In Which We Learn Where "That Song" Came From Posted: 02 Mar 2021 05:12 PM PST THREAD: Lots of us learned classical music from watching old cartoons, so I'm going to identify the pieces that frequently popped up. One of the most recognizable is Franz Liszt's "Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2," performed by those great piano virtuosos Bugs Bunny and Tom & Jerry. pic.twitter.com/SmyKbMpw3e — Vincent Alexander (@NonsenseIsland) March 1, 2021 How much of your knowledge of classical music came from old cartoons? I thought so. Many of us cannot listen to "Ride of the Valkyries" without hearing "kill the wabbit" in our heads. Vincent Alexander shows us just how many of those classic compositions were used by Warner Bros. and Disney in their animated shorts. With videos! He identifies the original title and composer, and gives further examples of their use in cartoons. "Dance of the Comedians" by Czech composer Bedřich Smetana (from the comic opera THE BARTERED BRIDE) was used as an unofficial musical theme for the Road Runner cartoons. The propulsive energy of the piece matches well with Wile E. Coyote's various failures. pic.twitter.com/5iHF49P2El — Vincent Alexander (@NonsenseIsland) March 1, 2021 There are so many examples that you will run across some pieces that you never knew were by classical composers of the past. Or in other words, you know the songs but didn't know who wrote them. Now you can. There are 40, count 'em, 40 videos in the Twitter thread, and at Threadreader. -via Metafilter

Dog Goes for a Towed Sled Ride Posted: 02 Mar 2021 04:24 PM PST Pufi, a dog in Romania, knows how to enjoy a snowstorm. In this video, his human, Andrei, towed Pufi on a sled behind a bike. After this video went viral, CERT Transylvania, a disaster relief organization, provided Andrei with a new bicycle to make his transportation duties easier. -via The Dodo

Motorized Ice Skates Posted: 02 Mar 2021 04:24 PM PST Simon Sörensen builds remote controlled vehicles and handy gadgets of all kinds, including a hovercraft, an electric hand warmer, and an airboat. His latest invention is appropriate for winter weather. It takes all of the hard labor out of ice skating with two electric motors. Sörensen wears a battery pack on his back to juice up each motor mounted on the skates, held in place with custom 3D printed parts. Screws in the drive wheels provide traction. You can see his invention in action at the 9:07 mark. -via Hack A Day

Specialized Profession: Luxury Marriage Proposal Planner Posted: 02 Mar 2021 04:24 PM PST   View this post on Instagram A post shared by PROPOSAL PLANNERS | TYG EVENTS (@theyesgirls) Would you like to propose marriage to your partner? Do you have a $100,000 to spend? Then I have a great service for you! Heather Vaughn operates The Yes Girls, a business that creates perfect, customized marriage proposal scenes. Business Insider quotes her: We've planned some really high-end proposals — some that we haven't been able to share online due to privacy requests — but our most expensive was over $100,000.  It was on a private island off of Charleston, South Carolina where the gentleman flew in over 30 members of his closest family and friends on a private jet. We did a full-blown engagement party afterward, so it was a "proposal meets engagement party" all-in-one experience. She was really surprised, and it was gorgeous — like something out of a Nicholas Sparks movie, complete with a private villa and a boardwalk right up to the beach.  If you'd like to have this kind of proposal experience, you can use Vaughn's Wink Wink feature to subtly signal to your partner about your expectations for getting engaged. It would no doubt be illuminating to receive such a suggestion from one's partner. -via Marginal Revolution

Toy Company Offers Home Office Play Set Posted: 02 Mar 2021 10:58 AM PST When Mommy and/or Daddy are busy trying to get Zoom to work and fix errors in Excel formulas, we need to be quiet and not distract them. Or we can join in the obvious fun they are having talking with their boss, who is using a cat filter, and can't figure out how to turn it off. Fisher-Price recently unveiled a toy set appropriate for the coronavirus era. It gives children the opportunity to be as stressed as their parents. What would you add to this set to make it more realistic? -via Marginal Revolution | Image: Fisher-Price

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