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The Information reports that Microsoft is considering several ways to set loose its XBox gaming division, including spinning it out as a separate company, restructuring it as a subsidiary, or establishing a joint venture. Reuters echoes the paywalled report, which is clear about the intended conclusion: selling it off. - Read the rest The post Microsoft may spin off struggling XBox division appeared first on Boing Boing.

An early, sticker-sealed copy of Nintendo's Super Mario Bros. sold for $3m at auction today, stomping the record set in 2021. Chris Kohler writes on Bluesky that it's the first sticker-sealed copy (from Nintendo's earliest production runs) to go under the hammer. - Read the rest The post Sealed 1985 Super Mario Bros game fetches record $3m at auction appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR: If you're in the market for a budget-friendly alternative for desk-based work, thisrefurbished 2019 21.5-inch iMac offers a 4K display, solid everyday performance, and 1TB of storage for just $339.99 (reg. $1,499).If you think MacBooks are great, you aren't prepared for how much better iMacs are. - Read the rest The post Turn your desk into a 4K workstation with this iMac for under $350 appeared first on Boing Boing.

The president of Taipei's Shih Hsin University told graduates to end their own lives if they couldn't handle the workforce, remarks that led to widespread anger. Yang Mien-chieh and Jake Chung of The Taipei Times add that he subsequently requested a two-month suspension of his duties and pay to atone. - Read the rest The post College president suggests graduates "put a quick end" to themselves in commencement speech appeared first on Boing Boing.

Lake Powell is still more than 150 feet above dead pool, but it is only about 38 feet above minimum power pool, the line where Glen Canyon Dam stops generating hydropower. That is close enough to make the old "drain Lake Powell" debate feel less theoretical and more like reading the manual after the warning light comes on. - Read the rest The post Lake Powell is approaching the line where Glen Canyon Dam stops making power appeared first on Boing Boing.

Grandpa Pudding Brains has found another election he may not respect: a Democratic mayoral primary in Washington, D.C., may serve as a reason to impose martial law. Clearly, this man of the people has no respect for the will of the people. - Read the rest The post Grandpa Pudding Brains set to invade Washington, D.C. appeared first on Boing Boing.

Reversing the egocentric high watermark of the MAGA Clown Reich, a newly re-annoited The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts shares this livestream:How cheaply, and in the wrong font, Trump's slathering of his name on this monument to the arts, along with the absolute destruction of its message and integrity, is truly symbolic of what the Orange Menace is doing to all our institutions. - Read the rest The post Watch the live Kennedy Center stream of Trump's name coming down (video) appeared first on Boing Boing.

In a Threads post, Craig Brittain, a former Arizona Senate candidate, says an FBI agent confronted him while he was protesting ICE at Delaney Hall in Newark, and the alleged agent refused to give his name.Ignoring the grossness of an FBI visit for protesting peacefully, or the obscene amount of research the "Agent" had with him: the stranger detail is the new FBI outfit. - Read the rest The post The FBI's protest-harassment fit has sponsors appeared first on Boing Boing.

Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is dead at 87, reports the court. Ginsburg was appointed in 1993 by President Bill Clinton and in recent years served as the most senior member of the court's liberal wing consistently delivering progressive votes on the most divisive social issues of the day, including abortion rights, same-sex marriage,…Read More

Inspired by that shitshow that is 2020, Oakland-based singer/songwriter Rachel Lark (whose bio reads "confrontational comedy punk for weird people and weird times") has just dropped an existential crisis of a music video on us for her single, "The World's Really F*cked But This Show Will Be Pretty Good." Prepare to both smile and weep.…Read More

Polish author Stanislaw Lem's 1964 sci-fi thriller, The Invincible, is being made into a videogame by Polish game company, Starward Industries. Sayeth PC Gamer: The Invincible is a 1964 hard sci-fi novel by Polish author Stanislaw Lem about the crew of a powerful deep-space vessel that lands on the planet Regis 3 and learns some…Read More

Another great backyard "Live at Home" moment from BBC Radio 2. It's disco funk-rockers Chic, joined by UK singer-songwriter, Rebecca Ferguson, doing Chic's iconic 1979 disco hit, "Good Times." Kind of heartbreaking to hear such a joyous booty-shaker at this particular point in time, but it's at least fun to dance to and dream of…Read More

"Pron" was always a lie. The common misspelling of the term at hand is "porm," says PornHub, a site that would know. The infographic is a couple of years old, but I doubt literacy has improved in the meantime. "On a side note… the newly minted term "covfefe" has already been searched over 9,000 times…Read More

College engineering student Sam Zeloof, known for converting his parents' garage into a semiconductor fab while in high school, transformed a vintage Polaroid camera into a digital camera with a thermal printer scavenged from a receipt machine. Press the button and the camera spits out a photo print from what was formerly the film cartridge…Read More

NASA released this astonishingly beautiful image of Jupiter captured by the Hubble Space Telescope on August 25. From NASA: Hubble's near-infrared imaging, combined with ultraviolet views, provides a unique panchromatic look that offers insights into the altitude and distribution of the planet's haze and particles. This complements Hubble's visible-light pictures that show the ever-changing cloud…Read More

If you're catching the feeling of good cheer and holiday merriment in the air, that's probably because we're smack in the middle of The Boing Boing Store's Three-Day VIP Annual Sale. One of the biggest discount shopping sprints of the year, you can save serious cash on huge collections of the best items we bring…Read More

The town of Asbestos in Quebec, Canada has long been dreaming of a new identity. Its current name was appropriate as the town was home to what was once the world's largest asbestos mine. But ever since asbestos was deemed a deadly carcinogen, the name has bummed out many of its citizens. Four new town…Read More

Musician Alexey Rom arranged this wonderful version of ABBA's classic "Dancing Queen" for a 1914 mechanical fairground organ built by Belgian makers Hooghuys. You may recall Rom as the arranger behind the below rendition of "Bohemian Rhapsody" performed on this same instrument:Read More

Paleontologists found this bundle of "giant sperm" in the reproductive tract of an ostracod that's been preserved for 100 million years in amber from Myanmar. From the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München: In fact, this is the oldest fossil in which sperm cells have been conclusively identified. Moreover, the specimen represents a previously unknown species of crustacean, which…Read More

The itty-bitty Dodocool Bluetooth speaker is surprisingly loud and distortion-free. I pair it to my phone and use it to listen to music and podcasts when I'm outside or working on projects. It's cheap, too!Read More

The Canadian government granted Uline billionaire COVID-critic Liz Uihlein an exemption to its mandatory 14-day quarantine for people entering the country. She and two companions flew into Canada on a private jet and held large meetings without masks, according to CBC News. From The Guardian: Uihlein and her husband have been called the "powerful conservative…Read More

Emma Pope nails it.Read More

Max Ravitz (aka Patricia) uses a Moog Subharmonicon, a Mother-32, and a DFAM to make beautiful music in his garden. From Moog: In this new semi-modular exploration, Asheville-based electronic music producer and Moog Product Specialist Max Ravitz (aka Patricia) brings Subharmonicon together with Mother-32 and DFAM for an intricate performance among the flora of his…Read More

Trump's "herd mentality" (sic) plan is to "infect 7 out of 10 Americans with Covid. The Trump plan will kill at least 3 million people/"Read More

"What should be a cosy, pleasant corner of the internet has become a monster," writes Sarah Manavis in New Statesmen. "Goodreads sucks, and is just shy of unbearable." Goodreads today looks and works much as it did when it was launched. The design is like a teenager's 2005 Myspace page: cluttered, random and unintuitive. Books fail…Read More

Coffee YouTuber James Hoffman takes a look at five espresso machines costing under £500 (US$650). His top overall choice is the most expensive one, the Rancilio Silvia. I've had one for about 15 years and really like it, though I added a PID temperature control unit, which cost a couple of hundred dollars, making the…Read More

Diogenes is the pithos-inhabiting star of Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy, the most sadistic game to never spill a pixel of blood. He (Diogenes, not Bennett) is hereby immortalized as a $25 plushie by Makeship: "If we get 400 preorders they'll do a production run!" [via @bfod]Read More

The science-fiction dream of videoconferencing is finally grim, merciless reality, but tech companies have wanted to foist it on us for decades and this business-to-business marketing video for AT&T's early-1990s solution makes for amusing viewing. They hired David Fincher to do TV ads for AT&T about the same time. They don't depict the VideoPhone itself,…Read More

This is sadly and absolutely as true today as it was when they wrote it.Read More

When we pick up our phones to shoot a video, most of us aren't looking to craft "The Godfather." We just want something that looks reasonably decent that won't be an embarrassment when it gets posted to YouTube or social media. But while not every video needs to reach Spielbergian levels of production, you might…Read More

Drew Barrymore and Adam Sandler reprise their 50 First Dates roles in this comedic short that imagines what life would be like now for the 2004 film's characters, Lucy and Henry. Lucy (Drew Barrymore) wakes up to husband Henry's (Adam Sandler) routine message to remind her of what's been going on the past 16 years…Read More

The Pretenders recorded this Live at Home rendition of "Back on the Chain Gang" for BBC Radio 2. Chrissie Hynde's voice is apparently immortal.Read More

Former FBI Director James Comey is scheduled to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee on September 30, which is just about one month before the presidential election. The GOP keeps trying to gin up the lie that Comey and the FBI under his direction conspired against Donald Trump in 2016. From the Associated Press: Comey,…

Remember that Trump photo op in front of St. John's Church in Lafayette Square in DC, on June 1st, where American citizens were tear-gassed? Military police were also considering using what is described as a heat ray to burn the skin of people protesting the killing of George Floyd on that day. Previously, the heat […]

The two Tom the Dancing Bug books, Tom the Dancing Bug: Into the Trumpverse, and The Super-Fun-Pak Comix Reader, are now available. Information about the books, including how to order, and special offers here. "God bless Tom the Dancing Bug! Funny, succinct, and highly original, Ruben Bolling is able to make sense from the chaos […]

The French political cartoon website Charlie Hebdo says Al Qaeda has issued death threats to the staff, after republication of the infamous Mohammed cartooons. SITE Intel Group and AFP have also reported about the threats on Friday, and say they were published in Al Qaeda's magazine, One UMMAH. An image from the cover of the […]

At The Catapult, writer/artist Shing Yin Khor has an incredibly beautiful illustrated essay about her relationship with peaches and depression — connecting both things back to their own Chinese heritage, and to the fruit's relationship with Confederate white supremacy in America. Khor takes a touching personal narrative and deftly weaves it through and around hundreds […]

Sometimes, in my dreams, I am the lead in Kool Moe Dee's I Go To Work.

In artists Erwin Driessens and Maria Verstappen's installation "Pareidolia," a computer vision system uses facial recognition software to find faces in grains of sand. Of course, "pareidolia" is a trick our brain plays that causes us to see meaningful patterns that aren't really there, like animals in clouds or hidden messages in songs. From the […]

Today I learned about the Houston Vampire Court and the Vampire Court of Dallas/Fort Worth, both member-driven organizations for "Sanguinarians" — humans who sustain themselves through blood (animal, or human) or by "draining" "psychic energies" from other humans. These are, perhaps unsurprisingly, largely off-shoots or goth and/or fetish subcultures, but there's something heartwarming about the […]

The "magnificent" home in Berkeley, California, formerly lived in by author Ursula K. Le Guin is on the market for $4.1m. Pictured above, the writing room, though the press releasy stories about it are vague on when and how long she lived there (Wikipedia suggests not past her twenties) . Below, a video tour of […]

The Broomway is a path over tidal flats near Southend-on-Sea in England, linking the mainland with Foulness Island for at least 600 years. Often shrouded in mist, surrounded by whirpools and quicksand, or simply underwater during high tide, it has claimed countless lives. It has refused all efforts to improve it, finally being replaced with […]

Theodor Kittelsen was a neo-Romantic and fantasy artist famous in Norway but relatively unknown beyond it. Here's a brief documentary featuring and explaining some of his most distinctive work. Narrator Sindrelf posted an accompanying article explaining his fondness for Kittelsen, whose cosy yet unsettling perch rests somewhere between victorian fairy art and the towering gloom […]

Today I learned: Flamingos feed with their heads upside down and that their beaks are adapted for this purpose. This essay on flamingo feeding from Stanford explains: In most birds a smaller lower beak works against a larger upper one. In flamingos this is reversed; the lower bill is much larger and stronger, and the […]

What's brown and white and tastes nothing like Christmas? Archie McPhee's Shiitake Mushroom Candy Canes, of course. Not sure what to do for the holidays this year? Give a shiitake! Shiitake Mushroom Candy Canes may seem odd at first, but they're sprouting up all over the place. How do they taste? Like shiitake. After all, […]

Finally, all this new technology put to useful purpose: film stars manipulated by an evil AI into singing "All Star". The software that does the magic is Wav2Lip [github]. Highlights Lip-sync videos to any target speech with high accuracy. Try our interactive demo. Works for any identity, voice, and language. Also works for CGI faces […]

Being a mortician means getting asked a lot of interesting questions, especially ones on keeping a skull or other memento mori after a loved one shuffles off this mortal coil. The answer is interesting and takes gentle viewers into the arcana of corpse desecration laws. The short answer is that you will need to find […]

Impeached U.S. President Donald Trump was accused by his Democratic rival Joe Biden of causing mass deaths with incompetent handling of the coronavirus crisis. So, on Monday, Trump did what he does best: DARVO. He called Biden "stupid," then demanded an apology for what Trump nonsensically called anti-vaccine rhetoric (Biden is pro-vaccine-science, this is false). […]

"The wildfire that has burned more than 7,000 acres in Yucaipa and surrounding areas was caused by an explosive used during a gender reveal party, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection." — KTLA One of many fires burning in California on Monday is the El Dorado Fire in San Bernardino County. […]

While Labor Day is a moment to solemnly consider the role that work serves in all of our lives, there are certain workers among us who will not benefit from a day of celebration and reflection. Robot vacuums, you just keep working like normal this weekend. Look, it's not that we don't appreciate you. But […]