Boing Boing

In an interview with CBS News' Jeff Glor on Sunday, President Donald Trump was asked which nations he considered to be foes of the United States.(more…)

Alabama college student Walter Carr, 20, got a job at a moving company in a nearby town. The night before his new job started, his 2003 Nissan Altima broke down.(more…)

Sarah Palin is doing a great job promoting Sacha Baron Cohen's Showtime series, Who is America?, by going on TV and complaining that she had been tricked and embarrassed by Cohen when he interviewed her under false pretenses. Gee, who wants that?Interestingly, the is one of the first times that Palin didn't speak in the kind of nonsensical word salad she is famous for. She is articulate and directly answers the pandering softball questions that the Good Morning America host gently tosses her.And here's former GOP Illinois congressman / radio host Joe Walsh making similar complaints about being tricked into supporting the proposal to give guns to preschoolers:https://youtu.be/Z9LjwRRO9fk

You've probably seen the video clip from Who Is America? in which comedian provocateur Sacha Baron Cohen easily convinces right wing politicians and lobbyists to express their support for giving guns to four-year-olds. Here's another clip with Cohen's character trying to explain a mathematically unsound proposal to Bernie Sanders, who patiently explains why the proposal move the 99% into the 1% won't work. (more…)

The Facebook data set on tens of millions of Americans that was gathered for Cambridge Analytica was accessed from within Russia, British MP Damian Collins today told CNN.(more…)

Fathom Information Design created an interactive website called Fakebook that presents a bunch of Facebook ads purchased by Russia-linked agents, showing the intended audiences for the ads. Is their any reason to doubt that the Russians are still buying Facebook ads designed to divide and anger Americans?

There have been a lot of iconic images offering the FEELING of a NYC subway ride.The goth woman and her raven, and the Ramones and their guitars are the first to come to mind. Taking photos of people riding the subway is likely on par with photographers crapping out another image of San Franciaco's Golden Gate Bridge. Once in a while tho, we get art.I have an MTA card in my wallet.

I bought PG Tips for a taste off with my favorite black tea Barry's Gold Blend. I decided to finish the box, rather than just throw it out, and ended up depressed.When I first started drinking Barry's folks told me it was "a builder's blend" and that I would "taste the bag." Folks insisted I try PG Tips. A woman I'd been seeing who claimed deep knowledge of tea was an aficionado of the triangular PF Tips bag. I ignored them as I didn't care, and liked Barry's. After enough pressure, I tried PG Tips and wrote a review. I didn't like it much. The box got put away.A few weeks ago I put my box of Barry's in my camper and headed north up the West Coast of the United States of America. When I got home I realized the box must have been left someplace along the way. I was about to re-order when I realized the PG Tips was just sitting there. I'd finish it before reordering and reclaim that tiny bit of cabinet space.PG Tips tastes like cardboard. Rather than the 3-5 cups of Barry's I'll drink in a day, I was having one or less. Unfinished mugs of tea were gently evaporating around my kitchen and office. I was getting less done than I wanted to and felt pretty tired all day. Then I realized what was up!Quickly I ordered a few boxes of Barry's Gold Blend. This morning I made my first cup in a few weeks. I was thrilled to look into my cup of Barry's to see the abyss staring right back!Americans can find Barry's Gold Blend readily available via Amazon.

San Francisco's new mayor, London Breed, blames homeless people for the piles of poop and ever present scent of urine that characterize the city. There is also awesome avocado toast.Via the Modesto Bee:

Portland-based musician Randall Taylor, aka Amulets, creates gorgeous experimental music performances from modded Walkmans and old multitrack cassette decks playing handcrafted tape loops, live guitar loops processed through circuit-bent pedals, field recordings and other sound sources. He calls his portable setup, featured in the video below, the Suitcase of Drone. Absolutely stunning work.From Austin's Dimension Gallery where Amulets created a sound installation that runs until August 14:

The long-awaited biopic Bohemian Rhapsody tells the story of Freddie Mercury and Queen's incredible story from their formation in 1970 to their outstanding Live Aid performance in 1985 just a few years before Mercury died due to complications from AIDS.Hitting theaters November 2, the film stars Rami Malek as Freddie Mercury with Ben Hardy, Gwilym Lee, Joseph Mazzello, Allen Leech, and Lucy Boynton. Bryan Singer directed much of the principal photography before he was fired, apparently for repeatedly not showing up to work, and replaced by Dexter Fletcher who completed the movie.

The Mandalay Bay hotel was used by Stephen Paddock as a vantage point to slaughter dozens and hurt hundreds more in October 2017's gun massacre on the Las Vegas strip. Now the hotel's owner, MGM Resorts International, is suing his victims—more than 1000 of them—to warn them off trying to hold it in any part responsible.

Because Venmo defaults to making all payments public, privacy researcher Hang Do Thi Duc was able to download and analyze 208,000,000 transactions, whose notes and other metadata revealed a wealth of personal, compromising information, including drug deals and breakups. (more…)

Pew! Liquid Ass prank spray will make a room smell like farts, really foul smelling ones. According to people who have bought and used it, it's strong and it will make you gag. But it also has another use, a more noble one:

When my daughter was little, I had a mirror leaning against the wall for her to look in. For a while, she thought she had a playmate and would interact with this "other" baby. She would laugh with it and sometimes even kiss it. It was adorable. So I had to chuckle when I saw this video. This little guy probably hasn't had a mirror at his height before. From what I can gather, he thinks this standalone department store mirror is a window and that if he could just get around it, he could play with his new friend.

A new page at Itch.io, the top platform for publishing and selling indie games, reveals the most popular game development engines and apps there. Unity is way out in the lead, accounting for almost half the projects published at Itch. Construct, an app requiring no coding skills, and GameMaker, a general-purpose creative suite with powerful scripting tools and optional modules, together account for about a quarter of the projects.Then come engines designed for specific genres: Twine, for interactive fiction, in fourth, and RPG Maker, for Japanese-style computer role playing games, in fifth. PICO-8, a "fantasy console" that imposes strict limitations on developers in imitation of a 1980s' 8-bit box, is in sixth. Bitsy and Puzzlescript, which produce simple tile-based games, are the seventh- and twelfth-most popular engines. Ren'Py, for making visual novels, is in ninth. Unreal Engine and the beloved free 2D engine Löve round out the top 10.Of the rest, only the fast-growing Godot engine has more than 500 projects.Note that software frameworks—HTML games—are excluded from the tally. Only Phaser, with 1,173 projects, would rank in the top 10, between Bitsy and Unreal Engine.

I spent the last few days fighting off a mouse infestation in our RV. So far I've trapped and tossed six of the furry little bastards out on their asses. As I began the search for where they were getting into our rig, yesterday, I got to wondering how much space they can actually squeeze through. According to this video, I'm doomed.

The forthcoming Atari VCS got a mixed reception from players, who are wary of a nostalgic cash-grab but hopeful for something more versatile and capable than Nintendo's one-shot classics consoles. A great sign: not only has it received spec bumps to 8GB of RAM and a decent GPU, but owners can install Linux. You probably won't want to, but it's proof of the system's general-purpose performance and open-ness.

I first spoke with Chris Skaife in 2013 after he was was awarded a position at The Tower of London following a long and distinguished career in the the British Army. A Yeoman Warder, Skaife holds the position of Ravenmaster. As the title implies, he’s responsible for the care of the Tower's unkindness of ravens.Our first conversation about his gig left me fascinated: Here was a man with a job that’s completely singular in the world. His days, are full or tourists and the occasional state visit, history and tradition. That he goes about his duties in a uniform that looks like it’s designed to kill its wearer on a hot summer day, is shorthand for the amount of dedication he has to his responsibilities. I came from talking with Skaife with so many unanswered questions about what his day entails, his passion for the birds under his care and what it’s like to navigate such a unique gig. Happily, I’ve had most of my questions answered by Skaife’s upcoming book, The Ravenmaster: My Life with the Ravens at the Tower of London. It’s not out until October, but it is available for pre-order at Amazon. Chris, good fella that he is, provided me with an early draft of the book to read, a few weeks ago. I’m looking forward to buying the real McCoy once it becomes available.The book’s structure and Skaife’s friendly, matter-of-fact narrative style made for a quick, enjoyable read. It smacks of a friend talking you through his day at work. In the book, Skaife takes the reader on a tour of his daily duties, from morning until dusk, explaining the ins and outs of everything that he and his team do to keep the Tower of London’s ravens healthy and entertained. He’s happy to talk about his successes in the position of Ravenmaster. He’s also frank about his failures. The most fascinating bits of the book, for me at least, came from Skaife’s explanation of the relationships he has with each of the corvids in his care. There’s love, annoyance and respect in how he talks about each of the Ravens he’s responsible for. The amount of knowledge of corvid body language, the meaning behind the sounds that his ravens make and their individual quirks makes for a damn good read. Given the utter shambles of a world that we’re living in right now, running into a read like this felt like a vacation from the vile news cycle that I normally wade through with my eyes. When it’s possible to get your hands on a copy, I heartily recommend that you do so. It’s not a long book, but I think you’ll find it to be a very satisfying one. Image via Historic Royal Palaces

After seeing a successful Kickstarter project, Angus from Makers Muse has been experimenting with sphericons, unusual shapes that meander when they roll. (more…)

In their latest video, the strapping food and fitness YouTubers at Buff Dudes chainsawed down some rancher's "hazard trees" and made a bench press with the lumber. It may very well be the brawniest thing you've seen in a while. https://www.instagram.com/p/BlGoufCFAVC/https://www.instagram.com/p/BlBLbcJlLfG/(Likecool)

A couple of years ago, online read-it-later darling Instapaper got sold to Pinterest. Then, in the lousiest possible way, nothing happened. No real updates, tweaks or refinements for Instapaper the service or the app. It was frozen in time! Currently, it's not even possible to use it in Europe as its not in compliance with the new GDPR rules put in place in May. Fortunately, aside from the GDPR thing, everything still runs as smoothly as it did a few years back--users save content cleaved from the internet to read in their browser, on a Kindle or with a tablet or smartphone app, just like they could before the acquisition. But, as Instapaper's chief competitor, Pocket, has continued to add new features, better e-reader support (its app for Kobo E-Ink devices is frigging great,) and slicker mobile apps to its arsenal, it's been hard to stick by Instapaper, which feels stale by. Hopefully, all of that's about to change.This morning, in a press release, the team that sold Instapaper to Pinterest announced that they have bought the service back:

Twitter user πend creates mesmerizing mechanisms called kaleidocycles, which twist and torque and spin in an endless loop. Some of them are quite imaginative: (more…)

I've had a Roku, Apple TV, and the Fire TV Stick. I no longer use the Roku or Apple TV because the Fire TV Stick, in my experience is less buggy and easier to use than the other streaming devices. Also, I'm an Amazon Prime member, so I can watch a bunch of shows and movies that are included in the membership. Right now its on sale for just $20.

Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Cybersecurity Subcommittee, is no different from other members of Trump's base. They admire him for his ability to stare into people's eyes and tell them "big whoppers." There is no such thing as an inconvenient truth for a Trumpkin, because they prefer falsehoods over facts.From Slate:

Back in May, indy romance author Faleena Hopkins embarked on a second career as a trademark troll, threatening to sue peers who use the word "cocky" in the titles of their romance novels, forcing people to take down books they'd written. (more…)

This video was far more interesting than I thought it was going to be. It's not only the story of the restoration of a cool barn find, a circa 1890 candy-making machine, but it details how Greg Cohen of Lofty Pursuits in Tallahassee, Florida used it to make strawberry "drops" (hard candies). Cohen is a real candy-making nerd and he shares how he spent 70 to 80 hours restoring this antique machine for the Klondike Gold Rush National Historic Museum in Skagway, Alaska:

Andy Phillip found a tree burl out in the world, then decided to turn it on a lathe and make it into a sapphire dragon's egg. (more…)

Ten days ago, the European Parliament dealt a major blow to a radical proposal that would force online services to deploy copyright bots to examine everything posted by users and block anything that might be a copyright infringement; the proposal would also ban linking to news articles without paid permission from the news sites. (more…)

Brent Longborough did me the enormous favor of translating my latest Locus column, Zuck's Empire of Oily Rags, into Portuguese, and sent it to me to publish.(more…)

That'd be a no.

The little pink-edged ferns above are Azolla filiculoides, and they're smaller than a fingernail. Scientists just made it the first fern to get its genome sequenced because of its potential for fertilizing and even cooling the planet. Fifty million years ago, it was so abundant as ocean blooms that it helped cool the earth's atmosphere. Via Quartz:

Axel Voss is the German MEP responsible for Article 13 of the pending EU Copyright Directive, which says that it's not good enough for companies to remove infringing material posted by users once they're notified of its existence; instead, Voss wants then to spend hundreds of millions of dollars implementing automated filters that prevent anyone from posting copyrighted material in the first place (even if they have the right to do so under fair dealing, and even if that means that a lot of legitimate material gets accidentally blocked). (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYvS7r9_MwQZach Smith writes, "Lorenzo Music's Carlton the Doorman was one of TV's great unseen characters...but he finally got a face in this special, intended as a series pilot. And he...kind of looked like a hippie. The intended series would have been one of the first adult-oriented prime-time cartoons, but while it didn't make it past the pilot, it did win an Emmy for Outstanding Animated Program...and Lorenzo Music would have better luck in animation a few years later when he started voicing Garfield the Cat. The special, which was never rebroadcast after its initial airing, is also available on the RHODA: SEASON FIVE DVD set from SHOUT! Factory, and the YouTube channel this is on has a treasure trove of unaired series, alternate first episodes, concept presentations and more."

Democratic Socialist heroine Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (previously) is heading to Congress this fall, and though she's promised not to blow up the Democratic party when she gets there, she's not going to let the pro-finance establishment roll over her. (more…)

https://youtu.be/QkXeMoBPSDkSacha "Ali G/Borat" Baron Cohen has a new prank show called "Who Is America?" in the offing in which he punks political figures into endorsing bizarre, extreme political positions (think of it as a 21st century "Brass Eye"). (more…)

As far back as 2012, UCLA researchers were publishing studies that showed that Americans basically never used their "formal spaces" -- dining rooms, "great rooms" and parlours -- instead, they spend most of their time in the kitchen and the "informal" den. (more…)

The UK will give you a visa if you "invest" USD2.65M in the country; historically these "millionaire visas" were used by Eastern European oligarchs and other looters whose "investments" were in shell companies or high-end, empty luxury flats, or similar socially useless ways of laundering their fortunes. (more…)

Silicon Valley's War on Walls has declared its first casualties according to a new study in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. Those casualties are workplace interaction and productivity. (more…)

Alex Jones accused the grieving parents of the dead children of Sandy Hook of being "crisis actors" and kicked off a campaign of brutal harassment by his idiotic followers -- 900,000 of them on Facebook alone. (more…)

Coming to Netflix soon. It's enraged the online nazis for the usual reasons, but this time it's particularly delicious because they can't even pretend it was ever for them. When they say she looks like a boy, all you have to do is take that thought seriously, just for a second, to understand how completely they're losing that particular aspect of the culture wars.

On April 18th, Nicaragua’s President Daniel Ortega, announced that changes would be made to the country’s social security system: workers would be forced to pay more but would receive fewer benefits, despite their increased contributions. Understandably, people were pissed. They staged peaceful demonstrations. Then came the not so peaceful ones: the outrage the nation’s citizens felt over the changes to a system they had paid into the whole of their working lives, spilled over into resentment for the Nicaraguan government as a whole. Since then, 300 civilians have died. On July 14th, Nicaraguan police and pro-government paramilitary types trapped a group of student protestors inside of a church and commenced firing on those inside with military-grade arms. The whole, bloody, terrifying show was captured on video and in Twitter posts from inside of the church. One young man named Gerald, was from the city of Masaya. He was in Managua, Nicaraguas capital, attending university. Gerald was shot in the head—dead at 20 years old. His last rights delivered by a priest who was trapped in the church with him. Those trapped in the church have since been allowed to go free. Its said that there is at least one other dead and several wounded as a result of the incident. Daniel Ortega’s been in office as the President of Nicaragua for 11 years. To get there, he ran for the position from 1990 until 2007. It was with a promise to improve the lives of the poor, to end the rampant corruption that infected Nicaragua’s political elite. Ortega came from a poor family, that was well known for being unable to pay the rent on the flats where they lived. The Ortegas moved from place to place, pushed out for not paying their way until there was no where in the area that they lived in where anyone would take them in. In 1967, Ortega was sent to prison for bank robbery. Unlike the leaders of the current American administration, he grew up in poverty. He understands what it’s like to be poor. It apparently doesn’t matter. Just like someone else you may know, Ortega’s initial presidential win was called into question, due to the fact that he was ragingly unpopular with the people of his nation: he won 37% of the total vote, with the remaining votes eaten up by other political factions too much in love with the smell of their own stink to get their shit together and do something just for their country.Ortega’s government is the very model of cronyism. His wife plans on running to become Vice President of Nicaragua to Ortega’s position of head honcho in the country’s upcoming presidential elections, despite the fact that her doing so, as the sitting President’s wife, is against the nation’s constitution. It’s said that Ortega has accumulated a massive fortune through tax evasion, bribes and kickbacks since coming into office. If this doesn’t smack of something familiar yet, maybe this will bring it home.From the Pan Am Post:

Here are transcripts and videos of the press conference with US President Donald Trump & Russian President Vladimir Putin, following their meeting at the Presidential Palace in Helsinki. (more…)

Last week, Defense Distributed founder Cody Wilson won a major ruling in his quest to distribute gun-printing software. The video above from February outlines the background of the case. (more…)