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For better or worse, the state of the contemporary game industry has always been reflected in Rockstar's blockbuster Grand Theft Auto series. The mid-2000s push toward gritty realism (i.e. putting a brown filter on everything), the emergence of ruthlessly exploitative live-service elements, even the 3D sandbox tropes we now take for granted - GTA has always been a time capsule of the triple-A gaming sphere at large. - Read the rest The post GTA 6 is now paywalling its own advertisements appeared first on Boing Boing.

I'm headed back to Japan soon. This will be my 10th visit there. I've been going to Japan since 1986. It's changed in a lot of ways. Most noticeably, it is less expensive than it was in 1986, and there are far more foreigners in Tokyo now. - Read the rest The post A little plastic holder for the yen coins in my pocket appeared first on Boing Boing.

Disney made many announcements for the future of its theme parks at the D23 Disney fan event in Anaheim, California, Saturday night. One headline is that an upcoming refurbishment of the Imagination Pavilion in Disney World's EPCOT (Orlando, Florida) will feature beloved but neglected characters Figment and Dreamfinder. - Read the rest The post Disney will reunite Figment and Dreamfinder at EPCOT appeared first on Boing Boing.

The time-honored trick of "repeat after me" strikes again.Elon "Pedo Guy" Musk calls his expensive AI Grok "maximum truth-seeking." Users apparently discovered they could create maximum truths by putting inflammatory text in an X bio, asking Grok to repeat the bio verbatim, and then sitting back as Musk's personal AI shared it with the world. - Read the rest The post Grok explains why it called for Elon Musk's assassination appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR: Disappear into an immersive game withRed Dead Redemption 2 Ultimate Edition, now just $49.99 for an XBOX Live Key.Your real life might be filled with responsibilities and boring things like emails, work tasks, and chores, but if you're Arthur Morgan, you're regularly dealing with bank robberies, shootouts, and everything the Wild West entails. - Read the rest The post Your next gaming obsession is half off right now appeared first on Boing Boing.

Budding Portland celebrities Billy the Kid and Billy the Goat escaped their owner's yard, found a TriMet stop, and briefly attempted the morning commute.Two pygmy goats showed up at a Portland bus stop Tuesday morning, waited for the FX2 and climbed on aboard with the other passengers. - Read the rest The post Escaped pygmy goats try Portland public transit appeared first on Boing Boing.

If you want to sell AI to the Russian state, you're going to have to tune it to the nation's "traditional spiritual and moral values" before you have a shot, reports Vedomosti, a Russian-language business daily out of Moscow. - Read the rest The post Russia to test AI models for traditional spiritual and moral values appeared first on Boing Boing.

After more than a decade of reading on Kindle e-readers, I finally added custom fonts, and I'm blown away.I was never sold. When Amazon's first "made for ereaders" font, Bookerly, came out, I set it on my Kindle and never looked back. - Read the rest The post OK, custom Kindle fonts are really nice appeared first on Boing Boing.

Claude Monet's first paying work was caricature. At fifteen, he sold unflattering drawings of well-known men around Le Havre through a framing shop, and crowds gathered at the window to look at them. By his own later account, he was among the most successful artists in the Norman port city. - Read the rest The post Before the water lilies, Monet drew cartoons of well-known locals appeared first on Boing Boing.

Roger Waters built the opening of Pink Floyd's "Money" in 1972 out of spliced tape: cash registers, torn paper, and coins. Open Culture posted a video of a German band that played those same sounds live at Abbey Road Studios, where Pink Floyd recorded The Dark Side of the Moon, and identifies the drummer as Sina Doering. - Read the rest The post A band recreated the cash register sounds from "Money" live appeared first on Boing Boing.

Pompous scholars were a standard joke on the Italian stage through the 16th century. Arnoud Visser writes in The Public Domain Review that Francesco Belo, a playwright from Rome, published the first play to put one at the center. In El pedante, from the 1520s, the schoolmaster Prudenzio "talks in a mangled mix of Latin and vernacular." - Read the rest The post A 1582 comedy translates "pedant" as "worthless idiot, donkey head" appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR: Getlifetime access to Microsoft Office Professional 2021 for Windowsfor just $32.97 (reg. $219.99).If you're a working professional who prefers a traditional, standalone software experience, Microsoft Office Professional 2021 for Windows Lifetime License might just be right up your alley. - Read the rest The post Get lifetime access to the full MS Office 2021 suite for $33 appeared first on Boing Boing.

Canned sardines are hard to find in American supermarketsbecause of a fad diet.Corner of Fifth reports that the diet consists of tinned fish and water, black coffee, or plain tea. It spread on TikTok and YouTube and through keto communities, and Dr. - Read the rest The post A viral diet and warm oceans emptied the canned sardine shelf appeared first on Boing Boing.

Phyllis Zorn, a reporter at the Marion County Record, will get $850,000 from the city of Marion, Kansas to settle her federal lawsuit over the 2023 police raid on the newspaper, reports the Kansas Reflector. Lawyers for Zorn and the city filed the motion to dismiss on August 11, three years to the day after the raid. - Read the rest The post A Kansas reporter raided by police settles for $850,000 appeared first on Boing Boing.

Food safety lawyer Bill Marler says theFDA's new guide on fresh-cut produce admits it knows of no chemical wash that stops Cyclospora from spreading between pieces of cut produce.Cyclospora is a parasite hazard in berries, fresh basil, fresh cilantro, and fresh salad mixes. - Read the rest The post The FDA says you can't wash Cyclospora from your lettuce appeared first on Boing Boing.

The EU AI Act AI outputs to be "detectable as artificially generated"and "embedded within the content in a manner that is difficult for it to be separated from the content."But Sean Goedecke, a software engineer, explains why the European Union's new watermark rule for AI text won't work. - Read the rest The post You can remove an AI watermark from text by asking a second AI appeared first on Boing Boing.

The US Treasury sold $25 billion of 30-year bonds at a 5.22 percent yield, the most it has paid to borrow that far out since 2001, reports the Financial Times.That's up from 5.06 percent at July's sale, and 4.91 percent just before Trump's second term began. - Read the rest The post The government now spends more on interest than on the military appeared first on Boing Boing.

noRecognition is a line of basic fashion items (tees, hoodies and gaiters) printed with "adversarial" patterns demonstrated to stymie machine vision systems' ability to detect humans. If battleship dazzle for people has been tried many times, this effort has undergone extensive testing and you can now pre-order custom sets of clothing on Kickstarter. - Read the rest The post Adversarial clothing: custom, one-off tees and hoodies that dazzle AI appeared first on Boing Boing.

In a newStarTalk episode, Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-host Negin Farsad interviewed Jaron Lanier, the computer scientist who wrote the 2023 New Yorker piece, "There Is No AI."Lanier thinks calling AI a "black box" where nobody knows what's inside these models is really just a way to avoid the truth: the box is full of people and their data. - Read the rest The post The only thing inside an AI is people appeared first on Boing Boing.

WhatCable does what your eyes can't: it tells you what a USB-C cable can actually do. 40Gbps transfer? 100W fast charging? DisplayPort Alt Mode? So long as you have macOS and a port to plug it into, this free app will provide detailed specs on any of those annoyingly indistinguishable cables in your drawer. - Read the rest The post App tells you what USB-C cables are capable of appeared first on Boing Boing.

Peter Bebergal, author of Season of the Witch, Strange Frequencies, and Appendix N: The Eldritch Roots of Dungeons & Dragons, has spent years thoughtfully exploring the borderlands where occultism, religion, pop culture, and imagination overlap. Writer and filmmaker JF Martel hosts the art and philosophy podcast, Weird Studies, and is the author of Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice, for my money, one of the smartest and most provocative books about art and the imagination published in recent memory. - Read the rest The post When Jewish mysticism answers the Call of Cthulhu appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR:Get Microsoft Windows 11 Pro for just $9.97 (MSRP $199) through August 20. The upgrade addsadvanced security, productivity, and management featuresto compatible PCs - without the usual $199 price tag.Windows 11 Pro is currently available for just $9.97, giving you afull-featured PC operating systemat a fraction of the usual cost through August 20. - Read the rest The post BitLocker, Copilot, and more are yours for $9.97 with this Windows 11 Pro deal appeared first on Boing Boing.

Thus, exits the Mouth of Moron.After returning early from maternity leave at the request of her crying baby President, Leavitt learned that the press corps and senior White House staff had been left aboard a decoy plane under a credible missile threat while her boss escaped in a catering truck. - Read the rest The post Seems Karoline Leavitt doesn't want to be left to die appeared first on Boing Boing.

North Korea'sRed Star Linux OSships with a modified Firefox called Naenara ("Our country") and lets users browse Kwangmyong, the country's isolated national intranet. It also comes with an office suite, media players, and video games. It sells for $15. - Read the rest The post North Korea's operating system watermarks every file you touch appeared first on Boing Boing.

The British Transport Police announced it would start using facial recognition cameras in a London Underground station. The Victoria Underground station was the first to be equipped with cameras.The cameras scan the faces of everyone who walks past them and compare each face to a watchlist of people the police or the courts want to find. - Read the rest The post Police are now scanning faces at a London Underground station appeared first on Boing Boing.

Many restaurants in Japan put a small plastic device on tables. When you press it, a chime rings at the waitstaff station or in the kitchen, and a server comes to your table.Algis Tamosaitis writes the newsletter Japan or Die, and he explained the table call button for travelers. - Read the rest The post In Japan, press the button on your table and a server appears appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR:UPDFpacks editing, OCR, conversion, forms, signatures, batch processing, and cloud syncing into one cross-platform PDF toolkit, now $69.99 for life.PDFs are already stubborn enough without your editing software demanding a specific operating system.UPDFworks across Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android and packs editing, conversion, OCR, signing, and more into one lifetime subscription for $69.99 (reg. - Read the rest The post This $70 PDF editor doesn't care which operating system you use appeared first on Boing Boing.

In 1941 the National Park Service hired Ansel Adams to make a photo mural of the national parks for the Department of the Interior Building in Washington, DC. Adams took the pictures between 1941 and 1942, and then the project stopped. - Read the rest The post Ansel Adams shot 226 park photos for a mural that never got made appeared first on Boing Boing.

How Buildings Learn is a six-part BBC television series from 1997 about what happens to a building after the builders leave. Stewart Brand wrote and presented it, and Brian Eno wrote the music.Brand made the series from his illustrated book of the same name. - Read the rest The post Stewart Brand put his 1997 BBC architecture series online for free appeared first on Boing Boing.

The world's southernmost ATM is at McMurdo Station in Antarctica, at 7751' south. It is the only cash machine on the continent.Atlas Obscura says the machine works the same way as an ATM in the United States, and it gives out U.S. - Read the rest The post The only ATM in Antarctica has a second ATM for spare parts appeared first on Boing Boing.

Keith Kahn-Harris is a sociologist in London who writes about heavy metal and about Jewish communities. His ninth book, The Beautiful Death of Ozzy Osbourne: How Metal Teaches Us To Live, came out in June 2026. He types on a Wobkey Rainy 75 mechanical keyboard, which he replaced the stock switches on with Gateron Oil Kings. - Read the rest The post A mechanical keyboard, plain yoghurt, and a 7am start appeared first on Boing Boing.

Jonathan Weber has written a history of San Francisco's rise as a global technology capital and the crises that came with it. City on the Edge: Technology, Politics, and the Fight for the Soul of San Franciscoopens in the early 1990s, when San Francisco had not recovered from the AIDS epidemic and the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. - Read the rest The post How San Francisco became a tech capital, then nearly lost itself appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR:AskAnyModelis a new platform that gives you access to 50+ popular AI models, and it's only $39.99 for life.Most of thegood AI modelscost about $20 per month. For one, that's not too bad, but no single model is good at everything. - Read the rest The post Get 50+ AI models for life, including GPT, Claude, and Gemini, for just $40 appeared first on Boing Boing.

I thought Ghost of Tsushima was areally good game, what with all its razor-sharp samurai action and breathtaking Japanese vistas. I thought its sequel Ghost of Ytei was pretty damn good too... weird as it was to see local comedian Erika Ishii, a person I have seen get their head shaved live on stage for a few measly improv comedy points, gruffly deliver stone-cold badass lines about revenge. - Read the rest The post Slick samurai simulator Ghost of Ytei finally getting some DLC appeared first on Boing Boing.

Louis Pope Gratacap was the curator of mineralogy at the American Museum of Natural History from 1880 until his death in 1917. He usually read during his three-hour round trip to the museum from Staten Island. He also wrote novels, and one of them, The New Northland (1915), may be the earliest novel to feature a Tyrannosaurus rex. - Read the rest The post A museum curator wrote the first T. rex novel on his daily commute appeared first on Boing Boing.

What could possibly be worse than being sick with explosive diarrhea? Being sick with explosive, spicy diarrhea. Unfortunately, it sounds like the latter has been unleashed on America, as everyone's favorite source of cyclospora, Taylor Farms, has issued a recall of its products containing jalapenos. - Read the rest The post Taylor Farms recalls jalapeno products in 26 states over salmonella appeared first on Boing Boing.

Ten years after Star Wars joined Marvel at Disney, and just in time for the 50th anniversary of A New Hope, the two franchises will get their first-ever crossover, in comic form.Kevin Smith, who made us consider the fates of the independent contractors on the second Death Star, has been tasked with writing the five-issue series. - Read the rest The post Kevin Smith writes first Star Wars/Marvel comic crossover appeared first on Boing Boing.

If you've ever been wowed by a cutaway illustration of a ship from your favorite sci-fi series or movie, there's a pretty good chance Matt Cushman had something to do with it. His visualizations of the guts of ships from Star Wars and Star Trek are astounding in their detail and the thoughtfulness given to functional, interior design. - Read the rest The post Adam Savage is gobsmacked by this hand-drawn Enterprise cutaway appeared first on Boing Boing.

Everyone's been so busy worrying and squawking about Flock that we completely missed the police discovering Meta's shifty-as-hell AI Smart glasses. However, thanks to Florida's Sunshine laws-which demand that everything the cops do on the record down there is available to the public-at least two law enforcement agencies in the state have started issuing the pervy peepers to police. - Read the rest The post Florida police are using Meta's creepy smart glasses appeared first on Boing Boing.

Tom the Dancing Bug 1797 sfpc180 - mank & mook-> Please join the team that makes it possible for your friendly neighborhood comic strip Tom the Dancing Bug to exist in this hostile Trumpverse! JOIN US INTHE INNERHIVE, and be the first kid on your block to get each week's Tom the Dancing Bug comic - before it's published anywhere, plus lots of other stuff! - Read the rest The post Tom the Dancing Bug: Super-Fun-Pak Comix, feat. Super Pals, McSmelty's World starring Mickey Mouse, and MORE! appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR:Internxt gives you 10TB of encrypted cloud storagefor a one-time $359.99 payment (reg. $2,900), with end-to-end encryption, zero-knowledge privacy, and no recurring storage bill.Cloud storage is useful. Paying rent on your own files forever is less charming. - Read the rest The post A giant cloud storage upgrade works out to $36 per TB appeared first on Boing Boing.

A programmer named Fogus came across a GitHub argument about chess engine development and wrote about why hobby coding communities are hostile toward large language models. Hobbyists sayis working code isn't the goal. They like to build operating systems, programming languages, and console emulators, or try to fit a working program into as few characters as possible. - Read the rest The post Why hobby coders treat AI-written code as missing the point appeared first on Boing Boing.

The TAC-2 was a famous joystick offered for Commodore's C64, the 8-bit personal computer first sold in 1982, and compatible with the Atari and other systems using the classic 9-pin plug. And now you can buy it again. There are upgrades such as a stronger steel shaft (the original was just a tire valve, according to the press release, which would be typical of the old Commodore) but its otherwise high-fidelity, including the connector (no USB!) - Read the rest The post TAC-2 is back: the new Commodore reissues an old joystick appeared first on Boing Boing.

Dima Kogan hiked in the San Gabriel Mountains, and a friend wondered which point in the range sits farthest from any road or trail. Kogan went home and computed it, and his notes on the poles of inaccessibility above Los Angeles put the answer at 4,343 meters, or about 2.7 miles, from the nearest one. - Read the rest The post The farthest you can get from a road in the San Gabriels is 2.7 miles appeared first on Boing Boing.

The US Bureau of Reclamation is resorting to moving water between reservoirs so that Glen Canyon Dam can continue to generate electricity. Darren Orf reported in Popular Mechanics on August 10, 2026, that a long drought has pulled Lake Powell and Lake Mead so low that Hoover Dam's output this year will fall by 40 percent from its full-capacity output. - Read the rest The post Hoover Dam is set to lose 40% of its maximum power this year appeared first on Boing Boing.

Microsoft, Google, and Amazon's growth depends on two companies that lose tens of billions of dollars a year. In a newsletter post,"Where's Your Ed At" reported on analyst estimates from Wells Fargo, Barclays, UBS, and Deutsche Bank.Wells Fargo estimates Microsoft's AI revenue at $34.43 billion, with about 70% coming from OpenAI. - Read the rest The post Microsoft, Google and Amazon now depend on two money-losing AI firms appeared first on Boing Boing.

I Love the 90s! is a website designed to evoke the feel of channel-surfing cable TV in the 1990s. It looks like it was made before HTML was standardized (but is perfectly modern under the hood) and wraps a myriad of low-bitrate standard-def compressed-to-heck YouTubes scanned from VHS tape. - Read the rest The post I Love the 90s! curates classics of the web and cable TV appeared first on Boing Boing.

A federal rule that targets cartel money laundering has driven customers away from the money-transfer counters at small shops on the US-Mexico border. The Guardian's Lourdes Medrano reported on August 11, 2026 that the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, ordered businesses in 30 border zip codes in Texas and California to file a report on every cash transaction above $200. - Read the rest The post Border corner stores have filed 700,000 reports on cash transfers appeared first on Boing Boing.

The ComicBooks.com Reading Room is a free online library of old comics that you read in your browser, one deep-zoomable page at a time. Open Culture pointed to it this week. The counter on the front page listed 20,109 books. The site promises "No login, no paywall, no catch." - Read the rest The post Read 20,000 restored golden-age comics free in your browser appeared first on Boing Boing.

Take twelve words and rearrange them to say the same thing in just five. That's the game.Sheets.works takes spreadsheets and turns them into dashboards and reports. To show off their chops in a fun way, they release a Data Drop once a week, like a collection of startup sounds or an explanation of why it takes so long to board an airplane. - Read the rest The post New daily word game challenges you to be succinct appeared first on Boing Boing.