YouTuber Oxalis shared Ryan Deboodt's gorgeous footage of the world's largest cave, Vietnam's Hang Son Doong. (more…)

The YouTube channel HooplaKidzLab demonstrates some awesome science experiments you can try with your kids this summer. Here’s another video from the channel about how to make a robotic arm out of popsicle sticks: https://youtu.be/vvBkS1QsZ6o

It turns out lions, tigers, leopards, and jaguars are the only species of cat that can roar. SciShow explains why in this new video.

YouTuber David Kawai makes impossibly small origami cranes. After watching this timelapse, check out his Instagram:

My 12-year old collects coins. She's not a hardcore numismatist by any means but she has spent quite a bit of time collecting state quarters in one of those special coin albums. The most difficult one to get was Alaska. Luckily for her, our friend Jim recently traveled to Alaska and found two of them in his roll of laundry quarters.Anyway, to celebrate Canada's 150th anniversary, the Royal Canadian Mint has issued a new two-dollar coin (which is commonly known as a "toonie") that glows in the dark. The coin uses a special luminescent ink to light up in the dark and depicts two people canoeing under the northern lights. This special "toonie" is the world’s first colored bimetallic coin in circulation and the first circulation coin to glow in the dark.According to CBCNews, the toonie was designed by two British Columbia-based brothers, Stephen and Timothy Hsia, who won the coin's design contest late last year.Timothy says of the design:

FOLLOW @RubenBolling on the Twitters and a Face Book.JOIN Tom the Dancing Bug's subscription club, the Proud & Mighty INNER HIVE, for exclusive early access to comics, extra comics, and much more.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…)

A fellow in Reading, England, was lucky to survive when a runaway bus plowed into him, sending him flying through the air and landing only inches from where the vehicle's tires barreled past. Fortunately there was a pub only feet away, allowing him to acquire a healing potion within seconds of the incident.

I spotted FEMICOM Museum tweeting about a true rarity, the translucent Hello Kitty edition Sega Dreamcast, and immediately headed to eBay to see what the situation was. It's expensive -- you're looking at at least $250 shipped, five times the going price of a normal Dreamcast -- but that's a fair price for the ultimate in translucent Hello Kitty video game consoles, many replete with matching controllers, keyboards and other peripherals. It also comes in blue.

For more than 40 years, my favorite avant-garde classical group Kronos Quartet has pushed the boundaries of contemporary music across genres and cultures. Now, filmmaker Sam Green is raising funds to complete the first live documentary about Kronos in collaboration with the artists themselves. It's titled "A Thousand Thoughts." I can't wait to watch, and hear, this amazing story. From the Kickstarter page:

Douglas Adams and John Lloyd's 1983 The Meaning of Liff (expanded in 1993 as The Deeper Meaning of Liff) is one of my favorite books and a seminal part of my education. So I was delighted and surprised to see I'd completely missed the 2013 publication of Afterliff, a sequel by Lloyd and Jon Canter. (more…)

What do you after you Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out? Well, you go and Find The Others.Last May 2017, I flew to London for the staging of Cosmic Trigger — The Play , a sheer delight for any Robert Anton Wilson fan, a masterpiece of high weirdness befitting the book it derives from. The experience proved to be more mind-shattering and category-defying than I could have ever imagined. A 23-night run hosted at The Cockpit Theatre, the play is an ambitious theatrical event: an intense four-hour long immersive happening, an experimental and multi-layered metafiction, intellectually challenging and spiritually intoxicating, a disorienting dance of Discordian confusion and uncanny mindfuck. An extraordinary cast of actors created a colourfully wild, merry parade of countercultural icons—along with Robert Anton Wilson and his wife Arlen, Robert Shea, Timothy Leary, Alan Watts, William Burroughs, Albert Hoffman, John Lilly, Jacques Vallee, Aleister Crowley—in brief, great fun!Not only that, Cosmic Trigger — The Play has the inherent magical qualities of a collective ritual or mass initiation: it is "a narrative so utterly complex and so thoroughly self-referential that it becomes to all intents and purposes alive." As magicians know, " by doing certain things certain results will follow."Hail Daisy Campbell!The mastermind behind such a unique endeavour and artistic achievement is director Daisy Campbell, who pulled some cosmic and genealogical strings to bring her vision to life. Daisy is the daughter of the late famed British director Ken Campbell, who achieved notoriety in the 1970s for his nine-hour adaptation of the epic science-fiction trilogy Illuminatus! by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea, among other works. Daisy half-jokingly says she was conceived backstage during the show run (where her mother, actress Prunella Gee, interpreted the role of Discordian Goddess Eris).In 2013, Daisy received an inner call and decided to answer it, adapting Cosmic Trigger into a play, a manifestation of her inherited artistic and theatrical legacy — both in homage to the mind-expanding philosophy of Wilson and to her father's epic production of Illuminatus! Synchronistically attracting a crew of crazy comrades and producers, the whole production became a full-throttle magical adventure for all involved. Cosmic Trigger — The Play eventually debuted in Liverpool in 2014, creating the space for finding the others .Robert Anton WilsonRAW has been a true maverick of the mind, arguably one of the most intriguing and important esoteric thinkers to emerge from the American counterculture. Uncle Bob, " the Carl Sagan of religion, the Jerry Falwell of quantum physics, the Arnold Schwarzenegger of feminism, the Helen Keller of art and music, the Nelson Mandela of white supremacists, the James Joyce of swing set assembly manuals, the Lenny Bruce of funerals, the Salvador Dali of assembly line workers" (1)RAW's works deeply affected and stretched many minds. There is deep, widespread sense of gratitude among those whose lives he touched with his books, talks and friendship. His mind-stirring books are paper-and-ink equivalents of psychoactive compound, providing rich, meaningful metaphors for the forest of symbols we navigate and experience. Armed with an unusually creative way of using language and a peculiar sense of humor, he explored domains as diverse as chaos magick, Jungian pyschology, cybernetics, Neuro Linguistic Programming, tantric sex, yoga, Zen Buddhism, Freemasonry... and many other esoteric or counterculture philosophies. The basic tenet of his agnosticism and multi-model thinking is that any perspective we have on the world is bound to a massive tapestry of beliefs about the world itself. These sets of world-describing (or world-creating) beliefs he called reality tunnels. Once we recognize we are living inside a particular reality tunnel, which limits everything we can perceive, we gain the freedom to shift to another. Reality is always plural and mutable belief being the death of intelligence.Our culture is turning to steamPublished in 1977, Cosmic Trigger is 40 years old this year, though it seems as relevant as ever. "In fact,” Daisy Campbell says, “the world he predicted, it’s just here, we are living in it, everything is actually happening, right here, right now. And his antidote to the world madness is to recognize the limits and dangers of our single vision and limited reality tunnels, and the hypnotic trance we are collectively living.” (2)Further on that, writer John Higgs (himself an inspiration behind the play) wrote:"Wilson's books depict a bewildering world of conspiracies, half-truths, lies, fake news, incompetence and our inability to find anything resembling objective truth. Or to put it another way, it describes the world as it is now, ten years after his death. (3) In Cosmic Trigger, RAW talks about the psychological state where you have no way of making sense of what is happening, where all your maps have run out, and where you have no fixed point with which to orient yourself by. He called this place Chapel Perilous. This is where we are now as a culture." (4)Sounds like an announcement of cultural collapse and apocalypse. According to magician and graphic novel writer superstar Alan Moore, whose voice leads the opening invocation of The Play :"Most people find the word 'Apocalypse' to be a terrifying concept. Checked in the dictionary, it means only 'revelation,' although it obviously has also come to mean end of the world. As to what the end of the world means, I would say that probably depends on what we mean by world. I don't think this means the planet, or even the life forms upon the planet. I think the world is purely a construction of ideas, and not just the physical structures, but the mental structures, the ideologies that we've erected, THAT is what I would call the world. Our political structures, philosophical structures, ideological frameworks, economies. These are actually imaginary things, and yet that is the framework that we have built our entire world upon. (...) History is a heat, it is the heat of accumulated information and accumulated complexity. As our culture progresses, we find that we gather more and more information and that we slowly start to move almost from a fluid to a vaporous state, as we approach the ultimate complexity of a social boiling point. I believe that our culture is turning to steam." (5)Waiting for the apocalypse, let's have a party!In his later years, Wilson had become a beloved resident character in Santa Cruz, and in 2003 the mayor of town proclaimed July 23rd to be Robert Anton Wilson Day , encouraging " all the citizens to join in commending him for consistently extending the boundaries of modern thought and providing a model of courage and intelligence in an age sadly short on heroes" (6)This coming July 23rd, Santa Cruz will host a RAW celebration — a day of talks to celebrate his legacy, with contributions from Daisy Campbell, Erik Davis and Richard Rasa of Hilaritas Press, and an evening party with legendary DJ Greg Wilson. To receive information and details, subscribe to the newsletter on the website - or just tune in to the signals leading to the party. That's where you'll find the others! Fnord.Images from the play by Simon Annand. Poster by: Amoeba DesignsNotes

Check out this rad skate deck illustrated by Hellen Jo. She lives in LA and makes bad-ass comic books and zines. LA Weekly stated that “Her zines show teenage girls in everyday scenes (like chilling at the skate park) but also in more violent settings.” The illustration on the deck is from one of Hellen's zines. “The scene comes from Frontier #2, a work filled with 32 full-color pages of troublemaking youths unleashed on the world.”I met Hellen at the Giant Robot store in Los Angeles while she was signing the decks. I’m really into comic book art, and Hellen’s punky style of illustration stood out to me right away. You can buy one of Hellen’s decks at the Giant Robot store, in person or online.

Google expected to be punished by the European Union for anticompetitive shenanigans, but it didn't expect a slap this hard: €2.42 billion, the largest fine on record. The company says it "respectfully disagrees" with both the ruling and the amount and may appeal.

Sean Hannity, the conservative firebrand and one of Fox News' last remaining ratings-grabbers, does not gargle piss, reports Clayton Purdom. The cable news pundit had publicly responded to a tweet saying "Sean you should drink more!!!" with "I need one" only for his interlocutor to change his name to "hannity gargles piss", thereby creating the unfortunate impression Hannity had cheerfully agreed he hankered for a nice pint of warm urine. Hannity, made aware of the clever switcheroo, decided to delete his tweet, thereby making clear that he does not suffer from a thirst that can be slaked only with a long draft of his own bitter pilsner.https://twitter.com/ChrisCaesar/status/879779901628440576

Charlie Chaplin's 1940 movie The Great Dictator features one of the greatest anti-authoritarian speeches of all time, so it's no surprise that Thailand's censorship-crazed king is abusing his country's grotesque lese majeste laws to order Youtube to remove clips of Chaplin's masterpiece. (more…)

The owners of Toronto's "Trump Hotel" just spent a reported $6M to get out of its deal with Trump and cleanse their property of his hated name; they will probably rebrand it as a "St Regis" hotel instead. (more…)

Starting July 1, the official Android and Apple App stores will no longer allow Chinese users to download the VPN apps that Chinese people rely upon in order to get around the Great Firewall of China, which censors information in China and surveils Chinese peoples' use of the net. (more…)

The Trump administration is failing to pull off its latest efforts to 'repeal and replace Obamacare' with a draconian plan that would leave 22 million or more without health coverage.After a growing number of Republican senators voiced opposition to the GOP plan, Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) today said he'd delay the vote on legislation until after lawmakers return from the July 4th recess.“We will not be on the bill this week, but we will still be working to get at least 50 people in a comfortable place,” McConnell today said.It's a big setback for Trump. It's fantastic news for every American who may need health care now, or in the future, or may have a child or parent who does. The fight isn't over, but these monsters aren't winning just yet.(more…)

Verizon's using its purchase of Yahoo for more than undermining the fight for net neutrality: it's also using its new acquisitions to make anti-competitive moves against its telcoms rivals, deploying the users of Flickr and Tumblr as hostages. (more…)

https://youtu.be/CTx4cy9gNXYBecky Stern writes, "My elderly cat passed away earlier this month, so I spent some mourning time stitching up these embroidered cat patches based on photos of my kitty Beatrice. I made a tutorial walking through the process from Photoshop to embroidery hoop."

Bruce Sterling's short story "The Beachcomber of Novi Kotor" is a monologue by a rogue Montenegran artist-roboticist, delivered at the 85th Venice Biennale, in a world where climate change has made venices out of all the world's low-lying cities, where Montenegro has been plunged into economic collapse by the precipitous departure of the neo-Czarist Russian oligarchs whose tourist trade it depended on. (more…)

As soon as this kid wields a leafblower, he acquires a diabolical laugh, along with the realization that he holds the fate of humankind in his hands.

This is great. A gentleman is watching a Rugby game – All Blacks vs Lions – in New Zealand with only a shirt on. His pants are nowhere to be seen. The couple videotaping him are having a delightful time – the woman can be heard laughing hysterically. The camera pans to the game for a few seconds, and when it pans back to the half-dressed man he finally seizes the moment and makes his way towards the players. He then takes it all off and streaks across the field. Makes me nostalgic for the 1970s.For a longer, better, more detailed video that is uncensored (in other words, if you want to see his unblurred bum), check it out at The West Australian.

Petya is a well-known ransomware app that has attained a new, deadly virulence, with thousands of new infection attempts hitting Kaspersky Lab's honeypots; security firm Avira attributes this new hardiness to the incorporation of EternalBlue -- the same NSA cyberweapon that the Wannacry ransomware used, which was published by The Shadow Brokers hacker group -- into a new Petya strain. (more…)

Carla has a tried a lot of different tea makers, and the Teavana Perfectea Maker ($20, Amazon) is her favorite. It doesn’t burn her hands, drains neatly into a mug, is easy to clean, and makes up to 16 oz.

More than a quarter of New York City lives without broadband, thanks to the sweetheart deals the city has cut with Verizon and the other big telcos, which chargessome of the highest rates in America for some of the country's worst service. (more…)

Research has shown the the best length for vacation is between 3 to 6 days: "People on mid-length holidays of between three to six days tended to report more positive mood than those on shorter or longer trips." This is one of six sensible tips to make your vacation as enjoyable as possible Barking Up the Wrong Tree from Barking Up the Wrong Tree.

I can feel my cortisol spiking as I watch this angry, aggressive Jacksonville, FL cop harassing a black man for jaywalking. He tickets him for that, and then when he finds out the man isn't carrying ID, tickets him for a bogus law – walking without ID.According to the YouTube page:

I'm listening to the audiobook version of Ian Fleming's Live and Let Die. It's narrated by a Brit, and I was thinking his American accent was pretty bad when he was reading lines from American characters in the book. But I shouldn't be too hard on him, after I watching this video of Americans trying and failing to speak with a British accent.

This is one of the best group photos ever. See a bigger version here.[via Peter from Texas]

Hot on the heels of the WannaCry attack, a massive, new, ransomware attack has struck Europe, shutting down systems in Ukraine, Britain, and Spain.From The Telegraph:

McMansion Hell (previously at BB) was a hilarious, incisive and explosively popular blog detailing and mocking America's dreadful suburban architecture. Zillow is a real estate site that exists to profit from it. Zillow used a grossly bogus legal threat to get McMansion Hell shut down, and everyone within sniffing distance of the law or media freedom is mad.Zillow claims that McMansion Hell was 'violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) and state laws prohibiting "interference with Zillow's business expectations and interests"', a claim augmented by a curious theory of copyright whereby Zillow has "particular rights" to images it doesn't own.

It was hot in Denver on Thursday, the day Emily France and her infant son were stuck aboard a United Airlines jet idling on the runway. After two hours inside the sweltering cabin, the baby became overheated and had trouble breathing. France asked for an ambulance and for the captain to let her and the baby off the plane immediately, but United kept her on the plane for another 30 minutes. “They couldn’t evacuate us," France told the Denver Post. "It was chaos. I really thought my son was going to die in my arms.”Snip:

Meat brand Oscar Mayer has announced the latest additions to its WienerFleet and frankly, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't relishing the news.Their fleet already includes the iconic Wienermobile, the WienerMini (a hotdog-shaped MINI Cooper), and the four-wheeling, off-roading Wiener Rover. This summer, to introduce their new line of less-wurst* dogs, they've added two new branded vehicles. The first is the WienerCycle which is a three-wheeled moped designed for "tricky urban deliveries." It's pretty cool looking with its sweet sidecar which also acts a hotdog warming station.But, the one that really kicks buns is the WienerDrone, a small 6.5 pound drone that drops warm meat from the sky. They report that it's the "first unmanned hot dog-carrying aircraft designed for remote location delivery."If you're trying to ketchup, that means it will rain fewer cats and more dogs this summer. *They're removing "all added nitrates and nitrites, by-products and artificial preservatives from the meat" in their "entire line of hot dogs."(Gizmodo)

A frozen Independence Day treat that’s a whole lot healthier than a Bomb Pop.

Introduce yourself, introduce your friends, and make sure you don’t talk about things that only interest you.

The Bank of International Settlements -- the "central bank for central bankers" -- has released its latest annual report, warning that the looming debt crises in China, Hong Kong and Thailand could precipitate an abrupt collapse, or, as BIS monetary and economic department head Claudio Borio put it, "That end may come to resemble more closely a financial boom gone wrong, just as the latest recession showed, with a vengeance." (more…)

After the civil war, formerly enslaved people bought about 15 million acres across the US (mostly in the south), but those landowners lacked clear legal title and also often did not have access to legal advice for estate planning -- combine that with lending discrimination (redlining) and the diasporas that scattered families across the country and that land has become easy pickings for crooked property developers and their crooked lawyers. (more…)

Snazzy Labs built a startlingly powerful Mac with only $70—editing the video above on it to prove it! A big part of it is being armed with knowledge and some technical chops: the donor PC (from institutional surplus) was a real beast in its day, they repaired a broken SSD (!), and found a miraculously appropriate bus-powered video card on Craiglist. All of which means you're not likely to replicate the "Crapintosh" in a $100 visit to Goodwill.All the same, though, I still think this shows something interesting. Not that MacBooks are underpowered, but rather that traditional desktop PCs, unfashionable as they are, are a cheap way to serious computing power if you're happy with an enormous noisy box under your desk. You might know this, but processors and video cards alike have long been marketed to obscure the performance differences between mobile and desktop parts, and they are often substantial! So educate your thrifty friends.

Learning a new language will give your resume an upgrade, sure, but it will also provide a huge cognitive boost for mental tasks outside of translation and conversation. Bilingual brains have been shown to be better at handling multiple concurrent tasks, and gaining fluency in a new tongue is an amazing way to improve memory, and stave off dementia later in life.uTalk is a mobile application for studying foreign languages. Instead of grilling you on complex grammar rules, this app focuses on building a practical vocabulary so you actually communicate with people. You’ll grow your language skills naturally with input from native speakers, and build confidence with interactive speaking games. This app syncs your progress across all of your devices and is compatible with most mobile and desktop platforms.This package from uTalk includes American English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, and Latin American Spanish. You can get lifetime access to resources for these six languages for $29.99 in the Boing Boing Store.

I've long thought that online crowdfunding campaigns were ripe for fraudulent activity. Drum up a decent sob story (or rip one off from the headlines) and you too can have strangers sending you money you don't deserve.Well, for just over a year now, Adrienne Gonzalez of Richmond, Virginia has been tracking GoFundMe scams on her site, GoFraudMe. Check out her site and learn how shameless some people can be, from faking cancer for cash to raising funds for cats who fake died in a fire (and more). Eeesh.(Super Punch)

Rolling Stone magazine asked the Prince of Darkness to list his ten favorite metal albums. Here are five of Ozzy's sure-shots:AC/DC, 'Highway to Hell' (1979)"I love Brian Johnson but to me my good friend, the late Bon Scott, was the best singer AC/DC ever had. This album was like an addiction to me."https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l482T0yNkeoGuns N' Roses, 'Appetite for Destruction' (1987)"One of the greatest debut albums of all time. There's not a weak song in the bunch. I never get tired of hearing it."https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1tj2zJ2WvgLed Zeppelin, 'Led Zeppelin IV' (1971)"I've always been a huge Led Zeppelin fan. All of their studio albums are classics but this is one of my all-time favorites."https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyivczZI5pwMetallica, 'Master of Puppets' (1986)"I took Metallica on tour with me after the release of Master of Puppets. The album was a milestone for the band and for heavy metal."https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVR4bkyMykAMotörhead, 'Ace of Spades' (1980)"The album that put Motörhead over the top. The title track "Ace of Spades" is Motörhead's "Paranoid." It's one of the great metal anthems and, to me, a band hasn't made it until they have their own anthem. This is theirs."https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWB5JZRGl0UOzzy Osbourne: My 10 Favorite Metal Albums (Rolling Stone)

The following are pioneering animator and Studio Ghibli director Hayao Miyazaki's (My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away, etc.) top ten favorite books for young people:

Jack Baker was bodyboarding at Sydney Australia's Cape Solander when a big backwash wave launched him into the sky. Fortunately, he suffered only from a burst lung and is now recovering."I even said to the photographer who was in the water: 'this backwash is going to kill someone.' As this wave came towards me, I took off and as I got in it was real deep, I was already going too fast, I attempted to eject hoping it would send me back through the wave," he told SurferToday."Instead of ejecting, I got smashed by the wave, and suddenly I was in the air just falling. I had already got kicked about so hard in the waves so as I came back down I was dizzy and I didn’t know whether I was in the water or up in the air. But when I hit the water that woke me up."

Last time I saw Death Cab for Cutie guitarist Dave Depper, we were at our dear friends' wedding dancing in a huge sweaty group and singing along to 1980s anthems by New Order and Pet Shop Boys. I mention that because Dave just released his stunning first solo album and there's a bit of that vintage synthpop vibe flowing through the record, titled "Emotional Freedom Technique." Not that this is a retro play; it's not. The record is a wholly contemporary affair even as Dave freely allows his influences, from 80s dancefloor jams to Prince's funky rhythms, ebb and flow through his songwriting. Emotional Freedom Technique blends nu-disco ass-shakers with lovely emo mix tape material and afterparty ambience. You'll dig it. Listen below and order here.

If you struggle to get a good night’s rest, consider replacing your pillows before dropping hundreds on a new mattress. You can give your tired neck a break with a 2-pack of memory foam pillows, available now in the Boing Boing Store.Each of these pillows is stuffed with cooling polyurethane foam that molds to your shape and provides ample nighttime support. For those with sensitive sinuses, its outer case is made from soft, hypoallergenic bamboo rayon that resists moisture, mold, and pesky dust mites. Each pillow compresses into a packable tube for easy carrying, and may be used comfortably without a pillow case.These pillows are perfect for travel and home use alike, and this set of two is now $39.99.

A couple of bull-headed drivers have blocked each other in a Taco Bell lot, but neither one is willing to back up for the other. One of the stubborn drivers threatens to call the police. The big problem is that they are blocking everyone else from entering the drive-through lane (but at least it's good entertainment). After much yelling and honking, the show ends as the police arrive.

Silicon Valley is a family favorite. It really nails startup culture, and every episode seems to raise the stakes. The opening title sequence is a 10-second animation of the growth and collapse of different software companies in Silicon Valley. It seems to change from episode-to-episode. It's hard to see everything that's going on, but this guy has studied it closely and reported what he found.

https://youtu.be/q_1GxcM95goNothing says MOTORCYCLE SAFETY like the Rockford files theme and a British accent.

It's likely you've gotten calls from criminals who pose as IRS employees and threaten to imprison you if you don't pay them thousands of dollars. These crooks work in teams based in Indian call centers. They are scumbags of the lowest order, preying on seniors and immigrants through fear and intimidation. Here's a security developer who decided to fight back. He wrote a script that called one of these IRS scammers' phone banks 28 times a second, flooding their phone lines and making it impossible for them to ply their vile trade. It's fun to listen to the scammers curse at the programmer's recorded message. According to Twisted Sifter, he has launched something called Project Mayhem to continue his fight against these unscrupulous scammers." He is seeking Patreon donations to go after IRS scammers, tech support scammers, loan scammers, "you have won" scammers, and "family member in trouble" scammers.Here's a recording of revenge on a tech support scammer:https://youtu.be/EOs_SjPGPNs