Whether you’re an aspiring da Vinci or just like doodling in the margins of your notebook, you’ll love taking your skills to your iPhone or iPad. FiftyThree’s Pencil rolls up your pick of pens, pencils, paintbrushes, and color palettes into one nifty gadget, and never requires switching tools. Erase and blend to your heart’s content— with Pencil, it’s just as easy to create a watercolor portrait as it is to design a custom invitation to your next event. Plus its classic carpenter’s pencil design guarantees you’ll look like a pro while you’re crafting your mini masterpieces.

See more photos at Wink Fun.Crosley makes a line of vintage-inspired portable turntables in great colors and prints. Thanks to variable speed settings, each player can handle your perennial 78s as well as your newly pressed Hozier record. They even come fully loaded with an adapter for your Lemonheads 45s.With built-in speakers, you need only the turntable, your album of choice, and a power outlet. If you prefer to listen to Tori Amos on full size speakers, the player also has a stereo output discreetly hidden in back.If your spouse or partner doesn’t find the hisses and pops of vinyl recordings charming, the headphone jack allows you to immerse yourself in Paul’s Boutique while pretending you're only pending obligation is a paper on Faulkner and feminism. And because no urban hipster is complete without a little irony, your vintage-inspired record play comes equipped with an input for your MP3 player. You will have to provide your own mustache and slouchy beanie, however. – Elly LononCrosley Cruiser Portable Turntable

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YE6MQ56_yyg

It's still in beta, but Tor Messenger from the Tor Project has security and privacy baked in by design, and it's the easiest method yet devised to use OTR (Off the Record), the gold standard in secure communications. (more…)

Available in Conical and Round, these designs won my heart with their clever use of retort stands and sandblasted lab glass; love the fabric-sleeved power-cable too (available in four colors!). The £165; price-tag is admittedly steep, though. (more…)

From the 1980s, an era when I wore copious amount of black eyeliner, and Ministry's Al Jourgensen cultivated a faux English accent, we bring you the underground club anthem "(Every Day Is) Halloween."(Fan video via YouTube.)

1,492 supporters and rising on Change.org: "It would be Harper’s style — he’s not a show-off, he’s not about selfies, and being named after a popular airport would certainly help him rehabilitate his image after such a disastrous campaign." (via Making Light)

A poster from Scarfolk, the English horror-town that loops through the decade 1970-1980, over and over, warns of the Infant Catcherbots that roam the town's roads, looking for children whose parents unwisely hid them from the civic trials of the 1970s. (more…)

Super Punch's annual roundup of printable Hallowe'en masks includes some old faves and some stunning new entries in the race to celebrate a truly incredible inkjet Samhain. (more…)

The New York Times's slideshow of the Hallowe'en displays of hedge-fund managers and other NYC oligarchs has some pretty impressive haunts, though nothing that justifies the socially corrosive effect of out-of-control wealth gaps. (Photo: Christian Hansen) (via 3 Quarks Daily)

What better way to let your true colors shine—while staying business casual—than with your socks and underwear. Whether you sport boxers or briefs, full-ankle or mid-ankle coverage, bold colors or classic patterns, Happy Socks will have you looking on point where it counts the most. Get $60 to spend site-wide—that’ll get you a full Monday-through-Friday’s worth of quality footwear or a full set of undeniably attractive space-themed briefs.

It’s day one of the 2015 Trivia Championships of North America (TCONA) and already there’s been an “incident.”We’re oblivious to the unfolding disaster as we mill around the Havana Room of the Tropicana Hotel in Las Vegas. Approximately half of the 200 or so registrants have just finished playing the First Quiz of TCONA, a 100-question written exam covering everything from Gwyneth Paltrow’s vagina cleaning regimen to French World War I flying aces.But now we’re ready for 5x5, the Jeopardy style game that is a TCONA favorite. And there’s no 5x5 to be had.A couple of guys wearing sports caps and jerseys break unexpectedly into show tunes. The rest of us Monday morning quarterback the First Quiz.We agree that the test’s biggest stumper was to name the most recent Mexican-born winner of an acting Oscar.I had immediately thought of Anthony Quinn, who was born in Mexico and won two Oscars for Best Supporting Actor in the 1950s (for Viva Zapata! and Lust for Life). I eventually settled on the equally wrong Salma Hayek, who was nominated for Frida but didn’t win.[caption id="attachment_431519" align="alignnone" width="960"] Warren Usui wracks his brain for an answer. Photo courtesy of Dan Avila.

https://youtu.be/cAlnykGHjwwThe fun-loving Chinese journalists in this segment manage to out-VICE VICE. 侣行 On the Road is billed as “a homemade outdoor reality show” featuring an "extreme couple" who love adventure. The pair and their team got some great footage of an open-air weapons market in Sadr City.(more…)

Enigma Café in Romania claims to be the first “kinetic steampunk” pub in the world. (more…)

A windless sail and a waterless sea, a rusted ship and a discontinued journey.

It's fall and my buddy Marcus is at it again. The Extra Life 2015 Video Game Marathon is just a couple weeks away and gamers across the country are preparing to play for 24 hours straight, raising money for Children's Hospitals in their hometowns.Come on - it's the perfect excuse to pull an all nighter and finish exploring all the HALO5 content, or finally get your Guardian up to 300 Light level. Do that, get a couple sponsors and 100% of the funds go to your local Children's Hospital.Join Marcus' team TH3 M0TL3Y CR3W here or sponsor Marcus. I'll likely join him for a few hours.

Every 80s baby remembers Bob Ross, the gentle-voiced art instructor whose public television show brought "happy trees" and "almighty mountains" to life before your eyes, often using nothing more than a pallet knife, a fan brush and a little Titanium White. Although Ross's "Joy of Painting" ceased airing in 1994—right before he passed away from lymphoma in 1995—he's being remembered and adored today by a potentially unlikely crew: gamers on streaming service Twitch.tv.Twitch's audience primarily convenes to watch people play video games live, alternately cheering players on and trolling them with a fascinatingly-specific vocabulary of in-jokes, memes and visual iconography. Sometimes this leads to expansive and delightful cultural phenomena—remember last year's 1.16 million-person Pokemon game, and the rich bank of lore that organically sprouted up around it? Have you heard about the communal machine art of Salty Bet?In Twitch's latest happy surprise, the world of meme-spouting esports geeks has been drawn into a charming relationship with late painter Ross. The service just launched a "Creative" channel, and celebrated it with a nonstop marathon of all 408 "Joy of Painting" episodes starring the gentle painter and his teaching techniques. The results have been genuinely beautiful: The Twitchers are transfixed by Ross, his warm throwback style and the way he summons lakes and fir trees to the canvas as if anybody, even you, could do it. Though the popular "Let's Play" format often involves lots of yelling—streamers chatting and shrieking while irritable meme jockeys accuse them of cheating— watching Bob "play" gently with color, light and idiosyncratic vocabulary ("don't piddle it too much", he softly warns aspiring painters to the chat's sincere delight) has had a charming effect.I clearly remember being little, watching Bob scrape misty mountainscapes gently across a pale sky. Suddenly he'd slash the canvas with a knife of Van Dyke Brown, and though he promised it was a tree trunk—and it always would be, quite beautifully in the end—the child-me would be secretly horrified, convinced he had ruined it.RUINED, the Twitch chat erupts with hundreds of users every single time Bob begins a new landscape feature, a slash of brown or black whose role in the pastoral environment has not yet been clearly established. I can't help laughing along. I want to type RUINED, too. "trust in bob," users urge in response. "have you learned NOTHING," laments another.Whenever Bob finishes a painting, everyone types "GG", or "good game", a common post-competition sign-off. Relatively-obscure internal video game language becomes wonderful in its new context; chatters praise his "god-tier" skills, or suggest he has "nerfed" an ugly feature by blending it more naturally with the rest of the painting.With "The Joy of Painting", which aired on PBS from 1983 to 1994, Ross sought to democratize the arcane and elite art world with clear, unpretentious instruction (his biggest tip is to make sure you have enough paint on your brush) and a gentle, playful attitude. "This is your mountain," he might say, hoping to offer the at-home viewing audience an opportunity to feel as if they had the right to make art—and to enjoy it just as much as some fancy-pants painter. Ross sought to challenge the misconception that art had to be gatekept by skill, and that spontaneity and imagination mattered the most."Let's have a river," Ross might decide. "There are no mistakes, just happy accidents," he advises. "Let's give this tree a friend," he suggests. "I wish I had a friend," reply several tens of Twitch users, either in ironic unison or sincerely.This democratic approach, his hypnotic soft voice and the deeply-soothing, ASMR-inducing patter of brush on canvas make Ross a secretly-awaited hard counter to the traditional world of public "gaming" and Let's Plays. Where games culture traditionally prizes "elite" skills and internal knowledge, Ross offers an environment where participants get to watch something rare and magical coalesce—and yet the skills still feel attainable, and the simple spectator always feels welcome and loved.Lots of the people typing "can Bob respond to chat?" are trolling; some of them might just be young and genuinely hopeful. You can't know, really.It's rare that we get a chance to remember that sometimes the crowds really are wise. It is easy to develop and to calcify a natural suspicion of "gaming community" online. Which makes experiences like the Bob Ross Twitch collective all the more meaningful—what if the gentle painter posthumously inspired tens of thousands of chat-spamming esports geeks to try making art? What if the parlance of Bob Ross' old democratic, joyful painting program made its way into the cultural vocabulary of competitive video games? It's almost enough to restore your faith in humanity.If you like to watch people play arcane games while talking softly and serving ASMR keyboard tapping, you might enjoy my Lo-Fi Let's Play YouTube channel, explicating odd 1980s and 90s adventure games.

This morning, the hosts of the TODAY show dressed as ridiculously bizarre and frightening interpretations of the Peanuts characters."I'm actually Charlie James Brown!" Al Roker said."TODAY goes nuts for Halloween: 'Peanuts'! See our Charlie Brown and the gang" (Thanks, Kelly Sparks!)

Who can resist an $11 bluetooth smartwatch with a touch screen display, even if it is an utter piece of junk? Not me! I just ordered one on Amazon. It will supposedly pair to an iPhone.Features

Watching TV as a little kid in the early 1960s, I yearned very deeply— an insatiable craving sucking at my guts — for a Hootin’ Hollow Haunted House, a tin toy produced by Louis Marx. I saw this commercial on our small black and white TV (I was between four and six years old at the time) and immediately began pestering my parents:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8Gh0-9B7BYIt was probably too expensive, but Robot Commando from Remco cost just as much and that showed up under the Christmas tree although I didn’t ask for it. I think my father really wanted to play with it and that’s why I got it. But he didn’t care about ghosts, witches, and haunted houses, and so my desire was doomed.What is so special about the Hootin’ Hollow Haunted House? To a six-year old boy it was probably the coolest thing on earth. There are eight typewriter style buttons on the right side of the house, each neatly labeled with the effect that is produced when you push it down. And it was like they took every neat spooky thing a kid could wish for and stuffed it into this beautifully lithographed tin house—an example of great toy design. The sides of the house are not straight verticals, but splay outward from the bottom up, as if viewed in a foreshortened image; the roof and windows are a-kilter, all influenced by German Expressionism in the art design of films like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.Of course, I didn’t know crap from Caligari as a little kid, but damn I wanted a Hootin’ Hollow Haunted House so badly it seemed like my life could not continue without it. But continue it did, and as a gift to myself upon hitting the half century mark (when my wife enrolled me in AARP as a joke — NOT, just saying, NOT FUNNY), I finally found a house at a good price and scratched that long-standing itch. Not a real house, a Hootin’ Hollow Haunted House. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nqlf_zvoAr0&feature=youtu.beBeware if you want one of these; a fully-functional Hootin’ Hollow Haunted House sells for about $1k without the box, and $2k with the box in excellent condition. The 6-year-old inside me is glad I got mine cheap.

If you really want to be scared this Hallowe'en, spare a moment to ponder six ways that the state engages in widepread and indiscriminate surveillance, from social media monitoring to license plate and toll-transponder readers to IMSI catchers, biometrics and more. (more…)

"My son's Chipotle cup says 'reproductive sex' on it," wrote a mom who posted this photo to Reddit. It also looks like the cylindrical object is penetrating something. The text below it reads, "Who wants to feel so small?"Confused? I was, too, until I learned that it's part of Chipotle's "Cultivating Thought" series. The cup was illustrated by James Gulliver Hancock, and is inspired by something Anthony Doerr wrote for Chipotle:

This parent doesn't want to check their kid's candy haul for nut products, so they put up these obnoxious posters instead. See full size image here.

The 285-281 vote was nonbinding and thus "largely symbolic" but it's a hell of a symbol. (more…)

See sample pages from this book at Wink.Pick up Lonely Planet’s Wild World, flip through a few pages, and I dare you to put the book back down. It isn’t easy. From the emerald spiraled snake of Cameroon to an ancient breed of semi-wild horses in France to the bejeweled Crystal Cave of the Dead Sea in Jordan (all shown above), every page pops with a breath-taking image of our planet’s natural splendor that makes you want to see more. The index in the back of the book gives us a brief explanation of each photograph. Oversized, textured, and loaded with nearly 200 stunning photographs of nature and wildlife from every corner of the world, Wild World is the quintessential coffee table book.Wild World

Cat collectors rejoice: the cult favorite mobile game Neko Atsume has finally made its way to Android—and soon, to iOS—in English under the name Neko Atsume: Kitty Collector.Originally created by the Japanese company Hit Point, the game had been available solely in Japanese since its launch, but the idea of collecting a coterie of cats in a digital backyard proved so adorable that it acquired a community of international fans anyway. Devoted players quickly created guides to help non-Japanese speakers navigate the menus, acquire fish and attract a wide range of kitties to romp around inside their phones."When we made the game we weren’t thinking about foreign users — we were only thinking about the Japanese audience," Neko Atsume project manager Yutaka Takazaki told the Verge. "It’s very helpful that the community is helping each other out." The English version also localizes the names of the cats to more typical English pet names, like Snowball, Smokey, and Shadow. If you've been holding out because the Japanese version seemed too complicated, now you have no excuse.

Susan Delson of the Wall Street Journal profiles the Japanese sister duo Charan-Po-Rantan, featuring accordion music that "glides from klezmer to Balkan beat to zydeco, from French chanson to blues and boogie."

When the Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act of 2005 passed, pharmacies moved all cold-medicine with the actually-works ingredient pseudoephedrine, only available on request and with a copy of your ID. In its place, the pharmacy shelves were restocked with phenylephrine, which was alleged to work just as well. It doesn't work at all. (more…)

A new plan from Tory Home Secretary/Sith Lord Theresa May will require ISPs to retain one year's worth of Britons' online activity, and hand it over to the police and security services on demand, without a warrant. (more…)

The Koch brothers give a lot of money to universities, but on the condition that they get to approve the economics faculty. They give to public television, but only if they can cancel the airing of documentaries on climate change. They're not the only ones. (more…)

It's been nearly a decade since a single thumbnail image of Michaelangelo's David's willie caused a censorware company founded by a registered sex-offender to block Boing Boing for all its clients as a "nudity" site. This post will probably blow their minds. (more…)

Complete with an adorable toy Uzi, the $27.44 Israeli Soldier Costume comes in various sizes of small and features a red beret, belt, and fatigues with Hebrew text on a lapel pocket.It's off the shelves, sadly, following a furore this week, but it's all over eBay.NBC News:

Police in Waco, Texas, have released video of the biker shootout that left 9 dead, 18 injured, and reportedly involved 5 different gangs.CNN acquired the video, captured on security cameras at the Twin Peaks bar where turf tensions erupted in violence, after a freedom of information act request.177 were arrested in the aftermath, and the mens' lawyers say the video proved that the crackdown was excessive, as most were clearly trying to escape rather than participate. More than 1000 weapons were found in the roundup, however, which police say belies the claims of a peaceful gathering gone awry.The principal rivalry in the region is between The Cossacks and The Banditos, reports CBS.

Bad cops respond to disorderly teens with contempt and violence. Good cops get down and dance. (more…)

Creepypasta, for those somehow unawares, are short, shonky, mutated ghost and horror tales, nth-generation copies of something dimly-remembered. Gizmodo's Kiona Smith-Strickland collects some of the best.

Chris Grayling, UK Tory MP and leader of the House of Commons: The Freedom of Information act isn't for journalism, it's for "those who want to understand why and how government is taking decisions." If you want to hold your government accountable, you, personally, should do it, without any help from the press. It will make Britain great again. (more…)

In 2004, Helen Linehan terminated a pregnancy she had conceived with her husband, IT Crowd/Father Ted creator Graham Linehan, after discovering that the fetus had acrania and could not survive for more than an hour after the birth. As sad as the occasion was, the pair were more traumatised when the moved to Ireland shortly after and discovered that if Helen had had her abortion there, she'd have faced 16 years in prison. (more…)

Trick Decks, my e-book about making your own trick magic decks is just 99 cents today. Tomorrow the price goes to $1.99, and the day after that it goes to its regular price of $2.99. Learn more about the book on the Trick Decks website.

Ever since VE Holding, a 1990 Federal Circuit decision, patent holders have been able to sue their adversaries in practically any court in America, leading to competition among jurisdictions to see which one bend the furthest backwards to deliver patent-friendly decisions and so tempt the nation's most litigious companies to sue in their local courthouse. (more…)

LA Makerspace co-founder Tara Tiger Brown shares a project that her kid-friendly maker workshop is trying to make a reality.(more…)

Paul Messing emailed me and said, "I watched the footage Boing Boing had on Facebook yesterday - the dancers from another time and place - and I added some music of mine and edited all so the clip is even more amusing, but no less bizarre."Thank you Paul!

People operating under the Anonymous banner took over a KKK-linked Twitter account during the Ferguson uprising in retaliation for Klan threats to attack the protesters. Now people under the #Intelgroup Anonymous banner are threatening to dump the personally identifying information of "1000 Klan members, Ghoul Squad affiliates and other close associates of various factions of the Ku Klux Klan across the United States." (more…)

It took 40 years for someone to make a motorcycle that looks nearly as pretty as BMW's R90s. Enter Triumph's 2016 Thruxton R!What do I find most exciting about these new Triumph models? SI like is the dual disc brakes up front. That sexy fairing and sleek seat are deliciously re-envisioned '70s styling, but Triumph excels at making motorcycles that are fun to ride! You'll want the extra stopping power, as they also make bikes that are heavy, and usually come stock with terrible suspensions. My reliable bike is a 2013 Scrambler, I've "had to" modify it quite a bit.If the new entries in Triumph's modern classic line are anything like the old, there will be a wealth of aftermarket parts and mods available for these as well. Sadly, I believe this generation of the Bonnieville sees the end of air/oil cooling and introduces liquid to the equation. Perhaps you should let someone else can buy the first years model.More photos and details from Xtremebikes.es:

The web-hosting service 000Webhost stored user passwords as plain text. We know this because 13 million of them were exposed in a five-month old hack whose consequences are only now becoming clear. (more…)

This looks cool. The American Bystander Humor Magazine is going to be a "lavish print quarterly featuring comedy all-stars from SNL, The Simpsons, Monty Python & National Lampoon." It looks a lot like 1970s era National Lampoon, with a touch of Harvey Kurtzman's Humbug. They have almost made their Kickstarter goal.Ethan Persoff (co-creator of the John Wilcock comic strip that premieres on Boing Boing) said, "The goal of the magazine is to bring back a national humor publication, along the lines of National Lampoon, Spy, etc. What I like about it is the project actually involves many of the original writers of that era. Apparently the idea for the Bystander is it was originally thought up by Brian McConnachie around the same time he contributed to National Lampoon Radio Hour (which, in turn became Saturday Night Live) and the idea for the magazine has been percolating since then, becoming a serious idea about two years ago. First issue also includes Terry Jones from Monty Python, Jack Handey (SNL's Deep Thoughts) tons of interesting work. They're running about seven pages of John Wilcock comics, too."

Hassan Abdo Ahmed Mohammed, his wife, and four children escaped the Syrian civil war to settle in Russia. The Kurdish family landed in Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport but the Russian government says the family's visas are fake. If they return to Syria, they may be killed. So they have been living in the airport for 50 days while lawyers try to sort out their status. UNICEF brings them food and, a week ago, the United Nations and an NGO convinced Russian authorities to permit them to spend their nights in a terminal hotel room. From CNN:

Alison Moritsugu paints beautiful landscapes, including some on slices of trees that make the logs resemble portals onto the natural scenes in which they grew. Her new work, a collection called titled "inconsequence / in consequence," will be exhibited at the Littlejohn Contemporary gallery in New Canaan, Connecticut from November 12 through December 12, 2015.

I'm sold on wrist pads. I've been using them for many years. When I don't use one, the bony parts of my wrist that come in contact with the desk get sore. This wrist pad from 3M ($14 on Amazon) is filled with a gel that cushions your wrists, and positions them for typing. It has good reviews in Amazon, but one reviewer said his cat poked a hole in it and gel oozed out. He patched it with duct tape.

Erebus is a vampire who seeks psychiatric treatment for his hemophobia.Turns out he really likes mambo sauce.[vimeo]

See sample pages from this book at Wink.As a kid, my favorite thing about MAD was “Spy vs Spy.” (I didn’t know that “vs” stood for “versus” so I pronounced the comic “spyvisspy.”) The strips were excellently drawn and plotted, and were the most appealing part of the magazine to me. It was a wordless one-page comic about two oddly pointy faced spies, one dressed in black and the other dressed in white. Other than their different colored outfits, they behaved identically. They hated each other and created elaborate Rube Goldberg type machines to try to kill each other. Sometimes their machines worked, often, they’d backfire. They were tricky but usually too clever for their own good.This anthology colorizes 150 “Spy vs Spy” comics drawn by Antonio Prohías from 1961 until his death in 1987. The book also includes a collection of “Spy vs Spy” comics by the talented cartoonist Peter Kuper, who took over the strip when Prohías died. The anthology features a section of wonderful “Spy vs Spy” tribute drawings by noted cartoonists such as Peter Bagge, Bob Staake, Darwyn Cooke, Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez, and Bill Sienkiewicz. There’s also a biography of the Cuban-born Prohíasm and a new 4-page color strip by MAD luminary Sergio Aragones about his friendship with Prohías. With all the new material here, this book is a must for anyone who loves “Spy vs Spy.”Spy Vs Spy: An Explosive Celebration