Jesse writes, "Like you, I've been following the TPP news with much trepidation. My partner is a librarian-archivist, so I'm keenly away of how difficult copyright law can make the job of the average archivist. I put together a piece explaining how the TPP's copyright extension will hurt Canadian city archives, and the galleries of historical city photos we love so much." (more…)

“What doge the Fawkes say?” (more…)

U.S. Presidential candidate Ben Carson sure is one wacky guy. (more…)

https://youtu.be/wWeE0OjjewoNathan Chung's dog really hates it when he “blows raspberries.” (more…)

Comic Book Resources broke the sad news today that the great car customizer George Barris, who created the Batmobile for the 1966 "Batman" TV series, has passed away. Barris died early this morning at his home. He was 89 years old. (more…)

Summer 1989Natalie wore a red-and-white checked dress with strawberry buttons, and she could feel the ends of her hair brush her chin. She held on to Mommy’s purse with one hand as Mommy pushed the stroller and Meredith walked a few steps ahead, in her dress that was blue.Yesterday Mommy had given them afternoon baths and then asked them to go out on the front porch and sit still while she cut their wet hair. She asked them not to put their feet near the broken part of the step because Daddy hadn’t fixed it yet. Then Mommy put one knee on each side of Natalie to hold her in place as she cut and combed and cut again, and pulled Natalie’s hair straight with her fingers to make sure it was even.They all had just-alike hair now, all new-school just-alike hair and different colored barrettes that had come from the same package. Natalie’s barrettes were red, and Meredith’s was blue, and Jackie’s was yellow. Mommy had let them toss the old hair in the yard, for the birds. Meredith had not been happy.Now they were going to school for Orientation. They were close enough that Natalie could see the tent. She had never seen a school with a tent before. When they lived in Portland, she had gone to preschool.They stopped at the crosswalk and looked up and down the empty street for cars, because Rosemary knew you had to do it every time or one of her girls would forget, when they were older. She said the sing-song they had made up—”left, then right, then left again”—and heard three voices sing it along with her. Then they crossed, all together, Meredith not bothering to seek out her mother’s hand.Rosemary knew Meredith was mad about the haircut. She had been watching the girls’ hair in the Midwestern humid heat, seen enough long sticky strands attach themselves to a sweaty neck or arm. Nat’s hair was like hers, which meant it looked thick and shiny no matter what, but Meredith and Jackie had Jack’s hair, which brushed out fine and smooth but ended up clustered in limp locks like the wax on a melting candle. And now they all had neat hair, cut off their neck in sweet little-girl bobs, and Rosemary was the one who needed a haircut, but that would have to wait until after the girls were in school. She had used one of the girls’ elastics to pull her hair back into a ponytail, wondering if it made her look younger or just made her look silly. She hadn’t known what to wear to this event, so she put on a jean skirt and a T-shirt with pink stripes that felt nicer than the other ones. As she led her three girls under the tent she saw that most of the other moms were wearing shorts, and most of the kids were wearing shorts too. People in Kirkland only seemed to dress up for church.“Rosemary!” Donna was of course wearing shorts, and the Kirkland College graphic on her T-shirt had started to come apart in rivulets. “Hello, girls! Natalie, don’t you look just like Strawberry Shortcake.”Meredith knew that Natalie didn’t look like Strawberry Shortcake; Strawberry Shortcake had a bonnet and red hair and a pink dress with a white apron. Natalie had strawberry buttons down the front of her dress. And Donna hadn’t said anything about her, which Meredith knew to mean she didn’t look like anything. Her dress was blue checked, like Dorothy’s, but nobody would say she looked like Dorothy anymore because she didn’t have braids. She had short hair. Meredith hated her hair because she no longer knew who to be. Sometimes when she was at church, or when her parents went shopping and they had to stand still and be quiet, she would pretend to be someone else and imagine what life would be like as them. What would Mary Ingalls be able to tell about the Methodist church just by listening to the people and feeling the rough fabric on the chairs? And now it was harder to imagine herself as Dorothy, stepping out into a world of color, pretending that the grocery store was Oz and she hadn’t seen any of it before, staring at the shiny green apples next to the ones with the little brown spots. Not even when she was wearing a blue checked dress. After she had gotten her hair cut she had gone upstairs and looked at the picture of Betsy in Betsy-Tacy and Tib, because she wanted to see someone whose hair looked like hers. Mom hadn’t let her keep a lock of hair, which would have made it a little better because she could have felt more like Betsy. Betsy’s hair grew back, and it didn’t stop her from making up stories. And then Alex came running up, and she was wearing a blue dress like Meredith’s except hers had a fish print on it. “Do you want to meet our teacher?” she said. Meredith looked at her mom, hoping she would say yes. “She’s right over there,” Alex said, pointing to a blonde woman in a green jumper with an apple stitched on the pocket. “Stay under the tent,” Rosemary said, “where I can see you.”“You know,” Donna said, after they had gone, “she wanted to wear a dress today because of Meredith. They are already such a pair.” Rosemary watched the two girls talking to their second-grade teacher and thought how grown up Meredith and Alex looked, engaging in this conversation. She saw Alex say something that made them all laugh, and then she saw Meredith say something that made them all laugh, and she saw her daughter smile again, the real smile that seemed so rare. Alex was a good friend for her, a nice smart girl who might help her kid relax a little. “You make those dresses, right?” Donna asked. “That must be hard.”“It isn’t that hard,” Rosemary said. She had been making clothes since she was a teenager. She and her best friend had spent Saturday afternoons picking out fabric and patterns for their prom dresses, and then cutting and sewing and taking turns pinning up each other’s hems. Rosemary remembered how quiet and tidy her friend’s home was; how she looked around at the ballerina figurines and the mugs stacked upside-down in rows, dripping dry next to the clean sink, and decided she would have a home like that when she grew up. Except now she knew ballerina figurines were tacky. “Do you sew at all?”“Never picked it up,” Donna said. “Except for one summer in 4-H. I made a pillow.”There was a general rush of excitement under the tent; a man was wheeling up a white box with a metal lid, and the words “Sno-Cone” stenciled on the side.“Better get your girls in line for snowcones,” Donna said, as Rosemary watched every child under the tent begin to cluster around the man and the white box. She wondered if the snowcones would cost money, and if she’d have to be the mean mom if they cost too much, but as the first kids started peeling off, gripping sticky colored ice in paper cones, she realized they must be free. So she took Jackie’s hand and walked Jackie and Natalie over to the end of the line, but they were stopped by two women—one of them short and round, in the general “apple and schoolbooks” outfit that designated her as a teacher, and the other tall and thin with a stiffly-sprayed cluster of gray curls. “You must be Rosemary Gruber,” the older woman said. “I’m Peg Howard, the principal, and this is Deanna Cory, our kindergarten teacher.”“Hi,” Deanna said to Rosemary, and then she squatted down to Natalie’s level. “I’m Miss Cory. Are you going to be in kindergarten with me this year?” “Yes,” Natalie said, with one eye on the snowcone line. “We need to do Kindergarten Readiness,” Peg Howard continued. “Most people do it at the beginning of the summer, but you hadn’t moved here yet.”Natalie knew the women were talking about her, but she also knew that all the other kids were over there, in a line, and that they were coming back eating something that Natalie had never seen before. Something with red or yellow or purple ice in it. Natalie wanted one, and she wanted to be where the other kids were. Some of the kids she remembered from the pool, and they were waving, and she waved back, and then she felt Mommy’s hand come down on her shoulder, to hold her in place.Then the woman with gray hair asked Natalie to come with her, and walked her away from the snowcones and the other kids. They walked up to the school and opened one of the big doors with the gray bars. Inside it was quiet, and the lights were off, and Natalie’s sandals made slapping sounds against the floor. The woman took Natalie into a small room with white walls and said that she was the principal, and that she wanted to ask Natalie a few questions. She asked Natalie if she knew her name and her address and her telephone number, and then she asked Natalie to say the alphabet, and then she took a book from a basket next to her desk and asked if Natalie could read it.Natalie could read but she didn’t like it. She kept her eyes wide open and tried not to blink. This book had big letters, though, and it had pictures that helped her guess. Cat, dog, ball.Then the woman asked if Natalie could count for her. Natalie counted to ten, and then stopped. “Do you know any numbers higher than that?” the woman asked.Natalie knew from PBS and from Meredith telling her that numbers went all the way to infinity. She nodded.“Can you keep counting?” the woman prodded, and so Natalie continued, working her way up past twenty and thirty and then fifty and eighty and ninety. She could feel sweat on the back of her neck. She did not like the sound of her voice in this quiet school. She wondered what she was missing, under the tent outside. All the other kids were there and she was here. She wanted to be there too. She wanted a snowcone.When Natalie reached one hundred, she paused and looked at the gray-haired woman. The woman didn’t say anything. Natalie suddenly thought that the test must not end until she reached a number she didn’t know. She thought of all the snowcones and the kids in line. There wouldn’t be any left.“Two hundred,” she said, watching the woman to see if she could tell. “Three hundred. Four hundred. Five hundred.”“Thank you,” the woman said. “You can stop now.” She made a note in a book, and then walked Natalie back outside. There were still snowcones, and the man put a squirt of both orange and red in hers. And then she saw the kids she knew from the pool, and she clutched her snowcone in its wet paper and ran over to them, forgetting anything else existed except these new friends and the taste of cold sweet ice in her mouth. She ran out from under the tent into the sunlight, dripping snowcone onto her red checked dress and its strawberry buttons. Nicole Dieker's serial novel, The Biographies of Ordinary People, tells the story of three sisters, their parents, and the past 27 years. Read and support the story at Patreon.

https://youtu.be/Km1p2-SB-WE?t=1m24sHere's a fellow who happens to have a jet engine strapped to his truck and an Elmo doll. He didn't have much choice in what he did next.[via]

A nice reminder of just how utterly daft they are!P.S. All reviews of new Bond movies are really reviews of old Bond movies.

Paul Ford mounts a defense of the Internet’s absence of meaningThe most meaningful experiences I have, the experiences that give me the greatest insight into the operation of culture over time—something over which historians used to hold a monopoly—are the results of database queries. I go in, I search for a term, I click some links, and the resulting stream of options is not even a narrative, just a bag of odds and ends. Then I begin a gentle pawing-through. What I like most is to skim through things that were intended to be transient. The ads, the newsy bits from beekeeping journals, the announcements of 1940s automobiles. You could call me an ephemeralist.Life is ephemeral, and so is the Internet. But the internet has advantages…

Prada, Armani, Rolex… Paul Bloom mediates between the belief that it's OK to like nice things and the belief that empty acts of consumption signal attractive traits: the lure of luxury.I don’t think any of this is mistaken. But it is seriously incomplete. There is a further explanation for our love of such goods, which draws upon one of the most interesting ideas in the cognitive sciences: that humans are not primarily sensory creatures. Rather, we respond to what we believe are objects’ deeper properties, including their histories. Sensory properties are relevant and so is signaling, but the pleasure we get from the right sort of history explains much of the lure of luxury items—and of more mundane consumer items as well.The ersatz oldness of expensive new things is more obvious than ever before. Also: anyone who plays computer role-playing games understands the mystic appeal of set loot.Bloom: "The moralist should recognize that our appreciation of them is psychologically on par with other, more respected, human wants. The utilitarian should acknowledge that they are not pollution; they add to the value of our lives."Given that expensive luxury brands don't have a monopoly on these attributes (in the same way they do have a monopoly on, say, certain signals), it seems they (and your money) serve in this view as a shortcut to a suggestion of history that can be attained by other means (e.g. taste, tradition, cool)

(more…)

Jumpstart a steady and high-paying career in front-end development! This bundle will teach you the skills you need to score that essential first job--and it will do so right from your computer screen. So don't get up, start making career strides right here, right now.Here's a breakdown of everything included in the bundle: 1jQuery Fundamentals Training$149 Value2Developing Mobile Websites$99 Value3Introduction to JavaScript$149 Value4Advanced JavaScript Programming$99 ValueMaster front-end development today with the Javascript & jQuery developer bundle in the Boing Boing store today.

SDR Traveller caters to people who, for one reason or another, need to haul huge amounts of cash money through dangerous territory. The bags are made from a super strong, super light synthetic material designed for yacht sails, are RFID-shielded, and are rated by how much cash in US$100 bills each can carry, from the $1M Hauly Heist to the Money Pouch in denominations from $10K to $400K. (more…)

Regina, or 1995Regi, as she calls herself on Instagram, is a Polish girl who likes selfies, science fiction, and Drake. She's also the creation of artist Katarzyna Witerscheim, who dreamed Regina up as a cross between a slice-of-life webcomic and a roleplaying game, which you read and interact with through her illustrated selfies on social media.The details of Regina's life can be gleaned not only from the images Witerscheim creates, but also the interactions she has with followers as Regina. Shortly before Halloween, for example, "Regina" took a poll on what costume to wear; later, in a photo taken at a Halloween party, we see her dressed as the people's choice: Sailor Moon. https://instagram.com/p/9h_VfnSxXA/?taken-by=1995regiIn another image, we see Regina kissing a handsome boy named Sasha, and answering questions about where they met. A week later she Instagrams a picture of her tear-stained face: They're broken up. She posts a screenshot of Adele's melodramatic ballad "Hello," playing on her phone. The responses from fans are serious and sympathetic: "Treat yourself kindly and surround yourself with people who love you!!" says one. "I thought the project would be great to be interactive," Witerscheim told The Daily Dot. "You can write to her, you can talk to her, you can say to her about what she should do. I don't have one solid script. The plot can change because of the people who write to her."She might even ask your opinion, just like any other Instagram star who occasionally descends from the clouds to walk amongst the people. If you're like to read, watch and play along, you can follow 1995regi on Instagram and Facebook.

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@RoboRosewater is a twitter account that posts, once a day, a Magic: The Gathering card generated by a recurrent neural network. [via Ditto]This is an implementation of the science described by Vice's Brian Merchant in this article.Reed Morgan Milewicz, a programmer and computer science researcher, may be the first person to teach an AI to do Magic, literally. Milewicz wowed a popular online MTG forum—as well as hacker forums like Y Combinator’s Hacker News and Reddit—when he posted the results of an experiment to “teach” a weak AI to auto-generate Magic cards. He shared a number of the bizarre “cards” his program had come up with, replete with their properly fantastical names (“Shring the Artist,” “Mided Hied Parira's Scepter”) and freshly invented abilities (“fuseback”). Players devoured the results.Here's the code, and here's a simple text-only generator. Magic: The Gathering is Turing-complete.

The "pot-laced" candy that a man from Ohio complained about was tested by police and had no traces of drugs. The razor blade in a Hershey bar had been placed there by the kid who found it. The needle in the candy bar was the handiwork of a kid looking for attention. The 16-year-old girl who said she needed 23 stitches to sew her cheek back together after chewing bubble gum with a razor blade hidden in it admitted the wound was self-inflicted.Jesse Walker of Reason says his favorite 2015 Halloween scare hoax involves "a man named Robert Ledrew [who] told first his Facebook friends and then the police that he'd found four sewing needles in his children's goodies. This time the parent turned out to be the hoaxer: Ledrew eventually confessed to the cops that he had inserted the objects himself, claiming he'd been trying to teach his kids a safety lesson. He certainly taught them some sort of lesson: He's being charged with filing a false police report.

TSA screeners' ability to detect weapons in luggage is "pitiful," according to classified reports on the security administration's ongoing story of failure and fear.We know about them because lawmakers are tiring of the charade and the complacency that comes with it. Ars Technica reports:"In looking at the number of times people got through with guns or bombs in these covert testing exercises it really was pathetic. When I say that I mean pitiful," said Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.), speaking Tuesday during a House Oversight hearing concerning classified reports from federal watchdogs. "Just thinking about the breaches there, it's horrific," he added.Auditors from the Inspector General's Office, posing as travelers, discovered enormous loopholes in the TSA's screening process. A leaked classified report this summer found that as much as 95 percent of contraband, like weapons and explosives, got through during clandestine testings. Lynch's comments were in response to the classified report's findings.What will the future bring? We all love puppies, don't we?

FOLLOW @RubenBolling on Twitter and Facebook.And FURTHER, please join Tom the Dancing Bug's subscription club, the INNER HIVE for exclusive, advance access to comics and more stuff. HEY, the second book in Ruben Bolling’s series, The EMU Club Adventures, came out yesterday! For a limited time, you can buy both installments, signed and sketched! HERE. More Tom the Dancing Bug comics on Boing Boing! (more…)

For that fully functional carbohydrate station: $40 from Thinkgeek (produces two-sided, 8" diameter waffles). It's waffley good!

A police officer in Arkansas sparked a manhunt and investigation when he claimed he'd been shot during a traffic stop by a “Hispanic man in his 30s.” Turns out that was total bullshit. David Houser, 50, was arrested Tuesday after finally admitting to his colleagues that it never happened, there was no traffic stop, and no scary brown guy. The cop just shot himself, and apparently by accident. (more…)

OpenBCI is an open-source brain computer interface that had a successful Kickstarter a couple of years ago. They are back with a $99 biodata acquisition device and a 3D-printed, brain-sensing headset. They look cool!The OpenBCI Ganglion is a high-quality, affordable bio-sensing device. On the input side, there are 4 high-impedance differential inputs, a driven ground (DRL), a positive voltage supply (Vdd), and a negative voltage supply (Vss). The inputs can be used as individual differential inputs for measuring EMG or ECG, or they can be individually connected to a reference electrode for measuring EEG.We are using a Simblee for our on-board microcontroller and wireless connection. Simblee is RF Digital’s next generation Arduino-compatible radio module. It is smaller, cheaper, and more robust than the RFDuino, which we have been using on our OpenBCI 32bit Boards and USB Dongles. The new Simblee provides user programmable flash, 29 GPIO pins, and the ability to update software over the air (OTA). Every Ganglion will be pre-programmed with versatile firmware so you can get started sensing your body right out of the box. We will also break-out up to 20 of the GPIOs for you to hack with.

Zoe Quinn knows what it's like to be lied about, harassed and generally made a prop in other people's angry inner lives. But she also knows what it's like to have been one of the internet's useful idiots—and how to build something powerful in response to the online mob. In her XOXO speech from September, she talked about providing targeted individuals with the means to unfuck their situation, but also about what the internet could be—should be—after years of growing failure.Zoe Quinn continued to encourage new voices in indie game development with learning resources like Sorting Hat and Games Are For Everyone, and launched Crash Override, a volunteer-run task force for victims and targets of online mob hatred.Recorded in September 2015 at XOXO, an experimental festival celebrating independently produced art and technology in Portland, Oregon.

I'm a fan of DK's "Big Ideas Simply Explained series." I have the Psychology Book and the Philosophy Book. Both books go through the history of the subjects, with lots of well-designed infographics. They are written in clear, easy-to-comprehend language and assume no prior knowledge on the part of the reader. I have the hardbound editions, which cost about $15-$20 and are attractive, but if you're looking for a bargain, the e-books are just $5 each. Right now, they are running a special on The Sociology Book e-book for just $1.99. I bought it, and if I like is as much as I liked the other two "Big Ideas Simply Explained" books I have, I'll spring for the dead tree version.

If you want to tell a sad, fraught story, does it need to be through a video game? Not always—but Llaura DreamFeel is a creator who has a unique, refreshing grasp on the little spaces that open up in games that can't be created in other media, and she makes profound and considered aesthetic choices with her works. Last year, her game Curtain affected many: The story of two girls in a Glasgow punk band, the game is consciously both bright and glitchy and tightly-framed, two choices that help tell the story of an abusive relationship. Her writing style seems to make even abstracted sketches of human beings feel grounded, plausible, in a way I haven't quite experienced through more traditional 'game dialogue' ("people who like good music usually don't take the time to become good people" is a particularly jarring quote). She has a masterful sense of structure, too, and her newest work, Istanbul, Texas, is a brief but strong example. You play a man returning to Donny's Discount Dungeon (formerly Donny and Dave's Discount Dungeon), a record shop that you may or may not have burned down, to see what's left. One song makes you want to tear down everything you find; one song makes you feel hopeful to rebuild. Saying any more about the game itself would probably ruin the delicate experience, but the tension DreamFeel has built between the man's two states of being is unexpectedly palpable.It's the way the character drifts independently, a train wreck who can be influenced by the player's movements, but never wholly controlled. His sprite is indistinct, a sort of continuously-weeping raincloud with two grasping hands. "I had never made rough and ready lil characters and art like this before, literally scribbling pixels until I hit something I liked. And I just threw out everything I didn't," says DreamFeel, who also tells me Istanbul, Texas' initial conceit came to life while she was delirious with food poisoning, trying to design a game that would capture the cathartic push-and-pull of getting sick and then feeling briefly better til the illness rises again. "This idea of structuring a story is always really important to what I do, and I was thinking about how could I use music to that end," she continues. "Usually music just becomes this background texture to a scene unless the game responds to it directly (or the music responds directly to the game). "I realized another way to give structure with music would be to use two songs intentionally juxtaposed against each other. Everything came from that. Particularly the first song, Yaylalar by Selda Bagcan, helped develop the story a lot."https://youtu.be/n6b0Gsnq6ZIIstanbul, Texas is free to download.

See sample pages from this book at Wink.For much of the 1990s, Mark Hogancamp of Kingston, New York, adhered to a predictable pattern of waking up, going to work, returning home, drinking as much as a half-gallon of vodka, and then passing out. He was a serious alcoholic, as Hogancamp and Chris Shellen make clear in Welcome to Marwencol (Shellen produced a documentary on Hogancamp’s life in 2010). He also liked to dress in women’s clothes.Hogancamp didn’t know it, but this last fact would change his life when he drunkenly mentioned it to a stranger in the Luny Tune Saloon, sometime before closing in the wee hours of April 8, 2000. Shortly after exiting the bar, he was brutally beaten by the man and four others, who left his broken and bloodied body in the middle of the street. He would spend nine days in a coma and more than a month in the hospital.After his release, Hogancamp’s recovery was aided, essentially, by playing with dolls. He got into it when he rediscovered his childhood interest in World War II miniatures. The tiny objects, though, were too small for Hogancamp’s shaky, post-recovery hands to paint, so the owners of his local hobby shop suggested he try detailing figures at a larger 1:6 scale. Dressing the figures proved good therapy for Hogancamp, and before long he had moved on to Barbies and action figures, for whom he eventually built a fictional but physically real place called Marwencol, named after himself, a friend named Wendy, and a neighbor named Colleen.Welcome to Marwencol covers Hogancamp’s decline, beating, and recovery, but mostly it details the world he created and photographed, as well as the characters he conceived to inhabit it — the last third of the book tells Hogancamp’s Marwencol tales in graphic-novel form. Besides Hogie, the stand-in for Hogancamp, we meet Wendy and Colleen, five sadistic SS soldiers (obviously Hogancamp’s attackers), as well as Anna Romanov, a Russian princess who appears to be based on Hogancamp’s real-life ex-wife, Anastasia, who he married while serving in the U.S. Navy in the 1980s. These characters and dozens of others populate the stories Hogancamp has written to set his world in motion, and while Hogancamp’s fiction is clever and engaging, I was most interested in the dual denouement to his story – that the attack beat the alcoholism out of him (43 days in the hospital was enough to dry him out), and that he still enjoys wearing women’s heels. Welcome to Marwencolby Mark E. Hogancamp and Chris ShellanPrinceton Architectural Press2015, 278 pages, 7.2 x 9.8 x 1 inches$16 Buy a copy on Amazon$19 Buy the documentary

You've no doubt seen those street performance artists who wear metallic clothes and makeup and stand in frozen poses. Well, here's a gentleman who is apparently unfamiliar with these performances, because he reaches into a performer's tip bucket to steal money from it. The performer breaks character and delivers a sharp kick to the thief's head.

Police departments around the country are establishing "safe exchange zones" at police stations for people who buy and sell stuff on Craigslist to meet in person. From the Washington Post:The practice appears to have started last year in Boca Raton, Fla., spread through central Florida and then through the law enforcement grapevine to police parking lots and lobbies throughout the country. Leesburg and Fairfax City in Northern Virginia have adopted the approach in recent months, as a way to give online buyers and sellers a sense of security when they meet.“Over the summer of 2014,” said Boca Raton Officer Sandra Boonenberg, “we had three or four different robberies where the victim had made arrangements to meet someone to see either an iPhone or a computer. They met them in public places — one happened at a gas station — and they still got robbed. We decided we’re going to have to come up with something better, and the chief [Daniel C. Alexander] came up with the idea to use the police department for transactions.”Officers do not get involved or actively monitor the transaction, although many police parking lots and lobbies have surveillance cameras as an added backup. In some smaller departments, such as Fairview Heights, Ill., east of St. Louis, an officer might go outside and meet the buyer and seller just to make public contact and reassure them, Lt. Mike Hoguet said.

The languid, pulsing beauty of Hideki Inaba's retro-style animation is the perfect way to becalm your Tuesday morning. An organic landscape set to the music of BEATSOFREEN's "Slowly Rising," it flows and grows into a glorious profusion of color and movement."Slowly Rising" suggested to me the image of the sun.A seed was born beneath the sun, the source of all existence.The seed absorbed the light. It created more seeds like itself, gradually increasing in number.Time passed, but still their numbers slowly continued to rise,and before long they were quietly swallowed up by their own shadows.After everything that had lived had perished, nothing but an empty world remained.There, once again, an environment where the next living things could grow silently began to spread.

With instruction from experts in their fields and unlimited access to an enormous library of trainings, you’ll learn to build and launch amazing websites using open source platforms like WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal. These platforms allow you to build, launch, and manage professional looking website for pennies on the dollar. And guess what? You don’t even have to know a line of code to get your website up and running, but you’ll learn that too.Organizations that trust in OSTraining include: Apple, George Washington University, U.S Department of Education & PfizerWatch 2500+ videos on WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, SEO, HTML, CSS, PHP & moreGain access to 2 new additional classes every weekReceive printable certificates upon each course completionLearn from only the best & most experienced instructorsUtilize Joomla’s 10,000+ extensions & templates to build fully functional websitesMaster WordPress, the most popular platform used on the Web todayBuild sites w/ Drupal, the intuitive software used by large organizations like WhiteHouse.gov, Sony & moreSave 96% on a Lifetime Subscription of OSTraining Developer CoursesNote: promotion available to new OSTraining students only.

They're hand-screened and $11.09 from Danse Macabre on Etsy. (via Geekymerch)

Lana covered her face in adhesive googly-eyes and won trypophobic, slo-mo Hallowe'en. (via JWZ)

Artist Robert Sikoryak is creating a full-length graphic novel based on the terms and conditions for Apple's Itunes, a novella-length document of eye-watering legalese that you "agree" to without ever reading. (more…)

Jeff Newelt says, "Here's a story from Dean Haspiel's Beef With Tomato, a collection of autobiographical comics with some essays that cover Dean's move from Manhattan to Brooklyn. Dean as you may know, drew The Quitter graphic novel for Harvey Pekar plus many American Splendor stories, and he collaborated with Jonathan Ames on The Alcoholic graphic novel, and also drew the opening title sequence for Bored To Death Beef With Tomato is published by Dean's own Hang Dai Editions imprint (distributed by the newly revamped Alternative Comics) that he started with fellow cartoonists including Gregory Benton, Joshua Neufeld and the late Seth Kushner."

https://youtu.be/PwJaa-TFVSgBehold, how the mighty have fallen. (more…)

If you're in Ikebukuro and need a cozy, bookish bed for the night, try Book and Bed, a "designed hostel" that hides coffin-hotel-style bunks among bookshelves lined with handsome volumes and rolling ladders. The books aren't for sale, but you're welcome to read them in your bunk. (more…)

This week, our partnership with Critical Distance brings us a look inside the cheerful pacifist adventure game Undertale as well as Life is Strange's final chapter.Kill Screen's Frances Chiem argues that the “gut punch” of futility in Life is Strange’s conclusion is effective because it transcends genre cliches. Protagonist Max doesn’t get to be the hero. As the title of Chiem’s article succinctly argues, "We Need to Stop Letting Everyone Save the World."Writing for FemHype, the writer known as Nightmare takes on the staggeringly popular Undertale, "the RPG game where you don't have to destroy anyone." The game has become a hit for its charming characters and broad, inclusive representation, as well as its emphasis on pacifist resolutions, which Nightmare argues speaks especially to LGBT+ players.At Ludus Novus, Gregory Avery-Weir explains how Skyrim’s city of Riften is doomed to perpetual crime and poverty because the thieves and thugs running it are “essential” in the game’s code and therefore can’t be removed:When games portray fictional worlds, they make implicit statements about the nature of the real world. By placing the Thieves Guild—one of the game’s three major employers—in a corrupt town ruled by a coldhearted mead magnate, Skyrim makes a statement about criminals and morality. Criminals come from bad places, and there’s nothing you can do to improve the situation.Bianca Batti of Not Your Mama’s Gamer takes a look at women-driven horror games like Among the Sleep and Alien: Isolation and concludes that they, too, often 'hard code' their mother figures as either victims or monsters:In these two texts, motherhood becomes binaristically constructed between the two poles of good mothering and bad mothering, with no other options for maternal identity made available.Finally, speaking at a recent Queerness in Games Conference local event, Critical Distance's own Kris Ligman discusses Dark Souls and sex as an extended metaphor on the cultural gatekeeping of playing the 'right' games:It seems funny to me that even within my own social circles, frequently self-identified as progressive and inclusive, we police each other in this way. ‘What do you mean you haven’t played this critical darling indie game because you work two full-time jobs to keep a roof over your head, and even if you could play a game in your off hours your machine is too outdated to run it? What do you mean a game is too physically demanding for you, and you already can’t afford to go to the doctor? What do you mean you’re just not into that sort of game?’follow Critical Distance on Twitter and consider pledging your support on Patreon

Over the course of 12 years, photographer Christopher Herwig traveled more than 18,000 miles around Eastern Europe to photograph the incredible, brutalist, experimental, and downright bizarre bus stops built during the Communist era. He compiled the results into a new book titled Soviet Bus Stops. “I’d never seen such a variety of creative expression applied to a public structures before,” Herwig told Vantage. “The designers pushed the limits of their imaginations. They did not hold back and sometimes, maybe, even they went too far...These bus stops are less about the Soviet Union as a whole and more about the local regions and individual artists … people who were often creatively oppressed.”Soviet Bus Stops (Amazon)

This looks like a billboard from the movie Idiocracy, but it is Christchurch, New Zealand, and the property development company that owns it has refused to take it down after receiving complaints that it demeans female construction workers. (more…)

Comcast's Xfinity posted a snide comment on Facebook about Google Fiber's hiccup during a televised pro sports event. Comcast customers used the opportunity to fire back at the much-hated cable provider.The first reply to the post said, "Screw yourself, Xfinity. Google Fiber has failed once, and you are failing continuously." (more…)

https://youtu.be/1Mx97ZuRMrgRobots have a hard time making their way across uneven, unstable terrain. (more…)

In 1959, Texas journalist John Howard Griffin darkened his skin and lived for six weeks as a black man in the segregated South. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll describe his harrowing story and what it showed about the true state of race relations in America.We'll also ponder crescent moons, German submarines, and griffins in India and puzzle over why a man would be arrested for winning a prize at a county fair.Show notesEnter coupon code CLOSET at Harry's and $5 off their starter set of high-quality razors.Please support us on Patreon!

"Haters gonna hate" may just be a dumb meme, but "haters gonna hate, players gonna play" is a copyrighted expression, according to a lawsuit filed against pop singer Taylor Swift.The claimed copyright proprietor is Jesse Graham, whose action comes not long after Swift declined to appear in a selfie with him, according to the New York Post.Taylor Swift's song, Shake it Off, contains a similar wording to the one Graham situates in his own work. Graham, 50, alleges that the chorus of Swift's 2014 anthem ("Cause the players gonna play, play, play, play, play / And the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate") borrows from his slow-jam "Haters Gone Hate," which contains the phrase "Haters gonna hate, players gonna play."Though the two songs bear little resemblance beyond that one lyrical similarity, Graham adamantly defends his case."Her hook is the same hook as mine," he told the Daily News on Saturday, claiming Swift uses it about 72 times in her song. "If I didn't write the song 'Haters Gone Hate,' there wouldn't be a song called 'Shake It Off.'"Here is Mr. Graham's 2003 song:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=808MLaHcBs4And here's Swift's hit:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfWlot6h_JMAccording to the Post, he's also planning to sue CNN for the title of its morning show "New Day," as he operates a church organization called "New Day Worldwide."In 2010 I asked a Latin forum what "haters gonna hate" is in Latin. It's apparently "Osores Oderint". Then I asked them what "let them hate, so long as they click" would be. At that point, as I recall, I was banned from the Latin forum.

A crack in the Earth almost a kilometer long opened in Wyoming—and no-one was around to see it happen. CBS Local reports that the fissure was likely the result of landslides over a period of two weeks.The size is estimated at 750 yards long by 50 yards wide.Randy Becker, a hunter who saw the crack and took some pictures, was surprised to see it, “I was stunned. The magnitude of this shift in earth is dramatic. It blows you away to see it.”NBC News has this incredible shot of it from the sky:The Washington Post reports that the mysterious hole has opened nervous questions about fearsome regional megavolcanoes. Experts, however, say it's NBD.According to the SNS, locals have been referring to the newly formed trench as “the gash.” Others simply call it “the crack.” Photos from the crevasse reveal steep cliffs, massive earthen towers and large boulders strewn across the bottom.The gash’s size was impressive, but so was the speed at which it formed. Social media users speculated that the formation represented an impending volcanic eruption or an earthquake, but experts were quick to allay their fears.On its Facebook page last week, SNS provided an update about what might have caused the ground to split open:Since so many people have commented and asked questions, we wanted to post an update with a little more information. An engineer from Riverton, WY came out to shed a little light on this giant crack in the earth. Apparently, a wet spring lubricated across a cap rock. Then, a small spring on either side caused the bottom to slide out. He estimated 15 to 20 million yards of movement.

Here is excellent work by Dave Pollot, who improves thrift-store art with the addition of pop culture icons. [via r/gaming]In another series, he describes how he turned a charming, if slightly uncanny beach painting into a scene from libertarian nightmare Bioshock.He doesn't just stick to games. Here's a Sharknado perfect from grandma's wall.My favorite, though, is this lovely painting of Falkor the Luckdragon, from The Never-Ending Story.You can follow Dave on Instragram, too.

Titan’s top-selling, MFi-certified, tangle-free charging cables now come in a pack, so you can conveniently charge anywhere life may take you. Titan’s original 3.25 foot cable is wrapped twice in industrial-grade, flexible steel and packs permanently-sealed USB and Lightning connectors that won’t be falling apart in this century, or the next. The Loop, its smaller sibling, features the same great strength, but also conveniently folds in half to attach to your keychain or belt loop. One for home, one for the road, it’s a match made in heaven.Wrapped in two layers of flexible, high-strength steelIncludes sealed one-piece housing fused directly over the cable to keep the connectors in placeCertified w/ Apple’s MFi program for safe chargingMade to last for lifeBacked by a Limited Lifetime WarrantyFor the micro USB version, click here.Save 30% on the Titan cable & Titan loop lightning charger bundle in the Boing Boing Store.