Boing Boing

We live in a golden age of Star Wars merch, but even by those hopeful standards, the Luke Skywalker flight suit tee is pretty fine. The matching Chewbacca tee is also worth a look. (via Canopy)

This was a Fun movie, and a very funny one, too. Until the end, I wasn't sure if it was a good one. Hell, it is good. The first was well-made and profoundly clever in its use of nostalgia as part of its storytelling soul rather than just appearances, but the sequel has a more perfect magic: emotional honesty. It's about a team of famous yet bickering mercenaries and their unseemly associates, all outmaneuvering enemies and gravitating toward epic destinies that turn out to be mirages obscuring the smaller truths of family. I suspect this will make older viewers like it more, but younger ones like it less, because they don't sleep with the sort of well-settled emotional tangles that the movie vicariously unravels. I don't really feel like more should be said, frankly, than that. It's a light show, lacking any suggestion of physical threat or danger, yet it wields its human weaponry so well.

On Monday evenings some of the best magicians in the world perform intimate sets at the Santa Monica Playhouse.The Santa Monica Playhouse is a long running, classic, beautiful small theatre just off the 3rd St. Promenade in Santa Monica, CA. I was thrilled, last year, when I had the chance to catch a few performances at Albie Selznick's Magic Monday. Albie is an accomplished actor and magician who brings together phenomenal acts for a very playful and in-your-lap kind of night. Frequently, you'll see the most sought after magicians and variety performers from the Magic Castle here, in a far less formal but no less charming setting.This week, Monday May 8th, two of my favourites are in the cast: puppeteer Scott Land, and (if memorry hasn't failed me) Troop 2 Santa Monica Eagle Scout, and world renowned magician Matt Marcy.The most fun you'll have on a Monday west of Sepulveda!Magic Monday at the Santa Monica Playhouse

Today Show host Matt Lauer interviewed Ellen DeGeneres, and after asking her what it was like to publicly come out as gay 20 years ago, he moved on to Trump. Lauer: What's your relationship with Donald Trump? Do you know him at all? Have you had a chance to interview him?DeGeneres: I mean, I know him from Celebrity Apprentice because when we first started the show... we filmed something with him. I flew in his helicopter and did a bit with him. So I knew him then. I have not spoken to him since he he's run for president or become president.Lauer: Would you like him to come on the show?Degeneres: Um...No. [Explosive laughter, hoots and applause from audience.]Lauer: Why not?DeGeneres: Because I'm not gonna change his mind. He's against everything I stand for.Here's the full segment:https://youtu.be/0dki_Wg45xM

https://youtu.be/hv5lcQBv8mYIs this the teaser for Portal 3? The disarray, scattered equipment, and posters on the wall seem like the work of a thoughtful set decorator. But, as Sean Hannity likes to say, "Wow if true." lockquote>While walking through the territory of a factory, located in the industrial area of the city, I noticed a weird concrete block with a metal gate on the side of it. I opened it and a latter climb later I was in a dark, small tunnel leading to an underground bomb shelter/safe house.

What I learned from this awe-inspiring animated explainer video from Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell.Ninety-seven percent of all stars will eventually become white dwarfs.White dwarfs have a long lifespan! Up to 100 billion billion years. That's 10 billion times longer than the universe has existed. Intelligent life has a few billion years to learn how to move close to white dwarfs in order to survive. (In other words, it's a good idea to start planning now!)When a white dwarf dies, it will become a black dwarf. The universe will begin the slow process of heat death, and all life will die.*If protons decay the universe will eventually dissolve into nothingness.If protons don't decay, then they will become iron spheres, suspended in a black cold universe. This will be the forever end state of the universe.*Not in the video, but Freeman Dyson has put forth the idea (in his wonderful book, Infinite in All Directions) that as long as there is a temperature differential (and there always will be), energy can be used to support life. Imagine a system that harvests energy for 10 billion years, which is enough to power a computer with a universe simulation in it for one second before shutting down. The next time, it has to harvest energy for 20 billion years to run the simulation for a second. This could go on literally forever, and the conscious entities in the simulation would not be aware of the long hibernation periods. Other physicists have shot down Dyson's "Eternal Life Postulate."

All this cute Pikachu wants to do is dance centerstage with his fellow Pikachus at the The Pokemon World Festival 2017 in South Korea, but because of his pre-existing condition – deflating mid-performance – security swarms up and manhandles him off stage as if he is a ticking bomb. At around 4:30 the Pikachu looks hopeful as he tries to rejoin the other dancers, and almost makes it, but his luck runs out as a stagehand decides he's still not fit for the job.Thanks The Verge!

I have a column in today's International Business Times: Unchecked Surveillance Technology Is Leading Us Towards Totalitarianism, where I discuss this week's NYPL event with Edward Snowden and how mass surveillance connects to the themes in my novel Walkaway. (more…)

Students of Avondale High School in the Detroit neighborhood of Auburn, MI are currently sitting in in the hallways of their school to protest the announcement that 6 of their teachers were to be laid off. (more…)

Landon Meier, maker of fantastically realistic (and hyperrealistic) masks introduces us to a wonderfully weird little girl who visits us from the uncanny valley. (Stan Winston School via Laughing Squid)

The city of Flint, Michigan notoriously poisoned a generation of its children with lead in the water supply, having ignored and covered up reports from whistleblowers and denied complaints from residents. (more…)

With all the excitement/hype around the 20th anniversary of Radiohead's OK Computer, I was compelled to revisit Reggie Watts's 2012 brilliant performance of "Reggiohead" from his A "Live" in Central Park album.

Oskar Stalberg (previously) made Brick Block, a fun online 3D toy that lets you design surreal blocky houses. You can spin the scene to any degree and have it generate random houses. It's like the level editor for a Victorian-themed version of the classic cyberpunk game Syndicate.https://twitter.com/MLFrances/status/860328983539220480

Why do so many people just leave their shopping carts in the parking lot after unloading groceries instead of rolling them to the receptacles? Sure, one answer is laziness. But it's actually more interesting than that, involving what kind of cart user you are and how your motivation aligns with two general categories of social norms. You may be someone who always returns the cart, never returns it, only does so if it's convenience, feels pressure to return it from either a cart attendant or someone waiting to park in the spot where your cart is parked, you have children and they get a kick out of returning it. From Krystal D'Costa's "Anthropology in Practice" column in Scientific American:Social norms fall into two general categories. There are injunctive norms, which drive our responses based on our perception of how others will interpret our actions. This means that we're inclined to act in certain ways if we think people will think well or think poorly of us. And there are descriptive norms, where our responses are driven by contextual clues. This means we're apt to mimic behaviors of others—so what we see or hear or smell suggests the appropriate/accepted response or behavior that we should display.Supermarkets can try and guide our behavior with receptacles or cart attendants, but they’re competing with our own self-serving goals, which in this case may be staying dry, keeping an eye on our children, or simply getting home as quickly as possible, and we’re being guided by the ways others behave on top of that. These goals can override the norm because the support provided by the supermarket—ironically—resets the situation before complete chaos is unleashed with carts running rampant in the parking lot. An attendant will most likely step in before that happens. So if we apply this definition of norms to our classification of cart returners, the injunctive norm applies the greatest pressure to Returners and Pressure Returners. These folks are concerned by what others will think of them on some level, and want to adhere to social rule mandating that the carts are returned. Descriptive norms are at play for Convenience Returners and Pressure Returners who are more inclined to act if there is precedent. These folks are more likely to return a cart if there are no carts parked haphazardly. The Never Returners and the Child-Driven Returners are two example of goal-driven actors, which means that they’re responding to a more individual need. These two are interesting as they’re on opposing ends of the spectrum but still demonstrate the ways an individual goal can work for or against a norm....As a situation broaches on deviance, more people will trend toward disorder; once we have permission to pursue an alternative action, we will do so if it suits us. Not returning our shopping carts opens the door to throwing our circulars on the ground to parking haphazardly or in reserved spaces to other items that impact the quality of our experience at that establishment.Why Don't People Return Their Shopping Carts? (SciAm)(photo: Daniel Blume/Flickr)

Charles Ross recorded himself removing stop signs for sweet, sweet YouTube views. He found an audience in the local police who pranked him back with a 3rd-degree felony charge. (more…)

Science Fiction Interfaces, gathered by nnkd, represent the myriad yet curiously familiar systems of control found in other worlds and times.Previously: Chris Noessel: lessons of science fiction computer interfacesUser interfaces in sf movies and tv

In a 217-213 vote in the House of Representatives, every Democrat and 20 Republicans were not enough to prevent the passage of Paul Ryan's Obamacare repeal bill. The American Health Care Act (ACHA) will reportedly allow insurers to raise premiums and deny healthcare coverage on the basis of pre-existing conditions (including being the victim of domestic abuse or sexual assault, or giving birth by c-section) and amounts to an $880-billion slashing of healthcare services in the form of a tax cut returning mostly to the rich.The Senate, however, will not need any Democrats to pass it because they are using a procedural mechanism that allows the bill to pass the Senate to pass with just 51 votes instead of the usual 60-vote threshold. There are 52 Republicans in the Senate.The House measure came to the floor without an updated accounting of how much the bill will cost or its impact. The last assessment, which was done before the bill was altered, said that 24 million people would lose insurance, it would save $300 million and premiums would go down ten percent after ten years.Rep. Barry Loudermilk, R-Georgia, said that having no updated CBO score is slightly concerning."It is a concern, but at this point we have to move forward. The American people are clear they want this done, so I think we have to strike when the iron's hot," he said.The bill must still be voted on in the Senate. Then, assuming it passes, it will be signed into law by President Trump, who had promised before the election to provide healthcare coverage for all Americans.As the bill passed to cheers, House Democrats sang "hey hey goodbye" to their Republican counterparts, because the only thing that matters to them is the sweet hope that it might be unpopular enough to serve them a political victory in 18 months' time.https://twitter.com/ezraklein/status/860201880290340864https://twitter.com/chrislhayes/status/860198826757541889https://twitter.com/shannonrwatts/status/860216330120814592https://twitter.com/Beschizza/status/860204118509596672

@Smutclyde Google Translated sequences of unicode characters and short pairings, at varying lengths, to see what the neural networks would interpret each as. The results are remarkable. Lovecraftian wailings, for example, become homoerotic death metal lyrics.And is this not as disturbing as it is funny? Especially when you consider that the machine minds are learning their way beyond our comprehension.

Luis Padron, 25, has spent huge sums of money on cosmetic surgery in order to resemble an elf. He has almost spent more than £25,000 on surgery including liposuction on his jaw, a nose job, full body hair removal and operations to change his eye colour. ... He is planning surgery to make his ears pointed, hair implants for a heart-shaped hairline and a limb lengthening operation to make him 6ft 5in tall.Mr Padron fell in love with the fantasy genre during his early teenage years, while struggling with bullies who mocked him because he dyed his hair and had different dress sense.But by the end of high school, he claimed his quirkiness led to him being admired, which further fuelled his desire to be different.He added: 'I was bullied as a child and as an escape I would submerge myself in fantasy movies like Labyrinth and The NeverEnding Story, as well as other fantasy tales.'Over time things changed, older teens liked me because I was unique and that's what encouraged me to start turning what I felt on the inside into a reality.From an aesthetic perspective, I think he's executing his goals unusually well, which is largely due to broadened horizons among competent surgeons. There will be more of this in future from the rich (and those willing to tolerate a lifetime of debt). But I must say his is a rather sickly and emo-looking sort of elf. It's like he set out to turn his body into an illustration rather than an embodied creature; the details require "a £4,000-a-month ritual applying creams, dyes and treatment," according to the Daily Mail.Such measures can hide human problems, too. Without making any judgement on this chap's motives or concerns or what-have-you, let me just point out that the price drops to like $75 if you're OK being a fat elf.

Surveillance companies like Axon hope to turn every law enforcement officer into a data-gathering drone for a bodycam surveillance database they privately control. Now ShotSpotter, a listening technology that triangulates gunfire in "urban, high-crime areas," announced a planned IPO. (more…)

Last night, the whistleblower Edward Snowden and appeard on stage at the New York Public Library's LIVE from the NYPL series, to discuss my novel Walkaway. (more…)

The SS7 vulnerability has long been understood and publicized: anyone who spends $1000 or so for a mobile data roaming license can use the SS7 protocol to tell your phone company that your phone just showed up on their network and hijack all the traffic destined for your phone, including those handy SMSes used to verify sketchy attempts to log into your bank account and steal all your money. (more…)

Trish Vickers of Dorset, England, decided to write a novel. Though blind, she preferred to work the old-fashioned way, with pen and paper, with her son dropping in weekly to type up the results. On one visit, though, she learned to her horror that her pen had ran out of ink fully 26 pages ago. But all was not lost!Not knowing what else to do, she and Simon called the police. To the Vickers’s surprise, officers at Dorset HQ volunteered to work during their breaks and free time, hoping to use their forensic tools to help. And, five months later, the police reported back with success: they recovered the never-written words. Vickers told a local newspaper that the pen she used to write the pages — even though there was no ink left in it — left behind a series of indentations: “I think they used a combination of various lights at different angles to see if they could get the impression made by my pen.”Vickers finished the book, Grannifer's Legacy, and died the day it was published. [via MeFi]

MapSCII turns vectors into text-mode maps using the Braille ASCII character set. You can check out examples at ASCII Cinema, which provides animated embeds comprising of actual text!Examples follow:(more…)

Ultrasonic beacons (previously, previously) let advertisers build an idea of when and where you use your devices: the sound plays in an ad on one device, and is heard by other devices. This way, they can associate two gadgets with a single user, precisely geolocate devices without aGPS, or even build graphs of real-world social networks. The threat was considered more academic than some, but more than 200 Android apps were found in the wild using the technique.In research sponsored by the German government [PDF], a team of researchers conducted extensive tests across the EU to better understand how widespread this practice is in the real world.Their results revealed Shopkick ultrasonic beacons at 4 of 35 stores in two European cities. The situation isn't that worrisome, as users have to open an app with the Shopkick SDK for the beacon to be picked up.In the real world, this isn't an issue, as store owners, advertisers, or product manufactures could incentivize users to open various apps as a way to get discounts.From the paper:While in April 2015 only six instances were known,we have been able to identify 39 further instances in a datasetof about 1,3 million applications in December 2015, and untilnow, a total of 234 samples containing SilverPush has beendiscovered. We conclude that even if the tracking through TVcontent is not actively used yet, the monitoring functionalityis already deployed in mobile applications and might becomea serious privacy threat in the near futureApparently it's not very effective—consumer speakers and mics aren't designed with ultrasonic use in mind and the authors say noise, audio compression and other factors "significantly affects the feasibility" of the technology—but the intent is clearly there on the part of advertisers and appmakers to make a stab at it. Annoyingly, there doesn't seem to be a list of the apps that are doing this, but there is a reference to a McDonalds app. If an app asks for access to your device's microphone, camera, etc., and you don't know why, delete the app.

Subject-28 presentes sketches, cels and animation tests from Katsuhiro Otomo's 1988 masterpiece, Akira. A huge and beautifully-presented selection. [via]

@mattatomic on Twitter not only had a brilliant idea, but executed it with such perfection I'm not sure I'll ever be able to eat carbs again without wondering at its moral and ethical placement.

My latest Locus Magazine column is Weaponized Narrative, about the pulp fiction convention of mashing up "man against nature" stories with "man against man" stories to tell "man against nature stories" (first the tornado smashes your house, then your neighbors come over to eat you). (more…)

Lasermad's Nixie Chessboards take 8-10 weeks to hand build, during which time each of the chess pieces is painstakingly built around a vintage nixie tube scavenged from the world's dwindling supply, and the board is prepared with the wireless induction coils that power the pieces when they're set on the board, lighting them up. (via Red Ferret) (more…)

A pizza dress and a taco gown by IMGUR-ian Avant Geek Art. (more…)

Behold, “The Nicolas Cage suit.” (more…)

Desiree Fairooz is a Code Pink activist who attended the confirmation hearing for former Senator Jefferson Sessions, in which he was approved as Attorney General for the USA; when Sessions' colleague Senator Richard Shelby claimed that Sessions' record of "treating all Americans equally under the law is clear and well documented," she burst out laughing and was arrested for disorderly conduct. (more…)

Oh Joy Sex Toy (previously), our favorite pervy webcomic, just announced their fourth annual kickstarter for a new collection of the best of their excellent, excellent, sex-positive comic. (more…)

Evan from Fight for the Future writes, "The Internet strikes back! Hundreds of people chipped in small amounts to crowdfund these billboards targeting U.S. lawmakers who voted to gut the FCC's Internet privacy rules and allow ISPs like Comcast and Verizon to collect and sell their customers' personal information and web browsing history without our consent. Check out photos of the billboards here. (more…)

William Gibson's next novel, Agency, comes out in January 2018; it's a near-future science fiction story set in the world of The Peripheral in which "a gifted 'app-whisperer' is hired by a mysterious San Francisco start-up and finds herself in contact with a unique and surprisingly combat-savvy AI." (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aiOzt57mfyAEric writes, "This is an analysis on the Chuck Jones short 'So Much for So Little' -- a documentary cartoon produced and paid for by the American government in 1949 that makes a stark case for public healthcare that everyone chips in a little for, in the interest of the greater good. This topic's always relevant, but with the recent monologue from Jimmy Kimmel, I think it's even more so this week." (more…)

Motorcyclists are 27x more likely to die and 5x more likely to be injured than folks in passenger cars. RideApart discusses the dangers of motorcycling in a mature and upfront fashion. (more…)

This weekend legendary centre of western civilization Eugene, Oregon once again plays host to the greatest spectacle in all of roller derby: THE BIG O!Teams usually come from all over the world to compete in Eugene's thunderdome of derby, however Orange Julius bullshit travel bans may have tempered that a bit. A quick glance shows there are still international teams on the roster.If you just happen to be in the greater Eugene metropolitan area this weekend, check out the Big O!

Pensacola, and the Internet's, Mark Gormley released this new recording in February! Since his first video took the internet by storm in 2006 folks anxiously await Mark's next gem.https://youtu.be/zEcGNj5nIgQ

Kent Tyler Smith made this lovely documentary covering artists Gus Harper and Gronk's collaborative painting.Gus and I are old friends, and it is no surprise to hear him describe his process, hobbies and life as fairly solitary. Over the years, however, I've seen Gus collaborate with a number of artists to create works that were more than what he could achieve alone. In the past this has involved other mediums like body painting or photography. Here Gus works with another amazing painter, they share the canvas. Gus and Gronk working together on the same images is wonderful to watch.

I bought this set of 4 little silicone bowls in 2015 and they still look new despite using them every day. I use them to sort vitamins and supplement powder and to hold chopped herbs and garlic. I started using another set for painting and gluing, because they are so easy to clean. The set is only $6.72 on Amazon.

Read Max Read's sharp précis of what happened to the internet over the last few years: the slow drifting of message-boards to the right as their inhabitants grew from sad kids to angry adults, then the sudden explosion of that pattern across social networks run by corporations with only an ambivalent interest in stopping it. This was the core value of message-board political consciousness: sovereignty, a concept similarly important to the politics of the far right. Posters and trolls wanted to reserve for themselves on the internet the power and freedom they couldn’t find off it. And as the online and offline spheres slowly merged over the course of the 2010s, that sovereignty expressed itself as an abject refusal to resocialize — the reservation of a sacred right to be cruel. The puckish left-libertarianism that had characterized the early message-board political activity of groups like Anonymous transformed into a revanchism, seemingly intended to protect “Kekistan” — the joking name, from the LOL-like word Kek, for the safe spaces of the frustrated men of the internet.This was the sensibility galvanized in 2014 by — what else? — a depressed and frustrated man’s rambling, 9,000-word post falsely accusing his game-developer ex-girlfriend Zoë Quinn of exchanging sex for video-game reviewsTim O'Brien's painting of Pepe is fantastic: a poisoned meme made creepily, grossly real.One of the interesting oddities about the Alt Right is a "geek fallacies" thing: loyalty to parasitic luminaries, even though they're crudely exploitative, too weird to be on television, and all seem to hate one another. As with Trump himself, the Nazi comparisons are (frankly) strained. But they're stuck on their proverbial Drexlers and Eckarts and you wonder not what comes next but who.

Here are five new lateral thinking puzzles to test your wits and stump your friends -- play along with us as we try to untangle some perplexing situations using yes-or-no questions.Show notesPlease support us on Patreon!

FOLLOW @RubenBolling on the Twitters and a Face Book.JOIN Tom the Dancing Bug's subscription club, the Proud & Mighty INNER HIVE, for exclusive early access to comics, extra comics, and other Stuff. GET Ruben Bolling’s new hit book series for kids, The EMU Club Adventures. (”A book for the curious and adventurous!” -Cory Doctorow) Book One here. Book Two here. More Tom the Dancing Bug comics on Boing Boing! (more…)

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@matttomic's Sandwich Alignment Chart isn't just an amusing and thought-provoking taxonomy of sandwiches (though it certainly is that!). (more…)

From the wonderful, refreshingly bullshit-free marketing guy Seth Godin (Seth Godin, a new online course on marketing, called (simply enough), "The Marketing Seminar." (more…)

FJ Anscome's classic, oft-cited 1973 paper "Graphs in Statistical Analysis" showed that very different datasets could produce "the same summary statistics (mean, standard deviation, and correlation) while producing vastly different plots" -- Anscome's point being that you can miss important differences if you just look at tables of data, and these leap out when you use graphs to represent the same data. (more…)

Tor Books -- my publisher, who are also DRM free and the largest English-language science fiction publisher in the world -- have announced a new project, Tor Labs, "a new imprint emphasizing experimental approaches to genre publishing, beginning with original dramatic podcasts." (more…)

I loved this too short-lived late 70s/early 80s New Adventures of Flash Gordon. The full first episode is here.