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https://youtu.be/y_8q-K99RPMDogEden (DogeDen, surely?) is a doghouse designed to be mostly buried, with a tiny entrance above ground and a cavernous space beneath grade level. That way, the temperature is kept cooler in summer and warmer in winter, ensuring doge a more comfortable snooze. And when the fascist death squads come for you, they'll be a great place to hide the children!

The Nick Hotel was Nickelodeon's failed attempt to license their brand as a resort hotel focused on fans of their shows. Defunctland does a detailed autopsy. (more…)

Universal quantum computers have the potential for exponentially faster processing speeds. Seeker looks at where things stand in the race to build the first one. (more…)

Juan Carlos Bustamente, 62, is a Chilean political consultant living in Rome. On a recent trip to Venice he sat down at Caffe Lavena in the popular tourist area called St. Mark's Square and ordered two bottles of water and two espressos. The bill was €43 (about $50). He thought it was ridiculous and he posted the receipt to Facebook.Other people commented about being overcharged at Caffe Lavena. Then they headed over to TripAdvisor and left a lot of 1-star reviews, like this one from Jacob U of Orinda, CAe:

David Cerny (previously) created this wonderful kinetic sculpture of Prague's own Franz Kafka. (more…)

Jeffrey and Tracy Katz own a $25 million house in Laguna Beach, CA. The house is very close to the pounding surf of Victoria Beach, closer and lower than the neighboring houses. So they built a sea wall to prevent erosion of their house's foundation. Coastal officials ordered the Katz's to take the wall down because it degrades the quality of the public beach in front of it, and, as the LA Times reports, "Sea walls can obstruct the natural flow and replenishment of sand, leading to smaller and smaller beaches until the sand disappears altogether." The Katzes and the officials went to court and the Katzes were fined $1 million and ordered to take down the wall within 60 days. The Katzes are fighting the ruling, saying that orders to remove the wall are reducing the value of the home and the ability to rent it for $70,000 a month.Image: Patrick Pelster/Wikipedia. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Germany license.

Florian Kohler (previously), aka Venom Trickshots, teamed up with bowling trick shot master Jason Belmonte for some pretty astonishing billiards-bowling hybrid tricks. (more…)

If Gas Station Encounters had been around in the 1980s, it would have run on Night Flight. This YouTube channel has an endless supply of videos depicting dumb stick-up men, con artists, bad drivers, and weird people. In the video above we see a small time grifter pulling a short change con on a cashier. The video includes narration by another cashier explaining how to spot this trick for the benefiy of those who share his profession. And below are a couple of videos showing people who used gas station dumpsters to dispose their garbage, only to have it returned to their driveway by a gas station employee:https://youtu.be/9EdGtYNYB80https://youtu.be/wZINq0Vc4xgThere are even videos of good samaritans, like this one where a guy parks his pickup truck in the parking lot and walks into the gas station store, failing to notice that his truck was rolling away. Another man standing in the parking lot made a heroic last minute save:https://youtu.be/RmeW-B2Gf-0

Thanks to climate change, folks living in regions that were once tick-free zones have had to begin getting used to the blood-thirsty little bastards. Just as these unfortunate souls were getting used to this new reality, it seems that the bugs, which up until now have been happy working solo, are ganging up for all new levels of blood-draining terror. According to Ars Technica, a species of tick that’s been a massive pain in the ass in Asia has made its way to North America. Currently doing its thing on the United States' eastern seaboard, the Asian Longhorned Tick travels in swarms and has the potential to spread all sorts of ugly diseases to livestock, pets and humans alike.From Ars Technica:

I upgraded to a 13” 2015 MacBook Pro with Retina display after a two-week working vacation in Costa Rica. The extreme heat laid on me during my time there was enough to fry the 11” MacBook Air that I’d brought with me in a way that made it all but impossible to use. There was just one problem: All of the accessories I had for my old MacBook Air were too small to use with my new MacBook. I had to invest in something new. The first item on my list: a classy-looking case for my stupid expensive new laptop. It would need to be able to protect my computer while I was out doing inadvisable things. It would also need to look good for the times when I pretend I'm a professional, attending meetings or press junkets. After shopping around online, I discovered Picaso Lab’s Classic Brown Leather MacBook sleeve. Three years in, I feel like it's one of the smartest investments that I’ve ever made.The sleeve is made from lined Napa leather which, on the outside, has a bit of a texture to it. This makes it easy to grip the sleeve. The texture is slight enough that the pebbling doesn't screw with the sleeve's clean lines. The leather is tough, but supple. When my laptop’s not in the sleeve, the leather can be bent, this way and that, despite being pretty thick. I’m betting that this is one of the reasons that the sleeve still looks so good after riding around in my backpack or the back of our Jeep for the past three years. The sleeve’s stitching still looks just as handsome as the day that I got the sleeve in the mail. One of the things that I really love about this case was that I was able to have it personalized, with a bit of engraving. “Now, I want you to go in that bag and find my laptop.”“Which one is it?”“It’s the one that says...”I half expected to get an email from Picaso Lab saying that they wouldn’t engrave it for me. Nope. In the time since I bought this sleeve, it looks like the company has added a number of new products to its lineup. If they’re anywhere as well made as my laptop sleeve is, then they’re worth every stinking penny being asked for them.Images via Seamus Bellamy

"Can't take the insanity anymore?" asks the official trailer for Michael Moore's newest feature-length documentary Fahrenheit 11/9.

Stepping into a wardrobe was the way to get into Narnia. Stepping into the blue portable toilet (in a row of green ones) was the way get into a hidden rave at UK's Eastern Electrics Festival. Are they implying the DJ's shitty? https://twitter.com/persandwichman/status/1026032955167334400And, this isn't the first time this has been done. A music festival in Hungary did this last year:https://youtu.be/xiqJzWhwaW8

Of all the service industries, tattooing naturally seems like a good one for crazy client stories, but some of these doozies would make even the most jaded inkslinger raise their eyebrows. (more…)

Alas, here is the trailer for Michael Moore's new anti-Trump documentary, Fahrenheit 11/9, a title that references the day that Trump won the electoral vote (and, of course, a play on the title of his other documentary, Fahrenheit 9/11). Fahrenheit 11/9 will be released September 21.

I have had one of these rolling boxes ever since I was a teen.I do not know why I can not roll a joint. It isn't for a lack of trying, or practice. I just can not do it. I can however reliably pop a joint out of this rolling box. After 20 years or so my last one just died of a broken belt. If this $6.15 box lasts 1/2 as long, I'll be thrilled.Any brand rolling paper will work.1 X 70mm Metal Cigarette Roller & Storage Box via Amazon

A new study revealed that monthly page visits to the user-hostile social media site Facebook have dropped from 8.5 billion to 4.7 billion since 2016.From CNBC:

Brandon Li captures the dazzling excitement and beauty of Seoul and its environs in seven minutes. The transitions and camera work are stunning. He shot two terabytes of data and spent three months, off and on, editing it.He also made a director's commentary version of the video, which you can see here:https://youtu.be/S9kLihqA7jA

A fire that broke out at a plastic tray factory in Derbyshire, England caused a spectacular fire tornado to form. Also known as a fire whirl or firenado, the rare spectacle could be seen from 25 miles away and took 12 hours to put out. No one was injured.Via The Independent:

The Air Carrier Access Act, written back in 1986, was kind of lazy in how it defined ‘what a service animals is, to the point where almost anything goes. As such, there’s been a whole lot of folks of late bringing their animals on board of airplanes claiming that they’re emotional support animals. This peacock is an example of that sort of thing. Maybe some help calm their owners on what would be a harrowing in-air experience, without them. But for individuals with verifiable medical conditions who have been given specially-trained psychiatric service animals to help them better navigate their lives, it’s a serious pain in the ass. With travelers and airlines alike getting tired of people attempting to bring their ‘comfort’ and ‘support’ animals on flights with them, the idea of bringing along an animal for legitimate medical reasons, even one that comes with documentation from a doctor or mental health professional, can cause a lot of unnecessary stress and anxiety. That’s not OK. It’s a problem that can be especially prevalent with veterans afflicted with PTSD. Many rely on their service dogs to ground them during a flashback, make them feel like someone is watching their back in public places or wake them from reoccurring nightmares. It's not the sort of tool that you want to leave at home when you travel.Thanks to a pair of new registries currently in development, the epidemic of false service animals that’s cropped up in the news of late could come to an end while, at the same time, helping those with a legitimate medical need to have their prescribed pooches with them on a flight do so, with less hassle. From NPR:

Elia Saikaly decided to film Mount Everest at night: "While most climbers slept, I attempted to capture some of the magic that the Himalayan skies have to offer while climbing to the top of the world." (more…)

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.