Check out the new "Swatch x You" artist edition from longtime Boing Boing pals eBoy, the pixelmasters whose dingbat font FF Peecol birthed our own Jackhammer Jill mascot! With the new Swatch, you get to choose from a variety of eBoy characters in a pre-determined pattern to "design" your own watch. From Swatch:Three designers, never-ending 8-bit paradises. The always-surprising pixel creations by the Berlin-based trio have been on the cover of numerous magazines, ad campaigns and many art galleries. Since 1977, eBoy keeps building, pixel by pixel, the most original digital environments and characters that invite people on a journey of discovery and wonder. Read the rest

On April 20 (4/20, duh), Carl's Jr. will sell a cannabidiol (CBD)-infused burger at one of their Denver, Colorado locations. It's called the Rocky Mountain High: CheeseBurger Delight. Of course, CBD actually doesn't get you high but can provide other benefits as an analgesic, to reduce inflammation, alleviate anxiety, etc. Anyway, the fast food chain insists this isn't a publicity stunt but the beginning of an actual market test. From CNN:"It is something that feels right for the brand," (Carl's Jr. senior vice president of brand marketing Patty Trevino) told CNN Business. "We are all about innovation..."The chain first decided to explore CBD in January, after introducing a product based on another trend. Earlier this year, the chain announced a plant-based alternative to its signature burger in partnership with Beyond Meat."I was sitting down with our head chef Owen Klein, and we were talking about trends," Trevino said. After the Beyond Meat launch, they came up with a wish list that included a CBD product. "We looked at ourselves and said, you know what, let's try."Starting small, in a market where cannabis regulation is "really strong," will allow Carl's Jr. to figure out how to move forward. Testing CBD could give the company an edge over competitors, because most of its locations are in Western states, where recreational cannabis is legal. Read the rest

Sculptor Jud Turner (previously) sends us two new pieces: Deindustry ("a meditation on the industrial divinity of late-stage capitalism, and combines my fear of heights with my fear of over-industrialization") and Scale of Themis ("an imagined tool for the Greek goddess Themis to weigh possible civilizations against each other. The tiny differences in these two -- vertical stackers vs. horizontal placers -- seem to balance out").Deindustry: 40" x 30" x 10"Scale of Themis: 32" x 40" x 8" Read the rest

Late last month, Rep. Andy Barr [R-KY] "invited" Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to visit the coal miners in his Appalachian district, by way of rebuttal to her brilliant response to the charge that the Green New Deal was a rich, city-person's luxury, taking no account of working, poor and rural people.AOC took him up on the invitation, saying "It’s a complete injustice the cancer levels that a lot of these communities are confronting. We have to plan a future for all of our communities, no matter what. Failure to plan is planning to fail and I feel like we’ve been failing Appalachian communities for a very long time and it’s time to turn that ship around."Now, Barr has rescinded the invitation, blaming it on her defense of Rep Ilhan Omar, who has been smeared by Republicans and establishment Democrats with the racist slur that she supports Islamic terror. Barr said he was dismayed by her "lack of civility."In response, AOC tweeted: "GOP’s getting scared that up close, their constituents will realize I’m fighting harder for their healthcare than their own Reps 🙂." Read the rest

The video ad for this smart mug, for sale on Amazon, is either brilliant or an SNL parody.I can not embed the video, you have to click to the Amazon product page to load it.(Thanks, Jolie!)**UPDATE** A kind reader found an embeddable copy, and it has subtitles! Read the rest

I get a lot of mileage out of The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai's "Evil! Pure and simple from the Eighth Dimension!" but Time Bandits "It's evil! Don't touch it!" certainly gets put to frequent use. Read the rest

Yes, thank you, I know guacamole is extra.Sergeant Nibbles at the ready.This Squirrel Eating an Avocado[via] Read the rest

The IG Meme Union Local 69-420 is pretty damned lulzy, but the organizers are dead serious about creating a union that will negotiate on behalf of memers with Instagram and other tech platforms that exploit them by alienating their labor.Though the union won't qualify under National Labor Review Board standards, it can still unite its members for collective action against companies that screw them over, just as the Freelancers Union does -- and as Paul Praindo, a spokesperson on the organizing committee says, "We stand in firm support of others who are working to organize anti-labor industries. We think these movements mark the beginning of a labor renaissance." It may sound like a joke, but the IG Meme Union is seeking to organize a group of underpaid, precarious workers skilled in easy-to-understand, spreadable public communications who have hundreds of thousands, or even millions of followers. A few things the IG Meme Union wants: a more open and transparent appeals process for account bans; a direct line of support with Instagram, or a dedicated liaison to the meme community; and a better way to ensure that original content isn’t monetized by someone else. “Having a public and clear appeal process is a big thing,” Praindo said. “People appeal now and get turned down, and they won’t know why.” (In a statement, an Instagram spokesperson said, “Each week we review millions of reports and there are times when we make mistakes.” She also said the company would soon be rolling out an option to appeal post removals.)So far, the union’s message has been well received by the broader meme community. Read the rest

Just what we needed, said exactly no one.

Grether Labs's Science Fiction Plot Generator can sure pick 'em: "You are friends with a talking fireplace, and you are working to solve this ancient puzzle before the creatures consume you"; "You are a cyan-eyed cartographer who is finding the awful truth beneath this false utopia, and who is struggling with the terribly thick underbrush and terrible isolation"; "You are friends with a penniless government agent, and you are working to gather the spice before the computer system becomes self-aware"; "You are a science fiction writer and activist who has been made obsolete by a small perl script." Read the rest

As ongoing and growing measles outbreaks flare up around America some New York City anti-vaxxers are suing to block last-minute emergency measures city leaders are taking to slow the spread of infectious disease.The anti-vaxxers are relying on the repetition of known bad science to carry the day.Ars Technica:Five unnamed mothers in New York City filed a lawsuit Monday, April 15, seeking to block the city's mandatory vaccination order in areas hit by a massive measles outbreak that has raged since last October.City health officials announced the order earlier this month as they declared a public health emergency over the outbreak, which has sickened 329 people so far—mostly children. According to the city's order, all unvaccinated people in affected ZIP codes must receive the Measles, Mumps, and Rubella (MMR) vaccine, prove immunity, or have a valid medical exemption. Violators could face a fine of $1,000.In the lawsuit, the mothers claim that the outbreak does not constitute a dangerous epidemic (though the virus can cause severe complications and even death) and that the city's orders are "arbitrary and capricious." Moreover, they allege that the MMR vaccine has significant safety concerns (this is false; side effects beyond mild, temporary discomfort are exceedingly rare) and that the order violates their religious freedom.The lawsuit is just the latest example of anti-vaccine parents challenging the legality of public health officials' efforts to curb measles cases—which are mounting at an unprecedented rate across the United States. As the mothers filed their lawsuit Monday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention updated this year's nationwide measles count, reporting a whopping 555 cases confirmed from 20 states. Read the rest

It's been 111 years since a subdivision of the Denver suburb of Cherry Hills was given the name of "Swastika Acres," and now, finally, the name has been changed to "Old Cherry Hills," thanks to an official act of the local council.The Swastika Acres subdivision was named in 1908 by the Denver Swastika Land Co., well before the Nazis co-opted the symbol and forever changed its meaning. At the time, the swastika remained a common sight across the Southwest, used by Native Americans for centuries. “The right thing to do”: Cherry Hills Village to officially rename Swastika Acres subdivision [Sam Tabachnik/Denver Post](Thanks, Kent KB!) Read the rest

The Intercept has just released "A Message From the Future," a short science fiction movie narrated by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and drawn by Molly Crabapple, describing the coming "Green New Deal Decade," when Americans pulled together and found prosperity, stability, solidarity and full employment through a massive, nationwide effort to refit the country to be resilient to climate shocks and stem the tide of global climate change.It's an astonishingly moving and beautiful piece, and deploys a tactic that has been surprisingly effective at mobilising large groups of people: creating a retrospective describing the successful project to inspire people to make it a success. Famously, this is the tactic that Jeff Bezos insists on at Amazon for the launch of new internal projects: ambitious internal entrepreneurs must submit a memo describing the project as a fait accompli, and if the description is compelling and exciting enough, they get the resources to make it happen. But it's not just Amazon: as anthropologist Gabriella Coleman describes in Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy, her seminal 2014 study of Anonymous, this is how Anon ops get started: an individual Anon makes a video announcing victory in some op that hasn't taken place yet, and if enough other anons are inspired by it to make it happen, then it happens.In her article accompanying the video, Naomi Klein describes the audacity of other projects on this scale, like FDR's New Deal, and how much skepticism they were met with at their outset -- and how, as the vision caught on, it spread like wildfire through the population, so that something that was once impossible became inevitable. Read the rest

“Environmentalists say the bear could have lost its bearings while drifting on an ice floe.”

Sidewalk Labs is the division of Alphabet/Google that builds "smart city" technology; their most ambitious project to date is a massive privatised city-within-a-city planned for Toronto's lakeshore -- a project that received secretly approval to be much larger than was announced, a fact that Sidewalk lied about.Now, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association has filed suit against all three levels of government -- the city, the province and the country -- over the Toronto Sidewalk Labs project, seeking a judgment that the project will violate Canadians' privacy rights under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.Sidewalk Labs argues that the privacy issues are being taken care of through its contract with Waterfront Toronto, a body chartered by the national, provincial and municipal governments. CCLA says that Waterfront Toronto does not have the authority to sign away peoples' privacy rights. Waterfront Toronto is certainly a toothless watchdog, and a string of high-profile resignations from its advisory board have highlighted the frustration that public-minded advocates feel with the organisation's unwillingness to take the public interest seriously.People interested in fighting the Sidewalk Labs project can follow #BlockSidewalk, which is organising a series of community meetings and other events to put the brakes on the project. “You can argue that you consent when you put Alexa in your home or connect your electronics to your online accounts,” Michael Bryant, executive director of the CCLA, told me over the phone. “It’s another thing to say you consent when you walk from one block in Toronto to the next.”Canada Is Getting Sued Over Sidewalk Labs’ ‘Smart City’ In Toronto [Jordan Pearson/Motherboard] Read the rest

Yale scientists have managed to restore some biological function to the brains of dead pigs killed in a slaughterhouse 4 hours before the experiment. Yep, that's it. The most 2019 sentence I've read or written.ABOVE: The image on the left shows the brains of pigs that were untreated for 10 hours after death, with neurons appearing as green, astrocytes as red and cell nuclei as blue. The image on the right shows cells in the same area of brains that, four hours after death, were hooked up to a system that the Yale University researchers call BrainEx. [Photo courtesy Stefano G. Daniele and Zvonimir Vrselja, Sestan Laboratory, Yale School of Medicine]The Yale study was published in the journal Nature. From a story aired today on NPR:The Yale University research team is careful to say that none of the brains regained the kind of organized electrical activity associated with consciousness or awareness. Still, the experiment described Wednesday in the journal Nature showed that a surprising amount of cellular function was either preserved or restored.The implications of this study have staggered ethicists, as they contemplate how this research should move forward and how it fits into the current understanding of what separates the living from the dead."It was mind-blowing," says Nita Farahany, who studies the ethics of emerging technologies at Duke Law School. "My initial reaction was pretty shocked. It's a groundbreaking discovery, but it also really fundamentally changes a lot of what the existing beliefs are in neuroscience about the irreversible loss of brain function once there is deprivation of oxygen to the brain."The brain is extremely sensitive to a lack of oxygen and shuts down quickly. Read the rest

In advance of Cobra Kai's season 2, we get this fantastic spoof.When you think about 1984, you’re thinking about the fight between Daniel LaRusso and Johnny Lawrence. It was the biggest event of the year. It was the fight that’s gone down in history as both one of the dirtiest moments in sports history and the greatest comeback in fighting. Whichever side you land on, people are still talking about the All Valley Karate Championship 35 years later. Read the rest

Holy smokes! Air Royale is fun! FUN! FUUUUUUUUUUUUN!Two-person teams take to the skies and try to be the last in the air. The storm closes in from the sides, and above. Health and weapons upgrades abound, for those daring enough to collect them. This is a wild dogfighting free-for-all in the sky!You can now pet other people's pets as of v8.40. pic.twitter.com/z2Xm1Ut1hm— Ben Walker (@bnwkr) April 17, 2019 Epic has also added functionality to allow in-game players to stroke other players back-bling 'pets' with a motion that looks more like telling the pet to buzz off. Read the rest

One of the most memorable moments of the movie that will always be known to me as Star Wars is now in LEGO.I had to wonder if people just went around kissing strangers for good luck in the Republic. This scene was awesome, it deserves to be immortalized in LEGO.The Han Solo chases stormtroopers down hallways scene will come with 1000 extra stormies, in the event you want to re-enact the re-releases.LEGO Star Wars: A New Hope Death Star Escape 75229 Building Kit , New 2019 (329 Piece) via Amazon Read the rest

Ola Bini is a Swedish free/open source software developer who lives in Quito, Ecudaor; as he prepared to depart for a long-planned (and previously publicly announced) vacation in Japan, he was seized by Ecuadorean police, who claimed he was fleeing the country after the arrest of Julian Assange; authorities had a warrant for a "Russian hacker" (Bini is neither Russian, nor a hacker) and they have held him without reading him his rights, offering him a translator, or allowing him to contact his lawyer.Bini is a developer for Thoughtworks, a global, justice-oriented IT consultancy, and has contributed to many privacy and security tools, including OTR. Bini is still in custody, being held on absurd charges and on the thinnest of evidence.The charges against him, when they were finally made public, are tenuous. Ecuador’s general prosecutor has stated that Bini was accused of “alleged participation in the crime of assault on the integrity of computer systems” and attempts to destabilize the country. The “evidence” seized from Ola’s home that Ecuadorean police showed journalists to demonstrate his guilt was nothing more than a pile of USB drives, hard drives, two-factor authentication keys, and technical manuals: all familiar property for anyone working in his field.The Ecuadorean Authorities Have No Reason to Detain Free Software Developer Ola Bini [Danny O'Brien/EFF](Image: @olabini) Read the rest

Phenomenal Los Angeles-area photographer Star Foreman visited Disneyland's Dapper Day. The resultant images are wonderful.View her entire slideshow at the LA Weekly!Dapper dude with the moustache is Marquis Howell II, of the wonderful Marquis and the Rhythm Howlers. Read the rest

One major tactical consideration for Democrats in selecting their candidate for the 2020 presidential election is whether that candidate can garner support in flippable red states, like North Carolina: that's why it's so important that Bernie Sanders outraised every other would-be Democrat nominee in NC this year, bringing in $48,000 (his nearest competitor, Pete Buttigieg, raised $32K, while Kamala Harris raised $29K and Elizabeth Warren raised $20K) (I am a donor to both the Sanders and Warren campaigns). Sanders also outraised every other Democrat nationally and leads in polls with key traditional Democrat voting groups, including Hispanics. (Image: Gage Skidmore< CC-BY-SA) (via Naked Capitalism) Read the rest

British Columbia -- ground zero for the opioid epidemic in Canada and long a principal point of ingress for heroin -- pioneered the harm-reduction approach with the world's first safe injection sites; now addiction researcher and MD Mark Tyndall wants to go further and end accidental overdoses from fentanyl and other additives by giving registered addicts access to an armored, biometrically controlled "opioid vending machine" that dispenses prescribed amounts of hydromorphone pills without subjecting addicts -- whose lives are often chaotic due to homelessness and the need to steal or prostitute themselves to avoid dope-sickness -- to a bureaucratic process at a pharmacy or clinic.Tyndall points out that the opioid epidemic is not like other epidemics, which slow down after the vulnerable population is killed off -- rather, opioids keep finding their way into the hands (and veins) of fresh addicts, and the body count is mounting.Tyndall came up with his proposal spontaneously, while giving a talk at an overdose symposium in Victoria, BC, and the idea was spotted by Corey Yantha of Nova Scotia's Dispension Industries, a startup that makes armored, biometric legal weed vending machines (Canada legalized marijuana last year).Tyndall's idea has been divisive. It may be the reason he was fired from his long tenure as executive director at the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control. But it also attracted $1.4M from Health Canada for a phase-one trial, partly on the strength of Tyndall's exemplary record as a harm reduction/public health activist during the AIDS epidemic. Read the rest

When Rivers Were Trails is a "Native-themed decision-based RPG" based on the classic Apple ][+ game "Oregon Trail," in which you play an 1890 Anishinaabeg person who has been forced off your land in Fond du Lac, Minnesota and must migrate through the northwest to California.The game was created by Elizabeth LaPensée -- an Anishinaabe game creator from Baawaating -- and a team of more than 20 indigenous writers and artists, including visual artist Weshoyot Alvitre and composers Supaman and Michael Charette. LaPensée says that she used to joke that she wanted an Oregon Trail-style tee with the slogan "You have died of colonization," and that was the germ of the idea that she pitched to Dr. Nichlas Emmons for the Indian Land Tenure Foundation's project to develop K-12 Lessons of Our Land curriculum.The writers used drew on their own families' stories of displacement to craft the narrative and interactions in the game. This is a sovereign game funded by the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians, making the gameplay considerably. The game goes so far as to end by warning the player that people are being scaled in southern California, which was true of the time because there were still bounties for Native scalps in the 1890s. The player is forced to choose which way they want to go in a final decision which leads to different endings and life paths. All of the Indigenous creatives involved wanted to make sure the gritty but real truth was included. Read the rest

The metric is dubious — traffic to Know Your Meme entries normalized by Google Trends — but what a journey it's been.Jessi Slaughter (previously) — a child sexually victimized by notorious scene creep Dahvie Vanity, then bullied by his fans and made famous by her late father's 2010 webcam rant ("you done goofed") — is conspiciously the first to break a million views at KYM. (Dahvie was inoculated from consequences as a result of media amusement at the situation; he got to freely enjoy the 2010s and is still at large.) Read the rest

The EU Copyright Directive was voted through the Parliament because a handful of MEPs accidentally pushed the wrong button; this week, it passed through the Council -- representing the national governments of the EU -- and as it did, the German government admitted what opponents had said all along: even though the Directive doesn't mention copyright filters for all human expression (photos, videos, text messages, code, Minecraft skins, etc etc), these filters are inevitable.The Directive's proponents had insisted all along that filters were not going to be required, and accused opponents like me of fearmongering. But it was clear from the outset that the goal of the Directive -- that no user should be permitted to upload anything that infringes copyright, even momentarily -- could only be accomplished with filters. After all, if I pass a law requiring you to produce a large, grey, four-legged African land mammal with two tusks and a trunk, you are going to go out and find an elephant -- even if I say, "Please avoid making it an elephant if at all possible."And right on cue, as soon as the Directive was passed, European Commissioners who'd argued for the Directive and insisted that filters would not be required changed their tunes, saying that filters would be inevitable. The French government -- who were so committed to the Directive that they dropped their opposition to a Russian gas pipeline to get it passed -- also immediately announced that they would pass a law mandating filters. Read the rest

They pressed on through the blasted heath, as burnt to ash as the nights were long and dark and cold enough to crack the life out of stone. Walked past the cauterized ribcages of what might have been sheep. He held the boy shivering against him and felt the warm of each frail breath in the dark.Something woke him. He lay listening. Clattering, like insects. Underscored by an anxious mechanical hum, the voice of no beast but that which man had made to hunt himself. He rose slowly and when he looked back toward the road the first of them were already coming into view. God, he whispered. He reached and shook the boy, keeping his eyes on the road. They came prancing through the ash. Metal and lithe. Canine parodies jerking their limbs and their headless shoulders at the dead threshold of perception.Dont look back, he whispered, pulling the boy. The boy was frozen with fear. It's all right. We have to run. They all but fell into the brake tearing through it. Something snarled around his ankle. He grabbed the boy and fell to ground with his arm around him. The pack came to a sudden halt, yellow digitigrade legs shuddering to a halt. Maybe a hundred feet from them. The boy looked back.Then silence. The sound of the dogs listening for them. Muttered electronic croaks that might be a perverse speech. Shh, he said. Shh. They waited. Then with a lurch the motors whined into life and the clanking mindless beasts pressed on. Read the rest

James "New Aesthetic" Bridle (previously) is several kinds of provocateur and artist (who can forget his autonomous vehicle trap, to say nothing of his groundbreaking research on the violent Youtube Kids spammers who came to dominate the platform with hour+ long cartoons depicting cartoon characters barfing and murdering all over each other?).So there's no one better poised to comment on the way that the meaning of images is changing thanks to networked digital tools that have created an "image-soaked culture" where the meaning of those images can change from moment to moment and person to person?Bridle has created a new radio series for BBC Radio 4: it's called New Ways of Seeing, a riff on John Berger's seminal 1972 art-criticism series Ways of Seeing. The show kicks off with profiles of artists like Ingrid Burrington (previously) and Trevor Paglen (previously), whose work reveals the hidden-in-plain-sight invisible architecture of the internet, from unassuming buildings that house major internet backbone exchanges to the undersea cables that service them. Then it gets even more interesting, with work on artificial intelligence narratives designed to change the perception of women to 3D printing as a means of reclaiming looted and lost artifacts taken by the Gulf Wars. In the first episode of New Ways of Seeing, I meet artists such as Ingrid Burrington and Trevor Paglen, who explore this hidden architecture of the internet. In New York, Burrington takes us inside 32 Avenue of the Americas, an art deco temple to telecommunications dating from 1932, when it was the headquarters of AT&T’s transatlantic network. Read the rest

Amazon's search results for basic consumer electronics are dominated by no-name brands with hundreds of obviously-fake 5-star reviews. The company claims to put a lot of effort into stopping this, but few are apparent, leaving the world to speculate at Amazon's plans for the market at hand: people who search vaguely for cheap things and buy whatever the algorithm picks for them. I wondered if Amazon is permitting it because it doesn't want low-information consumers to know what low-margin items are reliable, but that seems awfully cynical, doesn't it? The idea it's cultivating a "trust hole" it can later plug with Amazon Basics or other decent-quality house brands just seems too mwa-ha-ha-ha conspiratorial.Anyway, the Beeb interviewed some of the folks who crank out fake Amazon reviews in return for free stuff or money. Sounds like a fun gig!"I have written reviews from numbing creams to eBooks to downloadable independent films," he says. "I think it's bad - but I think everyone's doing it," says Mr Taylor, describing himself as "cynical". "Since I started doing it I tell my family and friends not to trust reviews. If you are going to buy something you should do more research than look at a couple of five-star reviews on Amazon."He says writers are paid to buy the product and then leave a review, meaning the review can be verified.Et tu, numbing creams? Read the rest

Check out this video of artist TerraTerrific using the miniature 8bitdo Zero game controller as a bluetooth hotkey gadget on the iPad, executing commands like "undo" and switching tools without having to interrupt the painting hand. I bought one of those 8bitdo zero controllers to use for clip studio shortcuts on the iPad and uh...I dig it. pic.twitter.com/mBhjUjJq9g— 🍰That's a thing y'know and it's gotta hurt.🍰 (@TerraTerrific) April 16, 2019Unlike a standard bluetooth keyboard or full-size controller, the 8bitdo Zero fits easy in the palm. And unlike specialized art gadgets, it's cheap.I reviewed it a while back. It's nice, but so small it's difficult to play with, and a pain to pair. So this is a better use for it! Read the rest

This morning, the British Transport Police has ordered Virgin Media to switch off the wifi to some undisclosed London Underground stations in a bid to make it harder for climate protesters to organise their activities.It's an echo of 2011's shut-down of cellular service in BART stations to deter protests over an incident in which transit police murdered a Black man.London's climate protesters are organised under the banner of Extinction Rebellion (previously), one of the world's most effective and important climate change action groups. 300 Extinction Rebellion protesters have been arrested in London this week, as they have shut down "main roads, bridges, and Tube stations." Extinction Rebellion's demands include zero emissions by 2025. “In the interests of safety and to prevent and deter serious disruption to the London Underground network, British Transport Police has taken the decision to restrict passenger Wi-Fi connectivity at Tube stations,” a British Transport Police spokesperson said in a statement to The Verge. “This follows intelligence that Extinction Rebellion protesters intend to cause disruption to Tube services during Wednesday 17 April.” UK police shut off Wi-Fi in London Tube stations to deter climate protestors [James Vincent/The Verge](Image: Extinction Rebellion) Read the rest

Who wouldn't want to buy a telescreen from Facebook, the least-trusted privacy merchant on Earth, so that they may be placed around the house? The obviously despised Facebook Portal will now be half-price, reports Matt Navarra. Details:No, you’re not misremembering the details from that young adult dystopian fiction you’re reading — Facebook really does sell a video chat camera adept at tracking the faces of you and your loved ones. Now, you too can own Facebook’s poorly timed foray into social hardware for the low, low price of $99. That’s a pretty big price drop considering that the Portal, introduced less than six months ago, debuted at $199.People think this product's failure moment will be along the lines of "woops we recorded petabytes of footage of you pooping" but it won't be that, it will be more abstract, like a patent for "correlations in facial chroma averages and political sentiment analysis" or some other horrible thing with little line-art drawings of the Portal right there in the filing diagrams.The thing about Facebook Apology Tour Moments is that they come from things Facebook itself can't anticipate, because you never told it explicitly that it couldn't do something extremely specific and strange with aggregated data. The reason Facebook can't understand why it is bad is because the people who run it can't understand what's good about human beings. Read the rest

Twitter is appalling, but I finally found an account I like: Can You Pet The Dog? A catalog of pettable and non-pettable dogs in video games. Manual input resulting in visual representation of petting is required for affirmation.As noted in the latest tweet, you cannot pet the dog in Shadow of The Collossus. You can pet the horse. Read the rest

Tom the Dancing Bug, IN WHICH little Donald the boy president and his imaginary publicist John take America on a magical journey to authoritarianism

The boys, Ed Piskor, Jim Rugg, and Tom Scioli got hold of a couple animation cels from the classic anime and couldn't help but show them off. A fun glimpse into the analogue way of producing animation. Come for the cels, stay for the Katsuhiro Otomo storyboard books.Also, in case you missed the Cartoonist Kayfabe coverage of the Akira manga:Subscribe to the Cartoonist Kayfabe YouTube channel for more vids celebrating the medium of comics. Read the rest

Here is a wonderful tl;dw meme recap of the premiere episode of the 8th season of Game of Thrones, by chrysreviews. There are 260 frames here. A work of genius by a fan, don't sue please.Spoilers below...................Really, spoilers. So don't look if you haven't seen it yet...................You have been warned.Okay. Again, @chrysreviews made 'em.The whole creation is here, like 250+ frames, and embedded below.tl;dw Game of Thrones Season 8, Episode 1 Recap[via IMGUR] Read the rest

“Sing us a soooonng, you’re the pianohorse”

As the world mourns what was lost in the devastating fire at Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, the country's elite have pledged nearly half a billion euros towards the rebuild. Apple CEO Tim Cook tweeted this morning that the company will contribute a yet-unspecified amount as well. Yashar Ali, a writer for New York Magazine and one of the best people to follow on Twitter, noted that the rebuilding of Notre Dame will be well-funded and shared the GoFundMe for the three historically Black churches in a single Louisiana parish that were destroyed by fire over the course of two weeks. 21-year-old Holden Matthews has been charged with hate crimes in the arson attacks. The GoFundMe has a goal of $1.8 million dollars to cover the cost of rebuilding. Ali's Twitter plea went viral this afternoon, bringing in close to $300,000 in a few short hours. You can help the rebuilding effort in Louisiana by donating HERE. Read the rest

* whether they deserve one or not

If you're an entrepreneur, you're not just hungry for success. You're hungry for knowledge, the insights that can lead to bigger and better ideas and ways to implement them. That knowledge is out there in the bestselling biz books that have changed the game over the years. There's just one problem: In a fast-paced lifestyle, who has the time to read them?That's where Readitfor.me comes in.It's a reading service built specifically for people who need the big ideas boiled down into a compact presentation. In 12-minute animated videos and summaries, Readitfor.me gives you the big takeaways from bestselling, fact-packed books like The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, To Sell is Human, Hooked, Steve Jobs, Leaders Eat Last and 10% Happier. The complete library has over 300 essential guidebooks for the business world, with more being added all the time.You can get a one-year subscription to the Readitfor.me Standard Plan for $29 today - a full 87% off the list price. Read the rest

Neal Shusterman's Scythe explores a post-mortal dystopia where everything is perfect except humanity.Our nascent 'Cloud' has developed into 'the Thunderhead' and all of humanities problems are solved! The Thunderhead is an AI that has only our best intentions at heart! Amazon Cloud Services Rejoice! Quantum computing or some advancements in cloud technology have allowed for the elimination of human death! Go figure! Aged folk can reboot into new younger bodies! Accidental deaths simply render people 'dead-ish' until they are revived in a new bod.Unsurprisingly, humanity not motivated by want or finite time on the planet becomes pretty boring. To add the edge back into life Scythes are created. This group of humans randomly permanently kill otherwise-immortal humans. The idea is that random death will keep folks aware that their end could come. This service is for some reason viewed as critical for the survival of the species and Scythes are the one aspect of life not controlled by the Thunderhead.Humans have never proven good at running things for themselves.I had a fantastic time reading this book, look forward to the second installment in the series, and was disappointed to learn I'd have to wait until November for the finale.Scythe by Neal Shusterman via Amazon Read the rest

Today, Alberta is having one of its bitterest, hardest-fought elections, with far-right/xenophobic elements on the upswing through the United Conservative Party, led by Jason Kenney, who has been awfully cavalier about the white nationalists in his party.On the literal eve of the election, Twitter suddenly -- and without explanation -- removed the accounts of many prominent progressive activists who'd been campaigning against the UCP. My money is on the Twitter suspension system being gamed by far-right elements: as neo-Nazis and other xenophobes have been removed from Twitter for violating the company's policies, they have become experts in walking right up to the line for removal, and then goading their opponents into crossing that line. They've also mastered Twitter's complaints procedure, figuring out how to phrase a complaint to maximize the chances that Twitter will take action on it. They're basically the Nazi dice-lawyers of Twitter.And the thing is, the more account-suspension policies Twitter and the other platforms put in place, the better these trolls will get at abusing them. People who want to criticize Nazis are good at pointing out what's wrong with Naziism, while Nazis are increasingly skilled at mastering the baroque, secretive process of getting your opponents' accounts suspended from the big platforms.And as the bannable offenses mount, Twitter and the other platforms are having to adjudicate an ever-longer docket of complaints from dolphins who've been caught in their tuna-nets, meaning that it can take days or even weeks to get unblocked after the trolls have managed to get you suspended. Read the rest

The US Board on Geographic Names has officially renamed Runaway Negro Creek on Savannah, Georgia's Skidaway Island. It's now called Freedom Creek. Last year, State Sen. Lester Jackson sponsored the resolution to get rid of the offensive name. According to WJCL, the creek was originally "named after slaves that escaped after the Civil War." Read the rest

Baking great tasting, and looking sourdough bread with freshly milled wheat is only complicated if you are used to market-bought wheat. Like we all are.These two loaves are pretty identical, the only difference in their composition was perhaps 1 tablespoon of extra water in the loaf that got the dusted linen crust. I eyeball water in the measuring cups and do not weigh anything.I used 2 cups of King Arthur bread flour and 1 1/2 cups of the Hard Red Winter Wheat supplied by Grist and Toll for each loaf, as well as 1 1/2 cups of water, 1/3 cup of well-fed starter and 1 1/2 tsp of Trader Joe's fine sea salt.I find the Grist and Toll wheat slows fermentation down. Everything I read suggested fresh wheat would speed things up, by my experience showed that more patience and more time are needed. In addition to giving the first ferment more time, close to 18 hours rather than a normal 12-14, I also engaged the use of my Rancilio Ms Silvia espresso machine. I put the fermenting glass bowls of dough on top of Silvia, and her warming tray helps kick the yeast into high gear.Fresh whole wheat absorbs water differently than market-sourced wheat. 'Hydration' or ratio of flour to water in the dough is something a baker can pay a lot of attention to if said baker wants. I don't bother, but you do need enough water in the dough to get everything to stick together. Read the rest

In September, Bigfoot enthusiasts in upstate New York head to Whitehall for the annual Sasquatch Calling Festival, including a contest to mimic the creature's telltale vocalizations --- from howls and yelps to growls and moans. ESPN visited the tournament. Unfortunately, the winner isn't the person who successfully summons the sasquatch. Not yet anyway.(via The Anomalist) Read the rest

Pete Warden (previously) is one of my favorite commentators on machine learning and computer science; yesterday he gave a keynote at the IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference, on the ways that hardware specialization could improve machine learning: his main point is that though there's a wealth of hardware specialized for creating models, we need more hardware optimized for running models.I’ve saved what I expect may be my most controversial request until last. The typical design process I’ve seen from hardware teams is that they will look at some existing ML workloads, note that almost all of the time goes into just a few operations, and so design an accelerator that speeds up those critical-path ops.This sounds fine in principle, but when an accelerator like that is integrated into a full system it often fails to live up to its potential. The problem is that even though most of the compute for almost all models does go into a handful of common operations, there are hundreds of others that often appear. Almost every model I see has some of these, and they’re almost always different from network to network. A good example is ‘non-max suppression’ in MobileSSD and similar object detection models, where we need some very specific and custom operations to merge the many bounding boxes that are output by the model into just a few coherent final results. This doesn’t require very much raw compute, but it does take a lot of logic, and is hard to express except as general C++ code. Read the rest

Back in 2017, the Norwegian Consumer Council published a damning report on the privacy leaks from kids' "smart watches," a parade of horrors that included allowing unauthorized third parties to trace your kid's location, and also to covertly eavesdrop through the watches' microphones and bark creepy orders at them through their speakers.A year later, Pen Test Partners audited the security of the popular Misafe kid smart-watch and guess what? It was a fucking dumpster-fire, too. Six months later, Pen Test Partners checked kids "smart watches" like those from Gator and they were still fucking dumpster-fires. The accumulated evidence was finally enough to prompt a recall of Safe-Kid One, one of the terrible watches.You'd think that this would be a wake-up call for the kids' "smart watch" sector. You'd be wrong.This week, nearly two years after the first of these reports were published, Pen Test Partners has audited Tictoctrack, a kids' "smart watch" retailed in Australia, and you will: never. guess. what. they. found.Tictoctrack is a rebadged Gator watch -- the ones that had to fix a glaring API flaw that Pen Test Partners published on in January -- but because it has its own back-end, one that keeps all kid-data onshore in Australia, it has its own grotesque security defects.Ticktoctrack paid a Sri Lankan company called Nibaya to develop a new mobile front-end, and hosts the servers with an Australian firm called 6YS. The backend's API allows for wideranging access to all users' data with no meaningful authentication (you need a valid user/pass combo, but you can generate one of these by buying a watch and intitializing it, and thereafter you can access all of the users' accounts). Read the rest

Well, sort of. Paleontologists have identified a 430 million-year-old fossil of a multi-tentacled sea creature as a new species and dubbed it Sollasina cthulhu after HP Lovecraft's Great Old One. From Yale University:The new cthulhu, Sollasina, had 45 tentacle-like tube feet, which it used to crawl along the ocean floor and capture food. The creature was small, about the size of a large spider. It was found in the Herefordshire Lagerstätte in the United Kingdom, a site that has proven to be a trove of fossilized ancient sea animals.“In this paper, we report a new echinoderm — the group that includes sea urchins, sea cucumbers, and sea stars — with soft-tissue preservation,” said Yale paleontologist Derek Briggs, a co-author of the study. “This new species belongs to an extinct group called the ophiocistioids. With the aid of high-resolution physical-optical tomography, we describe the species in 3D, revealing internal elements of the water vascular system that were previously unknown in this group and, indeed, in nearly all fossil echinoderms.” Read the rest

One of my shoulders stopped working very well about three years ago. Hanging from a pull-up and chin-up bar helps me a lot.I was waking up in the middle of the night unable to move my right arm. Then my arm started to ache all day and I was already suffering a greatly reduced range of motion. A physical therapist told me that my sleeping position, on my right side, matched with my 8-12 hours a day standing in front of a laptop and typing, was to blame.I can't stop typing, and the frustration of trying to change my sleeping position is a monster. As if an aching dominant arm's shooting pains when moved were not hardship enough, running on to little sleep is a whole other category of horrendous. Issues start to compound. I was spending a lot of time wondering if this was now my life.My physical therapist told me to hang from my chin-up bar, palms out. Just to hang there and to try and do it for 2 minutes a day. The first time I tried it, I didn't have the strength to even hang there for 5 seconds. I could do chin-ups with my palms facing in no problem, but just hanging on the bar palms out caused the impinged arm to start shaking and trembling. Over the course of a few days, I worked up to 30 seconds and maybe up to one minute hangs.My arm felt better.My arm improves for longer and longer periods of time after hanging. Read the rest

Following up on Xeni's post from earlier today: For their 12,000-word, beautifully reported story on how Facebook's top executives coped with 15 months of mounting crises, Wired's Nicholas Thompson and Fred Vogelstein spoke with 65 current and former insider sources, producing a gripping account of how the people who built the worst thing to ever happen to the web coped when the world woke up one day and figured this all out.It's a portrait of a company that can't escape its DNA, a company birthed with the proposition that it would let Harvard students nonconsensually rate the fuckability of undergrads, now blossomed into a 2.3 billion user juggernaut whose top management still operate on the ethos of violating their promises to their users, mouthing empty apologies, and moving on.It's also a portrait in official incompetence, as grandstanding politicians in the US and the UK have demanded that Something Be Done about Facebook but who were totally underinformed about what Facebook is, how it operates, and what might actually be done about it (this is partly because, with few exceptions, lawmakers' staffers are paid so little that they take second and third jobs, leaving lawmakers to go into crucial hearings almost totally unbriefed).Not a day goes by that we don't learn something new and horrible about Facebook. The company has accumulated so much scandal-debt that it will continue to default on that even if it were to clean house today (an impossibility) there would be new scandals breaking for years to come, detailing old misdeeds, each slimier than the last. Read the rest