From light to dark, affordable high-heeled shoes are available in a variety of skin tones from British retail brand Marks and Spencer (M&S). French shoe designer Christian Louboutin first brought "nude" shoes, in seven shades, to the market in 2017, but the collection was very pricey. https://www.instagram.com/p/BV5BJGkBCaE/Now, M&S is offering six "vegan friendly" (which is code for "not leather") shades of stilettos for approximately $33/pair.Not everyone is impressed, however:(TAXI)

The rich world has never been more unequal, and the poor world has never richer: in 2018, we're seeing record low levels of global "extreme poverty" (a measure that's admittedly a bit fuzzy) and record levels of inequality, which wealth concentrated into a declining number of hands. (more…)

Boaters in Comox, British Columbia were surprised to find an orca that had been acting strangely in the harbor began pulling a boat around like it was a toy. (more…)

For years, I maintained a Skype number that’d forward to whatever phone number I happened to be using at the time. It was the only way to make myself reachable on the phone, despite my switching to a new mobile number every time I moved to a different region. It worked well enough—until last year when Microsoft redesigned the iOS version of their app to make it damn near unusable as a phone forwarding service. I hated Skype’s mobile makeover so much that I decided not to renew my annual plan with the service. If you want to find me, these days, it has to happen via Twitter or email. It seems that users of Microsoft’s desktop version of the app have all sorts of loathing for its recent redesign as well. According to The Verge, the backlash against version 8.0 of the app has been so widespread that it’s put Microsoft back on its heels. From The Verge:

We’ve known for a while that military personnel using GPS-enabled health tracking apps and accessories in sensitive operational areas was kind of a problem, from an intelligence standpoint. Such appliances make it wicked easy for someone to check in on the wearer’s daily routine, whereabouts or, should enough people in an operational area use the same service like Strava, figure out where personnel congregate at certain times of the day, no satellite surveillance or human intelligence assets required. Well, it looks like the Department of Defense has finally decided to do something about it: As of right now, DoD employees are no longer allowed to wear or use a wide variety of health tracking hardware. From Gizmodo:

In Boots Riley's Sorry to Bother You, there's a protest scene where there's a 12-foot-tall "Steve Lift Fucking a Horse" sculpture. It's hard to miss! Well, come to find out, my badass friend Spy Emerson (whose Hook Up Truck made international news a few years back) is the artist who created it. And now I've learned, on Boots' request, she's made a mini version of the sculpture to sell.If you want to get on your hands it, you can find her on Instagram or Patreon. Or you can reach her through her website. https://www.instagram.com/p/BlRVRdCBMr6/?taken-by=spy.emersonSpy shared with me that she clocked in 130 hours during filming last summer, as both an artist and a performer, and appears in the movie as a member of the Left Eye girl gang (in the photo below, she's the one in the goggles). In one scene she said that she's wearing an old punk t-shirt of hers from high school that reads, "Stay Warm, Burn the Rich."https://twitter.com/BootsRiley/status/1025490819153686528

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Yosuke Kurosawa takes a tour of Nara Juvenile Prison, which was in use until 2017 and will soon be turned into hotels for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. It's like a really clean Shawshank Prison. (more…)

The tweet has been removed and apologies made concerning this threatening message, depicting a Canadian airliner aimed at the CN Tower in Toronto, a response to Canadian criticism of Saudi Arabia's spectacularly grim human rights record.

Todd Kincannon was found "bloodied and covered in dog hair" by police officers after killing and mutilating his mother's 10-year-old beagle.

Another delight from Retro Pi Cases, albeit one you won't yet be stuffing a computer in. [Previously]

Rick Gates, on the witness stand today in the trial of Paul Manafort, says he committed crimes with Manafort, and embezzled “hundreds of thousands” of dollars from Manafort. (more…)

This handy wallwart lets me charge my phone and watch while I sleep, without a lot of extra chargers hanging around.After living in the same house for 10 years I am pretty sure I know where I want things. Moving USB chargers around gets tiresome, and the sheer convenience of just having a few USB ports on the wall behind my bed became too much to resist.I have also never had electronics damaged by a "surge." I am glad that so many of my home electronics are protected, as The Protectors have clearly done their job. HERE IS TO YOU SURGE PROTECTORS!I put this wallwart behind my bed, things are easier. It fits in a top outlet, leaving the bottom usable.AmazonBasics 3-Outlet Surge Protector with 2 USB Ports via Amazon

Facebook wants to "deepen user engagement" with Messenger, and to that end, it's been pitching America's giant banks on joint enterprises where Facebook will get to see all your financial info (especially info on where you're shopping and what you're buying) to help it suck you into using Messenger for longer. (more…)

Dance battles have come a long way from a bunch of kids breaking on a piece of cardboard. Watch as The Lab shows how it's done these days, replete with gymnastics, tight choreography, and the slick production values of a major network show. (more…)

Kate "McMansion Hell" Wagner is carrying $42,000 in student debt; heiress Betsy "Marie Antoinette" DeVos is the anti-public-school advocate whom Donald Trump put in charge of the nation's public schools, and one of her first official acts was to end the rules limiting sleazy student debt-collection tactics, even as Trump was ending debt relief for students defrauded by diploma mills (like, say, Trump University). (more…)

Consumer Reports is arguably America's most trusted source of product reviews -- published by Consumers Union, a venerable nonprofit with a deserved reputation for scrupulous care and neutrality -- and for years it has been wrestling with how to address privacy and cybersecurity in modern products (disclosure: I have advised them some on this). (more…)

Let us start the week off cute.

The Alternative For Germany (AfD) is a xenophobic far-right party whose ranks include neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers; in a new tell-all book by "AfD dropout" Franziska Schreiber (once the head of the AfD's youth wing), we learn that party leader Frauke Petry worked closely with Hans-Georg Maaßen, the president of Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (a domestic surveillance agency with 3,100 employees and an annual budget of €350m). (more…)

We've seen a lot of Sacha Baron Cohen's "mental Israeli colonel" persona lately, but it's his "narcissist European YouTuber" one that got former Sheriff Joe Arpaio to admit that he'd let Trump perform oral sex on him.

Rock that ball, kid.Thanks, Jay!

The Basic Engine is a tiny but intentionally limited computer platform designed to be like a late-1980s game console or home computer, but with some useful modern benefits. In effect, it's like Pico-8, but hardware instead of a set of abstract and arbitrary design limitations on software.

Whether or not you've ever chosen to eat insects, you've eaten insects, or parts of them, in the grains, legumes, fruits and nuts you've consumed (not to mention the occasional inhaled kamikaze mosquito). (more…)

The Ancient Earth Globe is an interactive 3D globe that depics the Earth at various points in geological history from 750m years ago until now. Here it is 300m years ago.

Director Nicolas Winding Refn loves cult movies and has been quietly restoring some of his faves. Now they are available to stream free on his byNWR site. (more…)

A group of high school students in Japan spent two years recreating the sounds and sights of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 in painstaking detail.

Apple has joined Facebook, Spotify and YouTube in tossing Alex Jones and InfoWars material from their platforms.

Archaeologists have determined from a butchered rhinoceros that the Philippine island of Luzon was inhabited by hominins hundreds of thousands of years before anatomically modern humans arrived. (more…)

Arthur Jones is a former Nazi, he insists, having not been a member of any official Nazi group since the 1980s. But he is still a holocaust denier, a proud racist, and the Republican Party candidate for Illinois' 3rd congressional district. The Chicago Tribune interviewed him and it went exactly as you would expect.

There is no Santa Claus, Lassie was played by nine different dogs over the years and, according to a recent lawsuit filed in New York, there isn’t any ginger in Canada Dry Ginger Ale.From USA Today:

You likely remember Steven Seagal from blockbuster films like Hard to Kill, The Glimmer Man, Under Siege and, more recently, his being identified by The Washington Post as a serial sex abuser. That’s just Seagal’s public face on this side of the water. He’s wicked famous overseas, too. Russians purportedly adore the man’s films and value his opinion. He routinely rubs elbows with the country’s elite. In 2016, President Vladimir Putin went so far as to award Seagal a Russian passport. Putin, who apparently loves him some foreshadowing, said that the gifting of the passport was “…a symbol of how fractious ties between Moscow and Washington were starting to improve.” Fast forward a few years: relations between the two Cold War adversaries have indeed improved, thanks to Russia’s meddling with the the U.S. presidential elections, backroom cash deals between Russian oligarchs and well-placed members of the American government and spies screwing their way into the halls of power. Also, very likely, a pee tape. With things going so swimmingly and filth rising to the top, there could be no better time for the Russian Foreign Ministry to announce that, to keep the good vibes for Russia going, they’ve appointed Seagal as their ‘special representative for Russian-U.S. humanitarian ties.’Just let that title soak into your brain until you can’t feel anything at all.From Reuters:

Waterjets are very useful for many kinds of industrial cutting, including this giant handheld one available for firefighters. The PyroLance allows water to enter an enclosed fire without adding dangerous oxygen from opening a door or punching a larger hole. (more…)

Antipodr is a nifty little site that lets visitors learn what's on the opposite side of the globe from any coordinate. For instance, Auckland, New Zealand is directly opposite Venta de Leche in southern Spain. (more…)

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Tech moves faster than virtually any other industry, which means the skills to stay competitive are frequently changing. Case in point, more companies are shifting their production to the new DevOps model, which merges development and operational teams into one, dramatically improving efficiency and product quality. As such, demand is high for DevOps-savvy professionals, and you can train to join their highly-paid ranks with the Pay What You Want DevOps Bundle.Here's how the deal works: pay what you want, and you'll instantly unlock one of the collection's courses. Beat the average price paid, and you'll get the remaining six courses at no extra charge.With courses on Linux shell scripting, Docker, Jenkins, and other industry tools, this training will expose you to the tools DevOps professionals use daily. You'll get a deeper understanding of what exactly DevOps is and why its trending, and you'll foster concrete skills as you learn how to create a basic web app on the cloud, build components on a development stack, and more.Choose your price, and you can start your DevOps education with the Pay What You Want DevOps Bundle.

Research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (paywalled, no Sci-Hub mirror) describes a fascinating experimental outcome in which subjects were asked to enact "meaningless rituals" ("knocking the table with their knuckles, closing their eyes and counting, among other things") before being confronted with a self-control challenge (eating two carrots, then deciding between a third carrot and a chocolate truffle). (more…)

For cyberpunks of a certain vintage, Re/Search press (previously) was absolutely formative -- books like Incredibly Strange Films, Zines!, and, of course, Modern Primitives (RIP, Fakir) were incredibly influential material for the modern happy mutant. (more…)

Last week, it was revealed by a sharp-eyed Redditor that the information kiosks at a mall in Calgary, Canada, were full of software designed to track the age and sex of anyone that stopped to use it. Pretty damn greasy. Greasier still, the management company that operates the mall, Cadillac Fairview admitted that the software was in use at a number of its other properties. The greasiest bit out of all of it? They shrugged off privacy concerns raised by a number of news outlets as there’s nothing in Alberta’s laws that keeps them from doing it without permission, or warning mall patrons that it’s being done. Well, that was last week.From The CBC:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8HB2cQm_AgMarianne Keating from The Tate takes viewers through the complex process of making prints in the style of many of Andy Warhol's most famous silk screen works. (more…)

Captain Jean-Luc Picard is back. This afternoon in Las Vegas, Patrick Stewart announced he was returning to the iconic role in a new Star Trek series for CBS All Access.

John Cage liked to share a list of rules for creativity developed by artist Sister Corita Kent. That list was then typed up and popularized by Cage. They are: (more…)

In the north of Burgandy, France, a group of history buffs are hard at work building a castle, from scratch, using traditional building methods and materials--and they've been at it for TWENTY YEARS. The project is supported entirely on the backs of donations and hard, dedicated, manual labor.Incredible.

Is the WWE becoming a training camp for future politicians? WWE Hall-of-Famer Donald Trump is (sweet Jesus) President of the United States. Former WWF/WWE president and CEO Linda McMahon is the Administrator of the Small Business Association in the Trump Administration. And now WWE legend Kane (real name Glenn Jacobs) is the next mayor of Knox County, Tennessee.Jacobs ran as a conservative Republican and has dabbled in libertarian politics, writing for the controversial website LewRockwell.com. He'll take office on September 1st and hasn't ruled out a return to the WWE. Jacobs previously wrestled as Isaac Yankem, DDS.WWE wrestler Kane wins bid for Knox County mayor [CNN/Euan McKidry] [Photo: Wikimedia Commons]

Zephyr Teachout (previously) isn't just an expert on antitrust law and corruption, and isn't merely a netroots pioneer who has been on the right side of every technology policy fight since the Gore years -- she's also running to be the Attorney General of the State of New York, from which position she plans on gutting Trump on his corrupt business practices, targeting him using the dread emoluments clause. (more…)

In its latest round of shareholder disclosures, Wells Fargo admitted that it "unnecessarily foreclosed" on 400-odd householders (that is, stole their houses) and failed to grant loan modifications to 625 qualified borrowers (this is just the latest revelation about Wells Fargo stealing houses); it's also being investigated for its practice of purchasing low-income housing credits. (via Naked Capitalism)

Earplugs aren't the most stylish accessories to bring to a show, but if you're at all invested in your long-term hearing, you should be packing a pair whenever you go. For those of us who still feel a bit self-conscious sporting those bright foam plugs in the pit, the EarDial Earplugs offer a subtler, smarter way to safeguard your hearing, and they're available in the Boing Boing store for $19.99.Made with a unique low-profile design, EarDial Earplugs don't just dampen noise; they filter it. These invisible earplugs allow you to hear the music and even chat with your friends while keeping harmful decibel levels from damaging your ears. They're made to wear comfortably for hours on end, and even come with a companion app that displays the noise levels around you—letting you know when it's appropriate to pop them in. What's more, they stow inside a sleek aluminum case that can readily clip to your keychain for quick access.Preserve your hearing—and your style with a pair of EarDial Earplugs, on sale for $19.99.

Back in the day, before Amazon and even before the internet, dash buttons took physical form in Reddilist, a handy little wall hanging for the kitchen or pantry with tabs for Instant Vi-Tone, Frostade, or Johnson's Glo-Coat. (more…)

About 10% of plastic ocean pollution is ghost nets, the countless lost or abandoned fishing nets that maim and kill marine life. Jenga Ocean, made of recycled nets, tries to raise awareness, recycle recovered nets, and raise funds to help end this type of pollution. Via Bureo: (more…)

Daniel Mercadante uses colored lights and long exposures to create his Rainbow Roads series of photos. (more…)