Boing Boing

It's fascinating to read Dan King writing in The American Conservative to decry "Dickensian debtors' prisons" in the USA -- the practice of judges locking up poor people who can't pay fines for petty infractions like traffic tickets. (more…)

The Financial Times kicked off its "How To Spend It" section in 1967 as a single page in the Saturday issue (then called "A guide to good living"); the section grew to its own glossy magazine over the years, weathering lean years and good ones, and has found its niche half a century later, in an era of mass inequality as a weekly catalog of things that the super rich should buy to demonstrate their dominance over everyone else. (more…)

Smirking pharma-bro Martin Shkreli first came to public attention when he hiked the price of a drug used by people with HIV from $13.50/pill to $750/pill. (more…)

Running a retroarcade sounds like a lot of fun, and the same games that used to get the kids pumping quarters then are still the most popular. Which means that 32-year old OutRun cabinets tend to break down often.

On Monday's Today Show, Cher spilled the news that she's recorded an entire album of ABBA covers. "After I did 'Fernando,' I thought it would be really fun to an album of ABBA songs, so I did!" she said in the interview. "It's not how you think of ABBA songs because I did it my way."She recorded "Fernando" for the new film, Mamma Mia! 2 Here We Go Again, in which she has a role:https://youtu.be/gXmaZCm7fqs

This past Friday, the citizens of Nicaragua declared a national strike in protest of their president, Daniel Ortega, and his oh-so corrupt government. In the city of Managua, pro-government paramilitaries and the police cornered roughly 200 protesters in a church and opened fire on the building. During the siege, the pro-Ortega forces murdered two of the unarmed protesters trapped inside of the church and wounded several others. The Pro government El 19 called the protestors “terrorists” and “thieves”: in effect, they declared the people, brave enough to demand that a dictator return their country to them, an enemy of the people. This labelling of Nicaraguans who would dare to speak out against their government as terrorists, is kind of a thing now. According to El Nuevo Diario, Roger Martinez, a respected psychologist with a practice in the Nicaraguan city of Granada, has been given the same label. He was picked up, along with 23 others by, you guessed it, police and paramilitaries, during a national “cleanup operation.” At the time that this post was written, Martinez was still in prison. Yesterday, Dr. Blanca Cajina and Dr. Irvin Escobar, were whisked away from their lives as well. They’re the latest in the growing number of professionals and intellectuals and community leaders, to be accused of terrorism by the Ortega government. As this handy guide from the U.S. Holocaust Museum notes, cracking down on a nation's intellectuals is one of the signs that your nation is well on its way to being controlled by a fascist regime. In his book, On Tyranny: 20 Lessons from the 20th Century, author Timothy Snyder warns:

Wow! I'm quite aflutter.

We've all heard of staging a home for sale but this is outrageous.

There are three drawbridges within walking distance of my home here in Alameda, California. I have often wondered if anyone has ignored the warning gates and tried to go over the bridge.In Wisconsin, one cyclist did just that. And it was caught by the state's Department of Transportation surveillance camera. On the Fourth of July, on the Racine Street Bridge in Menasha, a 37-year-old woman maneuvered around the flashing barriers. She soon fell, bike and all, into the crack where the road and bridge meet. It's pretty freaky to watch. It made me gasp!Thankfully, she didn't get crushed by the bridge. According to reports, she only sustained minor facial injuries. She has been cited for failure to obey a traffic signal, according to KRON.(Likecool)

11 people drowned Thursday after a duck boat on Table Rock Lake in Missouri sank with 31 aboard.

Inspired by the fruit stickers of the Instagram account @fruit_stickers comes the Fruit Stickers tee (a sheet of fruit stickers ships with every order). Available until August 1 for $32.75. (Foodiggity)

After watching this video of the gazillion stages it takes to make wood ash cement, not to mention all of the hand-made tools required to do it, I'll never complain about having to stir up a bag of instant cement from Home Depot again.

This isn't a review, but I'd regret not giving you a heads up about Sorry to Bother You, Boots Riley's first feature film. It's an absurd black sci-fi satire shot in Oakland and it's the off-the-wall dystopian summer indie flick we all deserve. At the last minute last Friday, I put my hands on some tickets for its sold-out nationwide opening night at the Grand Lake Theatre in Oakland. And wow, am I glad I did. It was a real happening. People cheered and laughed. Plus, the movie was simply fantastic. After the show, folks with tickets for the late show (which had the bonus of an after-show Q&A with Boots himself) were already lining up. Lots of people posed with the shitty Tercel featured in the film, which was parked right in front of the theatre.Hilariously, you can buy that shitty Tercel for a mere $23,999.40 on the STBU website: (I got my eye on that Mr. Bobo collectible plate myself.)If you want to read what reviewers are saying, here's a good start:Review: ‘Sorry to Bother You,’ but Can I Interest You in a Wild Dystopian Satire? by A.O. Scott of The New York Times:

If you are in LA later this month through September, I recommend checking out "The New Romantics" group show at Corey Helford Gallery opening July 28. There's a great line up of artists.

I travel with a small bluetooth speaker similar to this one. It's great for watching movies on my laptop and for listening to music and podcasts. Amazon is selling it for $5, when you use IPSLZEP5.

Zeigeisty-ist auction ever: Marie Antoinette’s Jewelry to Be Auctioned in Geneva This November. (Image: Mosiac36, CC-BY) (Thanks, Peter!)

British Airways was outed by security researcher Mustafa Al-Bassam for telling passengers they couldn't help with delays and other problems unless they posted their personal information publicly to Twitter, in order "to comply with the GDPR." (more…)

Michael Scheuer says its about time to kill American citizens who oppose Trump. Scheuer is a former senior CIA official and the author of the New York Times bestseller, Imperial Hubris. In a now-deleted blog post (cached version here) Scheuer singles out "Strzok, Comey, McCabe, Page, and Rosenstein; worshipers of tyranny, like the Democratic members of Congress, the Clintons, the FBI, and the Obamas; apparent traitors like Brennan, Hayden, and Clapper; all of the mainstream media; and the tens of thousands of government-admitted-and-protected, violent, criminal, and illegal immigrants." He looks forward to the "sheer, nay, utter joy and satisfaction to be derived from beholding great piles of dead U.S.-citizen tyrants is not one that will be missed if Trump does not soon do the necessary to save the republic."

It's an accomplishment to find and photograph a lynx: they want little to do with humans and make an effort to keep themselves to themselves. It's an even bigger accomplishment to not only find a lynx to photograph, but to also spend enough time with it that it comes to see you as a hunting buddy.

Aarran Lee Wright, 36, a married man and father of two young children, says his sex-robot can be switched to "family mode," for G-rated playtime with the kids.From the NY Post:

Grammar might be dead, but Schoolhouse Rock! isn't (thanks to The Late Show with Stephen Colbert!).This latest episode of Schoolhouse Rock! teaches us all about the use of double negatives so that we can speak just like the US president.Double negative what's your function? A desperate way to not side with the Russians. Double negative how's that function? Confusin' the people with sentence construction...

David Frum, the conservative Republican senior editor at The Atlantic, says it has become clear that Trump has been bribed or blackmailed into becoming a Russian puppet, and that the "United States faces a national-security emergency."From The Atlantic:

A criminal mastermind in Vancouver, Washington thought that he'd help himself to the bounty of – I dunno, locks? doors? finger puzzles? – goods that an escape room business had on hand. He ended up, you guessed it, trapped in an escape room and unable to break free. In a fit of panic and defeat, he called 911 for help.

Our technology-centric society is making people miserable, says Don Norman, cognitive scientist and author of the classic book on human-centric design, The Design of Everyday Things. The technology we use expects us to behave like machines, he says, and when we fail, we get all the blame.From Fast Company:

President Trump plans to invite Russian President Vladimir Putin to Washington, DC for yet another one-on-one meeting in the fall. Under fire for shady shenanagins around Russia and Putin, Trump is doubling down on the crazy, like he always does.(more…)

The house at Klump Ave. and Dilling St. in Studio City, also known as the Brady Bunch house, has been put on the market for $1.885 million.LA Times:

A former nude model and “Bond girl” exchanged sexual messages via Twitter with the online persona now believed to be an unknown number of Russian spies who are accused of attacking the 2016 US elections, the UK tabloid Sun Online posted today.They're really awful and I don't want to link to them, but this is too rich, you guys. Motherboard has a more credible piece up, you should read that one, too.In today's garbage interview, Robbin Young told The Sun she "fell madly in love" with Twitter user Guccifer 2.0, and sent him photographs of her breasts and exchanged sexually explicit messages with him or them.Excerpt:

Jason Koebler and Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai received a $100 iPhone X from China and marveled at how convincing the top-to-bottom, software-to-hardware bootleggery is. iOS is recreated down to the pixel as an Android skin; only the sluggish performance, on-screen keyboard give the game away. Even many of the apps are nearly perfect, though once they run into the bad ones, it's immediately clear what is at hand. And how very bad some of them are...

How weird is it that this needed to happen.(more…)

Greg Harlow made the pre-dawn trek to the perfect vantage point and captured this lovely misty rainbow at Yosemite Falls. (more…)

A scuba diver in shallow water was surprised to see what looked like a "ghostly apparition" coming toward her. It turned out to be a rare albino stingray. (more…)

Austin's Michael-Scott Earle, last seen around these parts when he filed a trademark on the phrase "Dragon Slayer" for use in fantasy novel trademarks, has found a new depth to plumb: he's filed a trademark on book covers "one or more human or partially human figures underneath, at least one of the figures holding a weapon; and an author's name underneath the figures; wherein the title/series and author's name are depicted in the same or similar coloring." (more…)

Walmart has been whining about Amazon drinking what it considers to be its milkshake for some time. Sucking cash out of the pockets of the same low-income earners that you pay just enough to keep alive is a seriously competitive business. With Amazon's online shopping dominance in North America has left Walmart’s brick-and-mortar empire only capable of making Scrooge McDuck money when it’s really Jeff Bezos money that they’re after. In an effort to top off their coffers, Walmart’s been pushing, hard, into catching up to Amazon in the area of online sales. Earlier this week, they announced a partnership with Microsoft that’ll ensure that Walmart’s online shopping experience is faster, more secure and a lot more reliable. Maybe it’ll help! If not, plopping out yet another online video streaming service to compete against Amazon Prime video and, perhaps you’ve heard of it, a little thing called Netflix, will totally help them to make the crazy-hunting-man-because-he’s-the-most-dangerous-game cash that they’re so horny for. From The Information (subscription required):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGBPn9arfVoThe E-meter is a quack device used by Scientologists in a religious ritual called "auditing" in which changes in skin potential are said to indicate past traumas (including traumas from past lives) being re-experienced and cleared from your psyche. (more…)

London's property market continues its implosion, brought on by a combination of tightening capital controls (much of the market exists to help offshore criminals launder their money), Brexit, and a long-overdue correction to a wildly inflated market. (more…)

DiscoveryCube's annual Bubblefest pulled all the stops out this year with the Mega Bubblefest Laser Show. (more…)

California's gun control laws were jumpstarted by rifle-carrying Black Panthers who attended government meetings and went out "copwatching" (shadowing abusive white cops); white conservatives who'd been staunch ammosexuals, opposed to any limits on gun ownership and carrying, suddenly changed their tune and started hollering for gun control. (more…)

Composed from 13 years of Cassini probe mission data, NASA's infrared-based map of Titan shows off one of the solar system's most promising worlds.

When Bernie Sanders made a bid for the Democratic presidential candidacy in 2016 with a pledge of "Medicare For All," the party establishment (coffers fattened with money from the health insurance industry) claimed that the policy was a nonstarter that would never find popular support. (more…)

When Hang Do Thi Duc published her work on the privacy implications of payment processor Venmo's "public-by-default" directory of payments, she did not release her dataset out of respect for the privacy of the Venmo users whose personal lives were on display in the data. (more…)

The porn extortion scam works like this: you get an email from a stranger claiming that he hacked your computer and recorded video of you masturbating to pornography, which he'll release unless you send him some cryptocurrency. (more…)

War is a thing of terror, traditions, heartache and often, boredom. Passing the time between patrols, and the banality that comes from life in the field, is a constant challenge. Some people read. Most exercise. Everyone complains about the food. Soldiers write, train and call home--if there's someone there that'll pick up the phone. Video games? Totally a thing, in some instances. If you have a Sharpie, or a knife, there's a good chance that you might wind up doodling, scratching or scrawling something, at one point or another, to prove that you were there, where ever ‘there’ might be.Jonathan Bratt, a veteran of the war in Afghanistan and a current company commander in the National Guard, put together a great read on the history of military graffiti for The New York Times. Starting with 5,000-year old cave paintings and navigating conflicts across the span of history, Bratten touches on the artwork and vandalization that soldiers, living in Death’s shadow, undertook to cure themselves of boredom and, in some cases, serve as proof of their existence. From the New York Times Magazine:

Doc Martens embossed their leather 1460 boots with the iconic cover art from Joy Division's 1979 first album, Unknown Pleasures. So cool!

An Emmy For Megan is a funny take on the practice of "award whoring," or creating work that is specifically created as bait for award nominations. Megan Amram's web series just got two nominations. (more…)

The High Trestle Trail Bridge in Madrid, Iowa is quite lovely by day, but at night it's even cooler, when a lighting effect makes a bike ride a futuristic journey into a vortex. (more…)

Kiwami Japan is the MacGyver of knife making. He's made knives out of the darndest things -- cardboard, gelatin... fish. But he's really outdone himself this time. He's crafted one out of men's boxers. Yes, a knife made from underwear. It's sharp too, it can cut raw chicken, office paper and cucumbers. What will he think of next?

I grew up reading comic books. Green Lantern was my childhood superhero (do not talk to me about the movie.) I loved the X-Men, too. Batman? Hell yes. In my late teens, I graduated into Hellblazer, Shade: The Changing Man and honestly, pretty much anything that Vertigo printed. Sadly, when university rolled around, I was too much of a broke joke to afford extras like the occasional funny book. Of late, I’ve been catching up on what I missed.I’ve read to the end of Hellblazer (so good!) and pick up Saga, Trees and Injection on a regular basis. But I don’t know what to read next. I like dark gritty stuff—I came of age in the 1990s—and I’m not sure what to check out. As I live in an RV, even though it’s a big one, I don’t have space to build up a huge collection of comics, trade paperbacks or graphic novels. What ever I consume needs to make it to my eyeballs, via my iPad or Kindle. What do y’all think I should try next? Do you have any favorite titles that I should take for a spin? If so, what do you like about them and why, based on what I’ve told you that I dig, would I find to love in them?Help a fella out?Image via Flickr, courtesy of Sam Howzit

The concept of "nothing" is easy to grasp for most humans, but the concept of zero as a number is much harder. Recent research shows that bees can be taught that zero is a number which is less than one. This nifty explainer gives an overview. (more…)

My friend John Baichtal has a new project book out called 10 LED Projects for Geeks: Build Light-Up Costumes, Sci-Fi Gadgets, and Other Clever Inventions. John is an excellent teacher and his book will guide you on your way to making fun light-up projects and sharpen your maker skills, including how to:

iJustine and MKBHD opened a sealed iBook G3 from 2000 and started it up. It took a while to configure it to go online, but they were finally able to use Netscape Communicator to browse the Web. Then they used the World Book Encyclopedia CD-ROM to listen to animal sounds.