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Metafont makes it easy to create your own typeface: all you have to do is move sliders that alter the geometry until you've got the results you want. Then click "download," and you have your font!metaflop is an easy to use web application for modulating your own fonts. metaflop uses metafont, which allows you to easily customize a font within the given parameters and generate a large range of font families with very little effort. With the modulator it is possible to use metafont without dealing with the programming language and coding by yourself, but simply by changing sliders or numeric values of the font parameter set. this enables you to focus on the visual output – adjusting the parameters of the typeface to your own taste. all the repetitive tasks are automated in the background.The unique results can be downloaded as a webfontpackage for embedding on your homepage or an opentype postscript font (.otf) which can be used on any system in any application supporting otf. Various metafonts can be chosen from our type library. they all come along with a small showcase and a preset of type derivations. Metaflop is open source – you can find us on github, both for the source code of theplatform and for all the fonts.

You'd be forgiven for thinking the videocassette format long-dead, but it turns out that Betamax is still around. Sony is finally going to withdraw tapes from sale, bringing a 40-year story to an end.The last recorders were sold in 2002.ベータビデオカセットおよびマイクロMVカセットテープ出荷終了のお知らせ [Sony; via The Verge]

Photographic proof that dogs are angels. Not shopped, we can tell by the pixels.HT: d0gbl0g.dog

Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge came up with a convenient way to reject a proposed amendment to the state constitution to legalize cannabis: incorrect mixed singular and plural nouns, adjectives, and verbs in the amendment. Rutledge also said the the phrase “all products derived from the cannabis plant” was too ambiguous. The current laws against weed in Arkansas are some of the harshest in the country:Arkansas punishes first-time convicts of marijuana possession (fewer than four ounces) with a misdemeanor, which can result in up to a year in jail and a maximum $2,500 fine. A repeat offense of possessing fewer than four ounces amounts to a felony, inviting six years of incarceration and a maximum $10,000 fine. That is also the punishment for possession with the purpose of planting and growing more.

The U.K.'s Advertising Standards Authority has banned winemaker Premier Estates' "Taste the Bush" advertisement, created by agency Saatchi Masius. According to the government agency, the phrase is understood "to be a reference to oral sex, particularly given that it was accompanied with the image of the wine glass positioned directly in front of the woman's crotch" and that the "ad presented the woman in a degrading manner." Of course, the value of the ad's earned media, aka free publicity, has far exceeded anything Premier Estates could have paid for. ASA Ruling on Budge Brands Ltd t/a Premier Estates Wine (via Huffington Post)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmcGwBjL7W0

PrankvsPrank turned a remote-controlled car into the infamous pizza-loving rat to terrorize unwitting passers-by. How-To video below:https://youtu.be/HLcSDFtHOGA

The first time we ever see the power of the "light side" of the Force is to psychically dominate a security guard. The first time we see a lightsaber in use, it's to maim someone in a bar brawl. It's the "elegant weapon" of a man so feared that his battle cry sends the local people scattering. Small wonder, given that his apprentice slaughtered those same people indiscriminately and without repercussion.This man, Obi-Wan Kenobi, pines for a time when he and his brothers roamed the galaxy, meting out their unaccountable rulings as emotionless judges and executioners— when not using their powers to cheat at dice. "A more civilized age" indeed. (more…)

For our vacation this year, my wife Gina and I took a driving tour of the southern states. The plan was to eat as much BBQ as possible and my fingertips still smell of smoky sauces. We hung out in Memphis and pigged out in Nashville. We made our way south to Mississippi and that’s when it happened. We saw Yoda! The thing is, he wasn’t hanging out in the swamps like you’d expect. He was ON our rental car!I didn’t see him at first but as I got closer his image jumped out at me. It’s obvious right? You don’t even need to squint and look the other way. Yoda’s head is right there, as plain as day!And the license plate designer made absolutely no effort to make this Georgian peach pit look like a peach pit at all! Instead, it looks just like the silhouetted profile of our favorite Jedi Master! Now, if we do a side by side comparison of a peach pit and Yoda, I think you'll find they look nothing alike. Just look at how pissed off Yoda is for even having to hang out with a peach pit for this article. So I ask you dear reader, how could this have happened? How did that license plate artwork get created in the first place? Though this is a noodle scratcher, I have a couple of theories.THEORY #1I believe the designer had way too many free lance jobs going at one time and got overwhelmed. He swapped the Yoda asset from one job for a peach pit in another, went on a weekend bender and then to the printer. Nobody double-checked his work and the swap went unnoticed until it was too late. Both the state of Georgia and The Walt Disney Company were hoping no one would see it - and for a while they were fine...until now.By the way, this theory would also explain my childhood lunchbox.THEORY #2My second theory is that the green mass they call a peach pit, is actually the state of Georgia with some liberties taken.Here's is a diagram of how to take a perfectly good depiction of a proud US state and turn it into ambiguous story fodder. The truth is, I still prefer theory #1.So obvious it is.

In a characteristically insightful essay, Clay Shirky discusses the largely invisible rise of online education and dissects the causes of that invisibility: namely that the American higher education system is an iron-clad requirement for economic success, and it is remarkably bad at serving people who are already poor. (more…)

So smooth, so attractive…it doesn’t get much better than the Apple USB wall plug. NomadPlus acknowledges the presence of true greatness—it doesn’t replace your charger, it makes it better. Slip it inside the NomadPlug and charge your phone and internal 1800mAh backup battery via wall outlet. When you unplug, NomadPlus goes from average wall charger to clutch portable battery. From the wide open roads to the wall, NomadPlus will keep you powered.Fits perfectly w/ your existing Apple wall plugCharges Androids & other gadget types w/ use of a compatible cableCharges all iPhone models from standard Apple Lightning cableCharges gadgets via a wall plug as normal, while also charging the internal 1800mAh backup batteryPowers your phones & gadgets on-the-goIncludes pass-through smart charging & overload protectionSave $15 on the NomadPlus SmartPhone Wall Charger and Battery Pack in the Boing Boing Store today.

The politics escape me, but I'm fascinated by the US Debt Clock, a website covered in real-time tickers and counters purporting to show all of the unpleasant statistics piling up in America.They also have a World Debt Clock for all your international inchoate anxiety needs.

Christian Kirchesch put together a cracking set of logos as used by musicians, pirates, demo writers and other e'erdowells of the Commodore Amiga's hardcore coding scene.Originally this was supposed to be an article about the Top 20 Logos from Commodore Amiga. It ended up with 159. The more I digged into it, the more precious gems I fount. Graphics I hadn't seen for decades, straying around in .ADF- and .DMS-images somewhere on the Internet, forgotten by most people. Some of these Logos go even back to 1988 (Tristar, Unit A, World of Wonders).

The manual for Atari's classic game (posted to flickr by Brian Bennett exactly ten years ago) is not a masterpiece of design. But it is beautiful, in its way, and I strongly approve of that particular shade of orange. Sadly, your ninety-day warranty is over. Pong (1976) [via]P.S. there are all sorts of manuals for early arcade games, including Pong, at Textfiles.org.

Election Betting Odds tallies not polls but gambling odds, to figure out who people think will win the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Democrat Hillary Clinton is the predictable favorite, but interestingly, bettors don't think much of ostensible Republican front-runner Donald Trump, preferring Mark Rubio. Carson, high-polling among conservatives but fast-becoming an object of humor for everyone else, is way down the list. [via internet is beautiful]

In The Negative Association Between Religiousness and Children’s Altruism Across the World published this week in Current Biology, academic researchers from the US, Canada, Qatar, Jordan, South Africa, Turkey and China report on a study of about 1,200 children from around the world in which a "robust" correlation between religious upbringing in either Christianity or Islam and a lack of altruism was demonstrated. (more…)

https://vimeo.com/144773963You used to call me on my cell phone. Late night when you need my cat food. (more…)

In the past few days there have been a flurry of stories about the Russian plane that crashed in the Sinai peninsula, which investigators reportedly think may have been caused by a bomb. Notably, anonymous US officials have been leaking to journalists that they believe ISIS is involved, and it’s a perfect illustration of the US government’s rank hypocrisy when it comes to the Edward Snowden disclosures. (more…)

The Trans-Pacific Partnership is a very long, legalistic proposed treaty full of paid-for corporate graft. The Washington Post has made it easy to search, lest its inaccessibility dissuade scrutiny (which seems unlikely, though anything that makes it accessible to laypeople will annoy the right people)

The Staten Island Advance reports that Brandon Williams, 13, was eating his lunch at Barnes Intermediate School on Oct. 28 when he saw that his classmate Jessica Pellegrino was choking on a piece of apple. (more…)

American Apparel founder Dov Charney still lives in an 11,000 square foot mansion in Los Angeles, but he says he is so broke he can't even afford a lawyer and has to couch surf when he goes to New York. (more…)

Posted by Walt Disney Studios Japan.

Are you planning on taking a trip to the Moon? If so, you'll want to create a commemorative photo album. The moon is a pretty desolate place and the truth is, you just don’t have a whole lot to work with. You’ve got moon dust, some craters and if you’re lucky, you’ve got some shadow and light. (more…)

EFF, the Organization for Transformative Works, and the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund have filed a brief [PDF] in a Supreme Court case over "publicity rights" -- the right of famous people to veto the use of their names and likenesses in other works, like caricatures, documentaries, and biographies. (more…)

Coaxed by the Copyright Page: An Erotic Short Story is Leonard Delaney's latest erotic short story, part four in the Digital Desires series, which includes Taken by the Tetris Blocks, Conquered by Clippy and Invaded by the Iwatch -- they're $2.32 each. (more…)

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)

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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