In 1969, United Nations Command negotiator and US Maj. Gen. James B. Kapp and North Korean Maj. Gen. Ri Choon-Sun sat across the table from one another for 11.5 hours without eating or using the restroom. The delegates were only permitted to leave the room if the person who called the meeting proposes a recess. Ri never did. In fact, the two men spent the last 4.5 hours of the meeting silently staring at one another. At 10:30pm, Ri stood up and walked out.During the meeting, Knapp had asked Ri for North Korea to begin a four-step process to calm tensions in the region.The infamous meeting was featured in Jeffrey Z Rubin and Bert R. Brown's book "The Social Psychology of Bargaining and Negotiation" which sounds like a rather useful read."A long, awkward silence" (Weird Universe)

Reddit's management have posted a long explainer on the EU's extreme copyright proposal, which would snuff out sites like Reddit and make it impossible to start new ones. It's a great piece, and the discussion is pretty excellent, too.

The first electromechanical computers occupied whole buildings, making them rather unwieldy; in the 1950s, an effort to create a "portable" computer called the DYSEAC bore fruit in the form of a computer on wheels that could be relocated, provided you had the trucking logistics to move two trailers with a combined weight of 20 tons. (more…)

In April, Moby sold a slew of his vintage synthesizers to benefit the anti-animal testing organization Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. Now he's parting with 1,000 of his vinyl records with the proceeds going to the same group. The collection ranges from test pressings of his own albums to post-punk classics to 12-inches that he spun during his rave and club DJ days in the early 1990s. The sale launches Thursday on Moby's Reverb LP Shop.“These are all the records that I bought and loved and played and carried all around the world,” Moby says. “I would rather you have them than me, because if you have them, you’ll play them, you’ll love them, and the money will go to the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. So everybody wins. Well, except me, because now I don’t have any records.”(Reverb)

Southern California is almost totally dependent on Sierra snowpack and the Colorado River for its water, and both sources are endangered by climate change, even as SoCal's cycle of long droughts and catastrophic, torrential rains gets more extreme thanks to climate change. (more…)

At yesterday's Trump-Kim summit, the White House played this fake movie trailer. I wish it began with "Imagine a world.." but the actual narration is almost as good:“Destiny Pictures presents a story of opportunity, a new story, a new beginning, one of peace, two men, two leaders, one destiny."Korean version below.(Quartz)https://youtu.be/Y3EBABDEPkk

Raimundo Atesiano was chief of the Biscayne Park Police Department in 2013, and he was proud to boast about his department's 100% clearance rate for burglaries -- but according to federal prosecutors who just indicted him, Atesiano conspired with two of his officers to frame a 16-year-old child for unsolved burglaries so that they could impress local officials. (more…)

Dr. Laurence J. Peter's 1969 "Peter Principle" holds that companies promote high-performing employees to more and more exalted managerial jobs until those employees reach a role that they're incompetent to perform, and thereafter, the employees' negative performance reviews mean that they stop getting promoted, so that, on average, managers are all stuck in jobs they're not very good at. (more…)

There's one week to go until an EU committee votes on a plan to "transform the internet into a tool for surveillance and control," that will permanently cement the place of American internet giants like Google and Facebook, freezing out smaller internet companies (and even large nonprofits like Wikipedia) who lack the tens of millions of dollars that complying with the rule will require. (more…)

In one week, an EU committee will vote on a pair of extreme copyright proposals that will ban linking to news articles without permission, and force internet platforms to spy on all the pictures, text, video, audio and code their users post, sending it to AIs designed to catch copyright infringement and automatically censor anything that might violate copyright. (more…)

Steve Martin takes a walk in Michael Jackson's loafers for "The New Show," a 1984 sketch-comedy TV program from Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michaels. The New Show only ran for one season but this clip lives for eternity.(via r/ObscureMedia, thanks, UPSO!)

It's always a treat to see someone unexpected embrace tabletop gaming. I just got the Netrunner: Revised Core Set, the latest edition of the popular and surprisingly immersive cyberpunk card game originally designed by Richard Garfield (who also designed of Magic: The Gathering). I decided to watch some videos on playing the game using the new set, as I haven't played in a while. I happened upon a series of videos by Muttnchop Piper, a YouTuber who runs a channel on pipe smoking and tobacco.I was surprised by how good, and charming, these videos are. He talks about how the game brought him and his grown son closer together. His son is an artist, and growing up, wasn't into the typical things, like "hunting and fishing." His son introduced him to the game, and as you can clearly tell from the videos, Muttnchop Piper has really taken to it. He and his son play the game every Thursday.In the videos, he describes the world of Netrunner, how to play one of the Corporations, how to play a Runner, and he runs through a sample game. There are a lot of how-to-play Netrunner videos out there, but I don't think there's a better intro series than the one from this unlikely of sources.https://youtu.be/J7h4MH-braEhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLs1Ai8A-QEhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywu00LEwDaUhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHW4tsmBoqk&t=713sI also like this brief video explaining why you should play Netrunner. I love this game and think it evokes a cyberpunk world better than just about anything short of reading a novel in the genre. I strongly disagree with this reviewer's assessment that Netrunner is not a dark future. It says "dystopian" right on the box! I do agree that this game feels even more timely and relevant than it did when it was first released 5 years ago. I also really like how he explains why the community of Netrunner is different from other competitive and collectable card games.https://youtu.be/UnLqI8Enpo0Update: As readers in the BB forums were quick to point out, Fantasy Flight announced a few days ago that they will be discontinuing support of Netrunner the end October (after the release of the Reign and Reverie deluxe expansion). Oh well, still a great game, still worth checking out.

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I don't think I'm cool enough to have these Dream Pops delivered to my house monthly, or ever.

Ed Piskor's offering an annotated page-by-page look at the first part of X-Men: Grand Design, his epic retelling of how Marvel comics' pantheon of heroes came to be. Catch up here. — Eds.Director’s commentary…

When Brooklyn-based artist Iris Scott begins a new piece, she doesn't get out paintbrushes. Instead, she simply puts on gloves when she starts on an oil painting. Scott is a fine art finger painter.This 10-minute long mini documentary on her from a couple of years ago shares how she got started and what she thinks of her "gift." She's quick to point out that it's not a natural talent, that it's the result of a lot of time and practice:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wz8JepbR6d0Unreal Tournament was the multiplayer 3D shooter that stole Quake's candy, and now it's been demade to run on a toaster. Gone is the expansive virtual enrivonment and motion sickness; still in play is the cyberpunk corporate-sponsored deathmatch vibe and merciless sense of chaos and speed.

These 3-color block prints on matchboxes by Denver-based wife-and-husband team Arna Miller and Ravi Zupa are the cat's meow! The set, titled Strike Your Fancy, depicts "cats drinking at the bar and the good, embarrassing and confusing situations we have all found ourselves in."Buy one or more for $20 each here.(Colossal)

Designed to look like something running on the Commodore Amiga but with all the modern conveniences, Grafx 2 is pitched as "The ultimate 256-color painting program."

Commodore made the world's most successful 8-bit personal computer, the C64, and its most iconic 16-bit one, the Commodore Amiga. But the latter was a weird, complicated, two-faced beast, dooming a badly-managed company to a dead end of its own making. What if it had instead made a simple but powerful monster machine more like its earler models? Meet the C256.

Yoyoka Soma (YouTube) is an 8-year-old Japanese drummer.

Nine of thirteen "landmark" baobab trees across southern Africa abruptly died in recent years, reports Agence Presse-France. Climate change is blamed.

The attitude towards marijuana has changed a great deal since the days of Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" campaign in the 1980s, which was an escalation in Nixon's war on black people. Several states in the US have legalized recreational marijuana and more are considering it. A bipartisan bill was introduced in Congress to let states decide for themselves whether to legalize it, and Trump says he supports it. (Poor little Jeff Sessions!) The entire country of Canada is going to legalize it.But there are still a few people who want to force their belief that marijuana is a killer on everyone else. In addition to Jeff Sessions, former oxycontin addict Patrick Kennedy (son of Ted Kennedy) says weed "destroys the brain and expedites psychosis." (Patrick's attitude seems to be "I was addicted to heroin so people should be punished for smoking pot." He also greatly profits from opioid-addiction firms so it's in his financial interest to sing the dangers of all drugs.) Another weed foe is casino tycoon Sheldon Adelson, who has made billions of dollars selling alcohol and wiping out people's savings taking their money at his gambling tables.This episode of Kurzgesagt -- In a Nutshell takes a "fair look at some of the best counter arguments for legalization and see how they hold up in review." If you're on the fence about marijuana legalization, it's worth watching.

I could not be more thrilled that Come Inside My Mind, a documentary about the legendary Robin Williams, will air soon. Look for it on HBO starting on July 16.

This past weekend, a woefully overloaded rescue ship operated by SOS Méditerranée and Médecins Sans Frontières made its way across the Mediterranean Sea from Africa to Europe, looking for a safe port in Italy. Many of the 629 migrants on board of the ship, all of which were fleeing the horrors of war in Syria and Libya and the exploitation that displaced individuals often endure in Africa.Among the 629 passengers are 123 unaccompanied minors, 11 kids who made the crossing with family members and seven pregnant women. Some of the ship's passengers are said to be injured from beatings and torture endured in the home countries. By Sunday, there were only enough provisions to feed those on board for another 48 hours. Italy’s response to the vessel’s request to dock in the country?Nah, fuck those guys.According to the Globe and Mail, Italy’s newly elected populist government acted in a manner that may be familiar to those under the yolk of a populist government here in North America. In a xenophobic fervor, instead of rendering aid or shelter to a group of people who were in woeful need of it, they turned them away. Matteo Salvini, the governing party’s deputy prime minister and minister of the interior, gave the order to keep the boat-borne individuals from stepping foot on his country’s shores.From the Globe & Mail:

Håkon Wium Lie has many claims to fame -- he not only created Cascading Style Sheets, an integral part of the web, but he also was the first person to publish the laws of Norway (which are public domain, but were behind a $1/minute paywall at the time) for free, online. Though the company that maintained this paywall threatened to sue, they eventually saw the light and put the laws up for free. (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZjUsfrqYiAJohn writes, "My partner, Valery Estabrook, is an artist who has started a Kickstarter for a project of limited edition coins based on actual historic events associated with the Trump administration. The first of these is a coin commemorating all the participants of the infamous Trump Tower Meeting with Don Jr." Coins are $15 and up!

Nestled between two national parks, Sequoia and Death Valley, there is a ghost town for sale. For a little under a million dollars, you could own a piece of the American West: an abandoned silver mining town founded in 1867 called Cerro Gordo.Mental Floss reports:

It's been a year since the Mueller investigation began and the Trump administration and its goons have been working harder to derail it than they have on pretty much anything else, aside from creating massive divides in the American people. I've gotta say, things are looking a bit dark.

IHOP caused quite a stir last week by claiming they are changing the restaurant chain's name to IHOb. They aren't. It's (duh) a marketing stunt and the "b" stands for "burgers." From the New York Times:

The city of Xi'an in Shaanxi province has designated one of the sidewalks on Yanta Road for "phubbers" -- slow-walking smartphone users who shuffle while they read and text. (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qc5P2bvfl44SIGGRAPH is coming, when all the amazeballs graphics research drops, and the previews are terrifying and astonishing by turns (sometimes both!). (more…)

Here's the fourth and final part of my reading (MP3) of Petard (part one, part two, part three), a story from MIT Tech Review's Twelve Tomorrows, edited by Bruce Sterling; a story inspired by, and dedicated to, Aaron Swartz -- about elves, Net Neutrality, dorms and the collective action problem.MP3

The tiny embedded processors in smart gadgets -- including much of the Internet of Shit -- are able to do a lot of sensing without exhausting their batteries, because sensing is cheap in terms of power consumption. (more…)

Back in 2010, I linked to a superb infographic showing all the ways that official DVDs were worse than their pirate equivalents (unskippable ads and FBI warnings, etc); now Dnd01 has updated the graphic with a version highlighting all the ways that the games industry has encrufted their products with DRM that make them into a worse deal than the pirated versions. (more…)

Trump is notorious for his "filing system": when he is finished with a piece of paper, he tears it into tiny pieces and throws it away, which is fine if you're a CEO (maybe), but is radioactively illegal under the Presidential Records Act, because the President works for the public, and is required by law to archive their official papers and save them for public scrutiny. (more…)

Every August, British 16-year-olds get their marks from the GCSE exams, a high-stakes test that has an enormous impact on their future educational and earnings prospects; on results day 2015, the British Army used Facebook targeting to reach these 16-year-olds with messages like "No matter what your results will be, you can still improve yourself in the army." (more…)

The Obscuritory offers in-depth reviews of games "unplayed and unknown," lost to the rapid technological changes of the 80s and 90s and the countless mutually-incompatible platforms that came and went as the years rolled by. My favorite pick, though, is Knights of the Crystallion, the wonderfully weird and impenetrable magnum opus of legendary game designer Bill Williams, which baffled Amiga owners in 1989 or so. Psygnosis turned it down because it was too weird for them. I sometimes want to organize a modern sequel to this unfinished epic, but Bennett Foddy rightfully pointed out an Alley Cat remake would get a bigger audience.

You've likely seen maps of the earth with land and sea inverted, where Asia becomes the world's greatest ocean and the Pacific a vast, sprawling continent. But high school geography teacher John M Adams took it a step further and explained what it would be like to live in this parallel world. The Marianas Mountains make the Himalayas look like a traipse up Scafell Pike...

A study (inspired by a John Oliver segment about the decline of local newspapers) looked at data from 1,266 counties and found that the loss of watchdogs leads to less efficient government. The Guardian:

Restore Privacy collects alternatives to Google products: "It’s been fun Google, but it’s time to say goodbye." And it's not just Firefox, DuckDuckGo and Tutanota; privacy-oriented options include NextCloud for storage, Matomo for web anaytics, Etar for calendars, and HookTube for relaying YouTube videos.

Facebook opened up access to friends' data through its API in a bid to attract developers to its platform, but in 2015, it incurred those developers' wrath when it pulled the rug out from under them, killing the API calls that allowed apps to mine their users' friends' data. (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsae8f0Ajv0Mark Zuckerberg himself hosted World Hack Moscow, a hackathon in October 2012, handing the mic to Facebook product manager to Simon Cross, who walked the developers through the process of using Facebook's API to gather data on a users' friends, showing them how to get "a ton of information" on the entire friend graph of a Facebook user who gave simple permissions to their apps. (more…)

A long time ago, obesity was often used as a shorthand for wealth, but over the decades obesity has become more and more correlated with poverty, both in culture and science (while wealth is increasingly correlated with being slim). (more…)

From your apartment door to your bike lock, it's not uncommon to carry a number of different keys on your keyring, but that doesn't make it any more bearable when you're fussing to find the right one or deal with the infamous pocket bulge. The KeySmart Pro's smart design cuts down on key clutter and comes loaded with Tile™ Smart Location, so you'll always have your keys handy.https://www.youtube.com/embed/3UqTux-KOAwFashioned from stainless steel, the KeySmart can easily store up to 10 keys in its space-saving sleeve. In addition to locating your keys on a map, the KeySmart's Tile™ functionality also allows it to ring, so you can hear your sleeve even if it's buried between the couch cushions. What's more, the KeySmart even works in reverse, allowing you to ring your phone if you can't find it—even if it's on silent.The KeySmart Pro with Tile™ Smart Location is available in the Boing Boing Store for $39.99 today.

Pastry chef and Bon Appétit's senior food editor Claire Saffitz has been reverse engineering popular candies like Kit Kats and Skittles in an effort to make her own gourmet versions. For both candies, it's quite the process to recreate artisanal versions of them!If this is your kind of thing, Saffitz has also tried to recreate junk food like Cheetos and Twinkies.https://youtu.be/4nqJiBRNQuw(digg)

June is Pride month. What better time to spruce up your rows and columns with the colors of the rainbow?David Murphy of Lifehacker shares an oldie-but-goodie Easter egg in Google Sheets that turns them into the colorful spreadsheets we all need.

You have a right to privacy, but whether or not it's respected online is a different story. With hackers, shady third-party companies, and the government prowling the web for personal information, you can't be too careful when it comes to protecting yourself online. VPNs have emerged as a popular solution, but not all are created equal, especially when it comes to security. NordVPN, however, leverages powerful double data SSL-based 2048-bit encryption to keep your browsing movements and information safe, and two-year plans are available for $69.In addition to keeping your sensitive data under wraps, NordVPN lets you enjoy high-speed connections for streaming video and accessing content on its network of more than 3,500 servers around the globe. You can bypass content restrictions and access streaming sites, like Netflix and Hulu even if you're overseas, and, unlike other VPNs, NordVPN keeps absolutely zero logs of your browsing movements, ensuring your data stays private.Two-year subscriptions to NordVPN are available in the Boing Boing Store today for $69.

The next installment of the excellent SF in SF series is tomorrow night, June 10, starting at 630PM and featuring Ellen Klages (previously), Lucy Jane Bledsoe, and Meg Elison, moderated as always by Terry Bisson.

To promote his new film Action Point, professional jackass Johnny Knoxville made this video with Vanity Fair to share how he got every injury he's had in his career. As you can imagine, it's a painful watch.