If only we could all retire on a high note like John Schnatter! The founder and CEO of Papa John's Pizza has announced his departure only weeks after the brand was cast as the "official pizza" of the so-called alt-right, America's resurgent movement of fascists, neo-nazis, "cultural libertarians" and the like.

Pundits suggest the "Weinstein moment" — a broader, deeper awareness of abusive conduct, sexual harassment and criminal sexuality — is already fading without significant change. Few of the offenders face consequences worse than losing a gig, and yesterday we learned The New York Times isn't even up to that, letting its celebrity groper keep his job and trotting out Executive Editor Dean Baquet to dismiss his admitted behavior as merely "offensive." Sarah Jeong looks at another example: the hacker community, which did a surprisingly good job of outing its "missing stairs" but has trouble banishing them for good.

Swan:

Lloyd Kahn is one of the coolest people I know. He was the "shelter" editor of the Whole Earth Catalog. He is also the publisher of Shelter Publications. In this video, he demonstrates seven of his favorite tools.Below, a video from 2011, when Lloyd was just 76 years old, about his passion for skateboarding:https://youtu.be/EpHT4ScxTGQ

This week I got the chance to interview pro-skater Nora Vasconcellos after watching the inspiring new digital short, "Nora," (above) which is about her journey from being a kid who loved to skate to being the first woman on the Adidas global skate team. The film gives us a look at what it’s like to be a woman within the predominantly male skate world. Nora kicks ass and doesn’t let anything hold her back. I saw Nora skate this past summer at a competition, and she is super talented. She has become a skate icon and is an inspiration to many.What do you love the most about skating?I love how happy it makes me. Whether I’m skating alone or with friends, it always makes me feel good. I tend to always be in a better mood after skating.What has it been like so far to be a part of the adidas Skateboarding global team?It has been unreal. To get to travel alongside guys I have always admired has been incredible. I love going on trips and feeling like I have known the team forever when really it has just been a year.What piece of advice do you have to give to other young girls who are part of a male-dominated industry?Just to be yourself and work hard…really hard. Do not be discouraged by other people’s opinions and insecurities. It is so rewarding to get to do what you love, even when you think things aren’t working out.Who are some of your biggest influences?My parents are one of my greatest influences. My dad taught me the power of humor and how to be creative everyday. My mom showed me the power of perseverance and taught me to put my best effort into everything I did. I know that I wouldn’t be who I am without them and I still enjoy their influence and advice.As an inspiration to many, what message do you hope to convey to others?I believe if you are unapologetically yourself and work hard, you can achieve anything you want. Especially if you do it with a good attitude. I think in this day and age with social media, it is easy to feel bad for yourself but positivity is power.When did you compete in your first skate competition?I think I was around 12-13. I believe it was a Volcom Wild In the Parks contest at Skaters Edge in Taunton, MA.What’s your favorite trick to do and how long did it take you to learn it?My favorite trick is probably a backside air and it took me a few years to learn it. It’s funny how mental skateboarding is and how some things just “click”.On a typical day, how many hours do you spend skating?I don’t skate everyday. I wish I could. Today for instance. I’m taking it easy because I bruised my heel yesterday. A huge part of being a skateboarder is taking care of yourself and knowing when you need to rest your body.In the new short film “Nora”, we learn that you are an artist as well as a skater. What inspires your drawings?Growing up my dad had a home studio as he is a freelance illustrator. He and my mom are very artistic and it was very natural for us to be drawing or painting. Growing up, I read a lot of Shel Silverstein and I think I’m definitely inspired by his penwork. I like to create art when I am too tired to skate or at night when I am trying to unwind.Apart from skating, what would you like to be doing as an artist in the future?I’m working on some products with adidas including my art, which is extremely exciting. I would love to do more art shows and make more product with my sponsors. It’s really wonderful to have people enjoy my art as much as I love creating it.When you’re not skating or drawing, what are your favorite things to do?Spending time with my friends and family is a huge part of my life. I love to go to the movies and go dancing. Singing karaoke is one of my favorite pastimes. I also really enjoy surfing and riding my bike.

Argyle, New York. The stench of death descended upon this small upstate village, about halfway between the Hudson and Vermont, earlier this fall. It took until now for locals to find the source: a cache of moose bits...

The Long Island Iced Tea Corporation, aptly-named, is now the "Long Blockchain Corporation". The stock market was so pleased by the change of name that its stock price tripled. The company will continue to make iced tea beverages, but it's sure it'll figure out something with blockchains, the technical process used by Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies as a public ledger to ensure the trustworthiness of private transactions.

Check out the latest from Timur and the Dime Museum!

We had one of these in the MAKE magazine office for years. I think the shrimp's name was Fred. Amazon has the small one on sale for $44, which is an all-time low price.

Twitter user Kaela Thompson was schooled by MoonPie.

For three decades, Grant Morrison has been the most prominent voice of the avant-garde in the world of graphic novels. His work has redefined every landmark comic book title from Batman and Superman to the Justice League and the X-Men, and he has written more books that redefined the boundaries of the genre than could be comfortably listed here.While his creative stamp is visible all over the cinematic landscape (The Matrix films borrowed heavily from Morrison’s book The Invisibles, and characters and dialogue created by Morrison regularly find their way into the Marvel and DC superhero movies), what has been noticeably (and absurdly, to comic fans) absent is a wholly Morrison-driven project.On December 6, 2017, that oversight changed forever with the premiere episode of Morrison’s first television show, Happy! on SyFy, starring Chris Meloni as Nick Sax, a cop-turned-hitman who finds himself plagued by the desperate, imaginary friend of a kidnapped child: a blue, winged unicorn named Happy the Horse (voiced by Patton Oswalt).Thomas Negovan: Why do you think Happy! was the story that was the first property of yours that made it to the screen?Grant Morrison: It’s the one that seems least definitive, the one that seems least representative of my work, because it was an attempt to do something I hadn’t done, which was a crime genre comic; I had to add my own kind of twist, which was the character of Happy. But I think it’s because this is the one that condenses everything I’ve said. It’s a really simple story, but it condenses every other story I’ve done… it’s All-Star Superman, it’s got all of those things, because it ultimately says “Okay, we acknowledge the world is a nihilistic hellhole plunging toward screaming entropy, BUT... we have hope.” And right now, when people are getting really freaked out and things are seeming quite dystopian and out of control, and spinning even further out of control, hope is reduced to this tiny little unicorn. In some of my other stories, it’s been Superman and it’s been the Justice League or it’s been something, but right now it’s so down to nothing, it’s the tiniest last little candle flame. I think Happy just dramatizes that so nakedly as a way of condensing all my themes and all my ideas into something that’s primal and simple enough that it actually has this mass appeal.TN: Understanding that Happy! takes your ideologies and puts them into this crime-story package, where did the inspiration for the story structure itself come from?GM: I was watching Pop Idol, which was obviously American Idol, the British version, but it was Simon Cowell in his early days before he became a father and mellowed out a little bit, so it was Simon Cowell, the X-Factor, the whole thing, but basically watching those shows where kids would come on and dance their hearts out and sing... and even if they were so bad, he would sit there in terrifying judgement. Cowell would sit behind the desk, and everyone else would kind of let them off gently, but he would always just go “you’re terrrrrible” and at the same time on the internet we had this... it’s like every attempt to entertain would be met by “meh." And that wasn’t the only thing that was out there, but there was a sense, there was this tidal wave of absolute disinterest, and the sense of futility in even daring to present your hopeless, misguided efforts to do a tap dance, or to write a story, or to sing a song. So I thought, there’s definitely a story here -- the sensation of the critical community and the artistic community being so close that it had become destructive... So I thought, as some way of dramatising this: the idea of the most cynical man on Earth who eventually became Nick Sax, the detective-turned-hitman character, and Happy. But I needed something for them to go up against, and I was listening to The Hollies, they did a couple of psychedelic albums in the 60s, it was like “Butterfly” or whatever one it is. And there’s a song called “Pegasus,” and it is the most –- and I’m going to say this as a Hollies fan -- it’s the most saccharine, sickening, creepy, pedophilic kind of acid song you’ve ever heard, and I think it’s about acid, it’s all about you know “I’m Pegasus the flying horse, climb on my magic back and we’ll fly away,” and there’s a middle-eight in there which is about “this is just our secret, don’t tell mom and dad, don’t tell anyone what’s been going on here,” and it’s REALLY creepy, so I suddenly thought, what’s this Pegasus thing, this pedophilic sense that ties into something here? And that was it. And I guess that’s how ideas had formed, a colliding of atoms, and suddenly it was “okay, what if this most cynical man on Earth meets this absolutely optimistic super-hyper cartoon animal who only wants to save the day and believes in nothing but the best in us? Oh wow, that would be good, these two would strike sparks off each other, and then from that the story formed. It was that, and the story has this kind of pedophilic element where the evil santa is capturing children. So it all came out of the feelings that listening to that song gave me, that’s how ideas can kind of fuse together and start to grow tendrils and they become stories that have to be told.TN: And was part of that expansion because television is a different medium that afforded that to you, or is it mainly because of the new length of story that you had the opportunity to touch on larger ideas?GM: It’s the length of story, and the possibility of expanding what was already there, which was only four issues… and it was really quite tight and condensed because that was all we could do, that was all Darick (Robertson, artist of the Happy! comics) had a window to do but I always loved the characters, I wanted to do more with them. So, when this thing opened up it was just the opportunity to plant the seed and grow something new, the cutting… what could come out of this? And being in that writer’s room, and everyone’s throwing ideas in, and I was kind of “okay, I don’t even have to do all this work myself,” made it something completely different.It has mythological qualities, it has all the things I usually try to put into stuff, and which really didn’t quite make the cut in the original comic. So this one is interesting because we have this mystical, mythical dimension that starts to infiltrate more and more as the show goes on and to see how people respond to that and then what they think– “oh my god, it’s about this.”TN: When I read the first issue of your book The Invisibles, I thought I was getting a kind of straightforward spy story, and I stepped away from it. Then later I read it as an entire series and I couldn’t have been more wrong about my preconceptions, because I wasn’t familiar at that time with your skill of setting up one expectation and then using that to take your audience places they don’t expect. The basic elements you describe above, that’s definitely what you get in the first episode. Using The Invisibles as an example where you are looking at something, but then come to realize it’s like fixating on a mask but the person wearing it keeps changing, how would you explain what Happy! is versus the expectations that you just articulated? People will watch the first episode and think “corrupt police, pedophile Santa, an avatar of optimism…” I know your work well enough to know that I’m not not even close to seeing the bottom of the iceberg here.GM: Absolutely, we have created now, for the series, a mythology that didn’t exist when the book was originally done, which is kind of for me almost the equal of what we did with The Invisibles... it’s as big, it’s as global, it has cosmic tendrils. So there is now that element of the Happy! story. But yeah, initially it was a Christmas story, I wanted it to be super simple, the first season is a Christmas story. It starts off and it’s hyper violent, and it’s cartoonish, but halfway through strange mystical elements come in and there’s a much deeper delve into the emotions and the backgrounds of the characters and then it changes again, and it becomes... well, there are moments where you burst into tears, and there’s kind of manipulation of emotions like E.T. and we kind of wanted to cross a lot of different feelings and ideas in the show, and that’s why I keep saying I can’t wait for people to see it all together. I want it to be this Christmas thing you can put on every year; it’s the Scrooge of the 21st century, “It’s Not A Wonderful Life.” I’d love to have it be something where people say “okay, every Christmas we watch Happy!”Thomas Negovan is an author, art historian, and the founder of The Century Guild Museum of Art in Los Angeles.Happy! airs Wednesdays on Syfy.Image: Syfy

Textio, a company that makes tools for composing job-postings, analyzed the language used by major tech firms in their job listings. They found distinctive phrases that various firms used much more often than others.Indeed, the phrases sound a bit like the uncorked ids of the firms speaking directly to you. Amazon's statistically unique phrases included "wickedly", "fast-paced environment", and "maniacal". Google were "first rate", "prove that", and "tackle" -- while Slack's were "lasting relationships", "meaningfully", and "care deeply".And Uber? "Whatever it takes", "high-performance culture", and "all-star", of course.As Textio CEO Kieran Snyder notes ...

In 2016, the watchdog group Property of the People discovered a secret FBI spying program called Gravestone, a mention of which slipped into the metadata of a document on the DoJ's website. (more…)

https://youtu.be/HF7Ni347GvgI wish Jeff Sessions hated cilantro as much as he hates pot. I can't stand the stuff. According to this PBS video, I have a chromosomal abnormality that makes it taste terrible. I'm not the only one to suffer from this affliction. I think cilantro should be listed as a schedule 1 substance.

The Foreign Service Institute has ranked the difficulty of learning a language for English speakers.From Blazepress:

To promote his new movie All the Money in the World, Mark Wahlberg went on camera to translate some regional Boston slang. He starts with "Hoodsie," then moves on to "Masshole," "packie," "the Garden," "clicker," 'jimmies," "the Monster," "Dunkees," "wicked," "pissa," "Nor'easter," "bang a uey," "triple decker," "pockabook," and "shiesty."Now, I'm originally from Massachusetts (a Cape Codder) and was half-expecting to hate this video. Instead, it brought me back a little and put a big smile on my face. He really nailed it when he was explaining how his dad went every day to the package store to "get some coffee brandy, a six pack of Schlitz, and then some Certs." Though, my dad was more of a Narragansett kind of guy. The packie he went to was (and probably still is) filled with taxidermied animals.Some notes:-- I have a minor correction for Mr. Wahlberg. Sir, you probably haven't had a "Hoodsie" ice cream in years because you've forgotten that you eat them with little flat wooden spoons, not the package's top. Don't make me come take away your Mass. card. Nah, just kidding. You're busy making movies and stuff.-- In our house, we said "zip-zap" or "zapper" (pronounced "zappah"), not "clicker."-- Whoa! Where I grew up "jimmies" were definitely NOT condoms. In fact, I've never heard of that use before. The "jimmies" that I know are chocolate sprinkles that you eat on ice cream.-- I've never seen "pockabook" written out like that. I'm sure they did it for effect. A pocketbook is a purse.-- One that wasn't included is "bubbler." A "bubbler" (again, pronounced without the 'r') is a drinking water fountain.-- Another missing one: Fluffernutter. I mean, c'mon. The good state of Massachusetts once proposed it to be its official sandwich.Dangit, now I'm homesick.

Given the many historic records for dreadfulness that 2017 handily destroyed, let's try and find some a tiny moment of joy upon which to end the year, shall we?So: Behold Chowder, a 6-year-old Vietnamese potbellied pig. He lives with five rescue dogs, all of whom are apparently fast friends. There are several shots of this crew hanging out at at My Modern Met, and if you need a steady stream of such imagery to survive whatever horrors 2018 is nursing its in cradle, there's an Instagram feed for these animals at @piggypoo_and_crew.Images used with permission of @piggypoo_and_crew

The state of Alabama announced that it's mathematically impossible for accused pedophile Roy Moore to win the senate race. Moore predictably responded to the news by promoting an article from a loony conspiracy theory website called World Net Daily that's blaming “a coalition of Muslim and Marxist-led groups” for foiling God's plan to make him the winner.Moore, whose passion for cowboy cosplay is exceeded only by his sexual interest in teenage girls (but only with the "permission of her mother"), also took a jab at winner Doug Jones' son for being gay, like that had something to do with losing the election.[via Raw Story][Image: YouTube/LIVE SATELLITE NEWS]

Australian bathing-suit-area-gadget vendor Geeky Sex Toys has launched Star Toys, a line of Star Wars themed sex-toys that include a Dark Side Bondage Kit, a Hand Solo fleshlight, the Darth Vibrator, Vibe Trooper and R2V2, a C3PO buttplug, and Light Saber dildos in Blue, Red and Green. (via Mitch Wagner) (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PQNZd3BVeg&app=desktopIf ever I require courtoom representation in Canada, I'm definitely hiring Alf Kwinter of Singer Kwinter.

Theodora is a "financial dominatrix," a woman who sexually gratifies rich and powerful men by humiliating them with orders to give her money; in the age of cryptocurrency, she says her clients are now operating a "crypto slave farm" of cryptocurrency mining rigs built to her specification, which mine bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies for her. (more…)

On December 15, Ars Technica ran a story by veteran security reporter Dan Goodin in which Goodin reported on a disclosure by Google researcher Tavis Ormandy, who had discovered that Keeper Security's password manager, bundled with Windows 10, was vulnerable to a password stealing bug that was very similar to a bug that had been published more than a year before. (more…)

The German geometer Max Brückner was fascinated by polyhedra, and he wrote about them in depth in his 1900 work Polygons and Polyhedra: Theory and History.Over at the Internet Archive, they've scanned the book, and if you flip to the end -- beginning at page 243 -- there's a real visual treat: Several pages of Brückner's line drawings of polyhedra, followed by photos of his collection of 3D polyhedral objects.The Public Domain Review recently unearthed these, and now I want some of these pages blown up to poster-size for my walls!(You can seem more of these screenshots over at the Public Domain Review's post.)

In the wake of the Grenfell Tower disaster (in which a building full of poor people were roasted alive because their homes had been skinned with a highly flammable decorative element that was supposed to make it easier to look at from a nearby luxury neighborhood), local UK governments have scrambled to replace the deadly cladding on other buildings with something a little less fiery. (more…)

In a speech last week, US National Space Council executive director Scott Pace rejected the idea that space was a "global commons" or "the common heritage of mankind" and vowed to make the USA "the most attractive jurisdiction in the world for private-sector investment and innovation in outer space." (more…)

In Labor Market Concentration, a new working paper from economists at U Penn, U Navarra and the Roosevelt Institute, researchers analyze a large US government data-set to determine how many workers live in markets where there is effective only one or two employers, a situation called "monoposony" (when a single buyer has a monopoly). (more…)

A Propublica investigation (ed: I am an annual donor to Propublica and urge you to support their work) found dozens of companies who placed help wanted ads on Facebook that used ad-targeting to exclude older workers, a practice that an employment law specialist called "blatantly unlawful." (more…)

The Australian government's open data initiative is in the laudable business of publishing publicly accessible data about the government's actions and spending, in order to help scholars, businesses and officials understand and improve its processes. (more…)

It's cool just seeing these images of the original Santa and Rudolph puppets from Rankin/Bass' 1964 TV perennial classic Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. They're so iconic, so familiar, even if that Santa was a real jerk.It's exciting to dream about owning them. I mean, you could own them, as they've been put up for sale on eBay recently. But, what's not cool or exciting is that they are listed for TEN MILLION DOLLARS.Now before you whip out your checkbook, put down the crack pipe and take note of how small they are. Both of them fit comfortably in a briefcase:Also keep this 2006 Antiques Roadshow story and estimate in mind:

Wow. I had no idea that making rubber bands was so labor intensive. Can you imagine the resources it took just to get this long process in place?This footage is from the show How It's Made. An older (but worse quality) video exists and shares that this factory makes 40 million rubber bands a day.

https://youtu.be/whIQCKDlx-4?t=233Quake, the 1996 classic game set in a grim and hellish world of stone, fire and blood, pulsed with danger and violence. But a new mod from JP LeBreton turns it into a calm walking simulator, complete with a soundtrack based on Nine Inch Nails' chilly 2008 album Ghosts I-IV, which is available under the Creative Commons. Alice O'Connor:

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Lucky Shot's .308 Real Bullet hand-blown Shot Glass (Amazon), we are assured, "does not contain gunpowder or lead residue," making them safe to drink from. Described as the "ultimate gift," not without unnerving connotation. They also make tumblers and pint glasses, but, come now... shot glass.

If you've already bought one of everything from our Boing Boing gift guide, take a look at the Cool Tools gift guide! We've got a selection of gift books, tools under $10, musical instruments, kitchen gadgets, toys, and a lot more.

The Indiana Attorney General’s office has filed a lawsuit against the Abbey Inn in Nashville, Indiana, "claiming the hotel’s policy of levelling a charge against guests for negative reviews violated the state’s Deceptive Consumer Sales Act," reports Southern Living magazine.

The parents of redditor odin917 were away on vacation, and he needed to get into their mailbox. They had the only key with them. So they emailed him a picture of it, and he 3D-printed a copy of the key -- which worked.As is obvious by now, leaving pictures of your keys online is a huge security risk, because it's so easy to turn a snapshot into a 3D model. But as Hackaday points out, this is the first time they've heard of someone using the technique for good!

The Japanese word for snow is 雪 (yuki). I'm teaching myself kanji through a program called wanikani (just made it to level 10), and I memorized the word by associating snow with "yucky." This video strengthens my association with the word.

Meet Wyatt Ingraham Koch, the billionaire scion of the Koch Brothers empire. This gentleman makes shirts with oh-what-fun patterns, including the one he is wearing in this self-promotional video, which has bags of overflowing money.Via Raw Story:“My father said to me, ‘Wyatt, you can do whatever you want to in life. Just make sure you do it well and do it with passion,” says Koch, who is suing his ex-fiancée for the return of a $180,000 engagement ring. “Every day I got to the office, I enjoy creating the clothes.”His video offers a glimpse of his design process:

Plenty of parents are unsettled by abysmal quality of videos aimed at kids on Youtube -- which range from the merely dull/hacky/ultra-branded to the slurry of possibly-autogenerated brain porridge that James Bridle recently documented.The design director and video-producer Rion Nakaya got sick of this same sludge, so she created The Kid Should See This, a site that curates genuinely gorgeous and thought-provoking videos -- ones that aren't necessarily aimed at kids, so anyone, of any age, would also dig them.My favorites so far include "How does a bowling alley work?", "A 15-color rainbow spiral made with 12,000 dominoes", "How To Make a Navigational Chart", and "Ballet Rotoscope". I'm particularly into the ones like "Journey of a Letter: How a birthday card is sent and delivered in London", which illustrate the marvels of the hidden infrastructure that underpins everyday life.As Nakaya tells Lifehacker:

[Hi everyone! I'd like to re-introduce you to Clive Thompson, who will be writing posts for Boing Boing. You may remember Clive from his guestblogging stint here a few years ago. Clive is a journalist and book author -- he's a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, and a columnist with Wired and Smithsonian. He's working on his next book right now, about "how programmers think", and he's online as @pomeranian99 at Twitter and Instagram, or at his site www.clivethompson.net. ​I'm very excited to have him join us! -- Mark]The climate in Game of Thrones is incredibly weird, not least because of the strange timing of the oddly-long seasons. A group of climate scientists from the Universities of Bristol, Cardiff, and Southampton decided to figure out what's going on by making a climate model of the world -- based on the weather data they could scrounge from George R. R. Martin's novels. They wrote it up as a mock academic paper authored by the GoT character "Samwell Tarly".Their/his key finding? The only way to create a model that behaves like the world described in the books is to assume the planet in Game of Thrones "tumbles" as it orbits its sun:

Joi Ito has published the "1.0" version of his October essay, Resisting Reduction, which makes major advances on the earlier draft. He's soliciting revisions and comments here. Here's what I wrote about it then: (more…)

The Getting to the Future First: How Britain can lead the Fourth Industrial Revolution report was created by Alan Mak, Conservative Member of Parliament for Havant, and it's a laughable compendium of trickle-down nonsense proposing that if all dividends from automation flow to capital, somehow everyone in the world will share in the benefits. (more…)

A study published this year traces policing outcomes in Las Vegas between Sept 2014 and Oct 2015, comparing the conduct of 200 officers who wore bodycams and 200 who did not. (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…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIX7-Gkw0D0Portal was one of the best games of this century: originally a fan-mod of Half-Life, it used a clever-as-fuck game mechanic and outstanding game writing to tell a story and pose riddles that were fun to solve, play and watch. (more…)

The countable homeless population of the UK -- the people living on the streets and in shelters, not including people sofa-surfing -- is 307,000, about 1 in 200. In some places, it's as high as one in 27. (more…)

There's only hours remaining before Congress will vote to renew the Section 702 powers that let the NSA conduct mass surveillance; powers that expand in 12 days. (more…)

The Public Domain class of 2018 — authors with significant works entering the public domain next year — includes Aleister Crowley, Rene Magritte, Siegfied Sassoon and the other Winston Churchill.