These Japanese single color jigsaw puzzles are appropriately named "Pure Hell." They're available with 1,000 or 2,000 tiny pieces, black or white.Pure Hell jigsaw puzzles (Amazon via Laughing Squid)

In college and grad school, I knew several students who couldn't afford housing and "lived" in the student lounges (showering in the rec center) and one guy who pitched a tent in the hills near campus. But this story of Allan Kornfeld who lived in a Yale ventilation shaft from 1963 to 1964 is the closest I've seen to Lazlo Hollyfeld's secret lair in the classic 1985 film Real Genius.Kornfeld had hidden the entrance to the ventilation shift by covering the entrance with brick-patterned wallpaper. He left his DIY dorm room after graduation and shared his story with the press."It was a little cold," he said.More at Weird Universe: "Unauthorized dwelling at Yale"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qa8kCQQUjHM

More often than not, you won't see an accident coming, which means it pays to be proactive and ensure you have the right tools on-hand before you need them. Whether you find yourself in the middle of a power outage or having car trouble at night, you can make sure you're still capable of navigating with these UltraBright 500-Lumen Tactical Military Flashlights, and now you can get a two-pack for $20 in the Boing Boing Store.Powered with 500 lumens and an adjustable zoom that provides up to one mile of range, these ultra-bright flashlights are ideal for navigating in the dark. They boast bright, lower bright, and SOS modes, and their wide-working voltage ensures they'll last for a long time. What's more, these flashlights are packaged in an ultra-durable carrying case, so you can count on them working for you no matter how bad the situation is.A two-pack of UltraBright 500-Lumen Tactical Military Flashlights is on sale for $20, but you can take an extra 20% off when you plug in the coupon code, USA20, at checkout.

As Italy heads into a national election in which mass inequality and food poverty have disrupted Italy's always-shaky political equilibrium, La Republica publishes its analysis (Google Translate) of the Twitter followers associated with each of Italy's political superstars and finds some pretty intense inflation in the numbers. (more…)

From their inception, California's state colleges and universities were free or nearly free for in-state students, but since the 1970s, the state systems have been ratcheting up tuition and originating loans that impose crippling debt on students, leading to delayed fertility, late home-ownership, reduced retirement savings, and dampening entrepreneurial risk-taking. (more…)

Truly, the end times are upon us, friends. Soon, the dead shall rise from the earth and believers will be called to their reckoning. I know these things shall come to pass, for I have seen the sign: Kentucky Fried Chicken ran out of chicken.According to The Guardian, over two-thirds of the 900 KFC restaurants in the United Kingdom have been forced to close their doors, due to an acute shortage of birds to cook. The nightmare scenario is the fault of shipping giant DHL, who apparently hates joyfully greasy food. The Guardian reports that KFC chose DHL to manage its UK supply chain, because they'd illustrated having had their shit together when delivering stuff in other industries. By this logic, it's cool for you to leave your child's needs in the hands of a wheat thresher because it does such a good job of processing crops.In a statement posted online, KFC assured the Internet that The Colonel is on top of the problem.Fortunately, the chicken shortage shouldn't effect North American processed food aficionados, so we can all go on killing ourselves with scandalous amounts of sodium and fat, the same as always.Image courtesy of Wikipedia Commons

So, what exactly is going to happen to that Tesla that Elon Musk shot into space?It's going to wander around the solar system, sure. But there are planets and gravity and stuff, so what are the odds of it eventually slamming into something?Small, but not zero -- according to this fun analysis by a group of astrophysicists! They modeled the Telsa's current trajectory and estimated that there's a mid-to-low-single-digit chance that it hits Earth or Venus over the next million years:

Not to rain on anyone's parade, but this whimsical artist's home featured on Barcroft TV looks as if it breaks pretty much every building code in the book. (more…)

Whenever I have to turn a screw, I turn to this easy-to-find, yellow box of bits.Flat? Phillips? Torx? Square? Any time I run into a standard-style screw head that needs turning I reach for my drill and add one of these bits. There is a pretty fair assortment, though some repetition, of sizes and shapes in this yellow box.The metal the bits are made of? Good enough. What I really like? The "tough" plastic case! I dunno how tough canary yellow is, but it is easy to find in my tool bag, or left about the house.I also have a black box of bits, I can never find them. Yellow it is!DEWALT DW2166 45-Piece Screwdriving Set with Tough Case via AmazonImage via Amazon

Yusuke Aonuma created these amazing symmetrical sculptures by arranging dandelion achenes, the technical term for individual bits of wispy white dandelion fluff. (more…)

Until recently, under Canadian law, prison administrators could confine their charges to an indefinite period in solitary confinement. Thanks to a pair of high profile court rulings, this could change in a big way, provided the Federal government can get its shit together.Last month, the Supreme Court in the Canadian province of British Columbia struck down a law that allowed prisoners to be kept indefinitely in solitary confinement. It was a huge win for prison inmates and society: long-term solitary confinement does nothing to rehabilitate or condition an individual to become a more productive member of society. Worse, as humans are social animals, being locked away from our peers for long periods of time can cause psychological trauma--that's not something you want to do to someone who'll eventually be released back into society. Human rights activists in BC applauded the court's decision. Unfortunately, a similar case, heard in a different region of Canada, is keeping the verdict from changing the country's confinement laws.This past December, a Superior Court Judge in the province of Ontario handed down a verdict that found that solitary confinement lasting any longer than five days is absolute bullshit, according to the Canadian constitution. But, as the CBC details, the practice of doing so does not violate the constitutional rights of the individual being thrown into solitary.Both verdicts have merit, but which has more weight?It's a question that the Canadian government has decided can only be answered by another run through the legal system. As such, it has appealed the Supreme Court of British Columbia's decision, looking for 'judicial clarity.' At the same time, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association has appealed the ruling of the Ontario ruling.In the meantime, inmates in Canadian prisons and, eventually, our society once those prisoners are released, will pay for all the legal foot dragging. As the acting litigation director for the Canadian Civil Liberties Association puts it:

Labour leader and PM-in-waiting Jeremy Corbyn has promised that when he is Prime Minister, his government will introduce regulations that ban the finance-driven, asset-stripping hostile takeovers of UK companies, in a bid to make finance the "servants of industry not the masters of us all." (more…)

In this new article for SyFy Fangrrls, writer Clare McBride makes a compelling argument that Daisy Ridley’s Rey isn’t a parallel for Luke in the original Star Wars trilogy, she’s a parallel for Anakin in the prequels. McBride points out that both Anakin and Rey have trauma-filled childhoods that include being exploited for their labor on desert planets. But the two characters are put on different paths because of the respective support systems around them. Here’s how McBride puts it (spoilers for The Last Jedi follow):

The epidemic of cryptojacking malware isn't merely an outgrowth of the incentive created by the cryptocurrency bubble -- that's just the motive, and the all-important the means and opportunity were provided by the same leaked NSA superweapon that powered last year's Wannacry ransomware epidemic. (more…)

The Outdoor Element Kodiak Survival Bracelet resembles the basic paracord bracelet, but when unwound, it reveals a strand that contains firelighting tinder (similar to jute) and a fishing line and hook; the buckle doubles as a fire-striker and reflector. (via Red Ferret)

Genuinely impressive work from Everybody Deserves Music. God Bless America!

According to The Hong Kong Free Press, Apple is set to hand over the keys to the the accounts of iCloud users in China to a company owned by the surveillance and censorship-happy Chinese government.Guizhou-Cloud Big Data (GCBD) will take over the operation of Apple's Chinese data center at the end of February, making GCBD responsible for all legal and financial transactions between the Apple and China's iCloud users. Once GCBD is running the show, Apple will be responsible for investing one billion USD to build a new server farm in Guiyang and to provide technical support in the interest of preserving data security.Apple's doesn't like telling folks what iCloud user data they're able to read. The information could be limited to the size of uploaded files and where those files were uploaded, or as comprehensive as being able to browse through the photos taken with an iPhone. That China's communist government, which is big on watching the digital doings of its citizens, censorship and political activism could will soon have access to the iCloud account information of every iPhone, iPad or Mac user in China pretty troubling.This isn't the first time that Apple has bowed to pressure from the Chinese government, either. At the ass end of 2017, they happily removed close to 700 VPN apps from the Chinese iTunes App Store, making it extremely difficult for iOS users to view uncensored content. So, say good bye to news stories about China and the rest of the world that hasn't been approved by Chinese state censors.It feels like a real dick move for a company that refused to provide U.S. authorities with a back door to iPhones, iPads and Macs and makes me wonder if concessions in the name of selling more hardware in other locales can't be far behind.Image courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.

What to do with all that civil asset forfeiture? Why not erect a fake hotel sign outside the county jail and make a fake ad starring you? That's what Sherriff Rick Staly thought would be fun. (more…)

Lignum vitae is an extraordinarily dense and hard wood, so kiwami japan wanted to see if a knife made of the wood could maintain a sharp blade. An interesting and relaxing experiment. (more…)

Visual artist Michelle Rial has spent the past seven years making chart-based art and her latest project incorporates found objects into the mix. Rial began using everyday objects—which includes everything from food to office supplies to wine stains to floss—after a neck injury forced her to step away from her computer and away from the types of illustrations she had been doing previously. Using found objects cut down on some of the physical pain of illustrating for Rial and has resulted in some really cool, unique pieces of art with a great sense of humor. Here are some of my favorites:https://www.instagram.com/p/Bazq2dfBcYy/(more…)

Although I use Chicago's CTA public transportation system virtually every day, it never occurred to me that my experience is relatively underrepresented in pop culture. We don't often see fictional characters utilizing public transportation, at least not to the same extent we see them use other modes of travel, like cars and taxis. This fascinating article from Arlington-based public transportation think tank Mobility Lab offers two explanations for why that is. For one thing, showing characters driving a car allows a TV show or movie to utilize product placement; car companies pay big money to have their vehicles featured onscreen. And for another, it’s a lot more logistically difficult to film on public transportation. But as Mobility Lab notes:

One of the unexpected delights of 2018 has been watching Will Smith try to parlay his traditional celebrity into the world of YouTube celebrity. Though he hasn’t come close to racking up the millions of subscribers the most popular YouTubers have (Smith’s currently at about 670,000 subscribers as of the writing of this article), the 49-year-old is clearly having a lot of fun on his channel. Smith’s vlogs show off the goofy sense of humor that made him such a beloved star in the first place. He doesn’t seem to take either himself or his YouTube aspirations too seriously, but his videos are a short, weird burst of fun.https://youtu.be/mYnUTEq8NzAAnd if you like this, you’ll love Smith’s equally delightful Instagram account.

In addition to breaking box office records, Black Panther has quickly established itself as one of the best and most unique films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And the credit for that belongs largely to director and co-writer Ryan Coogler. In this fascinating “Notes on a Scene” video for Vanity Fair, Coogler talks through the production design, costuming, fight choreography, color story, themes, and character-building that went into creating one of the film’s best fight scenes—an undercover mission in which T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman), Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o), and Okoye (Danai Gurira) set out to capture Andy Serkis’ villainous Ulysses Klaue at an underground Korean casino.And if you enjoyed that video, you can also watch Thor: Ragnarok director Taika Waititi break down an action scene from his movie right here:https://youtu.be/7WahFlp7LKI

In this thoughtful 19-minute video essay, cultural critic Lindsay Ellis re-examines the history of hating on the vampire love story Twilight, which reached a fever pitch around 2008/2009. Though there’s no doubt Twilight is easy to make fun of, Ellis also comes to a more complicated conclusion about the maligned YA series: Twilight certainly has its problems, but the immense hatred towards the franchise (and towards author Stephenie Meyer) is also a potent example of the extreme, reflexive hatred we tend to feel towards anything that’s popular among teenage girls. After all, plenty of our pop culture is dumb and cheesy (Ellis cites The Fast And The Furious franchise as another example), but little of it gets as much backlash as Twilight did.

Science Channel's popular program How It's Made toured a paintball factory to see how the colorful welt-causing projectiles are manufactured. (more…)

Depending on your political leanings, the latest episode of Last Week Tonight, available on YouTube for the world to enjoy/loathe, will provide you with some catharsis or fill you with loathing.

Dennis Kucinich was once the youngest mayor of a major city in the US, leading Cleveland through a hard fight with the banks and mobbed-up city contractors to save its municipally owned power plants and kill a plan to privatize the city's energy; after decades in Congress, he's running for Democratic governor of Ohio (a state whose Republican leadership has shamelessly corrupted the state's electoral process) and promising to kill fracking and oil extraction, fund studies that will produce the evidence to sue Big Oil, and create jobs by funding a conversion of the state to renewable energy. (more…)

It's been months since Xi Jinping secured another five years in office and got his second five-year plan through Chinese Communist Party, and he's cleaning house: last week, the Chinese state news agency announced that Lu Wei, one of the most powerful internet policymakers in the world, had been fired, purged from the Party, and would be prosecuted for corruption. (more…)

It's been 72 hours since Google Images removed the "View Image" and (the even more essential) "Search By Image" buttons from its search-results; now you can just install a browser extension (Firefox, Chrome).

A fight over a flatulent passenger ended in a Dubai-Amsterdam flight making an emergency landing in Vienna, reports Metro, citing this Dutch news story. Several passengers were kicked off, some of them claiming that they were uninvolved into the farty fracas and that Transavias's cabin crew encouraged the violence.

When Facebook was desperately trying to game the Indian regulatory process to get approval for its "zero-rating" system (where it would bribe Indian ISPs to give it the power to decide which services would be free to access, and which would be capped and metered), one of the frequent arguments in favor of this "poor internet for poor people" was that the Wikimedia Foundation had struck similar deals in poor countries around the world, freeflagging Wikipedia use on networks that were otherwise strictly capped and metered. (more…)

VLC 3.0 is out and the world's greatest video-playback app includes many long-awaited features, including stable Chromecast support, native support for browsing LAN drives to find your videos, and adaptive streaming to improve playback.

Over at XKCD, Randall Munroe's predicted the Critical Vulnerabilities and Exposures for 2018, with some pretty solid predictions (especially under the tooltip, which finally reveals a secret that many of us have kept mum about for literal decades -- damn you, Munroe!).

A Cat Thing combined feline love for cardboard boxes with an architect's eye for modular prefab housing to create a series of max-and-match cat houses. (more…)

Parmigiano Reggiano cheese is a highly valued and tightly controlled commodity. This instructional video shows how to use specialized Parmesan cheese knives to cut the cheese by hand. (more…)

The Cease and Desist enamel pin—a hauntingly familiar soup can mounted on hauntingly familiar robot legs—is $7 on Kickstarter.

Ian Schramm from Tempest Rings makes lovely videos of his work handcrafting rings from unusual materials, like this beauty made of walnut burl and inlaid with crushed blue opal. (more…)

It's like something from an expedition to an alien world: "scuba diver attempts to swim in Argentina's Nahuel Huapi Lake, which has been recently covered in ash after the eruption of the Puyehue Volcano in nearby Chile."The eruption was in 2011. Here's higher-quality video (with loudly clipping wind noise) of the undulating blanket of ash atop the waves:https://www.flickr.com/photos/obstinato/5813205200/Here's a clip of ash and pumice washing ashore:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfcuwWiW4yAHere's what Nahuel Huapi normally looks like:Here's a lake covered in dogs:https://twitter.com/rabihalameddine/status/965249398555856896

In her delightful blog AI Weirdness, Janelle Shane entered 18,458 unique bills introduced in Massachusetts into a neural network, which then created some rather hilarious bills, including: (more…)

At last night's NBA All-Star basketball game, singer Fergie sang the Star-Spangled banner for thousands at the venue and millions at home. She's been getting interesting reviews and people stayed up late to give them. I, for one, hope she now sings Happy Birthday to President Trump, concluding by shouting "Let's play some basketball"

On his website Boy Culture, writer Matthew Rettenmund has put together an exhaustive list of LGBTQ characters, people, mentions, and moments on American primetime TV from the 1950s to 2000. Writing for The Advocate about the months-long project, Rettenmund explained:

https://youtu.be/Cv8zaUOmLzYElan Lee and Matthew "The Oatmeal" Inman have run some of the world's most successful game Kickstarters, but for their latest, You've Got Crabs, they're just selling it the traditional way. (more…)

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FOLLOW @RubenBolling on the Twitters and a Face Book.JOIN Tom the Dancing Bug's subscription club, the Proud & Mighty INNER HIVE, for exclusive early access to comics, extra comics, and much more.GET Ruben Bolling’s new hit book series for kids, The EMU Club Adventures. ("Filled with wild twists and funny dialogue" -Publishers Weekly) Book One here. Book Two here.More Tom the Dancing Bug comics on Boing Boing! (more…)

Here's a guy who's found his niche market. Out of a humble panga, there is a French baker who goes boat to boat selling his fresh-baked wares to those docked (primarily gringos) in Jalisco, Mexico's Barra de Navidad marina and lagoon area.Chef Emeric Fiegen opened up shop, with his wife Christine, in this small laidback beach town over 15 years ago after a stint in Montreal. Early each morning, Chef Emeric still personally delivers his many breads, baguettes, croissants, pies, and quiches by boat. Not surprisingly, his pastries sell out by the time he's done making his rounds. My friends Andrea and Nick are currently on an epic cruising adventure with their teen daughter Pari, and were lucky to sample the breakfast pastries while anchored in Barra de Navidad. Andrea told me that they've never come across a delivery service like this before on any of their many boating trips.Here's a look at the menu. Keep in mind that those prices are in pesos and that it's currently about 18.50 pesos to the dollar:Landlubbers, fear not, the French Bakery (aka El Horno Francés) has an onshore eatery for you in town.photos by Andrea Cook

Trains may not be the most popular means of conveyance nowadays, but chances are you grew up playing with toy trains or building a model set to wrap around the Christmas tree. In either case, it's safe to say that locomotives have long carried a unique sense of awe and scale, especially when they're hundreds of cars long and roaring across the countryside. Trainz: A New Era lets you experience this feeling again with a 21st-century spin, and its Platinum Edition Bundle is on sale for $19.99 in the Boing Boing Store.Trainz is a train simulator that brings famous locomotives to life as they travel across historical and modern routes in mind-blowing realism and with a powerful graphics engine. You can create your own routes with in-game editing tools and combine your efforts with other players to build and operate a working rail line. Plus, this edition includes 16 additional routes, three bonus trainsets, and a host of other downloadable content.The Trainz: A New Era Platinum Edition Bundle is on sale today for $19.99.

https://www.ted.com/talks/amit_kalra_3_creative_ways_to_fix_fashion_s_waste_problemThese stats are just staggering.According to Amit Kalra, the fashion industry is the second largest polluter in the world, right behind oil and gas.He says that in the United States alone, 85% of unsold apparel, a whopping 13 million tons a year, ends up in landfills instead of being donated or recycled.In his November 2017 TED@Tommy Talk, he offered three creative ways to deal with this issue. Kalra suggests methods for making garments more recyclable and even compostable, and for using spices and herbs to dye fabric instead of the harmful chemical colors that are currently being used.

At a followup visit a year after Elizabeth Moreno had a disk removed to successfully treat her crippling pain, her doctor asked her to leave a urine sample; a few months later, Sunset Labs LLC of Houston sent her a bill for $17,800. (more…)

I've never seen anything like this before and neither had Matt Dunbabin, the owner of the Bangor Vineyard Shed in Dunalley, Tasmania, who shot this now-viral video of a Tasmanian tiger snake slithering along the top of a wire fence.Dunbabin said there are plenty of snakes in southern Tasmania, but he had never witnessed one climbing a fence, he told The Mercury.

YouTube creators Gavin and Dan, aka the Slo Mo Guys, make lots of fun slow-motion videos. In this one, Dan gets in a speedo and belly flops into a pool from a platform 15 feet in the air. To capture the painful plunge, they've got high-speed cameras set up poolside and underwater. Ouch!(Tastefully Offensive)