UK Etsy seller Retromend (who specialise in vintage VW-related gifts) sell this Stranger Things-themed Upside Down doormat (coir fibers with rubber backing) for £20/USD27. (via Geeky Merch)

Jay Malsky knew he'd never get close enough to Donald Trump to heckle him in person, so he did the next best thing, chanting "LOCK HIM UP, LOCK HIM UP" when the Trumpbot took the stage at Walt Disney World's Hall of Presidents. (more…)

Zephyr Teachout's (previously) 2014 book Corruption in America is an incredibly important, timely book about the way that American policy and politics have been distorted by money, something that's gotten steadily worse as it is supercharged by (and supercharges) wealth inequality. (more…)

Alice Maz was part of a small group of players who came to have near-total mastery over the internal economy of a popular Minecraft; Maz describes how her early fascination with the mechanics of complex multiplayer games carried over into an interest in economics and games, and that let her become a virtuoso player, and brilliant thinker, about games and economics. (more…)

Mikhail Bopposov created an enormous poop snake -- not the predictable result of holiday overeating, but a menacing 9-foot sculpture of a coiled poop cobra, ready to strike. And he has created many others.

The web came of age with no-holds-barred finance capitalism, so it's hard to decide which of the last twenty years' worth of changes are the result of the tech industry, or of financialization, or a toxic mix of both. (more…)

Church Clarity set out to report the policies and structure of America's churches, a project doomed to anger them. It results in "three explosive insights," which are fairly easy to guess: evangelical churches are universally hostile to LBGTQ people, 93% are led by white pastors, and 99% by men.

Trailers have a mostly negative reputation, these days, drawing working-class resentment and middle-class contempt. But they once embodied a compact, affordable rendition of the American Dream. So let's talk about "Tiny Houses" and how it navigates a stigma that must end...

This quiet genius from "SardineWhiskers" returns the sinister potential to Nintendo's love of midcentury charm. Make musak grim again!

Charlie Stross's keynote at the 34th Chaos Communications Congress Leipzig is entitled "Dude, you broke the Future!" and it's an excellent, Strossian look at the future we're barelling towards, best understood by a critical examination of the past we've just gone through. (more…)

Softbank's bid to buy Uber shares based on a valuation 30% lower than the company rated in its last round has been largely successful, with about 15-20% of shares changing hands at that price. (more…)

Extreme housing prices in California -- driven by a combination of speculation, favorable legal/tax positions for landlords, foreclosures after the 2008 crisis, and an unwillingness to build public housing -- has created vast homeless encampments, but there's a less visible side to the crisis: working people in "good jobs" who have to live in their cars. (more…)

Trump won the election by welding together a coalition of racist rich people who wanted tax breaks and racist poor people who'd been living in Fox-induced terror for decades and believed the world was ending and thought that Trump would at least make brown people and liberals as miserable as they were on the way to total collapse. (more…)

When a billionaire Koch heir announces that he's taking a break from suing ex-fiancees to give back their engagement rings and playing tennis at Mar-a-Largo in order to produce designer shirts covered in money-bags, it's worth asking: did capitalism turn this guy into a useless asshole, or does capitalism find the useless assholes and shower them with money? (more…)

Choose Your Own Adventure: 44 percent of Republicans think Donald Trump has repealed Obamacare. If you want to just shut yer mouth and let them think it, go to page 1933.If you want to engage the dangerous mix of political obsession and ignorance, go to page 1789.

Posted by one Noah Nicholls to YouTube with the title "I was in a wedding and smashed my face," this video depicts the perfect ceremony. [via Reddit]

Britain's largest supermarket chain has refunded customers who said the Tesco turkeys tasted like they were soaked in bleach or were rotten.

An unidentified Wisconsin man truly had a bad hair day.He's accused a barber of making him look like Larry from The Three Stooges, as well as taking scissors to his ear.The Wisconsin State Journal reports:

With the price tag at just $29, it's pretty safe to assume many people got Google Home Mini as gifts this holiday season. The always-listening, voice-activated "smart speakers" are just waiting for a command. That command starts with either "Ok Google" or "Hey Google."It's easy enough for most of us to operate but what about for non-native English speakers? What about for people who don't keep up with the latest technology?For Redditor Ben Actis' thick-accented octogenarian grandmother, it was a matter of barking "Hey Googoo," and excessively tapping on it. At one point, she actually gets it to tell her the weather and Google Assistant's female voice scares her a little.

Fortunately for local shoppers, a manager at a Harris Teeter store in Charleston spotted a man squirting "a bottle of liquid with a bad odor like feces on the produce."

Roy Moore, a Republican of such unusually disgusting character that he lost Alabama to a Democrat, is not taking defeat well. He's filed a lawsuit to prevent the state's election board from certifying Doug Jones' victory.

The new GOP tax plan slashes the taxes on real estate investment trusts (REITS) by a quarter, dropping the rate from 39.6% down to 29.6% -- a move that will put tens of millions of dollars in the pockets of investors in America's notorious private prisons. (more…)

The US Consumer Product Safety Commission maintains a database of ER visits, which Barry Petchesky has mined to produce a list of the most interesting things we stuck in our bodies, sorted by orifice. (more…)

The DNC continues to struggle to raise cash, holding only $6.3M in the bank on Dec 1, compared to the RNC's $40M. But the numbers are deceiving, because 50% of the country want the Democrats to control Congress in 2018 (compared with 39% who want the GOP to retain power) and individual Democrat candidates are having banner years fundraising, especially the progressive, "Sanders Democrats" who break with the party's coziness with the finance industry and big business. (more…)

If you're an oligarch in the former Soviet Union, chances are you owe your billions to corruption and even overt criminal activity, and your ability to hang onto that money is entirely contingent on the sufferance of the even-more-corrupt strongmen at the top, like Vladimir Putin -- one wrong move and you may find yourself stripped of your assets (or even assassinated in broad daylight). (more…)

Knowing Microsoft's longtime sales chief Steve Ballmer, I thought I knew what to expect from this early ad starring him. But the sheer maniacal force of it means I've already had enough internet for the day, and it's not even 7 am.

NASA uses hundreds of thousands of gallons of water during launches to suppress vibration during liftoff: "a curtain of water around the engines to dampen the loudness of the test and protect the core stage from noise damage". Here's the system being tested!

As a youngster in England, my mental image of the roadrunner (Geococcyx Californianus) was just as the cartoon roadrunner (Accellerati Incredibilis) depicted. Almost as large as a coyote. An enormous blue bird of a size and weight approaching that of an emu, or ostrich. After moving to New Mexico, then, there came the inevitable moment of wonder and correction, when I first saw a wee bird sprinting along, and it dawned on me that I beheld the true form of the roadrunner.But my dream of seeing a huge flightless bird fleeing from a knife-and-fork-weilding wolf in a napkin was not dead, and is now 50% completed thanks to this clip from Brazil.Previously:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2m3aDCmjwo

The Planet Generator is a goldilocks of procedural generation: not too detailed, not too abstract, but just right. [via MeFi]

Armstrong Zoom, a northeastern US ISP with about a million subscribers, has sent its customers warnings that they have been accused of copyright infringement, and that subsequent accusations would lead to having their network connections slowed to the point of uselessness, which could impair their ability to control their internet-connected thermostats. (more…)

Starting in 1980, spurred by popularity of the Rubik's Cube, UK-based Tony Fisher started passionately collecting "twisty puzzles."Over the years, he's become quite the collector and inventor. All his "transformations" are really impressive. In fact, in 2016, he became a Guinness World Record holder for "World's Largest Rubik's Cube."Well, now he has fashioned a fully-functional Rubik's Cube out of ice.He explains:

Yay, Christmas isn't over yet. There's still one more gift under the internet "tree:" this special song featuring Donald, Melania, and Donald's new Disney robot. This belated prezzie is called "Christmas Is Here!" and it's from the good folks over at Bad Lip Reading.

It's cold in Erie, but not that cold: a woman who received a $284bn electric bill made international headlines this week. But it sounds like the power company suspects she got busy with the web inspector...

Every year, Jesse Thorn dedicates the final episode of his Bullseye podcast to a compendium of the year's best standup comedy albums (here's last year's); this year's installment is just out (MP3), and it's a must-listen tonic for difficult times. (more…)

A trans woman in North Carolina says she was called "it" and "thing" by co-workers and fired when she complained about it, according to a lawsuit filed this week.

Ozy was paid to run sponsored stories for clients such as JPMorgan. Ozy, among many others, bought traffic to run up the page view counter, making them appear successful and exposing sponsors' branding to "millions" of "readers". Now the nature of that traffic has been exposed and excuses are being made.

Daniel Limmer's Emma is a short, effective horror film that lasts just 15 seconds, one of many entered in the aptly-named "15 Second Horror Film Challenge."It echoes a scene from M. Night Shyamalan's Sixth Sense:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GK8CrMtyTdk(Previously)

The cost of lomustine, a veteran cancer drug, have skyrocketed after a startup bought the rights to it and hiked prices 1,400 percent.

Last night, St. Louis Lambert International Airport's Terminal 2 was fully evacuated due to fire concern. It was quickly determined that the smoke alarms were triggered by a burning bagel at one of the airport restaurants.(KMOV)

Russia's Roscosmos State Corporation for Space Activities is considering plans to add a space tourism module to the International Space Station. From Popular Mechanics:

https://youtu.be/k52Wa6dLPTELast week, I interviewed EFF's legal directory Corynne McSherry about the next steps in the Net Neutrality fight in a 35-minute-long livestream; the archived video is now online for your viewing pleasure. We talk about how we got here, what just happened -- and what we're going to do about it.

No More Ransom is a joint effort by Europol, the Dutch police, Kaspersky and McAfee to help people who've been compromised by ransomware get their data back without paying off criminals. (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSIIEgZrfusSonos and Bose speakers assume that any device on the same network segment can be trusted to send them audio without any further authentication; if these speakers are on a network whose owner has opened a hole in their firewalls (to run a game-server, say, or because another device on the network has been compromised), they can have data sent to them by anyone on the internet. (more…)

Peter Thiel thinks that it was a mistake to let women vote; that democracy is incompatible with "freedom" (because poor people will tax rich people if they get to elect their own leaders); that the major problem with the mass government surveillance that Edward Snowden revealed was that it was incompetently conducted (which is why he started Palantir, a mass surveillance contractor that sells spying services to authoritarian states); that free markets are inefficient and should be replaced with monopolies; and that marketplace of ideas should be replaced by secretly funded litigation campaigns that eliminate publications that say things you don't like. (more…)

To quote Doc Searls, adblocking is the largest consumer revolt in history; the rise of third-party tracking cookies, mounting awareness of breaches, and a shift in the balance of power between publishers and advertisers have conspired to make ads more visibly and invisibly obnoxious, driving millions to block ads in their browsers. (more…)

In 2010, Twitter gave the LoC a copy of every tweet sent since the first one in 2006, and the Library embarked on a program to archive every public tweet sent on the service -- but that will stop after Dec 31. (more…)

FOLLOW @RubenBolling on the Twitters and a Face Book.JOIN the Tom the Dancing Bug team, the INNER HIVE, for exclusive early access to comics before publication, extra comics, and much more. (Note, the deadline to join and be eligible for upper tier Patreon rewards is 12/31/17.)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…)

Posted to Reddit's Data is Beautiful subreddit (cf.), this animated map shows the growth in life expectancy for children born since 1960. Things get better, slowly. I'd expected to see declines in some parts of the world, and there are some temporary setbacks -- post-Soviet Russia drowning in the 1990s and subsaharan Africa at the height of the AIDS crisis, for example -- but it appears that nowhere is worse off now than in the past.

Some debate surrounds "The Jordache Look," a 1984 advertisement for the iconic brand's jeans. The proposition: that it is "the most 80s advert ever." If the presence of "ever" permits adverts from beyond the 80s to still be "80s," then I'm afraid there's no beating The Ambassador's Reception, shot by classy chocolatier Ferrero Rocher for screening in post-communist Eastern European markets, but so successful it ended up on British TV.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zs7gAxsfK5U

Erin Gloria Ryan reviews the evidence for a powerful cinematic hypothesis: in the movie "Home Alone," the abandoned youngster played by Macaulay Culkin is in fact dead.