Endless stream of metal music created by AI

Science Has Created Live, Endlessly Streaming AI-Generated Death Metal

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What happens when you feed death metal into a neural network? Relentless Doppelganger, a 24/7 livestream of AI-generated brutality.

Dadabots is an AI band created by CJ Carr and Zack Zukowski using deep learning software. Real snippets of music by death metal band Archspire are fed through the SampleRNN neural network to create Relentless Doppelganger, a constant, livestreaming aural assault that is actually pretty listenable. If you like death metal.

As the neural network learns, it tweaks and strengthens different parts to continuously improve the music it produces. The fast and aggressive style of Archspire allows the network to create a more realistic sound.

Carr and Zukiwski have been working for years to create realistic AI-generated music.

“Most nets we trained made shitty music,” Carr told Motherboard. “Music soup. The songs would destabilize and fall apart. This one was special though.”

Listen to Relentless Doppelganger:

Ruins of Aleister Crowley's Boleskine House

Ruins of Aleister Crowley’s Cursed House on Loch Ness for Sale

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You can buy the ruins of Boleskine House, where “the wickedest man in the world” carried out black magic rituals for years.

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Paranormal investigator Lorraine Warren

Paranormal Investigator Lorraine Warren Passed Away at 92

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Lorraine Warren is known for her investigations of the Amityville Horror house, the haunted Annabelle doll and the Warren Occult Museum.
Paranormal investigator Lorraine Warren with the haunted Annabelle doll
Lorraine Warren in the Warren’s Occult Museum with the haunted Annabelle doll

Lorraine Warren passed away last night in her home at the age of 92. Lorraine professed to be a professed to be clairvoyant and medium. Along with her husband Ed, a demonologist, Lorraine founded the New England Society for Psychic Research in 1952 and conducted numerous investigations of paranormal claims such as the Amityville Horror house, the Enfield Poltergeist, and Annabelle the haunted doll. They claimed to have investigated more than 10,000 cases, some of which The Conjuring movies are based on.

Chris McKinnell, Lorraine’s grandson and the director of The Warren Legacy Foundation for Paranormal Research, shared a heartfelt message on Facebook this morning:

“Last night my grandmother, Lorraine Warren, quietly and peacefully left us to join her beloved Ed,” McKinnell wrote. “She was happy and laughing until the very end. She was my angel and my hero, and she will be deeply missed. Please join us in celebrating her life and honoring her beautiful soul. Remember to treasure those you love while you can. Thank you and God bless you all.”

UPDATE: Lorraine was laid to rest on April 24th beside her husband Ed at the Stepney Village Cemetery in Monroe, Connecticut. The cemetery has a few of its own haunted legends.

Funeral Legos

6 Bricks Under: Vienna Cemetery Introduces Funeral LEGO Sets

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Kids will have a blast assembling a LEGO crematorium, hearse, grave and more now available from the Vienna Funeral Museum.
Lego crematorium
Lego crematorium oven set available from the Vienna Funeral Museum

Build your own funeral piece by piece with these LEGO kits from Bestattungsmuseum, the Vienna Funeral Museum in Vienna’s Central Cemetery. The museum’s gift shop and online store recently unveiled custom Lego sets designed to help kids answer the big questions like “What happens to grandpa in a crematorium?”

“Taboos create fears and uncertainties,” the Vienna Psychotherapy Association said. “The child feels that something is wrong, and then he is left alone with that.”

So to teach kids about death, the museum partnered with a company to produce some gloriously morbid Legos.

“For the small and large undertaker of tomorrow,” the description from the Historical Hearse set reads.

Other sets currently available include a WWI-era funeral tram, Lego graveyard with tombstone and excavator, a fourgon used to transport the deceased, a crematorium oven with a casket and urn, a horse-drawn “corpse carriage,” a bereaved family with the skeleton of the deceased, and minifigures in mourning.

Lego bereaved family
Lego bereaved family minifigures with the deceased

Lego graveyard
Lego cemetery with casket, gravestone, and excavator for digging your own graves

Lego horse-drawn funeral carriage
Lego horse-drawn corpse carriage with coffin

Historic Vienna funeral tram
WWI-era Vienna funeral tram with 2 coffins and Lego undertaker

Lego hearse
Lego hearse

These morbid LEGO sets are available now right here.

Thanks to Dead Sled Brand for putting this on my radar.

Apocalypse Any Day Now author Tea Krulos

Apocalypse Any Day Now: Into the World of Doomsday Preppers with Author Tea Krulos

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The End is near…right? For some, doomsday is right around the corner and they’re going to great lengths to be prepared.

When Tea Krulos decides to write about a particular topic he finds fascinating, he gets out into the wilderness and immerses himself in it. Whether it’s breaking up a dangerous fight on the streets of Seattle with real life superhero Phoenix Jones for Heroes in the Night, or fending off aggressive wildlife while tracking Bigfoot with Monster Hunters, he takes a few risks to experience the curious inner workings of some obscure subcultures.

Over the weekend I had the opportunity to catch Tea at a local comic shop called Crimson Cowl (owned by superheroes The Watchman and Crimson Crusader) where he discussed his experiences while researching his new book Apocalypse Any Day Now. The danger may not have been immediately present this time as Tea packed up and bugged out into the world of doomsday preppers, but it seems as though the paranoia was palpable.

Tea’s journey took him from the luxury bunkers built in an abandoned missile silo beneath the surface of the Kansas prairie, into the woods with a group that teaches disaster preparedness and survival skills under the guise of a zombie apocalypse, and out into the desolate Mojave Desert for the post-apocalyptic party known as Wasteland Weekend.

If you’ve been following Cult of Weird on the cesspool that is social media for a while, you may have noticed one of my favorite pass times is to track the latest end-of-the-world predictions and take a show of hands the following day to see who survived.

So far we’ve all squeaked by unscathed.

Be it a Biblical Armageddon, natural disaster, nuclear war, or the FEMA camps of a police state as conspiracy theorists are fond of preaching, there are some who believe there is a constant looming threat to humanity. Something set to wipe out civilization as we know it. And they’ll be ready.

Who knows. Maybe the end is near.

Will you be prepared…when it’s time for the Mad Max-themed swimsuit contest?

Apocalypse Any Day Now: Deep Underground with America's Doomsday Preppers by Tea Krulos

Find out in Apocalypse Any Day Now by Tea Krulos. Available now right here.

Tea Krulos is also the organizer of the Milwaukee Paranormal Conference.