Boing Boing

Pudding's data-driven analysis of women's jeans pockets compares 32" waist jeans for men and women from a variety of brands and uses various common cellphones as a benchmark; the conclusion will not surprise you. (more…)

Former Air Force language specialist and intelligence contractor Reality Winner has been sentenced to 63 months in prison. (more…)

Simon Stålenhag's famous for his atmospheric paintings depicting alien technology lurking in the mists of Scandinavia. He's just put out an album of lo-fi ambient music, C:\Music\for\DOS, made with cheap vintage keyboards and legendary 1990s music-making app Impulse Tracker. That's a picture of his "studio" up top: "Oh, the computer to the right was just for playing Doom."https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xn7sdC8rKqM&feature=youtu.be&list=OLAK5uy_lWUHfM87_5svYbCsqeO-uxtc-6lTxWGFA

"Titties" is a stupid word. It's so stupid and gross that some millennials are replacing it with even more ridiculous words like "tiddies" or "titays." Brilliantly funny MEL Magazine editor Alana Hope Levinson explores how "The Extremely Online are destroying language — one tiddy (or tity) at a time." From MEL:

As a wise man once said, "It's funny cause it's true."(r/funny)

Last week, Aretha Franklin died at the age of 76 in her hometown of Detroit. On Tuesday, during a pregame moment of silence at Detroit's Comerica Park dedicated to her memory, a full rainbow appeared. https://twitter.com/tigers/status/1032041080760541184

Every Facebook user will be assigned a "trustworthiness score" derived from a mix of user complaints and secret metrics derived from spying on user activity on the system (Twitter has a comparable system). (more…)

As you might imagine, Spyfone is a company that offers to spy on other peoples' phones for you: its major market is parents and bosses who infect and surveil the phones their kids/minions use, peeking on their texts, emails, Facebook messages, passwords, photos, browsing history, etc. (more…)

If you've ever picked up a game controller, you've likely considered what it would be like to create your own video game. Even if you have zero animation or coding experience, you can create your own games with help from the School of Game Design, which offers a massive library of step-by-step training videos covering everything from the absolute basics to modeling and animation.Featuring over 120 hours of easy-to-follow training videos on all things game design, the School of Game design is loaded with resources to help you make advanced 2D and 3D games that you can publish anywhere. You'll foster skills in both coding and digital artistry and take your knowledge further with support from instructors and professionals toting over 16 years of game industry experience. Plus, you'll even get unlimited access to thousands of dollars in royalty-free game art and textures that you can use when making your own projects.With lifetime access to the School of Game Design, you can learn at your own pace and keep up with the latest industry advancements as you go. Lifetime memberships are on sale for $59 (over 90% off the usual price.

There’s a Japanese proverb I’m particularly fond of that states how foolish it is to try and predict the future. It goes: “Rainen no koto ieba, oni ga warau”, meaning if you talk about next year the ogre or devil (ogres or devils) will laugh. Depending on where you live in Japan, there are different versions of this saying. One even brings that future closer. “Asu no koto ieba oni ga warau”— if you talk about tomorrow the ogre/devil will laugh. Then there is the one that states it isn’t a laughing devil you’ll get but a snickering mouse. However you say it, I think the Japanese saying about having demons laughing at your folly when trying to guess the future is a little bit more ominous version of “Don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched”. Photo: Thersa Matsuura

The ultimate crime, courtesy of the Whitest Kids U Know.

My American friends: I regret to inform you that your dream of declaring ding as duty-free swag when crossing back from Canada into the United States is oh, so very stillborn. From Newsweek:

When Lanny Davis announced the launch of the Michael Cohen Truth Fund campaign through GoFundMe, he should have been laughed off of television. Appearing on the Today Show, Davis said his client "needs help from the American people to tell the truth." At that moment, Lanny became less like a lawyer and more like a televangelist. "We can save this nation from the firey pits of hell with the truth that only our dear brother Michael can deliver! Pick up the phone now and give in the name of the Lord Almighty!" Oh, and the cost of that truth? $500,000. 1 in 3 campaigns on GoFundMe are to cover medical expenses. People desperately looking for money to cover a surgery, pay for chemo costs, get a wheelchair for their kid. Money can be raised via GoFundMe for virtually anything. But there's something especially revolting about using it to help the man who once famously said he take a bullet for the President whose shitty health care policies are what has driven a lot of those desperate people to GoFund Me in the first place. Less than 24 hours after its launch, the Michael Cohen Truth Fund has raised over $133,000. When I saw that amount, I was horrified. This is money that'll go to a man who purchased a $6.7 million dollar apartment FOUR months ago. A man who spent nearly a decade as Donald Trump's personal Ray Donovan. A man who didn't give a flying rat's ass about telling the truth until he realized he was looking at a lengthy prison sentence. But even though I was horrified, I kind of understood it. Our country has gone completely off the rails and we're all desperate to get rid of the conductor before he slams it into a wall or hands the keys over to his pal, Vlad. And that desperation can make people do funny things. Confession: I was one of the wildly optimistic fools who donated to Jill Stein's recount fiasco. So I understand the compulsion to throw coins into the Fountain of Bad Ideas. But not for Michael Cohen. Not for a man whose Holocaust-surviving father had to remind his son that he didn't survive just to have Donald Trump sully his name.We deserve to know everything Michael Cohen knows about the crimes Donald Trump and his family may have committed. But there's no way in hell the American people should have to pay in order for him to tell it. Don't give this asshole your money. He can sell another Birkin bag instead.[Photo: GoFundMe]

In Japan, Suntory has come out with a new beverage called All-Free All-Time, a clear, non-alcoholic drink that is purported to taste just like real beer. The bottles and commercials are pushing this as a drink to enjoy over lunch, at your office, during a meeting, or after you workout. I tried a swig. A nice hearty stout, it is not. Photo: Thersa Matsuura

Do you ever want to take a quick little note with real pen and paper, but hate carrying around big, medium, or even small-sized memo pads? Well, Mamimu Memo has got the stationary item for you. They make tiny, matchbook-sized memo pads that look just like real retro matchbooks. Not only adorable, but the detail is impressive as well. A closer look at the gritty surface you would normally use to strike a match, finds it is instead just quaintly colored edges. The real sweetness of these undersized memo pads is the nostalgic designs. Mamimu Memo boasts Japan Classic, World Classic, American Vintage, and European Vintage patterns. Even though they were 180 yen a piece, I couldn’t buy just one.Photos: Thersa Matsuura

You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain. Sadly, for the people of Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega, once a Sandinista and a trusted emissary of change to his people, chose the latter. It’d be flippant, under most circumstances, to use a quote pulled from a comic book movie to describe the doings of an autocratic dictator, but the desperate, comic book villain death grip that Ortega has held onto the seat of the Nicaraguan presidency these past few years makes it feel right, somehow. Painting himself as a good fella that's simply trying to hold his country’s shit together, Ortega, the police elements loyal to his government, and the paramilitaries under his sway have been responsible for at least 450 deaths since this past April when peaceful protests broke out over the Nicaraguan government’s plans to reform the nation’s social security system. Under Ortega’s new scheme, the poorest people in a nation full of poor people would have been forced to pay more for their pensions while receiving less. The protests soon turned violent. Then, they turned deadly. Currently, Ortega, who claims that the violence in his nation has come to an end, is living behind barricades and armed guards. His people want him gone. The Financial Times has, hands-down, the best explanation on why this is, that I’ve run across:

Living in what’s essentially a tiny house on wheels, I love eBooks and eBook readers. They allow me to maintain a complete and growing library without the space and weight gains that owning shelves full of dead tree editions come with. I own over 2,000 eBooks. I review eBook readers and provide tips on using them for one of the other outlets that I write for.None of this prepared me for the news that Rakuten Kobo has paired with Walmart to sell eBooks and at least one of its lower-end ebook readers at Walmart.According to The Digital Reader, Walmart will be selling Kobo’s base model Aura reader and possibly some of the company’s other excellent E-Ink reading devices as well, in store and online. This, to me, makes a lot of sense. Given the issues that Walmart is having with Amazon drinking their fiscal milkshake these past few years, making a bit of space for eBook appliances seems like an easy way to attempt to take a bite out of a market that Amazon pretty much owns in North America—dedicated electronic reading devices. It makes sense for Kobo too: despite their making some really great hardware, they’ve been having a hell of a time making in-roads against Amazon’s Kindle eBook readers and the massive scope of content that Amazon provides. Having their gear in a national chain might help to move Kobo’s pieces a little further across the board.What I am surprised by, however, is that, in addition to Kobo’s eBook readers being available in-store, Walmart will also be selling gift certificates for particular book titles. I get that having eBooks on sale like this allows folks to buy a particular book for someone as a gift or an impulse buy. But it feels like a clunky delivery system for digital content that, if you own a Kobo or have the Kobo app on your smartphone or tablet, you could otherwise just buy with a single click. It feels like a waste of shelf space. Granted, you can buy gift cards for Amazon, or Apple gift certificates to snag iBooks with. But both of those are more about having the credit required to make any number or purchases at a later date. Giving space over to cards for individual digital book downloads feels half-baked by comparison. That said, given Walmart’s re-investment in online streaming as a path to financial salvation, I suppose that I shouldn’t be too surprised. These are the actions of a brick-and-mortar empire trying to survive in an increasingly digital world. Given the number of independent businesses that Walmart’s been responsible for shuttering over the years, I kind of feel like this is a great look for them.Image via Flickr, courtesy of Brave New Films

California's Net Neutrality bill just passed out of committee and is on its way to be voted on by the Assembly. If you are a California voter, please take a moment now to call your assemblymember and tell them to vote "yes" on SB 822. (more…)

One of my favorite filmmakers has always been Preston Sturges. I call him the Judd Apatow of the 1940s. He was Hollywood's first writer/director and his films are truly memorable (and entertaining) in a time when we all need a little more comedy in our lives. (more…)

Josh Klein became a TED talk sensation a number of years ago when he created a vending machine that taught crows how to exchange lost coins for peanuts. Now Josh has a new project based on his vending machine -- an "experimentation platform designed to autonomously train corvids (the family of birds crows belong to)." I asked him to write a bit about it. Here it is:

Available as an add-on item on Amazon, this Kuru Toga pencil has a cool feature that rotates the lead incrementally every time you press it down on paper. That way, the tip stays nicely rounded. Here's a video of the spring-loaded clutch mechanism in action:https://youtu.be/VjQ68v0ZAnUThe pencil also has a metal sleeve that protects the lead, sliding into the pencil as the lead gets shorter. The sleeve retracts completely so you can lug it in a bag without having to worry about it getting bent or breaking off.I bought mine a while back and was happy to learn that Wirecutter also picked it as their favorite mechanical pencil.

A group of Facebook users who claim their personal data was misused, possibly to throw the 2016 U.S. Presidential election to Donald Trump, must wait until September to try and get more information from 'dark data' firm Cambridge Analytica. (more…)

The latest read from Alex Stamos bears an appropriately grim title. (more…)

The Nikonos-V is an underwater film camera that many older SCUBA divers learned on, and some still do. Even though it is absolutely lovely, it is a pain in the ass to use compared to digital, and has largely disappeared. Nikon let the trademark go in 2008. Appears they just renewed it.Via NikonRumors:

Burning Man message boards have been on fire all week as people report being stopped on flimsy pretexts by federal Bureau of Indian Affairs officers in the tiny town of Nixon, one of the last stops on the narrow, quiet rural roads that 60-80,000 people use to access the Black Rock Desert, home to the Burning Man festival, which opens to the public this coming Sunday. (more…)

My eight year-old nephew clicked this X-Wing fighter together in about 3 hours, and then spent two days playing with it, nonstop.This Luke-era X-Wing, with Luke and R2 minifigs, was the project of choice for my nephew. He said he loves to build LEGO, and attacked this set with gusto. Unlike my daughter's massive collection of Star Wars LEGO, which is all carefully organized on our living room shelves, nephew plays with his LEGO builds hard.It is fun to watch.LEGO Star Wars X-Wing Starfighter 75218 Building Kit (731 Piece) via Amazon

Andy Greenberg (previously) is a veteran Wired security reporter who has chronicled the frightening and chaotic world of cyberwar since its earliest days; in a forthcoming book called "Sandworm," Greenberg tells the fascinating and terrible tale of Notpetya (previously), a Russian cyberweapon (built on leaked NSA cyberweapons!) that disguised itself as criminal ransomware, but which was designed to identify and destroy key Ukrainian computer systems and networks. (more…)

German art school Bauhaus (1919-1933) had a tremendous impact on architecture, graphic design, and, yes, fashion. From Great Big Story:

They're still on the stories' own URLs, but are gone from the homepage. Eric Lipton, an investigative reporter at the Times, points out: "But names of OP-ED writers still there."https://twitter.com/danfagin/status/1032251083673022464https://twitter.com/dangillmor/status/1032328337069367296https://twitter.com/KarrieUrbanist/status/1032234958457380864Readers want to know who is behind a story before they commit to reading it, and this prevents it from happening. Current controversies over the Times' peaky opinion page, its chummy coverage of the far-right and its tendency to be steered by conservative anger are all becoming more personalized by obsessive readers. So it's inevitable that it will appear to be about certain individuals in some vague, paranoid way. And a bad time to toy with signifiers of credibility and transparency.The thing is, "remove bylines and metadata" is always a top priority in the click-funnelling shitfeast of modern web design. So the outcome might have had little to do with the people who are being held responsible in today's anguished and angry twitterings.

Good Old Games is a fantastic classic video game company whose products are 100% DRM-free; they are stalwart defenders of your rights to use your technology in legal ways, to protect your privacy and to experiment with the things you buy. (more…)

"He did nothing wrong," White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said Wednesday about the secret payments Donald Trump made to two women during the 2016 Election via his attorney, who just became a convicted felon. (more…)

Trump was asked by one of his ardent sycophants over at Fox News if he knew about the payments he made to buy the silence of women who say he had sex with him while he was married to his third wife Melania. Trump managed to squeeze in the word "campaign" 8 times in 45 seconds to prove that the hush money didn't come from campaign funds. At the end of his answer he said that even if the bribes had come from campaign funds, it wouldn't be a problem, because what-about-Obama-who-did-it-tens-times-worse.

Vtaiwan is a crowdsourcing tool for drafting legislation that kicked off in 2016; it allows citizens from different sides of thorny legislative proposals to gather and debate them in a structured forum with the goal of finding compromises that all sides can live with. (more…)

Australian actress Rose Byrne and Irish actor Chris O’Dowd, who are both in the movie Juliet, Naked, sat down to teach each other slang terms from their home countries. I like "banjaxed" (broken) and "goon bag" (cheap boxed wine).Image: Youtube screengrab

I'm not an expert in water tower demolition, but it doesn't seem like a good idea to break the support beams in a way that causes the tower to fall in your direction.

The Caucasian Ovcharka is a member of the extremely large, very willful, and demonically intelligent tree the dog family. This doggo decided silly kid shouldn't be allowed to play in the ocean without a life jacket. Canine Overlord immediately corrects the situation.A CO is a bad choice for anyone who isn't an experienced large breed dog owner. They are guard dogs first and cuddly mountains of fur second. There is no known maximum size, they are fearless and extremely aggressive when the guard genes kick in.Image via gfycat

"Michael Cohen knows information that would be of interest to the special counsel regarding both knowledge about a conspiracy to corrupt American democracy by the Russians and the failure to report that knowledge to the FBI," said Lanny Davis, the attorney representing Cohen told MSNBC. Watch the video here.Yesterday Cohen pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations, tax evasion, and bank fraud.

A sexually transmitted disease called Donovanosis has been diagnosed recently three times in the UK, according to documents turned over in a Freedom of Information request, marking what might be the first time it has appeared there. (It's usually found in tropical and subtropical regions.) “Bacteria that cause the disease, known as klebsiella granulomatis, infect the skin around the genitals, groin or anal area and causes lesions and skin disintegration as the flesh effectively consumes itself," pharmacist Shamir Patel told a reporter.From Cambridgeshire Live:

There are nine US states with legal recreational marijuana; five on the west coast and four in the east. (more…)

"County Fire has experienced throttling by its ISP, Verizon," wrote Santa Clara County Fire Chief Anthony Bowden a lawsuit declaration. "This throttling has had a significant impact on our ability to provide emergency services. Verizon imposed these limitations despite being informed that throttling was actively impeding County Fire's ability to provide crisis-response and essential emergency services." Bowden's declaration was included in a lawsuit, filed by 22 US states, to reinstate net neutrality.Bowden also said its fire department had to pay double to remove the throttling on its "unlimited" data plan: "Verizon representatives confirmed the throttling, but rather than restoring us to an essential data transfer speed, they indicated that County Fire would have to switch to a new data plan at more than twice the cost, and they would only remove throttling after we contacted the Department that handles billing and switched to the new data plan," Bowden wrote.[via Ars Technica]Image: Krista Kennell/Shutterstock

Every version of the popular Openssh program -- a critical, widely used tool for secure communications -- share a critical vulnerability that was present in the program's initial 1999 release. (more…)

It's hard to make hardware mods to an iPhone, because there's not a lot of room to add anything, and it doesn't have user friendly parts or interfaces. But Scotty Allen, a hardware hacker who lives part-time in Shenzhen, met up with a guy who designed a little circuit board that gives older iPhones the capability to charge wirelessly.

Let’s pretend we’re buddies. I’m visiting you from Japan and brought with me all kinds of fun and interesting snacks. There’s one in particular I want to introduce you to. I ask you to hold out your hand and close your eyes. We’re buddies, remember? You trust me. I then proceed to fill your palm with hard, brown and beige, oddly-sized pieces of something that isn’t exactly beef jerky.You open your eyes, examine the curious snack, sniff it, then pop one into your mouth.While you chew, I show you the package. A cute cartoonish pig is wearing an apron while standing in front of a BBQ with some nondescript meat cooking on the grill. If you’re okay with gamey, beef jerky textured, off-tasting meat, you’re quite happy with the gift. If you’re like me, however, and would rather not do unidentifiable dried flesh snacks, you’re starting to reach for your water bottle. Before you can even ask, I tell you you’ve just feasted on Yamituski Horumon, Addictive Hormones. This little package is one of the recommended snack foods currently touted in 7-11s across Japan.You raise an eyebrow. Hormones? I explain to you that it’s good to know if you’re ever traveling in Japan and see a restaurant or menu boasting horumon (hormones), it means they’re serving various animal innards. Here’s very short list of some of the yummies you might encounter: Harami = diaphragm Himo or hoso = (string, thin) small intestine (sometimes a pig’s appendix)Mino = first stomach of a cow’s four stomachs, a bit tough, not much fatHachi no su (bee hive, because that’s what it looks like) = this is cow stomach number two and thought to be the most delicious of the fourKobukuro (child bag) = uterus (almost always pork, beef uterus is too tough, they say)　Chichi kabu = nippleTeppo (rifle or gun) = rectumI immediately try to ease your mind by telling you what you’ve just eaten — the Yamitsuki Horumon treat — is none of the above, actually, it’s only dried heart and tripe that have been dipped in a delicious salty sauce. I watch your face. Are we still friends?

I too flap my ears whenever Clair de Lune is performed for me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCk8dyU7zUMRather than attempt to describe this, I'll just quote the artist verbatim:

One of my favorite things about learning Japanese and living here for over half my life is discovering all the words and phrases that have no exact equivalent in English. It’s an incredible feeling when you learn to describe an emotion, situation, or predicament that you never even realized you hadn’t previously been able to articulate.It wasn’t too long ago that the Japanese words kintsugi (repairing broken pottery with lacquer mixed with gold) and tsundoku (the act of piling up reading material, but not quite getting around to reading it) made the rounds. It dawned on me that maybe other people like discovering these little treasures, as well. Today I give you one of my favorite Japanese phrases: mushaburui. This one’s an oldie but a goodie. Let me explain: Musha in Japanese means warrior or samurai. While the character for burui is a different pronunciation of furu, to shiver, quiver, or shake. Thus, I give you the “shivering samurai”. But what it means is even better than that. When I was first taught this phrase, I was told to imagine the evening before a large battle. A samurai warrior is quietly making his preparations. He’s nervous, frightened, excited. Yet, despite this mix of emotions, there is a calmness and resignation at facing what might be a great victory or his inevitable death. He doesn’t know why, but as he reaches for his sword he’s trembling. It is an older Japanese term used to describe a feeling I think we’ve all had at sometime in our lives. Maybe we weren’t standing at the jaws of war. Maybe we were simply just about to do something out of our comfort zone, something we were terrified to do, but knew we had to do it. Going for an interview at our dream job. Telling our best friend that we’ve been in love with them all this time. Maybe we were submitting an article to BoingBoing. These situations, too, are mushaburui.

In 1893, Grover Cleveland discovered a cancerous tumor on the roof of his mouth. It was feared that public knowledge of the president's illness might set off a financial panic, so Cleveland suggested a daring plan: a secret surgery aboard a moving yacht. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll describe the president's gamble -- and the courageous reporter who threatened to expose it.We'll also audit some wallabies and puzzle over some welcome neo-Nazis.Show notesPlease support us on Patreon!

Data is worth more than gold these days, which is why companies, hackers, and governments alike are all eager to scoop up the browsing information of everyday users. For those of us not keen on disclosing our online movements, VPNs are a must-have, but many are not quite what they seem, offering lackluster encryption and even keeping logs of their users' browsing movements. Nord VPN maintains absolutely zero browsing logs and keeps its users anonymous with double the encryption.Earning an extremely rare "Outstanding" rating from PC Mag, NordVPN eliminates privacy threats by routing all of its users' traffic through double-encrypted tunnels. Users can access 3,521 worldwide server locations in 61 countries and enjoy high speed connections for streaming video and content access while staying completely under the radar. NordVPN even goes as far as shutting down your browsing in the event you lose connection, so no data is revealed.NordVPN 3-year subscriptions are on sale today for $99, more than 75% off the usual price.

In Trump's first statement since his former lawyer pleaded guilty to eight crimes, explicitly implicating the president in at least one of them, he recommends not hiring the man."If anyone is looking for a good lawyer, I would strongly suggest that you don’t retain the services of Michael Cohen!" he wrote at his page on the popular microblogging service "Twitter".This is a trivialize everything as kayfabe strategy and it's the best one he's got. But he'll break it in minutes and start ranting anyway.

Today was a good day. A package from San Francisco artist Doctor Popular arrived in the mail. Inside were eight tiny publications, what he calls the Mini-Comics Mixtape. He writes, "All 8 comics were drawn in under 24 hours with no planning in advance, so the stories can get a little out there." They're so good -- funny, offbeat and engaging! Plus, he used a Risograph to print the comic books in two colors, which makes them look extra neat.He's selling the set for $12 over at Etsy or through his site DoctorPopular.com.Doc Pop previously on BB