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"The greatest diplomatic troll of all time"Grandpa Pudding Brains signed a peace deal at Versailles, because apparently nobody in the room had a history teacher, a calendar, or access to the phrase "ominous symbolism."Versailles remains a bold venue for anyone announcing a peace deal with reparations. - Read the rest The post Grandpa Pudding Brains announces another Treaty of Versailles appeared first on Boing Boing.

MAD Magazine published its 600th issue this week, and celebrated with a gorgeous cover (and back cover) by the reigning champ of MAD cartooning, Sergio Aragones. Aragones's first appearance in the magazine was in issue #76, published in 1963.Posted with the permission of DC ComicsIt's quite a milestone for a publication that started in 1952 as a comic book, and as a way for Harvey Kurtzman to write humor for EC Comics, instead of the research-heavy, time-consuming war comics he'd been writing. - Read the rest The post MAD hits 600 issues; still, thankfully, hilariously juvenile appeared first on Boing Boing.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Max Fosh is the only YouTube prankster out there worth a damn. He's not obnoxious, he isn't self-centered, and most rare of all, he doesn't hurt anyone. His workflow begins with isolating a ridiculously silly idea, like hiring stuntmen to throw a fight so he can look cool in front of his friends, and doing everything possible to realize it. - Read the rest The post Becoming a British royal with nothing more than confidence and an accent appeared first on Boing Boing.

How many times do you think I can get away with saying Spider-Man in this post? You know, for maximum SEO points? Let's give it a shot:The upcoming Avengers: Doomsday is rumored to be a sort of soft reset for the MCU. - Read the rest The post Spider-Man continues to do the things only a spider can in the new trailer for the latest "Spider-Man" movie appeared first on Boing Boing.

Meta laid off thousands of workers, started monitoring employees' computers, assigned people to train the AI that may replace them, and then discovered the real missing ingredient: snacks.Meta CTO Andrew "Boz" Bosworth told employees morale is "probably one of the worst it's ever been" and that the "vibes are off." - Read the rest The post Meta lays off thousands, monitors workers, increases the snack budget appeared first on Boing Boing.

Grandpa Pudding Brains tried to sound tough about America and somehow wandered into saying that strength is based on stolen elections."Nobody plays rougher than the United States," Trump said. "Look, our elections are totally rigged. We have rigged elections." It is the usual election-denial poison, but with an extra little Freudian garnish: he says "we" right after bragging about how rough the United States plays. - Read the rest The post Grandpa Pudding Brains brags about how rigged U.S. elections are appeared first on Boing Boing.

Forget the pet-shop fluffball on a squeaky wheel. Europe's wild hamsters are out in Vienna's graveyards stuffing their faces, throwing hands, and living like tiny cemetery goblins.Not a Biologist shares wildlife filmmaker Yaz Ellis' look at the surprisingly dramatic lives of wild hamsters in Vienna's cemeteries. - Read the rest The post Vienna's graveyards are full of hardcore hamsters appeared first on Boing Boing.

Asked whether anyone would be held accountable for a strike on an elementary school that killed more than 100 children, Grandpa Pudding Brains said no, called it "a strange question," and shrugged: "Mistakes are made."The children were killed in the active voice. - Read the rest The post "Mistakes are made": Grandpa Pudding Brains shrugs at school strike that killed over 100 appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR: Get alifetime license to Microsoft Windows 11 Profor just $9.97 (reg. $199).Deal Days, Stack Social's Prime Day equivalent, is an excellent time to get the software you've always wanted at a great bargain; and this Microsoft Windows 11 Pro license is a great example of why. - Read the rest The post Get Windows 11 Pro for life for just $10 during Deal Days appeared first on Boing Boing.

It should come as no surprise by now that I enjoy a good scambait. Scambaiting, or the art of deliberately wasting scammers' time, has become a bit of a flourishing practice of late. All the better for people who love both being entertained and watching criminal activity get foiled. - Read the rest The post Watching a middle-aged English woman enrage romance scammers is my new favorite pastime appeared first on Boing Boing.

Well, this is a sweet bonus: if you own an Android foldable like a Samsung Z Series foldable, OnePlus Open or Google Pixel 10 Pro Fold, you may soon have access to a customizable, virtual gamepad baked into Android 17, which is set to start rolling out to Android hardware today. - Read the rest The post Android 17 brings a customizable virtual gamepad to foldables appeared first on Boing Boing.

Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is dead at 87, reports the court. Ginsburg was appointed in 1993 by President Bill Clinton and in recent years served as the most senior member of the court's liberal wing consistently delivering progressive votes on the most divisive social issues of the day, including abortion rights, same-sex marriage,…Read More

Inspired by that shitshow that is 2020, Oakland-based singer/songwriter Rachel Lark (whose bio reads "confrontational comedy punk for weird people and weird times") has just dropped an existential crisis of a music video on us for her single, "The World's Really F*cked But This Show Will Be Pretty Good." Prepare to both smile and weep.…Read More

Polish author Stanislaw Lem's 1964 sci-fi thriller, The Invincible, is being made into a videogame by Polish game company, Starward Industries. Sayeth PC Gamer: The Invincible is a 1964 hard sci-fi novel by Polish author Stanislaw Lem about the crew of a powerful deep-space vessel that lands on the planet Regis 3 and learns some…Read More

Another great backyard "Live at Home" moment from BBC Radio 2. It's disco funk-rockers Chic, joined by UK singer-songwriter, Rebecca Ferguson, doing Chic's iconic 1979 disco hit, "Good Times." Kind of heartbreaking to hear such a joyous booty-shaker at this particular point in time, but it's at least fun to dance to and dream of…Read More

"Pron" was always a lie. The common misspelling of the term at hand is "porm," says PornHub, a site that would know. The infographic is a couple of years old, but I doubt literacy has improved in the meantime. "On a side note… the newly minted term "covfefe" has already been searched over 9,000 times…Read More

College engineering student Sam Zeloof, known for converting his parents' garage into a semiconductor fab while in high school, transformed a vintage Polaroid camera into a digital camera with a thermal printer scavenged from a receipt machine. Press the button and the camera spits out a photo print from what was formerly the film cartridge…Read More

NASA released this astonishingly beautiful image of Jupiter captured by the Hubble Space Telescope on August 25. From NASA: Hubble's near-infrared imaging, combined with ultraviolet views, provides a unique panchromatic look that offers insights into the altitude and distribution of the planet's haze and particles. This complements Hubble's visible-light pictures that show the ever-changing cloud…Read More

If you're catching the feeling of good cheer and holiday merriment in the air, that's probably because we're smack in the middle of The Boing Boing Store's Three-Day VIP Annual Sale. One of the biggest discount shopping sprints of the year, you can save serious cash on huge collections of the best items we bring…Read More

The town of Asbestos in Quebec, Canada has long been dreaming of a new identity. Its current name was appropriate as the town was home to what was once the world's largest asbestos mine. But ever since asbestos was deemed a deadly carcinogen, the name has bummed out many of its citizens. Four new town…Read More

Musician Alexey Rom arranged this wonderful version of ABBA's classic "Dancing Queen" for a 1914 mechanical fairground organ built by Belgian makers Hooghuys. You may recall Rom as the arranger behind the below rendition of "Bohemian Rhapsody" performed on this same instrument:Read More

Paleontologists found this bundle of "giant sperm" in the reproductive tract of an ostracod that's been preserved for 100 million years in amber from Myanmar. From the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München: In fact, this is the oldest fossil in which sperm cells have been conclusively identified. Moreover, the specimen represents a previously unknown species of crustacean, which…Read More

The itty-bitty Dodocool Bluetooth speaker is surprisingly loud and distortion-free. I pair it to my phone and use it to listen to music and podcasts when I'm outside or working on projects. It's cheap, too!Read More

The Canadian government granted Uline billionaire COVID-critic Liz Uihlein an exemption to its mandatory 14-day quarantine for people entering the country. She and two companions flew into Canada on a private jet and held large meetings without masks, according to CBC News. From The Guardian: Uihlein and her husband have been called the "powerful conservative…Read More

Emma Pope nails it.Read More

Max Ravitz (aka Patricia) uses a Moog Subharmonicon, a Mother-32, and a DFAM to make beautiful music in his garden. From Moog: In this new semi-modular exploration, Asheville-based electronic music producer and Moog Product Specialist Max Ravitz (aka Patricia) brings Subharmonicon together with Mother-32 and DFAM for an intricate performance among the flora of his…Read More

Trump's "herd mentality" (sic) plan is to "infect 7 out of 10 Americans with Covid. The Trump plan will kill at least 3 million people/"Read More

"What should be a cosy, pleasant corner of the internet has become a monster," writes Sarah Manavis in New Statesmen. "Goodreads sucks, and is just shy of unbearable." Goodreads today looks and works much as it did when it was launched. The design is like a teenager's 2005 Myspace page: cluttered, random and unintuitive. Books fail…Read More

Coffee YouTuber James Hoffman takes a look at five espresso machines costing under £500 (US$650). His top overall choice is the most expensive one, the Rancilio Silvia. I've had one for about 15 years and really like it, though I added a PID temperature control unit, which cost a couple of hundred dollars, making the…Read More

Diogenes is the pithos-inhabiting star of Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy, the most sadistic game to never spill a pixel of blood. He (Diogenes, not Bennett) is hereby immortalized as a $25 plushie by Makeship: "If we get 400 preorders they'll do a production run!" [via @bfod]Read More

The science-fiction dream of videoconferencing is finally grim, merciless reality, but tech companies have wanted to foist it on us for decades and this business-to-business marketing video for AT&T's early-1990s solution makes for amusing viewing. They hired David Fincher to do TV ads for AT&T about the same time. They don't depict the VideoPhone itself,…Read More

This is sadly and absolutely as true today as it was when they wrote it.Read More

When we pick up our phones to shoot a video, most of us aren't looking to craft "The Godfather." We just want something that looks reasonably decent that won't be an embarrassment when it gets posted to YouTube or social media. But while not every video needs to reach Spielbergian levels of production, you might…Read More

Drew Barrymore and Adam Sandler reprise their 50 First Dates roles in this comedic short that imagines what life would be like now for the 2004 film's characters, Lucy and Henry. Lucy (Drew Barrymore) wakes up to husband Henry's (Adam Sandler) routine message to remind her of what's been going on the past 16 years…Read More

The Pretenders recorded this Live at Home rendition of "Back on the Chain Gang" for BBC Radio 2. Chrissie Hynde's voice is apparently immortal.Read More

Former FBI Director James Comey is scheduled to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee on September 30, which is just about one month before the presidential election. The GOP keeps trying to gin up the lie that Comey and the FBI under his direction conspired against Donald Trump in 2016. From the Associated Press: Comey,…

Remember that Trump photo op in front of St. John's Church in Lafayette Square in DC, on June 1st, where American citizens were tear-gassed? Military police were also considering using what is described as a heat ray to burn the skin of people protesting the killing of George Floyd on that day. Previously, the heat […]

The two Tom the Dancing Bug books, Tom the Dancing Bug: Into the Trumpverse, and The Super-Fun-Pak Comix Reader, are now available. Information about the books, including how to order, and special offers here. "God bless Tom the Dancing Bug! Funny, succinct, and highly original, Ruben Bolling is able to make sense from the chaos […]

The French political cartoon website Charlie Hebdo says Al Qaeda has issued death threats to the staff, after republication of the infamous Mohammed cartooons. SITE Intel Group and AFP have also reported about the threats on Friday, and say they were published in Al Qaeda's magazine, One UMMAH. An image from the cover of the […]

At The Catapult, writer/artist Shing Yin Khor has an incredibly beautiful illustrated essay about her relationship with peaches and depression — connecting both things back to their own Chinese heritage, and to the fruit's relationship with Confederate white supremacy in America. Khor takes a touching personal narrative and deftly weaves it through and around hundreds […]

Sometimes, in my dreams, I am the lead in Kool Moe Dee's I Go To Work.

In artists Erwin Driessens and Maria Verstappen's installation "Pareidolia," a computer vision system uses facial recognition software to find faces in grains of sand. Of course, "pareidolia" is a trick our brain plays that causes us to see meaningful patterns that aren't really there, like animals in clouds or hidden messages in songs. From the […]

Today I learned about the Houston Vampire Court and the Vampire Court of Dallas/Fort Worth, both member-driven organizations for "Sanguinarians" — humans who sustain themselves through blood (animal, or human) or by "draining" "psychic energies" from other humans. These are, perhaps unsurprisingly, largely off-shoots or goth and/or fetish subcultures, but there's something heartwarming about the […]

The "magnificent" home in Berkeley, California, formerly lived in by author Ursula K. Le Guin is on the market for $4.1m. Pictured above, the writing room, though the press releasy stories about it are vague on when and how long she lived there (Wikipedia suggests not past her twenties) . Below, a video tour of […]

The Broomway is a path over tidal flats near Southend-on-Sea in England, linking the mainland with Foulness Island for at least 600 years. Often shrouded in mist, surrounded by whirpools and quicksand, or simply underwater during high tide, it has claimed countless lives. It has refused all efforts to improve it, finally being replaced with […]

Theodor Kittelsen was a neo-Romantic and fantasy artist famous in Norway but relatively unknown beyond it. Here's a brief documentary featuring and explaining some of his most distinctive work. Narrator Sindrelf posted an accompanying article explaining his fondness for Kittelsen, whose cosy yet unsettling perch rests somewhere between victorian fairy art and the towering gloom […]

Today I learned: Flamingos feed with their heads upside down and that their beaks are adapted for this purpose. This essay on flamingo feeding from Stanford explains: In most birds a smaller lower beak works against a larger upper one. In flamingos this is reversed; the lower bill is much larger and stronger, and the […]

What's brown and white and tastes nothing like Christmas? Archie McPhee's Shiitake Mushroom Candy Canes, of course. Not sure what to do for the holidays this year? Give a shiitake! Shiitake Mushroom Candy Canes may seem odd at first, but they're sprouting up all over the place. How do they taste? Like shiitake. After all, […]

Finally, all this new technology put to useful purpose: film stars manipulated by an evil AI into singing "All Star". The software that does the magic is Wav2Lip [github]. Highlights Lip-sync videos to any target speech with high accuracy. Try our interactive demo. Works for any identity, voice, and language. Also works for CGI faces […]

Being a mortician means getting asked a lot of interesting questions, especially ones on keeping a skull or other memento mori after a loved one shuffles off this mortal coil. The answer is interesting and takes gentle viewers into the arcana of corpse desecration laws. The short answer is that you will need to find […]