This week on the podcast, Boars, Gore, and Swords takes a break from the A Song of Ice and Fire book club to watch the first episode of Netflix's Spielbergian horror sci-fi series Stranger Things. In this installment of What You Should Be Watching, Ivan and Red discuss the shows's many references, what constitutes a solid creeping monster jump scare, and ill-fated emotional attachments to burly diner cooks.To catch up on previous television seasons, the A Song of Ice And Fire books, and other TV and movies, check out the BGaS archive. You can find them on Twitter @boarsgoreswords, like their Facebook fanpage, and email them. If you want access to extra episodes and content, you can donate to the Patreon.

When you want to enjoy a good smoke, the last thing you want to do is spend time rolling up a fat one. We know your pain, and that's why we're crazy about the Twisty Glass Blunt.This is a top-of-the-line glass pipe that holds 1.5 grams of our favorite herb, and lights like a regular cigar. Paper rollups? So yesterday. When we want to get to business, we simply take off the cap and insert our herb into the blunt.[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mmsUpKGRWA[/embed]The glass material lets us see how much we've inserted, and the pipe boasts infiniti-cherry technology that helps it stay hot. Cleanup is easy, too: just turn the internal corkscrew to empty out any ashes.Best of all, we love that the Twisty Glass is both ultra-portable and sleek. It rocks some seriously German-engineered glass that's a solid 2mm thick, and measures 5mm long. And if you want, you can use the blunt with any regular 14mm water pipe.We'll be blunt (pun intended--sorry, not sorry). Want to light up in style? Get the Twisty Glass. Normally retailing for $49.99, this premium glass blunt is now just $34.99.

When a woman who'd been arrested for failing to complete a diversion course stemming from a shoplifting charge was brought before Louisville, KY judge Amber Wolf with no pants on, the judge was horrified to learn that the arrestee had been held in custody for three days without a shower, without access to feminine hygiene products, and without pants. (more…)

I love Randall "xkcd" Munroe's latest book, Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words. The list price is $24.95 and it is on sale today for $10.93 on Amazon. I don't know how long this deal will last, but it's a bargain for this hardcover edition.

Around 3,000 sex offenders on parole are now banned from playing Pokémon Go in New York. In fact, they aren't allowed to play any "internet enabled gaming activities." According to a statement by New York governor Andrew Cuomo issued today:“Protecting New York’s children is priority number one and, as technology evolves, we must ensure these advances don't become new avenues for dangerous predators to prey on new victims," Governor Cuomo said. "These actions will provide safeguards for the players of these augmented reality games and help take one more tool away from those seeking to do harm to our children."The focus on Pokémon Go is due to the fact that players – many of them kids – are encouraged to walk along urban streets, sometimes near residential addresses of sex offenders. The governor sent a letter to Pokémon Go's developer Niantic to ask for their cooperation "to provide the most up-to-date information of offenders within the Sex Offender Registry."

When Times-Union Editor Frank Denton sued the Jacksonville Police and Fire Pension Fund over breaking the law by meeting secretly to negotiate pension benefits, the fund and the city blew nearly half a million dollars fighting the case before finally losing. (more…)

See sample pages from this book at Wink.How to Talk to Girls at Parties by Neiman Gaiman (author), Gabriel Bá (illustrator), and Fábio Moon (illustrator)Dark Horse Books2016, 64 pages, 6.9 x 10.5 x 0.4 inches $12 Buy a copy on AmazonHow to Talk to Girls at Parties is an adaptation of the Neil Gaiman short story of the same name, originally published in his collection Fragile Things. As adaptations go, this one tells the story pretty exactly as it was done by Gaiman. Two teens named Enn and Vic go to a party with the intention of picking up girls. Vic is handsome and confident, while Enn is shy and awkward. Enn doesn’t know how to talk to girls, and this becomes the central problem of the story. His attempts to seem cool and desirable are both humorous and relatable to anybody who has ever tried talking to a potential love interest. As the night moves on, it becomes clear that something is amiss at this party, but exactly what is unknown to Enn, and a little ambiguous to the reader.I really like this book. At first glance it might seem like an odd choice for a comic – the story doesn’t reach the heights of some of Gaiman’s other work, for example. But it’s short and sweet and so unique. The story is Gaiman at his best in terms of information release and character moments. You’re never completely ahead of the plot and it is so easy to sympathize with Enn’s awkwardness. The charm of the original story was Gaiman’s ability to play with a young man’s feeling that girls were practically another species, and that aspect thrives in this version. In terms of visual storytelling and artistic prowess, Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá are absolute masters, and I cannot recommend their work here enough. They have an incredible ability to draw worlds that look like reality, but maybe just a few degrees more fantastic. What perfect partners for Gaiman’s work. How to Talk to Girls at Parties gets my highest recommendation, both for fans of Gaiman and/or Moon & Bá as well as fans of unique sci-fi. It’s a short book you can breeze through pretty quickly, and then immediately restart to find more hints of what’s really going on. A film adaptation directed by John Cameron Mitchell (Rabbit Hole) is set to debut in 2017, so at the very least this interesting comic will prepare you for the film.– Alex Strine

Tokyo-based Masayoshi Matsumoto takes "balloon animals" out of backyard parties and into the colorful arena that falls between highbrow craft and art. The 27-year-old balloon-artist, who studied at Tokyo Institute of Technology, uses the same techniques that party clowns use – bending, twisting and tucking balloons into animals and other fun shapes – but he uses dozens at a time and ends up with stunning rubber sculptures that would easily fit in any pop-art gallery (or pop-up gallery because of their perishable nature). Check out his extensive photo gallery on his Facebook page.

We've featured David Dutton's 8-Bit Cinema many times over the past 8 years, but this astounding showreel demonstrates that his canon is wider, deeper and cooler that you might realize. (more…)

British funnyman Peter Serafinowicz (Shaun of the Dead, Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace) loves to tease Trump by redubbing Trump's exact words with funny voices. This time, Serafinowicz applies his talents to a clip from Sunday's George Stephanopoulos interview, in which Trump struggles to explain why he does not have a relationship with Putin even though Trump has claimed on record at least three times that he has a relationship with the Russian dictator.

Card Caddy is a cool invention: a $6 snap-lock case that holds your card-game cards securely in your bag, but unsnaps and reconnects to form its own discard pile; a hole in the case lets you tell at a glance which game you have in it. (more…)

If Trump was a smart terrible person, says Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo, his response to Khizr Khan's speech at the DNC would have been, "I grieve for the Khans' loss and I very much respect their opinion and their courage. But I believe the policy I have outlined is necessary for our national security for the following reasons ..." But he chose to say nasty things about the parents of a dead soldier, proving yet again he is a dumb terrible person.When Khizr Khan and his wife Ghazala appeared at the Democratic convention they attacked and shamed Trump. He no doubt experienced it that way and the chorus of approbation the Khans received from virtually every part of the political spectrum deepened his sense of humiliation and loss of status and standing. As I've noted in so many contexts, the need to assert dominance is at the root of all of Trump's actions. His whole way of understanding the world is one made up of dominators and the dominated. There's no infinite grey middle ground, where most of us live the vast majority of our human relationships. That's why even those who are conspicuously loyal are routinely humiliated in public. In that schema, Trump simply had no choice but to lash out, to rebalance the equation of dominance in his favor. It's an impulse that goes beyond reason or any deliberation. That's what left so many would-be or maybe allies flabbergasted at how or why he would have walked straight into such a buzzsaw of outrage.For a narcissist like Trump, the rage and emotional disequilibrium of being dominated, humiliated is simply too much to bear. He must lash out. What he said in one of his tweets responding to the Khans is perhaps the most telling. "I was viciously attacked by Mr. Khan at the Democratic Convention. Am I not allowed to respond?" The use of the adverb "viciously" is a good tell that Trump is a narcissist. But setting that aside, most people would know that the answer is "No, you're not." Certainly you're not allowed to respond in the sense of attacking back. Their son died serving the country. You don't get to attack them. Someone with a moral consciousness who is capable to empathy would understand this through a moral prism. A smart terrible person would understand it as a matter of pragmatism. Smart terrible people spend time to understand human behavior, even if the moral dimension of it is invisible to them or a matter of indifference. Just as importantly, they have impulse control.

Twitter's openness is its strength, and also its weakness: the ease with which new accounts can be created makes it into an amazing tool for free expression, and also a perfect venue for vicious harassment (see also); but Instagram (a division of Facebook, the home of the walled garden) has announced a suite of anti-harassment tools that seem like they'd be compatible with Twitter, raising the obvious question: why hasn't Twitter already deployed them? (more…)

Logos from Hell is death metal illustrator/designer Mark Riddick's massive compendium of heavy metal band logos that he's gathered from across the globe. These are the sigils printed on foreboding LP jackets, scratched into school desks, scribbled onto notebooks, and inked into hesher arms the world over. From Wired:As metal evolved into myriad subgenres, each more extreme than the last, wordmarks and branding evolved in step. “Logos just tend to get more and more extreme and as you branch out,” says Riddick. It’s reached the point that you can almost determine the style of music from the typography. Indeed, there might be no better example of typography’s multi-sensorial nature than extreme metal logos. Thrash metal bands like Metallica, Slayer, and Overkill adopted logos with straight, sharp edges to reflect the tight and controlled nature of the music. Death metal bands—which tend to focus on subjects like violence, religion, horror, and, yes, death—tend to incorporate those themes into logos that feature things like dripping blood, organs, severed limbs and skulls. The logos associated with black metal, which has its roots in deeply anti-Christian views, the occult and paganism, often are ornate, symmetrical, and derived from art nouveau’s swirling, rounded forms.

Two dogs left in a car in the Fort Wayne, W. Va., Walmart subsequently crashed it into the supermarket. WSAZ reports that a witness thought someone was messing with her "until she noticed the face of the driver was a dog's."She says a second dog was in the passenger seat, and after the wreck that dog somehow managed to roll the window down. The store paged the owner of the car, who turned out to be a woman the witness described as looking to be in her late 70s. The car owner said she left the car running while she went into the store so the dogs could stay cool, and the dog had managed the get the car out of park.

A fellow freaks out after a bear comes into his house. Crouching on the landing, he turns on his camera and waits for death, or, perhaps, to be informed how not to do vertical video. "It's coming up the stairs!" (more…)

Now that public schools across the country have opened their doors to after-school evangelical religious programming, the Satanic Temple thinks it's only fair to establish an "After School Satan Club" in elementary schools across the country to give children a choice.From The Salt Lake Tribune:Good News Clubs, which are sponsored by an organization founded in 1937 called the Child Evangelism Fellowship (CEF), aim to reach children as young as 5 with a fundamentalist form of evangelical Christianity. For most of their history, Good News Clubs were largely excluded from public schools out of concern that their presence would violate the Constitution.In 2001, in a case that commanded the resources of powerful legal advocacy groups on the religious right, including the Alliance Defending Freedom and the Liberty Counsel, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that to exclude an after-school program on account of the religious views of its sponsors amounted to a violation of free-speech rights. The CEF then went on a tear, and by 2011, it reported 3,560 Good News Clubs, putting them in more than 5 percent of the nation's public elementary schools.The Satanic Temple makes no secret of its desire to use that same approach."We would like to thank the Liberty Counsel specifically for opening the doors to the After School Satan Clubs through their dedication to religious liberty," [Satanic Temple co-founder] Lucien Greaves explained to the gathering of chapter heads in Salem. "So, 'the Satanic Temple leverages religious freedom laws that put after-school clubs in elementary schools nationwide.' That's going to be the message."Should schools allow the establishment of an "After School Satan Club," the Satanic Temple will not preach religions, Greaves told the paper. "While the Good News Clubs focus on indoctrination, instilling children with a fear of hell and God's wrath, After School Satan Clubs will focus on free inquiry and rationalism. We prefer to give children an appreciation of the natural wonders surrounding them, not a fear of an everlasting other-worldly horror."

People talk about Trump and totalitarianism in such a facile way. They don't know how close we came to the brink.

Our guest on the Cool Tools Show this week is Hugh Howey. Hugh is the New York Times bestselling author of WOOL, SAND, BEACON 23, and over a dozen other novels. He lives on a catamaran he custom built in South Africa and is now sailing around the world.Subscribe to the Cool Tools Show on iTunes | RSS | Transcript | Download MP3 | See all the Cool Tools Show posts on a single pageShow notes:Kindle Voyage E-reader ($199)"It is the perfect reading device. … It weighs almost nothing, it's comfortable in your hand, and I can fit an entire library. The only ding that people have said about the device is its price. I read a lot of classics. When I look at all the free books on gutenberg.org the device has paid for itself already several times over. … The Voyage uses the same screen as the Paperwhite. The body is just slimmer and there's physical page turn buttons now and my favorite thing actually about the interface is that there's a very wide side so that you can hold it with the kind of fat part of your thumb, the way you would hold a book without covering the screen or accidentally turning pages. …I have the same sort of emotional attachment to my e-readers as we've always had towards books because I think what I've found is that I imprinted on books by reading and enjoying them, and now I'm doing that with my e-reader device. The people who say, 'Well I'll never feel the same way about it,' well that's because you haven't read enough books yet to have that imprinting take place, but once you do you'll love the smell of plastic in your hand."Oceanic OCi Wrist Dive Computer ($1,175-$1,300)"[My Oceanic OCI] is a magical piece of technology. The original dive watches used to be enormous. They're about as big as the dive computers you carried on your scuba gear, but this ... is a very normal size watch. You can wear it every day for telling time, but when you go out for a swim — I'm doing a lot of free diving now — it keeps track of how deep you go and how long each dive is. You get basically a log of your entire swim, like every single time you surface it resets and logs that as a separate dive, so I know if I'm staying down for a minute, if I went down to 60 feet, like all these nice metrics which motivate me to work on my freediving even more. … The great thing about this watch is it's wireless and when I put on my scuba gear it communicates with my tank and it'll tell me how much air I have left."Hario Ceramic Coffee Mill ($26)"Something I love is my coffee mill. I could easily have a little plugin electric coffee mill but on my first sailboat I had very little power and I got as many hand powered things as I possibly could, including my drill was a hand-powered drill, which was a lot of fun, and this Hario ceramic coffee mill gives you a perfect grind. It's less than $30 for this thing and one of the things I really like about it is it's quite a bit of work. It might not seem like a selling point but ... I get more of a boost to my morning to making my coffee than I get from the coffee itself, and there's also a meditative quality about it. You really feel — between that and the French press and the whole coffee making process — it just fits with the boat lifestyle more than getting up to a coffee machine and pressing a button or getting in line at Starbucks."Magic Bullet Blender ($40)“This something else that I use every single day and I see these everywhere now. They've become very popular. … If you have all the right ingredients it makes for a wonderful replacement meal, very healthy. I started using it on land and it became indispensable. I actually traveled with my Magic Bullet Blender and I do a smoothie every day for lunch now. It's one and a half bananas, some peanut butter, yogurt, blueberry, strawberry, and protein mix, and then some camu camu and chia seeds. This all sounds like a lot of stuff but I have one little cabinet that has all my smoothie accoutrement in it. I pull it all out, that's what I had for lunch, just a couple hours ago, and it's so quick and easy and you're not hungry until dinner time. This blender, it's wonderful, it's very small and compact but it's powerful enough to crush ice. You drink right out of the thing that you blend in so you don't have a lot of extra cleanup and the blade has held up to 6 months of abuse so far. It comes with all kinds of blades and containers. You don't need a lot of it so you can really kind of figure out what you need and recycle the rest, but it’s a beautiful blender. I love it."

Everyone behaves badly in this one—snotty youngsters v. violent veterans—but that older guy throwing punches and threatening a pregnant woman should be in jail. Come for the Pokemon rage, stay for the expert demolition of a portable gazebo.A story at the Winona Daily News appears to concern the same park; it looks like there's a concerted effort afoot to ban more or less any unapproved "gatherings" there, and it's all about the Pokemon Go phenomenon.The ordinance would cover a wide array of activities, not all related to increased traffic from Pokémon players, and some which is already prohibited. ... recent crowds that suddenly began gathering at all hours earlier this month when the game was released include prohibitions on hammocks and tents, sleeping and sunbathing, recreational activities and games (electronic or not), having pets in the area and playing music.Why would you bother asking the Pokemon company not to use that location as a gym when it's so much easier to pass sweeping teen-menace legislation?

At 238 feet and 3 inches, Adam Winrich's manila rope whip is reportedly the world's longest. Adam's YouTube channel is packed with amazing whippings; below he dual-weild fire whips.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIEVegBfCB0

John Scalzi makes a very good case that the DNC's major message is that "this year is not about Democrat versus Republican, or conservative versus liberal, it’s about normal versus highly fucking abnormal" -- but Corey Robin persuasively argues that abnormality has been normal for a long time in the GOP: "the rational, prudential conservatives [Democrats] think they know [in the GOP] are in fact ultra-revanchist songstresses of domination and violence." (more…)

The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals has invalidated parts of North Carolina's voter suppression laws, ruling that the requirement to show photo ID was enacted "with racially discriminatory intent." (more…)

In an op-ed for the Guardian today, I shared the primal and personal experience I felt as a woman watching another woman make history, as Hillary Rodham Clinton accepted the Democratic Party's nomination for President of the United States. (more…)

Consumer Reports Labs tested Glow, a very popular menstrual cycle/fertility-tracking app, and found that the app's designers had made a number of fundamental errors in the security and privacy design of the app, which would make it easy for stalkers or griefers to take over the app, change users' passwords, spy on them, steal their identities, and access extremely intimate data about the millions of women and their partners who use the app. (more…)

En stackars hemlös kille som man kan tro försöker göra rätt för sig. Han säljer tidningar istället för att tjuva!! När vi avböjer att köpa hans tidningar passar han på att stjäla min kompis mobiltelefon!! Väldigt skickligt av honom då han smyger ner sina tidningar över mobilen och får sedan med sig den med lätthet!! Osis för denna kille att han råkade sno av två poliser👮🏻👮🏻!! Mitt första ingripande iklädd bikini under mina 11 år som polis!! Ganska kul och trivsamt måste jag säga 😂😂! Se upp för ficktjuvar, håll koll på era värdesaker!! A photo posted by mikaelakellner (@mikaelakellner) on Jul 27, 2016 at 7:18am PDTIt's not the clothes that make the cop. Swedish police officer Mikaela Kellner was sunbathing in Stockholm with friends, including another off-duty female cop, when a homeless man approached them selling newspapers. According to Aol.News:As the man lingered, Kellner grew suspicious. Her suspicions were confirmed just as he started to walk away when her friend noticed her cell phone was missing.The bikini-clad cop then ran 15 meters, tackled the man and held him down until fellow on-duty officers were arrived to make the arrest.Kellner says that in her 11 years of being a cop, it's the first time she's made an arrest while wearing a bikini, but says she'd go further than that. She would have arrested the thief even if she'd been naked.

Amy Sloper writes, "This is a really timely (while still feeling dated) voting PSA about the importance of tellin' the world your opinion by voting." (more…)

Boing Boing pal Jody Radzik designed this incredible infographic of marijuana strains for Berkeley, California's Patient’s Care Collective who claim to be "the longest continuously operating medical marijuana dispensary on the planet." Click the images to expand (your mind)!"The chart basically expands upon the traditional sativa-indica-hybrid classification scheme in a way that helps folks to make sense of the bewildering array of choices in marijuana medicine available at the PCC, as well as just about any other dispensary in the state," Jody explains.Far fucking out.

See sample pages from this book at Wink.In 1958 and '59, an unprecedented study was conducted by the Institute of Personality Assessment and Research at the University of California, Berkeley. The idea was to apply the latest psychological tests on the world’s most famous and accomplished architects to try and determine what makes them so creative and successful. In studying them, could some magical key to creativity be discovered? Astoundingly, some 40 major architects volunteered, including Eero Saarinen, I.M. Pei, Philip Johnson, George Nelson, Louis Kahn, and A. Quincy Jones. The group spent three days being subjected to a battery of tests, sitting for interviews, even evaluating the creative and design prowess of each other. While the idea was to publish the results of the tests at the time, besides some news and fluff pieces about the study, and some superficial conclusions about the nature of the creative impulse that drove these design superstars, the full results of the study have remained unpublished until this impressive new release from Monacelli Press.The Creative Architect: Inside the Great Midcentury Personality Study is a lovely and thought-provoking time-capsule of a book. Through its numerous black and white photos and reprints of the research materials, correspondences between the subjects of the study and the psychologists, and news clippings of the day, the book paints a surprisingly evocative picture of this unique study and the era in which it was conducted. Reading the test results, in the architects’ own hands, and the evaluations of the researchers, is fascinating. So, what conclusions did the study finally reach? Nothing earth shattering. Going into the study, the research group had circulated a list of “genius” attributes from a 1957 book about Freud, which included things like “the power of deep concentration, tremendous patience, and self-discipline...” and the “ability to generalize from the particular and to separate the significant from the unimportant...” Drawn from the data, the study reinforced many of these suppositions with conclusions like: “What propels creativity is the unfettered expression of the self,” “finding the solution to a problem is not sufficient to bring them personal satisfaction: there is a further demand for the solution to be elegant,” and the discovery that creative individuals “consistently safeguard their self-determination in order to stay their course and pursue what interests them no matter what, in a fierce escape from conformism of thought and behavior.”The Creative Architect: Inside the Great Midcentury Personality Study doesn’t necessarily contain any easy, replicable recipes for living a creative life, for becoming a design god. But what it does do is curate a captivating collection of literal and figurative snapshots from a peak time in design history and the creative genius that drove it. And that is ultimately very inspiring. [RELATED: Here's an excellent podcast episode about the study from 99% Invisible. – Mark]

Here's a very clear video showing how to create textured 3D objects with complex shapes.From the YouTube description:We propose a method to fabricate textured 3D models using thermoforming. Differently from industrial techniques, which target mass production of a specific shape, we propose a combined hardware and software solution to manufacture customized, unique objects. Our method simulates the forming process and converts the texture of a given digital 3D model into a pre-distorted image that we transfer onto a plastic sheet. During thermoforming, the sheet deforms to create a faithful physical replica of the digital model. Our hardware setup uses off-the-shelf components and can be calibrated with an automatic algorithm that extracts the simulation parameters from a single calibration object produced by the same process.

A man calmly orders a meal at Taco Bell while recording two women sharply disagreeing about something in the parking lot. And now, here come the first responders to break it.

Looks like all of your potential employers are hiring candidates with programming skills (which you don’t have). With all of the languages out there today, it's tough to know where to start.With the Complete Front-End to Back-End Coding Bundle, you can beef your resume up in all the right places, no confusion necessary. This package of hands-on courses teaches you everything from the basics to more advanced material (including the finer points of languages like Ruby, Python, and Scala). You’ll learn how to create a website CMS, improve your website’s user interface, and create JavaScript events—all for just $69 (95% off the usual price). And with lifetime access to thousands of hours of content in the bundle, you can always refresh your memory whenever things get fuzzy.So if you’re serious about kickstarting your career, grab one of these coding bundles while they're hot.

Lovin Dublin posted this perfect mashup of monster-hunting game Pokémon Go and soothing wildlife documentarian David Attenborough. https://www.facebook.com/LovinDublin/videos/1437230712970361/This makes me think that AR + ASMR is going to be a thing.

Black holes swoop around one another in a slow, elegant dance, their orbits mo—THWUP! *belching noise*https://youtu.be/MgX-7kRkx7Ihttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNWQLqefUpshttps://youtu.be/43Gs75GNC9Y

2001 Nobel laureate in economics Joseph Stiglitz has a long history of being on the right side of history. For example: pricing the Iraq war at $3T; raising the alarm about sovereign wealth funds acquiring US debt; nailing the double-standard on bailouts for debt crises (and the way that this destabilizes poor countries); sounding the alarm about austerity in times of recesssion; coming out early and strong over wealth concentration; calling for the imprisonment of the top executives at Barclays bank; and damning the TPP as "the worst trade deal ever." (more…)

The first woman to be nominated, and to accept, a major party's nomination as president of the United States of America. I came to America 15 years ago, and it took me 15 years to get citizenship: Trump is a chump—and I am with her. As your resident pet English muppet, I exhort you to vote for Hillary Clinton. That said, I'm slightly disappointed that she went for a white pantsuit instead of the usual Space Federation Onesie she's been rocking lately. Alas, in politics, no-one gets everything they want.

Having a baby requires adjustment for everyone in your home. This includes the cat. Now you can prepare your fur baby for a drooling hairless counterpart that will coo and wail in the dwelling where it was once the center of attention.Tell Your Cat You're Pregnant: Baby and Toy Sounds for Preparing Your Cat for a Baby is a set of audio tracks of actual unpleasant baby sounds for your cat to experience, with titles such as "Loud Crying" and "Screaming." Also doubles as a contraceptive.

If you've recently eaten a Krispy Kreme donut in your car, make sure to clean up the evidence. Florida man Daniel Rushing was arrested for possessing donut glaze crumbs on the floor of his car. The retired 64-year-old man had just picked up a church friend from a 7-11 in Orlando and drove through a stop sign going a bit above the speed limit. This prompted the police officer, who was on the lookout for drug activity, to have him step out of his car. And that's when she noticed the offensive flakes of sugar glaze. "I recognized through my 11 years of training and experience as a law enforcement officer the substance to be some sort of narcotic," the officer wrote in her report.The officer conducted a roadside test, which mistakenly determined the glaze to be crystal meth.He was handcuffed, arrested, taken to the county jail and strip searched, he said.A state crime lab, however, did another test several weeks later and cleared him."It was incredible," he said. "It feels scary when you haven't done anything wrong and get arrested. … It's just a terrible feeling."Rushing says he'll never let anyone search his car again and is now suing the city for damages. Read the full story at the Orlando Sentinel.

I'm not bitter or anything, but Twitter has denied my request for verification. (more…)

Sick of your PVC marshmallow shooter? Lichfield offers this handcrafted Marshmallow Crossbow for $90. It's an elegant design and I imagine it would make a delightful DIY project for the right woodtool-wielding maker. To avoid injury, perhaps make sure your ammo isn't stale. (via Uncrate)

See sample pages from this book at Wink.Dark Night: A True Batman Story by Paul Dini (author) and Eduardo Risso (illustrator)Vertigo2016, 128 pages, 6.9 x 10.4 x 0.5 inches $14 Buy a copy on AmazonBatman the Animated Series was perhaps the cartoon of my childhood. I remember watching it when it premiered, and followed it through its entire run. While I’ve loved the movies, and the comics, Batman for me will always be the voice of Kevin Conroy, and the Joker will always be Mark Hamill. I owe my love for Batman to this wonderful show that Paul Dini helped create, which is why I was so struck to read his chilling autobiographical Batman tale. Like myself and many others, Dini too was hugely influenced by Batman through his childhood. The beginning of the book establishes how comics became a coping mechanism for Dini as he navigated through the world with social anxiety. His lonely but successful life is thrown upside down one night when he was mugged and beaten within an inch of his life. Dini’s story is all about coming to grips with a world that can be cruel, dealing with demons, and finding a way to overcome. It’s a Batman story that doesn’t take place in the Batman universe. I found it tremendously moving, the artwork beautiful, and I highty recommend it.– JP LeRoux

Almost 40 years later and we're still treating indigenous peoples like this. (r/ObscureMedia, thanks UPSO!)

After penning the best article on the RNC, Laurie Penny has taken her Red Pen of Justice to the DNC, where she reports on the state of American progressivism in the balance, where the best we can hope for is "a future slightly less terrifying than Trump nation." (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KVgCTz7pg0At a hair salon somewhere in America, it's going down: "Your wife is assaulting me! I'm gonna shut you guys down after this!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=1KVyFio8gw4In this 30 minute video, Harry Brignull rounds up his work on cataloging and unpicking "Dark Patterns," (previously) the super-optimized techniques used by online services to lure their customers into taking actions they would not make otherwise and will later regret. (more…)

Stranger Things is a new hit Netflix show about supernatural goings-on in the mid-1980s. Part of its magic is the excellent production design: it doesn't just nail the 80s, but it nails the poor midwestern 80s rather than the usual Hollywood middle-class city/coastal/bible-belt 80s. It still feels a bit like the late 70s—not because of 19A0s consumer witchcraft stuff, but because it's the middle of Indiana and most everything's at least 5 years old. Even the typography is perfect, from the very first second.The Stranger Things title sequence is pure, unadulterated typographic porn. With television shows opting for more elaborate title sequences (think GOT and True Detective), the opening of Stranger Things is refreshingly simple. It trims the fat and shows only what is necessary to set the mood. More importantly, it proves a lesson I’ve learned time and time again as a designer: you can do a lot with type.But how do a few pans of a logo accomplish so much in such a short amount of time? I break down its typographic success to three powerful plays: recognition, scale and palette.Previously: Superrcut of 80s references in Strange Things

Gonzalo Ciruelos set out to discover which country was the roundest in shape. We can define roundness in many ways. For example, as you may know, the circle is the shape that given a fixed perimeter maximizes the area. This definition has many problems. One of the problems is that countries generally have chaotic perimeters (also known as borders), so they tend to be much longer than they seem to be.For that reason, we have to define roundness some other way. We represent countries as a plane region, i.e., a compact set C⊂R2C⊂R2. I will define its roundness asThat's about where I tune out! Turns out the answer is Sierra Leone. Click through to see lots of mathy thingies on the screen, the runners-up, the least round countries, and the source code.

It was a busy night at the 2016 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, as the party's leading lights made their case for Hillary Clinton. In this post: Video of the speeches given at the DNC Wednesday night by U.S. President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Clinton’s running mate Senator Tim Kaine, and former New York mayor and one-time presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg. (more…)

Trump at press conference yesterday: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. Let’s see if that happens.”Response from Clinton camp: "This has to be the first time that a major presidential candidate has actively encouraged a foreign power to conduct espionage against his political opponent. That’s not hyperbole, those are just the facts. This has gone from being a matter of curiosity, and a matter of politics, to being a national security issue."If Russia or any other country or person has Hillary Clinton's 33,000 illegally deleted emails, perhaps they should share them with the FBI!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 27, 2016