Here's a Facebook video explaining how to make "thick and glossy slime", for any and all slime-related needs you may have.The key ingredient is Elmer's Glue-All [Amazon]; the basic slime recipe is to add baking soda and contact lens solution to "activate" the glue, but that won't be thick and glossy enough. For that you need school glue, baby oil and generic lotion, added in the precise quantities shows in the video. Read the rest

There are so many retro-themed merch options out there, but I'm tickled blue by Rhayader Computers's mouse mat designs showing BASIC interpreters from classic 8-bit computers. It seems only the C64 and Amstrad CPC are thusly honored, but there's lots of other well-chosen designs to pick from. Read the rest

Bakersfield, California. That's where you'll find the last Woolworth's Luncheonette in America — and it's still serving food!Eater Los Angeles:Step into the Five & Dime Antique Mall in Bakersfield, California, and that rarity becomes reality. There, in the back corner at the ground-floor level of the four-story building, is a fully functioning former Woolworth luncheonette counter, complete with 22 counter seats, Formica tables ringing the room, and an open kitchen for griddling burgers and making milkshakes. But this well-protected bit of ephemera isn’t cordoned off with Do Not Touch signs — it’s still a real, thriving luncheonette counter called the Woolworth Diner, serving police officers, antiquers, and locals daily.Head over to Eater Los Angeles to see lots of photos of this fifties time capsule.screenshot via NorCalCorsello Read the rest

Mariners rely on GPS to avoid collisions, but increasingly they're finding GPS cannot be relied on near the Port of Shanghai:In fact, something far more dangerous was happening, and the Manukai’s captain was unaware of it. Although the American ship’s GPS signals initially seemed to have just been jammed, both it and its neighbor had also been spoofed—their true position and speed replaced by false coordinates broadcast from the ground....Analysts noticed that the attacks had actually started the previous summer, increasing as the months rolled on. The most intense interference was recorded on the very day in July that the Manukai’s captain reported difficulties, when a total of nearly 300 vessels had their locations spoofed.The spoofing could be China testing a new electronic weapon. Or it could be sand pirates trying to sneak through the area:Chinese builders call it “soft gold.” Sand dredged from Yangtze River, which has the ideal consistency and composition for cement, helped fuel Shanghai’s construction boom in the 1980s and 1990s. By the turn of the millennium, reckless sand extraction had undermined bridges, trashed ecosystems, and caused long stretches of the riverbank to collapse. In 2000, Chinese authorities banned sand mining on the Yangtze completely.The trade continued illicitly, however, expanding to include the illegal dredging of sand and gravel from the Yangtze estuary and the open seas near Shanghai. By day, such ships look innocuous. By night, they lower pipes to the riverbed to suck up thousands of tons of sand in a single session. Read the rest

Tom the Dancing Bug, IN WHICH spunky little boy president Donald and his imaginary publicist John create an imaginary foxy world where Donald is a selfless hero!

Blain Hefner's new show at Gallery 1988 is "Pop Toppers," and features over a dozen Christmas tree toppers. Because nothing says Christmas quite like Max Shreck polluting the city or Mola Ram ripping out someone's heart: You can see all the Pop Toppers here. If you're thinking Die Hard would have been a perfect film to feature, you're right. Blain already made a John McClane: Read the rest

Need a boost on that resume? Get a valuable tech education on your own time with these eBook bundles. They contain guides from Packt Publishing that cover everything from game development to machine learning.The Complete Mobile App Developer eBook BundleIt's a veritable gold rush in the App Store these days. Get in on it and develop your own killer app using Xamarin, JQuery and other platforms. This 10-book master class covers the entire development process from scripting to marketing.MSRP: $223.90Sale Price: $19.99 (91% off)The Machine Learning Mastery eBook BundleThis bundle simplifies the complex algorithms you need to kick off the process of machine learning, the technology powering voice recognition, self-driving cars, and more cutting-edge innovations. The eBooks here include broad overviews of the core concepts plus dedicated courses on Python and other essential tools.MSRP: $223.90Sale Price: $19.99 (91% off)The A to Z Artificial Intelligence eBook BundleMaster the growing field of AI, and you can work smarter by teaching your computers to work harder. There are applications for artificial intelligence in the worlds of robotics, big business, and gaming, all of which are covered in this series.MSRP: $311.90Sale Price: $19.99 (93% off)The Complete Game Developer eBook BundleThese guides will get you mastery of all the tools you need to make your game idea a reality. You'll get complete walkthroughs of not only platforms like Unity and Javascript, but the process of how to test your creation for bugs. Read the rest

Ten years, 100 songs, three minutes. Sheer. Fucking. Genius. Watch it before a Youtube copyright enforcement bot deletes it and DJ Earworm's channel with it. (via Metafilter) Read the rest

Part Two of "LEVITATION OF THE PENTAGON" — Concluded Next WeekRead Part One: Applying for a Permit to Exorcise the Pentagon of Evil Spirits, Levitating It Ten Feet Off the GroundFrom John Wilcock, New York Years, by Ethan Persoff and Scott Marshall.(See all Boing Boing installments) Read the rest

Crazed Indiana officer Daryl Jones was fired after bullying two black men for "acting suspicious" after they bought a bunch of goods from Nordstrom Rack.The unhinged officer came up to the men, who were sitting in their car in front of the department store, and asked for their ID. When the Nordstrom customers repeatedly asked why, the officer's only response was that they were acting suspicious. When they asked for the officer's name, he wouldn't give it to them. When they questioned his behavior, he said, "I got my rights to do anything I want to do, I’m a police officer."Finally the now ex-officer called for backup, who realized what a jerk the officer was and let the guys go. Good thing the guys videotaped the incident (things get going at 1:15). Two hours after the chief constable watched it, Jones was fired. A refreshing ending to a common horror story. According to NBC:In the video posted to YouTube on Nov. 13, the description says the two men first noticed the officer watching them while they were at a Nordstrom Rack store in the Castleton neighborhood of Indianapolis...According to the description of the 17-minute video posted a day after the incident, which has been viewed more than 300,000 times as of Tuesday morning, the men started filming when they began to exit the parking lot and the officer screamed he was going to run their plates."He watched us buy everything, and then followed us to the car," the YouTube video description says...The men repeatedly ask the officer, identified as Lawrence Township Deputy Constable Daryl Jones by NBC affiliate WTHR in Indianapolis, why he approached them in the parking lot and why he wanted to see their driver's licenses. Read the rest

From Hussy Horse Designs, this delightful Wile E. Coyote decal.It's the perfect band-aid until you get over to ACME Auto Body for a real repair.(via Gareth's Tips, Tools, and Shop Tales) Read the rest

Trump Junior retweeted an article from the Federalist this morning called “Let’s Stop Pretending Every Impeachment Witness Is A Selfless Hero" about National Security Council Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who received a purple heart medal in 2004. Yep, from the boy (and son of Bone Spurs) who fled from his own book signing at UCLA on Sunday because he was afraid that his own fans were mad at him. Of course it didn't take long for the Twitterverse to set things straight...This coming from a person who had to run out of a book signing because people were being mean.— Steve Timmons (@SteveTimmons15) November 19, 2019 The boy whose family NEVER wore the uniform is attacking a guy with a Purple Heart.— CHIDI®️ (@ChidiNwatu) November 19, 2019 How long did you serve in the armed forces?— WarMonitor (@TheWarMonitor) November 19, 2019 From the family that thinks war criminals are heroes..— Merrill⭐️ (@MerrillLynched) November 19, 2019 Vindeman only has a purple heart. If he were a real patriot, he'd have bone spurs. Right?— Jesse Ferguson (@JesseFFerguson) November 19, 2019 Daddy will never truly love you— Æch253 (@Aech253) November 19, 2019 Via HuffPost and Raw StoryImage: by DonkeyHotey - Donald Trump Jr. - Caricature, CC BY-SA 2.0, Link Read the rest

Did you see this trailer for Under the Silver Lake about a year ago and think nothing of it? Lots of people did and dismissed it as a generic hipster-centric snoozefest. But a few interested people stuck around and read the checklist as a piece of comedy. Vinyl? Yes. Ridiculously nice apartments with one sole occupant? Yes. Struggling actors trying to make it in Hollywood? Yes. Pretentious bars? Yes. Violent Femmes? Sure, yes.As much as these elements might seem like they'd make for a bland 30-something-centric film involving thousand yard stares and brunch, director David Robert Mitchell (It Follows) lampoons mumblecore, Los Angeles and "the male gaze."The story in Silver Lake starts off innocently enough, wherein our protagonist Sam (Andrew Garfield) is caught staring at his sunbathing neighbor through binoculars and later notices signs of a neighborhood dog murderer. Perpetually unemployed (and unperturbed), Sam tracks down clues surrounding a disappearance and gets rapidly sucked into the lavish, oddball world of the Hollywood adjacent. Though the plot reads a bit like a noir, it's difficult to describe this world as an "underbelly," seeing as the parties and high teas Sam goes to on his mock-chivalric quest are neither clouded in cigar smoke nor shot through shuttered blinds. The real hook of this film comes in the barrage of red herrings, corner-of-your-eye subplots and ridiculous clues that sometimes pan out, sometimes don't, and sometimes turn out to be redundant at best. In addition to all that, the film's (for lack of a better word) meta narrative allows you to go on a hunt for clues that parallel Sam's adventure. Read the rest

The Distributed Denial of Secrets Twitter account has published links to terabytes of data identified as raw data from the Cayman National Bank and Trust; Phineas Fisher (previously), the public-interest hacker(s) behind the Hacking Team breach, is credited with the leak.On Friday, Fisher claimed to have hacked the bank in 2016 and proposed a "Hacktivist Bug Hunting Program" that would offer bounties of up to $100,000 to those who hacked and dumped documents "in the public interest" from companies such as "South America, Israeli spyware vendor NSO Group, and oil company Halliburton." The document (which is full of references to Cult of the Dead Cow text files) also outlines a series of techniques for compromising bank security and exfiltrating money. Cayman National Bank and Trust has confirmed that it suffered a breach.The Distributed Denial of Secrets tweet links to a slow and overloaded server said to have the files from the breach; an associated torrent file promises access to the same data. In a Spanish-language "Hack Back" document released with the data, mirrored here in English translation, a person using the pen-name "Subcowmandante Marcos" (presumed to be Fisher) describes their motives: "As long as there is injustice, exploitation, alienation, violence and the ecological destruction, there will come many more like me: an endless series of people who will reject as illegitimate the bad system responsible for this suffering."Distributed Denial of Secrets founder Emma Best dedicated the leak Anonymous activist to Jeremy Hammond (previously), who was sentenced to 10 years in prison for his role in hacking and dumping the private intelligence contractor Stratfor. Read the rest

Gallium is a metal that melts at 86 degrees F. It's more fun than playing with mercury, and probably safer, too (it *will* temporarily stain your skin gray though, because it's "wet" when liquid and will adhere to the crevices of your skin). My daughter's friend brought some over a couple of years ago, and it was such a hit at our house that we had to get some of our own. This 20 gram sample is just on Amazon.Image: DaveHax/YouTube Read the rest

20 years ago, Illinois was rocked by a scandal after the widespread practice of locking schoolchildren, especially those with disabilities or special needs, in small, confining boxes was revealed. The teachers who imprisoned these children argued that they did so out of the interests of safety -- that of the imprisoned students, of the other students, and of school staff.In the wake of that scandal, Illinois codified rules for "quiet rooms" -- small cells, sometimes padded, where children are locked up as part of a school safety program. Ironically, by promulgating rules intended to curb abuse, the state legitimized the practice, making Illinois the national leader in the use of this inhumane, abusive practice. Propublica and the Chicago Tribune used extensive Freedom of Information Act requests to obtain records on the use of "quiet rooms" in Illinois schools and uncovered a disturbing pattern of what amounts to widespread torture of children, especially children with disabilities or special needs, in both private and public schools.The investigation also revealed that the "quiet rooms" are only incidentally used in the interests of safety -- rather, they are a disciplinary tool, used to punish children who are disruptive, disobedient, or who get on their teachers' bad side.The Illinois rules require that an adult be stationed outside of the "quiet room" when children are locked inside of it, and that they make minute-by-minute notes of everything the locked-up kid says or does, and weirdly, this seems like the sole legal requirement that schools comply with to any great degree, which means that Propublica was able to obtain thousands of pages' worth of terrifying logs that record children begging to be released, sobbing uncontrollably, and even self-harming while locked away, as an educator sits outside of the box, calmly noting down each of these cries and injuries, without acting on them. Read the rest

Mysterious rolls of cash keep showing up on sidewalks in the small English village of Blackhall Colliery, on the North Sea coast of County Durham. In the last 5 years, around US$30,000 has been found in twelve rolls. Well, twelve rolls that the finders turned in to police anyway. From 9News:"These bundles are always left in plain sight such as on pavements and discovered by random members of the public who have handed them in," Detective Constable John Forster said."I have looked into it and I am not thinking crime, drug dealing or money laundering. Drug dealers are not known for being reckless with their money." Read the rest

Yutaka Hirose is a Japanese composer who was a key figure in that country's ambient/environmental music scene of the 1980s that in recent years has been rediscovered by crate-diggers around the world. Hirose's "NOVA" (1986) is a classic of the genre, a soundscape that Misawa Home Corporation commissioned as a "soundtrack" for the prefabricated houses. While original LPs have sold for hundreds of dollars, WRWTFWW Records have recently reissued the record as an expanded double LP and double CD. (For a further exploration of Japanese environmental music of the 1980s, Light in the Attic Records' "Kankyō Ongaku: Japanese Ambient, Environmental & New Age Music 1980-1990" is a perfect portal.)To celebrate the NOVA reissue, The Vinyl Factory asked Hirose to create a mix of music he was listening to and inspired by in the 1980s Listen above. It's a beautiful, sometimes-jarring, and totally compelling journey through avant-garde sounds of the time. Here's the tracklist: 1. Jan Steele – All Day2. David Toop – Do The Bathosphere3. Gavin Bryars – 1, 2, 1-2-3-44. Joan La Barbara – Poems 43, 44, 455. Meredith Monk – Waltz6. Karlheinz Stockhausen – Stimmung7. John Cage – Seven Haiku8. Throbbing Gristle – Almost A Kiss9. Robert Ashley – Yellow Man With Heart With Wings10. The Flying Lizards – The Window11. Henry Cow Little Red Riding Hood Hit The Road12. Faust – Faust13. CAN – Future Days14. Tangerine Dream：Rubycon15. Michael Nyman – Decay Music16. Read the rest

Ship's captains and outside monitoring firms have reported waves of GPS jamming around Shanghai's ports, on a scale and of a severity never seen before: the jamming causes ships' locations to be incorrectly displayed and to jump around; the observations were confirmed via an anonymized (sic) data-set from a short-hire bike firm, whose bikes are also mysteriously appearing and disappearing at locations all through the region. The spoofing has created a massive local shipping hazard and has led to spectacular shipwrecks.The most likely culprit in the mystery is sand smugglers, who are part of a global network of sand-thieves who have literally cratered whole cities and islands in their drive to obtain sand for concrete.Sand for Shanghai's building boom was largely dredged from the Yangtze river, so prolifically that bridges, buildings, riverbanks and ecosystems on the river collapsed. The Chinese state has banned dredging from the Yangtze, but the practice continues, and it's theorized that "soft gold" smugglers are using GPS jammers to prevent Chinese law-enforcement from detecting and interdicting their vessels.The Shanghai “crop circles,” which somehow spoof each vessel to a different false location, are something new. “I’m still puzzled by this,” says Humphreys. “I can’t get it to work out in the math. It’s an interesting mystery.” It’s also a mystery that raises the possibility of potentially deadly accidents.“Captains and pilots have become very dependent on GPS, because it has been historically very reliable,” says Humphreys. “If it claims to be working, they rely on it and don’t double-check it all that much.”On June 5 this year, the Run 5678, a river cargo ship, tried to overtake a smaller craft on the Huangpu, about five miles south of the Bund. Read the rest

This kind man assisted a beaver with a heavy burden. Read the rest

I use these screen protectors on my Nintendo Switch.The Nintendo Switch gets handed from child to child. The Switch gets banged, bumped, dropped and treated like something a 5-year-old is struggling wrest from a 10-year-old. Screen protectors come and go, but thus far the Switch has been undamaged.Three packs are nice.[3 Pack] Screen Protector Tempered Glass for Nintendo Switch, iVoler Transparent HD Clear Anti-Scratch Screen Protector Compatible Nintendo Switch via Amazon Read the rest

CNN reports that Donald Trump can be forced to be deposed in a defamation case against him, ruled a New York state Supreme Court Justice.Summer Zervos, a a former Apprentice contestant accused Trump of sexually assaulting her. She filed a lawsuit against Trump, who responded by calling her a liar. Zervos then filed a defamation suit against Trump.From CNN:After the suit was filed, Trump's lawyers filed a motion to dismiss the case. They have argued the President has immunity from such lawsuits in state courts and that the case would conflict with Trump's official duties. They also said that Trump's frequent denials of accusations made by Zervos and others were protected political speech as statements of opinion.Schecter dismissed those arguments in March 2018, writing that "no one is above the law."In her ruling, she cited the 1997 Clinton vs. Jones sexual harassment lawsuit, in which the US Supreme Court held that a sitting president is not immune from being sued in federal court for unofficial acts.Image: CNN video screenshot Read the rest

Last month in Deggendorf, Germany, Alexander Oswald, 19, and his friends encountered a beaver on the road in the middle of the night. Afraid that a a driver might hit the animal, they stopped their car but the beaver had already disappeared. Moments later, it emerged again carrying a huge branch but was visibly struggling to drag it across the road. So Oswald lent a hand. What a nice boy.(PNP.de) Read the rest

Propublica has obtained a tranche of leaked internal communications between the Sackler family's Purdue Pharma, makers of the lethal opioid Oxycontin, and Dezenhall Resources, known as "The Pitbull of Public Relations," whose previous client roster includes Enron CEO Jeff Skilling, Exxon and other "beleaguered corporations," who masterminded a "blame the victim" strategy that apportioned responsibility for Oxycontin's mounting death toll on the people who became addicted to it -- not the Sacklers and Purdue, who falsified science, bribed doctors, and made billions from an epidemic that has now claimed more American lives than the Vietnam War.The leaks reveal how Dezenhall took credit for the work of psychiatrist Sally Satel, a "resident scholar" at the American Enterprise Institute, the DC thinktank notorious for its advocacy for the tobacco industry, against Net Neutrality, against Dodd-Frank, against a national minimum wage, and in favor of climate denial and the Iraq invasion.Satel penned a series of editorials and gave numerous media appearances that furthered the "blame the victim" narrative for the opioid epidemic, drawing on research funded by the Sacklers and Purdue, which ran under headlines like "Oxy Morons" (WSJ) and "OxyContin doesn’t cause addiction. Its abusers are already addicts" (Forbes).Purdue were $50,000/year funders of AEI, something that Satel says she didn't know about (she also says that she didn't know that the research she cited in her articles was funded by Purdue). Behind the scenes, the leaks show that Purdue and Dezenhall were intimately involved with Satel's work, with Dezenhall taking credit for briefing her, getting her articles published, and suppressing negative responses (Dezenhall also masterminded a campaign to get prominent retractions for critical articles about Purdue and Oxycontin, then followed up with a PR campaign that leveraged the retractions to generate press that expressed doubt about the risks of opioids). Read the rest

The US government detained more than 69,000 migrant children last year in the course of its brutal family separation policy. There's no guarantee these kids will ever be reunited with their parents; in fact, some of them have already been put up for "adoption" (read: legalized kidnapping) after their parents were deported. Many of these adoption agencies are of course Christian organizations, who genuinely believe themselves to be acting from a compassionate, altruistic pro-life perspective.This is not breaking news; nor is it necessarily unique to the Trump administration. But I was reminded of it as I scrolled through Twitter over the weekend:ICYMI: Some asylum seekers who have given birth in custody were forced to hand over their newborns to the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services. We were unable to verify what happens to the children of women who lack access to legal help. https://t.co/3BcZF7HmmL— Rewire.News (@Rewire_News) November 15, 2019And for whatever reason, this reminder flagged another connection in the mind: the second season of the "Missing and Murdered" podcast, produced by CBC, the Canadian public broadcasting service.Also known as "Finding Cleo," the 10-episode second season follows host Connie Walker as she tries to track down the truth about a deceased Cree girl named Cleo. According to Cleo's sister, Christine, all of the siblings in their family were forcefully taken from their First Nations home by Canadian child protective services. Somehow, Cleo ended up being adopted by a white Christian family in the United States until she was allegedly raped and murdered. Read the rest

Pixy Handmade creates adorable and delicious-looking keycaps for mechanical keyboards. They accept custom orders through Amazon. Read the rest

Over at Wirecutter, I have some handy advice for how to live safely with a space heater. Which is to say, don't do what I did:It was the winter of 2019, and I was down in my unfinished basement putting the finishing touches on my band’s next album. I had to get through only a few more guitar overdubs, but my fingers were too cold to play the parts quite right. So I grabbed a space heater I was long-term testing for Wirecutter. I placed it down on top of the wooden workbench where my digital audio workstation was set up and plugged it into the nearest power strip, which just so happened to be the same one through which I ran my half-stack Marshall amplifier.I turned the heater on. Five seconds later, the power strip blew up.This might not have been the single dumbest thing I’d ever done in my life. But as I watched the sparks fade from the smoldering lump of freshly burnt plastic before me, I knew it was up there on the list.There was one commenter who very much did not enjoy this self-deprecating anecdote. But there is more to the article than that, including some (hopefully) useful and relatable tips for keeping warm in the winter without risking your life and/or destroying everything you own. This is especially helpful if you, like me, live in the Northeast of the United States, which has been suffering through a nasty cold front lately. Read the rest

"Sir, you crashed into my car. You're in your car, your car is running, the engine's running, you still have the car in reverse, and you're touching my car. Sir." Read the rest

Nate Crowley wrote for Rock Paper Shotgun about the broken (as of this writing) economy in Planet Zoo. The game allows players to raise animals and then sell them for money or the rare currency called conservation credits. But the economy is broken, and desirable animals are unobtainable to all but the early adopters:In any case, the fact nobody is selling for cash has put CC at a massive premium: those who had got in early on endangered, prestige or hard-to-breed animals are now hoarding them, only selling them for wild sums. Prices have soared, making gorillas, tigers and the rest completely inaccessible to new players, while Pandas have become virtually mythical: beasts that might as well be made from pure diamond.New players are forced to breed and sell just a few types of animals, like warthogs, to try to grind their way to a better future. As a result the market is flooded with low quality animals:to make matters even more splendid, the animals people are selling on are the ones with genetic mutations that make them undesirable for further breeding – they might be highly susceptible to disease, tiny, incredibly short-lived, or even completely infertile. These sell for the lowest prices as well, naturally. Starting off as a new player, then, with your tiny pool of CC, you’re going to be spending a lot of time scrolling through pages and pages of dying mutants, desperately seeking something that won’t horrify your guests, and might have a chance of breeding. Read the rest

Bodycam footage involving cops and dogs is rarely pleasant viewing, but this one--featuring an officer rescuing a dog snarled in a wire fence--has a great twist ending. I shalln't ruin it for you. Read the rest

The rules for TweetTweetJam were simple--keep it short:Why 560?Because you don't always need a ton of code to make something fun. Because sometimes it's nice to scale back. But mostly because it's the length of two tweets. Use a minifier if you need to, and bend the rules if you can. PICO-8 is our recommended tool, but TIC-80 and other text-based engines will work as well!Rules:1. Your final game code must be 560 characters or less. This includes spaces and brackets.2. No spritesheets or external art libraries allowed! All of your game art must fit into your code. Symbols such as 웃 and ★ are acceptable, as long as they work in your editor and can be included in a tweet!The 60 entries included a typing game, city builder, and downhill racer:Typing game in #pico8, using 279 characters. Made for #TweetTweetJam. Code in replies. #gamedev #tweetcart pic.twitter.com/fZxoC7rFWP— GunTurtle (@GunTurtle) November 16, 2019My third #pico8 submission to #TweetTweetJam is a collaboration with StramDozer.We made a tiny city building game.Enjoy!https://t.co/NjCfD3N2hY pic.twitter.com/B9EY336eQs— RhizomaticWarMachine (@RhizomaticWar) November 16, 2019Fifth (and probably final) #pico8 submission to #TweetTweetJam It's a snowboarding game entirely inspired by Jammerboard (https://t.co/qCxk5alaVi) by Alexandre Rousseau because I like it.Play Tweet Tweet Board here:https://t.co/ST0MQf5NXd pic.twitter.com/1vO1w1x1Xe— RhizomaticWarMachine (@RhizomaticWar) November 17, 2019My entry for #TweetTweetJam: Rainbow Tunnel!🌈🎮> https://t.co/UyLWJmcih5🌟> https://t.co/yoE8KVEw20My best score is 560. Try to beat it!Code in the next tweettweets!#pico8 #gamedev #indiedev pic.twitter.com/X3M8JqcXrM— BoneVolt (@bone_volt) November 17, 2019Did a quick entry for #TweetTweetJam, the game jam where you make a game using less that 560 characters (two tweets) of code! Read the rest

A young girl snatched from her mother's arms on a Texas street was traced two days later to a nearby hotel, where cops busted down the door and arrested the kidnapper. Here's an Inside Edition segment showing the kidnapping, partically capture from a nearby video doorbell, and the hotel raid.Seven months after an 8-year-old girl was kidnapped while walking with her mom in their Texas neighborhood, police released heart-stopping video of the moment officers busted into the suspect's hotel room and rescued her. Michael Webb, 51, kidnapped the 8-year-old girl on May 18 as she was walking with her mom in Fort Worth. As the distraught mom tried to fight him off, he was able to get the girl in his car and take off. She called 911 and police immediately went searching for the girl.They almost bungled it.Acting on a tip, police in nearby Forest Hill searched Webb’s hotel room early the next day but didn’t find her. Two hours later, after getting another tip, Forest Hill and Fort Worth police responded. The girl was found hidden in a laundry basket.The Forest Hill police chief fired a sergeant who expressed doubt about the tip that led to the second visit.Webb was sentenced to life imprisonment on Federal kidnapping charges; jurors deliberated for 15 minutes. State charges of sexual assault of a child are yet to go to trial. Read the rest

Vinyl is officially back. People are hearing the proof behind the initial "retro" excitement: that records really do have a richer sound. And if you haven't switched to old-school records for serious listening, it's a new golden age.Why? Because quality turntables like the Altec Lansing ALT-500 are finally available to a market other than rich audiophiles.This unit comes with everything you need to start playing: A stylus cartridge, 45 RPM adapter, auto stop feature and two built-in hidden speakers.But there are some definite upgrades for modern listeners in terms of output. You can transmit sound to your own speakers through left-right RCA jacks. It's also compatible with Bluetooth technology, so you can use your wireless speakers or headphones. You can even stream in reverse, playing music from your own device through the ALT-500's speakers.The Altec Lansing ALT-500 Turntable is already half off the retail cost of $150, but you can take an extra 15% off by using the online promo code BFSAVE15 - for a final price of $63.74. Read the rest

I love what iOS 13 has brought to my iPhone's party. I'm not attached, however, to how frigging buggy it's been. More than once, I've been left waiting while waiting to receive a work-related message or something important, such as whether or not my wife should bring me a milkshake home from Peter's Drive-In. The Lords of Cupertino (which is like the shittiest possible version of the Masters of the Universe,) are aware that the delightful new iteration of their operating system is just a wee bit of a clusterfuck. As such, they've been liberal with the doling out of patches since the OS popped earlier this fall. The latest patch to make the scene is 13.2.3 which, hopefully, will fix more than it borks.From The Verge:The latest update includes a fix for the Spotlight system search feature that had been failing for some users recently. Search should now work consistently at the system level and in the Mail, Files, and Notes apps.If you use an app that downloads content in the background and you’ve noticed weird issues in iOS 13.2.2 or before, Apple is now addressing this in the new update. Mail is also getting updated to fix problems fetching new messages or quoting messages from Exchange accounts. The only other fix that’s listed on Apple’s release notes for iOS 13.2.3 is concerning an issue where photos, links, and other attachments haven’t been displaying properly in the iMessage details view.Today's update also includes security updates for iPhones and iPads (yes, I know they run iPadOS, yet here we are,) which is nice. Read the rest

The president made an unscheduled weekend visit to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center to "get a head start on his annual physical", but everyone is so accustomed to him and his staff lying about things it's blown up into a credible health scare. NBC News reports on the "skeptical reaction."For any president, a sudden trip to the hospital would raise questions. But such scrutiny was magnified with a president who has a history of exaggeration and playing loose with the facts, giving skeptics room to run with their own theories.“The one thing you can be absolutely sure of is this was not routine and he didn't go up there for half his physical,” tweeted Joe Lockhart, a press secretary under President Bill Clinton, who was himself impeached for perjury and obstruction. “What does it mean? It means that we just won't know what the medical issue was.”Note how the speculation abut his health echoes his own crude rumor-monging about the health of others. Bullshit is a hallmark of autocracy, but getting everyone to play by the same rules is another. Read the rest

Having spent hundreds of dollars on glass tripods and other camera accessories for my iPhone, it's fair to say that I'm neck-deep in love with iPhone photography. However, there are still some situations where pulling up my trust Sony RX100 III to capture a moment is a better choice. It's a wonderful camera, but it lacks GPS. To get around this issue, after taking a photo with my RX100, I often snap off a throwaway shot with my iPhone for the sake of capturing the location information. I've been doing it for years.This video covers a bit of this, but it also goes a step further by illustrating how to batch import GPS coordinates for a single location into multiple images via Lightroom Classic. Unfortunately, I haven't figured out how to preform the trick described in the video using Lightroom for iOS or Android, but it works a treat with the desktop version of the app.Image via Pixabay Read the rest

In 1909, 22-year-old Alice Huyler Ramsey set out to become the first woman to drive across the United States. In an era of imperfect cars and atrocious roads, she would have to find her own way and undertake her own repairs across 3,800 miles of rugged, poorly mapped terrain. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll follow Ramsey on her historic journey.We'll also ponder the limits of free speech and puzzle over some banned candy.Show notesPlease support us on Patreon! Read the rest

Back in 2016, Naomi Kritzer won the Hugo award for her brilliant, endearing story Cat Pictures Please, in which an AI with an insatiable craving for cat pictures explains its view on the world and the way that it makes humans' lives better; now Kritzer has adapted the story into her new novel, the equally brilliant, superbly plotted YA thriller Catfishing on CatNet.Steph doesn't know much about her dad: only that he tried to murder their family by burning the house down when she was little, and that she and her mother -- a gifted infosec freelancer who can earn a living writing cryptographic tools from anywhere -- have been on the run from him ever since.Every few months, her mother discovers -- through some unknown means -- that Steph's dad is catching up with them and then they get into the van in the middle of the night and drive a minimum of 250 miles, then turn off the highway and drive another 25 miles, then settle in whatever town they've found themselves in. It's a lonely and chaotic life, with few friends and little stability, and the fact that Steph can get out of a particularly terrible new town by misbehaving at school in a way that triggers police interest (and thus another middle-of-the-night move) isn't much comfort.Steph has one source of stability: CatNet. Her mom will let her use her laptop (through an anonymizing VPN) to login to the social networking service, where the currency is cute pictures of cats (or other animals: Steph's fond of bats). Read the rest

Between all of our apps, streaming devices, Bluetooth speakers, and energy-sucking decorations, paying for utilities each month can be...brutal. In fact, the average household spends roughly $70 a month on the water bill alone. That number might not seem terribly significant, but when you add it up, that's $840 a year — a pretty significant chunk of cheddar, and that's just for one of your many bills. Pair that with the fact that water conservation is becoming increasingly more important, (especially in areas susceptible to droughts) and being conscientious of your water use is, quite frankly, more important than ever.That's where Flume comes in. This easy-to-install smart water monitor pops right onto your home's water meter and tracks your water use in real time. You can check in on your use through Flume's companion app directly from your smartphone, which constantly gathers and reports the data back to you. If there's a leak or damage detected, you'll instantly be notified so you can quickly resolve the issue. Flume breaks down exactly where your water is going, so you can figure out how to cut back in areas where you're over-using it and save big on your monthly water bill. And, if you've already got a smart home or speaker setup, you can ask Alexa about your water status, use, and budget.Keep tabs on your water use with the Flume Smart Home Water Monitor and give the earth and your wallet some relief. You can grab it now for just $169. Read the rest

Here we see a man who takes Genesis 9:1-5 seriously: "The fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth." Unfortunately, the American Bison he challenged appears not to have read the Bible.If there is a God, I hope He pours the Seven Bowls of His wrath on this jackass.This happened in 2018, the man, Raymond T. Reinke of Pendleton, Oregon, was arrested. He has a history of being a jerk: allegedly being drunk and disorderly, and intoxication and harassing wildlife. He was sentenced to 130 days in jail.What an idiot pic.twitter.com/c88El7kqD0— The Human Experience (@thehumanxp) November 18, 2019 Read the rest

In my latest podcast (MP3), I read my new Locus column, "Jeannette Ng Was Right: John W. Campbell Was a Fascist,"which revisits Jeannette Ng's Campbell Awards speech from this summer's World Science Fiction convention.As far as I know, I'm the only person to have won both awards named for Campbell, which, I think, gives me license to speak on the subject. I think that Ng was absolutely right about Campbell and his legacy, and I think that understanding that the good that people do doesn't erase the harms they cause (and vice-versa) is critical to navigating a world of flawed people.Here’s the thing: neither one of those facets of Campbell cancels the other one out. Just as it’s not true that any amount of good deeds done for some people can repair the harms he visited on others, it’s also true that none of those harms can­cel out the kindnesses he did for the people he was kind to.Life is not a ledger. Your sins can’t be paid off through good deeds. Your good deeds are not cancelled by your sins. Your sins and your good deeds live alongside one another. They coexist in superposition.You (and I) can (and should) atone for our misdeeds. We can (and should) apologize for them to the people we’ve wronged. We should do those things, not because they will erase our misdeeds, but because the only thing worse than being really wrong is not learning to be better. Read the rest

From the 1950s until the 1980s, Randy and Dotti Smith supplied a line of fantastic cast sculptures sold in Disney theme-park gift shops, especially a line of skulls sold in shops associated with the Haunted Mansion and Pirates of the Caribbean rides; these Randotti skulls haven't been sold in decades, you can still find used ones (at high prices) online, as Boing Boing pal and fabulous illustrator Coop discovered when he sourced an impressive collection of Randotti sculpts.

The collapse of Atari SA exposed a vast trove of obscure game brands that it left to rot. For the new owners of old characters, the law—and YouTube—offer powerful tools to dispose of unwanted fandom.

[I'm delighted to welcome Lilian Radovac back for another excellent piece on the digital surveillance shenanigans in Canada, which aren't always as showy as their stateside counterparts, but are every bit as worrying. In this piece, Radovac reveals the buried plan for a finance-sector managed, all-surveilling National ID card buried in the latest massive wedge of largely unread documents from Google spin-out Sidewalk Labs (previously) that is building a controversial, privatised city-within-a-city in Toronto -Cory]In Sidewalk Toronto news, Sidewalk Labs has finally released its Master Innovation and Development Plan Digital Innovation Appendix. As with the 1,524 page MIDP before it, there's a lot to read in the DIA but a few excerpts already stand out.

During a lunch break at the “New Future for Antitrust” conference at the University of Utah, Lina Khan (previously), Marshall Steinbaum (previously), and Tim Wu (previously) drafted "https://onezero.medium.com/the-utah-statement-reviving-antimonopoly-traditions-for-the-era-of-big-tech-e6be198012d7"The Utah Statement, setting out a program for fighting monopolies beyond the mere revival and exercise of antitrust law, premised on the notion "that concentrated private power has become a menace, a barrier to widespread prosperity."The Statement sets out four credos, ten calls for reform, and thirteen principles. Despite its 27 clauses (!), the Utah Statement is an excellent articulation of how we got here, why it matters, and what we should do next.I see this as a harbringer of the "peak indifference" moment for monopolism, which hurts everyone from eyeglass wearers to pro wrestling fans (and beyond), a unifying vision for states' relationship to concentrated industries of all kinds and their corrupting influence on regulation.However, "anti-monopoly" is a terrible name for this movement, since it tells you what it stands against, but not what it stands for. I like "Pluralism" as an alternative, because using "pluralistic" as a modifier to other values ("pluralistic prosperity," "pluralistic self-determination," "pluralistic marketplaces of ideas") make it clear that you're not talking about a "freedom" that ends with one small slice of people dominating everyone else, but rather, about freedoms that end up with everyone having as much choice in how their lives unfold as is possible.We believe that:(1) Subjecting concentrated private power to democratic checks is a matter of constitutional importance;(2) The protection of fair competition is a means to a thriving and democratic society and an instrument for both the creation of opportunity and the distribution of wealth and power;(3) Excessive concentration of private economic power breeds antidemocratic political pressures and undermines liberties; and(4) While antitrust is not an answer to every economic distress, it is a democratically enacted and necessary element in achieving these aims. Read the rest

After trying out a lot of different scrub brushes, I think the OXO Good Grips scrub brush is the best. I prefer this palm-style brush to brushes with a handle because I can really bear down on the pots and pans. It's comfortable to hold and the bristles hold up well to rough treatment. I wish the brush was available via Subscribe and Save, because I'd get a new one every three months. Read the rest

Often, if you ask a human to optimize something, they'll make it orderly: straight lines, simple layouts and clean divisions, but when nature (or evolutionary algorithms) optimizes things, it produces redundancy, gradients, tangles, and complexity -- ironically, robots produce systems that look like nature designed them, while humans produce systems that look like robots designed them.In an essay called The Efficiency-Destroying Magic of Tidying Up, Uber product manager Florent Crivello lays out a thesis about the value of complexity, a subject that will be familiar to readers who enjoyed Tim Harford's 2016 book "Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Lives."Crivello suggests a three-part test that "messy" systems should be subjected to before anyone attempts to tidy them: 1. How much information is contained in the system’s current state? What constraints are expressing themselves through it? 2. How old is the system? How malleable is it? How strong are the forces put on it?3. Finally: who is complaining about the chaos? Finally: who is complaining about the chaos? If outsiders complain, but people living inside the system seem happy with it, it probably means that the chaos is serving them right, and that it’s just foreign eyes who are unable to perceive its underlying order.This is a special case of Chesterton’s Fence, which states you should never take down a fence before knowing why it was put up. Here, I propose Scott’s Law: never put order in a system before you understand the structure underneath its chaos. Read the rest

Whoever installed this power pole support in the middle of a road in Vladimir, Russia decided it would be a waste of money to erect the support in such a way that a driver wouldn't hit it and die.<em>Image: YouTube</em> Read the rest

People make fun of me when I talk about extending my wrists' duty cycle, but I earn the vast majority of my living with the parts of my body north of my chin and south of my elbows, and those are all pretty fragile, easily-damaged parts of your body.Ergnomic Trends' list of "8 Best Hand and Wrist Exercises for Computer Users" were largely familiar to me, but I'm seriously loving "thumb touches."Thumb touches help to increase coordination in the thumb and forefingers, and also help to reintroduce blood flow back to the area:1. Hold your hands outwards with your palms facing the ceiling2. With your right hand, slowly bring your thumb to touch the tip of every finger3. Repeat on the other hand4. Return to the starting position5. Repeat five times with both handsPreventing Injury: 8 Best Hand and Wrist Exercises for Computer Users [Ergonomic Trends](via Four Short Links) Read the rest

If you want to quickly find out about what kind of person Bikram Choudhury is, watch this interview, in which the yoga teacher and alleged serial rapist claims that women are begging to pay him $1,000,000 for a single drop of his sperm and that four women committed suicide because he denied them sex.If you want to know more about Choudhury, you can watch an upcoming Netflix documentary about him, called Bikram: Yogi, Guru, Predator, premiering November 20, 2019.Daily Beast has a review:[A]t closed-off, multi-week classes held at hotels around the country, Bikram was constantly supplied Bikram with fresh new females who wanted nothing more than to earn his favor. Sexual assault—quite a lot of it, by many accounts—followed, although out of fear of being kicked out of the profession they loved, most refused to publicly speak out. Sarah Baughn changed all that, filing suit against Bikram in March 2013 for allegedly trapping her in his hotel room and forcibly trying to initiate sex. Though she was condemned and ostracized by those in Bikram’s camp, other ugly stories soon emerged, including from Larissa Anderson, who says she was raped by Bikram in his home, and from Jafa-Bodden, who sued Bikram for unlawful termination after she refused to continue being party to his predatory behavior.Doing the guru no favors are deposition videos in which he pleads the fifth and, when speaking, curses Jafa-Bodden’s attorney Carla Minnard and admits that the four things he doesn’t like are “cold weather, cold food, cold hearts and cold pussy.”Facing multiple lawsuits and sexual harassment allegations, Choudhury fled the United States for India in 2016, where he is operating yoga studios. Read the rest