Boing Boing

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…)

Here are some recent game releases of note and some of what I've been up to in hobby gaming over the past month or so.Earlier this year, I wrote a piece about my favorite gaming magazine, UK's Tabletop Gaming. Another gaming mag I subscribe to and enjoy is Casual Game Insider. Where Tabletop Gaming covers all manner of tabletop, miniature, roleplaying, card, and board games, Casual Game Insider focuses on family games, party games, and palate cleansers, games to be played between longer games during a gaming night. In a word, casual games. CSI has something of a fanzine flavor (in a good way). It's obviously a passion and labor of love for those who produce it. They crowdfund the effort and just successfully finished their 7th round of funding. CSI covers every aspect of gaming, from creating, funding, and producing them, to the psychology and sociology of gaming, to gaming history, gaming types, you name it. And they have plenty of reviews and features on currently popular games. A free digital edition of the current issue is available for download (PDF).The Ricks Must Be CrazyCryptozoic Entertainment, $17, 2-4 Players, Ages: 17+Cryptozoic has been killing it with their series of quick, fun, and suitably strange Rick and Morty games. They've released five games so far. Each game is based on an episode of the popular Adult Swim animated series. And each is done in a different style, mechanic, and look and feel, attempting to capture the flavor of the episode it's based upon. In The Ricks Must Be Crazy, 2-4 players travel through four levels of the multiverse (the Rickverse, Microverse, Miniverse, and Teenyverse). To succeed in the game, you need to collect power and victory points and each 'verse (one nested within the other) offers different advantages and disadvantages. Each character has special abilities and each player spends Build tokens to construct contraptions in each 'verse which offer victory points and special abilities. The game proceeds in rounds until the first player reaches a set Victory Point total. One more round is then played and the player with the most VP at that time wins.I love the themes of this game series. It's fun to watch the episode before/after playing the game to see how they interpreted it in game terms. All of the artwork used in the game are stills from the episode and the production on everything is gorgeous and high-quality. The Ricks Must Be Crazy isn't likely the most exciting or smoothest game you'll ever play (doing all of the Power level addition and subtraction on the Power/Victory Point tracker is annoying), but it does a pretty admirable job of capturing the fractal craziness of the episode. Next up: The Pickle Rick Game, housed in a Rick pickle (and due out in early Sept).Epic Spell Wars of the Battle Wizards: Melee at Murdershroom MarshCryptozoic Entertainment, $26, 2-6 Players, Ages: 15+Epic Spell Wars is a series of wacky and weird psychedelic horror card games featuring dueling "battle wizards" trying to smite the toad stool out of each other. There are currently three games in the series (Duel at Mt. Skullzfyre, Rumble at Castle Tentakill, Melee at Murdershroom Marsh) and a 4th, Panic at the Pleasure Palace, coming later this year. The games are all about bringing the fun--talking cookie-monster/death metal smack to each other over a game of cleverly-stupid, eye-ball-melting spell-casting cards. In each round, players use the cards in their hand to construct a spell with a set syntax. Each spell can be comprised of a 3-part syntax: Source, Quality, and Delivery. These translate to the name of the wizard who first created the spell (Source), a spell descriptor (Quality), and what the spell actually does (Delivery). So, a spell a player might cast could read: Midnight Merlin's Devilicious Power Vortex or King Tut-n-Putts' Smelted LSD. The cards are also further grouped into magical types (e.g. Elemental, Illusion, Primal) and cards can be combined by these magical types to gain advantages. The game basically involves putting together your spell (drawn from the cards in your hand), casting the spell (out loud in a goofy death metal/monster truck rally announcer voice), and resolving the damage as indicated on the cards. Each wizard character, which have names like Zanzabart the Slag Genie and Krazztar the Blood o' Mancer, has a character dashboard for tracking hit points/health. Wizards that die (and they died a lot) still get to draw from a Dead Wizard deck that offers actions the dead wizard can resolve now or that are used in the next round.Mainly what each new game in the series offers is a new setting, a new cast of magical weirdos and dungeon degenerates, and more insanely psychedelic art by Nick Edwards and RS Bixby. You also get special rules or rules tweaks with each new release. Epic Spell Wars of the Battle Wizards: Melee at Murdershroom Marsh finds the Battle Wizards under the influence of some mind-scouring hallucinogenic drug (the titular "murdershrooms"). They attempt to vaporize each other as usual, but while fighting off hallucinations and madness. New rules for Murdershroom Marsh create some additional card management and play mechanics. Half of the Delivery cards in the deck have two magical types listed, therefore allow you to perform two Power Rolls with that single card. The game also introduces Cantrips. Sources and Quality cards with the Cantrip glyph on them allow you to add cards to your spell (after an indicated number of discards from your hand). And finally, there is Bad Trip, another new glyph found on Source and Quality cards. After you resolve the card as normal, if you have 4 or more different magical glyph types in your spell, you can resolve the Bad Trip card a second time (flashbacks, dude!). As with all of the previous Epic Spell Wars games, you can use the Mudershroom Marsh spell cards and wizards with all of the previous Spell Wars games. In the forthcoming Epic Spell Wars of the Battle Wizards: Panic at the Pleasure Palace, the Battle Wizards fight off each other (and MTDs: Magically Transmitted Diseases) in a monstrous whorehouse.Conspiracy Theory: Freedom from InformationSteve Jackson Games, $30, 3+ Players, Ages: 13+Conspiracy Theory is Steve Jackson's paranoid answer to black and white card games (*cough* Cards Against Humanity *cough*). As with similar games, a rotating judge chooses a black card with a statement and 1 or 2 missing words on it and players use words from their white-card hand to try and cleverly, creatively, hysterically complete the phrase. The judge for that turn votes on who had the best response. Conspiracy adds a third deck to the mix, a red deck. The red deck, which the judge can pick from, has themes for the responses (funny, serious, insane, etc). Adding this wrinkle makes coming up with worthy responses more challenging. The rules sheet points out that the 500+ cards in this deck can be incorporated into similar games (don't make me fake-cough again).Tiki ToppleGamewright, $14, 2-4 players, Ages: 10+If you've noticed, this month has something of a theme: casual games. One of the companies that rules in the casual/party game space is Gamewright. They know how to make games that are easy to learn, exciting and fun to play, and they produce games that are beautifully illustrated and produced and cleverly marketed. The latest in this party game fare is Tiki Topple, a simple abstract strategy game with a Polynesian flare. 2-4 players try and "stack" (despite "topple" in the title, you build your tiki totem horizontally) their tiki idols in a sequence as it is indicated on a secret card that each player draws. Additional drawn cards indicate what moves players can make to try and arrange their tikis at the top of the totem in the sequence indicated on their secret card. Players do this while trying to avoid Tiki Topple (a card that sends their idol to the bottom) or Tiki Toast, a card that destroys your tiki outright. And that's basically it. This is a great game to play with people who aren't gamers and might be intimidated by a more complicated rule set or longer games. The little plastic tiki idols and all of the game's components are lovely and add to the ambience. Mai Thais, Fog Cutters, and Navy Grog optional. Frostgrave: Maze of MalcorOsprey Games, $20, 2-8 players, Ages: 12+Maze of Malcor is a substantial expansion to Frostgrave, the hit fantasy skirmish game of battling wizards and their warbands fighting over magical items and treasure amongst the thawing ruins of Felstad, a once-frozen city of magic. Maze of Malcor contains rules tweaks and clarifications, an adventure setting in the Collegium of Artistry/Maze of Malcor, a lauded magical school before the fall of the city, and 5 new magical schools, known as The Pentangle. You don't actually play these schools, but your wizards can cast spells from them. As always, the supplement also includes new treasure and new additions to the growing Frostgrave bestiary. For those who got The Grimoire spell deck I wrote about in June, this book explains all of the spells included there that are from The Pentangle schools.Frostgrave MatPWork Wargames, ~$40, 3' x 3'Play mats are all the rage in tabletop gaming. You can now buy neoprene gaming mats (think: giant mouse pads) with art on top simulating just about any gaming terrain you want to play on. PWork Wargames has partnered with Osprey Games to create a line of mats with the bricks, snow, and ruined fragments depicting everyone's favorite frozen city. The mats are available in 3' x 3', 4' x 6', 4' x 4', and 3' x 6'.Snake-MenNorth Star Military Figures, $32I am a huge fan of North Star Military Figures Frostgrave miniatures line. Their boxed sets of multi-part miniatures are some of the coolest, most versatile minis I've ever modeled. Their latest boxed set includes parts to make up to 20 snake-men, a tribe of deadly adversaries found in Frostgrave: Ghost Archipelago. Although created for this sister game of Frostgrave proper, the snake-men could easily be used in Frostgrave itself, D&D, or many other fantasy games.https://youtu.be/mrW3P_T41DM Frostgrave Watch It Played seriesThe folks at the YouTube channel, Watch It Played, have put together a really excellent series of videos on learning how to play Frostgrave. If you want to get a feel for this fantasy skirmisher, check them out.I kind of hate Instagram Stories. Most postings there seem like a complete waste of my time. But there are a few makers and miniature painters that I follow and enjoy the temporary videos they post. One of my favorite painters is Malev_Minis. Malev Da Shinobi is a young rapper from SLC, UT who is also a talented pro mini painter. He often does live Instagram painting sessions where he free-raps while he paints. I know, I know... trust me, it's better than it sounds. He's good at both. And his painting is jaw dropping. One night, I'd just put together a Frostgrave archer. I checked my phone and was shocked to see that he had assembled an almost identical model and was beginning to paint it. I watched, transfixed, as he, within an hour or so, painted that figure to a standard I have never achieved. In contrast, my bowmen probably took 5 times as long and only looks half as good.Fantastic MapsOne of the first things that drew me to D&D in my youth was the opportunity to design dungeons and draw maps. I love maps and map-making. This website and YouTube channel offer an excellent series of tutorials on every aspect of map-making, dungeon design and rendering. I think it would be impossible to spend any time here and not dramatically up your cartographic rendering game as a result.Both Cory and I have written about our attraction to Gaslands, the post-apocalyptic vehicular combat game you play with modified Hot Wheels and Matchbox cars. This YouTube gamer just launched a series about Gaslands that looks very promising. This is the best Gaslands battle report I've seen to date.

Audible -- Amazon's audiobook company -- dominates audiobooks, controlling 90% or more of the market; their ACX platform is tailored to indie, self-published authors, and, until recently, it paid them handsomely for any new customers they brought into Audible's fold. (more…)