No one can explain why empty jars of Vaseline keep showing up on 68th Street N.E. in northeast Calgary. It's been going on for at least five years. There's even one of them in Google Street View, as you can see in this photo:Rodel Bique, who works for the city of Calgary on the road crew, told CBC: "Too much. Too much Vaseline bottles here. We cannot count it. Maybe an average of 15 bottles, 15 to 20 in a month."Unanswered questions: Who is using the Vaseline? For what purpose? And why are they throwing the empty containers in the street?By the way, there are a lot of songs about Vaseline. The one by Elastica is the best, FYI:https://youtu.be/2608iYI5pgE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PL_RJ8Z7XLsThe wonderful Aquabats, nearly killed when the network they'd signed with went out of business, are back, and they want to produce a new TV special episode of Super Show! with a new album to go with it. (more…)

I have been a tabletop/roleplaying gamer, off and on, for most of my life. Miniature modeling, painting, and terrain building have always been my favorite aspects of this wide-ranging and very maker-friendly hobby. As I've given in even more completely to my game-related obsessions these past few years (I may be in line for an intervention), painting minis has become my daily go-to activity for relaxation, creative expression, and escapism. I pretty much live for my painting and modeling sessions each night.I'm really enjoying focusing on painting and trying to get as good at it as possible. I am currently painting up a bunch of Frostgrave wizard warbands, adversaries, and terrain, several teams for Gaslands (and suitably Mad Max-ian terrain), and the recent plastic OGRE miniatures.After several years of nearly daily painting, I can now look back on my experience with some sense of what I did wrong. I was struck when I saw this video on Miniac because Scott touches on most of the key tips and cautions that I would share at this point.https://youtu.be/Xq2OtQxXTykBesides what he listed, I would add a few of my own.You really only need one good brushThere is a trap that new or inexperienced painters fall into of thinking that they need a different size brush for each type of painting operation (e.g., a size 1 or 2 for base coating, a 0 for highlighting, a 00 – or ridiculous sizes like 5/0 or 18/0 – for painting eyeballs and super-detailing). You really only need one main brush (and a crappy old brush for dry brushing). I recommend getting a high-quality Kolinsky sable brush. I use the Winsor & Newton Series 7 Kolinsky Sable Watercolor Brush, in a size 1. Acrylic paint dries quickly so when you put a spot of paint on a 00 brush to paint an eyeball, by the time you line up your approach, the paint is already half dry. A size 1 watercolor brush is designed to hold a lot of paint. If you keep the tip on it nice and fine and pointy, you can do everything you can with a jarful of brushes of different sizes. And it will hold lots of paint. Besides learning good brush care (see below) and maintaining a righteous point, the key is learning how to use pressure and control to allow your size 1 brush to act as all of these different point sizes.Use a good brush cleaner and conditionerGet yourself a pot of Masters Brush Cleaner and watch some videos on brush care. Treat your brush with reverence. Keep it clean, keep paint away from the ferule (the metal collar that holds the brush to the handle), and keep a point on the brush. After you've washed the brush well and rinsed it, coat the brush in some more Masters and twist the tip into a point. Store it flat while it dries (don't store a wet brush upright; water runs down into the ferule and degrades the connection to the handle).Use agitator balls in your paint After I got some squeeze-bottle paints that had agitator balls in them, I wanted them in all of my paint bottles and pots. You can get 100 nail polish balls on Amazon for $6. Put one in each bottle or pot. You'll wonder how you ever went without these.Use a matte medium thinnerThe quality of my painting took a giant leap forward when I started thinning the acrylic-based hobby paints I was using. Many painters just thin with water. But that makes it harder to apply consistently smooth, thin coats (one of the hallmarks of a great paint job). When you water-thin your paint, the pigment can separate from the medium and the water. To help keep your thinned paint integrated, you need a matte medium-based thinner. There are oodles of formulae out there, but basically all you need is to fill a bottle (e.g., 7ml eyedropper) with mostly distilled water and 5 or so drops of matte medium. Experiment until you find the amount of medium that keeps everything integrated while also keeping the paint nice and thin. Some people also add a few drops of Flow Aid. You can make that yourself, too: Mix about 6ml of distilled water with 5 or 6 drops of glycerine. You can also just add a modest drop of glycerin to your batch of acrylic thinner.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dw_oH5oiUSE&has_verified=1Robberies, hunting, fishing, sitting around campfires, exploration and that's not even getting into the game's story. Every time I look at Rockstar Games' Red Dead Redemption 2, my need to play it gets so much worse. I've still got my fingers crossed for a Switch port of the original Red Dead Redemption as well (I hear that the code for the game was something of a knife fight, back in the day, so I'm not holding my breath.) Even if that never happens, the sequel looks to offer be more than enough of the Old West for me to be satisfied by.

I'm heading to Scotland for the Edinburgh Festival where I'm appearing with the wonderful Ada Palmer on August 12th at 845PM (we're talking about the apocalypse, science fiction and hopefulness); from there, I'm heading to the 76th World Science Fiction Convention in San Jose, California, where I'll be doing a bunch of panels, signings and a reading. (more…)

Two years ago, I delivered the closing keynote at the Internet Archive's inaugural Decentralized Web event; last week, we had the second of these, and once again, I gave the closing keynote, entitled Big Tech's problem is Big, not Tech. Here's the abstract: (more…)

Good news everyone: those superbugs we’re all so afraid of? They’re evolving to be immune to a number of those popular alcohol-based hand sanitizers we all assumed would help to keep us from getting sick. Nature’s amazing!Seriously though, the planet is totally trying to kill us for all the shit we do to it.From Ars Technica:

After Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz (a movie that deserves a sequal more than any other film, ever) and The World's End, I'm willing to watch anything Nick Frost and Simon Pegg put in front of my eyeballs a go.Slaughterhouse Rulez looks like more of the same sort of violent whimsy that I've come to expect from Frost and Pegg. That's just fine by me.

YouTubers Home Science created a wonderful compilation of some simple science experiments that can be done at home as a family. (more…)

It's been ten years since the first warnings about the security defects in pacemakers, which made them vulnerable to lethal attacks over their wireless links, and since then the news has only gotten worse: one researcher found a way to make wireless pacemaker viruses that spread from patient to patient in cardiac care centers, and the medical device makers responded to all this risk by doubling down on secrecy and the use of proprietary code. (more…)

Senegalese musician Salliou made his own kashaka, a type of twin ball rattle on a string. Listen to him show how many sounds his ingenious creation can make. (more…)

Comedian Maeve Higgins is the host of the amazing Maeve In America podcast in which Higgins, an Irish immigrant to Brooklyn, discusses the immigrant experience in America with other immigrants (as an immigrant to the USA myself, I find this a consistently fascinating and uplifting listen); Mary Robinson was the first woman elected President of Ireland (1990-1997), and after a tenure marked by much-needed, groundbreaking liberalization and secularization, she served as the UN's High Commissioner for Human Rights (1997-2002 -- she was forced out by opposition from George W Bush's UN delegation!). (more…)

I've started dabbling in the Linux operating system, for two reasons -- the Raspberry Pi (a $30 single board computer that runs on Linux) and losing the PIN code for my Bitcoin hardware wallet (which I recovered using an old MacBook Air running Linux).If you are interested in Linux but don't know where to start, Lifewire has a good tutorial on how to install Linux Mint (one of the many different free distributions) on your Mac or Windows machine without overwriting the existing OS. That way, you can boot into either OS. It also shows you how to install Linux Mint onto a USB thumb drive and boot from that.Another recommendation: the book Linux for Makers, which is a great intro to the operating system, especially for Pi users.

A Norwich man who took a pig for a walk without a leash was charged with "having a pig untethered and loose", reports the BBC.

Aliens are coming. We need these guys to defend us.

Maciej Czapiewski set the world record when he solved this 2x2x2 cube at the Grudziądz Open. At this size, there's a bit of luck of the draw, but the skill is undeniable. (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9shVKjHkKy8Australian Tommy Emmanuel teamed up with Jerry Douglas on slide guitar for a virtuoso riff on the Hendrix classic Purple Haze. (more…)

For seven years, Florida state inmates could buy a $100 MP3 player from Access Corrections, the prisons' exclusive provider, and stock it with MP3s that cost $1.70 -- nearly double the going rate in the free world. (more…)

Alisdair McDiarmid's Kill Sticky Headers bookmarklet banishes all fixed-position CSS elements, like navigation bars, cookie consent popups, email list subscription solicitations, and so on -- these are an annoyance at best and an accessibility problem at worst; if you have low vision like me and habitually scale up the type on the pages you browse, these elements grow to completely eclipse the type, making you choose between eyestrain and access. Drag this Kill Sticky to your toolbar and click it whenever you want to get rid of these annoyances.

Comcast Xfininty's login page had an easily found bug that allowed anyone to gain access to the Social Security Numbers and partial home addresses of over 26.5 million customers. (more…)

A federal lawsuit brought by voting security activists against the State of Georgia has revealed breathtaking defects in the state's notoriously terrible voting machines -- and, coincidentally, the machines in question were wiped and repeatedly degaussed by the state before they could be forensically examined as evidence of their unsuitability for continued use. (more…)

Dressage sensation Wallace the mule was rescued in Ireland, and his new owner quickly saw his potential as a dressage competitor. It took a lot of work to overturn his intial ban on competing, but now he's won the UK dressage championship. (more…)

Every brand has a story, and animation is one of the best ways to tell it. That's why companies aren't afraid to pay a premium for professional animators to bring their brands to life and connect with their audiences. However, for those of us lacking the funds for a full animation team or the know-how to do it ourselves, Animatron Studio Pro has emerged as a beginner-friendly alternative, and it's on sale for $49.99 in the Boing Boing Store.Animatron Studio gives you the tools you need to create animations and graphics that will engage your audience, regardless of your technical know-how, and you can do it straight in your browser. With Animatron, you can make explainer videos, design HTML5 banners and animations, and build stunning presentations while choosing from thousands of free, pre-animated characters, backgrounds and props. You can customize everything you want—from basic shapes to fully-animated characters and export to HTML5, SVG, GIF, and video when your project is done.Lifetime subscriptions to Animatron Studio Pro are on sale for $49.99, more than 90% off the usual price.

Consumer Reports' latest telcoms survey finds that people hate their cable company with the fire of a thousand suns, and that they hate them even more than they did the last time they were asked, which is remarkable, because everyone hated them the last time they were asked. (more…)

YouTuber IAA015 likes to demonstrate fun decorative gadgets for the home and office, like this nicely designed Stirling engine that can reach speeds of over 2,000 revolutions per minute. (more…)

Now that Consumer Reports is explicitly factoring privacy and security into its tech reviews, we're making some progress to calling out the terrible state of affairs that turned the strange dream of an Internet of Things into a nightmare we call the Internet of Shit. (more…)

A low velocity vortex cannon isn't too hard to make, but a vortex cannon that's this high velocity takes a lot of trial and error. (more…)

Photoshopper James Fridman completes badly-phrased Photoshop requests to the letter, like Come take it away, which is obviously not what the requester expected. (more…)

Shudu is a harbinger of the future of modeling, a digitally created and enhanced supermodel created by Cameron-James Wilson. "Digital influencers" like Shudu are already clogging up Instagram and Snapchat, where kids these days can't get enough of the more-human-than-human beauties. (more…)

Here's former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams on J.R.R. Tolkien, often seen as a reactionary but also the creator of a myth of Englishness completely opposed to fascism and other rotten boughs of capitalism.

Pompeii is a vast archaeological site that continues to yield treasures buried beneath the pumice. This summer, workers discovered new murals and artifacts at the site of a wealthy homeowner's estate, nicknamed House of Jupiter for a statue of the god found there. (more…)

I’ve known Richard Kadrey for a number of years. We generally mouth off at each other about technology, injuries we acquired while we were young/dumb, barbecue, tiki drinks and movies. There’s not much jibba-jabba, however, about what either of us does for a living. He writes constantly. So do I. It’s nice to talk about anything but your gig, from time to time. That said, the rent must be paid, so here we go. On August 28th, the tenth book in Kadrey’s Sandman Slim series, Hollywood Dead, will be available in the United States. Last last week, after reading an advanced copy that was sent out to me, I got on the horn for a chat with him about the new book, his plans for Sandman Slim and what he’s got cooking beyond the massively popular urban fantasy series. SB: I read Hollywood Dead over the weekend. I think one of the things I enjoyed the most about the new book is how the tension ramps up as Stark came to understand how screwed he really was. RK: I really wanted him off-balance. He felt off-balanced in The Kill Society—Stark was basically hiding who he was. But I wanted him to be genuinely fucked up in this book. He thinks everything’s going to be fine now and nothing is fine. Everything is fucked up. There’s no problem he can solve by punching it. Yeah, there’s bad guys, but his overall situation can’t be solved with violence. In the book, a lot of the truth of what[Stark]is comes out of Kasabian’s mouth, the way it always has. The world without Stark has been better, in some ways, so he’s begging Stark to just not be there. If nobody wants you there, that’s kind of it. There’s no way of getting around it. None of Stark’s abilities will help him work through that. SB: You’ve had a long time to live with this character. How does a character that’s traditionally solved problems with blood and fire, grow?RK: I’m growing and changing with the character. So, I’m seeing the world differently, too. I’m seeing the stuff that my friends are going through, for instance. That’s how the issue of PTSD with Stark came up. Stark’s never going to be OK unless he deals with his own trauma. That was never in my head when I started writing the character. But if I’m going to deal with somebody like him over a long period of time and have some kind of truth in it, first, he has to admit that he has PTSD. The second thing is that he has to, at least, attempt to do something about it. Of course, the world conspires against him. Every time he says that he’s going to try and do something about it, something awful happens and it stops him. But he’s at least acknowledging that there’s something he can do to be more of a human being. Becoming more of a human being is at the core of what this series is about. In the first book, Stark is a genuine monster, just back from Hell and wanting to kill everything. Wanting to kill the world. Over the course of the books, that’s changed. I want to keep exploring that. I don’t know how far I can take that or how far I want to. I’m following what I think Stark would do and Stark would want. I’m hoping I’m getting that right, in letting the character lead me a bit in the rest of the series. SB: Every time you set out to write a new book you crack out a new Moleskine to plot it out. Did you have any idea of what the series was going to look like or do you sort it out as you go? RK: I worked out what happens to the end of the series. I know where it’s going, although there are questions on how it’s going to get there. I know what has to happen for the rest of the series because I needed to. The things I’m doing now, I can’t just wing it forever, although there were points at which I was doing that. There’s a certain amount of the series that I had to come up with as a matter of panicking, because originally, Harper only bought three books. I thought that might be it. When I finished the third book, and they were doing OK, they said that they wanted more. Suddenly, I had to get a lot deeper into the situation. That’s when I started creating more. More of an arc than I had before. Where I left it in book, three, it could have stopped, easily. For it to go on, and again, for Stark to deal with who he is, back in the world, I needed to do a lot more homework. The last half of the series, I’ve pretty much mapped out what needs to happen and now we’re getting towards the end of it. It’s all coming together. SB: Are you able to say how many books are left in the series?RK: I could say it, but I don’t want to.SB: Let’s talk about the movie. How does it feel to have someone else manhandling your characters after spending so much time with them. Do you have your fingers in the production?RK: I’m doing some consulting on it. There’s a brand new screenplay. I haven’t seen it yet, but I’ve heard really good things. Kerry Williamson is doing the screenplay. She’s worked with the director, Chas Stahelski a lot, so I like that. Plus, you know what man? I’m really happy to have a woman working on the screenplay for this. Its been such a dude-heavy project all the way through. To have a woman with [Williamson’s] credentials and her point of view is why Chad though of her as a good person to do it. Apparently, she worked in stunts: she has a writer’s point of view and understands action. In her body, not just intellectually. I think that’s great. I have a lot of faith with what they want to do with it. I have talked with Chad about the direction he wants to take things in. I’m excited. I trust this team completely. Top to bottom, I think they’re really quality people.SB: What are your plans do you have once you’re finished with Stark? The books you’ve been writing outside of the series have been doing pretty well. Is getting past Sandman Slim something you’re looking forward to or more of a ‘shit, what do I do now? You’ve spent a long time with this stuff, man.RK: It’ll be weird to end it, but there’s the movie is moving forward and there’s the talk of a comic and things like that, which I’ve discussed with the movie people. If they want to do a comic, I have ideas of what it should be. And what it shouldn’t be, which I think is more important. And yeah, I have a lot of stuff that I want to do afterwards. It’s why I’m working very hard on this new book right now, called The Grand Dark. In the way that Sandman Slim reestablished my career, I want to take a chance towards the end of Sandman Slim of rebooting myself. I love writing Sandman Slim. I love writing violence and action—pulp sensibilities. But I don’t want to be locked into that for the rest of my life. I want to do larger things, and that’s what the Grand Dark is.SB: Tell me more about The Grand Dark. Whatcha got? What’s going on?RK: I’m doing a massive rewrite right now, it’s driving me crazy. It is the story of a young man in a very different world, a world that feels…some people would use the word ‘steampunk.’ I never used to like the word, but I’m ok with it now. I’m going to use that word, which I used to not like, to say “Steampunk-Kafka.” That’s what I’m working on now. It’s not going to be a huge book, but it’s been a huge undertaking because there’s no aspect of it that’s like my previous work. It’s right down to my use to my use of language and the way that I write the book. With Stark there’s very specific rules of how the text appears on the page. This is sort of the opposite of that. It’s much more straightforward in someways and far more twisted in others than anything I’ve ever written.SB: It sounds like you’re challenging yourself. That’s where it’s at. If you get bored, whats the point?RK: That’s exactly it. It’s me pushing myself to do something new and hoping to establish myself to a broader audience while trying to bring my current audience into a new kind of work that I want to do. Certainly, there’s action and guns and crazy stuff going on. But it’s not presented in the hyperbolic way that Sandman Slim is.Headshot via Richard Kadrey, photographed by Tristan Crane; Book photo via Séamus Bellamy

The Royal Ocean Film Society examines and contextualizes the beach party movie genre formula perfected and then milked dry by the genius marketers at schlock house American International Pictures. (more…)

My daughter and her cousin are watching Muppets From Space, a $2 DVD bin find last weekend. It is well worth rewatching.There is a low quality version free on YouTube, or you can stream it in HD from Amazon.

Zuckerberg -- who says privacy isn't a value that's important to most people any more -- owns the four houses on either side of his Silicon Valley house so that no one can use them as a perch to spy on him; he bought 100 acres around his Hawai'ain beach house, suing native Hawai'ians to force them to sell to him, so that he could have a buffer between him and the world. (more…)

Brock Turner, convicted of sexual assault after attacking an unconscious woman in 2015, lost his appeal Wednesday.

There are more people who want to make art than the market would support, and the arts are a highly concentrated industry: combine those two facts and you get a buyers' market for artists' work, controlled by intermediaries, who take almost all of the money generated by the work. (more…)

Quicksilver is a machine-learning tool from AI startup Primer: it used 30,000 Wikipedia entries to create a model that allowed it to identify the characteristics that make a scientist noteworthy enough for encyclopedic inclusion; then it mined the academic search-engine Semantic Scholar to identify the 200,000 scholars in a variety of fields; now it is systematically composing draft Wikipedia entries for scholars on its list who are missing from the encyclopedia. (more…)

Millennial doctors are killing predatory health-care capitalism! (more…)

In certain circles, it's become popular for brides to ruin their wedding dress after the wedding, leading to more and more elaborate and risky photos. Pierre Violle specializes in the genre, and he's captures some amazing underwater couples over the years: (more…)

Johnathan Movie is losing his shit and it's all our fault.

Wakuneco uses wool felt to make amazingly detailed custom-ordered cat portraits that look uncannily like the subjects. Here are how the finishing touches like whiskers get done. (more…)

One of the holy grails of computer science is unsupervised machine learning, where you tell an algorithm what goal you want it to attain, and give it some data to practice on, and the algorithm uses statistics to invent surprising ways of solving your problem. (more…)

When we worry about free speech, we mostly worry about governments suppressing speech, not private actors. It's one thing to say that the US government shouldn't have the ability to arbitrarily censor some speech, but it's another altogether to say, that, for example, Boing Boing shouldn't be able to kick jerks off its message boards -- that has as much to do with "compelled publication" as it does with "free speech." (more…)

Andre Ferreira says: "My scissors handle broke, I was devastated! And then I thought, I could throw them away and buy some new ones for around $1. Or... I could spend 4 hours planning, measuring, CADing, 3D printing, fitting, glueing, and finishing a replacement handle. The choice was clear :)"[via Maker Share]

Astronaut Alexander Gerst captured the above photo of Northern California's Carr and Ferguson fires five days ago. Below is the blanket of smoke from the Mendocino Complex Fire, the largest fire in California's history, as imaged by the Aqua satellite. Horrifying and tragic no matter how you see it.From NASA:

Those of us who eschew a phone case take a lot of abuse in this cruel world. Finally, a send-up of all the things we endure from case freaks and their misguided fanaticism. Note: some spicy language that reflects what we have to deal with. (more…)

Yesterday, the FCC published an admission that it had lied about a supposed hack-attack that it blamed for the collapse of its public comments portal that led to the agency eventually shutting down public comment and announcing that it would give equal weight to obviously forged anti-Net Neutrality comments and the pro-Neutrality comments it received. (more…)