This helped: Three Things To Read About Greece . Read the rest

India's traditional roadside ear de-waxers, called kaan saaf wallahs, are known by the red handkerchiefs on their heads. They charge around 15 cents per ear, and one ear cleaner interviewed by the LA Times says he gets about 12 customers per day. Read the rest

Ryan Trawick celebrates a remix of Dragonette's I Get Around ('Here I come with a Big Gulp'?) with a unique and weirdly-fitting virtual space. Read the rest

Chances are you don't remember much from before you were about three years old, and the way we narrate our worlds to ourselves is a big part of why. Read the rest

Sosu Sauces' Lisa Murphy offers her recipe. [via]

GoPro Hero4 Session is the company's first new camera in years, reports Fast Company's Daniel Terdiman. Read the rest

Annie Zaleskie tackles a baffling conundrum: why do so many people dislike a band led by a man who says things like "as a person who’s been a lifelong member of Amnesty International, of all human-rights crimes I think that this kind of unwanted [pre-installed album], if it’s at the top of your list or even halfway up it, your life is really fantastic," while wearing wraparound sunglasses indoors? Read the rest

Dreams can be impossible to explain, but still make a strange kind of internal sense. So are the sentences you make in Sleep Furiously, a language game where the fun is in threading increasingly absurd sentences together, obeying grammar rules but few others. Read the rest

Immortalized in ink on the packaging of millions of salves, balms and other earthy cosmetics, Burt Shavitz's physical form has moved on. Read the rest

James Stark's returned to LA from hell's gladiator pits and has been tearing things up ever since -- but what do you get for the monster who has everything? Killing Pretty has the answer. Read the rest

One person said, "if you were right in front of me I'd cut off your penis and force you to eat it." Read the rest

My first steampunk story, “The Ape-box Affair,” was published in Unearth magazine in 1978. I was paid half a cent a word for it and was happy to get the 40 bucks—and doubly happy simply to see it in print. Read the rest

"Hacking Team" is a badly-named security contractor that helps governments spy on activists and journalists. It got hacked, badly, and more than 400GB of its data is now public. Read the rest

Remember Caitlyn, the dog whose muzzle was damaged after being taped shut with electric tape for days? Well, she's doing much better and posing with sexy firefighters in a new fundraising calendar. Read the rest

YouTuber Max Lee got a great 4K grab of how street vendors make ice cream by hand in hot and humid Thailand. The secret: nitrogen. Read the rest

The Association of Illustrators and Directory of Illustration announced the shortlisted entries for this year's World Illustration Awards, including Grahame Baker Smith's Alice in Wonderland commemorative stamp for Royal Mail, above. Others include: Read the rest

Illustrator Dino Tomic can draw trompe l'oeil leaves that look so realistic they are hard to tell apart from the real thing. Read the rest

The bitcoin blockchain could be used to decentralize media, putting it beyond the control of individual hosts. Read the rest

At Medium, Jay Allen deconstructs the demand for "objective game journalism" sometimes found among those uncomfortable with their hobby's growing status as an art form. Read the rest

Ladybird combines all the things you love about Japan. Wait, what?

Argentina's crazy copyright laws provide for prison sentences for "intellectual property fraud" -- in this case, rewriting a Borges short story in Borgesian fashion and publishing it in a super-limited underground press edition of 300. Read the rest

Last Week on the Colony is a new, regular Monday item here on Offworld, a special satellite transmission designed to highlight our favorite Offworld stories, wonderful trends, and the stories from elsewhere in the galaxy that got us talking Read the rest

The Delta IV rocket, Cape Canaveral, February 2014Last Week on the Colony is a new, regular Monday item here on Offworld, a special satellite transmission designed to highlight our favorite Offworld stories, wonderful trends, and the stories from elsewhere in the galaxy that got us talking. Read the rest

A fellow in Maine lit a firework that he had "strapped to his head." He was killed instantly, reports WCSH. Local officials stress that fireworks are dangerous, "especially if they are not used properly."

I asked Amy Parness, the co-founder of Sparkle Labs, maker of fantastic educational electronics kits, to write a Medium post about gender and the business of being a maker business person. Her terrific essay calls out the problems with "pink girly engineering kits." From Medium: Read the rest

WhAIRrgarbl [via. Previously.]

Looking for a fun, geeky DIY project to smarten your favorite sink? How about some colorful Thing, Batman, Tardis and Hans Solo soaps? Read the rest

For eight years in a row 31-year-old Joey Chestnut was the champ of Nathan's Famous annual hot dog eating contest in Coney Island, New York. Read the rest

In Fantasy Sports No. 1, a berzerker adventurer and his spellslinging, underappreciated apprentice go on a dungeon crawl that takes them into an eldritch game of basketball -- for the highest stakes imaginable. Read the rest

“Dream Recollection Inducer (GIF Format)—To gaze at shortly after waking.” By ZBAGS.

“Enjoy the parabolic envelopes that form while those bright, sparkling, parabolic curves are etched into the sky tonight.” Read the rest

Never gets old, even though these TV ad viral videos first came out in 2007-8, if I recall correctly.I neither know nor care whether this is, or ever was, a real business. Read the rest

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A stunning capture of the ISS in front of Earth's moon, by Dylan O'Donnell. Read the rest

People smart enough to pay $99.99 a year to subscribe to the Sarah Palin Channel learned that their winking maverick hero has solved the California drought crisis. Read the rest

Donald Gould became a viral celebrity after this video of him performing a classic rock anthem exploded on Facebook. He is homeless. Read the rest

Although recreational marijuana is legal to grow and smoke in Oregon, it's not yet legal to sell. But that doesn't mean you can't give it away to 2,000 people, which is what Portland's Weed the People event did yesterday. Read the rest

After owners of a Southeast Texas marina spotted an 11-plus foot alligator, they put up a warning sign: "No swimming alligators." But that didn't seem to faze 28-year-old Tommie Woodward, who was hell-bent on taking a night swim. Read the rest

"Fireworks," a classic from 2009 by PES. Happy Independence Day! (more…)

1" x 1", $6 at LA's Secret Headquarters, who note, "Anyone who gets it really gets it, ya know?"

UC Berkeley Political Scientist Wendy Brown came to the London School of Economics last week to discuss her book Undoing the Demos, and her lecture (MP3) is literally the best discussion of how and why human rights are being taken away from humans and given to corporations. Read the rest

Matt writes, "This is awesomeness beyond awesome. Magic swords, barbarians, crazy, nausea-inducing camera angles, pterodactyls... If 'Heavy Metal' needed a personal scent, it would be this."