Boing Boing

Music is hugely liberating. And whether you love rock, classical, country, rap or any other genre, there's a real sense of accomplishment when you can sit down in front of a keyboard and hammer out a note-perfect version of a favorite tune. Of course, the only way to get to that point is usually after […]

• Users who sued claim Trump's ban on WeChat prohibits "millions of WeChat users in the United States … from using the most popular social media space for Chinese speakers in the world." The Justice Department said on Wednesday that U.S.-based users of the Chinese-owned messaging app WeChat will not face civil or criminal penalties, […]

I have self-healing cutting mats in a few different sizes. One of them is over 30 years old. I used it to help make the zine version of Boing Boing in the late 1980s. I still use it today. If you have never used a self-healing cutting mat, you don't know what you are missing. You can […]

A Missouri court sentenced two men to write a letter of apology to their Amish community after pleading guilty to sexually abusing their sister when she was 12 and 13 years old. Webster County Prosecuting Attorney Ben Berkstresser explained why he didn't seek prison time for rapists: "These two young men would've been eaten alive […]

Given Chilean-French filmmaker and artist Alejandro Jodorowsky's storied history with adaptation attempts of Frank Herbert's Dune, it's natural to want to know what he thinks of the trailer to Denis Villeneuve's much-anticipated version of the story. He told French's Premier magazine: "I saw the trailer. It's very well done," Jodorowsky said. "We can see that […]

This astonishing video of a magical castle appearing in the clouds reportedly above Jinan, eastern China, has apparently gone viral on Chinese social media. Skeptics insist it's a Fata Morgana, but we know the truth. The Fata Morgana phenomenon is named after the Arthurian sorceress Morgan le Fay as her castle was said to hover […]

A decent starter electric guitar will often run you about $500 nowadays. If you'd rather learn to play before you dump hundreds into a cool instrument, the Jamstik Guitar Trainer is a brilliant way of turning you into a guitar player without the huge upfront expense. In addition to saving you money, the Jamstik has […]

On September 10, 2020, the fact-checking site Logically.ai posted a lengthy and fascinating article into how they tracked down the identity of the man behind the so-called "QMap": In the world of QAnon, the site qmap.pub is something of a sacred text. It's a site designed to collect Q's posts on other message boards and […]

Barbados, a former British colony, has announced its plans to remove Queen Elizabeth as its head of state and become a republic. Independent since 1966, the tiny island nation hopes to have its first president in time for the 55th anniversary celebrations. Though its government is elected and the monarchy all-but ceremonial, Barbados was colonized […]

The The Boston Globe reports that a woman showed up for the state primary election wearing a "McCain Hero, Trump Zero" t-shirt. Poll workers informed her that this attire was not allowed inside the polling station, as it could be construed as "electioneering." And then: [Town Moderator Paul] Scafidi told her that a shirt supporting […]

Fifty-one-year-old, I mean 26-year-old, actor Paul Rudd collaborated with New York Governor Andrew Cuomo on this humorous "wear a mask" PSA. It's directed at young people, because, as Rudd quips in the video, "Apparently, a lot of COVID is transmitted by us millennials. No cap." (Who else is reminded of "fellow kid" Steve Buscemi in […]

Credulous Redditors have been busy spreading the claim that bubbles can bounce off lasers, so Seb Lee-Delisle emulated the fakery with his pal Steve Mould. Here's the guy who allegedly started the hoax: Image: YouTube / Seb Lee-Delisle

This nighttime demonstration with tracer bullets in an AR-15 shows why it's a bad idea to shoot a gun at water. This is why it's one of the first things they tell students not to do in middle school hunting safety class. Image: YouTube / DoSomethings

A few days ago, this video of Hendrix performing "Voodoo Child" on Maui in 1970 was loaded to YouTube. This is part of an upcoming November release of the legendary Maui concert that Hendrix did as part of the psychedelic train wreck of a film known as Rainbow Bridge. As far as I know, the […]

You can laugh all you want at someone wearing a headlamp when they're out hiking or camping or spelunking. Of course, the only thing sillier than wearing a headlamp is being stuck somewhere in the dark without one. The truth is that emergencies and other situations come up all the time when you're out and […]

A man cut down a tree. It fell onto the house. He said some bad words.

You've probably seen some of the clips in this montage of Trump talking about his sexual interest in girls (speculating on the breast size of his infant daughter, bragging about barging into the dressing room of Miss Teen USA, telling a child on an escalator that he'll be dating her in ten years, etc.). But […]

One of the best times I have had hooning around was in a red 1971 Corvette Convertible. It liked to spin out in Topanga Canyon. There is something awesome about huge amounts of power and a really crappy suspension. Bring A Trailer: This 1971 Chevrolet Corvette convertible is powered by a fuel-injected 350ci ZZ4 V8 […]

It starts with a child parroting false comparisons to the flu. And then it keeps getting worse. This meme doesn't even really sum it up: A Significant Portion Of The American Public Has Gone Absolutely Bugf*ck [Evan Hurst / Wonkette]

Wealthy democracies have a lower-than-ever opinion of the United States, according to a 13-nation survey by the Pew Research Center. The country's handling of the pandemic is partly responsible for the decline. Its president also figures into the poor rating. A majority of the 13,000 people surveyed said they trusted Russian President Vladimir Putin and […]

White House aide Peter Navarro put on quite a show Sunday when he appeared on Jake Tapper's program to discuss the West Coast wildfires and the Covid-19 pandemic. Navarro didn't directly answer any of Tapper's questions and got upset when Tapper interrupted him in an attempt to get Navarro to directly answer the questions. From […]

Recently, for my ongoing series on the history of cyberpunk on Adafruit, I wrote about David Bowie and Brian Eno's cyberpunk-adjacent 1995 record, 1. Outside (The Nathan Adler Diaries: A Hyper Cycle). In the piece, I talk about the various experimental processes Bowie and Eno employed in creating the record, such as using Burroughsian cut-up […]

Astronomers reported today that they've detected phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus, a possible biosignature of life on the planet. The researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Manchester, and their colleagues published the news in Nature Astronomy and in another paper submitted to the science journal Astrobiology. From the New York Times: […]

I've been making ice cream at home for the past couple of months and have been doing a lot of experimenting. (You can read my recipe for low sugar vanilla chocolate chip ice cream here.) Here's Anne of All Trades' (I subscribe to her excellent YouTube channel) recipe for coffee ice cream. It looks great!

Please join the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in welcoming David Legates as its new as deputy assistant secretary of Commerce for observation and prediction. According to Science, Legates is a geography professor at the University of Delaware, with "a long history of questioning fundamental climate science and has suggested that an outcome […]

Enjoy the delicious sounds of Mezerg's wired-up midi-melon in a funky song about swimming pools. Very nice work on the electro-kiwi carrying the melody, too. Bonus footage of him cavorting underwater. If you're curious about what controller he's using, it's from Playtronica. Image: YouTube / MEZERG

Two weeks ago, activists in Montreal toppled a statue of Canada's first prime minister John A Macdonald who in the 19th century enacted cultural genocide against the indigenous peoples in the region. To celebrate the protest against colonialism with his own, a fellow named James Bone ordered custom stamps from Canada Post depicting the severed […]

I knew an idiot in junior high school who so wanted to impress some girls that he removed his own braces with a pair of pliers. What a waste of his parent's money. A few years later, in 1985, another bright young mind was also desperate to get his braces off but thought better (or […]

The Australian insurance company Budget Direct created this nifty graphic of every Motor Trend "Car of the Year" winner in the United States. After the Plymouth Volare (1976), my eyes glazed and interest waned. They created similar graphics for awards in Australia and the UK. "Award-winning cars: Every Car of the Year Winner" (Budget Direct)

Archie McPhee, sellers of curios, realized that any PayPal transaction containing the word "tardigrade" — that being the name of the adorable tiny space-surviving creatures they sell ornaments of — would be blocked. "We've contacted them and they told us we should just stop using the word tardigrade," Archie McPhee wrote on Twitter. "We changed […]

The US Customs and Border Patrol in Cincinnati, Ohio announced that they've intercepted more than 2,000 fake driver's licenses and 1,600 "ID-making materials" coming through a single express courier hub just this year. Meanwhile, college freshman across the country bow their heads in sorrow. From Cincinnati.com: The counterfeit licenses, which came in 343 shipments, originated in […]

Don't look now…but the PS5 and Xbox Series X are literally just weeks away. For gamers, the years-long wait for the premium next-generation gaming systems from the Big Two is going to make the 2020 holiday season one of the craziest we've ever seen. And considering that exploring and understanding every square millimeter of what […]

Researchers have transformed ordinary red bricks into batteries by injecting gases that enable the material to store electricity . Developed by chemists at Washington University, each brick costs only $3 but, at this point, just lights up an LED bulb. From Scientific American: The brick-battery relies on the reddish pigment known as iron oxide, or […]

Beijing is strongly against a Trump-forced sale of TikTok's U.S. operations by Chinese owner ByteDance, and the government of China would rather that TikTok shut down all operations in United States, Reuters reports on Friday. China has previously characterized the forced sale to a U.S. based buyer as "theft." ByteDance has been in talks to […]

Enjoying sex and food is not a sin and church leaders who tell you that are "overzealous," says Pope Francis. From the New York Post: "Pleasure arrives directly from God. It is neither Catholic nor Christian nor anything else; it is simply divine," he tells [author Carlo] Petrini in the book "TerraFutura: Conversations With Pope […]

Officials have signed an agreement to buy 50 million doses, plan to distribute in November

When you grind coffee beans, you want to use a burr grinder, not a blade grinder. Burr grinders break the beans into uniformly sized chunks, unlike blade grinders, which flay the beans into pieces of widely varying size. I've had my Capresso Infinity Conical Burr Grinder for over 10 years and it's still working like […]

Donald Trump, who is definitely not a drug user at all and has never been reported as a habitual user of stimulants to this very day, casually accuses Joe Biden of using performance enhancing drugs in this wacky news clip from the year of our hellscape 2020. DARVO'd Trump, "I think there's probably, possibly drugs […]

"Put your damn mask on!" from r/funny This swan doesn't like it when people don't wear face masks.

Kurdish journalist Oktay Candemir was arrested on Monday for making fun of an upcoming Turkish TV series about a 13th-century Ottoman sultan. From .coda: Authorities didn't find it funny and Candemir now faces up to two years in prison. He was briefly placed under house arrest and, while his case is pending, remains subject to […]

It is wonderful to have room temperature butter around to put on the baked goods. This butter bell is the crock that makes it happen safely. Simply fill the bell with warm butter and put about 1 ¼ cm of water into the crock. Place the bell in the crock when you are not using […]

To be fair, it does appear to have a ticket.

Punk-rock magic absurdist Zabrecky is at it again, and this time he's got Puddles Pity Party joining him! Saturday the 12th of September will see two shows of this new 'Magic Extravaganza.'

This 1902(!) video footage of the Flying Train in Wuppertal, Germany is of such high quality it seems hard to believe. But there it is. MoMA explains the stunning quality in the video's description: The Flying Train" depicts a ride on a suspended railway in Germany in 1902. The footage is almost as impressive as […]

One More Try is a free web-based service that records something on your computers webcam then plays it back after a specified amount of time. The creator made it to review a skateboard trick he was trying to learn. He says it's also useful for juggling, magic tricks, yo-yo, and anything else that would benefit […]

"Adults with positive SARS-CoV-2 test results were approximately twice as likely to have reported dining at a restaurant than were those with negative SARS-CoV-2 test results," according to the Centers for Disease Control's latest Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR). The CDC recommends that efforts to "reduce possible exposures where mask use and social distancing […]

From Punk News: The Dead Milkmen are releasing a role-playing game module called Lost Tomb of the Bitchin' Chimera. It's a 5e game meaning that it is comparable with Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition. The game is written by Andrew Ervin and is out via severed books this summer. Presumably, this means you need to […]

Neuroscientists at Georgetown University tested volunteers on their ability to predict patterns of dots appearing sequentially on a computer screen. The volunteers who were able to subconsciously anticipate the patterns were found to be more likely to believe in a god than volunteers who lacked the ability to subconsciously recognize patterns. From Georgetown University Medical […]

Is this episode of Rick Beato's "What Makes This Song Great?," he breaks down The Cure's "Just Like Heaven." What appears to be a peppy pop confection on the surface has a lot going on when you isolate its constituent parts. One thing we clearly hear is the sweetness of Robert Smith's voice and the […]

If 2020 has you pinching pennies, this site listing foods by calories per dollar may be helpful. Engineer Michael Kirk says he was inspired to create the list after calculating cost per calorie of fast foods. He notes, "We think we know what food costs, but we have no idea what nutrition costs. We needed […]