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I'd never heard of this genre referred to as 'LitRPG', but Awaken Online: Catharsis is a fantastic trip into MMORPG land!Things are always clear in a MMORPG, right? Kill the bats and rats to get a bigger sword, so you can kill bigger rats and bats and get an even better weapon! Up until now moral choices have been simple, good or bad? Welcome to Awaken Online, where moral ambiguity seems to be the thing! Join Jason (great name) as he tries to figure out if the ends really do justify the means, and that maybe, just maybe, he's the bad guy here. I really enjoyed this first novel by Travis Bagwell. It is free via Kindle Unlimited.Awaken Online: Catharsis by Travis Bagwell via Amazon

Forty five years after Richard Nixon launched the war on drugs as a way to persecute black people, little has changed, according to a new ACLU/Human Rights Watch report.The ACLU/Human Rights Watch report shows that arrests for drug possession continue to make up a significant chunk of modern-day police work."Around the country, police make more arrests for drug possession than for any other crime," the report finds, citing FBI data. "More than one of every nine arrests by state law enforcement is for drug possession, amounting to more than 1.25 million arrests each year."In fact, police make more arrests for marijuana possession alone than for all violent crimes combined.The report finds that the laws are enforced unequally, too. Over their lifetimes, black and white Americans use illicit drugs at similar rates, according to federal data. But black adults were more than two-and-a-half times as likely to be arrested for drug possession.

iamlindoro says: "I built a site that builds you custom budgets for 600 cities around the world based on your lifestyle, family, housing, and other needs."

Behold the Tunda Cyat, one of the many delights from P5YCKONOMIXXX. NSFW.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkiXbUCs1yAhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsdHRg0gDcM

Joi Ito (previously) -- director of MIT Media Lab, former Creative Commons chief, investor, entrepreneur, and happy mutant -- interviewed Barack Obama for a special, Obama-edited issue of Wired. (more…)

The Justice League collection from Hero Within works subtle DC hero insignia (Batman, Superman, Flash, Green Lantern, Hal Jordan) into hoodies, blazers, and pea coats. Costs range from $150-$250; coats ship in December. (more…)

The Women’s Reserve Camouflage Corps were a group of 40 woman artists from NYC and Philadelphia ("in perfect physical condition") who devised camouflage systems for fighters and materiel during WWI, testing their theories by hiding in Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx -- where the local cops grew accustomed to having seeming rocks and trees spring to life as they passed. (more…)

Explosive growth and change in China means many things must be built. They are not built well, writes British ex-pat James Palmer.The apartment is five years old. By Chinese standards, it’s far better than the average. Our toilet works, while in many of my friends’ houses, flushing the loo is a hydraulic operation akin to controlling the Nile floods. The sockets do not flash blue sparks when plugged in, and all but two work. None of the lightbulbs have ever exploded; and the mirror merely broke away, rather than falling spontaneously from the frame. The shower is not placed next to the apartment’s central wiring and protected by nothing more than rotting drywall.It's so brutal—"My time in China has taught me the pleasure and value of craftsmanship, simply because it’s so rare"—I can't help but wonder if it's really that bad! The word Chabuduo is offered as the cultural gravity point at hand. Meaning "close enough," it is depicted here as a powerful and useful concept in earlier times (think: improvisation, effectiveness, ingenuity) that has become dangerous in the context of modern life (think: slapdash, jobsworth, irritable.)Yet chabuduo is also the casual dismissal of problems. Oh, your door doesn’t fit the frame? Chabuduo, you’ll get used to kicking it open. We sent you a shirt two sizes too big? Chabuduo, what are you complaining about?At my old compound, the entrance to the underground parking lot was covered by a 20-metre-long half-cylinder of heavy blue plastic. Nobody had noticed that this made a highly effective wind trap, and it had been only crudely nailed to the brick foundations. Chabuduo, what’s it going to matter? When a storm hit, the nails burst from the pressure and it was sent hurtling across the compound, smashing stone tables and trees; I came down in the morning to find it lying across the grass like a fallen jumbo jet’s wing.If you're wondering where the Chinese precision craftsmanship goes, well, chances are you're looking at it right now.Photo: Three Gorges Dam by Le Grand Portage (CC-BY-2.0)

Modal VR, the new stealth startup co-founded by Atari and Chuck E. Cheese creator, has opened the doors a crack. According to Bushnell, their portable VR system is built for business applications (even though the demo video shows, you guessed it, a game). “We want to help enterprises solve problems by looking at them from another point of view," Bushnell said. “For those of us who grew up on “Star Trek,” the holodeck has always been the gold standard," he said. “Modal VR is the first time that I believe we actually have the holodeck.”"Nolan Bushnell’s Modal VR launches next-generation virtual reality platform for enterprises" (VentureBeat)"Nolan Bushnell Says His New Virtual Reality Startup Has the Keys to the Holodeck—and it’s Portable" (IEEE Spectrum)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5gzOQ2x-4c

The Chemical Weapons Convention has a giant loophole in that it allows for the stockpiling and use of chemical agents in law-enforcement; with the Eighth Review Conference of the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC) coming up next month, there's an urgent question about whether "neuroweapons" (chemical agents intended to pacify or disperse people) will become tools of law-enforcement and "defensive warfare." (more…)

In a brand new series for the Webby Awards where I'm editor-at-large, I commissioned the talented comic artist Andy Warner to illustrate the wild history of the Web, from inspiring eureka moments to crackpot ideas that changed the world to fantastic failures.The first comic in the series is: "Twitter's First Chirps"!And for more of Andy's work, I highly recommend his absolutely wonderful book just out this week, Brief Histories of Everyday Objects, the illustrated stories behind life’s most common and underappreciated items.

Mark Rittman is a "BI, DW & Big Data specialist, Oracle ACE Director" who dabbles in home automation and smart appliances: he spent 11 hilarious hours locked in an epic struggle with a wifi-equipped smart kettle, trying to get it to heat water for a cup of tea, livetweeting the battle. (more…)

Observer writer Dana Schwartz (the person behind the account) nails the voice of a generation:https://twitter.com/GuyInYourMFA/status/774326049513570304https://twitter.com/GuyInYourMFA/status/663751991231979520https://twitter.com/GuyInYourMFA/status/664926366282833920https://twitter.com/GuyInYourMFA/status/670676131377455104https://twitter.com/GuyInYourMFA/status/682385693398708225https://twitter.com/GuyInYourMFA/status/698591489534914560https://twitter.com/GuyInYourMFA/status/729089528296812545https://twitter.com/GuyInYourMFA/status/735474996659781632https://twitter.com/GuyInYourMFA/status/738814721462259713https://twitter.com/GuyInYourMFA/status/745794891616260096https://twitter.com/GuyInYourMFA/status/747589437937287168https://twitter.com/GuyInYourMFA/status/620880017564794880https://twitter.com/GuyInYourMFA/status/587769733409329152

The Hagströmer Medico-Historical Library is a treasury of the past, in particular its online Wunderkammer, where glorious high-resolution scans of old artwork and book illustrations pile up insufficiently explored. [via]

The cat’s out of the bag: Cats are great. Bonus: Kittens are also great for stress relief.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35T8wtmTbVg

According to Culture N Lifestyle, French designers Maxime Derrouch, Typhaine Le Goff, and Emeline Marty created this installation for the Architectures Vives Festival. It joins together modern and ancient styles while linking art with architecture. The mirror on the floor acts like a pool and adds more dimension to the space.You can find a full set of photos on Culture N Lifestyle.

Rule 34 strikes again, this time in the form of a childhood memory that was apparently titillating to some: accidentally turning into a swollen blueberry. (more…)

After being missing for seven days, whistleblower Chelsea Manning has made contact. Her prison warders threw her into solitary for a week and didn't tell her lawyers or friends where she was. (more…)

They're $10 for 12 at Urban Medium, whose awesome designs I've been tracking since 2004.

From Vic Berger at SuperDeluxe, a psychedelically weird edit of the already horrifyingly bizarre second presidential debate in St. Louis last Sunday, with Donald Trump stalking Hillary Clinton around the stage. (more…)

Under Section 1201 of the DMCA, a law passed in 1998, people who fix things can be sued (and even jailed!) for violating copyright law, if fixing stuff involves bypassing some kind of copyright lock; this has incentivized manufacturers so that fixing your stuff means breaking this law, allowing them to decide who gets to fix your stuff and how much you have to pay to have it fixed. (more…)

IMGUrian Colo1 shared this wonderful series of images documenting a cardboard dinosaur creation. (more…)

Esquire has rebooted the greatly missed SPY magazine from the the 1980s. It exists as a web site and will run new pieces during the 30 days running up to the election.SPY co-founder Kurt Andersen wrote:As Trump became the Republicans' presumptive nominee, lots more people, pretty much every day, said to me, "SPY really needs to be rebooted, if only just for the election."I guess maybe they're right, so I'm very pleased that Esquire has decided to produce an online pop-up SPY during the last thirty days of the presidential campaign. It has my whole-hearted best wishes. And it's also a nice serendipity that this October will mark the magazine's thirtieth anniversary. It's as if SPY, a retired superhero, is making a brief but necessary comeback.

It's hard to know who to feel less sorry for - a Silicon Valley company with a portfolio of quackery and deceit or the San Francisco hedge fund that was bamboozled into investing $96.1 million in it? On Monday, Partner Fund Management LP filed a lawsuit against Theranos in an attempt to get its money back. A letter to its investors said, "Through a series of lies, material misstatements, and omissions, the defendants engaged in securities fraud and other violations by fraudulently inducing PFM to invest and maintain its investment in the company.” From the Wall Street Journal:The suit is the first sign of trouble from investors who poured about $800 million into the company, and then remained silent as it navigated a challenging year that began when the Journal first reported on shortcomings in its operations and technology last October.[Founder Elizabeth] Holmes had said Theranos could accurately perform dozens of tests using a few drops of blood, a premise that drove the firm to a valuation of $9 billion in a 2014 fundraising round. The Journal’s investigation showed it used its flagship technology for a small number of tests, relied on devices made by conventional manufacturers and released questionable test results to patients.Since then, Theranos has voided tens of thousands of test results, faces federal civil and criminal investigations, and is appealing a regulator’s revocation of its blood-testing license at a California lab.Good luck getting your money back, PFM. And good luck with your pivot, Theranos.

Did you catch the delightful duet after Sunday's debate?"

The Wall Street Journal reports that Samsung is to withdraw the Galaxy Note 7 cellphone for good. Subject to recurring reports of fires, even after replacement, the dodgy smartphone's burned through users' pockets to threaten the Korean brand itself.The New York Times describes it as a "a humbling about-face."The demise of the Galaxy Note 7 is a major setback for Samsung, the world’s largest maker of smartphones. The premium device — with a 5.7-inch screen, curved contours and comparatively high price — won praise from consumers and reviewers, and was the company’s most ambitious effort yet to take on Apple for the high-end market.But Samsung has struggled to address reports that the Galaxy Note 7 could overheat and catch fire because of a manufacturing flaw. Last month, the company said it would recall 2.5 million phones to fix the problem. But in recent days, Galaxy Note 7 users emerged with reports that some devices that had supposedly been repaired were overheating, smoking and even bursting into flames. And on Monday, Samsung asked Note 7 customers to power off the phones while it worked on the problem.Previously: Southwest plane evacuated after Samsung Note 7 catches fire. It was a recall replacement.

A week after the revelations that Yahoo illegally allowed American spies to access all Yahoo users' email (possibly via a dangerous rootkit), and two weeks after admitting that 500,000,000 Yahoo Mail users' passwords were leaked years previously, possibly to a "state actor," the company has disabled email forwarding for Yahoo Mail users. (more…)

In this video, a man plays Abba's 1976 classic Money Money Money using one of the new £5 notes issued in the UK. They're made of plastic.The new polymer five pound notes have a rather curious ability of being just about able to play vinyl records (with the aid of a contact microphone and small amplifier not shown on screen). As the corners on these new banknotes are more durable and sharper than its paper counterpart it acts like a very crude record needle. Like a lady barbarian's armor in a computer game, the new fiver doesn't crumple easily or get wet or tear, but still folds, and has a see-through window. "I do quite like them," says a Briton on the street.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChqhM9C44fMhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srQSzhkh8Uo

America paid about $16 billion to five companies last year for 80% of our contracted domestic and international surveillance: Leidos Holdings, CSRA Inc., SAIC, CACI International, and Booz Allen Hamilton, recently in the news following an employee arrest on cyberweapons theft charges.Tim Shorrock at The Nation did the legwork to to come up with the numbers.“The problem with just five companies providing the lion’s share of contractors is that the client, the U.S. government, won’t have much alternative when a company screws up,” says David Isenberg, the author of Shadow Force: Private Security Contractors in Iraq. [...] “There comes a point when the marketplace is so concentrated that the service provider simply becomes too big to fail, no matter how lousy their performance,” says Isenberg, who closely monitors the privatization of national-security work. “If that makes you think of the financial-services industry, well, that’s exactly what I’m talking about.” • 5 Corporations Now Dominate Our Privatized Intelligence Industry (The Nation)Image: Thomas Tolkein

Jeb Lund writes about Trump's Vile Game of Distraction, running the wargames for what happens to his party now that he has destroyed its "beautiful dream of a permanent Christian ethnocentric oligarchy."The twitter-consensus is that there's some kind of divide between principled conservatives and the Trumpkins who want to pick up his supporters after he's gone. Ah, but:Ordinarily, a rich and powerful man amplifying the anguish of powerless women who claimed to have been raped by another extremely powerful man would be a noble gesture. Out of context and devoid of sound, it would have been a silent, stunning reminder that Bill Clinton would be nearly unthinkable as a Democratic candidate today. ... except, this time, it was done to distract from the very real possibility that the Republican Party nominee for President of the United States is a sex offender. That, and only that, was enough to arrest the endless forward movement of a party happy to glide on racism, religious discrimination, misogyny and xenophobia – profitably and seemingly forever.Here's Paul Krugman, writing that Trump and the GOP are Predators in Arms, that it's naive to think Republicans care about sexual assault on any level other than its consequences for the horse race.As many people are pointing out, Republicans now trying to distance themselves from Donald Trump need to explain why The Tape was a breaking point, when so many previous incidents weren’t. ...Of course, we know the answer: The latest scandal upset Republicans, when previous scandals didn’t, because the candidate’s campaign was already in free fall. You can even see it in the numbers: The probability of a House Republican jumping off the Trump train is strongly related to the Obama share of a district’s vote in 2012. That is, Republicans in competitive districts are outraged by Mr. Trump’s behavior; those in safe seats seem oddly indifferent.He adds: Trump "isn’t so much an anomaly as he is a pure distillation of his party’s modern essence."

Writing for New Republic, cultural critic Angelica Jade Bastién explains: I have been reading comics obsessively since I was about ten years old. I can probably quote from John Ostrander’s original Suicide Squad run in my sleep, I’ve watched all of the Star Trek series more times than I can count, and I often whip out Klingon when I’m nervous. But I’ve found that the love and knowledge I have on these subjects never seems to be good enough for the people who grow furious at a black woman writing about these properties. White male fans often don’t want to face how their beloved properties often have troubling racial and gender politics. (Just peruse the comments on my review of X-Men: Apocalypse for RogerEbert.com: “The author feels like the X-Men series in general has failed its female characters—ignoring the fact that Mystique is elevated to a leadership and relevance level well above the source material.” Many didn’t want to face a critique coming from a woman, and a fan, who knows them better than they do.) You can only delete emails and block people on Twitter for so long until you feel burnt out. The reason why we don’t see more black women writing about these subjects with such visibility isn’t because we haven’t been interested in them, it’s that publications rarely give us the opportunity, and when we do write, we often find ourselves facing personal scrutiny that has little to do with the actual writing. At times, I’ve been left to wonder, why do I love these stories so much when they rarely care about people who look like me?You can read the full piece on New Republic.

Written by and starring Jen Richards and Laura Zak, Her Story blows the lid of the stereotypical trans story. According to the show’s website:Trans women in the media have long been punchlines, killers, indications of urban grit, pathetic tragedies, and dangerous sirens. Rarely have they been complex characters who laugh, struggle, and grow, who share strength in sisterhood, who seek and find love. Her Story depicts the unique, complicated, and very human women we see in queer communities, and explores how these women navigate the intersections of label identity and love.And not only is Her Story a big win for representation, it's also funny, thoughtful, and romantic. You can find the full six-episode series on YouTube.

Photographer Matt Van der Velde traveled the U.S. to document his upcoming book Abandoned Asylums. Most of the locations featured are still in fairly pristine states because entry is restricted by the private or governmental owners of the properties. (more…)

Maria Yablonina developed a system for wall-climbing robots to weave fibers into useful structures on vertical surfaces, like this hammock-like web that can support a human. The bots can even trade the threaded bobbin between units. (more…)

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…)

Today our friends Death Cab For Cutie released a new anti-Trump song, titled "Million Dollar Loan," and video directed by Simian Design. The song is the first in DCfC manager Jordan Kurland and author Dave Eggers's 30 Days, 30 Songs series featuring a single song from a different artist each day until the election. Later this week, look for tunes by Aimee Mann, Thao Nguyen, Bhi Bhiman, and REM. Here's what DCfC singer Ben Gibbard says about "Million Dollar Loan:"Lyrically, ‘Million Dollar Loan’ deals with a particularly tone deaf moment in Donald Trump's ascent to the Republican nomination. While campaigning in New Hampshire last year, he attempted to cast himself as a self-made man by claiming he built his fortune with just a ‘small loan of a million dollars’ from his father. Not only has this statement been proven to be wildly untrue, he was so flippant about it. It truly disgusted me. Donald Trump has repeatedly demonstrated that he is unworthy of the honor and responsibility of being President of the United States of America, and in no way, shape or form represents what this country truly stands for. He is beneath us.

Vertigo has tapped Cecil Castellucci (previously) and Marley Zarcone to reboot Shade, a Steve Ditko character last rebooted as a weird 1990s comic book about a transdimensional alien shape-shifter poet who used a "madness vest" in his quest to stem the tide of insanity leaking from Earth into his dimension; in Castellucci's capable hands, the new Shade is a fugitive who steals the madness vest in her escape to Earth and finds herself in the body of a Megan Boyer, a comatose mean girl who was about to have the plug pulled on her. (more…)

The amazing illustrator Drew Friedman created this art based on the back cover of John Lennon's 1971 Imagine album for the latest issue of MAD. Parody lyrics by Stan Sinberg.

Unblinking Eye, EFF's giant, deep research report (available in Spanish, English and Portuguese) on the state of surveillance law in latinamerica, reveals an alarming patchwork of overbroad powers given to police forces and government agencies. (more…)

I love the well-made "Primitive Technology" videos. In this one, the guy (I don't know his name but he live in Australia) makes a few spears and a spear thrower, using only materials he finds in the wild. He even starts a fire without matches to harden the spear points. After, we get to see him do target practice. From his FAQ:Q.Why don't you talk in the videos? A.When I watch how to videos I fast forward past the talking part to see the action part. So I leave it out of my videos in favor of pure demonstration.

Samata Ullah from Cardiff faces six terrorism charges, including "preparation of terrorism..."by researching an encryption programme, developing an encrypted version of his blog site, and publishing the instructions around the use of [the] programme on his blog site." (more…)

RBS, the bank that UK taxpayers bailed out during the financial crisis, after its reckless speculation drove it to bankruptcy, ran a fake "restructuring unit" that was pitched to business customers as a way of helping them weather the market turmoil, but was actually a loan-sharking operation that cranked up interest rates and imposed high penalties, deliberately driving healthy businesses into bankruptcy so that the bank could snap up their assets (illegally sharing information between business units so that RBS always beat the other bidders) and then selling them off to keep the bank profitable. (more…)

A slow motion camera captures the squishy, rubbery transformation of a golf ball hitting a steel plate at 150mph.[via]

Stephanie Pokorny freehand crocheted this out-of-this-world E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial costume for her son Jack, age 2! The project took her four days. "He is free handed and made with no pattern," she said. "I literally just tried it on him as I created and stopped when it fit right!""Grab a Phone, ET needs to call home! New “HumanGurumi!”" (Crochetverse)

You're looking at Dorothy Studio's beautiful map of the history of alternative music, available as a poster from their website. (more…)

Ventusky depicts gorgeous animated maps showing where the wind blows—and how fast it's blowing. Pictured above is Hurricane Matthew making landfall on Friday. (more…)

"Haha look at this goat!!!" writes nevadamountains. "He is funny, and the dog doesn't care!!!" [via]