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Designer/activist Mike Monteiro added a pointed pro-Union message to the cover of his new, print-on-demand book that Amazon workers would perhaps see when they print copies to ship to customers. The Amazon-specific cover to Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It made it through their approval process and is visible on the product page, for the moment anyway.From The Verge:While Monteiro says he’s sold over 10,000 copies of the book so far, only 150 paperbacks have been printed since he changed the cover, which isn’t a lot of opportunities for it to catch the right person’s eye.Monteiro says he was working on some union organizing when he came up with the idea: “We were discussing how to get messages in front of people and I realized ‘Oh, huh. I have this thing that Amazon workers see every time a book gets ordered. Let’s put a message there.’”Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It (Amazon)Every time you buy my book from Amazon, a warehouse worker has to pull it off the shelf. From now on, this is what that worker will see. At least until Amazon shitcans the whole thing. Hurry up. https://t.co/l5jxdz1azW pic.twitter.com/DqWZT5MI9q— Mike Monteiro (@monteiro) October 4, 2019 Read the rest

What's more fun than playing The Legend of Zelda? Not making Perler bead art of the characters and icons in the game, that's for sure. But Perler beading is enjoyable, in a non-creative way (unless you are using it to make art without a pattern, which makes it enjoyable and creative) . If you aren't familiar with Perler beads, they are small colored plastic beads. Each bead is like a pixel. You place the beads on a pegboard according to a pattern sheet, then fuse the beads together by running a hot iron over them. The Legend of Zelda Perler Bead Kit has 2000 beads, a pegboard, a pattern sheet with 12 designs, an ironing paper. You supply the iron. Read the rest

Here’s the trailer to The Life Cycle, a new podcast starting next week. Featuring renowned thinkers like Bryan Johnson of Kernel, Neural Signals’ Dr. Philip Kennedy, and many more, it’s an offbeat series about tech, transhumanism, future politics, brain uploads, and life as we do not yet know it.Hosted by writers John Holten and Eva Kelley, it’s a spinoff project of Seed, the upcoming space colony simulation MMO. (Watch the game teaser here.) The first season of The Life Cycle features experts interviewed during Seed’s development, turning their talks into a free-form conversation and soundscape about our future as a species. Subscribe here. Read the rest

I woke up this morning to two exciting announcements about crowdfunders for kid-oriented RPGs, which is outstanding news indeed: the first is a set of adventures for Martin Lloyd's superb Amazing Tales, a (four and up) kid-and-adult RPG that's endlessly fun and incredibly easy to get started with; the second is Destiny Dez, from Scott Wayne Indiana, last seen around here with his pacifist RPG Lotus Dimension, now back with an RPG for 3-8 year olds, in which "kids come up with their own plans to navigate situations before rolling a 20 sided die to decide their fate and move on in the story."I love RPGs for really little kids (when my daughter was a toddler, I created a stripped-down version of D&D to play with her, and Enrique Bertran did the same for his 4 year old).Amazing Tales (previously only available with a long fulfillment delay from a print-on-demand outlet, now available as a pre-printed book) was especially great when I took my daughter -- then nine -- on a book tour around Australia and New Zealand, it being a game that we could take from the airplane to the hotel room all the way to walking down the street (I kept a pocket full of dice for her to roll at key junctures). It's really exciting to see Lloyd back with a volume of pre-set adventures for the game, at €15 for a PDF and €25 for a hardcover.Meanwhile, Destiny Dez holds out the promise of gaming with kids as young as three years old, at $20 for a paperback and $28 for a hardcover, built around a hybrid of choose-your-own-adventures and imaginative play. Read the rest

Behold the master in enunciation outclass the mediocrities that surround him.Previously in Diabeetus: Cat resembling Wilford Brimley skilled in art of playing "death by diabeetus" Read the rest

An app used by Hong Kong protestors to track security forces there disappeared Wednesday from Apple's app store. Apple says it's being used by criminals to attack police, but given that it very publicly reviewed and approved the app just days ago, the true reason seems obvious: the Chinese government ordered it gone to stymie ongoing pro-democracy demonstrations in the autonomous city-state.The U.S. tech giant had come under fire from China over the app, with the Chinese Communist Party’s official newspaper calling the app “poisonous” and decrying what it said was Apple’s complicity in helping the Hong Kong protesters.Apple rejected the crowdsourcing app, HKmap.live, earlier this month but then reversed course last week.Apple said in a statement that it had began an immediate investigation after “many concerned customers in Hong Kong” contacted the company about the app and Apple found it had endangered law enforcement and residents.Apple joins a growing list of prominent American companies, including Activision-Blizzard and the NBA, to kowtow to the Chinese government. This year, reports Nikkei, China overtook the U.S. as the world's largest market for consumer goods. Read the rest

Whoever said you'd never need math to succeed in life clearly never sat down at a high-stakes poker table. When it comes right down to it, poker is a winnable game no matter where you play it - as long as you play the odds.There are time-honored strategies for playing those odds, tested by card sharks the world over. And if you want to make an already exciting game pay off for you, the Ultimate Poker Pro Blueprint Mastery Bundle is an invaluable resource that's an additional 20% off for October.Whether you play at the casino or on a laptop, this massive 11-course bundle teaches the skills you need to minimize your mistakes and capitalize on those of others. There are beginner courses that will teach you to read the odds at any table and build a stake in no time. Dedicated courses cover the peculiarities of online play at sites like PokerStars Zoom 2nl and various multi-table tournaments. You can even learn how to use PokerTracker4 and other tools to take the guesswork out of your game and start racking up the chips - virtual or otherwise.The Ultimate Poker Pro Blueprint Mastery Bundle is already on sale for 99% off the original cost of the individual courses, but you can take an extra 20% off that price by using the online code 20LEARN20 - for a final price of just $16.72. Read the rest

A series of identical monuments depicting a tourist being mauled by a pack of wolves have surreptitiously been installed in different New York City parks with plaques that read:Dedicated to the many tourists that go missing every year in New York City. And a reminder as to why the parks close at dusk. Erected by the Ed Koch Wolf Foundation and the NYC Fellowship.A brilliant prankster with mad sculpting skills is taking credit.His "Ed Koch Wolf Foundation" reveals the fabricated backstory behind the statues: In the late 1970s, New York Mayor Edward I. Koch launched an unprecedented campaign against subway graffiti. The city employed new guardians to patrol its vast train yards—wolves. Captured from upstate New York and set loose in various borough depots, the wolves successfully kept taggers at bay until anti-graffiti technology eliminated the need for the animals. At that point, the wolves migrated underground. Since then, wolf packs have survived and even thrived in New York’s labyrinthine tunnels, emerging in local parks only on occasion to hunt in the moonlight for live prey. In fact, the NYPD chalks up the majority of missing tourist reports each year to the city’s subterranean canine inhabitants. Today, The Ed Koch Wolf Foundation in partnership with the NYC Fellowship is erecting monuments in city parks to serve as cautionary reminders to out-of-town visitors. When in NYC, visit our many beautiful green districts. Just let these stunning statues remind you as to why we close our parks at night. Read the rest

Raytracing is a method for drawing scenes by modeling beams of light, illuminating and richocheting off objects. It's realistic but very slow, and only the newest and most expensive video cards [Amazon] introduce it to realtime games. MySQL is the most commonplace relational database, the sewer containing all the web's fatbergs, the last thing on earth you'd use for number-crunching graphics. Or ... is it? Behold the MySQL Raytracer, by Holtsetio.This is a raytracing engine contained in a single Mysql SELECT statement. In the beginning of the code there are a few parameters that can be modified. The scene can be specified using the @triangles and @squares parameters, but everything is explained in the comments. The whole query returns a bitmap file which can be written to the filesystem using the "INTO DUMPFILE" syntax at the end of the query, if mysql has filesystem write permissions.The raytracer supports shadows and reflections, which makes it, to my knowledge, the most advanced MySQL raytracer on the market right now. However, it is not really polished and kinda slow. Since I didn't really know how to present this work in a demoparty friendly way, I just included two finished renderings. Read the rest

Scientists in Queensland, Australia have pieced together the most complete pterosaur fossil collection yet—a big-headed reptile with a 12-foot wingspan they've named Ferrodraco lentoni, or "Butch's Iron Dragon.""It’s kind of scary when you think their heads are disproportionately large, it would have had a skull maybe 60cm," Adele Pentland from Swinburne University, the lead author on the study, told The Guardian. "To see it walking around on the ground it would have walked on four legs and looked really different to any kind of animal we have today." You can check out an artist's rendering of the derpy-looking lizard-bird here.The field of dinosaur research is in a bit of a renaissance period, with some three dozen new species discovered this year alone. More importantly: of course a flying mini-T-Rex was found in Australia of all places. After all, this is the land of such natural wonders as mutant eel-sharks, birds that weaponize fire, projectile bull semen, human-sized jellyfish, and more strange spiders than anyone ever wants to hear about, except for that guy who was bit on the penis not once but twice (and still hasn't gained any spider-penis super powers).In that context, it's frankly surprising that a flying T-Rex hadn't been discovered there until now.(Image via Luis Rey/Wikimedia Commons) Read the rest

[Before he was a crime writer, Alex Segura was busily overseeing the edgy, amazing reboot of Archie Comics. Now, he's murging his murder-mystery career with his comics life, in The Black Ghost, a new noir comics collaboration with Monica Gallagher. It's a delight to offer this conversation between Alex and Monica. -Cory]When we first announced plans to launch The Black Ghost - a crime/vigilante comic series from Comixology Originals, co-written by Monica and I, with art by George Kambadais, colors by Ellie Wright, letters by Taylor Esposito, and edits by Greg Lockard - we knew the kind of story we wanted to tell: a story about a woman overcoming her own demons to become the hero her city needs - vigilante mask and all. The crux of the narrative was about how our eventual hero, Lara Dominguez - a grizzled cops reporter that’s battling two obsessions: alcohol and her city, Creighton’s, lone vigilante, The Black Ghost - makes it from zero to hero. Our tale mixes elements from our own past works - including the acclaimed iHeart podcast, Lethal Lit, and our respective gigs writing the Pete Fernandez Miami Mysteries and the webcomic Assassin Roommate - with the tropes of the street-level vigilante genre: the fictional city, the masked protector, the eager sidekick. Blended together, the end result was The Black Ghost - a book that hopefully feels like the perfect balance between classic, gritty vigilante comics and hardboiled crime fiction.ALEX SEGURA: First off, have you been surprised by the response to the book? Read the rest

Terumasa Ikeda uses lacquer and bits of mother of pearl to create surreal sculptures. He demonstrates the painstaking process in this video:The results look like code given solid form:(H/T @MasakiSe.) Read the rest

NPR reports a real life X-File: someone (or something!) drained the blood from cattle at Silvies Valley Ranch in eastern Oregon:The bull looks like a giant, deflated plush toy. It smells. Weirdly, there are no signs of buzzards, coyotes or other scavengers. His red coat is as shiny as if he were going to the fair, but he's bloodless and his tongue and genitals have been surgically cut out.Over the course of a few days, more mutilated bulls were discovered:four more Hereford bulls were found within 1.5 miles in the same condition. There were no tracks around the carcasses.To date, the investigation has mostly just eliminated possibilities such as poisonous plants or bullets being the cause of death. Perhaps overlooking the public's enthusiasm for Westworld-style adventures, the ranch does not seem to have added the ongoing investigation to its list of activities. Read the rest

Ellen DeGeneres's friendship with ex-President George W. Bush became controversial this week, in light of the progressive values she claims and the 600,000 corpses left by his occupation of Iraq. She delivered a monologue on her show in response, casting their friendship as an example of civility, overcoming political differences, and having "faith in America". So Rafael Shimunov added a simple backdrop of Iraq war scenes to her monolog, in the hopes DeGeneres might better understand the complaints. In response, copyright takedown notices flew and it was removed from the 'net, so it is at least getting under her skin. Here's a copy, which I'll update if and when it disappears.Not one word of hers is changed, and there are no misleading or misrepresentative edits to her performance. Only the backdrop is changed, so that it now shows scenes of abuse, atrocity and horror from her friend's ruinous war instead of the blue studio wall.The video is transformative and offers clear editorial comment, so its creator could certainly avail himself of a fair use defense in court. But social media is not the courts, and the companies running the platforms tend to side quickly with takedown requests and respond slowly to counterclaims.The Streisand Effect, however, is something celebs and their agents can rarely control: countless social media users are reposting the remix in response to its disappearance, spreading it far wider than Shimunov could have ever hoped.Thanks to Ellen DeGeneres' chilling of my antiwar criticism by filing fraudulent copyright claims on my video with 10K views, people are reuploading all over Twitter for a now collective 300K (and growing) views faster than @andylassner can file false claims. Read the rest

Oregon Zoo posted a collection of X-ray images of animals taken at its Veterinary Medical Center, reavealing "the inner gothy beauty of animals." [h/t Steven Glista]See if you can guess the beasties; then hit the Zoo's Twitter thread for answers (and more beasties). Read the rest

Australian politics are a revolting mess of unstable governments dominated by xenophobic, climate-denying far-right oligarchs, and the only check on their power is the fact that Australian governments are so riven by internal strife and unhinged authoritarianism that they tend to collapse on a quarterly basis, triggering new elections and/or leadership contests.But the Aussie oligarch class are persistent: sometimes, they can actually get policies and laws that suit their needs enacted, as happened in late 2018, when the country banned working cryptography, or last June, when cops and spies staged a series of armed raids on journalists who'd reported on leaks that revealed official corruption.So it's perhaps not surprising that the country's annual flagship cybersecurity conference, the annual conference of the Australian Information Security Association, has become mired in a censorship scandal.This year, AISA opted to co-organise its annual conference with the Australian Cyber Security Centre, a creature of the same spy agencies that led the crackdown on whistleblowers in June.But the ACSC has a very different set of priorities to AISA, which is why it insisted on the cancellation of multiple invited talks at the show, including Thomas Drake, a celebrated NSA whistleblower who was scheduled to give a talk on "the golden age of surveillance, both government and corporate"; and the University of Melbourne's Dr Suelette Dreyfus whose cancelled lecture was on "anonymous whistleblowing technologies like SecureDrop and how they reduce corruption in countries where that is a problem."Both speakers have posted their slides, and Bruce Schneier, who gave a keynote at the conference, opened his talk by reading the URLs aloud. Read the rest

SQL Murder Mystery is a free/open game from Northwestern University's Knight Lab that teaches the player SQL database query structures and related concepts while they solve imaginary crimes.It was inspired by The Command Line Murders, a murder mystery game that teaches you to master Unix command-line syntax.I love this kind of thing so much. Learning the abstruse syntaxes of power-users, network administrators and programmers gives users so much power over the computers they use.SQL Murder Mystery [NU Knight Lab/Github](via Four Short Links) Read the rest

Modern Monetary Theory (previously) is an economic philosophy based on the idea that all state spending is "deficit" spending, since money comes into existence when the government spends it, and when the government raises taxes, it does so in order to take that money out of existence, both in order to control inflation and to limit the concentration of power in the hands of the wealthy.The corollaries of this are many, but the two standout ones are:1. The government can create money to buy any good or service that the private sector isn't using without driving inflation (that is, if there's someone unemployed and the government gives them a job, that won't drive up wages because the private sector had already passed on using their labor, so the supply/demand ratio of labor to private jobs remains constant), offering full employment to everyone who wants to work; and2. The government can create money to buy goods and services that the private sector is currently using without creating inflation, provided it can convince people not to spend that money -- for example, by creating "war bonds" that sequester the vast sums that get pumped into the economy during wartime, to prevent the workers who receive those sums from bidding against the materials that are being used in munitions factories.These two facts are central to the Green New Deal, which proposes using a combination of a federal jobs guarantee and federal procurements of the materials needed for a sustainable energy conversion and climate change remediation to avert the climate crisis. Read the rest

Assuming facts not in evidence is a time-honored courtroom objection, and one which could be stamped on almost every page of this week’s tawdry tabloids.

This summer on remote U.S. Forest Service land in eastern Oregon, cowboys discovered five, young purebred bulls dead, drained of blood, and their tongues and genitals removed with almost surgical precision. Who or what did this and why remains a mystery. (Insert "I'm not saying it's aliens..." joke here.) Silvies Valley Ranch has offered a $25,000 reward for information that could lead to answers. From National Public Radio:"A lot of people lean toward the aliens," (Harney County Sheriff's Deputy Dan) Jenkins says. "One caller had told us to look for basically a depression under the carcass. 'Cause he said that the alien ships will kinda beam the cow up and do whatever they are going to do with it. Then they just drop them from a great height."Jenkins says the cases have been tough, with little evidence and no credible leads.On his whiteboard, he has a running list scrawled in green marker with the top theories. What's clear: It isn't bears, wolves, cougars or poisonous plants. Nor were the animals shot.The FBI won't confirm or deny that it's looking into the multiple slaughters.image: Silvies Valley Ranch Read the rest

In the early 1980s, Susan Kare joined Apple Computer to design fonts and user interface graphics. A legend of pixel art, Kare created the look of the original Macintosh, from the Chicago typeface to the Trash Can to the Happy Mac icon. She's currently creative director at Pinterest. David Kindy profiles Kare in Smithsonian:Pioneering designer Susan Kare was taught by her mother how to do counted-thread embroidery, which gave her the basic knowledge she needed to create the first icons for the Apple Macintosh 35 years ago.“It just so happened that I had small black and white grids to work with,” she says. “The process reminded me of working needlepoint, knitting patterns or mosaics. I was lucky to have had a mother who enjoyed crafts..."Designing the icons proved to be more of a challenge (than the typefaces). Reproducing artwork on those primitive CRT surfaces, which used a bit-mapped matrix system with points of light, or pixels, to display data, was a designer’s nightmare.However, the friend who recommended Kare for the job—-Andy Hertzfeld, then lead software architect for Macintosh-—had an idea. Since the matrix was essentially a grid, he suggested Kare get the smallest graph paper she could find. She then blocked out a 32-by-32 square and began coloring in squares to create the graphics...After leaving Apple in 1986, Kare became creative director for Apple cofounder Steve Jobs at the short-lived NeXT, Inc., an influential computer startup that was eventually acquired by Apple. She founded her own eponymous design firm in 1989, which created graphic designs for hundreds of clients, including Autodesk, Facebook, Fossil, General Magic, IBM, Microsoft and PayPal. Read the rest

Efteling is an amazing Dutch theme park about an hour outside of Amsterdam; while it deploys many of the same technologies as Disney-style parks, it has a completely different affect, centered around small, homely, perfect little jewel-box rides that bring fairy tales to life.Case in point: the new Elisa and the Six Swans ride, which uses swan-boats as ride vehicles to bring visitors into a set of watery caverns for a brief, soft-focus encounter with a detailed and lovely animatronic, followed by a short denouement. It's a huge investment in a very short, very sweet experience, the kind of thing that's motivated by equal parts craft and business.(Thanks, Dan!) Read the rest

The green cardigan that Kurt Cobain wore during Nirvana's classic MTV Unplugged performance in 1993 (see above) will be on the auction block at the end of the month. The sweater last changed hands following a November 2015 auction, selling for $137,500. This time, the minimum bid is set for $200,000 and it's expected to go for more than $300,000. It has not been washed. “It’s very important that we don’t wash it,” Darren Julien of Julien’s Auctions said in Rolling Stone. “The stains are still there. There’s even cigarettes burns that you can see on the sweater.”From Julien's Auctions:The Manhattan brand sweater is a blend of acrylic, mohair and Lycra with five-button closure (one button absent) with two exterior pockets, a burn hole and discoloration near left pocket and discoloration on right pocket. Size medium. The sweater was obtained from Jackie Farry, a close friend of the Cobain family, and is accompanied by both a handwritten letter and a typed, signed letter from Farry. Read the rest

AirCSI is a prototype drone system that scans crime scenes from above, identify possible pieces of evidence, and then collect more detailed images and data of such items of interest. Leading the development of the system is Pompílio Araújo, a researcher at the Intelligent Vision Research Lab at Federal University of Bahia who often assists the Federal Police of Brazil in crime scene investigation. From IEEE Spectrum:"...AirCSI provides a sketch with the localization of the evidences, as well as a detailed crime scene imagery,” says Araújo. His team used simulation software to test this newer version of AirCSI, and found that using multiple angles to detect evidence is up to 18 percent more effective than using only one angle...While the researchers have yet to test the new, multi-angle approach beyond simulations, they expect to try it out in a real environment by the end of this year or early next year...He also plans on developing a way to completely reconstruct crime scenes using the drone footage, creating a virtual environment that investigators can explore indefinitely—or at least until the crime is solved."Multi-Perspective Object Detection for Remote Criminal Analysis Using Drones" (IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters) Read the rest

Follow your muse where it takes you, even if it leads to a day's worth of articles trashing Cap'n Crunch in outlandish and disturbing ways. (H/T Ben Collins.) Read the rest

From left: Akira Yoshino, Dr. M. Stanley Whittingham and Dr. John Goodenough (Charles Dharapak / Yoshiaki Sakamoto / Kyodo News / Binghamton University)The 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to three scientists whose work developing lithium-ion batteries made mobile phones, iPads, laptops, and electric cars possible.The three recipients are U.S. engineer John B. Goodenough, M. Stanley Whittingham of the U.K., and Akira Yoshino of Japan. They will share the 9 million Swedish kronor ($906,000) prize awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.“This is a highly-charged story of tremendous potential,” said Olof Ramstrom of the Nobel committee for chemistry today.The breakthroughs these scientists made opened up a new world of possibilities to counter global warming and the worldwide climate crisis.From the Associated Press:The prize announced Wednesday went to John B. Goodenough, 97, a German-born American engineering professor at the University of Texas; M. Stanley Whittingham, 77, a British-American chemistry professor at the State University of New York at Binghamton; and Akira Yoshino, 71, of chemicals company Asahi Kasei Corp. and Meijo University in Japan.The honor awarded to the three scientists is a capstone of a truly transformative technology that has permeated billions of lives across the planet, including anyone who uses mobile phones, computers, pacemakers, electric cars and beyond.“The heart of the phone is the rechargeable battery. The heart of the electric vehicle is the rechargeable battery. The success and failure of so many new technologies depends on the batteries,” said Alexej Jerschow, a chemist at New York University, whose research focuses on lithium ion battery diagnostics. Read the rest

Many people around the world use bidets so they can clean themselves properly after using the toilet. I discovered them in the 1980s in Japan and I installed them in the toilets in my house. (I have the cold-water version, which doesn't require electricity. They cost just and are truly life-changing.)In this video we learn why most Americans don't have bidets. It started because US servicemen first saw them in French brothels in WWII and associated them with prostitution. And when bidet manufacturers in the 1960s tried to get Americans warmed up to the idea of bidets, they learned that Americans didn't want to hear about machines that would clean their butts. They would rather use toilet paper and have dirty butts.Image: YouTube/Tech Insider Read the rest

In celebration of this year's 50th anniversary of the first humans on the moon, the Ohio State Marching Band staged this wonderful performance on Saturday. Read the rest

These heavy duty nitrile gloves keep my hands clean when an automotive emergency pops up.Frequently my 43-year-old motorcycle and 32-year-old VW bus hiccup. Usually, they do it when I am wearing something I do not want covered in grease, and am far away from home. Luckily both vehicles have nearly full sets of tools in them, and I can usually get to work wherever need finds me.Keeping my hands clean, however, not likely until I started keeping a handful of nitrile gloves in each.I tried keeping a pair of shop gloves in the car, but they got lost quick. With these nitrile gloves, I can refill either vehicle when I run out.These gloves are also easier to work with while wearing. Bulky gloves are no fun.They do tear but less frequently than the thin medical exam gloves I tried before.GLOVEWORKS HD Industrial Orange Nitrile Gloves - 8 mil, Latex Free, Powder Free, Diamond Texture, Disposable, Heavy Duty via Amazon Read the rest

While young and pregnant Elizabeth Warren lost her job as a school teacher. Right-wing critics are using this true story to create doubt and distrust about everything she says.Salon:Warren confirmed this timeline to CBS News in an interview Monday: "All I know is I was 22 years old, I was six months pregnant, and the job that I had been promised for the next year was going to someone else. The principal said they were going to hire someone else for my job."If anything, these new details make Warren's story more touching, since she lost a job that she had good reason to believe was hers for at least another year.It's easy to see why Warren's story about her first pregnancy sticks in the craws of those who resent her recent rise in the polls. Warren uses this story both to position herself as a relatable candidate who understands the challenges of everyday Americans, but also to showcase the talents that allowed her to rise above those humble beginnings — talents, she suggests, that will help her lead the country during difficult times. So it's not surprising that Republicans, and even some on the left who prefer another primary candidate — judging from social media, mostly supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders — would want to take this story away from her.Sadly, as Vox's David Roberts pointed out on Twitter, this debunking won't stop right-wing media from continuing to repeat these baseless accusations against Warren as if they were fact. Read the rest

Trump gave Erdogan green light, Putin nods in approval from Moscow.Turkey has launched an attack against US-allied Kurds in Northern Syria, after Donald Trump expressed his support for the military assault in a now-infamous phone call to Turkish president Tayyip Erdogan. Updates on Wednesday morning:• Turkish warplanes and artillery are striking militia positions in several towns in the border region.• Erdogan said the Syria assault is code-named “Peace Spring.”• The United Nations Security Council will meet on Syria behind closed-doors on Thursday, diplomats said, after Turkey launched a military operation against Kurdish fighters in the northeast of the country.• Emergency Syria talks by 15-member Security Council was requested by 5 European members: Britain, France, Germany, Belgium and Poland• In announcing the start of Turkey's military action, Erdogan today said the goal is to eliminate a “terror corridor” on Turkey’s southern border.• NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg today: “I count on Turkey to act with restraint and ensure that any action it may take in northern Syria is proportionate and measured,” he said after meeting Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte. “It is important to avoid actions that may further destabilize the region, escalate tensions and cause more human suffering.”• Chaotic scenes in northern Syria as people flee for their lives.More below. This is a developing story, and this post will be updated.NB: Lots of reporting this week that the US had "closed off" the airspace around the Syrian border I think reflected a misunderstanding of what the US actually did, which was cut Turkey out of ISR feeds they'd been getting as part of the "security mechanism." Not the same thing. Read the rest

The House Financial Services Committee has asked Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to testify on Facebook's planned Libra cryptocurrency, and he will do so on October 23.“Mark looks forward to testifying before the House Financial Services Committee and responding to lawmakers’ questions,” a Facebook spokesperson told CNBC:Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will testify before the House Financial Services Committee on Oct. 23 at 10 a.m. Eastern Time, the committee announced Wednesday.Zuckerberg will be the only witness at a hearing entitled “An Examination of Facebook and Its Impact on the Financial Services and Housing Sectors.” House members had been pushing for Zuckerberg to testify on Facebook’s cryptocurrency plans as the committee had been in talks with his second-in-command about testifying, CNBC reported last week. Mark Zuckerberg to testify before Congress on Facebook’s libra cryptocurrencySheryl Sandberg has been planning to testify but chairwoman Maxine Waters was insistent on Zuckerberg so he’ll be defending cryto currency that is getting a lot of scrutiny in Washington. Hill has told me they feel Libra announced launch has shown “hubris”— CeciliaKang (@ceciliakang) October 9, 2019 Read the rest

Vegetation is overtaking the Fukushima exclusion zone, eight years after the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant disaster. In the eerily isolated area, buildings are leaning, windows are broken, shrines are slowly toppling. In this video, the host of Abroad in Japan visits the exclusion zone and speaks to residents and officials about the future of the region. This is not disaster tourism, it's a well made video about the aftermath of the disaster and Japan's 40-year-plan to restore the area.Image: Abroad in Japan/YouTube Read the rest

Apparent a coping method for these troubled times is unprotected sex.UPI:A new government report finds that combined cases of syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia reached an all-time high in 2018. Nearly 2.5 million cases of these sexually transmitted diseases were reported to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for the year."We're documenting an increase in STDs for the fifth consecutive year," said Elizabeth Torrone, an epidemiologist with the CDC. Read the rest

Alabama 3 has long been a favorite and is never long out of rotation. Read the rest

Oh, the joys of #vanlife!I was checking up on my Vanagon yesterday and noticed the coolant was low. Missing coolant is very bad in a Vanagon for many, many reasons.I looked for a leak.I could not find a leak. It was possible the car had just burped an air bubble and swallowed a cup or two of coolant from the reserve. I was not in a panic. View this post on Instagram Via my sisterA post shared by Jason Weisberger (@jlw) on Jul 25, 2017 at 4:09pm PDT I also knew my power steering belt was looking really ragged. I decided to call the local shop I've been working with and see if they could swap the belt and pressure test the system today. They said bring the bus in at 7am.I drove the 10-15 miles to my mechanic with no problems at all. I had given myself an extra hour in the event something terrible went wrong with the cooling system, or the v-belt decided to trash my day on the way to being replaced.It is a Vanagon, these things happen.I got to the shop uneventfully. I love my bus. I take good care of it.See, things work out!I decided to park about 3 blocks away and get a cup of pretty terrible coffee from a Starbucks.Starbucks had terrible coffee.I, and Pretzel my faithful Cavalier King Charles companion, returned to the van. I turned the key in the ignition. Read the rest

Ronan Farrow reports, in his forthcoming book Catch and Kill [Amazon], that TV host Matt Lauer is accused of raping a colleague at NBC News. Lauer was fired in 2017 from his Today Show perch after reports of "inappropriate sexual behavior" were found credible by the network. Now that its severity is revealed, the lingering efforts to rehabilitate his career are surely over.In the book, obtained by Variety, Nevils alleges that at the 2014 Sochi Olympics, Lauer anally raped her in his hotel room. ... According to Nevils, she “was in the midst of telling him she wasn’t interested again when he ‘just did it,’” Farrow writes. “Lauer, she said, didn’t use lubricant. The encounter was excruciatingly painful. ‘It hurt so bad. I remember thinking, Is this normal?’ She told me she stopped saying no, but wept silently into a pillow.” Lauer then asked her if she liked it. She tells him yes. She claims that “she bled for days,” Farrow writes.Nevils tells Farrow: “It was nonconsensual in the sense that I was too drunk to consent,” she says. “It was nonconsensual in that I said, multiple times, that I didn’t want to have anal sex.” Read the rest

Foolish mortals, Disney's latest Haunted Mansion merchandise is to die for. In 1969, the Haunted Mansion opened at Disneyland and now, fifty years later, they've pulled out all the stops to make us pull out our wallet. From special light-up Grim Grinning Ghosts Mouse ears to two insane artist-made guitars (and everything in between), there are plenty of opportunities to drop some cash at the Resort right now. On my recent trip there, I tried to capture every single Haunted Mansion-related product and store display I could find (I won't share them all here but, if you're curious, I've posted some in Flickr.)Today I want to share with you a couple of items that really caught my eye. The first being these long striped socks featuring the stretching room portraits. So good! My one complaint with them is that they are printed using dye sublimation which means they are polyester, and polyester makes for stinky socks. Because of that, I didn't buy them even though I really wanted to. Luckily, I soon found a way to itch my "stretching room portrait merch" scratch. In a Main Street, U.S.A. store, I found this small double-sided pouch ($19.99) which unzippers to not only show the entirety of the portraits but to make the bag bigger too. How clever! And, as you can see, it has the same art as the socks. I did buy one of those, and my sweetie had to have this door knocker.Hey, while you're here, watch this fun video about the history of the Haunted Mansion. Read the rest

Natalie Martinez offers some good advice, which will not be taken, to Fox News: "Maybe read the screen name aloud before you broadcast it to the world."i'd like to thank the Miami-Dade Public School system for endowing me with the skills necessary to discern this cryptic message— Natalie Martinez (@natijomartinez) October 9, 2019 Read the rest

One of you out there needs your vehicle ("car, truck, van, boat, RV, motorcycle, ATV, golf cart or any 12 volt supplied power source") to roar like Godzilla, I just know it. So, you're welcome. The Godzilla Roar Car Horn is available from Boom Blasters ($39.99-$59.99).Thanks, Maggie!Godzilla image via The Wrap Read the rest

Jaywick started life as a holiday camp for East London's working class families. It became permanently occupied after World War II and is now a cluster of rotting shotgun shacks behind a forlorn Essex beach. It looks from above like an abandoned game of Sim City, but up-close has an eerie League of Gentlemen energy: there's a sandwich bar named "Goodfillers" (with the wrong Mafia movie font) right next to a tattoo parlor named "Pain 'n' Pride," and it starred in a deranged pro-Trump American political ad to warn voters of the dangers of socialism. But it is the British government that just named Jaywick the most deprived place in the U.K.—a title it has already long-held.The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) looked at levels of income, employment, education, health and crime as well as housing services and living environment.Jaywick in Essex, near Clacton-on-Sea, was previously found to be the most deprived in the last two reports in 2010 and 2015.The village, partly made up of a former holiday park, has been visited by the UN special rapporteur for extreme poverty during a fact-finding mission to the UK.Blackpool appears to have finally dethroned Middlesborough as the most deprived big town, according to the BBC's review of the figures, but it's a close-run thing. Congrats, Blackpool!Here's some interviews with Jaywick locals, from 2010:Here's some Jaywick footage from the 1960s: Read the rest

Clearly there's a booming market for CBD out there, as more people discover the relief from pain and stress that it can bring. But not everyone uses it the same way, and that's why cannabidiol products from Common Ground are gaining ground with consumers - not just because they're one of the most trusted sources for CBD, but because of the variety of delivery methods they can provide.If you haven't tried CBD yet, you should know it's a derivative of the cannabis plant that is non-psychoactive. You'll still need to be 18 to purchase CBD products and check your state laws regarding its use. And as with any medicine, check with a doctor before taking it.FREEZE 350mg CBD Topical OilTargeted specifically as muscle pains, this oil contains not just a healthy dose of CBD but a balanced mix of peppermint and camphor. That means an instant jolt of cooling to aching areas, while the CBD works on deep healing. Get your 350 mg bottle for 20% off the retail price.FOCUS 750mg Broad Spectrum CBD Tincture + PeppermintNeed a quick wake up? Each drop of this tincture contains organic peppermint and steam-distilled terpenes from Colorado hemp for quick clarity. Each bottle is now 20% off the MSRP.BALANCE 900mg CBD CapsulesFor a dose of CBD that's easy to regulate, make these soft gels a part of your morning regimen. As with all Common Ground products, there's no THC - just 900 mg of organic CBD extracted from Colorado hemp. Read the rest

Tom the Dancing Bug, IN WHICH Donald Trump gets a hot tip on corruption, tracks it down every path, no matter the consequences!

A Punk Rock Future is a brand new fiction anthology featuring 25 speculative sci-fi and fantasy writers smashing the State in whatever fantastical futuristic form that it might take. Editor Steve Zisson (not to be confused with Steve Zissou) was smart enough to realize that a good short story is already like a punk song—fast, effective, and brutally DIY, with a fistful of meaning that explodes in your face with pure undistilled emotion. It only made sense to slam the two together.The anthology features a setlist of writers with all the scene cred you need, including Nebula Award-winner Sarah Pinkser, who just released her debut novel about an illegal underground music scene; Margaret Killjoy, whose book The Lamb Will Slaughter The Lion was nominated for a Shirley Jackson award; and Marie Vibbert, who has published some forty-plus short stories and also attended the Clarion Writer's Workshop with me (where BoingBoing's own Cory Doctorow was our instructor).We might be trapped in the dystopian cyberpunk hellhole of a future we were promised is children, but another world is possible. So check out A Punk Rock Future, or there's no future for you. Read the rest

Raph Koster (previously) is a games design legend, the designer behind such classics as Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies, a consistently thoughtful and smart theorist of games, and the author of A Theory of Fun, the best book I've ever read about games and gaming.Koster sold his last games startup, Metaplace, to Disney many years ago, cashed out, and has been doing various side projects ever since. But today, he closed financing for "Playable Worlds," his next big game, which will offer something for everyone: "adventuring, PvP, socializing, combat, crafting, or enabling online communities to cross over with each other."Koster calls it the next stage in the evolution of "sandbox games," a category that has existed for so long that there are multiple generations of players who cut their teeth on various iterations from Runescape to Minecraft.Congrats, Raph! “When I look across games today, what I see is games about crafting, fashion play, timed reengagement, social play – basically a whole lot of things that are old tropes out of sandbox MMO play,” he said. “Multiple generations have grown up with sandbox play now – kids who played Runescape are in their 30s, kids who played Minecraft in their 20s, and Roblox is already a decade old. We are seeing demand for ‘sandbox-y’ play all over the place, so I think it is very much of the moment. Heck, when I look at something like GTA Online, what I see is players role-playing cops and bus drivers and whatnot in there. Read the rest

Back in 2015, the Marvin Gaye estate secured a bizarre copyright judgment against Pharrell Williams and Robin Thicke over their hit song "Blurred Lines," in which the Gaye estate argued (successfully) that even though "Blurred Lines" didn't copy Gaye's songs, it copied the feeling of Gaye's music -- that is, that Thicke and Williams made a song that reminded people of Gaye.This was a catastrophically bad ruling, since it required that musicians pretend that they had no musical influences, lest they face a similar lawsuit. People who pointed this out were called "alarmists" by copyright maximalists, who were sure that this decision would not spawn a generation of musical copyright trolls who'd go around shaking down musicians for big payouts from hit songs (every one of which, after all, is related in some way to the songs that came before it).Here we go.Last summer, Lil Nas X ("Old Town Road") and Cardi B ("I Like It") collaborated on a track called "Rodeo." This song did pretty well, and it's a pretty good song, and it managed to catch the attention of Don Lee and Glen Keith DeMeritt III, whose beat "gwenXdonelee4-142" was incorporated into Puretoreefa and Sakrite Duexe's not-very-successful track Broad Day.Lee and DeMeritt have now filed a lawsuit against Lil Nas X and Cardi B, in which they assert that X and B's "Rodeo" has "a substantially similar overall sound and feel" to "Broad Day," because both songs are 142 bpm, and Rodeo has "guitar and wind instruments to evoke a certain aesthetic that is set against hip-hop elements derived from digital drum and bass elements" and "guitar and wind instruments to evoke a certain aesthetic that is set against hip-hop elements derived from digital drum and bass elements" and "the rhythmic guitar part outlining chords is replaced with a single note line playing an ascending then descending scale moving with the chord change" and "Rodeo’s rhythmic guitar part is replaced with a single note line playing ascending and descending scales following the chord progression."That is, the songs are recognizably from the same genre. Read the rest

My favorite pre-roll cone for home filling of joints is the RAW '98 Special.'I've tried the 1 ¼, King Size and 98 Special sizes of cones. The 98 Special splits the difference between the very large joint of a King Size and the harder to fill, but great for .5 gram to .75 gram sized joints, 1 ¼. You can fill the 98 Special to the same volume as a 1 ¼, however, the length and opening of the 98 Special are much more cooperative.The 98 Special cones have a taper that gives them a larger opening hole and longer length, making it easier to get ground weed into versus the 1 ¼. The included cardboard shovel is helpful.The King Size cone is easy to fill but wants to be at least a .7 to 1.25 gram joint.I am eyeballing my measures based on prior experience and not actually weighing out each joint before filling.RAW Classic Natural Unrefined Pre Rolled Cones - 20 Cones Per Pack - 98 Special Size (1 Pack) via Amazon Read the rest

Yesterday I wrote about how having a Tile Bluetooth tracker helped me find my wallet when I lost it at the theater last week. I just found out that Tile has refreshed its product lineup and one of the new devices is called the Tile Sticker. It has an adhesive so you can stick it to items that you want to keep track of. A Tile Sticker 2-pack costs , but right now Amazon has a deal where you can get 4 Tile Stickers and an Echo Dot for . Read the rest

Twitter reports that email address and phone numbers added for security reasons such as two-factor authorization "may have inadvertently been used for advertising purposes."When an advertiser uploaded their marketing list, we may have matched people on Twitter to their list based on the email or phone number the Twitter account holder provided for safety and security purposes. This was an error and we apologize.We cannot say with certainty how many people were impacted by this, but in an effort to be transparent, we wanted to make everyone aware. No personal data was ever shared externally with our partners or any other third parties.User data that Twitter cannot sell ended up in an advertising product that lets Twitter monetize such data without revealing it directly to third parties. Inadvertantly. Read the rest

A reptile breeder in the SF Bay Area says he'd just finished giving a talk and was packing up in the parking lot when thieves stole one of his duffel bags containing four live snakes.The man says the thieves probably thought it was full of something valuable other than, say, four live snakes.Two of the four snakes have been retrieved so far, says Brian Gunday, who told KRON-4 News his beloved serpents were found inside a trash dumpster, probably after the bad guys figured out what was inside the stolen duffel bag:“I went and walked to my car, got in it, backed out. As I backed out I noticed there was some people at the other end of the parking lot where my gear was and I didn’t think anything of it,” he said. Gunday said as he got out of his car, he noticed his duffel bag was gone. Three ball pythons, a baby albino caramel Burmese python and a blue-tailed skink were inside the duffel bag. Gundy believes whoever stole his bag had quite the surprise once they opened it.“They picked it up. It was probably heavy, probably 30 pounds in someone’s mind probably camera equipment or computer gear,” he said.Since the snakes went missing on Saturday, two of them turned up in a dumpster. Gunday’s proudly wearing one of the recovered snakes.“This is shorty. Shorty is a caramel albino Burmese python,” Gunday said. “He’s about three-months-old or so and this snake will grow to 13 or 15 feet long.”The stolen snakes are worth thousands of dollars but gundy says it’s not about the money. Read the rest