Dream Askew and Dream Apart are "no-dice, no masters" RPGs where players collaborate to tell stories together without dice or dungeon masters: Dream Askew uses the system to create campaigns in "a queer enclave enduring the collapse of civilization" and Dream Apart is set in "a Jewish shtetl in a fantastical-historical Eastern Europe." (more…)

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Once again, the future has been unevenly distributed: Makita's coffee machine was available in Japan years ago. I can't wait to have one of these in my kitchen. Asahi Shimbun writes:

In 1927, folks in the Fresno, California area went down to the local cinema to learn how to use those new-fangled dial telephones that everybody was talking about. This is the charming footage, a combo of live action and cartoons, created by the American Telephone and Telegraph Co. (AT&T) that they saw 91 years ago.The AT&T Archives writes:

A few weeks back, we pushed out a post about the fact that Heathens serving in the U.S. Army are now allowed to sport a beard as part of their faith. In the story, I mentioned that a group that stands for heathens serving in the military stated that the growing of a beard wasn’t a tenet of Heathenry. Given that Ásatrú, Heathenry and Paganism have been used to describe a wide number of belief systems and religions, I wasn’t sure if making a basket statement like this was factually correct. Fortunately, I know someone who does.Dr. Karl E.H. Seigfried holds degrees in literature and music from University of California at San Diego, University of Wisconsin at Madison, and University of Texas at Austin. He studied literature and art history at Loyola University Chicago, Rome Center, in Italy and took Icelandic language courses through University of Iceland's distance learning program. Dr. Seigfried currently works at the Illinois Institute of Technology as an Adjunct Professor in Humanities and as a Pagan Chaplain. He’s Goði (priest) of Thor’s Oak Kindred—a Chicago-based organization dedicated to the practice of the Ásatrú faith and a member of the Troth Clergy Program. Previously, Dr. Seigfried taught Norse mythology and religion at Loyola University Chicago, Carthage College, and the Newberry Library Seminars Program.Long story short, the good doctor knows everything about Heathenry that I don’t.While I wanted, primarily, to ask him if the wearing of a beard as part of Heathenry was bonafide bunk, I felt the opportunity to follow up with a few questions about an often misunderstood religion was too good to pass up. So here we go.How would you define Heathenry to someone unfamiliar with the term?Ásatrú is a modern religion that revives, reconstructs, and reimagines pre-Christian Germanic polytheistic religion with emphasis on medieval Icelandic texts. The term Ásatrú itself is modern Icelandic for “Æsir faith” and means belief in or loyalty to the major tribe of Norse gods and goddesses. Practitioners usually refer to themselves as Heathens.More generally, the term Heathenry refers to the wider world of contemporary Germanic polytheism, which includes not only modern traditions based on older Icelandic and Norse beliefs and practices, but also on those of the Anglo-Saxons, Franks, and other ancient groups that spoke Germanic languages.Depending where in the world you are, today’s practitioners may use the terms Ásatrú and Heathenry interchangeably, or they may insist that the first one refers specifically to beliefs and practices centered on Icelandic sources.When we self-identify as Heathens, it doesn’t mean we’re calling ourselves “heathens” in the popular or derogatory sense. There doesn’t seem to have been a native word for the various systems of polytheistic religious beliefs and practices in any Germanic language before the clash with Christianity. After the new religion came to the north, the term Heathen (Old Norse heiðinn, Old English haéðen, Old High German heidan) was used for those who believed in what was also called the Old Way, and it’s used in this sense by modern practitioners.Most Heathens around the world are deeply familiar with a wide range of source texts on various aspects of historical belief and practice. In order to understand the origins and development of our tradition, we study Roman reports, Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon poetry, Icelandic sagas, medieval legal codes, early German literature, nineteenth century folklore collections, and many other types of written sources – along with academic works on archaeology, history, and so on.Although it’s a modern religion, Ásatrú has a four-thousand-year history. Its gods, symbols, and rituals have roots in Northern Europe that date to approximately 2000 BCE. From shadowy beginnings in the Bronze Age through a late flowering in the Viking Age, local variants developed throughout continental Europe, the Nordic countries, and the British Isles. Large-scale public practice ended with Christian conversion, but there is documentation of private practice continuing for several centuries. Some beliefs and rituals survived into the twentieth century as elements of folk religion throughout the Northern European diaspora, including North America.Ásatrú is what sociologists call a new religious movement (NRM). In Iceland, the old faith of Odin, Thor, Freya, and the other Norse gods and goddesses was officially abandoned for Christianity at the national assembly in the year 1000 CE. Although private practice continued for some time afterward – and folk practices continued much longer still – it wasn’t until after a group of twelve men and women adopted the term Ásatrú and formed the Ásatrúarfélagið (“Ásatrú Fellowship”) as a new religious organization in 1972 that the old gods were once more openly worshipped in the country.The Ásatrúarfélagið was officially recognized by the Icelandic government in 1973, and its members performed the first public blót (Heathen ritual) held in Iceland since the rite was outlawed almost a thousand years earlier. The religion soon spread out internationally, and the number of adherents has greatly grown over the past 45 years. Ásatrú is now the largest non-Christian religion in Iceland, and the construction of a major hof (Heathen temple) is nearing completion.According to the 2013 Worldwide Heathen Census, some form of the religion can be found in 98 countries, with the United States having by far the largest number of practitioners. That’s an amazing spread of what remains a largely unrecognized and misunderstood religion in less than half of a century.What beliefs, if you are comfortable speaking about them, do you personally hold?Worldview might be a better term than belief. In both modern Ásatrú and the ancient Germanic traditions that inform it, the focus is less on subscribing to a dogmatic set of beliefs than to experiencing and living life in a way that engages with the numinous as an intrinsic part of the world, not as an external force that stands outside time and space.I sometimes think of Ásatrú as a poetic gloss on life that is informed by the poems, myths, sagas, legends, and histories that we turn to for information and inspiration. We don’t have sacred texts that parallel those of the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. We don’t have commandments handed down from the heavens and preserved in infallible texts. Instead, our lore provides a guide to forming ways of seeing and acting.For just one example, a quiet walk in a forest can be a deeply meaningful experience enriched by both conscious and subconscious internal connections of the present moment to past engagement with lore of elves, myths of Odin, legends of Siegfried, and history of the early Germanic tribes. The nonverbal connection of elements can be more meaningful as a religious experience than any verbal discourse about beliefs.This way of seeing the world leads to a way of living in the world. The past is an active force that affects the present as the present continually becomes the past. Heathens often say that “we are our deeds,” meaning that the actions we take in the now become part of the past that determines what can happen in the future. One way of conceiving of this process is as weaving a web of wyrd, of being part of a vast network of deeds and consequences. This naturally leads to the honoring – not the worship, as it’s often misunderstood – of those who came before us and whose deeds made our own lives possible.In this worldview, death is the final action of an individual’s life story, but it isn’t at all the end of that life's effect on the future present. In the poem Hávamál (“Sayings of the High One”), the god Odin famously says,

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Ireland's no-exceptions-made abortion ban was one of the cruelest and most inhumane in the world, and after years of struggle, the country has finally held a referendum to amend its constitution and strike down the abortion ban in Article 8; the official count isn't out, but the Irish Times has called it for the reformers, in a "landslide," with a projected 68%-32% margin. (more…)

Politico spoke to four former congressional staffers who'd been assigned to Rep. Tom Garrett [R-VA] who say that the Congressman and his wife treated the staff as "personal servants," demanding that they run personal errands for the Congressman and his family (including handling his dog's feces), and that they were expected to do these things at all hours. (more…)

Onnit's $65 Solo Yoga Mat features a lifesize Han-in-Carbon for you to perform upward-facing Jabba on. (via Cnet)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Fju9o8BVJ8Memorial Day is upon us. As you enjoy the long weekend, don't forget what that extra day off you're getting this month represents: lower your flags to half mast. Honor the fallen. Celebrate the living who would put themselves between us and harm's way.

https://vimeo.com/114879061Built in 718 AD, Hōshi is the second oldest ryokan (hotel or inn) in the world and, with 46 consecutive generations of the same family running it, is hands down the longest running known family business in history. But, after 1300 years of tradition, change is in the air. The Hōshi ryokan, in Komatsu, Japan, is a beautiful space that has a beautiful story, told well, in this short video by filmmaker Fritz Schumann.

Fortnite is popular for tons of reasons, but chief among it is the "battle royale" style of combat -- 100 random players dropped on an island, foraging for defenses and weapons, and killing each other until only one is left standing. There's no in-game chat, so you have to assume that anyone you encounter is a threat. In such a situation, it's necessarily dog-eat-dog, yes?Nope. As Robin Sloan -- one of my fave writers and thinkers -- discovered, it's also possible to hack a form of cooperation.It works like this: Sloan unlocked an upgrade that lets you display a "heart" icon above your head. So he tried using it as a single-bit mode of game-theoretical communication. When he was dropped into the game, upon encountering another player, he'd refrain from shooting -- and instead toss up the "heart" icon.At first, it didn't work. The other player kept on killing him anyway. Until ...

Social rating site Klout saw where society was heading with influencer marketing, but like many bad ideas that were a little ahead of their time, Klout will not live on to see the devastation they helped usher in. (more…)

So THAT'S what happened to Marcie. She became the BBQ snitch.(more…)

Nkechi Diallo, formerly known as Rachel Dolezal, was charged with welfare fraud this week over payments totaling about $9,000, received between 2015 and 2017. As Dolezal, she served as the Spokane Chapter NAACP President, but became infamous after it was found that her biological parents were white.

"White supremacy" is forbidden on Facebook, but "white nationalism" is OK. They know it's bullshit, elsewhere talking of "overlaps with white nationalism/separatism," but it's what they've got. Motherboard got the docs.

My Cool Tools podcast guest this week is Scotty Allen. Scotty is a nomadic engineer, entrepreneur, adventurer and storyteller who orbits around San Francisco and Shenzhen, China. He runs a YouTube channel Strange Parts, a travel adventure show for geeks where he goes on adventures ranging from building his own iPhone in China to trying to make a manhole cover in India.Subscribe to the Cool Tools Show on iTunes | RSS | Transcript | Download MP3 | See all the Cool Tools Show posts on a single pageShow notes:1080P HDMI digital camera video microscope ($299)“So one of the things that I have gotten an outsized amount of value from over the past year has been this microscope that I bought here in the electronics markets in China. It's a no-brand-name microscope that I got from a little tiny microscope booth in the market, and it's really been this incredibly high-leverage tool for me, and I didn't realize how much I was missing out until I bought it. It's been really great for doing detail work. And I use it for really small soldering work on iPhones and related circuit boards … It's a binocular microscope. It's not super high magnification, but because it's binocular you get depth of field, and so you can really see well. So you can look through the microscope and work underneath it with tweezers or a soldering iron or other tools and in great depth see what you're doing."Frame.io"Frame.io is an online tool that I use for collaborating on the videos I'm making. And it's a really simple tool ... The short version is that you can upload a video to it, and then you can share that video privately with other people, who can then go in and leave comments. You can even draw things on a specific frame of the video using some drawing tools. And then you can have threaded conversations on each of the comments you leave, and multiple people can leave comments, et cetera. And that, at face value, is super simple, but it really allows remote collaboration on videos in ways that there really aren't very many other good tools for. In fact, I don't think I've found any other good tools. I come from a software engineering background, and we have some great tools there now that have been built over the past 10 years for doing things like code review where you can do something similar, where you can go in and leave comments on a particular line of code on a change someone wants to make. And so I come from that. I come from running a remote software team prior to doing Strange Parts, and so I was really hungry for all of these tools that I'd used as a software engineer. And so Frame.io is one piece of that. It's sort of that feedback piece of, 'Hey, I did this thing. Can you give me feedback on it in a detailed way that's sort of context-based on the part you're talking about?'"TV-B-Gone universal remote control ($25)"The TV-B-Gone is a universal television remote with one button, and the button turns any TV off. So this is a cool thing made by a close friend of mine, Mitch Altman, who I know from Noisebridge hackerspace, and I actually owned one long before I knew Mitch. It was given to me as a stocking stuffer at Christmas one year, probably like 10 years ago, something like that. … for the first long while that I owned it, I didn't really use it very much, but now it has become indispensable because I'm traveling a lot more, and when you're jetlagged and you're in an airport on a layover in the middle of the night in Russia and there's a blaring TV in the corner that nobody's watching, the TV-B-Gone is a great way to solve that problem. So in short, you press the button, it takes up to 15 seconds, and it will cycle through all of the off codes that are programmed in it for all of the different televisions. So you just point it at the TV, and it's great for just sort of calming an otherwise unbearable airport lounge."Shoe cover dispenser ($114)"The one I have kind of looks like a suitcase. It's maybe two feet by one foot by like six inches tall, and it's that silver material, silver metal that they make briefcases in the movies for carrying large amount of cash in sort of look. It's got a handle. And on top, it's got an oval-shaped hole that is slightly larger than your average foot, or your average shoe, and the idea is that you stomp your foot down through the hole and it applies a shoe cover over your shoes automatically. You don't have to touch anything. You just step in it and then step out, and now you've got a shoe cover on your shoe. … I ran across it on a factory tour. I visit a lot of factories here in Shenzhen, and I was at an LED factory that was making LEDs. They were trying to keep dust down, and one of the ways they do that is by having everybody wear shoe covers. So there are a number of factories that will do this, and you can tell how fancy the factory is based on whether you have to bend down and put the shoe cover on yourself or whether you have one of these automatic shoe cover machines. And so this LED factory was the first time I'd seen this, and it blew my mind. It was a special purpose thing that was so clever and so well made."We have hired professional editors to help create our weekly podcasts and video reviews. So far, Cool Tools listeners have pledged $342 a month. Please consider supporting us on Patreon. We have great rewards for people who contribute! – MF

YouTuber Retic over at Prehistoric Pets TV has a huge collection of pythons and other ancient creatures. Here he shows how and why a clutch of python eggs can be lifted up in giant sticky clumps. (more…)

If you’ve been using or abusing an opioid, then your pee’s been full of opioids. When your opioid-laced pee gets flushed away, those opioids wind up in our water: our reservoirs, streams and oceans.And that, friends, is why mussels are failing drug tests.According to CBS News, scientists at Washington’s Department of Fish & Wildlife have found evidence that the dregs of the opioids we consume and then whiz out are now present enough in the waters around Seattle that mussels are testing positive for oxycodone. As mussels are filter feeders, they tend to soak up environmental contaminants into their tissues in large concentrations.From CBS News:

Buy 3 Kuhn Rikon Swiss Peelers for $6.69. Keep one and give the other 2 to friends. They'll love you forever. Once I started using this, I got rid of my other, inferior peelers.

A man was driving on I-5 in Washington when he saw "a small black object in the air." He then heard it hitting the front of his car, but it didn't seem like a big deal. It wasn't until he stopped for gas 18 miles later that he noticed a handgun lodged snugly into his bumper.According to the The Seattle Times:

This baggage handler looks like she's been at her job for a long time, effortlessly tossing luggage down the slide as if they were bags of marshmallows. Hopefully, marshmallows are what's in that luggage because anything else is likely to break.

Martin Shkreli, the imprisoned pharmacy tycoon who skyrocketed the price of an HIV drug and enjoyed a short period of trollish infamy on social media, owes the IRS more than $1.6 million, according to a court filing.ABC news reports, "If Shkreli cannot pay, the IRS wants a piece of his other forfeited assets, including an E-Trade brokerage account, a Picasso work and the rare Wu-Tang Clan album 'Once Upon a Time in Shaolin.'"Image: By JStone/Shutterstock

Last week, the Democratic Republic of Congo’s latest Ebola outbreak was confirmed to have spread to Mbandaka, a transportation hub, home to over one million people. As of the time that this post was written, 31 cases of the disease have been confirmed in the west African nation. Of those confirmed to have been afflicted, nine have died.Oh, and three individuals confirmed to have contracted the disease, two of which who were showing significant symptoms, managed to escape quarantine and mingle with an unknown number of people.From the Washington Post:

I sleep in late whenever I can, and have felt vaguely guilty about it because everything I've read about sleep says people are supposed to stick to a strict sleep schedule every day. That's not possible for me, because I often get up very early to catch a morning flight. Sleeping in on the weekends always feels great. Well, it turns out I should keeping following my instincts. You actually *can* catch up on sleep by sawing logs on the weekend.From Shondaland:

A gun-toting gentleman in Ohio wanted to keep his revolver out of harm's reach when his kids came to visit him, so he hid it in his oven's broiler. But 44-year-old Robin Garlock neglected to tell his girlfriend, who decided to do some baking later that evening. Suddenly, she heard gunfire and shouted for Garlock, thinking it was coming from outside. But no, the loud bangs were coming from inside the oven – the revolver was spinning around, firing off shots.In the process of trying to secure the gun, Garlock forgot to put on an oven mitt and burned himself. He was also struck twice with bullets. Lucky for him he was "severely injured" but is doing okay.According to Miami Herald:

In February Xeni tweeted a history of the Twitter experience over the last 10 years or so:

Underoos were always treated more as pajama than underwear, but occasionally some Super Kid would wear them to school and the jokes would fly!Sometimes that kid was me.I had the Spiderman Underoos. Thank Moses they didn't make Hong Kong Fooey Underoos, I still have a permanent divot in my head from diving into a filing cabinet as a child.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Va_Rmpd3PZIUnderoos are still for sale, but seems to have lost whatever charm they had.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzAbWzelMWc

Beth Skwarecki reviewed the Motiv fitness-tracking ring and liked it a lot. I can't get over how tiny and inconspicuous it is: it syncs wirelessly with a phone app and needs about an hour's charge every two or three days. The limitations are that it only tracks heartrate and movement, deducing sleep, steps and active cardio sessions.

Tim Easley's gorgeous sculpture depicting an elaborate circuit board made from modeling clay, was commissioned by the record label Albert's Favourites as the cover art for Modified Man's new release, Modifications: Set 2. (more…)

Warming Stripes: (cache) average annual temperatures in England, with each year depicted as a vertical line, from left to right, covering 1772-2017. At the link, see the U.S. and Toronto.

On the occasion of Bird being ordered to remove its scooters from the streets of San Francisco, JWZ has published the beginnings of a costed teardown of the key components of any you find lying around after they become illegal litter: (more…)

Counter the creeping resurgence of genuine, non-metaphorical Naziism in gamer culture with Fernando Reza's kick-ass WWII style Zelda propaganda posters! $40 each, 18" x 24", printed on archival paper. (more…)

Flame weeding involves strapping a tank of propane to the back of a tractor and running specialized equipment down rows of crops, burning any non-crop stuff that gets in the way. (more…)

I found John Hodgman's Vacationland to be a genuinely moving and hilarious read; and it has stuck with me in the year since its hardcover release -- now it's out in paperback, and Hodgman is touring with it. (more…)

Economists Erik Brynjolfsson, Felix Eggers and Avinash Gannamaneni have published an NBER paper (Sci-Hub mirror) detailing an experiment where they offered Americans varying sums to give up Facebook, and then used a less-rigorous means to estimate much much Americans valued other kinds of online services: maps, webmail, search, etc. (more…)

Ahead of Trump's planned summit with North Korean "Supreme Leader" Kim Jong Un, the White House issued a tacky commemorative coin; once Trump sent his petulant breakup letter to Kim canceling the summit, the coin became the discounted "deal of the day" at the White House gift shop. (more…)

In 1978, the 76477 Complex Sound Generation chip was foundational to creating the sound effects in many popular games, notably Space Invaders; it was also popular with hobbyists who could buy the chip at Radio Shack -- it could do minor miracles, tweaking a white noise generator to produce everything from drums to explosions, using an integrated digital mixer to layer and sequence these sounds. (more…)

Crazy Carts are souped-up electric go-karts with rear wheels like the ones on the front of shopping carts. Some goofballs decided to turn a real car into a Crazy Cart by replacing the rear tires with caster wheels. (more…)

Dallas-Fort Worth's Prosper High School has an excellent student paper, the Eagle Nation Online, with a most excellent advisor, Lori Oglesbee-Petter, a journalism teacher with 34 years of experience, whose students won 175 state and national journalism awards last year alone. (more…)

Hey Californians, a burlesque show is headed your way for a short tour all the way from Australia starting on May 31. Not just any burlesque show though, this is "The Empire Strips Back: A Burlesque Parody."Yep, a Star Wars-themed burlesque show. https://vimeo.com/261938598It started off in 2011 as a one-off event in Sydney but apparently the demand is high for sexy, stripping Stormtroopers. Its organizer Russall S. Beattie soon found himself extending its run, and then extending it some more. In 2014, he directed its full-blown production.

You might think you're smooth. But you'll never be as smooth as this black cat redirecting a robotic vacuum with its back leg WHILE continuing to aggressively stare down another cat. I mean, it doesn't even move its head as the vacuum approaches. So good.Previously: If you watch one cat video this year, let it be this one(Robbie Lockie)

Cool Backgrounds generates beautiful, abstract, geometric images perfect for use as backgrounds on your computer or mobile gadgetry. There are four different styles, many color scheme options, and a feed of nice free photos.

No matter how shitty a day I've had, I can always count on Florida Man to cheer me up or at the very least, horrify me to the point that my personal problems feel like minor issues.In this episode, we find Florida Man educating the young in the miracle of human reproduction. Unfortunately, not everyone present for Florida Man's lecture enjoyed what he had to say, or how he said it.From BuzzFeed:

Tech Insider, I break with thee. Science, I break with thee. None of this is OK. It will never be OK.

This is fun.Using his phone, a dad in Boston put a digital filter on his daughter's face. It made the poor thing look like a little John C. Reilly in a pink fleece onesie.Baby Reilly's dad, Joe Gaudet of Boston, then did a great impression of the real Reilly.(What service had John C. Reilly as a filter option?)(reddit)

4-Mation is a product being developed by Kevin Holmes, Jonathan Scoon, and Charlie Round-Turner that features a spinner that accommodates different 3D-printed animations, like the leaping frogs above.They also have this cute fish loop:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaI3ZFs_oEcThey plan to offer three models, from basic to deluxe:

Amazon has now publicly responded to today's bombshell news that an Alexa/Echo personal digital assistive device recorded and then leaked a Portland family's private conversation to a third party acquaintance in Seattle. An "unlikely" string of events led to the freak occurrence, says Amazon. OK. Sure.(more…)

Menage Life's world's biggest orgy on June 2 will move from an Embassy Suites hotel in Las Vegas to the Erotic Heritage Museum. Menage Life said the change is due to “increased interest in the event." Embassy Suites management told the Las Vegas Weekly that "while Sin City 8 room guests are welcome to stay there, the previously scheduled events outside of the orgy—including the seminars and parties—are no longer permitted at the hotel." No matter who made the decision to relocate the orgy and other events, Menage Life says that the new location for the sex party makes it possible to do some science among the carnal chaos! From the Las Vegas Weekly: