A U.S. judge ruled Monday that the accused Russian military operative Maria Butina must remain in jail, saying she poses a “very real risk of flight,” and also granted the government prosecutors' request for a gag order in the high-stakes case. (more…)

Talk about bad sports. Holy cow! (more…)

Honest Guide made this 3-minute video about Vinohrady, "possibly the coolest district in Prague." It mainly focuses on restaurants and coffee shops, which look enticing.

Kazakh blogger Lyubov Kalugina has been charged under Russia's Article 282, an "anti-extremism" law now being used by men who claim women sharing jokes and memes offend them. Via Quartz: (more…)

Channel 4 in the UK: We stand up for diversity and inclusion. Unfortunately, not everyone agrees. One of the dark sides of this is online abuse. To highlight this disturbing trend, we’ve partnered with some advertisers to show examples of real abuse against real people in their ads. It may shock you.Here are the ads. If the embed doesn't show, click the link above.https://twitter.com/Channel4/status/1038158715101298694T.S. Eliot, as dissatisfied by life's pettiness as he was satisfied by his own conservative fatalism, ended his poem The Hollow Men with the famous lines "This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper." He later regretted it. People who survived bombings told him they heard nothing at all.

Former Trump campaign adviser (and coffee boy) George Papadopoulos was sentenced to 14 days in jail, a year of supervised release, 200 hours of community service, and a $9,500 fine after pleading guilty to lying to federal agents in connection with the Russia investigation. (more…)

Next Wednesday, the EU will vote on a potentially internet-destroying regulation that will ban linking to the news unless you're using a service that has paid for a "linking license" from the news site you're linking to; and that will force all user-submitted content (text, audio, video, code, stills) through copyright filters that will censor anything that matches a database of works that anyone can put anything in, whether or not it is in copyright. (more…)

Australian software engineer Sarah Spencer used a 1980s knitting machine to create a gorgeous equatorial star map in the form of a huge tapestry.From Space.com:The piece features all 88 constellations as seen from Earth, as well as the equatorial line with the zodiac constellations running along it, stars scaled according to their real-life brightness, the Milky Way galaxy, the sun, Earth's moon and all of the planets within our solar system. Spencer made sure to put the planets, sun and moon in specific, strategic positions so that the heavenly bodies indicate a specific date in time.After 15kg of wool and over 💯 hrs of knitting, I’m finally ready to fly to the UK. Now I just need to pack the entire universe into my suitcase! I’ll see you all soon 🤗 pic.twitter.com/orBWAmi3bW— Heart of Pluto (@HeartOfPluto_) August 26, 2018

Florida is one of three states where felons who have completed their sentences are still barred from voting; it's also a notoriously inhospitable place for Black people, where the combination of racial profiling, understaffed public defenders' offices, and the threat of farcically long minimum sentences has led to 1.5 million black people with fully discharged felony convictions on their records who are nevertheless banned from voting. (more…)

Here we see a drone operator pestering a man who appears frightened and confused. It's a shame the man didn't have a shotgun to take care of the pesky flying contraption.

John Frost writes, "Four members of the Williamston, Michigan Board of Education are being recalled because they enacted policies that enable schools to treat children with respect regardless of their gender identities." (more…)

Trump is mentally incapable of functioning as president, writes one of his administration's senior officials, anonymously, in the New York Times. But not to worry, America. An administrative coup has been effected and we're making sure the GOP's agenda will be executed for as long as we can strap him to his horse.Given the instability many witnessed, there were early whispers within the cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment, which would start a complex process for removing the president. But no one wanted to precipitate a constitutional crisis. So we will do what we can to steer the administration in the right direction until — one way or another — it’s over.It's so uninformative and lacking in detail that anyone could fake it and were it not for the Times' imprimatur, no-one would believe it was real. Nothing good will come of this, other than the fun of speculating who authored it and why.What it smoothly describes is, in fact, worse than Trump: an administration run secretly by unnamed, unelected figures in the Republican Party. But that can't be the whole truth, because why would they publish an op-ed about it in the Times if they actually wanted to carry on with the plan?This is probably just blather from some palace functionary or a cabinet member who wants to look good when it's all over, someone who knows that the editorial page of the New York Times is 2018's best place for bullshit.Update: an unusual word in the article, "lodestar," is a favorite of Vice President Mike Pence. The "why" in this case is obvious, but the "how" becomes incomprehensibly dumb.

At $62.80 this is the best price I've seen for a SanDisk 256GB microSD card. (more…)

Robert Kyncl, Youtube's Chief Business Officer, writes about Article 13, the EU proposal to force all online services to evaluate all user-generated content with a copyright enforcement algorithm and censor anything that looks like a known copyrighted work (anyone can add anything to the databases of known copyrighted works and prevent it from being posted). (more…)

I'm a big fan of Christian Thompson's YouTube tutorials on the Python programming language. He explains his thinking as he enters code, in a way that is instructive and enlightening. In this 7-part series (each video is around 10 minutes or less) he shows how to program the classic Snake game.https://youtu.be/rrOqlfMujqQhttps://youtu.be/J5yJilI-Af4https://youtu.be/DxVPN1PIuLMhttps://youtu.be/VH-011awPyQhttps://youtu.be/duElRYWqLgYhttps://youtu.be/Vi0AhyUCCkE

Before the Internet was a thing, the postal service was a big deal for folks flung far from one another. Back in the mid-20th century, a phone call from one coast to the other, no matter how brief, would see you paying through the nose. As such, the postal service reigned supreme when it came to staying in touch in an intimate, personal manner. There was just one problem: unless you paid for rushed delivery, using the postal service to send a letter or other document was, and still is, slow as hell.Thank God for rocket-powered mail delivery! The future of mail! Well, they thought it was, at the time.

Yep, the Beatle was tripping balls. Specifically, he had just taken a hit of DMT with famed 1960s art dealer Robert "Groovy Bob" Fraser. From the NME quoting a paywalled Sunday Times interview:“We were immediately nailed to the sofa... And I saw God, this amazing towering thing, and I was humbled. And what I’m saying is, that moment didn’t turn my life around, but it was a clue.“It was huge. A massive wall that I couldn’t see the top of, and I was at the bottom.“And anybody else would say it’s just the drug, the hallucination, but both Robert and I were like, ‘Did you see that?’ We felt we had seen a higher thing.”Illustration: Mitch O'Connell's fantastic Paul McCartney poster art.

All summer long Epic Games has thrown huge money at their exciting series of tournaments, the Fortnite Summer Skirmish. Two players in particular made this weekend's grande finale burning hot! NickMercs and Ghost Gaming's Aydan made Tilted Towers their personal dueling ground.NickMercs is known for his brutal, efficient gameplay on console with a controller in a game dominated by keyboard and mouse PC players. He is also well known for going to Tilted Towers, a high loot, high action portion of the Fortnite Island. In the $1.5 million dollar showdown finale another console player decided to take him down! Ghost gaming's insanely aggressive Aydan repeatedly landed Tilted and the play was spectacular!I loved Aydan dancing on Nickmercs eliminated puddle of loot! Face to face they were gracious, clearly in awe of one another's play, and clearly the two players to watch.

We must secure the existence of white people and a future for white ... comics?Theodore "Vox Day" Beale, the Nazi-quoting nationalist most famous for gaming the Hugo Awards with bloc voting campaigns, has appropriated the "ComicsGate" name for a new comics publishing company. But adherents of the ComicsGate movement, though sharing his distate for diversity, are far from pleased.Richard Meyer, who runs the "Diversity & Comics" YouTube channel, offered a one-word response: "NOPE.""VOX DAY tried to steal #ComicsGate," wrote pro-ComicsGate artist Ethan Van Sciver. "ComicsGate destroyed him tonight, live."ComicsGate's followers are notorious for online harassment, from abuse aimed at women Marvel employees to recent attacks on Marsha Cooke, who had debunked the movement's attempt to claim her late husband Darwyn as an adherent. In recent weeks, major comics industry figures denounced it as a hate group.ComicsGate's leading lights have now drawn a line in the sand at overt affiliation with white supremacists. It's Beale's commercial grab at the word, though, that really threatens to upset the apple cart. Meyer recently raised nearly $400,000 crowdfunding a graphic novel marketed explicitly as a ComicsGate response to "SJWs", but it's an open question as to whether it amounted to a media stunt or a sustainable market for reactionary comics. Beale plans to answer it first, beating Meyer and co. to the market as a fully-fledged, operating imprint. Asked by an interviewer if he planned to launch a crowdfunding campaign, Beale replied "I expect we will do so, yes."Also raising ire among ComicsGaters was Beale's use of the GamerGate green-and-purple color scheme in the company's logo. Though ComicsGate was inspired by and is connected to the earlier movement, many adherents wish to avoid association with its reported excesses and disgraced figureheads. ComicsGaters and GamerGaters share one more thing in common, though, beyond politics: an obsession with appearances."Just call it literally anything else," one ComicsGate fan said on Twitter of Beale's publishing plans, "and I'm totally fine."

The New Yorker invited white supremacist sponge Steve Bannon to headline its festival. The magazine is famous for its cartoons' caption competitions, but it was discovered not so long ago that the phrase "Christ, what an asshole" perfectly captions all of them.I propose that editor David Remnick's excuse for inviting Bannon — "I have every intention of asking him difficult questions and engaging in a serious and even combative conversation" — is even better.

It's either unbearably cute or the prologue to a rabies epidemic. No matter how you see it, this raccoon takes a pass at every cat in the neighborhood, searching for the one that'll be the life-long pal he's looking for. Or at the very least, find one that'll tolerate him for a few hours.

Once dominated by triple-A studios with massive budgets, the game development landscape is changing, and now it's easier than ever for aspiring creators to make gaming hits all on their own—provided they start with the right training. Covering the game development process from start to finish, the Complete Unity Game Developer Bundle can get you up to speed with the essentials behind design, animation, and more, all for $39.This 7-course collection dives deep into the Unity game engine, an industry-favorite tool that developers use to build their titles. Following along more than 200 lessons, you'll explore how Unity can be used to create massive game worlds, cinematic cutscenes, and playable human characters. You'll learn how to develop a complete 2D mobile game and even make it more profitable by integrating monetization techniques, like AdMob banner ads.You can get your feet wet with Unity and work toward creating your own game with the Complete Unity Game Developer Bundle, on sale for $39 in the Boing Boing Store.

The life of Aretha Franklin is being celebrated today in Detroit, at what is already described as a legendary memorial service. Earlier today, the British Army paid tribute to the late singer during the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace in London. (more…)

For me, it amounts to a useful guide to the next step. I like Suntory Toki a lot......but haven't wanted to commit to more expensive or unusual options. Now I feel I know where to go, and I didn't even have to look anything up on the internet.The history and elaboration is neither exoticized nor blandly literal, with fascinating stories and descriptions of Japan's unique methods and personalities (it all starts with a business partnership falling apart, naturally) fitting into the larger context Ashcraft seeks to throw light on, which is that Japanese whisky has a deep and broad heritage to match its now well-established quality.It is, in all this, too dense: 135 pages is not quite enough for all the sidebars, photos, biographies and reviews to breathe, and as a result the basic historical narrative is as dense and occasionally superficial as a coffee-table book about famous generals or artists. But I did want to know about Japanese peats, bartender fashions, handcrafted ice spheres and risque interwar-period advertisements as well as specific distilleries and beverages, so there's nothing to complain about—except the Torys Extra. Japanese Whisky [Amazon]Photo: Mikael Leppä (CC)

E-scooter sharing companies Scoot and Skip scooted and skipped their way to the head of the permit approval processing line in San Francisco, but the city flipped the bird at Bird and left Lime feeling sour. Word on the street is that San Francisco is peeved that Bird and Lime deployed their scooters without securing permits, and retaliated by denying their applications and while accepting Scoot and Skip's, which have headquarters based there.Meanwhile, Santa Monica gave the green light to Bird, Lime, Lyft, and Uber's electric bike pilot programs. Axios has more.Image: Grendelkhan/Wikimedia.This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

A new ABC News/Washington Post poll that was conducted between August 26-29 shows Trump's approval and disapproval ratings to be at their worst for Trump since he took office. His disapproval rating is at its highest, with 60% who disapprove of his job performance, and a mere 35% who approve of it. Disapproval of Pres. Trump is at a new high, support for the Mueller probe is broad, and half of Americans favor Congress initiating impeachment proceedings against the president, new @ABC News/WaPo poll finds. https://t.co/Q7G4jb1LUo pic.twitter.com/4KkN1eHGg8— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) August 31, 2018According to ABC:Sixty percent in the national survey disapprove of Trump’s performance in office, numerically the highest of his presidency, albeit by a single point; that includes 53 percent who disapprove strongly, more than half for the first time. Thirty-six percent approve, matching his low...Trump’s average approval rating since taking office is the lowest for any president in modern polling since the 1940s. One factor: Contrary to his “drain the swamp” rhetoric, 45 percent say corruption in Washington has increased under Trump, while just 13 percent say it’s declined.Of course poll numbers change from poll to poll and from day to day, but hey, let us enjoy this snapshot moment while it lasts.

Earlier this week, police in Montgomery County, Texas were searching for this mysterious shackled woman who was apparently ringing multiple doorbells in the middle of the night at a subdivision over the weekend. The Sherrif's Office reports that she is now safe and considered a "family violence victim." Her boyfriend was found dead in their home from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. "Boyfriend of distressed woman seen in doorbell video found dead in Lake Conroe home" (Click2Houston, thanks Pink Frankenstein!)

Five octogenarian patients died after air conditioning units at the Fujikake Y&M Daiichi Hospital in Gifu City failed. While some patients were moved to the cooler second floor, others were left in the hot floors for a week. Four of those who remained died between August 26 and 27, with the fifth dying on August 28. The recorded temperature in Gifu on the 26th was 36.2°C (97°F). The hospital reported they were using fans to cool the patients and that the deaths were from chronic illnesses. An investigation is being conducted on the suspicion of professional negligence.Japan is suffering from a heatwave with the some of the highest temperatures on record. The heat killed 133 people in the month of July alone and sent thousands to hospital. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_01GUoKcXs

“Oh no! For the first time since 1981 there will be no Woody Allen this year,” lulzed Joe Berkowitz, speaking for me also, and everyone who's grossed out by Woody Allen.“NOW how will we get our required annual dosage of shrewish women complicating a nervous man's life?” (more…)

Hey, a lot can happen in 8 weeks.Donald Trump, President of the United States, said today he's keeping Attorney General Jeff Sessions around until after the midterm elections in November. (more…)

Drones capture stunning aerial photos, but not all of us have the piloting expertise to fly one without creating an impromptu shower of plastic confetti. Engineered with adjustable gyro sensitivity and a 6-axis flight control system, the SKEYE Nano 2 Camera Drone lets even novice pilots take beautiful aerial shots, and it's on sale for $19.https://www.youtube.com/embed/ovIcsqK4xSkThe world's smallest camera drone, the SKEYE Nano 2 is great for snapping photos from even the tightest spaces. Deploy your drone in seconds with Ready to Fly technology and keep it steady with simple hover controls. The built-in HD camera lets you capture sharp photos and videos while you fly, and the automatic landing function makes for easier retrieval once you're done documenting your adventures.Whether you're hiking through Yosemite or exploring Los Angeles, the SKEYE Nano 2 Camera Drone offers a fun and unique way to immortalize your travels, and it's on sale today. Get it in the Boing Boing Store for $19.

Every fall in Japan, McDonald's releases a Moon Viewing Burger (Tsukimi Burger). Basically, it's a burger with a perfectly round fried egg in the middle somewhere. This year added to the regular lineup is a new Golden Tsukimi Burger. Not only do you get a golden bun (that smells like butter!), but also a thick slice of golden-colored cheese.

This post is going to be super upsetting if you are a cat person. I am sorry. (more…)

Everything has a cost, especially in the realm of online services. It used to be a pretty common practice for providers of 'free' email services to scan their user's messages for data that'd be valuable to advertisers. The data got sold to keep the email provider's lights on, with in-browser advertising filling in the financial gaps. Most email providers abandoned the practice, years ago: they were amazed to find that it pissed off their users. Yahoo's parent company, Oath, however, is getting back on this particular brand of bullshit. From The Verge:Yahoo’s owner, Oath, is in talks with advertisers to provide a service that would analyze over 200 million Yahoo Mail inboxes for consumer data, sources told WSJ. Oath did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Oath confirmed to the WSJ that it performs email scannings and said that it only scans promotional emails, usually from retailers. Users have the ability to opt out, it said. Oath’s argument is that email is an expensive system, and people can’t expect a free service without some value exchanged.That's greasy. Greasier still is the fact that even if you pony up the dough, on a monthly basis, for Yahoo's premium email services, your data will get scanned unless you opt to opt out. Finding the page that lets you do this, surprise, surprise is not easy to do. We've got your back, though. Follow this link to take control of your Oath-related privacy settings.Oath swears that the data scraping method they use ignores personal information and personal identifiers. Somehow, given the number of data breaches and user-related scandals that Yahoo and Oath have seen in the past, I have a hard time believing this--especially given the fact that Oath's privacy policy mentions that they think it's cool for your emails to be read not just by machines, but people in their employ and maaaaaaaybe contractors, too. Image via Wikipedia Commons

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“This is a pivotal moment for California, for the country, and the world.”On Tuesday, California state lawmakers passed SB100, a major bill that would commit to making the state’s electricity supply completely emissions-free by the year 2045. SB100 passed 43-32. (more…)

When I was 13, I unsuccessfully lobbied my dad to buy me Bugle Boy clothes from Merry-Go-Round. The closest I got was a pair of knock-off parachute pants. This Bugle Boy TV commercial from 1984 makes me grateful that I was quickly distracted by the Dead Kennedys and The Damned. (via r/ObscureMedia)

wideNES is an ingenious tool that lets you zoom out of the NES game you're playing. It's a feature of ANESE, a new NES emulator developed by Daniel Prilik.wideNES is a novel technique to automatically and interactively map-out NES games, in real time.As players move within a level, wideNES records the screen, gradually building-up a map of what’s been explored. On subsequent playthroughs of the level, wideNES syncs the action on-screen to the generated map, effectively letting players see more of the level by “peeking” past the edge of the NES’s screen! Best of all, wideNES’s approach to mapping games is totally generalized, enabling a wide range of NES games to work with wideNES right out of the box!The technical description of how it works is well-worth reading. It's like a primer on how memory-challenged early game consoles managed to keep things smooth and sweet--and why it's better to employ such an elaborate technique of observation than to try and pre-emptively decode the internal geography of each game.Why not extract levels directly from ROMs?Trying to extract level data from a NES ROM would be equivalent to determining which sections of the ROM are code (as opposed to data), which is hard, since finding all code in a given binary is equivalent to the Halting problem!wideNES takes a much simpler approach: Instead of guessing how games pack level data in ROM, wideNES will simply run the game and watch the output!An excellent suggestion from ArtWomb on Hacker News: set up a high-resolution monitor that has the entirety of a game world on it, letting it remain static whole your tiny sprite (Link, for example, in Hyrule) quests forth.

Artist Michael Grider of Santa Maria, California makes all kinds of neat tiki accessories. He's got his own branded cocktail umbrellas, bar spoons, and lots more.But it's his brass swizzle sticks that look like mini tiki torches that are catching the most attention. Why? Because you can actually light them on fire. Warning: If you light this on fire, it will be HOT! Extinguish before drinking and if lit the metal torch topper will get hot to the touch! Do not burn yourself! We take no responsibility for injury! These are novelty items that are USE AT YOUR OWN RISK 😆He's completely sold out but when you can get them, you can also buy his Tiki Torch Juice, a flammable lemon extract he's specially created for burning in the swizzles. Be careful out there, tikiphiles!https://www.instagram.com/p/BmrAnQ_FbJJ/?hl=en&taken-by=mkgrider(Nag on the Lake)

Come Saturday, September 22, master pumpkin carver Ray Villafane will be teaching a class on subtractive sculpturing techniques so you can decorate your own gourds for the season. It happens at The Butter End Cakery in Garden, California from 9 AM to 6 PM. Cost is $350. There are only 18 spots available per class with a registration deadline of September 10th... Please register by emailing classes@villafanestudios.com for further instructions.https://www.facebook.com/ray.villafane.1/posts/10216496614149936Ray Villafane previously on BB

No matter how old you are it’s always fun to pause and check out what's being sold in Japanese capsule vending machines (called Gotcha Gotcha in Japan). You know the ones where you insert a couple coins, twist the knob, and out pops a crappy toy in a clear capsule. Only in Japan they aren’t crappy toys. They might not be particularly useful, but the items are often so strange, so intriguing, or so incredibly well-crafted you can’t help coughing up a couple bucks to see what you get. This is what happened to me when I saw the Cat Hats: Aquarium-themed cat hats. [caption id="attachment_656676" align="alignnone" width="600"] Photo: Thersa Matsuura[/caption]Here's the hashtag where all the cats in aquarium-themed hats reside. Photos: Thersa Matsuura

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An internet classic from before he became president. In 2016, Donald Trump shared his personal thoughts on 'Citizen Kane,' the iconic film by Orson Welles. Trump identified the film back in 1992 as his “all-time favorite movie,” and said the same thing in an interview with Fox News in 2016. In this Errol Morris clip, Trump explains why he loves it, and shares the advice he’d offer to Charles Foster Kane.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a63ymFn6nS0Trump's advice to Kane: “Get yourself a different woman.”This footage comes from a never-finished, never-released Errol Morris documentary on Citizen Kane, for which he interviewed Trump in 2002. “I think you learn in Citizen Kane that maybe wealth isn’t everything. Because he had the wealth, but he didn’t have the happiness. The table getting larger, and larger, and larger, with he and his wife getting further and further apart as he got wealthier and wealthier—perhaps I can understand that. ... In real life, I do believe that wealth does in fact isolate you from other people.” Trump concludes that “It was a great rise in Citizen Kane. And there was a modest fall.”He learned all the wrong lessons from this film.And as our Mark Frauenfelder wrote in 2016, this speech from the film “sounds like Trump's threat to imprison Clinton” during the 2016 campaign. Watch both below.https://youtu.be/uNaDrnxp3L0https://youtu.be/thaNhEAKF_U[via Ben Jacobs]

When you snap dry spaghetti before dropping it into the pot, it sometimes results in an explosion of shards. To understand the physics of the phenomenon, MIT mathematicians used computer simulation and a custom machine to break lots of sticks of spaghetti. It turned out that spaghetti that's twisted first reduces the strength of vibrations that cause more cracks. From Science News:This strategy may not be much practical help in the kitchen; Patil and colleagues aren’t selling their spaghetti snapper for $19.95 — and even if they were, meticulously twisting and bending pieces of pasta one-by-one is hardly efficient meal prep. Still, the discovery of the bend-and-twist technique may lend new insight into controlling the breakage of all kinds of brittle rods, from pole vault sticks to nanotubes.And from their scientific paper in PNAS:Fracture processes are ubiquitous in nature, from earthquakes to broken trees and bones. Understanding and controlling fracture dynamics remain one of the foremost theoretical and practical challenges in material science and physics. A well-known problem with direct implications for the fracture behavior of elongated brittle objects, such as vaulting poles or long fibers, goes back to the famous physicist Richard Feynman who observed that dry spaghetti almost always breaks into three or more pieces when exposed to large bending stresses. While bending-induced fracture is fairly well understood nowadays, much less is known about the effects of twist. Our experimental and theoretical results demonstrate that twisting enables remarkable fracture control by using the different propagation speeds of twist and bending waves.

A homeowner is suing police in Greenwood Village, Colorado, after they destroyed his house with explosives to flush out a shoplifter hiding there. The cops maintained a 19-hour siege to collar Robert Seacat, who "stole items from WalMart" and fired a gun at them during the showdown.Police offered Leo Lech $5000 for the loss of his home.“If you look at the photos of Osama Bin Laden’s compound, I would say his house looks better than mine does,” Lech said at the time.After inspectors declared the home a total loss, the city offered Lech $5,000 in compensation.Since then he’s spent hundreds of thousands of dollars repairing the home.He’s now filed a federal lawsuit, claiming civil rights violations, and unjust compensation from the government.This story was from last year; his case doesn't seem to be going well.Attorney Rachel Maxam, who represents Lech, isn't giving up. After U.S. District Court judge Philip Brimmer ruled against her earlier this year, she appealed the case to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit. ... But from the beginning, attorney Maxam knew that increasing that figure would be difficult. After all, the Colorado Governmental Immunity Act restricts suits against municipalities such as Greenwood Village, and complaints against individuals can only succeed if they're found to have acted willfully and wantonlyThis situation has the whiff of "rich urban enclave" to it, where local government exists to keep other local government (and their taxes) out, and functions more or less as a glorified, armed HOA.

That pie chart shows the number of games released on Steam. The number of new titles being published there is overwhelming, almost doubling in 2015 alone and increasing anually by between a quarter and a third since. The sheer volume of absolute garbage is making it impossible to find good stuff, and indie developers, unable to market their way out of the sewer, can't make a living. Welcome to life in the Indie Post-Apoclypse.Do you have the answer yet? In reviews? Sales? Dollars? Actually it doesn’t matter what units you chose. Because to a first approximation they’re all the same.• Zero reviews• Zero comments on announcements of the game launching• One curator, who has depressingly enough not even played the game• Two comments in the entire forum sectionThings have been asymptotically approaching zero. Now we’ve arrived. We’ve arrived at the worst it can get because you can’t sell less than zero. An experienced game designer with multiple shipped titles and a moderately sized following shouting into the void and getting no response whatsoever.Steam's dominating position in digital game distribution means that market saturation is converted into some weird form of attention-economy inflation. The currency -- the games -- can be devalued at will. Privately-owned, Valve/Steam could eat a recession or even a collapse of its own internal market and not skip a beat. Products representing years of labor (or, more likely, mere hours of it) all take on the same ephemeral, vaporous quality, disappearing into the void as easily as tweets.

Feed Rave.dj songs (i.e. YouTube videos or Spotify links) and it will mash them right up. It takes a while to generate the resulting remix, but the results are fascinating and often outrageously fun.My first failed effort: here's my mix of New Order's Blue Monday and Depeche Mode's Everything Counts in Large Amounts. I get the feeling it understands the structure of the tracks perfectly, but this particular pairing doesn't work because the superficial elements just don't mix. Most songs, even similar ones, just become a cacophany.This one that's going around [via Hacker News] is pretty amazing, though. Video is NSFW! And then there's Rammstein vs Crazytown, embedded at the top of this post. Then jump thirty seconds into this Biggie Smalls vs Thomas the Tank Engine pairing to get what you came for.(The site's background video's CSS blur effect brought my late-model iMac to its knees; you can get rid of it by killing the classes added to the div id "backgroundPlayer" in the web inspector, or by not using Firefox.)

I’m now the proud owner of a Microsoft Surface Go with 8GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD. It’s by no means a power house (I’ll have a review for you sometime next week that addresses my user experience,) but it’s more than capable of allowing me to get work done in coffee shops, on an airplane tray table or in the bathroom.You’ll never know if I wrote this in the middle of a poop. You must live with this.I have a list of software that I install before on a Windows 10 machine before I dare to put it to work: Firefox, ProtonMail Bridge and ProtonVPN, TripMode and, so I can easily move my work from one device to another, SpiderOak and Dropbox. But none of these is as important to my peace of mind than a piece of software called ShutUp10, from O&O Software.The annoying shit that Windows 10 does that makes using it a security nightmare and a bloatware ridden pain in the ass to use? ShutUp10 kills it all. It’s an application that collects all of Windows 10’s security, privacy and update options in one easy to manage UI. If you’re new to securing your information and tweaking out a Microsoft-powered rig, O&O has your back: ShutUp10’s comes with a list of recommendations for the ‘features’ that most people will want to and, in many cases, should turn off. For more experienced users, it’s also possible to address each of the options in ShutUp10 on a granular level. So, if you want to leave location services on, but keep the Windows Store from downloading Solitaire every time you turn away from your computer for more than a moment, it can do that too. If you’re not into my explanation of why this bit of software is awesome, try this on for size:From O&O Software:Windows 10 wants to give users the easiest possible daily experience and in doing so very rarely forces you to actually read and confirm a security notice. Unfortunately, this simplified approach from Microsoft means much more data is passed onto them than many users would like. Microsoft uses most data to display personalized information to you that is aimed at making your computer life easier. As an example, Windows 10 can remind you to set off to the airport 30 minutes earlier due to traffic en route. In order to deliver this information to you, however, Windows 10 has to access your calendar entries, your mails (i.e. the airline confirmation email), your location and it has to have access to the internet to get traffic news. Some services protocol your entire keyboard entries, share your WLAN access data with your Facebook contacts or connect your computer without asking permission to a public – and potentially unprotected – network. While this means that you and your contacts do not have to grapple with complicated WLAN passwords, it also poses a significant security risk. Decide for yourself how important your “comfort” is when weighed up with your privacy and how to protect it. O&O ShutUp10 presents you with all important settings in one location – you need no previous IT knowledge and there is no need to manually change the Windows 10 system settings. Did I mention that it’s available for the low, low price of absolutely free? Because, well it is. This if nothing else, makes it worth checking out, in my opinion.

That poop you’ve been holding in until you get home? Stop it: use a restroom as soon you can. The wind you’re not breaking because you’re only on your fourth date? Make an excuse to walk away from the table and let it rip. Working your way through a keto diet and haven’t had a dump in a few days? Ingest large amounts of Psyllium husk, stat. Good God, just read this, from Ars Technica:Doctors are urging caution after a 24-year-old UK man underwent emergency surgery when they discovered that his severely enlarged colon, filled with feces, had burst.At the time of the surgery, the man had “reduced consciousness” and severe abdominal pain, as well as air trapped under his diaphragm, failing kidneys, and acidic blood.In a short communication published this week in BMJ Case Reports, doctors elaborated on the man’s rare conditions, known as “megacolon” and “megarectum.” These are poorly-understood ailments marked by enlarged entrails that aren’t caused by a physical blockage. Sometimes they can be explained by genetic abnormalities or other acquired conditions, such as diseases that affect intestinal motility or muscle and connective-tissue function. But in this case, the man seemed to have a chronic, idiopathic case, meaning there was no clear cause of the gargantuan guts.Apparently he a long history of constipation. In a great deal of discomfort, he came to his local hospital’s emergency department, looking for help. The doctors on duty, assuming it was just a typical log jam, gave the pained individual marching orders to head on home and sort things out using laxatives and self administered enemas. In the days after his initial hospital visit, the man’s situation went from bad to worse. In order to correct his megacolon, doctors has to remove a vast amount of feces and a small piece of the man’s colon in emergency surgery. What a shitty situation.Image via Pxhere

Collecting water from the air is nothing new. Fog nets—typically constructed using a sheet of plastic mesh hung between a pair of poles—are often used in arid areas to capture water vapor. The vapor condenses into a liquid on the mesh and is then drawn down into a collection receptacle. Boom: drinkable water. That said, the amount of drinkable water that a fog net can yield doesn’t amount to much and, as its name suggests, if it’s not a foggy day, there’s not likely to be much, if any, water collected at all. Happily, for people living in areas that are dryer than a popcorn fart, a team from the University of Akron have devised a way to spin nanoscale fibers that will provide a huge upgrade over the conventional fog nets in use today.From New Scientist: They used electrospun polymers – a technique which allowed them to create nanoscale fibres. These are tangled around fragments of expanded graphite, like spaghetti around meatballs. The fibers provide a large surface area for droplets to condense onto, and the graphite encourages the water to drip out of the material when it is squeezed or heated.According to the team’s leader, Shing-Chung Josh Wong, fog nets made using these new nanoscale fibres could harvest as much as 180 liters of water per square meter of material deployed, every day. Fog nets made using plastic and other conventional materials? They’re lucky to snag 30 liters of water during the same amount of time with the same square footage of material deployed. What’s more, there may not be any need for fog. According to Wong, to use the team’s new vapor collection hardware, the gear would only need to be 10° Celcius cooler than the air around it—something that’s easily achievable through the use of a bit of refrigeration tech and rechargeable batteries. Image via Pxhere