Boing Boing

See sample pages from this book at Wink.Pocket Imperium is a surprisingly big game in a very small box. The “Pocket” in its name refers to its microgame stature, while “Imperium” offers a clue to its galaxy-spanning scale and 4X game mechanic (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate), popular among galactic empire games. The first thing you notice about Pocket Imperium is the quality of its components. The box and art are lovely, as are the command cards and seven main “sector tiles” (the game board). The game also comes with 52 brightly colored wooden spaceship markers in four designs. There's a lot stuffed into this box, and with everything placed on the table, it really makes for a satisfying game spread. But at $40, you do pay for all this. The rules for Pocket Imperium are deceptively simple. Each player plays three cards (six if it's two players) that contain movement commands (Expand, Explore, Exterminate). These moves are “pre-programmed” before each turn with the cards turned over simultaneously and executed in the sequence of Expand, Explore, Exterminate. So, one player may want to expand first, another explore, and maybe another exterminate. If you're the only player commanding an expansion that turn, you get two bonus ships; if two players execute the same order, they each get one extra ship; if all of the players execute the same turn command, no one gets extra vessels to field. The turn sequence and bonuses are indicated on quick reference cards you can keep on the table.The game is played on a 7-tile galaxy of planetary systems that can be configured into different galactic shapes. The tiles are also two-sided and the flip sides contain more difficult star systems to conquer and new obstacles like a black hole.

 Playing the game basically consists of moving your ships from system to system, trying to exploit its resources and take over its planets. Each planet has point values and there are various bonuses (and limitations). This game may seem simple and not tremendously exciting on the surface, but it has some real depth and replayability to it. The command cards being locked in before the round begins, and then executed in a set order, creates a great psychological dimension to the game as you try and get inside the heads of your opponents to figure out what turn sequence they might program. And with the dual-sided tiles, and different galaxy configurations, there's a lot you can do to change up the game. For a 2-3 player game, the game ends in six rounds; eight rounds if four people are playing. A movement tracker printed on the back of the box keeps tabs of your turns. Players add up all of their victory point tiles at the end and there are some final-round bonuses. In the end, the galactic overlord with the most points wins. Praise Xenu!Pocket Imperium Card Game by Passport Game StudiosAges 12 and up, 2-4 players$40 Buy a copy on Amazon

The Treaty on the Right to Privacy, Protection AgainstImproper Surveillance and Protection of Whistleblowers [PDF] (AKA "The Snowden Treaty") was created by David Miranda, Glenn Greenwald's partner, who was detained by UK police under terrorism legislation while transiting through London's Heathrow airport with a encrypted thumbdrive containing some of the Snowden leaks.The treaty, which has Snowden's endorsement, is co-sponsored by the international NGO Avaaz, and will be the first instrument of its kind: an agreement among nations to protect people who expose official wrongdoing.The treaty arrives at an important moment: with the first tremors of the age of privacy breaches upon us, officialdom's response is to enable more spying and to immunize companies who rat out whistleblowers from liability for breaching their customers' privacy.Without a counternarrative about security that involves protecting populations rather than putting them under suspicion, we are headed down a very dangerous and scary path.Entitled the “The International Treaty on the Right to Privacy, Protection Against Improper Surveillance and Protection of Whistleblowers,” or, colloquially, the “Snowden Treaty,” an executive summary of the forthcoming treaty calls on signatories “to enact concrete changes to outlaw mass surveillance,” increase efforts to provide “oversight of state surveillance,” and “develop international protections for whistleblowers.”At the event launching the treaty, Snowden spoke via a video link to say that the treaty was “the beginning of work that will continue for many years,” aimed at building popular pressure to convince governments to recognize privacy as a fundamental human right, and to provide internationally-guaranteed protections to whistleblowers who come forward to expose government corruption. Snowden also cited the threat of pervasive surveillance in the United States, stating that “the same tactics that the NSA and the CIA collaborated on in places like Yemen are migrating home to be used in the United States against common criminals and people who pose no threat to national security.”“SNOWDEN TREATY” CALLS FOR END TO MASS SURVEILLANCE, PROTECTIONS FOR WHISTLEBLOWERS [Murtaza Hussain/The Intercept]

https://youtu.be/iQ52OkyNp8QCB Gitty is an online store that sells parts for people who like to make cigar box guitars. On of their new offerings is a Teisco Del Rey-style Gold Foil Clip-in Magnetic Pickup with Amp Cord. It's only $13.50 and sounds great! In the video above, Shane Speal demos the pickup on one of his handmade three-string license plate guitars.

David Stojcevski, 32, was sentenced to 30 days in Michigan's Macomb County jail for failing to pay a traffic fine. He was addicted to drugs but the jail refused to treat him so he died. Reason reports that over the "next 17 days of his incarceration in a brightly lit cell — where he was denied clothing — he lost 50 pounds, suffered convulsions, and eventually began to hallucinate. He died in agony, from a combination of obvious, untreated drug withdrawal and galling neglect." Jailers were able to see him on a security monitor the entire time, but they simply allowed him to suffer and die.Stojcevski’s parents are suing the county. A lawyer for Macomb county said the suit “lacks legal merit,” and the county has no plans to settle.

Whether it was Leland Palmer's grotesque waltzing or the silent shimmy of The Man From Another Place, dancing played a key role in the cult favorite mystery show Twin Peaks. Now you and a friend can play as different Twin Peaks characters (even a log), and join a sobbing Leland on the dance floor with Dance Dance Revolution-style controls. It's called Fire Dance With Me (of course), and it's awesome, free and quick to play. One of you plays with the arrow keys, the other with the WASD controls, as a surprisingly-compelling dance take on the Angelo Badalamenti sound plays. It was made for DUPLICADE, a jam for short player versus player games where one person can win within 30 seconds.This year's DUPLICADE is themed around games that feel like "outlaw flea" works, bizarre knockoffs and bootlegs mashed up from media properties real and imagined. See all the entries here.

Anil Dash is on fire in his editorial on all the ways that publishers, advertisers, brokers, readers, OS vendors, browser vendors, and users pass the buck when it comes to intrusive ads, ad-blocking, and sustaining ad-supported media.“I’m a publisher. I let the ad networks handle the inventory. I have to worry about the bottom line, and our brand. I can’t get in the weeds with all this stuff.”“We’re just an ad serving platform. We deliver the ads, and make sure they’re tracked. It’s not up to us what ads come through. Who are we to say?”“We’re an optimization platform. Sure, we make the algorithm that decides which ads are displayed. But the software is neutral, it just uses math to decide. We’re not responsible for what buyers put in the system. And publishers can say no to anything they want to.”“We’re buying ads because we’ve got something to sell. We have to use whatever techniques are gonna make us the most money. Don’t like it? Don’t take our money.”How we pass the buck [Anil Dash/Medium]

https://youtu.be/OKTR6kMs--8From Champion's creation of the hooded sweatshirt in the 1930s through Rocky Balboa to today's high-end cashmere designs to Trayvon Martin, writer Gary Warnett explores the cultural history of the hoodie.

Imperial Phase by Plastic AntsCincinnati's Plastic Ants, purveyors of lovely "maximum chamber pop," follow up this year's gorgeous full-length debut LP, "Falling to Rise," with a new track "Imperial Phase." Listen above! Plastic Ants' dreamy orchestrations come from the friendship and collaboration of four music scene veterans: John Curley, bassist for Afghan Whigs, Joe Klug, drummer for Wussy, Robert Cherry, singer/songwriter perhaps best known from his many years as top editor of Alternative Press magazine, and Guy Vanasse, a multi-instrumentalist and singer with deep classical training. Cellist Amy Gillingham and Lisa Walker, Wussy's stellar singer, guest on the Falling to Rise album as well. "I don’t even consider (Plastic Ants to be) rock music,” Cherry said in a recent interview. “It’s hard pop with timeless classical arrangements. We wanted to keep the instrumentation more acoustic because that’s where the songs originated and closer to how they were written. We like that instrumentation in terms of how timeless it can be. The collision of rock players and classical players made for some funny moments in the studio. At one point, John and I were trying to explain the appeal of AC/DC — a guitarist wearing a school boy’s outfit accompanied by a shirtless singer shouting sexual innuendos. They gave us this blank look and humored us.”I'm glad, because they sure make beautiful music together. Plastic Ants play a free show at Cincinnati's MOTR Pub on Monday, September 28. Plastic AntsTrailer for "Falling to Rise" below:https://youtu.be/LyaR4lDz13g(album cover photo at top by John Curley)

This is cracking me up, from Santa Monica College's 1989 course catalog:As a member of the Associated Student board of directors, Jason Weisberger “feels like part of a family.” He is one of a dozen student government leaders who oversee a $300,000 budget, providing funding for clubs, and such student activities as Homecoming, annual festivals, and free campus concerts.With the aid of Santa Monica College’s transfer center, Jason, a business management major with an eye on a legal career, plans to attend the University of Southern California. The overwhelming success of SMC’s transfer programs convinced the 17-year-old Santa Monica High School graduate that this was the community college for him.Working with the college’s counselors, Jason was able to arrange a class schedule that would accommodate both his student government responsibilities and his job at a Beverly Hills law firm. He is studying psychology, accounting, and cinema.While Jason has been away from his birthplace, Philadelphia, for most of his life, he still enjoys playing “lacrosse, a real East Coast game.” During his rare quiet moments he reads; he is fond of classics, Greek histories, and poetry, especially the work of Alfred Lord Tennyson.I'm actually working on a book of poetry, so while the last line makes me cringe I have to say I guess 17 year old me was dead on.

Rightscorp is the publicly traded extortion racket that tries to force/bribe ISPs into disconnecting their customers from the Internet unless those customers pay "settlements" for unproven allegations of copyright infringement.Cox, a major ISP, is locked in a legal battle with Rightscorp, who represent a bunch of music publishers -- companies that control the rights to musical compositions.Cox's lawyers have come up with a really interesting legal tactic. They say that Rightscorp only represents the composers in the songs they're suing over; they do not represent the performers. That means that when Rightscorp joined Bittorrent swarms to download the "evidence" they used to attack Cox, they were committing mass-scale copyright infringement against the recording artists in those songs.Cox lawyers don't stop there! Anticipating that Rightscorp will say that the company's downloading was fair use, they argue that this means that Rightscorp acknowledges that in some cases, Bittorrent downloading is fair use. If so, they should have taken that into account when they started threatening Cox's subscribers.The Cox motion is a thing of beauty, a wonderfully constructed argument that hoists the highest petard it's ever been my privilege to witness.“Rightscorp either committed massive infringements of the sound recording copyrights or must have relied on the fair use doctrine. If the latter, that fact is an admission that activity over BitTorrent may constitute fair use, but there is no evidence that Rightscorp considered the possibility of fair use in generating millions of notices of claimed infringement,” Cox lawyers add.Cox goes on to highlight that Rightscorp targets elderly and disabled consumers, instructing its employees to disregard protests from alleged infringers.“When a consumer denies infringement, the phone script instructs the enforcer to state that the consumer must obtain a police report, and that the police may ‘take your device and hold it for ~5 days to investigate the matter’.”Finally, Cox highlights that the copyright holders have failed to directly address the alleged damage downloaders are causing. Instead of sending takedown notices to torrent sites asking them to remove infringing content, Rightscorp relies on these torrents to conduct its business.COX ACCUSES RIGHTSCORP OF MASS COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT [Ernesto/Torrentfreak]

The Womanizer is a German-made sex toy looks like an ear thermometer or a vaporizer. It comes in a variety of garish, bejeweled, leopard-spotted, and tattooed designs. It's not a vibrator. It's a gadget that suckles the clitoris. Vanessa Marin, a licensed psychotherapist specializing in sex therapy, reviewed it for Lifehacker and said it "induces powerful orgasms in a shockingly short amount of time."After about ninety seconds of use, this bedazzled ear thermometer had completely won me over. The suction sensation feels unassuming at first, but catches up with you real quick and pushes you over the edge into powerful, throbbing orgasms that feel remarkably different (and better) than vibration-induced orgasms. If you hold the Womanizer in place, this little workhorse will make you come over and over again with ease. It’s pretty awesome.The Womanizer also offers a huge range of stimulation. The lowest level hardly feels like anything, and the highest feels like it could suck your clitoris straight off your body. All that variety means it can work well for a lot of women.This Ridiculous Toy Will Give You One of the Best Orgasms of Your Lifehttps://youtu.be/Xy0gKeZ879s

This kindly snapping turtle has been trained to open pineapples for his human companion.

https://youtu.be/ysCaqh38JVQLaser cutters are machines that cut and engrave flat material – such as plywood, acrylic, chocolate, leather, cardboard, seashells, glass, even sheets of dried seaweed. Today, Glowforge introduced a low-price laser cutter that blows away the competition at a much lower price.Glowforge is a game changer in many ways, and I haven't been this excited by a technology in a long time. The things you can make with one (see images below) are orders of magnitude better looking than things you can make with a 3D printer of the same price, and the Glowforge is much easier to learn how to use than a 3D printer. Dan Shapiro, the founder of Glowforge (he's the creator of the Robot Turtles game), gave me a Skype video demo of the machine in action earlier this week. He showed me how to make a votive candle holder out of two different materials. He placed one sheet of thin walnut and another sheet of frosted acrylic on the Glowforge's cutting bed (which has a 12-inch x 20-inch working area). He opened his iPad, which had a live image of the cutting bed displayed on it (the Glowforge has a camera and is conected to Wi-Fi). Dan then dragged the cutting patterns for the pieces of the candle holder onto the video image of the walnut and acrylic pieces. This neat software solution for aligning material was developed by Dean Putney, who was a contractor for many years at Boing Boing, and now works for Dan in Seattle. The software innovations in the Glowforge not only allows the company sell the machine at a lower cost than other laser cutters, is also enables the Glowforge to do things that other laser printers can't: • It automatically profiles a material by looking at an invisible bar code on the protective paper that covers the material. The user does not have to set the intensity or speed of the laser cuts. You can also use your own materials, and once you figure out the best settings, you can save them in a drop-down menu.• It has an autofocus system inside the cutting head, which measures the height of the material, so the head will move up and down as it traverses over bent or curved material.• Typical laser cutters have a red dot that shows you where it is going to cut. If you want to engrave the back of your iPhone, for instance, the laser cutter will draw rectangles around the phone to figure out where the engraving goes. Dan says that red dot system adds about $600 to the cost of a laser cutter. Glowforge did away with all that and just put a camera in the lid (which also takes a picture of you when you lift the lid to remove your creation from the cutting bed).• You can simple draw on the material (or paper on top of the material), and the Glowforge will cut or engrave the drawingAfter dragging the votive candle holder cutting patterns over the image of the two sheets of material, Dan hit the send button on the iPad. The data was sent via Wi-Fi to the cloud and then to the Glowforge machine. He pressed the print button on the Glowforge and it went to work, cutting the walnut first, and then the acrylic. While the Glowforge was cutting (it took about 15 minutes to cut all the pieces) he showed me some of the other things that he and his colleagues have made, including a beautiful leather wallet with a century-old map of Seattle engraved in it (image above). It was made from a single seamless piece of leather. The Glowforge cut the stitch holes with a 0.001 inch precision, and the lacing looks perfect. This laser cutter is going to change the world of leathercraft. I want a Glowforge for this reason alone. He also showed me a gorgeous Settlers of Catan gameboard with interlocking hexagons made from different kinds of colorful unpainted wood. When the Glowforge was finished cutting, Dan removed the cut pieces and assembled the candle holder. The pieces fit together perfectly and were designed to stay in place using friction. Dan dropped it in the mail and I took a photo of it:Glowforge cuts through a quarter-inch of wood with no problem. You can also cut one-half inch by cutting one one side, then flipping the material over and having the camera re-register the material. Pre-order prices: The base model is $2,000 and can handle material up to 20-inches x 12-inches. The pro model is $4,000 and has faster and better optics, a HEPA air filter so you don't have to vent the smoke outside, and includes a drawer that opens to allow you to feed longer pieces of material through it, so you can make furniture. Both models will ship in December 2015.Below, a gallery of things people have made with Glowforge prototypes.

“Proprietary software is an unsafe building material. You can’t inspect it.” Columbia University law professor Eben Moglen made that observation 5 years ago. It's timely today, as the Volkswagen emissions fraud scandal--enabled by proprietary software--worsens. Volkswagen admitted this week it altered proprietary software on 11 million VW diesel cars, so they'd pass emissions tests when they were actually belching more smog. “The breadth of the Volkswagen scandal should not obscure the broader question of how vulnerable we are to software code that is out of sight and beyond oversight,” writes Jim Dwyer at the New York Times today.Mr. Moglen, a lawyer, technologist and historian who founded the Software Freedom Law Center, has argued for decades that software ought to be transparent. That would best serve the public interest, he said in his 2010 speech.“Software is in everything,” he said, citing airplanes, medical devices and cars, much of it proprietary and thus invisible. “We shouldn’t use it for purposes that could conceivably cause harm, like running personal computers, let alone should we use it for things like anti-lock brakes or throttle control in automobiles.”On Tuesday, Mr. Moglen recalled the elevator in his hotel.“Intelligent public policy, as we all have learned since the early 20th century, is to require elevators to be inspectable, and to require manufacturers of elevators to build them so they can be inspected,” he said. “If Volkswagen knew that every customer who buys a vehicle would have a right to read the source code of all the software in the vehicle, they would never even consider the cheat, because the certainty of getting caught would terrify them.”“Volkswagen’s Diesel Fraud Makes Critic of Secret Code a Prophet”[caption id="attachment_401447" align="alignnone" width="644"]A VW Golf VII car is pictured in a production line at the plant of German carmaker Volkswagen in Wolfsburg, Germany, 2013. REUTERS[/caption]

This week, the "doomsday seed vault" (as it's known in headlines, anyway) made the news because scientists made the first "withdrawal" from the remote arctic store. But there's another reason to be excited about the underground vault on Norway's Svalbard archipelago. Weed! And when shit gets real, we're gonna need it. [caption id="attachment_423358" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Svalbard seed vault[/caption]Why did they take some seeds out? According to The Crop Trust, an affiliated seed bank in Syria couldn't provide needed seeds to researchers in the Middle East because of the war in Syria. It's kind of amazing that the Aleppo field station functioned through the war as long as it did. Now that it can't, the mothership in the ice cliffs takes over. [caption id="attachment_423038" align="alignnone" width="800"] Photo: The Crop Trust[/caption]But there's more to be amazed about with this crazy Norwegian hidey-hole! It contains tons of beautiful magical cannabis seeds, because cannabis is an important plant that humans have used for everything from medicine to food to architecture to fashion to--well, getting high--for many thousands of years.[caption id="attachment_423373" align="alignnone" width="1000"] Hemp (cannabis) seeds and leaves. Shutterstock[/caption]As this 17-minute Svalbard mini-documentary puts it, the vault is “built to withstand an extreme future.” That extreme future, thank heavens, will include marijuana. Can you even imagine an extreme future without pot? Perish the thought. But not the pot.https://vimeo.com/62688049From a story on Marijuana.com, written some time ago but worth a new look today:According to a Marijuana.com analysis of Svalbard’s database, there are 21,500 cannabis seeds being held for safekeeping in the vault. That’s more weed seeds than there are asparagus, blueberry or raspberry seeds stored at the facility. There are more marijuana genetics in the “Doomsday Seed Vault” than there are for artichoke, cranberry and pear combined.The stored cannabis seeds originate from at least 17 countries, some of which aren’t at all surprising, like The Netherlands. Five hundred of the marijuana seeds, however, come from North Korea. None originate from the United States.While the government of Norway owns and operates the Svalbard vault itself, with assistance from the Nordic Genetic Research Center and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation-funded Global Crop Diversity Trust, the seeds are actually owned by the gene banks that stashed them there.Since the facility opened in 2008, there have been 39 deposits of cannabis seeds by three separate organizations: the Austrian Agency for Health and Food Safety, the Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research in Germany and the Nordic Genetic Resource Center, based in Sweden and Norway.Most recently, on April 9 of this year the Austrian group deposited 1,000 seeds each from France, The Netherlands, Poland and its own country.[via Marijuana Majority][caption id="attachment_423360" align="alignnone" width="598"] Location, location, location.[/caption][caption id="attachment_423361" align="alignnone" width="990"] Svalbard seed vault exterior[/caption][caption id="attachment_423372" align="alignnone" width="1000"] Cannabis, sprouting. Shutterstock[/caption]

Michael from Muckrock: "Union-busting Walt Disney became cozy with J. Edgar Hoover, the iconic animator's FBI files show, helping shut down dissident workers while infusing Disney programming with fond portrayals of federal enforcement. Disney even wanted to dedicate a special section of Tomorrowland to highlighting the Bureau of tomorrow -- which ended up being a step to far for America's head investigative agency."Giving the Bureau a coveted spot in the “science of tomorrow” wasn’t the only way Walt Disney planned to catapult the FBI into the imaginations of American children. Between January 1956 and December 1957 Disney repeatedly approached the Los Angeles office about devoting an episode of the beloved children’s show “Mickey Mouse Club” to the FBI. Although the objective was to, “acquaint American children with various employment opportunities in numerous fields of American endeavor,” the initial pitch was declined, but after years of negotiation, the episodes eventually aired in January 1958.The Orwellian script has been immortalized within Walt Disney’s declassified FBI file. The script follows the precocious Dirk Metzger, a 13-year-old Mickey Mouse Club reporter and the son of a Marine Corps Colonel, as he meets J. Edgar Hoover, watches agents shoot at a fake Baby Face Nelson, and gets his fingerprints taken. He also gives salient advice to kids like, “take my advice. Never throw a haymaker at a G-man.” The comfort this kid exhibits while learning about FBI investigation tactics and seeing agents shoot at targets with a name and a face is terrifying and exactly to the point. If Dirk Metzger is comfortable with trench-coated agents, why shouldn’t we?Before the show could be made however, the FBI sent Disney three pages of script revisions including taking the gun out of Dirk’s all-American hands. “The handling of a supposedly loaded weapon by a boy of Dirk’s age is not considered appropriate,” a memo from October 22, 1957 reads."He has been quite helpful." Walt Disney's FBI file [Matthew Guariglia/Muckrock]

This is yuge. You can buy it right now from Yandy for seventy dollars. For this sum, you get a "sexy" navy "suit" of equal of greater quality to an actual Trump suit, a red "Make America Great Again" cap, and a combover wig. The wig fails to capture the apricot candyfloss tesseract atop Trump's head, but I'm not an aficionado of sexy Trump costumes, so what do I know?Thus reports CNBC. According to a survey released by the National Retail Federation on Monday, political costumes tied for 10th place in its annual top costume list for adults (though this likely wasn't what they had in mind)."As we've seen for several years, Hollywood and pop culture both have a tremendous impact on how adults and their children decide to dress the part each Halloween, and it's evident some of the biggest newsmakers of the year will be out in full force this fall," NRF President and CEO Matthew Shay said.Also on Yandy is a Sexy Charlie Brown costume. I suspect this is not official Peanuts-licensed merchandise.

Say goodbye to your annoying, bulky key ring—KeySmart organizes your keys in one convenient, compact, and lightweight place. Easily attach up to 10 keys, and use the included loop to latch on your car fob as needed. The award-winning KeySmart is meticulously designed to allow for quick and easy key access, and will rid your life of key jingling and jabbing forever.Frame crafted from quality titanium for lightweight bodyBottle opener includedHardware milled from stainless steel for durabilityUnique ‘S’ design made to fit 2x the keys in half the spaceSize accommodates most sizes of keyMade in Chicago[embed]https://youtu.be/d-BPMVPtL9c[/embed]Save 31% On The KeySmart 2.0 Titanium Organizer Today

https://youtu.be/F6PliZbgt4sSPL-T is a brand-new black-and-white puzzle game for iOS about the simplicity of splitting up space. You're compelled to touch and divide squares much in the way you create harmony out of the table rings left by a soda glass, or straight lines from a pile of spilled salt. It's impossible to stop playing with.The core concept is very simple to grasp: Touch a square to split it. Your first touch creates a vertical line, your second a horizontal line, and then a vertical line again. This alternating arrangement lets you plan your dissection, and you aim to split the board as many times as possible before you run out of moves. Ultimately you're scored based on your number of splits while you make even grids—difficult to describe, but instantly sensible and evident to the hand and eye when you try it for yourself. It's designed by Simogo, who is is my favorite mobile game developer. The two-person team is just as at home making visually-distinctive, narratively-driven works like Device 6 and The Sailor's Dream as they are with cute action games like Beat Sneak Bandit or Bumpy Road. Says the developer:In many ways SPL-T is one of the most “purposeful” games we’ve made. Every tiny decision has had long discussions. We’ve weighed arguments against each other. We’ve put in and out features. Tested what feels like one million rules. A simple thing like removing the restart feature might seem like a miss – but it’s deliberately not there, because we want every round of SPL-T to count. We want you to get better at it and get a deeper understanding for it every time you play it. We don’t want you to look at online leaderboards at pointless numbers. We want you to talk to friends playing SPL-T, and we hope it will invite you to talk about strategies together.The developer's crafty reputation has led many to suggest that there has to be more to SPL-T than meets the eye—after all, why should a game of black and white lines and minimal sound have a 69 MB file size? Pure puzzle endeavor or not, I recommend getting on board.SPL-T is $2.99 on the App Store.

https://youtu.be/Liv-EMavw0Q“My wife and I were worried about how the dog would react to a baby, so we kept them apart for a few months. This is when they get introduced to each other.”[Scott Moore, YouTube]

Joinyouinthesun posted 80 classic movie posters, in hi-resolution, with the text removed.80 hi-res, textless posters (some of my favorites)

When we were at the Mission Inn for Weekend of Wonder, this 5-port USB desktop charging station, on sale at Amazon for $10 kept 3 iPhones and a tablet well-fed. I used the additional port to charge a battery pack. The great thing about it is that you can plug it into a wall outlet (which are always in weird places in hotel rooms for some reason) and set the charger on a desk for ready access. It even comes with a suction cup mat to hold your soap in the shower!

Lightning bugs are a sort of magic when you're young, the kind that feels like it escaped from the halls of Hogwarts and somehow reclassified itself as science under the cover of darkness. It's the sort of memory that tends to stay vivid: the moment when you cupped a firefly inside your hands and watched its light seep out between the cracks in your fingers like greenish-yellow fire.In the game Imaginal, you decide to relive one of those memories with a friend by walking through the woods and catching fireflies together after dark, like you used to do as kids. "It'll be super chill," they promise. "We can just hang out, catch some bugs and have a chat." And that's exactly what you do.Armed with a glass jar, you can only capture the bugs while they're illuminated, and if you happen to snag a special blue lightning bug you'll share an insight or an idle thought with your friend—or maybe they'll one with you. Don't bother racing around to each firefly the moment it lights up; it'll almost certainly be too late by the time you reach it, and you'll earn yourself a lot of frustration, but few bugs. Instead, relax: try following one firefly at a time as they bob back and forth in the shadows, and wait for its light to turn on. This isn't Cookie Clicker, it's a gentle, meditative game about spending time with a friend, and one that's particularly pleasant to play before bed.Designed by Lisa Brown with art by Denae Wilkowski and music by Michael McCarthy, Imaginal is pay-what-you-will, and available for download on Windows, Mac and Linux.

A rockslide shut down Mount Carmel Highway in southern Utah's Zion National Park last night. No one was injured. "Crews will have to blast the rock and use heavy machinery to clear it. Due to the rock fall, emergency response is not available on the east side of Zion. The Scenic Drive and Zion Canyon remains open," Park spokeswoman Jin Prugsawan told the Salt Lake Tribune.

See sample pages from this book at Wink.You may have seen my earlier Wink Fun review of Elenco’s terrific Mini-beest Kit, a working miniature model kit of one of Theo Jansen’s amazing animated creatures. I wanted to know more about him and his work so I found a copy of his 2009 book, The Great Pretender. The 240-page volume contains notes, timelines, photos, sketches and family trees for Jansen’s “Animarus,” as he calls his species of moving, breathing, and thinking constructions. He creates magnificent beasts out of the cheapest and lowliest of raw materials: thin wall PVC pipes, packing tape, empty soda bottles, and zip ties. When assembled, the giant, articulated creatures walk along the beach in the Netherlands, powered only by the wind. In the book’s format, each of the verso pages (on the left) have color photographs of the many details about his designs and their construction: hinges and movable joints, leg linkages, molds and fixtures, pneumatic tubing muscles, etc. Each artifact is artfully depicted with low-key lighting and muted backgrounds, like specimens in an archeological volume. There are also beautiful photos of the fully-assembled creatures in their native habitat, strolling along the shore.The recto pages (on the right) carry the text, with chapter-length explanations of his thoughts and processes on how and why he came to create the various versions of his animated “life forms.” There’s Animarus Sabulosa Adolescense (young sand-coated beach animal) and Animarus Vermiculus (worm animal) and about 30 more, each as amazing as the last. Along with explaining the origins of his animals, Jansen also muses about life, evolution, natural selection, sex, gender roles, memes, and many other topics.Jansen originally studied to be a physicist, but ultimately he became an artist. His writing evidences this dual nature. His radical (to the “root”) thinking and his very personal (and humorous!) impressions on even dry, technical matters combine to make for an interesting read. He’ll offer a thought like “animals move by changing shape. Repeated changes in shape result in repeated changes in place.” He expands on the concept, going from worms, to shellfish, to limbs, and then shows examples of his design process, which embody these abstract principles in very concrete and ingenious constructions. By limiting his palette to just a few “junk” materials, he has to be fiendishly clever. He coaxes precision out of low tech materials, “nerves” out of tubing, “muscles” out of bathroom caulk, and even creates a rudimentary type “thinking” that lets his creatures sense and respond to sand conditions. A valuable addition to the volume is a DVD with video interviews, examples of his many other art projects, and plenty of sequences of the Animari in action. After reading the book I had a much fuller appreciation of the mind of Theo Jansen and an understanding of his improbable creations.The Great Pretenderby Theo Jansennai010 publishers2013, 240 pages, 8.5 x 11.2 x 1.1 inches From $90 (used) Buy one on Amazon

If I have to pick the single best Disney theme park in the world, it’s always going to be the one Walt built — Disneyland in Anaheim, California. It really is different, and better, than anyplace else and the people who run it and work there take special pride in that. But the best Disney Resort in the world, taking into account all its parks, hotels, special seasonal events, and transportation (don’t you hate waiting for those buses in Orlando?) has to be The Tokyo Disney Resort. It’s has the second best Magic Kingdom style park in the world, with many unique rides. They’re really big on seasonal events, too, and they go all-out for Halloween.Plenty has been written about Cosplay (i.e., “costume” + “play”) in Tokyo, but people mostly focus on dressing up as manga and anime characters in Harajuku — on the Harajuku Jingu Bridge; coincidentally right next to the cicadas singing in Mejii-Jingu — and in Akihabara. Less well known is that for precisely 10 days in early September and 7 days in late October, The Tokyo Disney Resort has official Cosplay days where adults are allowed to come to Tokyo Disneyland in full costume. Here, however, the only costumes allowed are Disney characters (no surprise). These are not the tired schleppers dragging their kids around you see in the U.S. In Tokyo Disneyland there is a regal quality to the care with which the cosplayers make the costumes and the pride which with they wear them. Photos are generally allowed as long as you ask first. [caption id="attachment_423114" align="alignnone" width="1200"] They think Western guys are cool ... even middle-aged Western guys.[/caption][caption id="attachment_423115" align="alignnone" width="1200"] After you've watched the Cosplayers, head over to Pooh's Hunny Hunt for a souvenir bucket of honey popcorn.[/caption][caption id="attachment_423116" align="alignnone" width="1200"] Once you've washed the honey popcorn off your hands, head on over to the Shootin' Gallery, where in Japan you actually get a badge when you hit all 10 shots for two bucks. Lucky folks get a gold badge (hint: aim for the high rat).[/caption][caption id="attachment_423117" align="alignnone" width="1200"] And of course Tokyo Disneyland has its own Halloween thing going on which trumps anything done in the U.S. parks (and it’s all free with admission—no extra purchase hard ticket events).[/caption]For information about cosplay rules at Tokyo Disneyland, visit the official website (use Google Chrome with automatic translation for best results)

https://youtu.be/f7AblTjKTHkAs performed by Viva Vox in May 2011. The arrangement is by Boris Balunović, and it is conducted by Jasmina Lorin. Ivan Propadović is the soloist. [via r/videos]Heather says it sounds vaguely like something from Spongebob Squarepants.Here's the original:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzGKsXPBILw

https://youtu.be/CZydrXAq2pYIt's not something you see every day at the lights: a small aircraft barreling through the intersection after making an emergency landing on Red Hill Avenue in Irvine, California."Unusual airplane landing," reports YouTuber CalicoStrike. "Nobody hurt."The Orange County Register reports that the plane belongs to a school and likely suffered engine trouble. The Piper Cherokee aircraft landed at 6:18 p.m. near John Wayne Airport at Red Hill and McGaw avenues during rush-hour traffic, coming to a stop at MacArthur Boulevard, Irvine Police spokeswoman Farrah Emami said.There are no injuries or damage to the plane or other vehicles, and an investigation is underway.

Brooklyn-based artist Michael Kagan creates oil paintings of astronauts and other space-themed subjects. They are indeed out of this world. Read the rest

This month marks the 40th anniversary of Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here. It's a good time to celebrate that moment, when the portals opened and a stream of cosmic creative force spilled into our reality. Read the rest

Economist Paul Mason's blockbuster manifesto Postcapitalism suggests that markets just can't organize products whose major input isn't labor or material, but information, and that means that, for the first time in history, it's conceivable that we can have a society based on abundance. Read the rest

"There's something mesmerizing about watching little dragons made of semi-viscous cookie batter falling helplessly into heaps and melting into each other." Read the rest

Kirby Ferguson writes, "Everything is a Remix has been polished, merged and rereleased for its fifth anniversary." (more…)

Holly Salzman of Albuquerque, New Mexico went to court to resolve coparenting issues with her ex-husband. The judge ordered Salzman to attend 10 sessions with a counselor named Mary Pepper (Photo). Read the rest

Emmanuel from 2600 Magazine writes, "Trunk Archive has apparently looked over its recent claim against 2600 for its Spring 2012 cover and realized how wrong they were. Read the rest

The Mr. Clean Magic Eraser is like TiVo. You don't "get it" until you get it. It's a plain looking white sponge that looks like a chunk of cheap mattress foam. Read the rest

Last chance to join us at our 3-day extravaganza this weekend in Southern California! Read the rest

Why aren’t there more Black people roaming the campuses of technology companies? Mark S. Luckie has some ideas. Read the rest

PsychGuides.com created the Miss America Morph, which shows how the winners' body mass index has declined over time, while the average American woman's body mass index has increased of the same period. Read the rest

Most contemporary "kids music" sucks. However, my favorite reissue label Light In The Attic is releasing a killer children's vinyl compilation titled "This Record Belongs To______" that includes the likes of Shel Silverstein, Nina Simone, Donovan, Van Dyke Parks, Vashti Bunyan, Woody Guthrie, and many other musical greats, along with a storybook illustrated by the talented Jess Rotter. Read the rest

Devon's new Star Wars wristwatch is $28,500, but at least they make it worth it by throwing in a pair of TIE Fighter cufflinks. Read the rest

Colin Toupé set up his electronic drum kit to trigger animations. Simple idea and wonderfully executed! (more…)

As the vinyl record resurgence continues, the problem is that there simply aren't enough record pressing plants to meet the demand. Indie labels get pushed to the back of the line when the majors place a big order. Read the rest

“Contrary to what conventional wisdom would have you believe…record collecting isn’t about music. Not entirely, anyway,” says music writer Jeff “Chairman” Mao in Dust & Grooves. Read the rest

We Know The Devil is a visual novel about three friends consigned to a miserable Christian summer camp. Eventually they'll have to confront the Devil, which might just be allegorical for how, in a group of three, two will always bond a little more closely. Read the rest

NobodyLikesASmartAss said, "My 4-year old twin girls wanted a Hulk Princess cake for their birthday. So I made one!"[via]

American children are "getting drunk off hand sanitizer like they never have before," reports Vice. Read the rest