Boing Boing

2600: The Hacker Quarterly -- a venerable and storied source of hacker mischief and wonder -- has publicly offered a bounty of $10,000 (payable in "dollars, bitcoin... or rubles") for the first look at Donald Trump's tax return. (more…)

In 2009, we covered a "one time only 'Road Warrior Weekend' campout" -- now, seven years later, it's an annual event called Wasteland, and it's better than ever. (more…)

My favorite Francis Bacon painting, Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pepe The Frog, has taken on new meaning what with all the memes lately.When asked why he was compelled to revisit the subject so often, Bacon replied that he had nothing against Pepe, that he merely sought "an excuse to use these colours, and you can't give ordinary skin that green colour without getting into a sort of false fauve manner".

Wang Jianlin made billions speculating on Chinese real-estate; now that he's diversified into buying Hollywood movie studios and chains of movie theaters, the richest man in China is prepared to say what many have known: the Chinese property market is a huge, deadly bubble that's ripe to burst. (more…)

By Jessica Leigh Clark-Bojin (aka @ThePieous)The tables have turned, now here’s your chance to “dig in like an Alabama tick” when you serve up this Pie-redator apple-strawberry pie at your next movie marathon night. (more…)

Nerdist found this wonderful fan-edit mashing up scenes from Stranger Things in a style of the opening credits from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. (more…)

The always-engaging George Pendle (Strange Angel, The Remarkable Millard Fillmore) has a fascinating piece on Atlas Obscura on the history of space art and NASA's (and the government's at large) current awkward relationship with the art world.Yet when the NASA scientists asked the attendant artists to refrain from posting pictures of the meeting on social media, it seemed to sum up both a generational and a temperamental mismatch. (In an email, a NASA spokesperson said that "participating artists are free to discuss their attendance.")From a NASA perspective, the secrecy was a budgetary imperative. In 2003, the renowned performance artist Laurie Anderson was appointed NASA’s first “artist-in-residence” with the remit of creating art about the agency’s exploration of space. Republican congressmen quickly seized on the move as a sign of wanton profligacy. “Mr. Chairman,” sputtered Representative Chris Chocola of Indiana on the floor of Congress, “nowhere in NASA's mission does it say anything about advancing fine arts or hiring a performance artist.” There has been no artist-in-residence since and the reverberations were no doubt part of the reason why NASA’s workshop at Grace Farms seemed tentative and vague. In the not-so-distant past, though, space and art intermingled happily. Artists were crucial to NASA’s development, at times outpacing the science of space travel itself. What happened?The above illustration is NASA concept art of a moon landing, from 1959.

A paper published this summer looked into over 100 times humpbacks were observed disrupting orcas who are hunting, like these humpbacks trying to save a gray whale and calf. But why do they do it? (more…)

At this week's London Design Festival, design firm Uniform displayed Solo Radio. Stand in front of the device and it scans your face for input into software that assesses your emotions. Then it plays a song via Spotify algorithms with the appropriate mood. (more…)

Amos Yee, a 17-year-old blogger in Singapore, is to spend six weeks in jail for "wounding religious feelings." It is his second such jail term: he spent a month in jail last year for criticizing Christianity.The teenager's latest trial was closely watched by rights groups, who argue that the case threatens freedom of expression.Phil Robertson of Human Rights Watch said Singapore now needs to review its approach in dealing with cases like Yee's, who is likely to benefit from the publicity."Every time the authorities go after him, it just adds to his online audience," said Mr Robertson in an email.Here's his blog, written in English. It's mostly teenage edgelording about religion and politics, but the boy's evidently got prospects—and adapting to the international audience his government has given him!https://twitter.com/amosyee/status/776031479713280000https://twitter.com/amosyee/status/765855631509041153https://twitter.com/amosyee/status/779098845875572736https://twitter.com/amosyee/status/779008556599169024

So, that huge hack of 500 million Yahoo user accounts last week that Yahoo blamed on a "state-sponsored actor"? A private internet security firm is calling bullshit on the "state-sponsored" part. (more…)

Alfred Okwera Olango, who was black, was fatally shot by police in El Cajon, California on Tuesday. Police in the San Diego suburb city say the 38 year old Ugandan immigrant pointed a vape pen or e-cigarette device at them, before police shot the man to death.Officers were responding to a call of a man behaving erratically, and walking in traffic. Olango's friends and supporters say court records show that he suffered from mental illness, and may have been experiencing a seizure before his death. An El Cajon police officer is believed to have shot Olango within as little as one or two minutes after arriving at the scene. (more…)

A friend in France sent me an email one day and wrote, "You have to watch this Japanese movie 'Ring.' It's very special." Since he likes horror films as much as I do, his words carried weight. But in 1998 it wasn't easy to find a copy, and I had to nose around a bit before finally locating a DVD on amazon.co.uk. As you can see from the photo above, it's one creepy-ass film. There's a moment at the end which, if watched in blissful ignorance of what's going to happen, and in a dark room, the hair on the back of your neck will stand up. If for some reason you haven't seen the movie, then watch it without reading anything about it in advance. Like all good horror in the past few decades, it was recently turned into a parody where Sadako (the creepy lady with pale skin and long black hair in Ring ) eventually faces off against the Kayako (the creepy lady with pale skin and long black hair from another excellent Japanese horror film, Ju-on [The Grudge]) and her son, who is seen below.The new film is supposedly funny (in a good way), though I haven't see it yet, so who knows. I guess it's the Japanese version of Freddie vs. Jason, which sucked. Or Alien vs. Predator, which sucked even more. (Frankenstin Meets The Wolfman still remains good fun.) But those films weren't supposedly to be intentionally funny. Shall we next see Michael Myers as a stand-up comedian?But if you're into that sort of thing, then this self-referential Japanese TV commercial has Sadako doing battle with a Snickers candy bar! I prefer Milky Way Dark, but if Sadako insists I eat a Snickers bar, who am I to say no?https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KgUUBFJgQcVia Rocket News

This segment from The Last Word explains the most painful things Donald Trump said, and why we can not elect him our President. (more…)

Both of my daughters like to sketch, and so do I. One of our favorite things to do is sit around the dining room table and spend the afternoon drawing. The sketchpad I typically use is the 9 in. x 12 in. Strathmore Series 400. A pad of 100 sheets costs $9 on Amazon. I use a variety of pencils and brush pens, but I really like the Black Prismacolor colored pencil (PC935), which is what illustrator Mark Crilley uses to "ink" his pencil drawings. It produces a dark black line that stays put when you erase the pencil marks around it.Here are a few of our sketches:

Two students and a teacher were injured in a shooting today at Townville Elementary School in Anderson County, South Carolina. A teenager identified as the shooting suspect is now in police custody.“A bad man came to our school today,” 4-year-old Townville student Amber Jolly told a television news reporter. (more…)

See sample pages from this book at Wink.Craft for the Soul: How to Get the Most Out of Your Creative Life by Pip Lincolne (author) Penguin Books Australia2016, 216 pages, 6 x 9 x 0.9 inches (hardcover)$28 Buy a copy on AmazonWhen it comes to dishing out all there is to know about living a creative life, Pip Lincolne is certainly your go-to woman. She’s the author of several creative titles and the talent behind popular blog Meet Me at Mike’s. She is also the founder of multiple inspiring projects, including worldwide craft group Brown Owls and the eMag series The Good Stuff Guide.For some, stumbling upon Pip Lincolne’s book, Craft for the Soul, might seem a bit like discovering a rare gem. Sure, there are plenty of books about creativity, as well as numerous books filled with cute craft projects, but Lincolne has seamlessly blended the two to produce a book that is bursting with all things creative. Nestled among her down-to-earth advice about morning rituals, keeping active for creativity’s sake, and how to constantly generate ideas (among plenty of other topics), you’ll also find her favorite delicious recipes, along with adorable illustrations, inspiring quotes, and crafty DIY projects. The author stresses that each and every one of us are capable of filling our day-to-day lives with more creativity, happiness, and fun. And for those of you thinking you don’t have a creative bone in your bodies – the pang of inspiration you feel every time you turn a page will certainly have you thinking otherwise! – Melanie Doncas

I spent the summer and fall of 1984 in London (living in this council flat in Elephant and Castle), and I loved hanging out at a park near the Battersea Power Station. Built in the 1930s, the coal-fired power station in South London had ceased operations a year earlier, and I was spellbound by the combination of its almost incomprehensible massiveness, utter stillness, and the emptiness around it.I haven't seen new photos of it for many years, and I was surprised to discover that a lot of commercial development has taken place next to it. Encroached upon by other large buildings, it no longer has mysterious grandeur. It looks like it has been caged and subdued. I hate it.From The Standard:[Apple] will move 1,400 staff from eight sites around the capital into what it calls “a new Apple campus” at the Grade II* listed former electricity generator.Its employees will occupy all six floors of office space in the brick “cathedral of power,” which is being painstakingly restored after 33 years standing derelict on the banks of the Thames. [caption id="attachment_485146" align="alignnone" width="800"] Image: Battersea in 2008 Wikipedia[/caption]

In the world of orange cheese there remains an outlier: Stadium Nacho Cheese. A lonely, rarely discussed and often maligned member of the bright and cheery circus colored cheese family! Nacho cheese is so disparaged it is often doubted that Nacho is even a cheese.Do not make this simple mistake! While the USDA has no official designation for cheese type Nacho, they do not officially deny its existence either. Frank Liberto, the Father of Nachos, is credited mass producing nacho cheese and making it widely available to the masses. Via First We Feast:While most popular tales of nacho lore jump straight from Piedras Negras to Howard Cosell’s mouth (the man, after all, put the snack on the map during a 1978 Monday Night Football Game at Cowboy’s Stadium), Smith details the key entrepreneurial exploits of Frank Liberto and his Ricos cheese sauce.Key points:Concession stand nachos were introduced in 1976 at a Texas Rangers game. That year, Arlington Stadium sold $800,000 worth of Ricos’ nachos.Each can of Ricos contain 107 ounces of cheese concoction, with 32 ounces of water and 20 ounces of pepper juice used to form the molten sauce we recognize at the concession stand pump.Since 1976, the Ricos style of nachos have become a sporting staple. And, taking into consideration the second key point, the profitability of the product is impossible to argue with, especially considering that the spiciness of the jalapeno was employed to boost drink sales as well as add flavor. Liberto’s innovation made nachos fast—Frank didn’t want customers to wait for more than a minute—and famous. Cosell may have propelled the word nacho into national consciousness, but it was Liberto’s business acumen that made chips and cheese a phenomenon. In the 1970s, Disney animators created trailers feature the characters of Nacho, Rico, and Pepe, helping propel Liberto’s empire beyond the ball park and into movie concessions.KNEEL BEFORE NACHO!

In this time-lapse video from Harvard Medical School, you can watch “bacteria [Escherichia coli] develop resistance to increasingly higher doses of antibiotics in a matter of days.”[via]

A teen boy has been arrested in Saudi Arabia for “unethical behaviour,” after he did a cute internet video chat with an American YouTube starlet. (more…)

After a customer in Canada complained about the Tapping Creeper, Home Depot removed the Halloween prop from its shelves.From Fortune:Breanne Hunt-Wells, who is a mother of two, told CBC that she feels the decoration downplays voyeurism, which can often lead to sexual assault or rape. She also said that she ”failed to see the humor in it.”“It makes light of a very serious crime,” she said. “Voyeurism is a crime in Canada.”It's still available in Home Depots in the US and online.

This dad has mad Dad Skills. (more…)

https://youtu.be/HFZFcyM4QvgLocksmith scammers are in every city. They advertise on Google, promising to unlock your house or car for $29 or so. (more…)

After last week's revelation of a record-smashing breach at Yahoo (which the company covered up for years), security researcher Matt Blaze tweeted: "Sorry, but if you have a Yahoo account, you will need to find a new mother, and have grown up on a different street." Ha, ha, only serious. (more…)

Vancouver-based engineer-turned-"entrepreneur" Valeriy Shershnyov published thousands of titles in the Kindle store, "books" of typo-riddled nonsense that he upranked with a system of bots that gamed Amazon's fraud-detection systems, allowing him to sell more than $3M worth of garbage to unsuspecting Amazon customers. (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 even 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…)

Rest in peace.

Over at National Geographic, Nadia Drake's feature on Elon Musk's plan for millions of people to live on Mars is the best explanation (and contextualization) of this far out vision that I've read. From Nat Geo:The rocket would deliver the crew capsule to orbit around Earth, then the booster would steer itself toward a soft landing back at the launch pad, a feat that SpaceX rocket boosters have been doing for almost a year now. Next, the booster would pick up a fuel tanker and carry that into orbit, where it would fuel the spaceship for its journey to Mars.Once en route, that spaceship would deploy solar panels to harvest energy from the sun and conserve valuable propellant for what promises to be an exciting landing on the Red Planet.As Musk envisions it, fleets of these crew-carrying capsules will remain in Earth orbit until a favorable planetary alignment brings the two planets close together—something that happens every 26 months. “We’d ultimately have upward of a thousand or more spaceships waiting in orbit. And so the Mars colonial fleet would depart en masse,” Musk says.The key to his plan is reusing the various spaceships as much as possible. “I just don’t think there’s any way to have a self-sustaining Mars base without reusability. I think this is really fundamental,” Musk says. “If wooden sailing ships in the old days were not reusable, I don’t think the United States would exist.”"Elon Musk: A Million Humans Could Live on Mars By the 2060s" by Nadia Drake (National Geographic)

In the early 1990s, former professional wrestler and police officer Michael Stivers launched a career as a hypnotist, but with the unusual specialty of "breast enlargement hypnotism."According to his pitch, "The larger-breast style of self-hypnosis relaxes the subject, then allows her to will an increased blood flow into the fatty tissues of the breast, much like that during menstruation or pregnancy. Daily conditioning through self-hypnosis allows what amounts to a permanent enhancement."As George Constanza once said, "It's not a lie if you believe it."It may comes as a surprise then that according to an article from the Des Moines Register posted by Weird Universe, not all of Stivers' customers were satisfied."A 58-year-old Tampa woman who wouldn't give her name said her bust measurement grew 3 inches through hypnosis in April, but then shrank 1 ½ inches," reads the article.

Wiggle wiggle.[via IMGUR]

The question of what to do with Battersea Power Station, a disused yet oddly beautiful pile of bricks in London, long occupied the city's planners. The latest developers have scored a coup that sounds a lot like the final answer: it's going to be Apple's London headquarters.Countless schemes came and went for the massive structure, whose four towers belched coal smoke until 1983 and graced the legendary cover of Pink Floyd's Animals. But it was only in the last few years that plans came together for a modern, mixed-use combination of homes, shops and businesses. Apple will be the single largest tenant, London's Evening Standard reports, taking the top 6 floors inside the old boiler house.Apple’s main European HQ will remain at Cork, Ireland, where it employs 4,000 people, but the Battersea site will be one of its biggest in the world outside America. The Californian giant, the world’s most valuable company, will be the largest single tenant in the 42-acre complex of homes, offices, shops and leisure facilities....Apple is leasing 500,000 sq ft in total, making it one of the biggest single office deals signed in London outside the City and Docklands in the past 20 years.It is expected all the firm’s “central function” staff in London in areas such as finance and human resources will move to the power station. Apple has 2,530 staff in total in the capital, including about 1,100 working in its stores. It has taken enough space for 3,000 employees, giving it room to hire more as its operation grows in London. The designers of the office space have not yet been appointed.

This summer, BB pal Adam Savage of MythBusters and Tested modified a pick-up truck into a mobile movie theater!

Wells Fargo's Board of Directors have finally exercised their right to claw back part of the hundreds of millions of dollars taken home by two senior executives who were compensated on the basis of the fraudulent earnings the bank took in while opening 2,000,000 secret accounts in their customers' names, taking money out of those customers' real accounts to pay for the fees and penalties accrued by the fake accounts, and trashing their customers' credit in the process. (more…)

Yesterday, Google announced "Youtube Go," an "offline first" version of the popular video service designed for the Indian market where internet coverage is intermittent, provided by monopolistic carriers that have a history of network discrimination, and where people have a wide variety of devices, including very low-powered ones. (more…)

We all know that expiration dates on food are as mostly worse than useless. Whether any given stuff is still tasty, though, can be found at the aptly-named stilltasty.com.How long will your favorite food or beverage stay safe and tasty? What's the best way to store it? Get the answers for thousands of items!Some interesting listicles, all somewhat lacking in sourcing: 9 Foods That Last Forever; Yes, Spices Go Bad; and 7 Vegetables That Last A Long Time.Wine is good for 6 months after you open it if you freeze it into ice cubes. For more on frozen wine trickery, read Singly Scruptious's article about it.

Clips of this are going viral as genuine security footage, but it's really a short film by Rasheed Parakkal about how technology helps us find redemption. (more…)

Once just a "gross but versatile" cartoon frog, Pepe slid the rage-greased chute of chan culture into the toilet of offensive memes and popped up on the other side in the Anti-Defamation League's archives. There, he takes his place beside the swastika and the Confederate flag. (more…)

If you have ever swallowed 20 golf balls, a pound of orange peels, or a pound and a half of chicken nuggets, then worried your habits might overwhelm your toilet, you might need this workhorse. (more…)

Since hydrofoil surfing was introduced, Kai Lenny has been experimenting with boards and techniques to the point that he can go out in the open ocean and glide across swells for miles without having to compete for waves. (more…)

Mike Campau recreated Generation Gap, a CGI series of some of the most iconic items from 1980s childhoods, each one lit with gorgeous multi-hued gradients. (more…)

As with each and every episode of his genius 'Sassy Trump' voicedub series, actor-director-comedienne Peter Serafinowicz is using 100% actual Donald Trump's own words here. He's just voicing them differently. More authentically, perhaps.

Bad Little Children's Books by "Arthur C. Gackley" darkly reimagines innocent kids' books from the mid 20th century.

My friend John Edgar Park made this cool MIDI controller in a pizza box with a conductive ink surface.

In 1924 a curious network of catacombs was discovered in Washington D.C. They were traced to Harrison Dyar, a Smithsonian entomologist who had been industriously digging tunnels in the city for almost two decades. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll describe Dyar's strange hobby -- and the equally bizarre affairs in his personal life.We'll also revisit balloons in World War II and puzzle over a thief's change of heart.Show notesPlease support us on Patreon!

Chemist George Zaidan makes homemade toothpaste using the same ingredients in commercial toothpaste. It includes abrasives, humectants, sweeteners, flavors, foaming agents, thickeners and binders, sodium fluoride, and a few other things. He uses chalk, xylitol, peppermint oil, and glycerine.

A very special edition of of an ongoing series by weird chart-maker Scott Bateman; link to today's edition.

When four named whistleblowers came forward to reveal that they'd been illegally fired from Wells Fargo for reporting that the company was experiencing widespread fraud, it was deja vu all over again: Wells also punished whistleblowers who sounded the alarm during the subprime crisis, and was thus so totally compromised that they needed a $36B taxpayer bailout. (more…)

The Rider Institute has launched an Indiegogo campaign to develop DRACOS, which are broad-spectrum antivirals. If it doesn't work, Dr. Todd Rider (Ph.D. from MIT) could enjoy a great career as a charmingly nerdy YouTube star.Currently there are relatively few prophylactics or therapeutics for viruses, and most that do exist are highly virus- or even strain-specific or have undesirable side effects or other disadvantages. We have developed a radically new, broad-spectrum antiviral therapeutic/prophylactic that has the potential to revolutionize the treatment of viral infections.Our Double-stranded RNA Activated Caspase Oligomerizer (DRACO) approach selectively induces apoptosis (cell suicide) in cells containing viral double-stranded RNA (dsRNA). DRACO should recognize virus-infected cells and rapidly kill those cells without harming uninfected cells, thereby terminating the viral infection while minimizing the impact on the host.He is asking for $100,000 to fund his research.