When we think of democracy, we generally think of voting: the people are polled, the people decide. But voting is zero-sum: it has winners and losers. There are other models of governance that can make claim to democratic legitimacy that produce wins for everyone. (more…)

Inspired by DEVO, Memphis musicians Tony Thomas, Sam Shoup, and Tom Lonardo took a break from the weirdo jazz fusion jams of their "real" trio create Dog Police. Dig the lyrics:The boys in blue had my baby on the floor,They were asking her if she wanted some more.They pulled out a net, they pulled out a leash,They said they were the... Dog Police!The resulting video was a big hit on MTV's "Basement Tapes" DIY music video contest and later on Night Flight:In the spring of 1990, the video’s popularity also led to the creation of a TV sitcom pilot called “Dog Police,” about a trio of psychic doggy detectives from outer space who wear fedoras and beige trenchcoats and grumble their dialogue to each other like they’re all channeling Humphrey Bogart.Comic actor Adam Sandler made a cameo appearance in the pilot (which possibly was never aired more than once), and the show was to also prominently feature Jeremy Piven as a beat cop. (Clip below.)More at Night Flight (via r/ObscureMedia, thanks UPSO!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1bfFNojAvI

Cambridge Analytica claimed that it could sway elections thanks to the devastating power of psychometric profiling, and they may have even believed it, but those claims should be read with a critical eye, because they're marketing hype aimed at people whom Cambridge Analytica was pitching as client; and because Cambridge Analytica is not a scientific enterprise, but a secretive corporation whose researchers never had to subject their experiments and results to critical, peer-reviewed scrutiny, opening up endless possibilities for self-deception and truth-shading. (more…)

Behold the wire-bending machine—a video I though would be curiously satisfying to watch, right up there in the "robots making things" pantheon of satisfying videos depicting repetitive movements, but which isn't satisfying at all, really, even if it is briefly hypnotic when it makes the loops. It's too staccato, too arrhythmic, too angry. You get the feeling the wire-bending machine hates its job.

When my pink-haired pal Brittany High told me that she won a ride with Angelyne in her signature pink Corvette and that she wanted me to come along, I thought, "Oh, this will be interesting."When identical twins Marian and Vivian Brown twins were still alive, it was considered a good omen to run into them up here in the San Francisco Bay Area. When I was pregnant, I spotted them in Union Square and felt my unborn child had been charmed in some way by their mere presence. An Angelyne sighting in Los Angeles has the same effect on people. I had briefly met the famous-for-being-famous L.A. icon once before. Near the end of 2013, I was driving to a lunch place in Burbank with my pal Allee Willis who startled me, "Pull over! Pull over! It's Angelyne!" And sure enough, there was her pink Corvette parked in front of a paint store. Allee told me to have cash ready but I didn't have any on me. I told her so. Allee, an icon herself, has known Angelyne since 1986 and knew the drill. Pushing money into my hand, she said, "You WILL buy something from her." I promised not to embarrass her and we headed to the Corvette.Our visit was short but yielded this epic photo of the three of us. I used the money Allee palmed me to quietly buy a t-shirt. Like the time I saw the Brown twins, I felt lucky stumbling upon Angelyne that day in Burbank.So, nearly four years later, when Brittany invited me to fly down to meet the Angelyne with her, my answer was, "Of course I want to!" We thought it would be fun to tell our stories of our afternoon with the billboard queen in tandem. (Brittany begins. My input is in italics.)A few months ago I entered to win a ride with the legendary Angelyne in her hot pink Corvette.Not long after I got a text message saying I won.I was told I could bring a friend along and I knew exactly who I wanted to invite -- Rusty Blazenhoff. No one would appreciate this as much as she would!It's true! I live for this kind of stuff.Angelyne's assistant instructed us to meet her at the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf. "Bring cash," he said. "She has merch."Not her "assistant," her "secret agent," lol. That's how he described himself to me when I asked if he was her manager. He said he's been working with her for 30 years. His name is Scott and he literally wears rose-colored glasses.And merch, OMG, so much merch!As she greeted us, she gave us each a gem. She said Rusty’s was supposed to ward off evil. I didn’t get an explanation what mine was meant for. Angelyne was curious about the gem on the ring I the was wearing. “What is THAT?” she asked. “Forever 21,” I answered.Mine is a Carnelian. It now sits in my pop culture trophy case gently fending off any bad juju. Angelyne was wearing a giant Quartz around her neck. Angelyne instructs Brittany how to properly do the flamingo stance in front of the Coffee Bean at Sunset near Vine.---Ok wait, let's get back to the merch. I think it's important to note Angelyne's truly inspired "merch table." It's the trunk of her Corvette. She pops it open and voila! there's t-shirts, hats, buttons, keychains, backpacks, and other pink and black goods. I remember envying her makeshift store back when I first met her. (I've honestly considered a Blazenhoff merch-trunk, but it just wouldn't be as sexy as hers, as I drive a gray hybrid and live in the 'burbs.)I also think a moment should be spent talking about the merch itself, as it's part of the overall ritual. Since I knew going into the meeting I would need cash, I brought a little over $100. Between the black trucker's cap (emblazoned with a large patch of her in her billboard's pinup pose), a pinback button, the opportunity to have our photograph taken together, and two large cups of coffee, I was soon parted with all of it. I'm not complaining. I look at it as the price of admission to a wild one-of-a-kind ride, a bonafide quirky-as-all-get-out L.A. experience. I feel it was money well spent.We briefly talked about out-of-body experiences, mass shootings, and what happens after you die as we drank “Angelyne coffee” (a blend of coffee, vanilla syrup, and African Sunrise Tea) out of tiny teacups. I knew hanging Angelyne was going to be interesting experience but I hadn't anticipated getting deep into a philosophical conversation about death and the afterlife with her.Then, she drove me in her hot pink Corvette around the block and down Hollywood Blvd with the windows down, blasting Angelyne’s very own music.She asked if I wanted to hear a joke and of course I said yes. It went something like this: A woman buys an expensive dress and her husband is angry how much money she spent. She says "The Devil made me do it." He asks why she didn't say "Get behind me Satan!" She responds "I did! And he told me it looked good from the back, too!" Angelyne asked which of her songs was my favorite. "All of them," I said and she skipped to "Sex Goddess." Then she told me we would be stopping at Denny's so she could use the restroom and said I should look up her music video for "My List" while I waited for her. When Angelyne returned, we walked back to her car and she asked me what I thought. She wanted to know how many boyfriends I had and if I wanted to get married. She asked me if Brittany was a stripper (she's not). I asked her how old she thought her inner child was, shared that mine was between 12 and 15, and she responded, "Three!" Then, later, "Sometimes fifteen."As we pulled back up to the Coffee Bean, Rusty was waiting there for us... and so was the person who was scheduled to have a ride next.If you'd like to try and win a ride with the lady-in-pink, the entry box lives on the counter of Ozzie Dots, a costume shop on Hollywood Boulevard.---photos by Brittany High and Rusty Blazenhoff

Avatar is a self-actualization "technique" created by an ex-Scientologist named Harry Palmer, who defected from the "church" in 1986 to found a lookalike multi-level-marketing version where he serves as a commission-earning "upline" from practitioners who teach his high-priced "courses" -- his Scientology-alike borrows heavily from the original cult and even used some of its symbols until he lost a trademark suit to Scientology. (more…)

Matt Burns at TechCrunch: "The additional horsepower isn’t needed for general use, but the added graphics cards supercharge Macs for VR rendering and gaming. Only a handful of eGPUs are compatible with macOS so choose carefully before adding one to your rig."The AMD Radeon RX 580 is the best card for games on the compatibility list, but most of the eGPU boxes are pretty bulky. Your best best is probably the Sonnet Box, which is the smallest and comes with an RX 570 built in (with a cheaper RX 560 option). The caveat is that it doesn't have USB-C output, so you can't put it between a Mac and the LG UltraFine monitors that Apple actually sells. Other eGPU boxes have this feature.This will probably go unheralded but I think it's a huge milestone in Mac history: serious game support! Finally!

The National Coffee Association failed to demonstrate that a known-carcinogen produced during the coffee brewing process is not harmful. A judge in the Bear Republic ruled coffee cups need to carry a warning.Via the NYT:The ruling stems from a lawsuit filed in 2010 by the Council for Education and Research on Toxics, a nonprofit group based in Long Beach. The group charged that Starbucks and other companies — a group that eventually included 91 defendants — did not warn consumers that ingesting coffee would expose them to acrylamide, a chemical formed when coffee beans are roasted.California keeps a list of chemicals it considers to cause cancer or reproductive harm, and acrylamide has been included since 1990. The state’s Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act, known as Proposition 65 after it was passed in 1986, requires businesses to provide warning labels when exposing consumers to any of the hundreds of chemicals listed.Judge Elihu M. Berle, in Los Angeles County Superior Court, wrote in a proposed decision on Wednesday that the companies failed to show that acrylamide does not pose a significant risk when produced during the coffee roasting process.“Since defendants failed to prove that coffee confers any human health benefits, defendants have failed to satisfy their burden of proving that sound considerations of public health support an alternate risk level for acrylamide in coffee,” the judge wrote.https://youtu.be/1azwQxMaTxEBarry's Gold Blend tea merely invokes an existential crisis. Drink Barry's.

Today, the US State Department published a notice in the Federal Register seeking comment on a plan to require 15,000,000+ foreigners who get a US visitor visa to disclose all their social media identities as a condition of entry. (more…)

John "The Paper Airplane Guy" Collins shows us how to fold "Suzanne," the aircraft that set a 2012 world record for flying 69.14 meters. "I bring paper airplanes into classrooms and start talking about complicated ideas involved with fluid dynamics and using paper airplanes to explain it," Collins told Wired. "If you can have a group of middle schoolers and high schoolers that don't look at their phones for 45 minutes while you're doing a demonstration, you've hit success," he says.

Developed by Jussi Leinonen of NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab, this is a visualization of the first ever 3D model of a snowflake melting in the atmosphere. Eventually, a deep understanding of how snow actually melts could "help scientists recognize the signature in radar signals of heavier, wetter snow -- the kind that breaks power lines and tree limbs -- and could be a step toward improving predictions of this hazard." From JPL:Leinonen's model reproduces key features of melting snowflakes that have been observed in nature. First, meltwater gathers in any concave regions of the snowflake's surface. These liquid-water regions then merge to form a shell of liquid around an ice core, and finally develop into a water drop. The modeled snowflake shown in the video is less than half an inch (one centimeter) long and composed of many individual ice crystals whose arms became entangled when they collided in midair."NASA Visualizes the Dance of a Melting Snowflake" (JPL)

RSS was a revelation for blogging and online media; we got our first RSS feed in 2001 and I have relied heavily on RSS feeds to write this site (and stay informed) for nearly two decades now; in 2005, Google bet heavily on RSS with its Google Reader product, which quickly eclipsed every other reader, so that by the time they killed it in 2013, there wasn't anything sophisticated, robust and well-maintained to switch to. (more…)

The late-great comedienne Joan Rivers was a frequent guest on Martha Stewart's daytime show. One year for Passover, they built gingerbread-like houses with sheets of matzo and decorated them with other kosher foods including macaroons, chocolate, dried fruits, and nuts. Such a cute idea!Watch:https://youtu.be/V9rTS8yNziIHappy Pesach to those of you out there who celebrate!

Sophia is an advanced social robot in her second year of development by Hanson Robotics. In this video, she's on a date in the Cayman Islands with actor Will Smith. He turns on the charm, goes in for a kiss but is immediately, awkwardly friendzoned by her. Last year Sophia was on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon with her creator, former Imagineer Dr. David Hanson. On it, she tells Jimmy a joke and then plays Rock, Paper, Scissors with him:https://youtu.be/Bg_tJvCA8zw?t=2m20sP.S. You can follow Sophia on Instagram! I just did.https://www.instagram.com/p/Bg661Ikn2vF/?taken-by=realsophiarobot

"A cheetah decided to explore our vehicle on a safari I was leading for Grand Ruaha Safaris (in the Serengeti National Park," wrote wildlife photographer Peter Heistein on Instagram. "Another one jumped up on the hood and was staring at us through the windshield. They were just curious, we kept calm and let them go about their business. Quite a thrill to be this close! "Our guide Alex Mnyangabe... helped us through the encounter with instructions on how to treat the animal 'with respect.'"

https://vimeo.com/124474617Calyx is an amazing nonprofit, privacy-oriented activist ISP (they were the first ISP to successfully resist a secret Patriot Act warrant); they are notable for offering an unlimited, unfiltered, unthrottled 4G/wifi hotspot for a tax-deductible $400 year (mine has repeatedly saved my bacon). (more…)

As advanced atom smashers like the Large Hadron Collider come online, older ones are sometimes abandoned or, better, used for unexpected science experiments. Examples range from recording high-speed X-rays of the biological "motor" that flaps a fly's wings to finding an easter egg in a Degas painting. In the video above, Science Hack Day "global instigator" Ariel Waldman reveals how researchers hack particle accelerators for new uses.

For more than 15 years I've lived in Alameda, a lovely island city in San Francisco's Bay Area. Because we're surrounded by water, there's a boating community. Thus, we have marine stores. I am not part of the boating community, so I had never gone into any of these stores. That is, until today. Our local West Marine store is moving to another part of town, so they're having a big sale. I decided it was time to check it out. It was nicer than I expected. They're set to close at the end of March, so a lot of the shelves were barren. But there were still some neat nautical products left like international code flags, personal locator beacons, and boat beanbag chairs.Though, what really caught my eye were these bottles of fake champagne. They're for when you christen a boat. You just take the bottle and smash it against the vessel. They don't contain alcohol (one reviewer says it contains a "soapy liquid") and are scored to break easily.Read for yourself. Here's the product's description:Save the real champagne for guests and break this special christening bottle on your vessel’s prow. The bottle is scored around the middle and housed in a net to ensure that your first swing is a smashing hit. The result: cheers from the crowd when an impressive-yet safe-spray of imitation bubbly celebrates your boat’s dent-free debut.Watch and learn:https://youtu.be/fBSAwPqVIDEphoto by Rusty Blazenhoff

President Donald J. Trump today fired Veterans Affairs secretary David Shulkin, then tweeted that the White House doctor Ronny Jackson is his nominee to replace. (more…)

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is running an excellent series on the potential and pitfalls of secure messaging app -- this is very timely given the ramping up of state surveillance and identity theft, not to mention anyone looking to #DeleteFacebook and transition away from Facebook Messenger. (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2drwelVD4QwDale Lane's Machine Learning for Kids project uses extensions to the popular Scratch programming environment to teach the basics of machine learning to children. (more…)

In the USA, there are tens of thousands of teachers in open rebellion, in Oklahoma, West Virginia, Arizona, Kentucky, and things are heating up in Pennsylvania, Illinois, Iowa and Colorado. (more…)

Self-taught stop-motion filmmaker PES made his first animated short in 2001. It was a saucy little number called "Roof Sex" that featured furniture getting it on. The film won several awards and its success kick-started his career. The Oscar and Emmy-nominated director recently reshared this "Making of Roof Sex" video on YouTube, a fun NSFW-ish behind-the-scenes piece that was originally released in 2003. Here's the original (which is NSFW, primarily because of the sexy moaning):https://youtu.be/1aodpb3vFU0PES is currently teaching a course on stop-motion animation on Skillshare.

Hedgehogs dream of musical glory in these charming announcements for NPR's annual Tiny Desk Concert competition. (more…)

At Vintage Cassettes, "you will find the beatiful pictures of sealed compact cassettes." Cassettes from 1970-1990 are covered the most. Collecting vintage cassettes is a great hobby and brings all good memories back. Cassettes are organized by brands and then the years they were produced. We concentrate on the most important brands. This site try to cover three markets: US, Europe and Japan. We also added the History of Compact Cassettes located to the right. When I was a kid I wondered if METAL meant that it was specially made for taping, like, Megadeth. The companion site (with better images) would be The Tape Deck, which posts pictures of the cassettes themselves.

On Saturday April 7, celebrate the wonder of space exploration during the Yuri's Night bash taking place under the Space Shuttle Endeavor at the California Science Center! Special guests include astronaut Nicole Stott, Bill Nye the Science Guy, and many more. Among dozens of far out talks and stellar interactive experiences, I'll be there playing the Voyager Golden Record, the iconic message for extraterrestrials launched into space 40 years ago. (My friends Tim Daly and Lawrence Azerrad and I co-produced the first ever vinyl release of the Voyager Record and we were honored with a 2018 Grammy award.) I hope to see you there! Tickets: Yuri's Night L.A.And of course if you're not in Los Angeles, there are Yuri's Night happenings all over the planet!

Julian Verland's "HP Joelcraft," an unholy union between the spine-tingling words of HP Lovecraft's "Nemesis" and Billy Joel's "Piano Man" music. Thro’ the ghoul-guarded gateways of slumber, Past the wan-moon’d abysses of night, I have liv’d o’er my lives without number, I have sounded all things with my sight;And I struggle and shriek ere the daybreak, being driven to madness with fright...(Thanks, UPSO!)

Intrepid vernacular photography collector Robert E. Jackson curated a delightful selection of creepy, fun, and funny vintage photos of the Easter Bunny. More at Flashbak.

I generally don't wear French cuff shirts, but I like the idea of Uncrate Supply's Lighter Cufflinks, $70. Problem is, I'd most certainly fiddle with them, leading to scorched sleeves or worse.

Privacy Badger is EFF's free privacy plugin; it blocks trackers and ads from companies that practice "non-consensual tracking," in which your browser's "do not track" instructions are not honored. (more…)

This automated watch winder automatically winds my favorite watch!I rarely wear a watch, I just don't remember to put them on any more. My favorite watch is a self-winding one and when I did go to put it on it has always stopped. I never remember to set the watch until I actually tried to use it, and then it is too late.I decided to try one of these self-winding gadgets, and it works. Once a day the mechanism spins the watch in the correct direction for about 5 minutes. The watch stays wound and my superlative chronometer with a perpetual movement keeps moving.I use the app Emerald Time to set my watches to an atomic clock. [Newly Upgraded] Versa Automatic Single Watch Winder with Sliding Cover via Amazon

People who buy sex toys generally want "high-quality, ergonomically designed toys that are intuitive to use," but Silicon Valley keeps delivering "innovative" and commercially unsuccessful sex toys whose selling-points are their "flashy apps and connectivity." (more…)

New Zealand set about expelling any Russians who might be spies, but couldn't find anyone who fit the profile. Apropos of nothing, there is a subreddit called "Maps Without New Zealand" dedicated to world maps that omit the island nation, as if the creator simply forgot that it existed or never knew in the first place.

Timothy Miller of Spirit Ironworks shows how to use a induction heater to heat metal extremely quickly. (more…)

A group of Chinese computer scientists from academia and industry have published a paper documenting a tool for fooling facial recognition software by shining hat-brim-mounted infrared LEDs on the user's face, projecting CCTV-visible, human-eye-invisible shapes designed to fool the face recognition software. (more…)

When Grey Heron surfaced this month selling anti-Signal and anti-Telegram surveillance tools at a UK trade show for cyber-arms-dealers, sharp-eyed journalists at Motherboard immediately noticed that the company's spokesman was last seen fronting for Hacking Team, a disgraced Italian cyber-arms-dealer that provided surveillance weapons to some of the world's cruelest dictators. (more…)

This LEGO Camper Van is far more accessible than the VW branded one.Growing up in Southern California instilled a love of all things camper van in me. My daughter loves our VW Westy so much that she cried when I suggested selling the ol' bus last year.There were peals of joy when she saw this kit!LEGO Creator Sunshine Surfer Van 31079 Building Kit (379 Piece) via Amazon

Courtesy the International Comet Quarterly, here's a list of meteorite strikes that focuses on situations where the meteorite hit something -- ranging from houses to cars to mailboxes and even a dog. There are a surprising number of tragic deaths; I can't imagine what the odds are of being maimed or killed by a meteorite, but it's got to be awfully high.A sample from the list:(CC-licensed photo via Pixabay)

A Reuters/Ipsos poll of 2,237 subjects found that the majority of Americans (59%) "do not trust Facebook to obey US privacy laws." (more…)

While it sure is a sight to behold, there’s much more to this magazine than meets the eye. I met Steve and Tanya, the duo at the top of the Singapore counterculture scene best known for curating Kult, the top local alternative art magazine and galley, and learned more about EYEYAH!Their new initiative aims to leverage their global network of 1000 plus artists to produce engaging multimedia content, events, and social campaigns to “inspire children, changing perceptions and provoking new points of view”.Their flagship creation, EYEYAH! Magazine, was launched this January. The first issue brings together interactive artwork, launches a social campaign for kids to contribute their own pieces, and comes with six visceral stickers. It kicks off with the below invitation where the authors rightly proclaim the magazine to be the “Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Wild Wild Web” and overall does a kickass job of teaching kids about the Internet.Though they just launched the first issue in January, selected pages are already being distributed to local schools in a black and white zine format, spicing up education about the Internet in participating local schools. While the magazine and curriculum are currently only available in Singapore, there are plans for a global launch later this year (which I am helping their team with). For now, you can check out their website to learn more about the magazines, prints, and tees they have to offer.

It's been six years since investigative journalists published their expose accusing London's Metropolitan Police of colluding with the UK's construction cartel to blacklist workers who complained about unsafe working conditions, abusive bosses and wage-theft, as well as union organisers and other "troublemakers" -- this week, the Met confirmed that its officers were an active part of the illegal blacklist. (more…)

After you #DeleteFacebook (here's step-by-step instructions, because they make it damned hard), you'll be wanting to replace the services it provided like instant messaging, event planning, and social news sharing. (more…)

A statistical analysis of the unsolved Zodiak killer cipher shows that it is like fake ciphers and unlike true ones, such as the Zodiak's other, cracked ciphertext. In the chart above, created by Tom S Juzek, the red dot is the unsolved cipher, the purple dot the solved one, the other squares known-true ciphers and the diamonds known-fake ciphers. [via r/codes]In my view, the most likely explanation is that the cipher is a ruse. Serial killers tend to be subject to hubris, as Douglas points out in his excellent book on the subject [html link]. It must have been a shock to the Zodiac Killer when he learnt that his z408 cipher had been deciphered so quick, by two hobby cryptographers. To prove intellectual superiority, he needed another cipher, one so strong that couldn't be deciphered, certainly not as easily as z408. I think the Zodiac Killer was unable to produce such a cipher, which is why he chose to take another route: He decided to cheat. The Zodiac Killer created a fake cipher that no-one could ever decrypt. If you're wondering why the cracked Zodiak cipher is way past the rest of the "true" ones, it's because they all involved more randomness than his--never roll your own crypto. Be sure to read Juzek's post as it's staggeringly thorough, yet interesting to someone like me who knows nothing of mathematics. Compare to Craig Bauer's solution, which Juzek describes as "far fetched."Here's the original, if you'd like to take another futile stab at it:

Welcome to the convergence point in a venn diagram of video games, youtube and J.G. Ballard.A very short comparison between BeamNG and reallife traffic accidents. That's pretty much how much attention I spend to detail when I recreating reallife dash cam crashes in beamng.Someone should make a forensics/legal-type show using BeamNG.Previously: Cult driving simulator spawns YouTube genre of automotive chaos

Exhibit A (above) is the Jovivi Handmade Natural Rose Quartz Gua Sha Scraping Massage Tool Massage Wand For Acupuncture Therapy Stick Point Treatment. It is 10cm long, $14, and comes with a free bag.Exhibit B is a 99c song titled "The Crystal Healing Dildo (Original Mix)" by an artist named The Real Kim Shady. It has the parental advisory sticker and is on YouTube with 415 views and the description "no copyright intended." There are no comments. I haven't listened to it.2 results for "healing crystal dildo" [Amazon.com]

After interviewing Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie and other CA sources and reviewing leaked documents, the Washington Post has pieced together the story of how the dirty-tricking electioneers worked their way Republican political circles, as billionaire founder Robert Mercer opened doors for them with other notorious GOP billionaire backers, with an able assist from newly minted national security adviser John Bolton, a notorious war-criminal with close ties to terrorist groups like MEK. (more…)

Here's Chris Baraniuk on people who make their own mechanical watches, from scratch: an intricate and delicate traditional craft that is, for once, not lost to time.He started reading forums, researching tools and materials, and checking out where parts could be acquired, such as cases, dials, hands, strap and movement. “It becomes like a big jigsaw puzzle, you try to work out what pieces will fit together,” he says.Thanks in part to the availability of information over the web, many people just as curious as [Matthew] Wright have embarked on their own home-made watch projects. And some have even launched businesses as a result. But how easy is it to get started?A quick hit on Google will bring up a wave of results that can kick things off for enthusiasts. There’s the Reddit Watch forum, the TimeZone Watch School, which offers courses via the web for a price, discussions on the WatchUSeek forum, and hundreds of YouTube videos aimed at makers.People can buy kits for assembling watches or individual parts online with relative ease, too. This is the exact rabbit-hole that Wright fell down when he started researching.“You see other people who’ve made little changes to watches, they’ve changed dials or whatever, and the next thing, I stumbled across websites where you can buy the cases completely empty,” he recalls.Pictured here is a watch made by Mike Hamende, who also took the photo. I once almost managed to put together a Lego kit and I'm still proud of myself.

This is a fun video introduction to feeding yourself in Japan, even if you don't know Japanese. Really, it's pretty easy to get food in Japan if you're a foreigner, but this video shows you different options, from konbini (convenience stores, which are much better than the ones in the US), to chain restaurants (again, usually tastier than US chains), to shopping mall food courts (beautiful and mind bending), and actual non-chain eateries.

Did the scene in the new IT movie where Pennywise bites Georgie's arm, only for the camera to cut to an exterior shot of the drain, leave you frustrated and hankering for more? If you want to dwell on the boy's dismembered fate on an indefinite basis, this animatronic prop at the TransWorld Halloween & Attractions Show in St. Louis this week should be right up your sewer. You might be fortunate enough to see this at your local haunted house this fall, the laughing and shaking and screaming as an endlessly looping moment.I usually love the pop-culture grand guignol transgressive trash of modern Halloween horror, but I really hate this! A sense of amazed wonder subsiding to cold dismay. There's something very 2018 going on here. It doesn't have anything to do with our lives but we all know that terrible things will soon be happening and we've developed a very strange language to accomodate ourselves to the prospect of it. Here's the top comment on the YouTube thread:Funny Vine Videos | FVV3 hours agoCan we feature your video in our YouTube channel ? Please make sure to email me at funnyvinevideos.fvv(at)gmail(dot)com I have a great offer for you $$$ Am I just getting old? Tell me if I'm just getting old.

Naomi Klein's l(ooooo)ongread in The Intercept about the state of play in Puerto Rico is the comprehensive summary of the post-Maria fuckery and hope that has gripped America's colonial laboratory, the place where taxation without representation, austerity, chemical weapons, new drugs, and new agribusiness techniques get trialed before the rest of America are subjected to them. (more…)