Boing Boing

The housing recovery has been famously uneven, in every way: for one thing, it's allowed hedge-fund and publicly listed landlords to acquire a greater proportion of America's housing stock than ever, even as mass foreclosures created a new class of desperate tenants who pay rent to these corporate giants, who charge higher rents than ever. (more…)

This week's Judge John Hodgman podcast is a live show recorded in Brooklyn, with guest music from the Pitch Blak Brass Band, whose music was so fantastically good that I immediately purchased their debut album, You See Us, and I am listening to it right now and loving it. (more…)

The start of a new year is a great time for reorganizing, and in this new video Elle Walker of What’s Up Moms offers five helpful tips for getting rid of counter clutter. As someone who just spent the day organizing her closets, I can personally attest to the therapeutic power of a good decluttering.

As Cassian Andor in Rogue One, Mexican actor Diego Luna decided to use his natural accent rather than adopt an American or British one. And that fact was particularly meaningful for one fan and her Mexican father. Tumblr user riveralwaysknew wrote a touching post about her father, which Luna himself shared on Twitter, noting, “I got emotional reading this!”https://twitter.com/diegoluna_/status/816479341588709377The post reads:I took my father to see Rogue One today. I’ve wanted to take him for a while. I wanted my Mexican father, with his thick Mexican accent, to experience what it was like to see a hero in a blockbuster film, speak the way he does. And although I wasn’t sure if it was going to resonate with him, I took him anyway. When Diego Luna’s character came on screen and started speaking, my dad nudged me and said, “he has a heavy accent.” I was like, “Yup.” When the film was over and we were walking to the car, he turns to me and says, “did you notice that he had an accent?” And I said, “Yeah dad, just like yours.” Then my dad asked me if the film had made a lot of money. I told him it was the second highest grossing film of 2016 despite it only being out for 18 days in 2016 (since new year just came around). He then asked me if people liked the film, I told him that it had a huge following online and great reviews. He then asked me why Diego Luna hadn’t changed his accent and I told him that Diego has openly talked about keeping his accent and how proud he is of it. And my dad was silent for a while and then he said, “And he was a main character.” And I said, “He was.” And my dad was so happy. As we drove home he started telling me about other Mexican actors that he thinks should be in movies in America. Representation matters.Riveralwaysknew also posted a follow-up video where she told her dad about Luna's response:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5e8GzAPdiS0[via The Huffington Post]

YouTuber 8booth runs a stunt channel where he's known for barely making jumps off cliffs and balconies into water. He almost killed himself over the summer with a cliff jump into Morro Bay. His luck ran out at a Laguna Beach motel. Videos below. (more…)

Designing for the web requires a mix of high-level planning, detailed mockups, and coding skills. Since such a variety of tools and skills are needed, knowing where to start can be overwhelming. This comprehensive Web Design bundle aims to demystify the process.Adobe Photoshop is a massive application with countless capabilities, this bundle starts off with a web-centric approach to using it. You'll then learn to craft elegant user interface elements and transform them into working prototypes with tools like JQuery UI and Bootstrap. You'll even study a range of design patterns employed by successful websites and mobile apps.Aside from learning the techniques of responsive design, this course bundle will prepare you for fast-paced commercial work by detailing rapid iteration methods and offering profitable freelance advice. For a limited time, pay what you want for this Learn to Web Design 2017 course bundle. Act now to lock in your low price for this brand new 2017 package worth over $1200.

Four parts hemp hurd, one part lime binder, and one part water is all you need to make hempcrete, a durable building material similar to pressboard or adobe. Just fill up the form with hempcrete, tamp it down, and once it's set, you're set! (more…)

My friend Kevin Mack (who did the Special Effects for Fight Club and many other movies) created a VR art experience called Blortasia for the HTC Vive. Here's a preview.​Fly freely through a surreal maze of evolving sculptures. Take a break from reality and explore an animated psychedelic sculpture park. Wander through the labyrinth, soar across the open space, or just hang out and let the mesmerizing ever-changing sculptures provide a rejuvenating refuge for your mind. Blortasia combines art and flying in virtual reality.

I posted this on Make: yesterday, but thought it was too good not to share here. A gamer named David Henning is in a gaming group and they exchanged gifts this past Christmas. Dave wanted to do something really special for his recipient, their new Dungeon Master, so he made him this amazing castle-themed DM screen. Not only does it act as a screen to hide the DM's dice rolls and campaign info, but it also includes a built-in dice tower, a lit dice display area, a place to mount quick reference material, a place to store non-playing characters (NPCs), and holders for pencils, erasers, and sharpeners.The screen was made almost entirely of foamboard (three 2' x 2' pieces) with all of the stonework made by drawing on the bricks and then using a foam cutter to burn in the mortar lines. The bricks were distressed with a ball of aluminum foil and a hobby knife. Popsicle sticks were used to create the wooden doors and hatches. The whole thing was primed black and then painted and drybrushed with lighter hues of gray up to white (with some green wash thrown in to add a hint of organic funk).More pics and information about the build can be found on Make:. I found out about Dave's project on the highly-recommend Facebook group, DM Scotty's Crafts N' Games (closed group, ask to join), a great place to find D&D-related terrain and accessory builds, miniature painting show n' tell, and gaming-related craft projects.

m0nster0 posted this 3mm-thick slice of a Seymchan pallasite meteorite to Reddit. He says its "one of my favorite bits of space rock." I can't argue with that! He bought it on eBay from this guy, who sells some stunning specimens.

What is a SaNDWiCH SLiCe? It's not cheese. Nor is it mere cheese food. It's not pasteurized process cheese food, either. Don't be misled into believing those who would tell you that it is imitation pasteurized process cheese food. Anyone who claims that it's simply flavored imitation pasteurized process cheese food is an outright liar. Because a true SaNDWiCH SLiCe is American flavored imitation pasteurized process cheese food. According to Wikipedia cheese food is "made from cheese (and sometimes other, unfermented, dairy by-product ingredients), plus emulsifiers, saturated vegetable oils, extra salt, food colorings, whey or sugar. As a result, many flavors, colors, and textures of processed cheese exist. Its invention is credited to Walter Gerber of Thun, Switzerland, in 1911."Curse you, Walter Gerber of Thun, Switzerland.https://youtu.be/U3jgo5ea_zc

Tomás Hijo makes linoleum block prints in a medieval style that is well-suited to Tolkein, Lovecraft and other fantasy writers' works. Check out his Nictonomicon bestiary project Kickstarter for more details. (more…)

Writer Lindy West is done with Twitter. From her essay in The Guardian:Twitter, for the past five years, has been a machine where I put in unpaid work and tension headaches come out. I write jokes there for free. I post political commentary for free. I answer questions for free. I teach feminism 101 for free. Off Twitter, these are all things by which I make my living – in fact, they comprise the totality of my income. But on Twitter, I do them pro bono and, in return, I am micromanaged in real time by strangers; neo-Nazis mine my personal life for vulnerabilities to exploit; and men enjoy unfettered, direct access to my brain so they can inform me, for the thousandth time, that they would gladly rape me if I weren’t so fat.Image: Faruk Ateş/Flickr

Jon Mooallem's beautiful profile of BJ Miller tells the tale of how Miller lost three of his limbs in a stupid accident and became a pioneer of palliative medicine: but for me, it's also a story of the very best of San Francisco's blend of technology, optimism, compassion and exuberant weirdness -- a blend that has been changing for the worse since the dotcom bubble of the turn of the century. (more…)

Historical novelist Debra Daley posts a master guide to the intoxicants of 18th century England, which ranged from modern favorites (laughing gas, cannabis) to historic classics (laudanum) to ratafia, "a sweet liqueur flavoured with peach or cherry kernels," which contained cyanogenic glycosides that broke down into fatal, insanity-causing hydrogen cyanide. (more…)

As part of her “I Didn’t Write This” series, filmmaker Yulin Kuang brings E. E. Cummings’ poem “maggie and milly and molly and may” to life. You can watch all of Kuang's "I Didn't Right This" literary adaptations right here.

Paul Schlemmer recently dug up some popular diagrams he made a while back to show how he lit some nice photos. He shares lots of tips and tricks, like how to use your phone's flashlight to give texture to the background. The drawing style is really fun, too. (more…)

Steve Mnuchin, Trump's pick for Secretary of Treasury, has a checkered past (he once foreclosed on a 90 year old customer who was $0.27 short on her mortgage payment) but a leaked memo from the California attorney general's Consumer Law Section reports that Mnuchin's leadership of Onewest Bank involved "widespread misconduct" in foreclosing on Californians, through which the bank was able to fraudulently confiscate their customers' homes. (more…)

When the fog rolls into Dubai, photographer Daniel Cheong races to the nearest skyscraper to capture some remarkable photos. Day or night, the effect is otherworldly. (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqSomhNuBAIAdam Harvey, creator of 2012's CV Dazzle project to systematically confound facial recognition software with makeup and hairstyles, presented his latest dazzle iteration, Hyperface, at the Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg last month. (more…)

Among the most-read articles of 2016 on McSweeney's Internet Tendency is this list by Susan Harlan, which includes many entries that will be more relevant than ever after January 20th.• Thanks For Behaving So Predictably Badly Face• A Smidge of Self-Awareness Would Not Go Amiss Face• Please Stop Touching My Knee Face (more…)

The Archemedian Turd is a "Decorational Defecation" offered either in gold plate or as matte or glazed poopy porcelain. The gold one is $350, the others an easily-passed $20.

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 oh, so much more. 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…)

In one simple comic, artist Gavin Aung Than celebrates the power of seeing yourself represented in art:[via Zen Pencils]

Is 2017 the year you're going to get organiz-ized? The first step is acknowledging the scope of the issue. A bunch of organizations (!) have helpful scales to determine how pronounced you or someone you know is getting with their clutter: (more…)

On-demand fresh coffee often requires an expensive trip to the cafe or staying tethered to a bulky drip machine. The GoJoe Self-Brewing Coffee Mug is a welcome alternative, and unlike an coffee mug I've seen.To make a cup, just fill the top half with ten ounces of water, add a filter-encapsulated coffee pod, and you can have a delicious cup of joe in moments. The battery contained in the lower section is removable, allowing you to enjoy your drink while the GoJoe charges for its next brew. Using this mug is incredibly straightforward. I just pressed the button once for light, and twice for a stronger kick. And the package also includes a month’s supply of Hey Joe’s eco-friendly coffee pods to help cut down on excessive plastic waste from single-serving cups. For a limited time, this GoJoe Self-Brewing Coffee Mug and Coffee Subscription is just $69.99, 43% off retail.

A couple of weeks ago I alerted you to the fact that the complete collection of Conan the Barbarian by Robert E. Howard was available as a free Kindle edition. You have probably read all 853-pages by now and are hungry for more stuff to read. Here you go: The Complete Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, weighing in at 1136 pages, is also available as a free Kindle edition. Happy reading!

Tofugu (where my wife Carla is exec editor) has a great article about the 20 best anime movies not made by Studio Ghibli (Totoro, Spirited Away).https://youtu.be/xGOneMdjpw419. REDLINEOften times, "anime" is defined by its lack of motion. Redline punches this "limited animation" concept in its motionless face. It's easily the busiest, most overstimulating animated film we've ever seen.A daredevil speedster named JP enters the Redline, a high-stakes, weaponized space race that nearly took his life. But first, he's gotta get back into racing shape to challenge the best in the universe with pure speed and guts. Along his comeback trail, JP meets Cherry-Boy Hunter, a young female competitor who unearths old memories. Can JP return to form in time for the Redline? Is Cherry-Boy Hunter friend or foe? Can JP survive the intergalactic conspiracy that saturates the race?Sure, Redline's plot plays like a giant stone soup of anime tropes: space, vehicles, aliens, and giant pompadours. Check, check, and check. The film took seven years and 100,000 hand drawings to create, all that hard work paid off. Down to its pop-art presentation, Redline is anime pulp fiction at its best. What it lacks in depth, it makes up for with an adrenaline-fueled circus of speed and action.

The beautiful Hot Topic dictation. Since the original tweet was deleted. pic.twitter.com/X2AoffeWdu— Ax Squared (@Axikor2) January 3, 2017"What do you know of the old ways?" It's a natural question to ask of a Hot Topic employee.Here's part two:@Axikor2 And part two. pic.twitter.com/WmemRQZJTS— Ax Squared (@Axikor2) January 3, 2017

A magnetic shark-repelling armband has failed to repel a shark. Zack Davis started surfing when he was a kid, and never had problems with sharks in that time. But he’s now recovering from a shark bite, after getting bitten for the first time while wearing his new shark repelling armband which he got for Christmas.Now his mum wants a refund, after she asked him to wear the green band, which has magnetic technology that supposedly repels sharks.The product, Sharkbanz, is claimed to cause an "intense" "unpleasant sensation" in sharks a meter from the swimmer, "becoming exponentially greater each inch closer." Once they enter the magnetic field," the Sharkbanz website promises, "they are quickly deterred."They claim to have tested the bands on many species of shark, but unfortunately there's been some kind of mixup and the "research" page at the underlying tech company, Shark Defense, links to product concepts instead of peer-reviewed papers.Some horrid cynics on the internet say it's a scam. In any case, they charge $100 — a one hundred American dollars — for a magnet in a rubber band.Jaws 2017By Peter BenchleyPART 1 Chapter 1The great fish moved silently through the night water, propelled by short sweeps of its crescent tail. The mouth was open just enough to permit a rush of water over the gills. The eyes were sightless in the black, other senses transmitting nothing extraordinary to the small, primitive brain. The woman backed up a few steps, then ran at the water. At first her strides were long and graceful, but then a small wave crashed into her knees. She flung herself over the next waist-high wave, pushed the hair out of her eyes, and continued walking until the water covered her shoulders. There she began to swim - with the jerky, head-above-water stroke of the untutored.A hundred yards offshore, the fish sensed a change in the sea's rhythm. The sweeps of its tail quickened, thrusting the giant body forward with a speed that agitated the tiny phosphorescent animals in the water, casting a mantle of sparks over the fish.It hurtled past a dozen feet to the side and six feet below the surface. The woman felt only a wave of pressure that seemed to lift her up in the water and ease her down again. She stopped swimming and for the first time felt fear, though she did not know why.The fish smelled her now, and the vibrations - erratic and sharp - signaled distress. Its dorsal fin broke water, and its tail, thrashing back and forth, cut the glassy surface with a hiss. A series of tremors shook its body.Adrenaline shot through her trunk and her limbs, generating a tingling heat and urging her to swim faster. She was fifty yards from shore. She could see the line of white foam where the waves broke on the beach. She saw the lights in the house.The fish was about forty feet from the woman, off to the side, when it turned suddenly to the left, dropped entirely below the surface, and, with two quick thrusts of its tail, was upon her.A meter from her, however, the fish felt an intense unpleasant sensation, becoming exponentially greater with each inch. So it turned away and disappeared into the deep.She had been saved by her Sharkbanz™ magnetic shark repelling band. She lived happily ever after.The fish was hungry for a bit. Then it ate a seal and lived happily ever after.THE END

Dave Allen was an Irish comedian popular in the UK from the 1960s until his death in 2005. His reputation is as a cantankerous irreligious fellow, but this family-friendly moment is widely held to be his best sketch. Someone on YouTube thinks it's the best British TV comedy sketch of the 1970s. There's some pretty stiff competition on that front, if you ask me. (Mastermind, from The Two Ronnies, is the best British comedy sketch of the 1980s. Dead Parrot was 1969.)

I'm still not sure about this whole whispery Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response thing, but it's nice to see Robert Blake still getting work.

Illustrator Hal Hefner created this great double homage to Charles Schulz and Stephen King. It does seem as if he missed an opportunity to put Marci in a denim jumper and holding a sledgehammer, though. (more…)

James Brown, his bad self, performs one of the best-known songs of the civil rights movement. Brown delivered his message in clear, bold words and beats. While the Godfather of Soul passed away a little over 10 years ago, on Christmas day 2006, I believe his music is always playing somewhere, and not a day goes by without someone dancing to it.

I placed this 33-foot string of LED lights along the brick path leading to our front door. The light from the LEDs is pleasantly warm and does a good job of illuminating the path without hurting your eyes at night. The whole string burns just 5w so when I forget to turn it off, it's not a big deal. It's just $10 on Amazon with free prime shipping.

Adam "Ape Lad" Koford writes, "Last Wednesday night as I was falling asleep, an idea came to me. The next morning I drew it and posted it online, not thinking much else of it. Then it started to go viral, and now it's on a shirt. Of all the drawings I've posted online over the past ten+ years, I guess I'm the autoexec.bat guy now."

The DIY Feminist Guide to Cybersecurity, available in Spanish and English, is designed to be a quickstart for "gendered, racialized, queerphobic, transphobic, ableist, and classist" threats to digital autonomy, created because "companies and developers frequently ignore or underestimate the digital threats to these spaces and their users."

As someone who's struggled with his weight all his life (and who comes from a family with similar problems), I've long been fascinated with the science of weight and obesity; many years ago I listened to a Quirks & Quarks segment detailing the theory that the modern obesity epidemic was the result of a bird flu that affected our gut flora and changed our metabolisms to make us hungrier and more susceptible to convert the food we ate to fat. (more…)

In 1818, Jacques Auguste Simon Collin de Plancy published his Dictionnaire Infernal, but it wasn't until Henry Plon's sixth printing in 1863 that the book got its now-infamous illustrations, which are a world of wonderful. (more…)

A newly discovered collection of notes written by Nixon aide HR Haldeman reveals that during Nixon's 68 presidential campaign, he illegally conspired to convince the South Vietnamese president, Nguyen Van Thieu, to scuttle the peace talks run by Nixon's political rival, Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey. (more…)

Two employees at the East Lake County Library created a fictional patron called Chuck Finley -- entering fake driver's license and address details into the library system -- and then used the account to check out 2,361 books over nine months in 2016, in order to trick the system into believing that the books they loved were being circulated to the library's patrons, thus rescuing the books from automated purges of low-popularity titles. (more…)

Checkmate, atheists! The king of the Internet has found religion.Zuckerberg, whose Facebook profile once identified him as an atheist, revealed his change of heart on his social media network after he wished everyone on Dec. 25 a “Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah” from “Priscilla, Max, Beast and me,” referring to his wife, daughter and dog. When a commenter asked him, “Aren’t you an atheist?” he responded: “No. I was raised Jewish and then I went through a period where I questioned things, but now I believe religion is very important.”Zuckerberg aside, Silicon Valley's values will evolve in the immediate future. Monospace-L libertarianism is nothing if not adaptable to circumstances.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Whatcouldgowrong/comments/5ll87c/cutting_a_watermelon_with_a_sword_wcgw/?st=ixgcfoxu&sh=c5ce2d64The right tools for the right job![via]

Peter Wohlleben is a German forrester who has revolutionized his field by developing community forest management that does not require pesticides or heavy machinery, and recruits local communities as stakeholders in forestry preservation; but the thing that made him known around the world is his 2016 book The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate—Discoveries from a Secret World, which presents evidence for unprecedented (and even spooky) degrees of cooperation among trees in a forest. (more…)

Kali Akuno, an organizer with Cooperation Jackson and the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement talks to Alternet about the first stirrings of the mass-scale civil disobedience we must practice to resist trumpism. (more…)

This is apparently a Chinese pirated edition of Star Wars: Episode III, but dubbed using the English subtitles offered on that disc. It's amazing, not least because the voice actors are so good I thought for a moment it might have been a TV segment with Ewan, Hayden, Samuel and co. [via]OBI WANThe front is a lemon avenue flying straightlyMore:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAoOOqOKLW8Here's clips from Episode II:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJYoIMsAbgwThe English subtitles on Chinese Star Wars discs are already legendary as the supposed source of the Do Not Want meme; the scene thusly subtitled is easy to guess.

After N2SUB posted a thoughtful, negative review of Ham Radio Deluxe, the company responded to his open trouble ticket with instructions that tricked him into bricking his software, in the guise of fixing his problem, then told him they'd done it on purpose, and wouldn't let him use their software anymore unless he deleted his review, and threatened to sue him. (more…)

Though he's lived there since 1994, German-born photographer Michael Wolf has only been documenting Hong Kong since 2003. This interview looks at two of his more notable projects: his shots of massive residential high-rises, and the back alleys of the city. Some of the high-rise shots are below: (more…)