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"Still Not Dotcom" is Brian McMullen's annual catalog of unregistered .com domains -- as found poetry goes, you'd be hard pressed to find anything funnier. You can also listen to it as a free, unabridged audiobook thanks to KCRW's The Organist. (more…)

The kind folks at Dark Delicacies, my local specialist horror bookstore here in beautiful Burbank, California have volunteered to fill orders for my novels; since they're walking distance from my front door, I'll be popping in there a couple of times every week between now and Xmas to sign and inscribe any orders you place; they make fabulous gifts and also excellent firelighters! Call them at +1-818-556-6660, or email darkdel@darkdel.com.

The US Department of Education's Free Application for Federal Student Aid program requires any student applying for federal aid for college or university to turn over an enormous amount of compromising personal information, including current and previous addresses, driver's license numbers, Green Card numbers, marital details, drug convictions, educational history, tax return details, total cash/savings/checking balances, net worth of all investments, child support received, veterans' benefits, children's details, homelessness status, parents details including SSNs, and much, much more. (more…)

An NBER paper from 2015 tracks the decline in corporate spending on basic science in R&D, which has become a practical, application-focused line-item in corporate budgets, creating a safe, predictable, and slow cycle of innovation. (more…)

Instagram user Lonseometown9 documents their ongoing series of street art that transforms dumped sofas, chairs, and televisions into sad clowns. (more…)

A newly-published overview of self-reported ayahuasca experiences indicates that the hallucinogen can help alleviate eating disorders and reduce alcohol consumption. Now, more scientists are pushing to make it easier to study the drug legally. (more…)

No time to waste opening an entire six-pack one bottle at a time? Now there's finally a solution: Sixoverone, the hexa-opener you never knew you needed.Here's another demo:https://vimeo.com/243069918If you'd rather do it the old fashioned way, efficiency comes with practice.https://youtu.be/Ccc4Wty5Wtc?t=20s• SIXOVERONE (via Indiegogo)

Nahre Sol's Practice Notes channel is a whirlwind tour of music history, with variations of well-known melodies in the styles of different composers, mashups of genres, and other delights. (more…)

Instead of waiting for January 1st to commit to your New Year’s resolutions, you can start teaching yourself programming and app development with this Learn to Code 2018 Bundle. The complete course material is available in the Boing Boing Store for a pay-what-you want price.This collection features 10 comprehensive video courses that will introduce you to full-stack web development, building iOS apps, and data analysis with the R programming language. With over 150 hours of content, you’ll get plenty of experience building professional software and manipulating data using a wide variety of platforms. Here’s what you’ll be studying: Complete Python Web Course: Build 8 Python Web AppsHow to Make a Freaking iPhone App: iOS 11 and Swift 4JavaScript for BeginnersThe Complete PHP MySQL Professional CourseLearn React by Building Real ProjectsProgramming for Complete Beginners in C#The Complete Java 9 Masterclass: Beginner to ExpertBeginner Full Stack Web Development: HTML, CSS, React & NodeAngular Crash Course for Busy DevelopersIntroduction to R ProgrammingYou can pay what you want for the Learn to Code 2018 Bundle.

Musterbrand's Star Wars line sports some amazing garments, like the Rebel and Vader capes, the Skywalker shoes, the Rey Sweater, the Sith coat, and the Skywalker jacket. (more…)

Luminaire's Piano Coat Rack hangs up to 48 garment from pegs that swing in and out of the piece, made from beech, oak, or walnut; it's a clever, space-saving, beautiful design, but at $1800-$4100, it exceeds my coat-rack budget by more than an order of magnitude. (via Yanko Design) (more…)

To the best of my recollection, this was Thanksgiving 1993.I was 21 and living in Chicago. I'd moved there a few months earlier, under the promise of a job at the Second City, a famed comedy club, that evaporated before I'd ever set foot in the door. Being young and refusing to give up, I stayed for the adventure. My apartment was incredibly cheap, and I was performing a lot more than I had been in LA. I thought I'd make this my new home.My two roommates had left town to visit family. Greg, a fellow improvisational comedian who'd suffered the same retracted job offer as I, was off to Massachusetts. Marko, a 6'6" pre-frontally lobotomized hoarder who suffered from homophobia, anti-semitism, and only experienced joy while performing as a children's party clown, was someplace I did not care.Over the many years, I have come to recognize that homophobic, anti-semitic, hoarder, children's party clown roommates come with an increased incidence of violent death. The rent was really cheap. My friend Kevin came into town from Los Angeles, we didn't even think about dinner. Mostly, we liked to drink. We were 21 and it was cold.It was Thursday, everything was closed and we were hungry. We realized it was Thanksgiving. I am absolutely certain this very-good-idea-were-we-not-broke-as-fuck was Kevin's and not mine: we would go to the Chicago Ritz-Carlton and join their Thanksgiving dinner.We decided that appearances would matter and that we should look nice if we intended to have dinner with rich and fancy people at a rich and fancy place. We put on our very nicest clothes. We still looked like shit.Moments after arriving at the Ritz, while I marveled at the lovely reception area, Kevin asked the Concierge for directions to the Thanksgiving Dinner. There is no finer magician than a five-star hotel's Concierge. He had a better idea! If we'd give him just a moment the hotel limousine would deliver us to a theater for dinner and a show! The tickets were going to go to waste, he'd feel great if we used them!The driver was super friendly and happy to give us a ride as well. People at the Ritz-Carlton were very cool. We couldn't believe our good fortune and hopped in the black stretch. We were bound for a theater neither of us had heard of, about 15 minutes away, called The Admiral.Not all theaters have the same sort of show. Once, when serving as the COO of an advertising start-up, one of my finance folk brought an expense to my attention. I needed to see a large charge on a salesperson's company card attributed to the "O'Farrell Theater" in San Francisco. Due to my Thanksgiving experience at The Admiral Theater, I knew immediately why this accountant was concerned. Salespeople shouldn't expense strip clubs.After presenting our tickets, and clearing a brief weapons check, we entered a room full of smoke, enlisted Navy guys, strippers and a full Thanksgiving buffet dinner. We each had two complimentary drink tickets. Tips were not included.The turkey was like cardboard. The gravy, stuffing and mashed potatoes were as one. The cranberry sauce was strangely made from fresh whole cranberries, and the headlining dancer was billed as "Sacajawea the Apache Princess of Fire." I knew this was culturally inappropriate long before I thought of things as culturally inappropriate. It was just wrong. I was mildly horrified. It was free dinner. I was 21.Sacajawea ate fire and juggled fire with her boobs out. We ate cardboard turkey. The Navy guys were thrilled. I paid the $20 for a Polaroid with Sacajawea. I regret having lost it. We did not finish our two drinks. The night ended at the Old Town Ale House. Every night in Chicago should.

America is in the midst of a "retail apocalypse": 6,800 chain stores are closing this year. It's true that online retailers and winner-take-alls like Walmart have delivered the coup de grace that finished off these stores, but the conditions that made them weak enough to kill are driven by Wall Street, not Walmart. (more…)

When Trump's Health and Human Services secretary Tom Price lost his job for chartering private jets to fly him all around America, it left a vacancy in Trump's cabinet of billionaire gators that he's been filling the DC swamp with. (more…)

The Philips Norelco OneBlade hybrid electric trimmer and shaver is regularly $35. Amazon is selling it for $17.47, which is lower than it's ever been. I've heard good things about it, so at this price I bought one.

https://youtu.be/eujd_POookcJimmy DiResta, who makes everything from knives to furniture to musical instruments, recently made this nfty spoon with two business ends. I've whittled quite a few spoons in the last several years, so to see that ball gouge carve out the hollows of the spoon so effortlessly made me envious.

Massive income inequality, combined with Republican attacks on the taxation of the wealthiest, has produced a situation in which the state increasingly depends on extracting fines, interest and debt service from people who grow steadily poorer and less able to pay, and thus the state must turn to ever-more-extreme measures to extract the money it needs to survive. (more…)

Scotty of Strange Parts went to the colorful bustling Chor Bazaar in Mumbai, India. It's chaotic and crammed and exciting. Scotty has videos of other markets he's been visiting lately and they are all worth watching.

Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign are the holy trinity of design tools, and you can get an in-depth introduction to all three with a lifetime subscription to Graphic Design Certification School. It’s usually offered in the Boing Boing Store for $39, but you can get it for $25 if you buy in the next 24 hours.This trio of online courses has over 40 hours of instructional material that will teach you how to create a variety of visual assets. In the Photoshop section, you’ll learn how to professionally retouch images and generate multi-layered raster artwork. Using Illustrator, you’ll get familiar with bezier curves and masks to create clean vector graphics for posters, logos, and digital display. Finally, you can tie it all together to make beautiful print layouts in InDesign.Once you’ve worked through all these lessons, you can show off your skills to employers with certificates for continuing professional development. For today only, lifetime access to Graphic Design Certification School is available for an early Black Friday price of $25.

The Airmega 400S (Amazon) is a luxury air filter, a sci-fi lounge monolith with touch-sensitive controls and a ring of colored light that turns with the air quality. High-end in fit, finish and capacity, it's also very online, with Internet-of-Things features and a stat-tracking app. Do I really need to remote-manage it with a mobile app? Have a username and login for a HEPA filter? No (see below), but the air quality tracking app did tell me two interesting things. First, it assured me that the air quality in my house is already pretty good, curing a certain degree of paranoia. So it mostly stays in sleep mode, silent, wasting no electricity -- unlike the permanently-whirring Honeywell it replaced. Secondly, it told me that air quality goes to hell when anything is cooked. At last! Confirmation of what we suspected all along about the wisdom of burning wet slabs of carbon in our well-insulated houses.I'm intrigued, then, by Airmega's air metrics, yet torn on its long-term value. This is an expensive gadget, after all, going for $650 or so on the street. (UPDATE: A non-IoT version, the Airmega 400 without an S, is available for about $100 less. — Thanks, Tim!)It's about the size of a desktop mini-fridge, significantly larger than most consumer air filters, with three HEPA filters and the promise of full-house coverage. 1,560 square feet, they claim, which would make it competitive on a price-per-square-foot basis with less expensive models. There's a smaller model, the Airmega 300, that claims to cover 1,256 feet and is about $100 cheaper. It's dead quiet, too, especially at the lowest settings. There is not the slightest buzz of vibration. Washing and replacing filters is very easy. It messages you when they need a bath.But still, for all this, it does only one thing: suck air through HEPA filters. And it is $650.It's been in my house for a couple of months now and spends almost all its time off, in smart mode. I sometimes get a bit angry when I walk past it and it's just sat there asleep having decided it doesn't need to filter my clean-enough air. There's something existential about it all. It's weird to pay so much for a machine that's honest about it being unnecessary. Except on bacon sandwiches day, that is, when it kicks into high gear and texts me every 2 minutes with panicky warnings, unrelenting until the bacon is gone.I'm extremely dubious about the utility and wisdom of an IoT air filter. But if you know you need an air filter, and you need one that's attractive, quiet and very high-capacity, where a $300 Honeywell (or HEPA filters duct-taped to a box fan) would just be unacceptably loud, trashy or ugly, the price premium is yours to consider.AIRMEGA 400S Smart Air Purifier [Amazon]Airmega homepage [airmega.com]

FOLLOW @RubenBolling on the Twitters and a Face Book.WE URGE YOU TO JOIN Tom the Dancing Bug's subscription club, the Proud & Mighty INNER HIVE, for exclusive early access to comics, extra comics, and Other Stuff. You can also now join through Patreon!GET Ruben Bolling’s new hit book series for kids, The EMU Club Adventures. (”Filled with wild twists and funny dialogue” -Publishers Weekly) Book One here. Book Two here. More Tom the Dancing Bug comics on Boing Boing! (more…)

ProPublica revealed earlier this year that Facebook allowed housing advertisers to target ads at white people and provided other racist segmentation options. Facebook promised to build a system that would spot and eliminate these ads, but a new investigation demonstrates that it failed to do so.Last week, ProPublica bought dozens of rental housing ads on Facebook, but asked that they not be shown to certain categories of users, such as African Americans, mothers of high school kids, people interested in wheelchair ramps, Jews, expats from Argentina and Spanish speakers.All of these groups are protected under the federal Fair Housing Act, which makes it illegal to publish any advertisement “with respect to the sale or rental of a dwelling that indicates any preference, limitation, or discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, handicap, familial status, or national origin.” Violators can face tens of thousands of dollars in fines.Every single ad was approved within minutes.It seems Facebook only ever does so much as is needed to get rid of bad press. As a promise of change always ends the news cycle, implementation hardly matters.UPDATE Facebook executive Ami Vora posted a statement:“This was a failure in our enforcement and we’re disappointed that we fell short of our commitments. Earlier this year, we added additional safeguards to protect against the abuse of our multicultural affinity tools to facilitate discrimination in housing, credit and employment. The rental housing ads purchased by ProPublica should have but did not trigger the extra review and certifications we put in place due to a technical failure. Our safeguards, including additional human reviewers and machine learning systems have successfully flagged millions of ads and their effectiveness has improved over time. Tens of thousands of advertisers have confirmed compliance with our tighter restrictions, including that they follow all applicable laws. We don’t want Facebook to be used for discrimination and will continue to strengthen our policies, hire more ad reviewers, and refine machine learning tools to help detect violations. Our systems continue to improve but we can do better. While we currently require compliance notifications of advertisers that seek to place ads for housing, employment, and credit opportunities, we will extend this requirement to ALL advertisers who choose to exclude some users from seeing their ads on Facebook to also confirm their compliance with our anti-discrimination policies – and the law.” -Ami Vora, VP Product Management, Facebook

The DC-based transparency group Property of the People successfully sued the White House to force it to disclose its visitor logs; now, in collaboration with Propublica, those logs are online as a free, searchable database. (more…)

Within science fiction, Jo Walton (previously) is legendary for hosting small, intimate gatherings of outstanding conversation and comradeship. (more…)

Reddit has resurfaced this 2012 paper from the New England Journal of Medicine titled "Chocolate Consumption, Cognitive Function, and Nobel Laureates," by Franz H. Messerli, M.D.From the abstract:Chocolate consumption could hypothetically improve cognitive function not only in individuals but in whole populations. Could there be a correlation between a country's level of chocolate consumption and its total number of Nobel laureates per capita?For other amusing spurious correlations here you go.

I am serious about sleepwear, and will not pass on a chance to change into jammies (I travel with them, wear them on long-haul flights, etc), and there's a universe of difference between slopping around in sweats and a tee and wearing actual jim-jams. (more…)

I'm certain the flames are CG, because I've seen a few tire fires in my time, but somewhere out there is a more uncannily scary video of the 60 MPH death wheel. Find it for a special no-reward!https://youtu.be/b6aJrPbeBfg?t=43s

Your kids thought that Elf on the Shelf was a dirty snitch, but just wait until they get a load of this Santa Cam. For just $19.99 you can further perpetuate one of the world's biggest lie to children, the existence of Santa Claus. Because, that jolly guy in the red suit knows when you are sleeping and he knows when you are awake, with or without this (dummy) cam.Santa can "check-in" from the North Pole to see when kids are kind to others, listen to their parents, and make good choices!But wait, there's more! The let's-normalize-survelliance cam comes with the book, The Santa Cam Saves Christmas. A big thanks to SF Slim!

This portable cat prison (Amazon) fully incarcerates your feline friend and you can throw it on just like any other backpack.From the product description:Take your pet out to the ballgame, on a plane, or to the vet in your choice of colors and budget friendly designs. Small pets, such as cats and rabbits can be difficult to keep in carriers. Semi-sphere Design: semi-sphere can stop them from escaping and keeps them safe in your care.Great tips in the Q&A section:Question: What do i do if my animal needs to use the restroomAnswer: Take the cat outI did not photoshop a screaming kitten into the product image. That is the one they market it with.

At $20, the Eufy Genie Smart Speaker With Amazon Alexa is the least expensive hands-free Alexa speaker I know of. I got my first Alexa device last year (a Dot) and my family uses it many times a day to listen to podcasts, get NPR news briefings, weather forecasts, audiobooks, latest bitcoin price, word definitions, Wikipedia entries, kitchen timer and more. I don't have this particular item, but I ordered one for upstairs.

Well before Breaking Bad, and Better Call Saul (and even Mr. Show), Bob Odenkirk showed his comedic chops by playing Charles Manson on the short-lived 1990s TV sketch series The Ben Stiller Show.In two of the skits, he plays the madman as a sort of incarcerated "Heloise" in "Ask Manson." In them, he answers questions on stain removal and car troubles. https://youtu.be/fuiXOoJTeRIThe third one takes a different, and completely inspired, turn. It's Manson as Lassie and it's one of my all-time favorites.I won't say anymore, just watch:https://youtu.be/Z5IrRe2F7qY

Retired Mythbuster and maker extraordinaire Adam Savage (previously) gave up on finding a bag to carry everything he needed and designed his own, a white, Gladstone-style toolbag that costs $225 and ships in time for Christmas. (more…)

There has never been a more urgent moment to merge ethics and technology: this shared spreadsheet of 57 (and counting) university courses on ethics and tech includes links to syllabi, moderated by Colorado University information science assistant prof Casey Fiesler, who runs The Internet Rules Lab (hey, grad students, she's hiring!)

To hear America's fearmongering private health-care shills describe it, socialized medicine is a kind of Soviet death march, where rationed care and long waits are imposed on all and sundry; but if that state of affairs sounds familiar, it's because of how neatly it describes America's dysfunctional private care system, where you need to change doctors every time you change employers, where your care is denied and your prescriptions are deemed unnecessary by faceless insurance-company bureaucrats, and where three quarters of your family doctor's overheads are dedicated to filling in insurance forms in triplicate and chasing payment in a kind of LARP of Terry Gilliam's Brazil or a Stalinist hospital in deepest Siberia. (more…)

My mother used to make an incredible grilled cheese sandwich. It was neither greasy nor too buttery, but simultaneously buttery and toasty. The bread was pan fried golden brown with a nice crunch on the exterior, and it was evenly cooked all the way around and all the way through. I’ve never seen another one like it until last week, when I happened to be in Frisco, Texas, eating at the one-year old restaurant @nerdvana. I had not ordered a grilled cheese sandwich, nor had anyone at my table. But someone had ordered a drink by the name of Tiny Tina’s TKO, which appears on the brunch menu. The first thing you should know is that Tiny Tina’s TKO costs 20 bucks. If that sounds expensive for a drink, you should also know that it will feed two people. That’s brunch for two, with alcoholic beverage, for $20 (plus tax and tip). That’s about what you’d pay to eat at McD’s, but instead you will find yourself in @nerdvana, which is heaven for nerds, gamers, and folks who just like good food and spirits. The portion in Tiny Tina’s glass is a killer Bloody Mary, while the skewers towering from the glass include two hard-boiled eggs, cherry tomatoes, bacon, celery, a big-ass Jalapeño pepper, and an entire grilled cheese sandwich cut into quarters. The only thing I ate was the grilled cheese sandwich, and it was mighty fine. My mama would have been proud.@nerdvana is one year old and owned and run by Kristy Junio-Pitchford. (Full disclosure: I’m the editor and publisher of Genii, The Conjurors’ Magazine, which is owned by Randy Pitchford, husband of Mrs. Pitchford. If the food sucked, I would not be writing this piece.)The menu was created by Mike Junio, while Kristy created the idea of having a Bloody Mary with “ridiculous shit on top” and the restaurant’s manager Cathy Brown developed the final product. Kristy calls her a “baller mixologist.” People are blown away by it and it’s one of the most instagrammable menu items.Also really good is the French Toast, Randy’s concoction the Boss Monster Shake (skewers of chocolate covered strawberries and bananas growing out of a chocolate shake piled with whipped cream and chocolate bits), and at dinner the perfectly cooked and seasoned ribeye steak is as good as any steakhouse but at half the price. @nerdvana is a fun restaurant for people to pig out and hang out. The place is a celebration of video games, with games available for customers to play and live simulcasts to watch of great gamers in competitions. Me, I’m still dreaming of that grilled cheese, the steak, and that chocolate shake.Visit @nerdvana

Oklahoma Republican state Sen. Ralph Shortey has resigned after pleading guilty to trafficking a teenaged boy for sex; when Shortey was serving as Trump's Oklahoma campaign manager, he introduced an anti-sanctuary cities bill, claiming that immigrants trafficked their children for sex. (more…)

Overtaking the sunset, I glide into the mesosphere hours ahead of darkness. Scattered islands beckon under shifting banks of white stratus. I veer toward one but lose sight of it in the clouds, emerging over an isthmus broad and gray in the oceans of Lahellt II. Knuckertail soars down and I land her upon a grass-topped arch, coiled slender and ominous over the shallows like an immense fossil.After visiting a hundred vicious worlds, frozen or burning, gassing me with oxides or crackling with radioactive menace, I think I've found home. Dropping from the canopy to make footfall, I look at the glittering sea. A world warm and quiet and mine declares itself to the exosuit's sensors. Something's not right.•No Man's Sky is a spectacular toy for exploring 18 quintillion uncannily similar worlds. Released a year ago to astronomical hype and sour reviews, it's since become a decent (and improving) game as its creators bolt on base-building, factions, planetside vehicles, narrative threads and evocative if slight multiplayer elements. As of the Atlas Rising update, it's widely hailed as a much more involving journey. But for me, it's neither one thing nor the other. The procedurally-generated worlds still lack depth and intrigue, limiting the appeal of exploration, while the gamery additions call for endless self-directed fetchquesting to make progress. Tweet-length nibbles of story string one instantly-forgotten Mr. Potato Head alien to the next, all immobile but for their looping busywork animations.But the weird dream at the heart of it — jumping to distant solar systems, visiting fabulous unchartered worlds, coasting over psychedelic meadows where bizarre and ungainly alien fauna swarm — sticks with me. Get a glimpse of what we hope our descendants will spiritualize on other worlds, knowing we'll never experience it. Sixty dollars, though!See, then there's the fiddly travel, maddening inventory management, and grinding repetitions. The generated worlds are smoothed noise with no suggestion of geology, nothing hot under the surface. Everything has a meaningless alphabetti-spaghetti name. Though every world is flavored with local color, all have the topology of a lightly whipped frosted cake, uniformly sprinkled with candy bits from the same jar. There are no cities or civilizations, no gas giants, no balls of boiling lead, no forests or fens. Just lots of porta-potties, abandoned prefabs, and glowing relics.What's the point of going anywhere I want if the same things are everywhere?This problem afflicts the flora and fauna too. Though adorable and strange, they're a roll of the dice with no suggestion of ecology, adaptation or habitation. Nothing connects to anything. Darwin would return to England certain both of God's hand and His zero fucks given.Sentient aliens are, like the dumb ones, a hodgepodge of parts with no personality and nothing to remember them by. There are three species, hints of political backdrop, and actions and events described in dialog, but nothing is seen to happen or change.More interesting are the tech tree and trade elements, especially the elaborate bases you can build and the ships you can buy, should you have the determination to earn them. Making a home, a career and a pile of money kept me going for twenty or so hours after I bored of visiting new planets — the key difference between No Man's Sky in late 2017 and last year — until I realized the next objective on my list might take twenty more.The ships are the coolest thing about No Man's Sky, the hard steel heart of its splendid late-seventies aesthetic. Space battles are dumb fun, especially once you have some power-ups. The pleasure of flight is occasionally marred by shifting and glitching in the middle distance, things popping into view and landforms deforming at different levels of detail. This becomes particlarly annoying when cruising low in search of specific things of interest, a constant reminder that No Man's Sky is random noise posing as empty space.•I slip down to a sloping meadow shadowed by the rock arch where Knuckertail perches. Off in the distance, a carved menhir rests at an odd angle and I skip toward it though platinum blooms and crystal hedges. Communion teaches me the Korvax word for sleep. I look back at the ship, a tiny shadow against the sun. The exosuit says it's 19˚ and balmy. As I entertain the idea of this being my avatar's homeworld, I realize that for me, it's perfect point to stop playing. Another step, and I'll just be shooting rocks again. Besides, I see what was bothering me: there's no fauna. But for the grasses and wildflowers on this perfect world, I'm the only thing alive.I rechristen the planet, instantly forgetting its original name, and upload the new one to No Man's Sky's mapping server so that other players may one day benefit from my discovery: "Lovely But Devoid of Life."Rob Beschizza is on Twitter and the e-mail.

With Christmas quickly approaching, the imaginary war on everyone’s favorite imaginary holiday always helps me get in the spirit. The latest Christmas offense is from Starbucks’ recent marketing campaign and “suggestive” coffee cup promoting the LGBTQ community. A commercial unveiling the cups briefly shows two women drinking coffee and placing their hands together while across a table in what is an “obvious” attack on our nation’s faltering morals. The mind-numbing outrage is only being furthered since Starbucks decided to place a pair of unknown hands gripped together that many are debating belong to a same-sex couple. This so called “gay agenda” that Starbucks is said to be pouring down our coffee-addicted throats has given rise to another series of boycotts for the coffee giant, according to the New York Daily News. Via the New York Daily News: Starbucks hasn’t resolved the issue of whether the hands are same-sex or not.The theme of the cups is “Give Good.” Customers are invited to color in the drawings of hearts, presents and a Christmas tree — and those hands.“Each year during the holidays we aim to bring our customers an experience that inspires the spirit of the season,” the coffee chain said in a statement. “And we will continue to embrace and welcome customers from all backgrounds and religions in our stores around the world.”

Check out these wonderful commercials for Chambong, the beverage bong.Drinking things, quickly or slowly, requires that you exercise caution and judgment. Rapidly ingesting alcohol can have some unpredictable effects.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEv1DrfntZ4Chambong - Glassware for rapid Champagne consumption via Amazon

The Upguard Cyber Risk Team has found three Department of Defense mass-storage "buckets" on Amazon that are world-viewable, containing 1.8 billion of social media posts that the DoD scraped from social media over 8 years as part of its global surveillance program. (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2hUkDVnXmE&feature=youtu.beOut with the old, in with the old.

I was kerplotzing around the internet today and upon seeing this video had the craziest thought: I’ve been in this place. Now since it involves free diving in the world’s deepest pool, in Italy, there’s no way I’ve even seen the place. Also can’t hold my breath for squat. Tried that recently while watching my friend David Blaine hold his breath for almost 11 minutes in a tank of water. I was really glad that he was in the tank and not me, since I was gasping at the 90 second mark. David Blaine Photographed by Asi WindThinking about the imagery in the video (below), it occurred to me that I was remembering a dream I’ve had many times about swimming underwater in a pool almost identical to this. A creepy feeling. What is it about this pool that seems like a dream … or a nightmare?On a single breath of air, Guillaume Néry explores the deepest pool in the world in Italy: Y40. The action is filmed on breath hold by his wife Julie Gautier.Find all their productions on: www.lesfilmsengloutis.comhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzh0woiH7Jw

Oh, just a baby riding around on a robotic vacuum. Usually it's a cat, but today it's someone's sprog.(Digg)

Brazilian artist Butcher Billy describes himself as a "pop culture butcher obsessively looking for the perfect cut." I think he's found just that with his latest artworks.The nine-piece series imagines each episode of Stranger Things 2, from "MADMAX" to "The Gate," as the cover of an 80s-style paperback book. So cool!Billy's work has been featured several times here on Boing Boing. If his work is your kind of thing, his Instagram is definitely worth following.(Design Taxi)

Press this plush Christmas elf's foot and its tongue starts vibrating, quite suggestively. The Sun reports:The £10 toy has been flying off the shelves at Asda stores across the country with sales reaching a climax even though there is still more than a month to go to the big day.Punters have to press a button in its foot to make its hands move away from its face as it wiggles its tongue at high speed and shouts: "Merry Christmas.""Merry Christmas," indeed.(somenews)

The "replay sessions" captured by surveillance-oriented "analytics" companies like Fullstory allow their customers -- "Walgreens, Zocdoc, Shopify, CareerBuilder, SeatGeek, Wix.com, Digital Ocean, DonorsChoose.org, and more" -- to watch everything you do when you're on their webpages -- every move of the mouse, every keystroke (even keystrokes you delete before submitting), and more, all attached to your real name, stored indefinitely, and shared widely with many, many "partners." (more…)

My grandmother's longtime partner Rusty was a former weightlifter with the sunniest, most reslient disposition of anyone I've known, and the only time I ever saw him reduced to tears was from the pain of a bout of shingles; now a new shingles vaccine called Shingrix has proven almost miraculously effective against the virus (which nearly every person who lives to 80 will suffer from) with a notable lack of downsides. If you're over 50, you should go get it right now. (via Naked Capitalism)

I love bagels. I wanted to learn to make delicious ones at home. I was surprised at how simple it really is. (more…)

Security researchers from Rhino Security Labs have shown that it is trivial to disable the Amazon Cloud Cam that is a crucial component of the Amazon Key product -- a connected home door-lock that allows delivery personnel to open your locked front door and leave your purchases inside -- and have demonstrated attacks that would allow thieves to exploit this weakness to rob your home. (more…)

Renowned for her sparkling wit and deep insight, commentator Tomi Lahren is considered to be the William F. Buckley Jr. of the millennial generation. She also has the ability to laugh at herself, so I'm sure she loves Super Deluxe's new video, which takes snippets of Lahren's bon mots, runs them through Auto-Tune, and edits them into a 1980s pop hit.Here's what @TomiLahren would sound like as an '80s pop hit. pic.twitter.com/esJJydjZME— Super Deluxe (@superdeluxe) November 15, 2017