From NASA's New Horizons Image Gallery, this is described as a "high-resolution enhanced color view" of the distant world.Getting to see Pluto up-close has only made it a more mysterious place:

What do you do about the huge, ugly neck-brace your doctor wants you to wear after spinal fusion surgery?If you're an awesome maker like redditor Penguinz90, you decorate it to turn it into your own, steampunked-out brace. Ms z90 is a 48 year olf science teacher with four kids who used to work in the medical field and has had a long series of spinal surgeries that she has borne with apparent grace and bravery. Part of her impetus for making her own collar is so that she won't freak out the kids she teaches.

https://youtu.be/UiQQ3kLtyiMPsychology professor Richard Wiseman of Quirkology shows how to make ten optical illusions. The one with the straw is a good magic trick! Download the floating dice template here.

The T-shirt of Terror's scary Arabic glyphs were enough to get Miru Kim pulled aside by New York City's finest for a chat.Stopped while walking a dog near the 9/11 memorial, Kim says the officers pointed to her shirt, designed by the NYC activist organization We Will Not Be Silent."I just got stopped by two police officers in downtown Manhattan just because I was wearing this shirt from an anti-Iraq war group called Granny Peace Brigade from 2006. They took all my info, my address, apt. number, cellphone, right in front of my building," she wrote on Instagram. "Are they serious, NYPD? Are they gonna call me a potential terrorist because I am wearing a shirt with Arabic on it?"Interviewed by Gothamist, Kim says she found it a bizarre and "quite intimidating" encounter.

Apparently the Pope, or one of his attachés, likes to put popsicles in mailboxes when they roll into town. The D.C. Post Office was prepared.[via]

South Korea has a Confucionist tradition of children supporting their elderly parents in South Korea whose existence meant that the country never had to develop an advanced social safety net for caring for the aged.The decline of the Confucionist values, along with globalism, a demographic crunch, a rise in divorces and the historic exclusion of women from education and careers has left a huge cohort of elderly women with no means of supporting themselves except for prostitution.Hyung-jin Kim profiled several elderly prostitutes and their clients in Seoul, and found stories of women who were doing sex-work to pay for basics like arthritis medication.There's a regional crisis in eldercare in the Pacific Rim. In China, two generations of one-child policy along with improved medical outcomes and longer lifespans has created a situation where two working parents might be expected to support seven people with their income -- four grandparents and a child (sometimes there are great-grandparents in the mix).Japan's well-known age crisis is exacerbated by a growing national xenophobia, which has the country severely limiting the number of careworkers who can come to the country from traditional labor-exporting nations like the Philippines.

https://youtu.be/DKqW4gw4wsg?t=16sYo dawg.

Designer Robert Yang has done a suite of unique and challenging games recently, small but considered works on consent, embodiment and masculinity, among other themes. In Stick Shift you jerk off a car; Hurt Me Plenty is about consensual pain; Cobra Club is about dick pics in the era of state surveillance, and the new and complex Rinse and Repeat is about waiting til after your gym class to help wash a hunk who calls you "bro" and "pal", and who wears sunglasses in the shower.These games are playful, funny, and sexy, and they provoke reflection and dialogue. Yang often reveals a thought process behind the technical decisions in his work that can be fascinatingly-congruent with the spiritual ones. But just four days after its release, Rinse and Repeat was banned from all broadcast on the online streaming community Twitch, just as Cobra Club previously was. Yang is among the most-banned developers on Twitch—perhaps an exciting status for an artist, but evidence of troubled standards for content.Twitch rules say that while occurrences of nudity or sex acts in games are "okay, so long as you do not make them a primary focus of your stream," games with nudity as a "core focus or feature" are disallowed. Under this rule, video games that feature sexualized bodies (usually women) for titillation are okay to stream, but that Yang's work centers on the vulnerability of nudity in a consensual space and other meaningful issues apparently makes it obscene.Writes the developer on his blog:

FIFA, the comically corrupt governing body of international soccer, has suffered hard times of late: several executives were collared by the law, it became apparent that World Cup hosting rights floated on a sea of bribery, and an expensively-financed biopic of glorious leader Sepp Blatter bombed at the box office.Blatter himself escaped serious trouble throughout the crisis, though he was ultimately forced to promise resignation—a promise he has yet failed to fulfill.Swiss prosecutors have provided an incentive, however, in the form of long hoped-for criminal proceedings against The Blatt. USA TODAY:

Press Your Luck was a mid-80s game show modeled along similar lines to Wheel of Fortune. But instead of a wheel, its flashing board was digital, supposedly random and unpredictable.Sadly, no, writes Priceonomics' Zacahry Crockett. One contestant, Michael Larson (not the fellow on the right) figured out the nonrandom patterns the board followed and racked up huge gains as the network panicked. He had turned their game of chance into a game of skill, and he was skilled enough to take them to the cleaners.

https://vimeo.com/channels/staffpicks/138236113Beautiful footage, perfectly narrated by Phil Reynolds, of the billions of beasties underfoot—and underground—in the New Forest. Beetles, bugs, dragonflies, and the law of an unseen landscape, all shot on a Super35 digital movie camera and a Canon 7D.

Double Union is moving from its space in San Francisco's Mission -- their building was sold out from under them and the new landlords evicted all the tenants -- and needs help finding somewhere new to set up shop.They're taking donations via Paypal to help pay the move/deposit/rent.Here's the kind of place they're looking for -- do you know of a space that fits the bill?

If you follow my tweets of interesting stories from one year ago, you'll have seen the Roca Labs saga popping up again. Roca sold a "non-surgical gastric bypass" that was mostly made from industrial food-thickeners that were supposed to gunk up your stomach and fill you up.Their terms of service included a gag-order that let them sue you if you posted a negative review -- e.g., if you told other prospective customers that it made you sick as a dog.Now the FTC is cracking down on them, launching a suit that includes a motion for a restraining order that Adam Steinbaugh describes as "pure brass knuckles" -- it's a joy to read.The FTC alleges that Roca used deceptive advertising, and asks to have the gag-clause invalidated and accuses the company of intimidating witnesses.

Under pressure from the right wing of his party, John Boehner is to resign from congress and from his role as speaker of the House of Representatives at the end of October.https://twitter.com/RepHuizenga/status/647401701306142720His departure comes as some members of his party plan to trigger a government shutdown over the funding of Planned Parenthood, a nonprofit that provides reproductive health services, largely for women, including abortions.The announcement was described as "shocking" by USA Today, coming a day after Pope Francis's first address to the U.S. Congress.CNBC writes that his departure will likely avert the shutdown threat, but quotes one commentator saying "Boehner critics are about to finally get what they want: Inmates running the asylum."

Zoanthid corals are a favorite with aquarium hobbyists -- beautiful and easy to grow (easy being a relative term -- coral's always a pain in the ass).Most people who keep coral know that they have to be careful when handling it they can poison you on contact with palytoxin, which bonds to sodium-potassium ATPase and disrupts the potassium/sodium balance in cells, killing them (and in sufficient doses, killing the organism too). What wasn't well-known (until a rash of emergency room visits in Anchorage) is that fragments of coral that are left exposed to air release an invisible, highly toxic gas that can seriously poison everyone in your home.

https://youtu.be/7aaoNEVfF_8Most of them are already broken, by the looks of it. But many of our gadget-demolishing heroes are obviously just too dumb to realize the residual value of old phones, so it's still pretty satisfying to watch . [Digg]

In contrast to yesterday's post about the way the Internet is depicted in patent drawings, check out these photos of the Internet's secret actual infrastructure.Photographer Heinrich Holtgreve's The Internet as a Place is a beautiful series of images of the deceptively banal places where the Internet's infrastructure lives -- the fiber passing through the Suez canal, the exchanges where networks talk to each other, the anonymous buildings and sewer openings that lead to dark spaces that course with data.On a recent trip to NYC, Henrik Moltke led me on a guided tour of the sidewalks around NASDAQ, which are spraypainted with markings indicating whose fiber goes where. It's precisely because these markings are so innocuous and easy to miss that they're exciting -- a form of secret knowledge that can be discovered by anyone who chooses to see it.

More weed than you can smoke in a long summer—hundreds of marijuana plants!—have been discovered amid the urban environs of London. Amused police published images of the pot paradise after learning of the "forest" in Kingston-upon-Thames, a built-up suburb of the UK capital.https://twitter.com/MPSKingston/status/647325739747033089https://twitter.com/MPSGroveSNT/status/647318642288381952The Guardian reports that the farm was carefully situated despite the location, being surrounded by wasteland that took about "20 minutes" to get through."But all their time, trouble and gardening skills will go unrewarded, as the whole lot will now be destroyed by police,” said PC Sarah Henderson of the Kingston force.No arrests have been made.

Sculptor Petros Eftstathiadiadis makes these "pacifist bombs" as a commentary on the Greek political/economic situation, constructing them from materials chosen to seem absurd, playful and harmless. Despite that, a few of these look somewhat alarming to me, possibly because of Eftstathiadiadis's (admirable) lack of knowledge about antipersonnel weaponry -- the soap immediately makes me think of jellied gasoline, for example.Eftstathiadiadis doesn't leave them on city streets or anything -- he makes and photographs them in private; presumably they end up in galleries or collections afterward. They must be a lot of fun to ship, though.

In the wake of iOS 9's new ad-blocking functionality, The Wall Street Journal reports that makers of ad-blocking apps are accepting payment from publishers to let ads through.

Inspired by the universality of symbols, the founders of Noun Project began to collect thousands of hand-drawn icons. The concept has since transformed into a massive digital collection of 150,000+ unique icons that fuel the work of designers every day. Spend less time crafting icons and more time putting amazing designs out into the world with two years of Noun Project.

Souris "Hustler of Culture" Hong-Poretta has followed up on her amazing 2013 coloring book Outside the Lines with a second edition: Outside the Lines Too.Both books feature fantastic and inspiring designs by brilliant artists for you to color in and complete. Adult coloring books are not only a thing, they're a wonderful thing -- a combination of meditation and self-expression that is delighting more and more people.Souris was kind enough to pass along some of her favorite designs from the book, along with these notes on its genesis and philosophy:

Dig these covers and spreads from OZ, the psychedelic magazine launched in Australia in 1963 and reborn in the UK in 1967 under the visionary editorship of Richard Neville, Martin Sharp, and Richard Walsh. Far fucking out. From Wikipedia:

https://youtu.be/IawMV4Ll1AoThis looks fun and delicious! (I'd definitely listen to Scott Joplin while eating it too.)

Police were called to a gated property in the exclusive Los Angeles community of Beverly Glen today “after a caretaker at the home reported a disturbance.” A man identified as 28-year-old prince Majed Abdulaziz Al-Saud was arrested on suspicion of forced oral copulation of an adult.An LAPD spokesperson said that a diplomatic liason desk determined that Al-Saud does not have immunity in this case. He is scheduled to appear in court Oct. 19.From the Los Angeles Times:

Posh luggage brand Globe-Trotter and boozemaker Chivas teamed up on this steamer trunk design that includes a minibar. Good for long flight delays, I reckon. They'll make you one for just $18,000.

See more photos at Wink Fun.One Night Ultimate Werewolf is a bluffing and role deduction game for between 3-10 players. During the game you'll be assuming one of a dozen different roles in a village on the brink of being destroyed by werewolves, possibly being one of the two werewolves. You'll start out knowing what your role is, but by the end of the night phase, it may have changed and typically you won't get to check it again. Working from that knowledge, you have just a few minutes during the day phase to puzzle out who the werewolves are with the limited information you have. You then vote to kill one of the roles, trying to catch one of the werewolves.The components for this game are top notch, and the speed at which it plays is a refreshing change from longer bluffing games like Mafia or Werewolves of Miller's Hollow, the granddad of this game. Bezier Games also has a free companion app for iOS and Android that does all of the narration that normally you'd need someone to sit out for. The app also has a running timer to give that against-the-clock feeling. Included, in addition to the role cards, are markers that you can use to physically sort out and keep track of your deductions.I really enjoy this game because you're trying to sort through the limited information that everyone has, or says that they have, sort out the lies and then decide if the werewolves are even in play. It's possible that no one is a werewolf at all, as there are 3 more cards in play than total players, and it's not unheard of that 2 of those 3 center cards are the werewolves. The choice of when to volunteer the information you have – which varies based on the roles that were randomly determined, and if someone claims to be someone that you're pretty sure they're not – all play into the deduction game as well. It's a fun puzzle to sort out with the group under pressure from the timer.– James OrrOne Night Ultimate Werewolf

Carla, Cory, David, Jason, Xeni, and I are still giddy from our Weekend of Wonder extravaganza in association with Baby Tattoo, held at the Mission Inn resort in Riverside, California on September 18-20. In three fun filled days we and about 75 other folks learned how to make juggling balls (and juggle them), drank weird coffee concoctions, dined at a printing company and an outsider art garden, learned how to pick locks, escaped from straitjackets, created trick card decks, toured the catacombs beneath the 19th-century hotel to view macabre automata, enjoyed a musical performance by stars of Adventure Time, played a cooperative alternative reality puzzle game, and mingled until the wee hours of the morning while enjoying cupcakes and ice cream. Phew! We can't wait to do it again. The best part of the event was meeting and hanging out with Boing Boing readers and their families.LA Weekly's Star Foreman was there for the entire event, and the paper has posted a gallery with 80 photos of the event. Enjoy the sampling below:

In the charming, compulsively playable Japanese iOS game Nekoatsume (aka Cat Collector), you spend a lot of time acquiring virtual toys to attract a coterie of virtual cats to your virtual backyard. But now it seems that there are actual Nekoastume toys for corporeal humans as well, and there's a way to buy them—even if you live outside of Japan.Hubbyte Toys and Collectibles, a vendor based in the Philippines, posted on Facebook today that it is taking preorders for what appears to be a Nekoatsume playset, complete with a pop-up yard, cats (Manzoku-san, Hoiiro-san and Akage-san specifically), a blue food dish and yes, yes! A yellow ball.The price is listed at what I believe is 1500 Philippine pesos, which is approximately $32 in U.S. dollars. You've spent so much time giving imaginary toys to imaginary cats. Why not give the gift of real toys based on imaginary cats to yourself?

My dog groomer told me the brushes I've been using on my pals are not good for them, or their coats. She recommends I use this slicker brush.A few weeks ago I reviewed the Furminator, a brush that removes great amounts of hair, and mats, from both my Cavalier King Charles and Main Coon cat. Today my groomer told me to throw it away! She showed me a number of small cuts on my pup that are a result of using that brush. Her suggestion is a simple slicker brush.I like this brush and it works well on the smaller animals with lighter fur. It'll last a few months before the pins become bent totally out of shape. The quick release mechanism for hair is pretty helpful, and slightly bends the pins back into shape with each use. That said, I'm glad these are only $9 as they wear out in 3-6 months.I love the ease of use and speed of the Fulminator. I can still use it, but not when the dog has really bad mats or stuff caught in her cottonball like fur, apparently it is too easy for her skin to get caught in it. Most of the time I'll be using a simple slicker.Sorry, Pretzel!Safari Self-Cleaning Large Slicker Brush for Dogs via Amazon

Republican Kentucky state Sen. John Schickel is suing to overturn the state's ethics laws so that he can accept gifts worth more than $1,000 from lobbyists without reporting them, because he thinks the current ethics rules violate his First and Fourteenth Amendment rights.The laws he's seeking to overturn were passed in 1992, after Kentucky legislators were revealed to be selling their votes. He has been emboldened by Citizens United and other court decisions in which judges ruled that limits on political spending were unconstitutional.

https://youtu.be/sSUXTFceiloOn arbitration show Judge Judy, the plaintiff describes the possessions allegedly stolen by the defendant. But she never gets to finish the list. [via r/videos]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BORMZ8UoUEJonathan Worth is a celebrated, successful, internationally recognized award-winning photographer who saw the writing on the wall for his business -- selling pictures to magazines -- when he found himself threatening a young girl for pirating his pictures, and decided there had to be a better way.Since then, Worth has pursued a new kind of photographic career, one that includes teaching literally tens of thousands of people to do tell their own stories with pictures; using Creative Commons licenses to sell physical photos; blazing new trail.This hour-long keynote from the Association for Learning Technology 2015 Conference is inspiring, beautiful, and beautifully delivered. I'm so proud that we've published Worth's work here, and that I've been able to collaborate with him on some of his fantastic open learning projects (I'm also eternally grateful to him for the amazing portraits he's shot of me and my family over the years).

Hundreds of people taking part in the pilgrimage to Mecca are dead after a stampede in nearby Mina, according to reports from Saudi Arabia.The death toll stands at 717, with 863 more injured, say the BBC and Al Jazeera. A BBC editor at the scene, Bashir Sa'ad Abdullahi, said that "dead bodies stretch as far as my eyes can see."

Marsha Blackburn has represented Tennessee's 7th district for more than a decade, on behalf of the Republican party, whose caucus has elevated her to the vice-chair of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce.Rep Blackburn has told America to ignore the Pope's message on climate change. When pressed on the subject on a BBC interview, she said "the jury is still out" and that "different researchers" had assured her that the Earth was cooling; as to the scientific consensus on anthropogenic climage change: "I just choose to disagree with that."When asked what evidence would convince her of the reality of climate change, she showed remarkable self-awareness, answering "I don't think you will see me being persuaded."She also said that she did not accept the theory of evolution.

Traffic is for sale. You can buy "good" traffic and "bad" traffic. But much of it is, as they say, "nonhuman"—and amounts to the normalization of click fraud on an epic scale.

SmokyMountains.com has a delightful interactive graphic to show the turn of the season by county. Slide it and see! [via Kottke]

https://youtu.be/XKijMZhZ_Z0This white budgie is grooming a cat friend, and the cat seems to like it. [HT: Falcor!]

Like a lot of roleplaying games, Undertale asks you to become a child. When you fall down a hole into an underworld populated with monsters, your path seems clear: set off on a brave journey across a hostile land, destroy the evil monsters you meet along the way, and emerge a hero.Then, almost immediately, you meet a monster who doesn't want to fight. Its name is Whimsum and it is very frightened, ready to burst into tears at the mere sight of you. So it's your choice, hero: do you spare it or cut it into pieces?

Yes, advertisements on websites are annoying at best, but they're also a large and important part of how websites make money so that they can keep providing you with sweet, sweet content. So what's an ethical person who desperately wants to install an ad blocker supposed to do?Fortunately, Darius Kazemi of the creative tech cooperative Feel Train has a solution. "The Ethical Ad Blocker is a Chrome extension that, when it detects advertising on a website, blocks the entire website," writes Kazemi. This way, the user doesn't experience ads, but they also don't leech free content. Everybody wins. Download it today!"

https://youtu.be/_J-uKNb6TaICrash Zone knew you had been wondering about this ever since you decided to become Lord Protector of the forthcoming New English Republic and know you'd need some breathing space. Is it possible to create a vehicle able to withstand an RPG attack without being buried in metal armor?The answer is "No."It's quite a firm no, too: even 45 layers (15.75 inches!) of the stuff can't protect what's on the other side. [via sploid.gizmodo.com]

Edd writes, "I am a professor at Ithaca College in New York. Recently for a research study I tracked almost every Role Playing Game Book circulating in every public and academic library in the world.""There were some really interesting results, for example if you looked in every single library in many states there are less than ten (10!) RPG books! That is horrible. The goal of this paper is to encourage libraries to add these materials to their collections. Something I hope you would also think is a good idea?"

As the supply of publishers went up, advertisers gained leverage they could use to insist on more invasive ads and more unethical editorial practices.It all grew too much for Heather "Dooce" Armstrong, who got fed up with having to pitch products with false sincerity, and censor her authentic voice because advertisers feared it would offend their customers.It's another aspect of the toxic relationship between advertisers and publishers: just as publishers accept ads because they want money (but are largely indifferent to the sales the ads generate, so long as the advertisers keep buying); advertisers are indifferent to the impact of invasive/dishonest ads on the publishers' reputations (just so long as there's somewhere else to advertise to the same audience).Armstrong says she faced dwindling revenue, more extreme demands, and an army of trolls who stalked and harassed her -- this last is a very gendered and racially unbalanced problem for publishers, effecting women, people of color and queer people more than white dudes like me. Not that I don't have haters and even a couple stalkers, but they're nowhere near as vicious, specific, sexual and personal as the stuff that women web-writers have shared with me.For Armstrong, the breaking point was the extent to which advertisers expected her to involve her kids in their pitches. I sometimes write about my kid, or even feature her reviews, but always and only because she's excited about the prospect. No one's ever asked me to, and if they did, I wouldn't entertain the proposition. I have enormous sympathy for Armstrong's position -- it's hard to imagine what sort of person insists that a parent exploit her child as a condition of payment.

For more than a decade, the UK movie industry makes a big deal out of announcing that audiences at the latest blockbuster movies will be surveilled by bored teenagers who get to LARP Buffalo Bill with greasy night-vision goggles that they'll use to catch camming pirates.With the impending release of a new Bond and Hunger Games movie, the studios have once again sent out their spokesbots to tell us about their high-tech war on camming.Meanwhile: box office returns are (once again) higher than ever, and most of the pirate editions are leaked by insiders from the studios.But Big Content will keep on playing alcoholic dad, insisting that their problems are caused by us, punishing the people who pay for movies because they can't reach the people who don't, looking for their keys under the lightpost because it's too dark where they dropped them.

The stylized art of patent drawings is instantly recognizable. Before the information age, the drawings were drafter's jewelboxes, designed to make the workings of new mechanical inventions legible to other inventors (and patent examiners).When the US Patent and Trademark Office (which is funded by patent-application fees) decided that it would allow "inventors" to patent doing obvious things by adding "but done with a computer" or "done on the Internet," the art in patents underwent a transformation. Since there was no invention to speak of (c.f. one-click purchasing; scanning a document and emailing it; podcasting) the application diagrams became more fanciful, depicting "the Internet" in various guises, doing things that lent the applicant the veneer of technical respectability in a bid to disguise the fact that the "invention" amounted to "incredibly obvious thing, but with the Internet."It's probably not a coincidence that patent examiners, whose salary came from these applicants, encouraged the practice.These 33 patent drawings depicting the Internet (sometimes labelled "cyberspace" or even "Internet highway") are a kind of rogues gallery in line-art schematic form.

Dorothy, Wendy and Alice are frenemies who disagree on everything, and it's breaking up their band, D.S.A (Dynamic Squid Antithesis). In a cool, handmade adventure game, you have to help the friends manage an increasingly surreal and trippy landscape full of rough style and offbeat humor.D.S.A., by TheWaether, has been five years in the making. I love its intense strangeness (an ancient gramophone threatens to play "Rollin'" by Limp Bizkit at you; a wall of Harry Potters prevents you from entering the enchanted wood, a missile silo alludes to an R.E.M. concert) and its intentionally-rough, unique MSPaint graphics.But it's just plain good fun as an adventure game; the main mechanic involves you switching among the three friends, with the actions each take affecting the situation of another friend. D.S.A. feels substantial to play, too—I've only just scratched the surface of it, really, and I'm being sucked in to its increasingly weird world.DSA is available for pay-what-you-want. The soundtrack, which is wonderful, is also available as a separate download.

https://youtu.be/MedgUUah1fwDesigner Adam Curtis has made a two-player flash game called NotDOBA, inspired by the aesthetics struck by 60s graphic designer Saul Bass.Visually it looks as neat as you'd expect. Curtis says he hopes the turn-based two-player game will appeal to fans of fast-paced local multiplayer works like Samurai Gunn or Nidhogg. I hope Curtis changes the name—I don't know what NotDOBA is nor is it catchy!—but the developer says he's committed to the ongoing update works necessary for a game like this to find a persistent community.I like it on style alone; I also really like Steve Margetson's lively, tonally-apt music. You can get NotDOBA for Windows or OSX for $3.49.

https://youtu.be/tHvExOg4NI0“Cooper and Daisy go through the drive up window at Mcdonalds.” Not cool, Cooper. Not cool.[YT]

Volkswagen's sponsored content may be disappearing around the internet, but the stink about their emissions scandal ain't going anywhere just yet.Just last week on social media, Wired was promoting content sponsored by now-disgraced car maker Volkswagen, all about "how diesel was re-engineered." From what we can tell, Volkswagen's native content campaign with Wired launched mid-2015. But as the scandal about software installed on Volkswagen diesel vehicles to trick emissions tests grows more serious, links to the sponsored content campaign have gone dark.In case you haven't been following the German auto maker's recent woes, Wired summarizes them neatly here, in a non-sponsored article about, let's not mince words here, how totally fucked VW is: