From the late 1800s to the early 1940s, many Americans celebrated Thanksgiving by dressing up as "ragamuffins" in masked costumes and then thronged the streets, basically trick-or-treating for money and gifts. (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHSFf0Lz1qcHardware hacker/security researcher Samy Kamkar is legendary for his legion of playful, ha-ha-only-serious gadgets that show how terrible information security is, and now he's turned his attention to the American Express company, which turns out to be a goddamned train-wreck. (more…)

The Teddytaur is an actual, $400 product, made from alpaca-wool, sold by high-end toymaker Steiff in its Japanese store. (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

When Zoe Stavri woke up with a yeast infection, she had a strange and intriguing idea: what about adding some of her vaginal candida to sourdough starter? (more…)

Uncle Bill, please lead us in A Thanksgiving Prayer.

Matthew Borgatti, purveyor of such Boing Boing favorites as the Guy Fawkes Bandanna, the War Boy Bandanna, and the Lockpick Earrings, offers you your choice of his wares at at 20% discount, with the coupon code "jackhammerjill." (more…)

The Internet Archive's Brewster Kahle writes, "We founded a credit union to build a new path after the banking debacle of 2008 and it's been crushed by federal regulators. The regulators close 200-300 credit unions every year, and have been since their founding of the NCUA in 1970. Only a couple are allowed to start each year. We were one of four in our year." (more…)

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There's still time to run down to the supermarket and buy this cake for the coprophages joining you for Thanksgiving dinner.Check out more unusual Thanksgiving treats in the gallery here.

[My friend Peter Sheridan is a Los Angeles-based correspondent for British national newspapers. He has covered revolutions, civil wars, riots, wildfires, and Hollywood celebrity misdeeds for longer than he cares to remember. As part of his job, he must read all the weekly tabloids. For the past couple of years, he's been posting terrific weekly tabloid recaps on Facebook and has graciously given us permission to run them on Boing Boing. Enjoy! - Mark] (more…)

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I use a Wacom Intuos Pro graphics tablet, but don't want to. Because I'm used to the quality of this product, though, I can't even use the toys that pass as art styluses for iOS an Android tablets. I've been thinking of switching to the Microsoft Surface Pro to avoid having to own a graphics tablet in the first place, but it turns out the iPad Pro and Apple Pencil are the bee's knees.Gus Mueller, creator of the popular Acorn image editor, is in the same boat as me. He's smitten:It feels absolutely right. Super low latency, palm rejection, and … it just works.Is it the same as drawing in my sketchbook? No. Of course not. I'm rubbing a plastic tip across a glass screen.It's still God Damn Amazing though. …I find that when using the HB Pencil in Procreate, I get something that is very, very close to what I feel when I'm drawing in my sketchbooks. But of course now I've got layers and many colors and a perfect eraser to work with. And endless pages. I love it. I'm drawn to it. It's wonderful. You should absolutely try one if you haven't already.The problem, of course, is that you're likely looking at a $1000 or so price tag for the cheapest iPad Pro, the Apple Pencil, Apps and tax.

A long time ago, Veronica Belmont was featured in a blooper reel for her old TV show in which she clowned around with a Cthulhu t-shirt, wiggling back and forth and saying "So lifelike." A creepy Internet person turned the moment into a GIF that has followed her around ever since, so that other creepy Internet people post it every time she opens her mouth online, and creepy Internet porn companies use it in their ads. (more…)

About a year ago my family started replacing plastic leftover containers with pyrex containers and we have been really happy with them. (more…)

One of the few major psychedelics conferences during the dark age of the “Just Say No” Reagan regime was the Psychedelics and Spirituality Conference (aka Psychedelic Conference II), held on the campus of UC-Santa Barbara on May 13-14, 1983.The speakers were a “who’s who” of drug discoverers and researchers: Albert Hofmann, Humphry Osmond, Ralph Metzner, Alexander Shulgin, Walter Houston Clark, Terence McKenna, Andrew Weil, Carl Ruck and Jonathan Ott.Timothy Leary, Joan Halifax and Kathleen Harrison (McKenna) were in attendance but did not give formal talks.Other notables visible in photos: Peter Stafford, Rick Doblin, Deborah Harlow, Robert Forte, John Palmer, Jeremy Tarcher and Shari Lewis.It was at this conference that Sasha Shulgin announced his discovery of 2C-B and delivered one of his greatest talks, “Drugs of Perception.” It was also here that Terence McKenna(in his brother Dennis’ words) “marked his emergence as a public persona with his talk ‘Hallucinogens: Monkeys Discover Hyperspace, aka Return to the Logos.’”Cynthia Palmer (Horowitz), whose ground-breaking anthologyof women’s drug writings (Shaman Woman, Mainline Lady, reprinted as Sisters of the Extreme ) had been published the preceding year, attended the conference with her husband and co-editor, Michael Horowitz. Her candid photos of the speakers and conference-goers during a break from their presentations are published here for the first time.A complete set of the talks delivered at the conference is available on 6 audiocassettes from Soundphotosynthesis.[caption id="attachment_436274" align="alignnone" width="800"] Albert Hofmann in the Cafe.[/caption][caption id="attachment_436273" align="alignnone" width="800"] Rick Doblin, center, Deborah Harlow to his left.[/caption][caption id="attachment_436272" align="alignnone" width="800"] Ann and Sasha Shulgin surrounded by speakers and attendees.[/caption][caption id="attachment_436271" align="alignnone" width="800"] Andy Weil, Michael Horowitz, Sasha Shulgin[/caption][caption id="attachment_436270" align="alignnone" width="800"] Living room scene From L: Andy Weil, Terence McKenna, Kat Harrison McKenna, Walter Houston Clark, Shari Lewis (Jeremy Tarcher's wife), 2 unidentified, Jonathan Ott, Ann Shulgin, Sasha Shulgin[/caption][caption id="attachment_436268" align="alignnone" width="800"] Sasha Shulgin, living room group[/caption][caption id="attachment_436267" align="alignnone" width="800"] Michael Horowitz (left), Sasha Shulgin (middle), Andy Weil (right).[/caption][caption id="attachment_436266" align="alignnone" width="800"] Andy Weil[/caption][caption id="attachment_436265" align="alignnone" width="800"] Ralph Metzner, Stephanie Bernstein[/caption][caption id="attachment_436264" align="alignnone" width="800"] Carl Ruck, Albert Hofmann, Joan Halifax[/caption][caption id="attachment_436263" align="alignnone" width="764"] Jeremy Tarcher, Cynthia Palmer[/caption][caption id="attachment_436262" align="alignnone" width="800"] From left to right: Andy Weil, Michael Horowitz, Sasha Shulgin[/caption][caption id="attachment_436261" align="alignnone" width="800"] Terence McKenna, Jeremy Tarcher (background), Walter Houston Clark (foreground)[/caption][caption id="attachment_436260" align="alignnone" width="800"] Luminaries on the lawn: Terence McKenna, Kat Harrison (McKenna), Albert Hofmann[/caption][caption id="attachment_436259" align="alignnone" width="800"] Albert Hofmann inscribing books, with John Palmer[/caption][caption id="attachment_436258" align="alignnone" width="800"] Patio scene with Carl Ruck and Joan Halifax in foreground. Albert Hofmann in the background.[/caption][caption id="attachment_436257" align="alignnone" width="800"] Walter Houston Clark (left) Sasha Shulgin (right)[/caption][caption id="attachment_436256" align="alignnone" width="800"] Albert Hofmann with attendees[/caption][caption id="attachment_436255" align="alignnone" width="800"] Living room scene. From Left: Cynthia Palmer, Albert Hofmann, Joan Halifax[/caption][caption id="attachment_436254" align="alignnone" width="800"] Humphry Osmond (left)[/caption][caption id="attachment_436253" align="alignnone" width="800"] Admission Ticket for Santa Barbara Psychedelic Conference II[/caption]

Read the rest of the Hip Hop Family Tree comics! (more…)

If you like the idea of stamping approved and rejected stamps on animals' helpless faces, Animal Inspector is the game for you. In a world where pets are taking up too much space, or have turned bad, or maybe both, the Animal Inspector's job is to flip through dossiers and decide which pets are useful enough to stick around. Of course, pets' utility is often things like "is a good listener" or "hides a lot". That's just how pets are. Animal Inspector, made by Tom Astle, is sort of like a lighthearted take on the famous Papers, Please, where your document-processing decisions can create moral conflicts or story branches. If you don't follow your supervisor's instructions, which are often wacky and place you at odds with your coworkers, you collect a "strike", and you can only have three. Your main objective as an Animal Inspector, though, is to stay on the job long enough to protect your own beloved dog from getting inspected away from you. How far will you go to keep him safe?It's well-conceived, fun and funny—you must type your own comments, or reasons for approving or rejecting a pet, on their dossier, and you can save these and share them on social media (I rejected one puppy with only the comment "has a stupid face"). Though the game isn't massive or anything—I finished in 25 minutes—it has multiple endings, and there is lots to see. It also has a soundtrack by Ben "Torahhorse" Esposito (whom we've previously interviewed on Offworld)—Animal Inspector is free to download here, but those who purchase it at the suggested $3 or more get the soundtrack.

The Jungle Cruise at Disneyland in California was an opening day attraction in 1955. Walt Disney’s desire to bring the mystique of faraway lands to what were once orange groves in Anaheim, combined with the inspiration from his series of “True Life Adventure” films, led to its creation. The original boats, festooned with red and white striped awnings on their roofs, were inspired by the film The African Queen.Walt was rarely satisfied with things in stasis: he was always “plussing” (improving) them. Many changes have been made to The Jungle Cruise since its opening, though the majority of park-goers are unaware of them. The Jungle Cruise has always been popular at both Disneyland and Walt Disney World – there’s always a wait (more so in Tokyo Disneyland, where the wait is usually 45 to 90 minutes). Walt didn’t have to change it, but he added new and more realistic animals over time, and in 1963 (or so, I believe) asked Imagineer Marc Davis to create a series of “gag” scenes that would increase the entertainment value. These scenes, including a rhino chasing a safari party up a tree, can still be seen in the attraction.An interesting black and white video of the ride from mid-1960s, where a vocal narration of the ride by Thurl Ravenscroft (he was the voice of Kellogg’s Tony the Tiger) from an old Disney LP has been added, is available here. Numerous videos of its current incarnation can be found on YouTube, and this one of the new upgraded version at Tokyo Disneyland is a lot of fun. The Jungle Cruise Skippers in Tokyo are an intrepid group whose energy level does not diminish even late into the evening. I don’t know what they’re saying, but it certainly draws a more enthusiastic response from those in the boat than you see in the United States.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNf8y8BC_YQThe Jungle Cruise remains popular and its old-fashioned charm is probably part of the reason. Considering what The Walt Disney Company could actually do if they put a lot of money into it, it remains somewhat of a curiosity caught in time. Over on the official Disney Parks Blog they are giving away a free map of the Jungle Cruise which you can download as a pdf and print out at home. Swipe some colored pencils from your kid and have fun.

This week, our partnership with Critical Distance brings us interviews with the developers behind Cibele and Uriel's Chasm, as well as a meditation on games that aren't meant to be played. (more…)

What if you could learn how to play chess simply by looking at the pieces? (more…)

Mattel's Hello Barbie has a microphone and a wifi interface, and it transmits the phrases it hears to a central server in order to parse them and formulate a response. Mattel claims that the data isn't being retained or harvested for marketing purposes, and assures parents that they can make Barbie stopping eavesdropping on them at will. But does it work? (more…)

Last February, Lenovo shocked its security-conscious customers by pre-installing its own, self-signed root certificates on the machines it sold. These certificates, provided by a spyware advertising company called Superfish, made it possible for attackers create "secure" connections to undetectable fake versions of banking sites, corporate intranets, webmail providers, etc. (more…)

If I could walk, I wouldn’t have missed my connection. If I could walk, I wouldn’t have been left onboard, twice, after everyone else disembarked. If I could walk, I wouldn’t have my feet crushed, dragged under a narrow chair, as untrained staff pulled me off a plane.“We'll still have someone contact you," came the message, at last, after two trips in travel hell. "We don't want to lose your business and hope you won't give up on us.”But I have given up on American Airlines. They have lost my business. I urge anybody who travels with a disability to consider any other airline.As a space and aviation writer, I never look forward to writing about a bad experience in the air. Those who use wheelchairs to get around know how unfriendly our friendly skies can become. But I never expected an experience as unpleasant as the one given to me by American Airlines. (more…)

You’ll have tons of fun playing this well-balanced board game even if you never win - and I should know.Getting my wife to play games with me is a bit like pulling teeth. To increase my odds of making it happen, I normally promise to light a fire and make a cozy evening out of it.Here, you can see the lengths I went through last weekend to get my game on. On this particular night, we played The Duke!It’s a 2-player strategy game that takes place on a simple board of 36 squares. The game is a bit like chess – only better. The mechanics are constantly in flux and it forces you to think in a way that’s very different from other games. Like chess, players take turns controlling the movement of troops on the playing field. The player's movement options are graphically portrayed on the front and back of each troop but only the side that’s facing up is in play. Each time you move a troop, it's flipped and the movement rules change.Each player begins with 3 "stock" troops a sack of mixed wooden tiles that'll be chosen from later. Stock troop #1 - The Duke. He’s like the King in Chess. It’s important to keep him safe at all times because once he’s captured - you lose. The Duke can move clear across the board like a Rook. Stock troops 2 & 3 – The Footmen. These are like pawns in chess. They’re expendable but powerful. When a Footman moves, it can only be from his current position to positions denoted by the black circles. The Footman on the right, would be able to move 1 space in any diagonal direction, or 2 spaces forward. Where the Footman on the left would be able to move either horizontally or vertically one square.Each player places their troops anywhere on their side of the board as long as the Duke touches the bottom edge and the footmen touch the Duke. There are many different troop types and each has a unique way of getting around the board. Some troops can slide clear across the board and attack anything in its line of sight while others have the ability to jump over troops to attack or flee.When a player takes his turn, he has the choice of either moving one of his troops to a new location or pulling a random troop into play. A player can bring out troops as long as there is an open space on one of the 4 sides of The Duke. These spots are troop spawn points.If a player's troop lands on an opponent's occupied square, the attacked troop is eliminated from play.Sometimes it’s tough to decide wheather to attack or fortify your army.Even through the rules are very, very simple, the combinations of game-play seem endless.Did I mention that my wife beat me?Here’s the thing - Gina claims to not care for games of any kind and yet she effortlessly destroyed me at The Duke all night long. There was nothing I could do and though it was a massacre, I still had a great time.But I just may have a secret weapon for our next battle.You see, The Duke comes with 2 blank troops for you to customize – and while I may never stoop as low as to create a kraken character who can wipe out an entire army with one wave of his tentacle, it’s nice to know it’s there just in case.She’d never know what hit her! But if you're looking for well designed augmented rules and expansion packs for The Duke, there are a few to choose from.With these you can play as the Knights of the Round Table, The Three Musketeers or as Robin Hood and his band of merry men. For now, I leave you with a final photo of my cat Kucha posing with The Duke. Boy is that box ever adorable.

The Slo Mo Guys set fire to a bucket of fuel surrounded by box fans, then filmed the resulting column of fire. It's really something—a beautiful and scary thing that's understandably hard to capture in the wild.

Self-experimenters, inspired by a 2011 presentation by The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide author James Fadiman, are taking tiny "sub-perceptual" doses of LSD and psilocybin to encourage workplace creativity and give them pep and a positive outcome in life overall. (more…)

Todd W. Schneider analyzed 1.1 Billion NYC taxi and Uber trips "with a Vengeance", teasing straightfoward visualizations from an absolutely enormous dataset.Taken as a whole, the detailed trip-level data is more than just a vast list of taxi pickup and drop off coordinates: it’s a story of New York. How bad is the rush hour traffic from Midtown to JFK? Where does the Bridge and Tunnel crowd hang out on Saturday nights? What time do investment bankers get to work? How has Uber changed the landscape for taxis? And could Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson have made it from 72nd and Broadway to Wall Street in less than 30 minutes? The dataset addresses all of these questions and many more.Remember the scene from Die Hard: With a Vengeance where Bruce Willis is given 30 minutes to drive from the Upper West Side to Wall Street to prevent a bombing? The writer knew New York very well, it turns out. The median journey time for that trip is 29.8 minutes.Traveler protip: don't take a car to JFK on weekday afternoons. Just never do that.[via The New Aesthetic]

Robbo sez, "Outaspaceman on YouTube shows his latest project - an Arduino-based knife wielding tentacle - which, of course, no home should be without."

It's been five years since the first cases of UK undercover police officers infiltrating environmental groups and tricking activists into having sex with them surfaced, and now, one of the survivors of the practice, "Lisa," has granted her first-ever interview. (more…)

The Right Way To Do Wrong presents a unique opportunity to experience Harry Houdini in his own words. A collection of the master magician's interviews of police, grifters, swindlers, and criminals of all sort. These papers also give a fantastic glimpse into Houdini.I expected another dreary book of magic, written in dated English with references to things I'd never understand. What I found is a fascinating collection of captivating essays that also open a window into who Harry Houdini! While I very much enjoyed hearing stories about how turn of the century pick-pockets plied their trade, I loved learned that Houdini has a goofy sense of humor. Peppered with corny jokes and oddball witticisms, we not only learn the secrets to some of histories greatest magicians tricks, but get a glimpse of him.For fans of magic, or just budding con-men, I highly recommend The Right Way To Do Wrong.The Right Way to Do Wrong: A Unique Selection of Writings by History's Greatest Escape Artist (Neversink) via Amazon

Here are a few samples from one of the better cats-that-look-like-pinup-model websites out there.

My father took me to see Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus at the old Madison Square Garden in the early 1960s. What a wondrous day! First the smell of the cotton candy and peanuts embrace you, then it’s on to the Side Show, with the giant (we bought a giant brass "finger" ring he was selling), and Lady Estelline the Sword Swallower (we bought a small silver cocktail sword that pierced a photo of her). Then it was into the big top for the real show. My god, the elephants! The majesty of the beasts. You never forget those sights, sounds, and smells when you're 5 or 6 years old.The circus is not what it used to be in those innocent times. One of the first things to go was the Side Show. Misguided folks forced it out of the circus and only succeeded in ruining the livelihoods of the performers, throwing them out of work. But we still had the pleasure of taking our daughter to see “the greatest show on earth” when they passed through our town over the past decade, and she was mesmerized by all of it, especially the parade of elephants.There’s a wonderful photo essay in the New York Times this week about Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus. Part of it is about the elephants being forced out of the show by local laws. I’m no expert at animal behavior (other than the domesticated house cat), and the only thing I really know about elephants is what’s obvious: they’re highly socialized and intelligent animals who live in groups. Regardless of what anyone thinks, for better or worse, the elephants will vanish from the ring by 1918. So take your kids to the circus and see the elephants while you can. They’ll remember it always.There’s an excellent bit of writing in the Times piece by Taffy Brodesser-Aknerm which confronts the challenges faced by the notion of a circus in the digital age: It is an amazing thing to see someone fly through the air, but it’s harder to convey that fact to people who believe they are watching people fly through the air on-screen all the time. You can’t convince children who watch shows with talking animals that it is an incredible thing just to see an elephant play ball with another elephant, or to see a tiger simply not eat his trainer. It’s getting harder to convince adults, too. Somehow, over the past few decades, we’ve forgotten how to be impressed by physical achievements, incredible feats that no normal person can do. We have forgotten how to prize an act in which a performer risks his life gracefully — to understand that it is both the risk and the grace that make it something truly astonishing. Nowadays, you go to Times Square, and you don’t see people juggling and eating fire and doing delightful busking; you see people in superhero and Elmo costumes doing nothing but existing off versions of something that appears in movies, on TVs and in toy stores. … The circus is the last bulwark against all that.So go! Buy a ticket, smell the cotton candy, see the wire walkers and aerialists, fear for the lion tamer, and say goodbye to the elephants. Get your tickets right here.

The people behind Brooklyn's brilliant science fiction bookstore Singularity & Co are looking to raise $60,000 to launch a new science fiction quarterly magazine called the Tycho Journal. (more…)

Jahfurry writes, "Ben McCool over at Tech Times unearthed five brilliantly bonkers Star Wars comics written by Alan Moore in the '80s. What a treat to read the Magus's take on Darth Vader, Han, Chewie, C-3P0 and the whole crew with great art by Alan Davis, John Stokes (Invisibles) and more UK artists extraoirdinaire... McCool examines each story separately, giddily dissecting the imaginative insanity you'd expect from Moore, while marveling at how these read as classic, albeit odd, Star Wars stories." (more…)

I watched the Bob Ross marathon on Twitch recently, where a whole new generation got to discover the magic that emerges from his brushes: how you can turn away for a moment and turn back to find a whole new world materializing across a blank canvas. The game Beyond Eyes can feel a little bit like that too.You play as Rae, a young girl who lost her sight in an accident. After her cat Nani goes missing, she opens the gate to that leads beyond her garden and adventures forth to find her friend. Since she's blind, she—and you—have to rely on touch, sound and memory to paint a picture of the world in the blank spaces of the unknown. If a bird sings in the distance, it'll light up a small area in the vast whiteness that cloaks the path ahead—at least until you draw closer. Gates, bushes and other obstacles often spring up in front of you suddenly, since you don't know where they are until you run into them. The world paints itself into being around you, in ways that are beautiful and surprising. Grass grows beneath your feet as you move, flowers bloom, bridges leap across rivers. https://youtu.be/gmmo_2llJp4But things aren't always what they seem: what sounds (and therefore looks) like a sparkling fountain might turn out to be water pouring through a rusty sewer grate. What you thought was your cat rustling around in the bushes might turn out to be some local wildlife. Your other senses can help you paint an imaginative picture of the world around you, but until you actually touch it, you never quite know for sure.The phrase "walking simulator" has become something of a pejorative in certain circles, but that's exactly what Beyond Eyes is. This is a game where almost all you do is wander, imagine, and watch the world unfold. But what ultimately makes it pleasurable is what makes so many "walking simulators" worthwhile: the chance to move through a different world in a different way, and perhaps to remember that not everyone walks through the world in the same way as us. Developed by the Tiger and Squid, Beyond Eyes is available for Mac, PC, Linux, PS4 and Xbox One.

A dumbass posted a thought experiment "proving" that homosexuality was wrong posited three islands: a gay island, a lesbian island and a straight island, in which the two former dwindle away without replenishment while the latter thrives. (more…)

Khartabil has been imprisoned in a Syria's Adra Prison since 2012, though as of October, he has been transferred to an undisclosed location. The free software/open culture activist was the lead for Creative Commons Syria and has contributed to Wikipedia, Firefox and many other projects. (more…)

The statistician and risk analyst, who rose to prominence with his 2007 book The Black Swan, has a history of sticking up for junk science, but has crossed a Rubicon with his latest set of tweets, in which he defended homeopathy as harmless placebos that divert hypochondriacs from taking too many real pharmaceutical products. (more…)

Take an additonal 15% off today only on the below products in the Boing Boing Store by using coupon code: DOORBUSTER at checkout!The future of photography is here--and Lytro has taken their technology up a notch with the Ilum. Transform moments by adjusting everything from the focus to the perspective after the fact. There's no better time to make the ultimate photographic splurge with this one time exclusive offer.There are many VPNs out there, so which is right for you? If you're looking for extreme reliability, Private Internet Access is one the most trusted names in the business--and for good reason. Trusted by Forbes, Wired, and more, PIA is a safe choice for safer Internet surfing.The Panther Air Drone is not your average quadcopter. With its unusually large size yet light durable foam body, the Panther boasts a 4.5 channel radio control to seamlessly maneuver in every direction. Capture snapshots and video footage of the world below or try out full stunt mode. Fly high with the Panther this holiday season.This bundle offers you the unique opportunity to take your gaming passion and turn it into an awesome career. You will learn to code iOS, Android and desktop games all in one fantastic package that will leave you with all the skills necessary to take the developer world by storm.The days of getting your headphones caught on your surroundings and ripping your ears off are over. The Active Wrap Bluetooth Headphones are the perfect solution to those constantly replaced wired headphones. With high-quality sound and noise-canceling technology, you can keep bumping your favorite jams for 8 non-stop hours without any annoying distractions.

Eric Lafforgue is a prolific, talented photographer who's travelled the world, living among people in many hard-to-reach places and telling their stories with his camera. Among the most striking sets of images in his deep portfolio is his 2013 portraits of Daasanach people in Ethiopia, who have created exuberant wigs and hats from mass-produced consumer goods, both new and discarded, that have recently reached their part of the world. (more…)

Using just five scenes and three keystrokes, renowned minimalist game designer Pippin Barr has released a dark, thoughtful piece on gun violence, made with his wife Rilla Khaled. A Series of Gunshots comes in part from the revelation that he was starting to find shooting things in video games "really gross"—and the wish to explore the horrible space around the sound of a shot. The game is very simple. Confronted with a color-starved scene of a street, an apartment front, or some other mundane place, the player must press any key, and the punctuation of a gunshot rings out. You might see a muzzle flash in one of the windows right before your eyes, or you might not, the sound coming from outside of your field of view. Pressing any key up to three more times may or may not trigger another shot, and then the scene changes. The set of scenes you see, and the hidden violence that may be occurring in each, is different each time you play. There is a remarkable thought space around such a deceptively simple design. You as the player notice the urge to 'advance' the scene; you find yourself wishing the shot will occur where you can 'see' it. The game's challenge, in a sense, is being able to sit in the pause after that first sound and to notice how you feel about it—and about your own lack of agency. There is a cold, frightening inevitability about the fact you cannot really observe, control or predict any aspect of the distant violence. You never get to know why the shot was fired, if anyone was hurt or killed, what any of it meant. There may be another round of gunfire coming, and there may not, but all you can do is press a key and see. Any key will do; letting the player use the mouse, Barr said, would have added too great an illusion of control, the player "pointing" hopefully (?) at dark windows. Mapping to a specific key, too, would accord the player too close of a relationship with the idea of a single "trigger." With careful decisions like these, A Series of Gunshots elegantly decouples the report of a gun from the thoughtless, self-relieving behavior that "shooting" usually is in video games, and redraws the weapon as it exists in reality—a deliverer of unknowable darkness.You can play A Series of Gunshots for free in your browser here. Offworld has previously covered some of Barr's projects here and here.

Hammacher Schlemmer is a mostly mail-order company from which I’ve bought some lovely cashmere sweaters for my wife at Christmas. The company is renowned for its entertaining mail-order catalogue (and a great return policy) which has provided me with hours of fun reading over the years. Often the cover features some incredibly outlandish extravagance designed solely for really wealthy folks, and which often costs a stratospheric amount of money. Top of the line at the moment is a “Five Person Exploration Submarine” which can descend to 656 feet, weighs over 7.7 tons and costs—take your seats, please—$2,700,000. As Dr. Evil used to say, “Almost three MILLION dollars.”This year’s new and more reasonably priced money pit is a racing simulator for $185,000. It looks like a lot of fun, and my daughter says she rode something like it at Epcot at Walt Disney World, but something tells me that whoever receives it will lose interest ’ere long.The exact prices are unimportant because they’re silly. As far as most of us are concerned, we’re far more likely to get hit by a bus than be given one of these gifts.I genuinely enjoy Hammacher Schlemmer’s catalogue simply because it’s filled with incredibly weird things, like the remote-controlled flying shark mini-blimp for $40, and “The NASA Sleep Promoting Light Bulb” for $40. There are also lots of handy things, like well-made flannel pjs, nice lined gloves, and so on. It’s a real 90-page potpourri and you should definitely call 1-800-543-3366 and request a free catalogue. You can also do it online. Once in a while I think their copy writers are overcome with enthusiasm to the point of nonsense. This year’s prize goes to something called “The Prestidigitator's Wallet.” As the editor of a well-known magazine on the subject of conjuring, I can tell a “Prestigitator’s Wallet” from one that’s not. This is not. The item is described as “… the ultra-slim wallet that magically secures folded bills with just a flip. Simply insert cash in the middle of the wallet and close it. Next, flip it over, and, like magic, the cash is secured instantly under taut and durable elastic straps.” This, I really have to tell you, is not a magic trick at all. It’s a wallet with some elastic straps in it that are there for no good reason. Nothing magical happens: if you put the folded bills inside, close the wallet, and reopen it on the other side, the bills are under those straps. They haven’t disappeared or changed or anything one would consider a trick. Now if we strip away the silliness of the name and sales pitch (“This wallet replicates a style originally invented by French waiters in the 1920s as a means to quickly squirrel away tips”) then you might have a nicely priced ($40) leather billfold with pockets for credit cards and a window-pocket for your driver’s license.Still, this line of ad copy kills me, “Removing money is as easy as pulling it from the straps.” No shit!

Kamasi Washington, 34, is a saxophonist and composer who is carrying the spiritual jazz torch pioneered by the likes of John Coltrane, Pharaoh Sanders, Albert Ayler, and Stanley Cowell. But his sound is not a retro trip. Washington, who has also played with Flying Lotus, Snoop Dogg, Herbie Hancock, and Kendrick Lamar, recently released his three hour album, aptly titled Epic. It's an immersive, post-post-bop modal groove that is utterly and entirely contemporary. Dig the performance above, recorded this summer for NPR's Jazz Night in America. I was thrilled when our friends at San Francisco's Noise Pop Music Festival announced that Washington will be part of this year's killer lineup for the musical extravaganza taking place February 19-28 at clubs around the city. So far, the schedule also includes performances by The Mountain Goats, Parquet Courts, Vince Staples, The Cave Singers, Caucus, The Thermals, Film School, Diane Coffee, Wild Ones, Beacon, Astronauts, Etc., Palehound, and Heartwatch. More details: Noise Pop Music Festival

Eric McDavid, a 26-year-old, nonviolent anarchist activist, was sentenced to 20 years in prison after a paid FBI informant promised to have sex with him if he'd help her bomb some unspecified targets in Northern California. She provided the money, transport, a cabin HQ (filled with hidden CCTVs), and the bomb recipe. Then she helped federal prosecutors illegally withhold 2,500 pages worth of evidence that eventually exonerated McDavid, after nine years in prison. (more…)

See sample pages from this book at Wink.In 1977 and 1978 Topps, the famous bubble gum trading card company, issued five series of Star Wars trading cards. Each series had 66 cards and 11 stickers, and the backs of the cards contained trivia, puzzles, actor bios, and story summaries.This fat little book has high quality scans of the fronts and backs of all 330 cards and 55 stickers from the five series. It also comes with a set of four actual trading cards in a plastic pocket glued to the inside back cover. There’s no gum, but if that’s a deal killer, eBay usually has at least one or two complete runs of the cards for $200 or so, including the sticks of nearly 40-year-old gum.Star Wars: The Original Topps Trading Card Series by Gary GeraniAbrams ComicArts2015, 548 pages, 1.5 x 5.5 x 7.5 inches$14 Buy one on Amazon

In this [NSFW] totally non-phallic animated cartoon from 1968 about Lyndon B. Johnson’s escalation of the Vietnam war, we see the orgasmic annihilation of the American Dream in a montage of cigarette boxes, Coke bottles, hotdogs, TV dinners, breasts, apple pie, Doris Day, Lassie, John Wayne, Superman, Aunt Jemimah, Detroit autos, and deodorant soap. It's called Escalation, and it was made by Disney animation pioneer Ward Kimball. Bryan Thomas at Night Flight has more:[In] 1968, an national election year coming a few years after Walt Disney’s death (in 1966), [Kimball] was venturing out on his own, and so Escalation should be seen as a personal and private Kimball film project, and not as a Disney short. It’s actually credited with being the only film made independently by one of Disney’s Nine Old Men. Kimball personally gave 16mm copies to friends and liberal-minded fans.We first came across this short film online a few years back, and it was said at the time that Kimball’s granddaughter, Laurey Kimball Boedoe, and other relatives of Kimball’s, had decided to put Escalation online, making it free for everyone to see, saying in an email to friends, “Our family thought it was time to put this short film out there for everyone to see since there are a lot of similarities to what is going on now.”

The day after authorities in Paris killed the suspected ringleader of last week's terror attacks, footage has emerged of one of the targeted cafés.The first security video shows the attackers outside, shooting at customers and into the building. Windows shatter, and some of those surviving the initial barrage flee inside. Occasionally, someone pops up to make a break for it.The other videos show the interior of the café—apparently, lives were saved after one of the attackers' guns jammed.

David Bowers, the mayor of Roanoke, Virginia, recently praised the concentration camps that the US built during World War II to imprison Japanese American adults and children. And, according to Bowers' logic, that's why we can't allow Syrian refugees to be resettled in his town. George Takei has something to say about it. From his Facebook post:Earlier today, the mayor of Roanoke, Virginia, Mr. David A. Bowers, in the attached letter, joined several state governors in ordering that Syrian refugees not receive any government assistance, or be relocated to their jurisdiction. Apart from the lack of legal authority to do so (under the Refugee Act of 1980, only the President has authority to accept or deny refugees), his resort to fear-based tactics, and his galling lack of compassion for people fleeing these same terrorists, Mayor Bowers made the following startling statement:“I’m reminded that Franklin D. Roosevelt felt compelled to sequester Japanese foreign nationals after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and it appears that the threat of harm to America from Isis now is just as real and serious as that from our enemies then.”Mayor Bowers, there are a few key points of history you seem to have missed:1) The internment (not a "sequester") was not of Japanese "foreign nationals," but of Japanese Americans, two-thirds of whom were U.S. citizens. I was one of them, and my family and I spent 4 years in prison camps because we happened to look like the people who bombed Pearl Harbor. It is my life’s mission to never let such a thing happen again in America.2) There never was any proven incident of espionage or sabotage from the suspected “enemies” then, just as there has been no act of terrorism from any of the 1,854 Syrian refugees the U.S. already has accepted. We were judged based on who we looked like, and that is about as un-American as it gets.3) If you are attempting to compare the actual threat of harm from the 120,000 of us who were interned then to the Syrian situation now, the simple answer is this: There was no threat. We loved America. We were decent, honest, hard-working folks. Tens of thousands of lives were ruined, over nothing.Mayor Bowers, one of the reasons I am telling our story on Broadway eight times a week in Allegiance is because of people like you. You who hold a position of authority and power, but you demonstrably have failed to learn the most basic of American civics or history lessons. So Mayor Bowers, I am officially inviting you to come see our show, as my personal guest. Perhaps you, too, will come away with more compassion and understanding.-- George Takei