Brilliantly Bad New Year's Edition!

Marble arcade consoles, backpackable scooters, AI birdhouses and more!

Jan 01, 2024

Mike’s List of Brilliantly Bad Ideas

1. Marble turns your classic arcade console into a classical one

An artist named Harold Sangouard custom-builds video game arcade cabinets hand-chiseled from marble. They weigh hundreds of pounds and start at $100,000. Sangouard takes a year to fulfill your order (Rome wasn’t built in a day).

2. This electric scooter folds up to fit into your backpack

The Shimizu Arma is an electric scooter that folds into a size equal to a stack of three or four 13-inch laptops. It weighs 10 pounds and transforms from folded to “ride mode” in 30 seconds. It goes 14 mph. Each battery gives you nearly 10 miles of range. But they’re USB C chargeable and hot-swappable, so you can buy extras and go further. The scooter should go on sale in time for the 2024 holiday season — the perfect stocking stuffer!

3. Finally, a birdhouse that uses ChatGPT!

The Birddy is a “smart bird house” from a startup called Reli that comes with a solar-powered 1080p camera inside, so you can watch birds the way Amazon or Google watches you. An “intelligent species recognition technology” identifies the birds you’re spying on, and its ChatGPT integration uses AI to tell you more about the birds you’re watching. What’s next, using AI to translate bird chirps to English-language subtitles?

Mickey Mouse today entered the public domain. And he wants blood.

Infestation 88 is a multiplayer horror game in which the monster is Mickey Mouse. How is this legally possible? The Mickey Mouse character entered into the public domain literally today, and Nightmare Forge Games was ready to ship the game. (They’re no Mickey Mouse operation, if you know what I mean.) In the game, players are exterminators called to eliminate rodents from a storage facility in the year 1988. The worst rodent is a Steamboat Willie-era black-and-white Mickey Mouse, and he’s covered in blood. Fun for the whole family.