Boing Boing

YouTuber Seth Everman plays just four notes on his piano and asks, "What's the name of this song?" <clickbait voice>The answer may surprise you!</clickbait voice> (The Awesomer) screengrab via SethEverman

Leatherface with a chainsaw or Karen with a cell phone – who really strikes fear into the hearts of men in 2020? This latex mask sculpted by artist Jason Adcock captures the true horror underneath the haircut. Be sure to talk your partner into dressing up like the manager of Arby's for an unbeatable couple's […]

My first son was born in early June. As terrifying as it was to have a premature child during an outbreak of police violence in the middle of a pandemic, it was made worse by The Pout-Pout Fish. I don't know which of my mom's friends (presumably) bought us this book at the baby shower. […]

Twitter user Sean Kelly AKA StorySlug shared an insightful Twitter thread about the Dark Knight after the release of the new trailer for The Batman. He addresses some of the problematic elements of the Batman mythos — like the idea of a billionaire beating up petty criminals and working with the police — by looking […]

As if Reality2020 wasn't horrifying enough, George Davila fed the King James Bible into a Boltzmannian natural-language processing model. He then asked the AI to write in the King James style about three topics: the Plague, Caesar, and the End of Days. Let's take a look at one of those results: The End of Days.And […]

According to ISoldMyHouse.com, an online service for people who want to sell their homes without an agent, conducted a survey of 5,000 Americans to gauge their belief in ghosts and haunted houses. They claim that 55% of those surveyed admit to believing in the supernatural and 61% wouldn't buy a house they suspected was haunted. […]

Between 2000-2016 the U.S. government seized over 2 billion dollars from U.S. airport travelers. The vast majority of these people were not charged with a crime. The Institute for Justice highlights one such case involving a retired railroad engineer and his daughter: Retired railroad engineer Terry Rolin's life savings were seized by the government, but […]

On Wednesday, police in Cologne, Germany responded to multiple reports of gunfire at an apartment complex in the city's Ehrenfeld district. Multiple units surrounded two residences and searched the area. Eventually, the discovered the truth and order was restored. From Polizei NRW Köln: After an added lockdown service opened a locked door, the reason behind […]

AnimeGan2 is a neural network that converts photos into images that look like anime art. It was trained with a data set of anime feature films by Hayao Miyazaki (The Wind Rises). Makoto Shinkai (Your Name and Weathering with You), and Satoshi Kon (Paprika).

The world would be better off without gold mines, argues JP Koning. What would happen if mines (which are big polluters) stopped producing 3,000 tonnes of gold annually so we had to make do with what we already have (around 190,000 tonnes)? We already have enough to meet our needs for electronic circuitry and other […]

Endoculus is a miniature robotic that can drive through your intestines on treads, streaming video and grabbing tissue samples with its electromechanical forceps. Developed by University of Colorado engineers, Edoculus or its descendants could someday replace the tubular scopes that physicians snake up our rectums during a colonoscopy. Evan Ackerman writes in IEEE Spectrum: Endoculus […]

Japanese monkeys who try to eat crops in Japan's Fukui prefecture are the targets of the Monkey Busters, a team of three airsoft gun-toting women between the ages of 67 and 74. One of Monkey Busters told The Fukui Shimbun that her squad has no tolerance for monkeys who "damage the precious vegetables made by […]

Viral today is this brief but charming clip of an old Japanese landline phone ringing. It's adorable! Below, evidence that this is or was a normal ring in Japan, for any "Japanese phones had a nice ring" disbelievers out there.

A lot of things suck right now, but not this. Every night I would get an alert from my driveway security camera, and at first I was a bit annoyed, but then I found myself looking forward to the evening alert. And then inspiration struck, in the form of my wife giving me this great […]

My friend gave me a bass guitar she didn't want anymore because she was moving. It's a great bass but I didn't have a way to store it, or several of the other guitars, ukuleles, banjo ukes, and cigar box guitars around the house. I bought a few of these inexpensive guitar wall mount 2-packs […]

I subscribe to the excellent daily newsletter The Browser, which has recommendations of 5 interesting articles that I would otherwise miss. It recently linked to an article in Strelka Mag that makes it clear that pulling carbon out of the atmosphere to reduce global warming is a big undertaking: Keynesian thought-experiment in climate change. If […]

Someone on Reddit did a bit of sleuthing and discovered that an American kid with no knowledge of the Scots language wrote almost every single article on the Scots version of Wikipedia. He offered up the following examples: Blaise Pascal (19 Juin 1623 – 19 August 1662) wis a French mathematician, pheesicist, inventor, writer an […]

For the most part, we're all sticking close to home this summer. And that's not just international trips or jet setting across the country that are on hold. Even traditional car travel is expected to finish down at least 15 percent from last year's figures. It will be the first decline in U.S. summer travel […]

"I don't know much about the NBA protests. I know their ratings have been very bad." — Trump Impeached President Donald Trump says the @NBA has become like a political organization, and the corrupt wannabe-dictator says he doesn't think that's good for the country. "People are tired of the NBA," he says at a news […]

Junglefowl (aka wild chickens) are wisely fearful of humans. Researchers from Linköping University were able to catch some junglefowl and selectively breed the ones who showed the least fear of humans. After 10 generations, "the offspring acquired smaller brains and found it easier to become accustomed to frightening but non-hazardous events." "We believe that the ability […]

The Wonder Woman 1984 trailer gives us tantalizing glimpses at some of the villains, including Kristen Wiig as Cheetah and Pedro Pascal as Maxwell Lord, a "desperate, self-obsessed, fraudulent entrepreneur who runs a business selling the American Dream," according to Associate Producer Anna Obropta. Looks familiar! Images: YouTube / DC Comics

Sing along with members of Pantera, Slayer, Mastodon, and 97 other metal musicians performing the folk standard "99 Bottles of Beer!" Listen here: From Spin: The project was put together by Scour's Derek Engemann and Nest's John Jarvis. All proceeds from the song will benefit the Old Dog Haven, a charity that helps old dogs find homes. […]

Oakland's Zide Door "Church of Entheogenic Plants" began as a private club where you could purchase marijuana. Then last year, after the City of Oakland decriminalized entheogenic plants, Zide Door expanded to include psilocybin mushrooms. Last week though, police raided Zide Door and confiscated $200,000, weed, and shrooms. According to authorities, police had warned co-founder […]

Baidu offers a satellite map service much like Google's or Microsoft's. Based in China, it is subject to rigorous censorship. By comparing conspiciously blanked-out areas on Baidu Maps to the corresponding regions in western mapping services, Buzzfeed uncovered a network of prisons and internment camps in Xinjiang. But there's more: also concealed this way are […]

This gentleman made a wonderful Sleestak costume to wear around Portland because Sleestak are cool. Sleestak are very slow and kinda dumb, however, and I totally get Enik's depression. Having watched the RNC I too feel like our culture has lost something. Amazing theme songs.

While we don't have the stats in front of us, you know the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas has seen a whole lot of earbuds and earbud manufacturers make their way through the show over the years. Dozens? For sure. Hundreds? Likely. Yet after all those buds, the CES Innovation Awards still saw […]

The black ink in Sakura Pigma pens is very rich. I love sketching with them. This set of six has nibs ranging from 0.20mm in diameter up to 0.50mm. They're cheap, too!

On October 30, 1961, the USSR detonated RDS-220, aka the Tsar Bomba, the most powerful nuclear bomb ever tested. The hydrogen bomb blast yielded the explosive force of around 50 megatons of TNT. That's more than 3,000 times more destructive than the US bomb dropped on Hiroshima. From the New York Times: In an interview, Alex […]

Cory Doctorow's new short book, How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism, was just published in its entirety on OneZero. Below is Cory's Twitter thread that summarizes his argument that the problem with surveillance capitalism isn't that it big tech has AI-enhanced power to brainwash people, the problem is that big tech uses its monopoly power in […]

Michael Pick created a fully-functional miniature "iMac", slicing down a Raspberry Pi 4 (with a Dremel!) to fit inside his custom-printed case. He takes us through the process of designing the device and assembling it; the keyboard is the only retail item left unhacked. At that size, you'd never know it was running Twister OS, […]

From Rolling Stone: A new Trump administration rule relaxing guidelines that govern the transport of liquefied natural gas could create "bomb trains" with enough explosive power to level whole cities, environmental groups say. A coalition of organizations led by the nonprofit Earthjustice has sued the administration, challenging the rule, which is scheduled to go into effect on […]

Ron Fein has written a delightful new piece for McSweeney's imagining Arkham County Health Inspector Herbert West ní Re-Animator reviewing a proposal from Miskatonic University to safely re-open their campus in a way that will protect students from an outbreak of COVID-19. Coronavirus safety guidelines are difficult of course, though perhaps not as difficult as […]

My pal Hugh D'Andrade mocked up this "2020 Funpocalypse" bingo card in response to humorous social media posts he was seeing by artist Isabel Samaras. With each disaster, she's been joking, "OK, who had {insert terrible thing} on their 2020 Bingo card?" What is it missing? Oh, other terrible 2020 stuff like "police murder of […]

The New Hot 5 is a jazz band, filmed here playing for a herd of cows in Autrans, France. The cows seem to enjoy the performance.

Biologist Merlin Sheldrake is an evangelist for the "neglected megascience" of mycology, the study of fungi and all the wonder within them. According to Sheldrake, fungi are the future—containing clues about our environment and as a source of sustainable food, packaging, and green building materials. Son of author and fringe science researcher Rupert Sheldrake, Merlin […]

I saw this on Twitter the other day and it blew my mind: After immediately falling down a Google hole about it, I discovered that this is, indeed, true! A butt, also known as a pipe, is a unit of measure for English Brewery Cask Units and English Wine Cask Units. It's the second-largest barrel […]

Black Days is a forthcoming biopic about Chris Cornell, the lead singer of seminal Seattle band Soundgarden who died of suicide in 2017. Cornell was an incredible talent, as evidenced by his work with Soundgarden and also Audioslave and Temple of the Dog. From Spin: The [film's barebones] site also states, "from the cast of […]

While a graduate student at the University of Utah in the early 1970s, computer graphics pioneer Frederic Parke created some of the first 3D models of human faces. The research was supported by the Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency (now called DARPA). Parke's wife Vicky was one the models. Here's the full technical […]

I got my first PC in 1996 and it came with Windows 95. It was hinky infested junkware, but also much more impressive than Windows 3.1 (and indeed MacOS) and of course would eventually give us the ａｅｓｔｈｅｔｉｃ. Today is Windows 95's 25th birthday, counting from the day of its media-extravaganza launch.

Electra is growing insanely fast, and the playing never seems to stop. Pretzel likes to assert her tiny dog dominance.

Watch as a Fox Business can not fathom that the Trump White House administration is packed with liars.

Because of the dumpster fire that is 2020, there is no IRL Black Rock City this summer. But there is Burning Man Multiverse and Burn Week is nigh, people. It starts August 30 and goes through September 6. Am I going to participate in it? Darn right I am. My first Burning Man was 1995. […]

As the animal rights movement continues to push for more legal protections for pets, Germany is leading the way on prohibitions for leaving dogs at home alone all day and getting enough daily walks. Via Treehugger: The country's agricultural minister Julia Klöckner is proposing legislation that would order dog owners to walk their dogs at least twice […]

DARPA AlphaDogfight Trials is a competition between AI programs in a fighter jet simulator. The final event pits the winning program "Heron" against Air Force F-16 pilot "Banger," and the AI wins with some unexpected moves that humans don't typically make. This is cued up to the finals, but you can watch from the beginning […]

The GOP's official 2020 platform is nothing but a loyalty pledge to Trump, and whatever it is that he believes in and plans to do. And what he plans to has been detailed on his website in a document that looks like a last-minute homework assignment trying to fudge with the margins and fonts to […]

The China Film Administration, which is part of China's Central Publicity Department and the China Association for Science and Technology, has released a new official set of moviemaking guidelines titled, "A Few Opinions on the Promotion and Development of Science Fiction Movies." As Variety reports: To make strong movies, the document claims, the number one […]

Woad is a plant and a blue dye taken thereof, popularly associated with iron-age Britons but replaced by the superior Indigo plant long before the modern age. But it has its fans and now you can even buy watercolor paint made from it. Don't leave it out in the sun. [via] The famous artist Lucas […]

It's set in the not-so-distant future but takes its design cues from the past, specifically the familiar stylings of old Popular Science magazines. Popular Pandemics is the parody publication of Bob Rucker who shared with Boing Boing: When I first saw videos of people in China collapsing on the sidewalks at the beginning of the […]

If you still haven't climbed aboard the robot vacuum cleaner bandwagon, there's probably one question about unleashing a tiny carpet sucker in your home that nags at you above all others — do they actually do a good job? No less an authority on tech as PCMag has the definitive statement, saying "robot vacuums have […]

That dog is a very good dog, and looking extremely cute in those snow goggles. [source]