Microsoft has a DRM-locked ebook store that isn't making enough money, so they're shutting it down and taking away every book that every one of its customers acquired effective July 1.Customers will receive refunds.This puts the difference between DRM-locked media and unencumbered media into sharp contrast. I have bought a lot of MP3s over the years, thousands of them, and many of the retailers I purchased from are long gone, but I still have the MP3s. Likewise, I have bought many books from long-defunct booksellers and even defunct publishers, but I still own those books.When I was a bookseller, nothing I could do would result in your losing the book that I sold you. If I regretted selling you a book, I didn't get to break into your house and steal it, even if I left you a cash refund for the price you paid. People sometimes treat me like my decision not to sell my books through Amazon's Audible is irrational (Audible will not let writers or publisher opt to sell their books without DRM), but if you think Amazon is immune to this kind of shenanigans, you are sadly mistaken. My books matter a lot to me. I just paid $8,000 to have a container full of books shipped from a storage locker in the UK to our home in LA so I can be closer to them. The idea that the books I buy can be relegated to some kind of fucking software license is the most grotesque and awful thing I can imagine: if the publishing industry deliberately set out to destroy any sense of intrinsic, civilization-supporting value in literary works, they could not have done a better job. Read the rest

At the end of 2019 first quarter fundraising for his campaign, would-be Democratic Party 2020 Presidential nominee Bernie Sanders has raised $18.2 million from 525,000 small-money donors (I'm one of them; I also gave to the Elizabeth Warren campaign).The average donation was $20.Sanders is the fundraising frontrunner, beating out Kamala Harris ($12m) and Pete Buttigieg ($7m) (Beto O'Rourke's campaign has not released its totals yet).Sanders' campaign said the makeup of their donors puts the Vermont independent in a good position to continue raking in contributions as the campaign heats up and they begin to set down stakes in new states. Shakir reported that 88% of the total came from donations of $200 or less and that 99.5% of donations were for $100 or less. The majority of donors were young, he said, and that the occupation most likely to give were teachers.Bernie Sanders raises $18.2 million during first 41 days of his 2020 campaign [Gregory Krieg and Fredreka Schouten/CNN](Image: Gage Skidmore) Read the rest

LEGO has released a wonderful diorama of the San Francisco skyline!Sadly, the San Francisco skyline is now dominated by the giant Salesforce tower, atleast until the Millenium tower falls into it.LEGO Architecture Skyline Collection 21043 San Francisco Building Kit , New 2019 (565 Piece) via Amazon Read the rest

The 2019 Hugo Award nominees have been announced; the Hugos will be presented this summer at the 2019 World Science Fiction Convention in Dublin, Ireland.Normally, I find that I've read and reviewed a huge slice of the year's finalists, but this year is different; I've done a lot less reading lately, partly because I wrote two books in 2018 and partly because the new EU Copyright Directive ate my life for about 10 months in the past year.I was a little sad to be so far behind the curve when I saw the new list, but then I realized that this meant that I had a bunch of really exciting books to add to my to-be-read pile!One notable inclusion: the Archive of Our Own fanfic archive -- a project of the Organization for Transformative Works (for whose advisory board I volunteer) -- is up for "Best Related Work."Congrats to all the nominees!Best Novel* The Calculating Stars, by Mary Robinette Kowal (Tor)* Record of a Spaceborn Few, by Becky Chambers (Hodder & Stoughton / Harper Voyager)* Revenant Gun, by Yoon Ha Lee (Solaris)* Space Opera, by Catherynne M. Valente (Saga)* Spinning Silver, by Naomi Novik (Del Rey / Macmillan)* Trail of Lightning, by Rebecca Roanhorse (Saga)Best Novella* Artificial Condition, by Martha Wells (Tor.com Publishing)* Beneath the Sugar Sky, by Seanan McGuire (Tor.com Publishing)* Binti: The Night Masquerade, by Nnedi Okorafor (Tor.com Publishing)* The Black God’s Drums, by P. Read the rest

The Soviet Synthpop Alliance is jam-packed with music that sounds familiar but isn't.The video is just too awesome.(Thanks, Charlie!) Read the rest

When you've got somewhere to go, but someone's in your way waiting for a parking spot to clear, what can you do about it? If you're a traffic cop with the NYPD and answerable to no-one, this is what you do: ram them.An NYPD spokesperson said the traffic supervisor appeared disoriented and was taken to a hospital for evaluation. Police sources say he was not intoxicated.The owner of the parked truck said he doesn't believe the incident was the result of a medical episode.The incident remains under internal review. So far no charges have been filed. Read the rest

Color Splash is an "automated AI enabled room painting technology" — which is to say, they gave a bot a bucket of paint and arms to throw it. I want one! Read the rest

Martin Shkreli, infamous for hiking the prices of life-saving drugs and jailed on unrelated fraud charges, is in solitary confinement. The Wall Street Journal reported that he was running businessess from inside using a contraband phone.One source close to Shkreli’s legal team said the fraudster was in the special housing unit (SHU) a week and a half after the article was published on March 7, but the source had not received an update on his status. But according to Justin Liverman, a fellow inmate and ex-member of notorious hacker crew Crackas With Attitude, Shkreli was indeed put in solitary and was still there as of Sunday. “Martin is in the SHU,” Liverman told Forbes.According to the Journal, Shkreli was operating his business, Phoenixus AG, via a cellphone. The company appears to be a reincarnation of Turing Pharmaceuticals AG, which jacked up the prices of rare drugs to the fury of patients, doctors and insurers. In one of the worst examples, Turing increased the cost of a pill for patients with HIV/AIDS from $13.50 to $750. Read the rest

The Drug Policy Alliance's Anthony Papa celebrates the reforms of the terrible Rockefeller drug laws of 2009.Image: YouTube Read the rest

Bärí A. Williams, Medium's head of trust and safety, conducted a long, wide-ranging interview with senior content moderation staffers with experience at Dropbox, Google, Facebook, Reddit, Pintrest, and many unnamed platforms; the interview is very frank and reveals a group of people with a deep, real-world commitment to protecting users as well as defending free speech.This raises an important question: why are the platforms so terrible at moderation? How is it that they get so much wrong, allowing so much harassment and also blocking so much legitimate speech?The answer is there, if you read between the lines. On the one hand, the platforms are so big that even small error rates affect lots of people: a 1% error rate in blocking 500m tweets/day is 5m tweets/day. On the other hand, the platforms give preference to product teams ("product people want to live in optimism, in an idealized vision of how people will use the product, not the ways that people will predictably break it") over the moderation and safety teams. Y.X. Yang: Sometimes other people in the company ask, “Did you know this was going to happen?” Yes, and we told the product team a year ago that if they did X, Y would happen, and because of the priorities at the time, the product manager went and did the thing anyway. It’s like, “But that’s okay, we’ll help you through this mess.”Adam: “Six months ago we told you, ‘Don’t pave the city with banana peels.’ You decided, ‘Let’s see what happens if we pave the city with banana peels.’ We are now here to clean up the injuries.”Vanessa: As with many roles focused on the larger good, it’s important to catch yourself when you’re walking around the company self-righteously and being like, “You’re welcome for being your conscience and heart and soul and working hard on the things that you’re not paying attention to.”Your Speech, Their Rules: Meet the People Who Guard the Internet [Bärí A. Read the rest

Enjoy Sverker Löding, Stefan Helin and William Forsberg make good use of an abandoned (but conscpicuously well-kept) wool factory before it gets turned into condos or turned into an Investigation Discovery Channel host's segue lair.This is one of my favourite indoor places I've ever filmed. A big old wool factory in the middle of nowhere. Just wanted to keep this edit very simple and real. Just pure skateboarding, sound and a very nice looking location.Filmed with BMPCC 4K in BRAW, Milvus 21mm on Ronin-S.Kristoffer Davidsson used the new 4k Blackmagic "Pocket" Cinema Camera, which is amazingly inexpensive for a credible production camera and produces great footage—but has some of the same practical shortcomings as its predecessor: tough to use without a rig, poor battery life, etc. They can't produce enough to meet demand, unfortunately, so they're selling far over MSRP on eBay and craigslist. Read the rest

Are you in Chicago? Do you want 70, washed, empty Popeye Spinach cans? Craigslist has you covered: "Stacked in a pyramid, they look like a modern art masterpiece one might find at the Museum of Contemporary Art. I ate a bunch of spinach years ago and never threw the cans away, if you’re wondering WTF." (Thanks, Fipi Lele!) Read the rest

Martin Shkreli's poor impulse control continues to land him in terrible trouble: his price-gouging on lifesaving drugs didn't land him in prison, but his profligate boasting about it did (to say nothing of the revocation of his bail after he put a bounty on Hillary Clinton's hair follicles).After Shrekli went to prison, his company started to hemorrhage money, alarming the grifter so severely that he acquired an illicit cellular phone and used it to run his business from prison, and then boasted about it, which led to a report in the Wall Street Journal that included a claim that he had fired his company's CEO from behind bars.This prompted a Federal Bureau of Prisons investigation that has resulted in Shkreli being sent to solitary confinement. He is one year into a seven-year prison sentence.Solitary confinement is classed as a form of torture by the United Nations.A source close to Shkreli’s legal team told the magazine that Shkreli was taken to Fort Dix’s special housing unit (SHU) about a week and a half after the Wall Street Journal reported that Shkreli fired Phoenixus AG’s interim CEO from behind bars.Martin Shkreli Placed in Solitary Confinement After Allegedly Running Company Behind Bars: Report [ Read the rest

The Property of the People transparency group (previously) has published another damning US intelligence file, this one a report circulated by the Regional Organized Crime Information Center (RICOC, a joint state/federal intelligence body), revealing how the US intelligence bodies advised local law enforcement after the Charlottesville white supremacist march.RICOC appears to have taken Trump's "very good people on both sides" doctrine to heart, from the report's title ("Antifa/Anti-antifa: Violence in the Streets") and through its conclusions, which claims that white supremacists are animated by an opposition to antifa, ignoring the movement's actual genocidal ambition to use ethnic cleansing to establish a "white homeland."The framing paints antifa as the antagonists, and the white supremacist terrorists -- one of whom committed a brutal murder that day -- as beset by the antifa activists. It quotes a newspaper editorial that branded the antifa protesters as terrorists. In the ROCIC report there is also no discussion of the specific groups actively organizing the Unite the Right rally not long after the report’s publication date. Neo-confederate groups such as the League of the South; neo-Nazi and Identitarian groups such as Vanguard America, the National Socialist Movement, the Rise Above Movement and Identity Evropa; and street-fighting groups such as the Fraternal Order of Alt Knights and the Proud Boys are not mentioned.All of these groups were involved in the demonstration in Charlottesville, which culminated in the killing of Heather Heyer by James Alex Fields, who marched with Vanguard America.The report also extensively sources information from conservative media and rightwing advocacy groups. Read the rest

I've got a couple of hometown appearances coming up, including a rare west-side event: on Sunday, April 7 at 4PM, I'll be at Burbank's Dark Delicacies for a final signing in their old store before they occupy their new digs around the corner, and then I'm taking off my writer hat and putting on my activist hat to do two more events in the area.On Thursday, April 11, I'm helping the San Diego Public Library celebrate its 40th anniversary with a keynote speech from 7-9PM at the Central Library's Neil Morgan Auditorium (330 Park Blvd., San Diego 92101): my theme will be " libraries as one of the few remnants of a world where people were valued because of their humanity,not their money, and how that works in the current moment of extreme inequality, epistemological incoherence, and fear of imminent collapse" (the event is free, but seating is limited; the Friends of the San Diego Public Library will hold you a seat if you pre-order a copy of my new book Radicalized from their bookstore).On Friday, April 12, I'll be at UCLA from 7-930PM for a two-part event called After Disruption, alongside Britt Paris from Data & Society, Sarah T. Roberts from the Department of Information Studies, and Saba Waheed from the UCLA Labor Center. It's sponsored by README and the LA Cryptoparty and will include "A conversation on Big Tech, the future of labor, and how systems have successfully been co-opted in the past" and "A collaborative, participatory workshop led by README and LA Cryptoparty where audience and speakers join together to re-imagine how platforms function." It's also free to attend but the organizers would like you to RSVP. Read the rest

I like these albino turtles.“What kind of pasta is this? Turtloni?”Albino turtles[via] Read the rest

Oh, he loves to be an Oscar Mayer weiner.Dexty the dachshund was enjoying a day outdoors with other weiner dogs in Southern California, at the So Cal Weinerfest.Check out the full video below, and a few other clips of Dexty enjoying the beach. View this post on Instagram This hat became a part of me guys... this is my trademark now ™️ #dadhatdexA post shared by Dexter (Dexty) 💖✨✨ (@dextythedachshund) on May 21, 2018 at 12:30pm PDT View this post on Instagram Me showing off my fit beach bod 😏🧢🏖🌊 #beachdayA post shared by Dexter (Dexty) 💖✨✨ (@dextythedachshund) on Jul 3, 2018 at 3:36pm PDT View this post on Instagram Me in the @oscarmayer Wiener Mobile at the @socalwienerfest 🌭🌭🌭 #hotdoginahotdog #wienerinceptionA post shared by Dexter (Dexty) 💖✨✨ (@dextythedachshund) on May 15, 2017 at 4:08pm PDT [videos originally published 2018] Read the rest

Making the viral rounds again this week is this extremely funny and cute video of young women who've had a few to drink, and are suddenly surprised with --- a puppy!Maybe more than one puppy at a time! What is even going on! Oh my heck!They did a dude version, too.Buzzfeed just let go of a bunch of staff, and I wonder if the folks who made this funny video still have a job. Not funny.[via IMGUR] Read the rest

Wells Fargo is America's largest bank and it also leads the nation's banks for scandals, having stolen from rich people, poor people, veterans, active-service military personnel, homeowners, small businesses, etc, as well as 2,000,000 ordinary customers who had fraudulent accounts opened in their names in order to bleed them of transaction fees, sometimes at the expense of their good credit and even their financial solvency.After handing John Stumpf (the CEO who presided over the first wave of scandals) a massive, multi-million-dollar payment to punish him for his wrongdoing, the company elevated CFO Timothy J Sloan to the CEO's chair, in the hopes that the public would believe that the former CFO could be sold as a change agent if he was enough of a bland nonentity. Unfortunately for the board, Sloan bumbled through a series of ever-more-grotesque scandals until it became evident that the board's only choice would be to make an example of him by giving him millions of dollars, too. Now he is out and the board is on the hunt for his replacement.On CNN, Matt Egan ruminates on how a criminal enterprise of the scale and notoriety of Wells Fargo can hire a leader that will allow it to continue to commit crimes without getting punished or being hated by the public. In particular, investors are anxious to find a CEO who can convince the Federal Researve to lift the company's sole meaningful punishment for its consistent wrongdoing: a cap on how big it can grow. Read the rest

Ed Piskor and Jim Rugg continue down the 1990s comic book speculation bubble:• ANIA - the Association of Black Publishers is born!• Image and Malibu breakup• Palmer's Picks: Ted McKeever, Eddy Current, Metropol, and more!• Elfquest's influence on a young Eddie P• Spawn 9 and its legacy: Todd McFarlane v Neil GaimanSupplemental Links:Neil Gaiman's 2002 depositionTodd McFarlane 2002 depositionANIA - Unsung Heroes of the Black Comics Movement,1992 CBS Evening News Feature on Omega 7 ComicsSubscribe to the Cartoonist Kayfabe YouTube channel.Cartoonist Kayfabe merchandise available at our Spreadshop Read the rest

I was just informed that it is National Sourdough Day, no fooling.I baked more sourdough this weekend. I wanted to see if my starter would come back to the reliable cycle I am used to if I treated it nice for a few days. This no-knead loaf rose very nicely for about 20 hrs.I folded the dough and put it into a linen lined banneton. I wanted to see if this would make my bread any different. For years I have been using floured banneton and getting really rustic, crusty, artisnal looking loaves. Cutting into one sends out an explosion of crumbs. I thought the linen liner might 'smooth things out.' Ha. Ha.The linen liner would, later in the weekend, nearly prove my undoing.I floured the linen pretty heavily and the loaf came out quite easily. As I would later deliver this bread into the eager hands of my daughter, spending the weekend at her moms house, I scored it with an "A" for Anarchy.The exterior looks beautiful, and the crumb was perfect for the sandwiches my child ate for dinner. The linen liner works wonders to develop a thin, even crispy and wonderful crust. You can cut this bread without leaving a small avalanche of crust behind.Later in the weekend, baking bread for a soon to arrive dinner guest I under floured the linen and had a fairly sticky loaf of bread. The loaf stuck to the liner and tore a little as I transferred from banneton to parchement paper for scoring. Read the rest

In 2007, a group of players in Runescape -- once billed as the world's most-played massively multiplayer game -- declared a Communist republic on Gielinor's Server 32, amid a revolution that saw 5,000 characters killed off in the fighting. The Gielinor republic established town councils who sent deputies to a people's parliament who advised a cabinet of 20 ministers who governed under party leader SireZaros. In 2008, a counterrevolution led by junior party member Redsteel136 deposed much of the leadership and executed them, instituting a program of market reforms. The new regime fell after the Runescape management revalued in-game items against real-world currency, leading to economic collapse.I am aware that today is April 1, and that the wiki that is thesource for this story does not appear in earlier versions on the Wayback Machine; however, based on the page's long edit history, I'm prepared to believe that this actually happened, as weird as that is.In October, the economy bottomed out at its historical low. Nevertheless, the communist party continued to hold out, hoping that the tradeable price of high-level items would eventually grow high enough to allow for an eventual economic recovery. Sadly, this was not to be. In the grip of total market collapse, the communists were incapable of extracting enough tax revenue from players to meet the clan fees necessary for them to maintain power. As the sun set on the final few days of December 2008, after almost a year of working class rule, General Secretary Redsteel136 dissolved the party and returned power to the bourgeoisie. Read the rest

OpenEmu is a free multi-platform retro video game emulator for OS X. It has emulators for Atari, Nintendo, Sega, PC, and Sony consoles. Setup is brainless Once you install it, you can drag and drop your ROM files (making sure, of course, you legally own them) into the app and start playing them. You can play the games from your keyboard, but I recommend getting a USB controller. The one I use is this Buffalo Classic USB Gamepad: To configure it, go to Preferences in OpenEmu, click Controllers, select the controller you want to emulate, then follow the prompts for which buttons to push. You'll be playing your favorite old games in no time. Check out the large library of great homebrew games that you can download directly from the app, too. Read the rest

Zuzana Caputova has just been elected to the presidency of Slovakia with 58% of the vote; the political novice rose to prominence with her campaign against a toxic waste dump in her hometown of Pezinok, which earned her the nickname "Slovakia's Erin Brockovoch."Caputova takes office amid widespread popular discontent with a corrupt national establishment that has been blamed for the murder of Jan Kucia, a journalist investigating state corruption. Tens of thousands of Slovaks demonstrated in the wake of the assassination under the banner of "Enough with Smer" (Smer is the incumbent leadership party).Caputova fought the election on corruption behind the slogan "Stand up to evil." She is now the country's fifth president since independence, and her first official act after her election was announced was to visit a shrine to Kucia and her fiance and light a candle for them. Her inaugural speech condemned the xenophobic ultra-nationalism in the region.Ján Orlovský, who heads Slovakia's Open Society Foundations, told NPR at the time, "We have lots of these skeletons in the closet, which we need to address and one of the skeletons is corruption."Caputova, a vocal participant in the protests that rocked the country, has promised to tackle corruption head-on. Casting herself as the anti-corruption candidate with the campaign slogan "stand up to evil," she vowed to shake-up the political establishment, which she says is currently run "by people pulling strings from behind." The 'Erin Brockovich of Slovakia' Is Elected The Country's First Female President [Rebecca Ellis/KGOU](via Naked Capitalism)(Image: Ivodo, CC-BY-SA) Read the rest

This robot is luckier than I am. I'm usually asked to click every image with a traffic light in it to prove I'm not a robot.Not today from r/funny[via r/funny] Read the rest

Trump has been threatening to shut down the border between Mexico and the US. This will halt the flow of not only people but also over $100 billion in imports. One of many things the US will run out of is avocados.From The Guardian:Avocados would run out in three weeks if imports from Mexico were stopped, said Steve Barnard, president and chief executive of Mission Produce, the largest distributor and grower of avocados in the world.“You couldn’t pick a worse time of year because Mexico supplies virtually 100% of the avocados in the US right now. California is just starting and they have a very small crop, but they’re not relevant right now and won’t be for another month or so,” said Barnard.Monica Ganley, principal at Quarterra, a consultancy specializing in Latin American agricultural issues and trade, said that a border closure would inevitably hit consumers.“We’re absolutely going to see higher prices. This is a very real and very relevant concern for American consumers.”Here's a recipe for mock guacamole.Image: Botrong Squishies Simulated Avocado Slow Rising Cream Scented Squeeze Stress Relief Toys on Amazon Read the rest

David Kaufman wanted to create a design tool that would make it easy to create repeating patterns that could be used in laser-cut (or other CNC or 3D printable) designs. The result is the Polygonia Design Suite. This free web-based app allows you to draw a few lines, and the Polygonia software clones and mirrors those lines to create your design. You can then save your design to your desktop as an image or vector drawing. From there, the design is ready to use or you can continue working on it within your favorite design software.On the development of the project, David writes:I have been working on a project to make it easy to create symmetrical patterns for laser cutting. It all started in May 2017 when I visited the Smithsonian Museum, in Washington, DC, where I saw an exhibit by an artisan from Afghanistan who made wood panels or screens of triangles, hexagons, and squares. I wanted to make my own using the laser cutter at my local makerspace, Nova Labs. So I got out a pad of paper, brushed off my high school math skills, and got to work. My goal was to create an online app that generates a symmetrical pattern based on the lines I draw, calculates the intersections of the lines, connects the lines, and generates a vector output file that I could use on a laser cutter.The program is fun to play around with, doodling designs, whether you plan to render them out in the real world or not. Read the rest

Since the 2008 financial crisis, the "sovereign citizen" movement/conspiracy theory (previously) has grown by leaps and bounds, thanks to a combination of the rise of antisemitism (long a dogwhistle in the movement, now out in the open), an increase in financial desperation and a sense of betrayal, and the movement's ability to realize real cash for its members, who have systematically defrauded the underfunded and resource-strapped IRS of move than $1B.Ashley Powers' long New York Times profile of movement leader Sean David Morton and his wife, Melissa Thomson, is a fascinating and chilling tour through the rise of a weaponized conspiracy movement with a business-model, a grift that sucks in people from the UFO believer circuit and other fringe nodes with promises of "debt relief" that turn out to be advice on how to defraud the government and a secret history of a cabal of Jewish bankers who are responsible for all of America's woes.This secret history is like a prototype for Qanon and other far-right conspiracy movements, alleging that a bankrupt business somehow mortgaged every US citizen for $630,000 to the US government, and that this led to the establishment of the Social Security Administration (this is the most coherent part of the theory -- it only gets stupider from here on out). "Sovereign Citizens" believe that they can speak certain words or phrases, or point out certain alleged defects in the formalities of their courtrooms (for example, whether or not a flag has gold fringe) and that these act as incantations that neutralize the power of the state. Read the rest

Hostile Planet, premiering tonight at 9/8c, brings fresh grit and excitement to the nature documentary genre with innovative camera technologies and a willingness to showcase animals’ struggles in the most exposed environments. The series doesn’t shy away from the unpleasant realities faced by many animals in bleak, unrelenting wilderness, which drives the energetic storytelling throughout the six-part series. New camera technologies allow stories to be told from creative and engaging perspectives. The camera incorporates the animal’s point of view into the series flawlessly, placing audiences in the middle of what they are watching. An immersive experience like this, which accredits the animal’s perspective of the world, brings new power to the wildlife film genre. But getting closer to the action and seeing events unfold as an animal would are not all that Hostile Planet does new; the series places a lot of focus on surviving in a rapidly changing world.Mateo Willis, producer and director of the Mountains episode, sets Hostile Planet apart from other wildlife films, saying it is not “like a moving coffee table book which is nice and calm and you can put it away at the end and forget about and it’s not troubling. That is not a real representation of the world, particularly not today. Because our world is changing faster that it ever has before.” The plight of animals in increasingly volatile environments is visually and emotionally striking, especially given how timely and accurate the series is. The brutal, dramatic, and endless realities of the natural world are on full display in this show, and are sure to stir empathy and awareness in viewers. Read the rest

Every year, 250,000 requests for vanity license plates are made in California every year. The DMV has to scrutinize every application to make sure the numbers and letters don't have an offensive or objectionable meaning. LA Mag has a collection of their favorites.Above:Applicant Explanation: On my way to bang your bitchDMV Comments: What he saidVerdict: NoApplicant Explanation: Celebration of my son moving out of the houseDMV Comments: DickVerdict: No Applicant Explanation: Sad time in my life and my car is blueDMV Comments: Blew MeVerdict: No Read the rest

As a superfan of Us and Get Out, I'm excited to watch the first episode of the new Twilight Zone, "The Comedian," which is directed by Jordan Peele. The hour-long episode is available now on YouTube. Read the rest

Alleged fake blood test grifter Elizabeth Holmes has a busy schedule this year. In addition to attending her upcoming trial for 11 criminal felony counts, she's getting married! The lucky groom-to-be is William "Billy" Evans, scion of the Evans Hotel Group fortune.From Brides Magazine:It's possible they bonded over their shared wealth or interest in tech, as Evans is an MIT grad who worked at Linked In, then Luminar Technologies, a driverless-car start-up. According to Linked In, Evans stopped working there in January—maybe to spend more time with his bride-to-be while he still can? Holmes is being charged with 11 criminal felony counts, including wire fraud and conspiracy, and could face jail time. Holmes has pleaded not guilty.While Holmes is awaiting trial, the couple has been living large in a luxury apartment in San Francisco, according to Vanity Fair, and they even attended Burning Man together just days before Theranos employees were notified the company was officially shutting down. In their San Francisco home, they coparent Holmes's "wolf," Balto. As it turns out, Balto is actually just a Siberian husky.For everyone asking about Holmes's social media. It's private. But here are a few screenshots of her and her fiancé we found online. (I personally find it crazy that she's being charged with 11 felony counts, thousands of people's lives were harmed, and she's as happy as can be.) pic.twitter.com/6nYfjltLt4— Nick Bilton (@nickbilton) February 21, 2019Image by Glenn Fawcett - Cropped version of from https://www.dvidshub.net/image/911248, Public Domain, Link Read the rest

The latest retro-fantasy from Squirrel Monkey - how to declutter your 1990s computer files, Marie Kondo style. Read the rest

For more than 50 years, photographer Roger Steffens has explored the electric arteries of the counterculture, embracing mind-expanding experiences, deep social connection, and unadulterated fun at every turn. After serving in Vietnam at the end of the 1960s, Steffens immersed himself in California’s vibrant bohemia. With his wife Mary and children Kate and Devon, he sought out the eccentric, the outlandish, and the transcendent. Just as often, it found him, grinning, a camera in one hand and a joint in the other. My Ozma Records partner Tim Daly and I are honored to share with you this new collection of Steffens’ spectacular snapshots taken between 1968 and 2015 during the foursome’s freewheeling adventures throughout the visionary state they call home. Think of it as a family album belonging to a very unconventional family. This is The Family Acid: California.Based in Los Angeles, the Steffens family traveled up and down the West Coast, from the wilds of Death Valley and reggae festivals in Humboldt to fiery protests in Berkeley and the ancient redwoods of Big Sur. Along the way, they’d rendezvous with friends like Bob Marley, Timothy Leary, and war photographer Tim Page, the inspiration for Dennis Hopper’s character in Apocalypse Now. They’d take in the wonders of nature and, of course, the adults would occasionally lose their minds in psychoactive celebrations of creativity, freedom, and hope. The Family Acid: California is a 192-page, large format book manufactured with the finest materials and attention to design as you've come to expect from Ozma Records, producers of the Voyager Golden Record: 40th Anniversary Edition. Read the rest

A new study reveals that the Skrillex track "Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites" reduces mosquitos' success in foraging, host attack, and sexual activities of Aedes aegypti, the mosquito that spreads dengue fever, chikungunya, Zika fever, Mayaro, and other nasty diseases. According to the researchers from the Universiti Malaysia Sarawak and their colleagues, it's all about that bass. From their scientific paper published in the journal Acta Tropica:Sound and its reception are crucial for reproduction, survival, and population maintenance of many animals. In insects, low-frequency vibrations facilitate sexual interactions, whereas noise disrupts the perception of signals from conspecifics and hosts. Despite evidence that mosquitoes respond to sound frequencies beyond fundamental ranges, including songs, and that males and females need to struggle to harmonize their flight tones, the behavioral impacts of music as control targets remain unexplored. In this study, we examined the effects of electronic music (Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites by Skrillex) on foraging, host attack, and sexual activities of the dengue vector Aedes aegypti. Adults were presented with two sound environments (music-off or music-on). Discrepancies in visitation, blood feeding, and copulation patterns were compared between environments with and without music. Ae. aegypti females maintained in the music-off environment initiated host visits earlier than those in the music-on environment. They visited the host significantly less often in the music-on than the music-off condition. Females exposed to music attacked hosts much later than their non-exposed peers. The occurrence of blood feeding activity was lower when music was being played. Adults exposed to music copulated far less often than their counterparts kept in an environment where there was no music. Read the rest

An astonishing school of hammerhead sharks surprises divers at Darwin's Arch in the Galápagos Islands in this majestic video from the BBC's Mission Galápagos series. In an article at a href="https://www.wanderlust.co.uk/content/liz-bonnin-amazing-wildlife-experiences/"Wanderlust, the Mission Galápagos series host, animal biologist and presenter Liz Bonnin, lists this adventure as one of her "most amazing wildlife experiences":The hammerheads come from all different directions and gather, swim around each other in big circles in a wonderful sort of balletic association. At the very centre of this big mass of hammerheads are the oldest, most mature females. The younger sharks swim around them. When the males come in to mate, they’ve got to weave and wind their way through this mass of hammerheads, so only the strongest, fittest males will get to mate with the females in the centre. We are only just beginning to understand the purpose of this mass congregation, so the more scientists dive down there, the more they’re understanding its importance. It’s a very special place, and a very important behaviour, that needs to be protected. The Galapagos is one of the last jewels of this blue planet of ours. It really needs extra protection of ours oceans to make sure that that doesn’t disappear for ever. It was extraordinary.(via The Kid Should See This) Read the rest

Remember that a lot of you see today on the internet will be humorless lies. And everything else will be April Fools jokes. Read the rest

The National Library of Scotland released an online viewer that combines historical maps with the latest elevation data. The results are a remarkably beautiful wedding of old and new. Here's a 1940s map of Loch Tay, in 3D.The 3D map viewer includes our standard interaction options, including a zoom slider, a scalebar, mouseposition location, as well as the ability to choose georeferenced overlays and background layers. Our standard map location options, such as geolocation, the ability to locate the map with placenames and drop-down lists of counties and parishes are all included. The 3D map viewer uses open-source technology, which has been shared on Github and described with notes in the GeoCart Historical Maps Online Workshop.[nls.uk via John Overholt] Read the rest

default filename tv finds and presents videos uploaded to YouTube without the filename being edited. The work of Everest Pipkin, it shimmers with the light of a liminal place between crushing normality and unhinged wonder. Which is to say,they've got a VIBE. Read the rest

You could be the proud owner of this customized 1978 Tradesman 200 undercover police surveillance van! Currently for sale on the San Francisco Bay Area's Craigslist, the white, 8-cylinder automatic has just 78,000 original miles. Asking price is $4,000. And now for the good stuff:It has been carpeted with a bench and workbench inside. It is chock full of surprises and cool modifications including; a CB radio setup (don't think it currently works), police band radio/scanner, black out windows/shades, custom AC unit designed to run off a few deep cycle-cell marine batteries (daisy-chained together), a door to separate the cab from the rear of the vehicle, and best of all.....a periscope that comes out of the vent. It does have some minor dents and dings as a 40 year-old truck will likely have, but no major defects/issues. Everything seems to work on it, but I haven't done much driving in it since it is not currently registered or insured. Seats are going to need to be recovered or replaced. This van would make an awesome undercover PI van, party van, camper van, hippy van, surfer van, boogie van, classic 70's van. I have another one already, and with two jobs, and school, I don't have a lot of free time to convert a second van. I may consider a trade for a 4x4 van, or similar, Suburban, Bronco, Scout, Jeep etc."1978 Dodge Tradesman 200 undercover police van - $4000 (san mateo)" (Craigslist) Read the rest

Actor EJ Zapata provides "solid evidence every TV show, Movie, and Commercial are all in the same Cinematic Universe." This is "How It All Connects," a compilation of Zapata's on-camera moments in the background.Learn more from Zapata over at r/videos. (Thanks pvanb!) Read the rest

Banksy's anonymity makes it hard to authenticate his pieces and prints, so Banksy has created a nonprofit called "Pest Control" that issues certificates of authenticity: you send them an alleged Banksy print and £65 and if they agree that it's authentic, they'll return it with a certificate that has a torn-in-half "Di-faced" fake banknote with Lady Diana's face on it, with a handwritten ID number across the bill.As Clinton Freeman points out, this is a great piece of cryptographic engineering: faking a Banksy cert involves matching the tear precisely, and also requires that a would-be counterfeiter know what was written on the other half of the note, which is stored at Pest Control and is not made available.Let’s say someone did manage to recreate a convincing copy of a print, certificate and the public half of the matching Di Faced Tenner. And you want to purchase this thing that looks like an authenticated print, so you head over to Pest Control’s website and make a change of ownership request. They contact who they have on file as the current owner of the work: ‘Hey, are you going to give your print to Joe Bloggs?’. Naturally the owner, unaware of the forgery and has no intention of selling their current print is going to be confused and reply ‘WTF are you talking about?’Can an information system be art? Because, like I said, it’s flipping sweet, and all executed in Banksy’s trademark tongue in cheek style. This whole authentication process would easily be my favourite artwork by Banksy. Read the rest

The Boston Globe has published a giant weekend package of responses to Elizabeth Warren's proposal to break up the Big Tech monopolies.I'm absolutely in favor of this proposal, but I'm concerned that the proponents for it have fallen into the trap of tech exceptionalism, the idea that tech is either intrinsically monopolistic (something you hear from Big Tech itself, as they insist that "network effects" and similar excuses mean that they are helpless to avoid monopolies), or more dangerous (see the rhetoric about how "algorithms" can produce influence campaigns that turn decent people into anti-vaxxers, Trump supporters or murderous jihadis), or both.I think both of these are vastly overstated and that you don't need to believe in them to support the case for breaking up Big Tech. Big Tech is monopolistic because it grew up without any meaningful antitrust enforcement -- because the Apple ][+ and Reaganomics were born in the same 12-month period, because a generation of tech lawyers learned from the FTC's tame response to Microsoft that it was fair game, and because the investors who choose the boards of these companies are great fans of monopolies in every industry they back, not just tech.And as to tech's ability to distort our thinking, the idea that this is due to some kind of machine-learning secret sauce is something that Big Tech itself promotes ("Buy our ad-tech and we'll sell your stuff to people who wouldn't buy it otherwise"), but I don't know why we'd conclude that these companies lie about everything except their sales literature. Read the rest

Today, I'm wrapping up the tour for my new book Radicalized at Anaheim's Wondercon, where I'm on a panel at 11AM (Technology Is Cold; People Are Warm, Room 300B), followed by a signing from 1215PM-1PM (in the Author Signing Area). I hope you can make it! (Image: Brandon Locke) Read the rest

PSA Press's $15 Stop Making Sense pin is jointed for moving Big Suit action, just like in the greatest concert movie ever made; I just bought one at Wondercon and it's superb. Read the rest

The $100 Frank Frazetta Death Dealer Xmas sweater is licensed, with a portion of the proceeds going to the Frazetta museum in East Stroudsburg, PA. Read the rest

AOL bought Netscape, renamed it New Aurora Corporation, sold it to Microsoft, who sold it to Facebook, where it is a "non-operating subsidiary." Netscape veteran JWZ writes, "That makes Facebook the current owner of the cookie patent, so I was hoping that this meant that they are now embroiled in the Forever War with ValueClick, but I now see that it was settled in 2010. Bummer!" Read the rest

I want to go there.My favorite pan is a Wagner I got at Goodwill in San Francisco.I especially like to refinish cast iron waffle irons.(Thanks, David Wolfberg!) Read the rest

Sourdough is not the complicated, finicky bread baking technique some folks might like you to believe. Sourdough baking takes very little effort and is mostly an art of patience.This loaf is an example of what you can achieve by barely paying attention to your starter. I left mine in the fridge for months, and then forgot it on the kitchen counter.Here is the dough after its first rise, and before I spread it out for folding.Here is the loaf in its proofing basket. It was VERY wet and took a lot of the flour out of the basket.Here is the finished second loaf, baked from a starter that had been left on my kitchen counter, unfed, for over a week. Previous to ignoring the starter on my counter, I had left it in my fridge for well over 6 months.Here are some details on preparation of a basic sourdough loaf. Read the rest

As the lawsuit against Alex Jones for his role in directing and encouraging the vicious harassment of the parents of children murdered at the Sandy Hook shooting has led to a lawsuit, and that has led to discovery and depositions that reveal much about how Jones deliberately and cynically created the campaign of terror against the grieving parents -- and the role that organizations like the NRA play in the creation of cruel and destructive conspiracy theories about mass shootings.The law firm of Farrar & Ball are representing the parents in the suit, and they've uploaded the video of their deposition of Jones, conducted by attorney Mark Bankston. It is a complete shitshow, as Jones spins, and does backflips, going back and forth on whether he believes that the Sandy Hook parents are part of a conspiracy or not, repeating conspiracy theories about shadowy figures in the woods and so on.If you can't bear to watch the video, you can read a transcript.Jones is asked about the supposed “deep research” he did on the shooting shortly after being read the official report: Bankston: Okay. Thank you, Mr. Jones. Mr. Jones, I’ve noticed on a lot of these answers you’ve said, “Well, I’m just going off what Mr. [Wolfgang] Halbig said.” So what I want to know is: When you talked earlier about how you did deep research, what was that? What deep research did you do? Jones: Well, I mean, I did look at the news articles saying they were being very secretive about the case, that a lot of things were sealed, which is unusual. Read the rest