1. We’re off to upscale the wizard.

When James Dolan decided to show The Wizard of Oz on the Las Vegas Sphere's massive curved screen, even Google's AI engineers thought he'd lost his marbles. How the hell do you take a 1939 film shot on 35mm and make it work on one of the world's highest-resolution displays without it looking like a pixelated disaster? Turns out the answer is to invent entirely new AI techniques and basically remake the whole film.

Google's team used their Gemini AI models to perform what they call "performance generation" and "outpainting". Basically fancy terms for making Uncle Henry magically appear in scenes where he was originally off-camera and extending backgrounds to fill the Sphere's enormous canvas. The Scarecrow's nose went from 10 pixels to screen-dominating detail, and AI touched over 90% of the final product.

The result debuts August 28th, and while purists might clutch their ruby slippers in horror, Google's essentially created a new category: the AI-enhanced classic. Whether this represents the future of cinema or just really expensive digital necromancy remains to be seen, but one thing's certain - Dorothy's not in Kansas anymore, and neither is filmmaking.

2. Street tags, translated.

What if you could finally read all those mysterious graffiti tags that blur past your peripheral vision? French artist Mathieu Tremblin’s Tag Clouds project does exactly that, transforming hastily scrawled signatures into precise stenciled lettering while keeping the original colors and positioning intact. Think of it as Google Translate for urban art. Suddenly, those illegible spray-painted mysteries become actual words.

Tremblin draws parallels between physical tags and virtual ones, comparing graffiti to keywords that mark our digital wandering through cyberspace. While his approach technically violates street art’s sacred rule of never covering another artist’s work, he frames it as tribute rather than erasure: a way to help city dwellers appreciate spontaneous writing by actually being able to read it. Whether this counts as artistic translation or typographic vandalism probably depends on which side of the spray can you’re on, but it definitely makes waiting for the bus more linguistically enlightening.

3. Sydney Sweeney bottles the internet’s weirdest request.

When fans kept asking Sydney Sweeney about her bath water after a Dr. Squatch ad, she did what any rational person would do: turned it into a product. Sydney’s Bathwater Bliss is a limited-edition soap made with sand, pine bark extract, and, yes, a “touch” of the actress’s real bath water.

The internet’s reaction has been predictably unhinged, with comparisons flying to everything from Saltburn’s bathtub scene to Belle Delphine’s 2019 bath water stunt. Some see it as Sweeney owning her sexualized image (fair enough), while others wonder if it’s preying on lonely fans. Dr. Squatch insists it’s about starting conversations around men’s personal care. Though one Redditor noted the target demo is probably “the bro who thinks he has a chance.”

Personal note: I was conflicted about including this one. It definitely struck a chord in culture, but also walks a fine line between clever stunt and something a bit… off. But weird can be good. Sometimes. All that to say: I’d love to hear your thoughts. Is this an interesting bit of branding, or just another product made for the male gaze?