Articles by BoingBoing from January 2014

Jeffrey sez, "The nice responses to my essay on 'Hotel California', has emboldened me to send a follow up on the curious life in China of another American song from the 1970s.    ...

Isabel Greenberg is a writer and illustrator who lives and works in North London. In her graphic novel The Encyclopedia of Early Earth, Greenberg combines art, mythology, and humor to tell a story of...

The Scientology Remix Project by NCN and JC Clone Phineas Narco sends us The Scientology Remix Project , "Broadcast on KFJC, May 9th 2013, mixed live with JC Clone and Phineas Narco on The Mr. &...

An internet-famous feline has died. From his caretaker's Facebook page: Colonel Meow passed away yesterday evening. I will post more about the details when I've had a few days to grieve.  &n...

An internet-famous feline has died. From his caretaker's Facebook page: Colonel Meow passed away yesterday evening. I will post more about the details when I've had a few days to grieve.  &n...

[Video Link]    ...

Here's a new turn in the saga of Rob "Laughable Bumblefuck" Ford, the mayor of Toronto: a lawsuit alleges that he had a couple of his former football team proteges beat six kind of hell out of his est...

The Clarion Writers' Workshop at UC San Diego has announced its lineup of instructors for the 2014 session, and it's pretty spectacular: this year's writer-instructors are Gregory Frost, Geoff Ryman, ...

Typographer Nate Piekos describes how he created a 21st-century typeface from a 1980 issue of Elfquest—just in time to begin lettering the comic series' conclusive installment.   ...

Like many people with cancer, I can't wait for June this year: it's when the motion picture adaptation of John Green's spectacular young adult novel "The Fault in our Stars" hits theaters.  ...

Now in the Boing Boing Shop, this classic design featuring Jackhammer Jill in all her beauty. Just $20, along with our other fantastic Boing Boing t-shirt designs!    ...

Alexis Madrigal explores the history of typewritten images, from their present nadir in YouTube comments to Illustrated Phonographic World's 1893 efforts to prove the value of the medium.  ...

Above is designer Ken Isaacs inside his Knowledge Box, a 1962 invention meant to educate students through "a rapid procession of thoughts and ideas projected on walls, ceilings and floor in a panoply ...

From Irregular Choice's Spring/Summer 2014 collection, as spotted by Spindle Magazine.    ...

Heres a great twist on the classic snowman theme: a bloody, carnivorous Frosty caught in the act of devouring a raccoon.    ...

That little smeary line in the center isn't a camera defect, it's the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE), as photographed by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), which is orbit...

The Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch program offers an app that helps identify businesses and restaurants using sustainably caught, reputedly healthy to eat seafood near you.   &nb...

The Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch program offers an app that helps identify businesses and restaurants using sustainably caught, reputedly healthy to eat seafood near you.   &nb...

We've talked here about why you shouldn't be worried about radiation from Fukushima tainting fish caught off the West Coast of North America.    ...

The gentleman in this video claims to hit 30 mph while sledding down Birmingham's Crestwood Boulevard. I have no idea whether or not this is true, but knowing the intersection he's sledding past (I u...

Want a surprise? Battery life on my smartphone sucks. I'm always looking for small, simple external packs that last. For $20 the Anker Astro-Mini gets the job done!    ...

Charles writes, "It's hard to imagine how we would have gotten all of the whiz-bang technology we enjoy today without the discovery of probability and statistics.    ...

Above is a micro-windmill that University of Texas Arlington researchers suggest could someday be used to charge mobile electronics if they were embedded en masse on the device's case.  &nbs...

Last October, the Justice Department made a seemingly cosmetic change to its procedures related to NSA surveillance: requiring prosecutors to tell defendants when the evidence against them originated ...

If you visit Thailand, Indonesia, and other forested parts of southeast Asia, and look up, you might catch a glimpse of a snake careening through the air.    ...

You probably caught Stevie Wonder playing with Daft Punk, Pharrell, and Nile Rodgers at the Grammys on Sunday night. My favorite Stevie Wonder jam remains "Superstition" (1972) due in part to the epi...

If you're not quite sure what the "H" and the "N" in H1N1 stand for or how the 2009 H1N1 differed from the 1918 H1N1, or if H10N8 is just starting to sound like alphabet soup to you, then Judy Stone's...

Days ago, venture capitalist Tom Perkins compared criticism of billionaires to Nazi persecution of Jews, likening recent events to Kristallnacht, the pogrom that heralded the beginning of the Holocaus...

Secret Headquarters, LA's finest comic store, is hosting a booth at the LA Book Fair this weekend, with a dynamite roster of previously unannounced comics creators for your meeting and squeeing pleasu...

Sandra writes, "What started as a 'class reunion' of bloggers, Internet activists, and researchers has become Europe's largest and most prominent conference on the future of our society and all things...

Leigh Alexander recalls her adventures working with porn spambots in the 1990s, and the strange mixture of nostalgia and disappointment that remains.    ...

Redditor Pastlightspeed cosplayed Chel from the game Portal and put together an amazing Portal Gun out of cardboard and paint for less than $10.    ...

Gareth Halfacree, who has a long history with both the Bletchley Park trust and the National Museum of Computing Trust, has published a detailed timeline of the two institutions, showing how they got ...

215 allows FBI to get records relevant to an investigation. PCLOB: NSA program fails on "FBI", "records," "relevant" & "investigation."— Julian Sanchez (@norm...

(Via Rudy Coby)    ...

Stephanie Fernandez is a spectacular makeup artist whose trompe l'oeil horror effects demonstrate a bottomless creativity, artistic talent, and a genuine flair for the macabre.    ...

In each episode of DiResta (every other Wednesday), artist and master builder Jimmy DiResta (Dirty Money, Hammered, Against the Grain, Trash for Cash) lets MAKE into his workshop, to look over his sh...

Eric Ferguson of Mooresville, NC was given a bill for $89,000 by Lake Norman Regional Medical Center, which treated him for a venomous snake-bite last August.    ...

"Angry Birds creator Rovio Entertainment Ltd. says the popular game's website was defaced by hackers Wednesday, two days after reports that the personal data of its customers might have been accessed ...

"Fifty years ago today, on January 29th, 1964, Stanley Kubricks film Doctor Strangelove or: How I Learned t to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb was released," write our friends at Dangerous Minds. ...

In California, state assembly lawmakers approved a number of bills today, including a measure to limit how law enforcement and public agencies can use drones: The bill, by Assemblymembers Jeff Gorell...

Yesterday marked the expiry of US Patent 5597589, "Apparatus for producing parts by selective sintering." This is one of the core patents in the 3D printing world -- the patent that allows 3D printer ...

Your browser doesn't support the HTML audio tag. You can still download the show, though! var audioTag = document.createElement('audio'); /* Do we not support MP3 audio?    ...

One year ago today Stranger Than Science: "Astounding stories of strange events - all absolutely true!" The first story is called "The Mystery of David Lang." It's about a man who, in 1880, was standi...

An announcement that crossed my in-box today: "Microsoft has joined the campaign to end bear bile farming with the development of an interactive website Exploring Moon Bears that explains the plight ...

Scientists have developed a two-part process to humanely and safely kill beached whales that can't get back to the ocean. It involves custom-built needles, one more than 3 feet long.   ...

With Obama pledging in the latest State of the Union address to finally shutter the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay -- something he's been promising to do since his 2008 election campaign -- it's worth ...

Julian May's four-volume Saga of the Pliocene Exile has long been one of my favorite fantasy series. It kicks off with the Many Colored Land.    ...

Here are two images from Maxime Mary's "Little Golden Books"-style interpretation of the television crime series Breaking Bad. I've followed his wonderful illustration blog for a while, and you can s...

Two politicians in Norway nominated NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden for a Nobel Peace Prize. Brian Fung for the Washington Post: In their nomination letter, Baard Vegar Solhjell and Snorre Valen, who...

BibliOdyssey, which you can now follow on Twitter, points to a wonderful collection on Pinterest by user "Iki" of images of "Imaginary gardens in art: from unicorns to mandrakes & from Botticelli...

Matthew O'Brien explains the peculiar super-rich habit for comparing Obama to Hitler. It's because: 1. They Feel Powerless 2. And They Might Not Ever Get Our Power Back.    ...

Naoki Hiroshima was lucky enough to snag a one-character Twitter username: @N. Over the years, he'd been offered large sums -- as much as $50,000 -- for the name, but he kept it.   &nbs...

You only need to watch the last five seconds (I set it to begin playing where the action starts).    ...

In a Senate Judiciary Hearing on NSA surveillance today, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper insinuated dozens of journalists reporting on documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snow...

Boing Boing reader Domenic Bahmann shot and shared this photo, "Kangaroo," in our Boing Boing Flickr Pool. "Eucalyptus tree leaves are like brush strokes," he says.    ...

Recommended if You Like is Boing Boing's weekly podcast of Brian Heater's cafe conversations with musicians, cartoonists, writers, and other creative types.    ...

Canada's Conservative government, led by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, has led a brutal attack on government libraries: literally burning the country's environmental records and doing such damage to...

Charles F. Pidgin came up with a great idea - a coiled paper tube with words printed on it. When actors in a silent movie needed to deliver a line of dialog, they simply blew on the tube to inflate it...

Weather Channel meteorologist Jim Cantore takes care of a jokester attempting to disrupt his on-the-scene report. (Vine)    ...

Etsy seller Migotochou created these earrings sporting custom Haunted Mansion beads inspired by the Disney ride's iconic wallpaper. (via The Haunted Mansion Disney)    ...

A tooth like this one, found in a 1,500-year-old grave site near Munich, harbored enough blood in the leftover bits of dental pulp that researchers were able to sequence the DNA.   &nb...

Some anniversary posts are less than intriguing, but I really like this celebratory video from Joe Hanson and the folks at It's Okay To Be Smart.    ...

Titan Comics has released an English translation of Snowpiercer, the acclaimed French graphic novel that inspired the new movie from Joon-ho Bong.    ...

New documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act show that federally contracted scientists have been raising red flags about the non-therapeutic use of antibiotics in the livestock indust...

Max Read asked his readers to name the 'hoods where all the hip stuff is. The results of his investigation were published today.    ...

And so, without any immediate family left in town, Raylan Givens gets drawn back to Harlan because of poor, stupid Wade Messer.    ...

A sad, but not unsurprising story from a traveler. Just then, the Captain comes out. Im elated. Yes! I dont like feeling like I have to run tell anybody anything, but I also dont want to get thrown ...

With "Obama's pot dealer beaten to death for farting in gay lover's face", I think The Daily Mail may reasonably claim to have created the second-best newspaper headline in human history.  &...

Here's a photo of Pete Seeger, aged 2, with his family in 1921. It comes from a National Photo Co. Collection glass negative.    ...

I dig watching live loop musicians do their thing and Elijah Aaron is a master of the technique. Here he is covering TLC's "No Scrubs" with panache.    ...

Eclectic Method offers a brief journey through the history of sampling, from the Mellotron to whatever happened last year beginning with the letter "M".    ...

The Wolfram Cabinet contains 170 items critical to human survival. Survival will cost $14,500 and require about 40 cubic feet. The inventory.    ...

Matthew Skomarovsky, @skomputer on twitter, averaged the faces of every member of congress to create this indistinct, vaguely orange form: "I found median values to generally produce a better image t...

Jane Austen was not a game theorist.    ...

Boing Boing reader RedandJonny shot and shared this photo, "An AT-AT mother feeding her young," in our Boing Boing Flickr Pool.    ...

The Application Developers Alliance is trying to nail Lodsys, the notorious troll that uses a bogus patent from Intellectual Ventures to extort money from app developers.    ...

Spitalfields Life has posted more Victorian portraits of London characters and tradesmen a (here's the last batch). The new set has some absolute gems, including the Muffin Man (above).  &nb...

The definitive Voyager torpedo inventory log [via MeFi]    ...

Naoki Hiroshima had a rare and valuable Twitter handle, @N. It was extorted from him, he claims, by a scammer who figured out that PayPal reveals part of one's credit card number during security verif...

Evan from Fight for the Future writes, "Want to help save democracy? The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a super-secretive trade agreement that threatens everything you care about.   ...

UK Labour Member of Parliament Tom Watson writes, "I thought you might be interested to read the latest developments on the drones and data collection front.    ...

Congressman Michael Grimm (R-NY/Staten Island) felt a little tense after the State of the Union. After giving a terse statement to an NY1 reporter, he was asked about the ongoing issue of his campaig...

Etsy seller Makeitgoodpdx has a sweet line of glowing textiles, including several pieces of glow-in-the-dark astronomical underwear, like the panties shown above.    ...

Grant Louden is an artist in Milton Keynes who is working on a series of incredible sculptures based on the spaceships from classic sf pulp covers.    ...

Just look at it. Dark Forces by Matthew j Mahoney (via Neatorama)    ...

(HT: @seanbonner)    ...

Are you one of those Old Net Hands who has a domain stashed with the always-terrible Network Solutions (now Web.com)? Time to move it somewhere sensible (I use and recommend Hover): Netsol is moving r...

The Writers Guild of America submitted an exemplary set of comments to the U.S. Government's Internet Policy Task Force green paper on the future of American copyright.    ...

Boars, Gore, and Swords is hosted by stand-up comedians Ivan Hernandez and Red Scott. In each episode they break down HBO's Game of Thrones and George R.R.    ...

Rob Cockerham says: "The Internet has a long history of tricking people into clicking on things. The latest version of this is the scourge of Facebook posts linking to Upworthy and Viralnova. &nb...

In this 9-minute video artist Joe Ledbetter presents the process of designing a vinyl toy. He runs through all the stages: conception, design, packaging, photography, and promotion.   ...

In honor of Pete Seeger's passing today, please take a moment to read his testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee, which is a cross between a witch-hunt and a Marx Brothers' routin...

Alex Duner describes the rise and rise of makerspaces in libraries, rattling off an impressive list of public libraries that have taken the mission of turning knowledge into action to the next step.&n...

Chvrches cover Bauhaus's "Bela Lugosi's Dead" (1979) for the soundtrack to the forthcoming Vampire Academy movie. (via NME) Of course, nothing beats Bauhaus themselves playing "Bela Lugosi's Dead" in ...

Russian opposition member Alexei Navalny created a website to document the rampant corruption at the Sochi Olympics. The site is a map with clickable regions showing how illegal dumping, graft, inside...

I'm looking forward to going to Make Your Thing in October. It's being produced by Jesse Thorn of Maximum Fun, so I know it's going to be great.    ...

In 2009, researchers sliced apart one of the most famous brains in history, live on the Internet. Now that brain (which once belonged to an amnesiac patient who had lost the ability to form new memori...

If you've ever dreamed of owning a bank-vault mounded high with shiny coins in which you can bathe like Scrooge McDuck, now is your chance.    ...

In the UK, the Crown Prosecution Service is pressing criminal charges against three men who dumpster-dived discarded food from the skip behind an Iceland grocery store.    ...

Tom the Dancing Bug, IN WHICH a courageous one-percenter makes a Holocaust analogy -- and you'll never guess which side he sees himself on.    ...

Pope Francis's Message for World Communication Day addressed itself to the Internet's place in Catholic society and the wider world. David Weinberger -- an "agno-atheistical Jew who lives in solidarit...

We featured this classic Ronen V video on our Virgin America in-flight Boing Boing video channel a couple of years ago.    ...

If you are red-green colorblind then there are lots of medically relevant observations of the human body that you see differently — and those differences could affect your ability to spot a heal...

Boing Boing reader Clovis Ravion shot and shared this photo, "Red Panda," in our Boing Boing Flickr Pool. If you would like to submit your images for consideration on Boing Boing, share them in the p...

Yet another crazy multi-tool ax on Boing Boing? Zippo sent me their 4-in-1 Woodsman a few months ago, it has come in extremely handy.    ...

Justin Hall sez, "My personal web site just turned 20 years old today! I posted a short film to celebrate." Happy 20 - long time linking (Thanks, Justin!    ...

[Click for large size.] Take a moment today to remember our fallen space heroes. On this day in 1986, the "worst accident in the history of the American space program" took place.   &...

Bravo, Zach King! Here's a profile of King, the master of what he calls "digital sleight of hand." And of course, more of his video fun at Vine and YouTube.    ...

Susan writes, "Over 22K game developers from all over the world (72 countries) came together this past weekend (January 24-26) at the annual Global Game Jam (GGJ).    ...

UC Berkeley researchers took inspiration from a turkey's color-changing wattle to design a biosensor that detects toxins or pathogens. Turkey wattles change between blue and red as the blood vessels b...

Cat vs. mail carrier. (via Neatorama)    ...

Guitar goddess Kaki King, who was the featured artist on a recent edition of Boing Boing's in-flight entertainment channel on Virgin America airlines, launched a Kickstarter last week: "The Neck is a ...

NYC-based artist duo The Laser Girls produced a set of 3D printed artificial fingernails they call Sour Razz. They're made of dyed nylon.    ...

"Wind chill" is how we talk about heat loss caused by wind. Your body produces heat and warms itself when you stand outside in the cold.    ...

TV writer/actor Bill Hader's excellent Star Wars impressions on Conan: Jabba the Hutt... dying! A tauntaun... dying!    ...

This is a picture of a Diana Tree — a formation of crystalized silver made from a reaction between mercury and silver nitrate.    ...

With the death yesterday of folk singer/activist Pete Seeger, I recalled how much my entire family enjoyed his children's music when my kids were little.    ...

An incredibly detailed reconstruction of Middle Earth is being made in Outerra, a 3D terrain program designed to model entire worlds.    ...

Back in 1931, a cancer researcher working in Puerto Rico either confessed to intentionally killing research subjects in a drunken, racist rant or (his side of the story) wrote a satirical letter to a ...

The NAX 2.0 will "never let you down in any extreme survival application" that requires cutting, chopping or clearing. It comes with a bottle opener.    ...

Google's autocomplete, as visualized by @Amazing_maps, discloses the questions that everyone is asking. [via]    ...

Laura sez, "For fans of investigative gaming, there's a new time-travel RPG burning up the Kickstarter charts. TimeWatch by Kevin Kulp adapts the GUMSHOE System for a fast-paced romp through alternate...

The New York Times published a fantastic slideshow detailing how the product is, more or less, bullshit. A splendidly revealing tl;dr: Italy is the world's largest importer of olive oil.  &...

I hope he was OK. [Video Link via Arbroath]    ...

Kim Nguyen paints oddly evocative furries. It reminds me somewhat of Saga.    ...

Nicko from the Sunlight Foundation writes, "Tomorrow night, President Barack Obama will give the annual State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress and today the Sunlight Foundation unve...

The Prime Minister of the Ukraine has tendered his resignation    ...

Read the rest of the Hip Hop Family Tree comics!     ...

Human Furriery is an art project/fashion line by Argentinian artist Nicola Peleteria, comprising clothes sporting 3D silicone nipples, whose "fur" trim was made of human hair.    ...

A Dutch court has ruled that the country's ISPs need no longer block The Pirate Bay. The court ruled that the block was disproportionate and ineffective, and ordered (notoriously corrupt) rightsholder...

Folk singer and icon of hope Pete Seeger has died at 94. I saw Seeger perform three times, and will never forget those performance.    ...

The Gartner Hype Cycle on the Gartner Hype Cycle: pic.twitter.com/fZCd9pMTCg— Phil Gyford (@philgyford) January 27, 2014 As Phil Gyford points out, the Gartner Hype Cycle is performing just as p...

Here's some further detail on yesterday's disturbing news about the Bletchley Park trust's management of the museum -- firing volunteers with decades of service with no notice, evicting collections, a...

(click to embiggen) When you log in to a service with Facebook, the company exposes an enormous amount of sensitive personal information to the service's operator -- everything from your political vi...

There's not much stigma attached to meth use in harsh North Korea, writes Los Angeles Times reporter Barbara Demick. Some take it to treat colds or boost their energy; students take it to work late.&n...

There's not much stigma attached to meth use in harsh North Korea, writes Los Angeles Times reporter Barbara Demick, interviewing North Koreans in China.    ...

Kevin Poulsen at Wired News: "While investigating a hosting company known for sheltering child porn last year the FBI incidentally seized the entire e-mail database of a popular anonymous webmail serv...

From a New York Times report today, based on the contents of NSA documents leaked by Edward Snowden: The N.S.A. and Britains Government Communications Headquarters were working together on how to coll...

Kevin Gosztola at Firedoglake: "The Bureau of Prisons, with a little assistance from the Central Intelligence Agency, have been engaging in a ham-handed attempt to stop former CIA officer John Kiriako...

Marine biologist David Shiffman of Southern Fried Science outlines a number of methods for making beaches that humans and sharks both like to frequent more safe for humans, without killing any of the ...

The Daily Mail is an awful, racist, hard-right UK newspaper, notorious for scare stories (see, for example, this exhaustive index of things that the Fail claims will give you cancer) and generally ter...

Remember when HSBC got caught laundering billions for Mexican narco-terror cartels? Remember how they offered to pay five weeks' profits in fines and to defer their executive bonuses to escape crimina...

What's the saddest drug-related tragedy that DEA head Michele Leonhart has ever seen? Botched drug raids in which innocent people were killed?    ...

What's the saddest drug-related tragedy that DEA head Michele Leonhart has ever seen? Botched drug raids in which innocent people were killed?    ...

Kirby Ferguson, creator of Everything Is a Remix, has launched the first installment of his serial documentary project about "the forces that that shape us." In this first entertaining episode, Fergu...

"Oil pulling is a technique to clean your teeth and mouth. You put a spoonful of oil in your mouth, then swish it around for 20 minutes (yes, 20 minutes!!).    ...

A case study in the New England Journal of Medicine details the tragic story of an electrician who received a shock of 14,000V and was blinded as part of his injuries.    ...

A particularly psychedelic Astronomy Picture of the Day: There is a road that connects the Northern to the Southern Cross but you have to be at the right place and time to see it.   &nb...

In April, my old friends in the recently-reunited Afghan Whigs will release their first new album in sixteen years. It seems that the gentlemen have been reading up on Aleister Crowley as the record i...

Inspired by the news that King.com -- creators of the game "Candy Crush" -- had received a trademark on the use of the words "candy" and "saga" in connection with video games (and other things) and we...

The tragic story of Howdy Doody's creator and puppeteer. Story by Tom Harrington. Art by Pat Moriarity    ...

Some of the most recent selections on our video archive page: • The Golden Age of insect aviation • John Lennon/Van Halen mashup: "Imagine a Jump" • Einstein vs Darth Vader • C...

Johhnyrandom made a great-sounding instrumental song using sounds generated from a bicycle. It's called Bespoken. Listen to separate tracks and samples on his Soundcloud site.    ...

In the small town of Binghamton, New York there spins a 1925 carousel that once inspired Rod Serling and has since become a portal into... the Twilight Zone.    ...

"My first project using TV Paint animation software," writes animator Wayne Unten. "(No rotoscoping used. Where's the fun in that?!) My work-in-progress can be found on my blog: animatingforfun.com.&...

The parental filter on Sky Broadband, one of the largest ISPs in the UK, blocked jquery, the widely used Javascript library, without which many websites cease to operate.    ...

(Via Bag of Nothing)    ...

Andrew Hardin, a grad student from the University of Colorado's geography department, created an interactive mat that shows how long it takes to get there from here in several major U.S.  &...

A man purchased a first-class ticket on China Eastern Airlines and enjoyed over 300 days of free meals and drinks at the airports VIP lounge at Xi'an Airport in Shaanxi, China.    ...

If you donate fluid/tissue samples ... if you participate in research as a subject of said research ... then you ought to know what scientists have learned about you, argue two geneticists in an upcom...

Judy Hoffman is the manager of Fire and Ice, a jewelry store at the Maryland mall where three died in a shotgun murder-suicide this weekend.    ...

I hope to dig into this study from Yale's Cultural Cognition Project a little more in weeks to come, but I wanted to point it out because it undermines two big ideas that are very prevalent in online ...

A small tornado that struck Chobham, England, left 13,000 without power over the weekend—and was said to have "lifted cats in the air." Local fire crews also found extensive damage to trees and ...

Helpful instructions for those clear, yet very cold, nights.    ...

New research supports a 14-year-old theory that could explain how lightning could form itself into a ball that moves eerily in a very un-lightning way until it, sometimes, eventually explodes. &...

Might Mike's Imagine/Jump mashup has a lot of precision in its execution, a great tempo/pitch match. I can't say as it's the catchiest tune I've yet heard, but I can really appreciate the execution.&...

Microsoft has renamed its cloud storage service, SkyDrive, after losing out in a trademark fight with UK TV service BSkyB.    ...

Over the last decade, the drugs used in lethal injection executions in the United States have fallen into short supply, as the mostly European companies that manufacture those drugs cut off their avai...

Some scientists claim we'll have holodeck-like experiences within a decade. Nick Bilton at the Times: This is all part of a quest by computer companies, Hollywood and video game makers to move enterta...

Vote for your favorites at the Gifys. The above is one of many to choose from, sorted into helpful categories such as "cats".    ...

Here's a reading of my latest Locus column, Cheap Writing Tricks, which discusses the mysterious business of why stories are satisfying, and how to make them so: Plots are funny things.  &...

One year ago today (Why you shouldn't) run your company like an airport: Problems persist because organizations defend their turf instead of embrace the problem.    ...

Dan Gillmor presents a wish-list of programmes that he'd like to see foundations funding to promote the open, independent Web. As he points out, the Internet is almost entirely without a "common" spac...

Kevin C Pyle and Scott Cunningham's non-fiction, book-length comic Bad for You: Exposing the War on Fun! is a marvellous and infuriating history of censorship, zero-tolerance, helicopter parenting, an...

Fables, Elfquest, Marvel's Conan and Neil Gaiman's Sandman are the best fantasy comics of all time, according to Comic Book Resources, whose list is bullshit without Groo.    ...

Here's more bad news from historic computing site Bletchley Park, where a new, slick museum is being put together with enormous corporate and state funding.    ...

Patrick Boivin is a stop-motion animation genius who does insanely amazing and expressive things with cheap action figures. I could watch Einstein kicking Vader's ass for hours.   &nbs...

Anyone who's ever had the misfortune to attend or work at an academic institution that uses the horrible classroom software Blackboard knows that it is a worse-than-useless exercise in technological s...

A Gangnam, Seoul plastic surgeon who did a roaring trade in excising womens' jawbones to give them V-shaped chins was forced to remove the towering jars of thousands of jawbone fragments with which he...

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal published a letter by Tom Perkins (the "Perkins" in the venture capital firm "Kleiner Perkins") in which he compared rhetoric about the unjust riches of the "1 perce...

Characters are still being created! The Adventure is just beginning! There is still room for you! Here is what our GM, Donald, wants you to know: Hey everybody, we're getting a door game started over...

"Koi," a photo shared in the Boing Boing Flickr Pool by reader and photographer Jason Brown. "Big big goldfish at the National Aquarium," Jason explains.    ...

Robbo sez, "Coke has set up a web site where you can design and share your own branded can of Coke.    ...

One year ago today Pee-Wee Herman cycling skinsuit: Podium Cycling sells this boss Pee-Wee Herman skinsuit for your Big Adventures. Five years ago today Tiny statue from the third century CE: This is ...

An amazing post on Livejournal from Ilya "Zyalt" Varlamov gives a glimpse of life behind the barricades at the #Euromaidan uprising in Kiev, Ukraine.    ...

Jayson from Gygax Magazine sez, "This Sunday, January 26th, marks the 40th anniversary of the first publication of Dungeons & Dragons.    ...

Copyfighting banjo teacher Patrick Costello writes, "A few years back you posted about the surgery I had to restore my hearing.    ...

Megan Rose "Rosalarian" Gedris has created a cthulhoid damask pattern that's available on Spoonflower as a wallpaper, fabric, and gift-wrap. If you like this, don't miss her zombie brains pattern.&nb...

Happy Caturday. "Blue-eyed Kitty," a photo shared in the Boing Boing Flickr Pool by reader Susan Iatonna.    ...

Kyle from Bumperactive writes, "On February 2, Washington and Colorado, the first two States to legalize recreational marijuana, compete in... The Smoke-A-Bowl!    ...

One year ago today Punk Voyager: when the punks launched their own space-probe: Shaenon Garrity story about punks at the twilight of the 1970s who are drunkenly outraged to discover that the Voyager ...

"It was one of Jobs's most whimsical ideas," writes John Brownlee. "A mysterious cartoon character that would live inside each Macintosh computer.    ...

In Graduated Response Policy and the Behavior of Digital Pirates: Evidence from the French Three-Strike (Hadopi) Law a team of business-school researchers from the University of Delaware and Universit...

This is huge news: the European Court of Human Rights has agreed to hear a challenge to bulk Internet surveillance by the UK spy agency GCHQ.    ...

Alan sez, "Spark.io provides instructions for making your own Nest-like 'smart' thermostat. Of course it's entirely open source, with files on github." * The Spark Core served as our connected brain...

Boing Boing pal Steve Silberman first wrote about the high number of autism cases in Silicon Valley in 2001, for this Wired feature.    ...

Kyle writes, "I just launched my first Kickstarter for this Steampunk flavoured Nixie clock in black walnut or (optionally) purpleheart. Comes with a proper adaptor for whichever country you should h...

This is one of my favorite Crumb covers. In 1990, Crumb drew this cartoon for the cover of Fantagraphic's The Complete Crumb Volume 6.    ...

Jeff VanderMeer sez, "Want a copy of the awesome Blackstone audiobook for Annihilation, the first book in my Southern Reach trilogy?    ...

In a live Q&A conducted on Twitter yesterday, Edward Snowden answered questions about the state of security and freedom in the world.    ...

Timo writes, "Digital Science Concepts showcases our thinking on how technology might shape the laboratory of the future. These are products that are not currently under development but one day they ...

Recommended if You Like is Boing Boing's weekly podcast of Brian Heater's cafe conversations with musicians, cartoonists, writers, and other creative types.    ...

Recommended if You Like is Boing Boing's weekly podcast of Brian Heater's cafe conversations with musicians, cartoonists, writers, and other creative types.    ...

Boing Boing reader Wayne Myers just whipped up an entire filk (nerd folk) song based on a tweet I posted from the TSA screening zone in an airport overseas.    ...

Boing Boing reader Wayne Myers just whipped up an entire filk (nerd folk) song based on a tweet I posted from the TSA screening zone in an airport overseas.    ...

Texas Governor Rick Perry has endorsed the idea of decriminalizing marijuana. Note that this is not Colorado/Washington-style legalization (which would give Texas access to a flood of tax-dollars from...

Tomorrow (Saturday 1/25), San Francisco's Exploratorium is hosting an "Experimental Films for Kids" program. Films to be screened include Hans Richter's Ghosts Before Breakfast (1928), Jodie Mack's R...

Source unknown. (via M. Borok/FB)    ...

The Pew Internet and American Life project has released a new report on reading, called E-Reading Rises as Device Ownership Jumps.    ...

"Felix the Fire God #2," a photo shared in the Boing Boing Flickr Pool by reader and photographer John K. Goodman.    ...

Many years ago I wrote a science fiction story for Wired called "Retro-a-Go-Go." It was about a gated community (the Bungalow Heaven RetroClave) where anything made after 1959 was prohibited. &nb...

This episode is brought to you by Audible, the leading provider of audiobooks. Download a free ebook, on us, and get an extended free trial of the service by using this link.    ...

The mantis shrimp is Internet famous for its appearance in an Oatmeal comic — an appearance that centered around the fact that the shrimps' eyes have 16 different color-receptive cones (as oppo...

Under Chrome's security model, a website that gets your permission to access your mic and camera once keeps it forever, regardless of which page is loaded -- so you might authorize an app running on o...

Kata Sutra's latest Boing Boing T-shirt brought this incredible bit of internet timewasting history to mind. Joe Spark's wonderful cartoons were all the rage in 2000!    ...

In which The Field Museum's Intern Emily schools a gentleman in anthropology and academic theory. (While you're at it, check out the video on the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition that inspired this p...

When you have a Great Pyrenees puppy sometimes he makes mistakes! Even though Nemo is one year old now, he sometimes relieves himself on the carpet.    ...

Last night, science journalist Ed Yong got himself caught in a Wikipedia rabbit hole centered around the Category: Feces. He mentioned it on Facebook and then, of course, the same thing happened to m...

Designed by Kata Sutra, our new Devil Skull garment is sure to be the envy of visitors to the Oklahoma state Capitol.    ...

Downworthy is a Chrome plugin that converts hyperbolic headlines from viral mills into sarcastic -- and much more realistic -- semantic equivalents.    ...

"Arlington Squirrel enjoying a snack in the snow," a photo shared in the Boing Boing Flickr Pool by reader and photographer John Sonderman.    ...

Today, we are gluten sensitive. In the past, we might have had the vapors, or melancholy, or consumption. Throughout history, some diseases, even ones that are very real, have taken on social meaning ...

Natalie is the proprietor of Austin's Side Serf Cakes. When she married Dave, they had a "Til Death Do Us Part"-themed wedding, whose centerpiece was this amazing cake that resembled their severed hea...

    ...

Thinkgeek's Crovel Extreme II    ...

Yesterday, Biebs was arrested and charged over a drunken driving incident. The unfolding saga was so important that MSNBC host Andrea Mitchel silenced the longtime congresswoman she was interviewing ...

A prized find of ambergris, the rare substance secreted by whales and coveted by perfumers, turned out on further inspection to be a big chunk of rubber, "possibly from a ship which caught fire." [Vi...

A growing collection illustrated by Fran Krause. Not all of them are as charming as this one. [via MeFi]    ...

Revenge porn "pioneer" Hunter Moore was arrested and charged with conspiracy, identity theft and unauthorized computer access, reports Time.    ...

Yesterday, FirstSecond formally announced the publication of In Real Life, a graphic novel about gaming and gold farming for young adults based on my award-winning story Anda's Game, adapted by Jen Wa...

In this video, Ukrainian riot police acting have stripped a protester naked in subzero conditions and are parading him in public before putting him in a police van.    ...

Megan Garber reports on how the NYT Mag created its freaky "Planet Hillary" cover.] 'I asked Duplessis whether he and his team considered the image's meme potential as they designed the magazine's cos...

David Pogue on Sony's amazing large-sensor compact cameras, which have done much to reestablish the company's reputation for cutting-edge consumer electronics.    ...

How do you say goodbye to someone you love? Do you shake a hand, give a hug, and then get it over with?    ...

One year ago today Susan Crawford should run the FCC!: She has just published an OpEd in the New York Times which could easily be titled 'If I were Chairwoman of the FCC' and she published a book call...

Speaking at the World Economic Forum, Russian Head of Foreign Affairs Alexy Pushkov announced that whistleblower Edward Snowden's asylum would be extended at the end of the year, and that Russia would...

Redditor LolBoopje discovered that the UK's Great Firewall of Cameron -- the national censorwall put in place by the prime minister -- was blocking updates to the game League of Legends.  &n...

A photo shared in the Boing Boing Flickr Pool by melissssaf.    ...

Auduno's Face substitution webtoy uses Javascript libraries to map your face using your computer's webcam and overlay it with the faces of celebrities from Bill Murray to Justin Beiber to Rihanna to t...

The photo above depicts an alleged new Vibram golf-shoe with two-tone uppers and individual toe-pockets. It's not clear whether this is real or rumor, nor am I sure whether this is terrible or wonderf...

Marty sez, "I've seen lots of homes for sale but this one is quite unique. A rideable scale railroad encircles the property, complete with a trainyard, trestles, the works." Railway Resort is Apparen...

Ben Marks of Collectors Weekly says: "If the phrase "estate jewelry' conjures images of fussy Victorian filigree necklaces or impossibly ostentatious diamond encrusted bling, you haven't seen the stuf...

Vladimir Gvozdeff's illustration series Mechanisms depicts a wonderful bestiary of armored, mechanical creatures in steampunk style, surrounded by the detritus of contrafactual Victorian inventorship....

Rogue archivist Rick Prelinger writes, "Last year I finished my archival road movie, No More Road Trips? It's a composite road trip made from my archives of over 10,000 home movies, hoping to ask the...

More than a few comic book aficionados rank Wally Wood as the greatest cartoonist of all time (he's in my top five, along with Carl Barks, Jack Kirby, Robert Crumb, and Daniel Clowes).  &nb...

Dominic Wilcox says: "Heres my second object for my Selfridges window at the Festival of Imagination. I thought to myself what would it sound like if I could hear the things that happened on my left s...

The brewing class-war in the Bay Area between tech companies and people who aren't inside the bubble (and are finding themselves priced out of their hometown), has produced almost no useful discourse....

Perhaps you've heard of the Russian cruise ship that was abandoned in the North Atlantic and is now, possibly, floating towards a landfall in England?    ...

Earlier this week, various outlets reported that the Department of Defence had put in a massive order for new smartphones, single-handedly rescuing BlackBerry from oblivion.    ...

Buzzfeed has it about right. Meanwhile, the control room of the Victoria Line was inexplicably submerged in quickset today. Previously.    ...

As American telcoms operators take up the practice of publishing transparency reports showing how many law-enforcement requests they receive, Canadian activists are wondering why Canada's telcoms sect...

While not a shot-for-shot remake, like their prior Prisoner video, Do Not Foresake Me Oh My Darling is back at it again.    ...

Nicholas from Amara writes, "Yesterday afternoon, the social coding platform GitHub invited their fans to collaboratively translate their how-to videos using open-source platform Amara.org.  ...

For the past 10 years, MAKE has been a quarterly magazine (I'm the editor-in-chief). The year, we've introduced three big changes: One, we've changed our format from digest-ish sized to full size.&nbs...

Mother is a system of sensors that you attach to things around your house (toothbrushes, houseplants, pill bottles, refrigerator, baby crib, etc.) Mother will process the data and send a cute-looking ...

Some of the biggest surf in decades is pounding the North and West shores of Oahu and other Hawaiian islands this week.    ...

Dan Shapiro created the game Robot Turtles out of scissors, clip art, and a printer to offer asymmetric play: kids and adults can play together and both can enjoy the experience.   &nbs...

The UK Conservative MP Mike Weatherley spoke at a second reading of the Intellectual Property Bill in Parliament and called for prison sentences for "persistent" downloaders.    ...

In trying to save an endangered species of robin, scientists began moving eggs laid perilously close to the edge of nests.    ...

In August, when we are rationing water, I can look back at the lovely photos instead of showering.    ...

"X being devoured by lava" is the new "Will it blend?" (Until the authorities put an end to it.) Video of Two Coke Cans Getting Slowly Devoured by Lava    ...

Kaup's Caecilians are worm-like amphibians native to tropical regions. Unlike frogs, however, these amphibians give birth to live young. No eggs required.    ...

Music historian Derek See examines three post-psychedelic freakout 45 records from his collection: River Deep's "Take A Ride," Kannibal Komix "Neurotic Reaction," and Plant & See's "Put Out My Fi...

The rare earth elements that play an important role in everything from electric car batteries, to LED lighting, to surgical lasers, aren't actually rare.    ...

The rare earth elements that play an important role in everything from electric car batteries, to LED lighting, to surgical lasers, aren't actually rare.    ...

Ukraine's dictatorship is revelling in its new, self-appointed dictatorial powers. The million-plus participants in the latest round of protests received a text-message from the government reading Dea...

The Great Velveeta Shortage story began when an editor at Ad Age couldn't make queso.    ...

I'd always assumed the moisture for black ice just came from the weather — it rains a little, then it freezes, and voila.    ...

Ed from the UK Open Rights Group writes, "In the next month Open Rights Group will be recruiting a Legal Director to help us intervene in crucial digital rights court cases and bring real legal expert...

Sheryl Canter's post on the science of cast-iron pan seasoning is a fascinating and practical tale of flaxseed, and kitchen chemistry.    ...

[via] I feel like this is a momentous moment, so I ordered myself a Planet Hillary Mini Button from Cafepress.    ...

The new nadir in network news.    ...

America may finally be saying farewell to its long, failed War on Drugs, but that doesn't mean we can't have a long, failed war on something!    ...

This just in from our bbs, community member Steampunk Banana shares FStoppers silly review of my favorite hipster Nikon. The last video we offered is a simple test and review, this one seems to be......

The New Yorker's Casey N. Cep on the "allure of the map", a form of storytelling in its own right.    ...

Dustin Senos offers his favorite sites for better, weirder free-use photos than the usual sources.    ...

Ben writes, "Overdrive, which is one of the main suppliers of downloadable audiobooks to public libraries, announced that it is retiring its DRM-encrusted .WMA formats and pushing everything to DRM-fr...

Bani Garu is Lea Hernandez's story of becoming the U.S. merchandising vice-president of notorious Japanese animation studio Gainax, "a year-long trip down a rabbit hole of reality." Start with page 1....

One year ago today Visualizing the net worth of the world's richest people: "Bloomberg Billionaires" is an intriguing example of information design.    ...

The Kitschies are a British award for science fiction and fantasy; every year they choose some marvellous books to honour. This year, I'm proud and pleased announce that they've shortlisted the UK edi...

The forthcoming report of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, the arm's-length body established by the Congress to investigate NSA spying, has leaked, with details appearing in The New Yo...

Bompas and Parr are a London-based "food-nerd" studio that makes weird and amazing foodstuffs, including an edible fireworks display for New Years Eve that showered revelers with strawberry smoke, pe...

The C3PO onesie isn't quite a kigurumi, but it sure does look cozy. $70, sizes S to XXX-L. Pair it with a Storm Trooper armor onesie and order now to get it in time for a Valentine's Day game of "Naug...

Dave from the Electronic Frontier Foundation writes, "I escort a lot of TV crews in and out of the building at EFF.    ...

A reader writes, "In late October, we shot some video in Detroit's abandoned Packard plant. The reasons included, to test a motorcycle I built, and also to practice flying our drone.   ...

Carl "Boutros77" BouMansour is a fine artist and modeller in the UK who makes elaborate diaoramas based on science fiction movies, especially Star Wars.    ...

If you're in New Zealand and want to have the coolest playhouse/LARP-prop south of the equator, this Trademe ad is offering a concrete water-tank converted to a castle for a surprisingly reasonable $5...

Your browser doesn't support the HTML audio tag. You can still download the show, though! var audioTag = document.createElement('audio'); /* Do we not support MP3 audio?    ...

Yesterday, I reviewed "What Makes This Book So Great", a collection of Jo Walton's brilliant book-reviews from Tor.com. Today, Tor editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden has posted his essay on the book, entit...

Video Link. By Cinefix.    ...

In a surprisingly sane ruling Washington District Judge Robert Lasnik found that an IP address is not sufficient evidence of the identity of a copyright infringer.    ...

Vija Celmins's beautiful "grayscale" paintings of night skies, planets, seascapes, spider webs, and the like remind me of the wonderfully grainy image quality of early Xeroxed 'zines.   ...

Mike from Mother Jones writes, "Mother Jones' James West looks into the dark side of the network's turn toward wildlife reality TV, and uncovers some disturbing revelations about a hit show. &nb...

Den Chu's Pikachu evolved into something wonderfully nightmarish somewhere on its journey. If you look closely, you can just make out the electricity-storage glands under its forked tongue.  ...

Dennis Hlynsky captured video of starlings flying at Massachusetts' Seekonk Speedway and then digtally drew in their flight paths. (via The Kid Should See This)    ...

On Twitter, some designers are going through the five stages of grief over Squarespace's logo designer tool. Denial: "This is garbage." Anger: "This is infuriating.    ...

In the New Yorker, Tim Wu reviews The Internet's Own Boy, a documentary about the life and death of Aaron Swartz.    ...

Socks Studio has a short article and a bunch of photos of "The Toy." The Toy was a self-assembly project made in 1951 by Charles and Ray Eames and sold by Sears, Roebuck and Co.    ...

A video of Toronto Mayor Rob "Laughable Bumblefuck" Ford drunk and bellowing obscenities in a jafaican accent has surfaced. Ford, a luminously white and privileged man who was born into millions in a...

When the polar vortex brought freezing temperatures to Florida earlier this month, the state's manatee population had to figure out how to survive.    ...

Raylan Givens has trust issues. I dont mean that in the conventional sense, although he does seem to exist as an island too remote for any permanent bridge to reach.    ...

Raylan Givens has trust issues. I dont mean that in the conventional sense, although he does seem to exist as an island too remote for any permanent bridge to reach.    ...

Drone designer Marque Cornblatt and Eli DElia have designed a sturdy multicopter airframe that stands up to the typical kinds of abusive inflicted on drones by clumsy newbie pilots.   &...

Representatives of the MPAA and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency confirmed that they worked together to yank a Google Glass wearer out of a movie theater, detain him in a small room agai...

Here's a curious clip of Andy Warhol and William S. Burroughs having a chat at the iconic Chelsea Hotel in NYC.    ...

Google Street View A 113-year old Victorian home is on the market in Dunmore, Pennsylvania. Unfortunately, some caveats are scaring away potential buyers.    ...

"A representative from the printing company based in Shah Alam told the Malay Mail Online in a telephone conversation that pictures of pigs are not allowed in a Muslim country like Malaysia." &nb...

I was so excited when I heard about this new print edition of the Codex Seraphinianus, I could not resist pre-ordering it.    ...

A program in Salt Lake City decided that it would be smarter -- and more humane -- to spend $11K/year each to house 17 chronically homeless people and provide them with social workers than it would be...

Delighted by The Crowned Heart's "Gay Disney" illustrations, Let There Be Doodles created a series of Disney "Princes." (via Laughing Squid)    ...

Tom the Dancing Bug, IN WHICH it is explained why idiot time-traveler Percival Dunwoody is naked.    ...

Carrie Fisher told TV Guide that she is due on the set of the next Star Wars film later this spring and that Harrison Ford and Mark Hamill will be joining.    ...

(via Seanan McGuire)    ...

Introducing Moving the Race Conversation Forward, a new research report by Race Forward, the amazing Jay Smooth talks about one way that we can talk about race productively: by focusing on systems, r...

Graham Henderson, the chief spokesjerk for Music Canada -- the voice in Canada for the big US labels represented by the RIAA -- wants Parliament to regulate the Internet, creating a regime of censorsh...

The Kudoktopus watch is the €30,000 creation of Stefan Kudoke in collaboration with Maria and Richard Habring. Out of my price range by a damned sight, but it gives me pleasure to consider a tim...

kj askdjhdkjashdkasjdhaskdjh asdkjh asdkjhas dkjashdkajshda skjdh askjdh askdjhas kdjhasdkjhasdkjashdkasjhdask jdhask djahsdkjhasd kjahsdk ajsdhaswawavoiwaov iwofiawoiv awioalksjflaksjcjalkwocaiwvoaw...

The $13 Mice Device is a reusable trap that captures mice without harming them. After the trap catches a mouse, simply carry the trap to your neighbor's garage and release the rodent.  &nbs...

Jenny writes, "A few years ago I created a Zombie Apocalypse Training Game in San Francisco as a way to teach urban disaster preparedness skills through play.    ...

Marc Andreessen, web revolutionary and venture capitalist, wrote an essay for the New York Times called Why Bitcoin Matters. Glenn Fleishman, however, thinks he misunderstands and misrepresents key as...

Why are some websites easy to read and focus on, while other strain your brain and eyes? Turns out, there's a science to fonts and the way they make you feel is controlled by both biology and culture....

The bright ball at the right hand end of the Cigar Galaxy is, probably, what it looks like when an old, cold, dense husk of a star (aka a "white dwarf") explodes 12 million light years away. &nb...

The world of entertainment reels in shock upon learning that the next Tarantino movie will end in a spectacular, violent climax.    ...

Syria was once one of the countries where polio was no longer a problem. The government began mandatory, free immunizations in 1964 and declared victory in 1995.    ...

That word, fanboys, is a thought-terminating clich deployed to instantly drown and toxify good discussion. But there are certain areas of discussion where the presence of, um, irrationally loyal and h...

Cartoon producer Fred Seibert posted this fun and informative sixteen-page manual with tips for drawing Finn & Jake from Pendleton Ward's Adventure Time series.    ...

One year ago today : "Last weekend the queens had turned commandos and stood bra strap to bra strap against an invasion of the helmeted Tactical Patrol Force." Five years ago today Black light tattoo ...

With Wii U sales slow and Nintendo suffering successive quarterly losses, critics say the firm's in real trouble. Chris Kohler, however, argues that the given wisdom—that it should port its game...

Useful Science gives you a quick summary of what you need to know about a scientific paper and then provides you a link to the full paper, so you can read it yourself.    ...

Here's a roundup of candid on-set photos from 1971's Stanley Kubrick movie A Clockwork Orange. Behind-the-scenes of A Clockwork Orange: Stanley Kubrick and his Droogie buddies [Tara McGinley/Danger...

Romanian authorities made their move Wednesday on Guccifer, the man who exposed the artistic oevre of George W. Bush. [Gawker]    ...

Designer Thom Browne's Look 27 is the couture/runway version of what the smart businessperson is wearing on the streets of R'lyeh this season.    ...

A Syrian defector who worked for the regime as a forensic photographer    ...

Remember David Eckert, the New Mexico man who got multiple anal probes after a cop decided he must be hiding drugs because a dog "alerted" on him?    ...

Ray Fawkes's One Soul is a moving, challenging and ambitious graphic novel that attempts -- with great success -- to do something genuinely new with the comics form, telling a story that literally cou...

(click for full) Despite the valiant efforts of the motley opposition in Ukraine, the tame Ukrainian Parliament has passed a brutal law that slides the country into full-on dictatorship.  &...

A broad coalition of businesses, civil society groups, activists, and individuals (including Boing Boing) are planning a global day of action against surveillance for February 11, in memory of Aaron S...

Back in 2012, Tim Vincent-Smith inherited a pair of unserviceable upright pianos. He took these to bits, and using "nose to tail carpentry," used their every morsel to build a staircase and mezzanine ...

Emmanuel Goldstein from 2600 Magazine writes, "The call for participation at HOPE X in New York City is now open.    ...

This is the 14th anniversary of the first ever post on Boing Boing!    ...

Speaking with the New Yorker via encrypted email, Edward Snowden denies allegations made by members of Congress that his leaks of NSA documents were to aid a foreign power.    ...

Boars, Gore, and Swords is hosted by stand-up comedians Ivan Hernandez and Red Scott. In each episode they break down HBO's Game of Thrones and George R.R.    ...

NASA flight engineer Karen Nyberg shot this video aboard the International Space Station, showing how she washes her hair in space.    ...

Our friend, artist Molly Crabapple, started Dr. Sketchy's figure drawing sessions in Brooklyn in 2005. Since then, it's grown into a network of art extravaganzas around the world.   &nb...

Eyes on the Prize is a famed documentary series on the civil rights movement that all but disappeared because of trouble clearing the copyrights to clips of leaders like Martin Luther King for the re...

There's a funny paradox in rooting your Android phone. Once you take total control over your phone, some apps refuse to run, because they're trying to do something that treats you as untrusted. &...

The great illustrator William Stout reviewed a new book called The Rhino Records Story: Revenge of the Music Nerds, by Harold Bronson.    ...

PBS NewsHour science correspondent Miles O'Brien goes underground in pursuit of dark matter: At the bottom of a nickel mine near Sudbury, Ontario, scientists at one of the world's most sophisticated ...

Science blogger Orac has a detailed update on the latest in the story of a man accused of being a cancer quack Stanislaw Burzynski, whom the FDA and Texas Medical Board have recently slapped. &nb...

The Sword and Laser (S&L) is a science fiction and fantasy-themed book club podcast hosted by Veronica Belmont and Tom Merritt.    ...

Twiggy Garcia, a bartender at the east London restaurant Tramshed -- which is right around the corner from me! -- interrupted former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair's dinner to place him under citizen's ...

For the first time since 2009, the coastline of Lake Superior has frozen hard enough that people can venture out onto the ice and into the sea caves that line the shore near Wisconsin's Apostle Islan...

I'll be returning to SXSW Interactive this March for the first time in more than five years, to interview Pulitzer-winning journalist Barton Gellman, who is one of the journalists who's been entrusted...

Many reported a claim, by security researcher David Kennedy, that he hacked 70,000 records from Healthcare.gov in four minutes. He did claim that, right, everyone?    ...

Many reported a claim, by security researcher David Kennedy, that he hacked 70,000 records from Healthcare.gov in four minutes. He did claim that, right, everyone?    ...

Above, a Soylent Green can and cracker that sold at auction in November for $2250. The cracker is a small piece of balsa wood painted lime green.    ...

The Internet's Own Boy is a documentary about the life and death of Aaron Swartz, and it just premiered at Sundance.    ...

My good friend Lee Costello is teaming up with Michael Blaha and actor David Dean Bottrell to produce SCI-FEST, Los Angeles' first, hopefully annual Science Fiction one act play festival.  &...

As noted, today is the on-sale date for The Days of Anna Madrigal, the final installment in Tales of the City, Armistead Maupin's addictive long-running series about bohemian life in San Francisco.&nb...

Redditor Michael Hindes found this photo, along with 25 others, taken by his Grandmother at the launch of the space shuttle Challenger on January 28, 1986.    ...

Redditor Michael Hindes found this photo, along with 25 others, in a box of his Grandmother's things. They were taken on January 28, 1986, at the launch of the space shuttle Challenger.  &n...

I'm thinking of getting a Grom, an inexpensive, fuel-efficient new bike from Honda. Joel Johnson likes his a lot: it sounds like the best of both worlds when it comes to scooters and motorcycles. ...

Hugh Hancock writes, "'Death Knight Love Story,' is a World of Warcraft-based machinima fanfilm [ed: machinima is a form of animation made using video-game engines].    ...

When I embarked on my quest to become a full-time author, there were certain high-water marks I knew would eventually make the endless hours of work all worthwhile: seeing my words ink-stained into a ...

Last week, Cory posted about Dr. Gary Greenberg's marvelous microscope photography of sand grains. Greenberg literally wrote the book on sand grain microphotography, titled A Grain of Sand: Nature's ...

An anonymous anti-censorship group is stamping Chinese banknotes with a QR code and the message "Scan and download software to break the Internet firewall." The stamps encode a URL for Freegate, a fir...

For her "Emptied Gestures" series, Heather Hansen coats her limbs in charcoal and then uses her body to paint beautiful shapes and forms on huge pieces of paper.    ...

Snap! Crackle! and Pop! are the embodiment of Rice Krispies cereal. They were born in 1928 when artist Vernon Grant was inspired by a Rice Krispies radio jingle describing how the puffed grains "merri...

In artist Attaboy's latest episode of "They Actually Made That!?," he demonstrates the wonder of Milky The Marvelous Milking Cow, a fine 1977 toy that was born from a licensing agreement between Kenn...

David Lynch's 1991 public service announcement for the City of New York's anti-litter campaign. (Via Neatorama)    ...

In a residential neighborhood in Raleigh, North Carolina, there's a house that looks like most every other house on the block.    ...

Mark Harrison made a quadcopter body out of sections of pool noodle, producing a UAV that's cheap, rugged and great for practicing on.    ...

A maple tree sapling with its crown cut off is "like a sugar-filled straw stuck in the ground." That's what researchers at the University of Vermonts Proctor Maple Research Center discovered when they...

You'll need patience and experience (and that rather expensive Adobe subscription), but The Creators Project's tutorial looks like a good way to learn the techniques used to create animations like th...

When you're used to seeing it in processed form, wrapped around old heating pipes or pressed into floor tiles, it's easy to forget that good old, cancer causing asbestos is actually a natural mineral...

Hildendiaz's Forms in Nature light fixture is a Haeckel-inspired, gnarled, treelike furnishing that casts gloriously spooky haunted-forest shadows on the walls.    ...

You know the Mutter Museum for its deformed fetuses and elephant man skulls, but they have a new exhibit dedicated to chronicling the injuries suffered by Civil War soldiers and (because this is the M...

Read the rest of the Hip Hop Family Tree comics!     ...

Science News has an interesting story about ancient history and speciation that can be boiled down to this: When your war elephants are inbred, they aren't going to be as big and tough as the other gu...

About the first thing I covered as a journalist was a 1998-ish talk, given at the Islington Business Design Center by Ian Livingstone, chief of the game publisher behind Lara.    ...

When the artists at Studio Fludd were sent to a peaceful Italian island with a group of other artists, they decided to improvise a set of living tools out of random flotsam and other found objects.&nb...

This time, it is Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz to declare that email is about to die. Technologists are such teases.    ...

Not just a JPP anymore! You can now order one from Flowing Data for $19.    ...

Jo Walton is one of my favorite novelists; books like Among Others (which justly swept the field's awards in 2011) and the Farthing/Ha'penny/Half a Crown novels show incredible insight into people, a ...

One year ago today Edward Tufte on Aaron Swartz and his own hacking career: At Saturday's memorial to Aaron at the Cooper Union in NYC, Tufte remembered both Aaron and his own hacking career, inventin...

Doctor Popular writes, "My new album, Destroy All Presets, was created using the Nanoloop cartidge on a GameBoy Advance. I decided to do it that way partially because I love working with limitations a...

Several high-profile speakers have bailed on RSA's annual security conference over the revelation that the company sabotaged its products at the behest of the NSA.    ...

With election season coming up, the Internet Archive is looking to publish collections of political ads from earlier US campaigns. They have a massive archive of digitized US TV footage, along with se...

Here's a reading of my latest Guardian column, Digital failures are inevitable, but we need them to be graceful, about the social and political factors that make all the difference when choosing techn...

This spooky photo appears to depict the 1970s-era Tram 58 terminus in Zugliget, Budapest, Hungary. The original source isn't clear to me (if you know it, please note it in the comments so I can re-att...

Jeffrey sez, "Our esteemed interplanetary panorama enthusiast, Andrew Bodrov, has done it again (previously, this time being the first to stitch a 360 from the new Chinese moon lander!  &nbs...

Street artist INSA paints and photographs multiple variations of his murals and then creates mind-bending animated GIFs from the photos. More examples below!    ...

Street artist INSA paints and photographs multiple variations of his murals and then creates mind-bending animated GIFs from the photos. More examples below!    ...

A new Oxfam report entitled Working for the Few (PDF), documents a "power grab" by the world's wealthy super-elite, who have amassed astonishing assets while the rest of the world grew poorer. &n...

A new Oxfam report entitled Working for the Few (PDF), documents a "power grab" by the world's wealthy super-elite, who have amassed astonishing assets while the rest of the world grew poorer. &n...

Eighty-two minutes of the hippest trip in America.    ...

Officemax sent junkmail to Mike Seay at his address in Lindenhurst, IL, with the notation "Daughter Killed In Car Crash" under his name.    ...

Officemax sent junkmail to Mike Seay at his address in Lindenhurst, IL, with the notation "Daughter Killed In Car Crash" under his name.    ...

In San Francisco and Boston during the 1980s and early 1990s, The Space Lady (aka Suzy Soundz) could be ound enchanting pedestrians with her astro-helmet and Casiotone-powered pop cover tunes. &n...

In San Francisco and Boston during the 1980s and early 1990s, The Space Lady (aka Suzy Soundz) could be found enchanting pedestrians with her astro-Viking helmet and Casiotone-powered pop cover tunes....

Raffi Krikorian is a smart engineer and technical manager; I've know him for decades, but didn't realize that he was currently Vice President for Platform Engineering at Twitter.   &nbs...

Lighting a match at 4,000 frames per second. UltraSlo says, "There was over 2000 wats of light within 4 inches (10 CM) of the match with mirrors and reflectors too."    ...

Lighting a match at 4,000 frames per second. UltraSlo says, "There was over 2000 wats of light within 4 inches (10 CM) of the match with mirrors and reflectors too."    ...

I'll take one of everything, please. See Big. (Via Suddenly, Flaming Turkey Wings)    ...

After an absence of more than two years, New York Times-bestselling author Max Allan Collins brings of his most popular characters, the ruthless professional killer known only as Quarry, in The Wrong ...

Call me juvenile, but watching a drone in a banshee costume chasing joggers just about made my day.    ...

More from the Canadian Harper government's War on Libraries (see also: literally burning the environmental archives). Dave writes, "Health Canada scientists are also facing difficulties with governmen...

Last November, Kris Temmerman decided to outfit the empty store-window of his Antwerp flat/studio as a playable video game for his neighbours to play as they passed by.    ...

Philadelphias surely got more comic shops than a city of that size requires and book and record stores for that matter.    ...

Philadelphias surely got more comic shops than a city of that size requires and book and record stores for that matter.    ...

It turns out that if you remove the cowling from a CT scanner, you get something that looks like a cross between a Stargate and a whirling Katamari Damacy.    ...

My bike famously has no place to secure a helmet. I'm always afraid my helmet'll get stolen if I leave it loose on the bars.    ...

One year ago today Improvised "Chechen" firearms: These are the Chechen homemade guns. Five years ago today Obama's whitehouse.gov nukes 2400-line Bush robots.txt file: Yesterday, the robots.txt file ...

You will need some sedatives and about a dozen trained personnel.    ...

"If You Can't Beat 'Em, Eat 'Em" — that's the name of a fishing tournament dedicated to ridding the Gulf of Mexico, Caribbean, and Atlantic coast of an invasive species the best way we humans k...

The Inkfish blog has a guest post by Amy Savage, a woman who is a professional fake patient — somebody hired to act out an office visit and help medical students learn how to both diagnose patie...

You've probably heard before about the idea of ocean mixing, where cold water from the murky depths rises up to the surface and warm water from the surface flows down.    ...

Last week, Rob posted a story about a Brazilian woman whose death by lightning strike was captured in a photograph.    ...

"Tell them about the dream, Martin!"    ...

Jitish Kallat's 2008 piece "Aquasaurus" is a massive replica water truck made to look like a great prehistoric leviathan's skeleton, with great bowed ribs and enormous grinding teeth.   ...

Can you guess why the Sony SRF-39FP is the most popular radio in America's prisons?    ...

You know that distinctive "cold air" smell you can't quite describe? Turns out, it's partly the result of you smelling less.    ...

Last week, Caleb Hannan wrote an article about a clever new golf club and its inventor, Dr. Essay Vanderbilt. Starting out as a profile, it briefly covers the scientific claims behind the design and ...

Dominic Wilcox made this Bugle Alarm Clock for a window at Selfridges department store in London: "This prototype alarm clock is fitted with mini air compressor and thin vibrating rubber membrane to m...

For ten years, I've been singing the praises of Out on Blue Six, Ian McDonald's 1989 science fiction novel that defies description and beggars the imagination.    ...

60 Minutes seems to be in rough shape: it's become something of a sport to write takedowns of the current affairs show's weaker outings.    ...

The subreddit Behind the GIFs has the often-horrible facts. [via]    ...

Joseph L. Flatley reports on a follower of the Old Ones and Elder Gods with a pre-Lovecraft copy of the Necronomicon.    ...

A city councillor from Britain's right-wing UKIP says that recent rough weather is divine retribution for the legalization of gay marriage.    ...

Love writes, "'R-Kaid-Revelation' is a my first complete all-in-one system designed for the dedicated gamer. Don't let the unique retro look fool you.    ...

Dan W's Edward Snowden 2014 Calendar is a rather subtle commentary on the cult of personality. Snowden has staunchly avoided the public eye, so much so that there aren't enough photos of him to fill a...

Jeffrey writes, "The song 'Hotel California,' which I have just written about for the hybrid (academia-meets-journalism) periodical Boom: A Journal of California, has garnered legions of fans (and d...

A Ninth Circuit Appeals court has overturned a lower-court decision that said that bloggers weren't entitled to the same free speech protection as journalists.    ...

Here's another great post from the Electronic Frontier Foundation in honor of Copyright Week, explaining the relationship between copyright and free expression.    ...

One year ago today Cat on Saturday: The bow tie really makes this work. Five years ago today Gaiman on Poe: read him aloud!    ...

A mediagenic press-release from Proofpoint, a security firm, announced that its researchers had discovered a 100,000-device-strong botnet made up of hacked "Internet of Things" appliances, such as ref...

More on yesterday's story about a nasal-wedged maggot scare in Portsmouth, RI's middle school (refresher: the Portsmouth Middle School sent parents a terrifying letter warning of a student Smartie-sno...

"Conan," a photograph shared by Benjamin G. Levy in the Boing Boing Flickr Pool. "Conan is the resident cat at Small World Books in Venice.    ...

The Los Angeles Times has a beautiful obituary for amateur astronomer and telescope pioneer John Dobson. He died on January 15, at 98 years of age.    ...

The Supreme Court will hear a pair of cases that will set precedents on the expectation of privacy in your mobile devices.    ...

Fielder's Choice Goods makes leather goods from recycled baseball mitts, choosing cuts that showcase the worked-in patina from a lifetime of play.    ...

Last year, Mochihead posted this image of a magnificent parfait from an unspecified Japanese restaurant. It leaves me with only one question: What are the rest of you having?    ...

Tim Wu is the law professor and activist who coined the term "net neutrality" -- the principle that ISPs should get you the data you request, as efficiently as they know how, without deliberately slow...

NukemeShop's Etsy store sells a pair of awesome, glitched out coats, custom tailored in cotton with patterns by Ucnv. There's a white coat and a black coat.    ...

Yesterday, we published reminiscences from Aime and Rose de Larabeitti, the daughters of author Michael de Larabeitti. The stories their father told them stories would go on to publish as the anarchic...

On last night's episode of Bill Maher's returning HBO program, this interview with Glenn Greenwald was almost upstaged by an intoxicated Mary Matalin.    ...

Earlier this week, EFF published a scorecard for rating Obama's NSA reforms. Now that the reforms have been announced, it's time to measure them up.    ...

Dogs robbing banks! Friends never believe me when I tell them The Doberman Gang doesn't just exist but there are two sequels!    ...

Just look at it. Happy International Fetish Day, everyone! (Thanks, Sla29970!)    ...

The NSA-O-Matic generates eerily plausible leaked NSA programs at the click of a mouse, including non-denial denials from NSA shills and spokesjerks.    ...

One year ago today Lessig: "A Time For Silence," for Aaron Swartz: I apologize for the silence. I am sorry for the replies I will not give.    ...

London's fried chicken restaurants are a bizarre and wonderful institution -- generally, they have American-ish names (Dixy Fried Chicken, Southern Fried Chicken, Carolina Fried Chicken) and KFC-ish l...

Carla sez, "There are two upcoming ways for designers and coders to put a little good out into the world. First, you can land a job that lets you spend your time making positive social change. &n...

The new Omnibus Appropriations Bill, which Congress passed yesterday, contains an important -- and fantastic -- provision: it requires that scientific research funded by the Departments of Labor, Heal...

Eddan sez, "The Oakland City Council is in the final stretch of approving the funding of the Domain Awareness Center to be built in Oakland.    ...

Your browser does not support the audio element. Subscribe to Apps for Kids Subscribe in iTunes | Download this episode | Stitcher Apps for Kids is Boing Boing's podcast about cool smartpho...

Julian Smith on the rise of handmade medical devices: When Richard Van As, a carpenter in Johannesburg, South Africa, cut off most of the fingers on his right hand with a table saw in 2011, he was alr...

Parents in Portsmouth, Rhode Island got a letter from the Portsmouth Middle School warning them that students may be snorting and smoking ground-up Smarties candies.    ...

Google has hired security guards to look out for the safety of its employees who ride buses from their homes in San Franciscos Mission District to company headquarters in Mountain View, 35 miles away....

Some Bitcoin enthusiasts have announced a new project called Bitcloud. The idea is something like the old Mojo Nation P2P architecture, in which individual Internet users perform tasks for each other ...

The New York Times published an article about the outing of a gay congressman without naming him. Moreover, Times writers often criticize outlets that name closeted public figures.   &n...

Matthew says: "A father in Kansas is outraged by a middle school sex-ed poster which lists anal sex, and sexual fantasy.'"    ...

Bunnie Huang is a virtuoso in hardware engineering, and a hero of the open source hardware movement. In this Make post, he documents how he and Sean "xobs" Cross prototyped a laptop that was open and ...

It's apparently Fortean Friday over at CNN where they share a handful of unusual natural curiosities and mysteries like "Magnetic Hill" in New Brunswick, spherical boulders in New Zealand, the "sailin...

Strange Attractors includes the work of 70 artists, writers and filmmakers who have created remarkable explorations of possible extraterrestrial life forms and their multifarious sexual desires. ...

The latest Electronic Frontier Foundation post for Copyright Week, Corynne McSherry tackles one of the most troubling aspects of modern copyright law: the idea that even though you've bought a device ...

Reuters reports that digital security firm IntelCrawler claims to have uncovered "at least six ongoing attacks at merchants across the United States whose credit card processing systems are infected w...

Reuters reports that digital security firm IntelCrawler claims to have uncovered "at least six ongoing attacks at merchants across the United States whose credit card processing systems are infected w...

Here is a PDF transcript of the president's speech on surveillance and national security today. Here's plaintext. Here's the New York Times' take on the speech.    ...

Here's a brain-meltingly cool proof of the bizarre mathematical truth that the sum of all positive integers (1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5....) is -1/12.    ...

Rudy Rucker -- science fiction writer, mathematician, painter, hoopy frood -- has a new art show going up at San Francisco's Borderlands Books tonight, and there's a reception from 5:30 to 7:30PM.&nbs...

In each episode of Not Playing, Lex Friedman and Dan Moren watch movies they've never seen but that everyone else has.    ...

Cooperative Polygraphy attempts to wrangle an incredible amount of different goals that it wants to accomplish in the span of 20 minutes.    ...

Dojo of Death, by Nico Tuason, is an addictive browser game you can pick up in ten seconds. Your man walks toward the mouse pointer; click to launch a lunging attack in that direction.  &nbs...

Yay, Congress passed a budget bill! Boo, it gutted energy efficiency standards for lightbulbs!    ...

In The Language that Gets People to Give: Phrases that Predict Success on Kickstarter" (PDF), a paper for the 17th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, Georgia T...

Archaeologists found a pit of skulls in London. Very beat-up skulls, with signs of having been gnawed by dogs. The skulls also showed signs of previous, physical injuries that had healed.  &...

"We've been visiting here for the last six years to say hello to the seal pups and we've never had this much interaction before," writes Jason Neilus, of a visit to the Farne Islands.  &nbs...

The most famous contemporary typeface designers are at legal loggerheads over ownership of their foundry, Hoefler & Frere-Jones. [Fast Co Design]    ...

Lycasin. [The Atlantic]    ...

Chris from Betabrand sez, "While humanity waits for the space industry to hurry the hell up and allow it to freely travel through the cosmos, the fashion industry is already prepared.   ...

This sculpture, by artist Andrew Kharkevich, sits near Russia's Institute of Cytology and Genetics in Novosibirsk, Russia's third most populous city and the most populous city in Siberia.  ...

The University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa is looking for early career scientists whose skill sets would be applicable to studying the anatomy of early hominins.    ...

Get an advanced degree, they said. Change the world, they said. But now, here you are, shaving bees. (Thanks to Dr.    ...

Get an advanced degree, they said. Change the world, they said. But now, here you are, shaving bees. (Thanks to Dr.    ...

Congress has grown so weary of the NSA's duck-and-weave routine when asked to explain its spying that yesterday, six members of Congress called in Bruce Schneier to give it the answers that the NSA ca...

It's been nearly four years since Kathe Koja's amazing novel "Under the Poppy" was published, plunging readers into a dark world of eros, war, and puppetry (seriously).    ...

Aime and Rose de Larabeitti remember the stories their father, Michael, told them—stories he would go on to publish as the anarchic, anti-authoritarian, and completely wonderful Borrible Trilogy...

The latest Snowden leak details DISHFIRE, a joint NSA/GCHQ program to slurp up hundreds of millions of SMS messages from global mobile phone users.    ...

In Paging Dr. MacGyver, Julian Smith profiles a wide range of medical makers, from patients to carers to doctors, each of whom has homebrewed some important piece of medical or therapeutic equipment.&...

My latest Guardian column, "Digital failures are inevitable, but we need them to be graceful," talks about evaluating technology based on more than its features -- rather, on how you relate to it, and...

John Steele is the colorful copyright troll whose work in shaking down people by threatening to link their names to gay porn with spurious lawsuits has been augmented by a series of bizarre legal mane...

Rogue archivist Carl Malamud writes, "On Tuesday, the House Judiciary Committee held a 3-hour hearing on revisions to the U.S. Copyright Act.    ...

You are Not So Smart is hosted by David McRaney, a journalist and self-described psychology nerd. In each episode, David explores cognitive biases and delusions, and is often joined by a guest expert....

Recommended if You Like is Boing Boing's weekly podcast of Brian Heater's cafe conversations with musicians, cartoonists, writers, and other creative types.    ...

Rachel Willmer, who runs the excellent ebook price-comparison site Luzme, summarizes the price-preference data she's captured from her customers. By measuring the point at which readers are willing to...

Tomorrow, Obama will announce his long-awaited reforms to the NSA. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has produced a score-card (with detailed commentary) describing the minimum set of reforms that wo...

Guest host Jason Snell talks to regular host Glenn Fleishman about Glenn's recent Kickstarter campaign to fund a book of non-fiction articles from The Magazine.    ...

Russell Johnson, who played iconic DIYer "The Professor" on Gilligan's Island, has died. He was 89. (CNN)    ...

In 2010, photojournalist Ellie Pritts vacation in Europe took an interesting turn and she found herself staying with an isolated, self-sufficient community in a shrouded-with-mystery place known as t...

As we wait to hear Obama's plan to reform the NSA, spare a thought for the poor rubberstamping judges of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, who are charged with the solemn duty of granting p...

Peter Frampton plays "Do You Feel Like We Do" on The Midnight Special in 1976. It really starts to groove midway through.    ...

Thomas Lord Busby's 1820 volume Costume Of The Lower Orders was part of a genre of books that featured colourful paintings depicting working people in the streets of London, generally viewed through t...

An elite Hawaiian surfing competition held only when waves are 35 feet or higher may be called within the coming week on the north shore of the island of Oahu.    ...

The company that owns the Chuck. E. Cheese restaurant chain has agreed to be acquired by an affiliate of Apollo Global Management for about $950 million.    ...

Joe Stone helped a lucky friend celebrate a birthday with a custom, Pulp Fiction-themed edition of "Guess Who?", packaged in a replica of Marcellus Wallace's briefcase.    ...

Mike Figgis, director of films like Leaving Las Vegas, Hotel, and Suspension of Disbelief interviewed David Lynch, director of films like Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, and Inland Empire.   ...

India's street typists -- skilled professionals who type documents for passersby who need formal paperwork for official purposes -- are in great financial difficulty.    ...

In Minneapolis, an estimated 4000 people ride their bikes as part of a daily commute — year round. (The number doubles for the non-winter months.) At the Pedal Minnesota blog, you can see some o...

Boars, Gore, and Swords is hosted by stand-up comedians Ivan Hernandez and Red Scott. In each episode they break down HBO's Game of Thrones and George R.R.    ...

Pentagon Papers whistleblower (and our co-founder) Daniel Ellsberg held an expansive, seven-hour long Reddit Ask Me Anything session yesterday to explain why NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden will join...

Why do birds fly in a "V" formation? Scientists at the UK's Royal Veterinary College attached sensors to endangered ibises migrating from Austria to Tuscany.    ...

The news that Target stores lost 110 million customers' credit card details in a hacker intrusion has illustrated just how grave a risk malicious software presents to the average person and the busine...

A couple of years ago I started working on electronics projects again after a long hiatus. To stock up on components, I bought bulk packages of resistors, capacitors, diodes, and transistors. &nb...

Cuddling foes on the city of Madison, Wisconsin's payroll have smothered the Snuggle House to death. The Snuggle House buckled under pressure from police (who threatened undercover sting operations) ...

The Brunton Torpedo charger is a light-saberoid* cigarette-lighter USB charger with an integrated battery. Use it to charge up to two devices in your car, then take it with when you go and it supplies...

Bavaria-born DJ and YouTube microstar Flula Borg reveals how strange beatboxing looks in super slow motion. He says his lips are like the vagina of a brontosaurus. More at Laughing Squid.  ...

BB pal "Ian Rubbish" interviews Mick Jones and Paul Simonon in this short "documentary" about The Clash: "The Last Gang In Town" (via Devour)    ...

From hazy Pre-Raphaelite beauty to shadowy baroque allegory, this short film weaves hundreds of years of art history into an amazing and unsettling narrative of human beauty.    ...

One year ago today Useful words with no English equivalent: Mamihlapinatapai (Yaghan language of Tierra del Fuego). This word captures that special look shared between two people, when both are wishin...

I've long considered Ben Hamper's Rivethead to be one of the most important books I've read. Hamper, the product of generations of GM motors "shoprats" recounts his 10 torturous but incredibly hilari...

The wonderful affidavit above was created by comedian Emily McWinter's parents when she was a little girl; she'd lost a tooth and didn't want to miss out on the tooth fairy's cash prize.  &n...

Patent troll "MPHJ"owned by Texas lawyer Jay Mac Rust, according to one lawsuitreportedly acquired its IP portfolio for a single dollar in 2012.    ...

Patent troll "MPHJ" has been exposed at length in recent reports. Today, Ars Technica takes a look at the firm's latest move: suing the federal government.    ...

Tom Scocca: "Just put a slice or two of pizza in the skillet, turn on the burner, and wait. How will you know when it's done?    ...

Back in September, I reviewed Tim Harford's new book The Undercover Economist Strikes Back, a great popular economics book on the perils and promise of the modern world.    ...

The work of dutch artist Diddo, Ecce Animal is purported to be made from "street sourced" cocaine and gelatin. The artist also describes the laboratory process used to determine the purity of the prod...

The last time Raylan Givens saw Loretta McCready, she had become the surprising but not unexpected beneficiary of pot empress Mags Bennetts money, and Raylan instructed her not to spend all of it on a...

Bani Garu is Lea Hernandez's story of becoming the U.S. merchandising vice-president of notorious Japanese animation studio Gainax, "a year-long trip down a rabbit hole of reality." Start with page 1....

I've been posting here about The Borribles for more than a decade (proof!). Michael de Larrabeiti's young adult fantasy trilogy from the 1980s remains among my most favourite examples of both YA liter...

In the Guardian, Serge Wroclawski makes the case for Openstreetmap, a free/open map tool maintained by a volunteer community. Wroclawski argues that allowing companies to own maps allows them to own p...

Here's another important Copyright Week post from the Electronic Frontier Foundation: Mitch Stoltz looks at the brutal penalties for copyright violations: "What if a single parking ticket carried a fi...

Mike from Mother Jones sez, "Josh Harkinson writes about the upcoming sentencing of Megan Rice, an elderly nun and Plowshares activist who broke into the Y-12 enriched uranium facility with two fellow...

Jason Torchinsky of Jalopnik says yes. He takes a look at the two products produced by butts: flatus and feces, and determines the harvestable energy in each.    ...

As Copyright Week continues, here's a pair of posts focusing on the importance of the public domain. First off, a guest editorial from Wikimedia's lawyers on the role of the public domain in the creat...

Your browser doesn't support the HTML audio tag. You can still download the show, though! var audioTag = document.createElement('audio'); /* Do we not support MP3 audio?    ...

Thinkgeek's Tardis Shower Curtain would make a dandy complement to their matching shower rack. Collect the whole set! Make your bathroom bigger on the inside than it is on the outside!  &nbs...

Go ahead, kill the magic. (Via Neatorama)    ...

Richard and Allen are kidnappers from a multigenerational kidnapping family. They're thingstarting a sustainable, green kidnapping practice that supports local farmers, green energy, and a community ...

A short video about the CNC-machined sculpture of Chris Bathgate. His work looks like alien technology. He says he likes to make his sculptures "hint at a purpose of some utility" without offering en...

Despite a series of disgraceful dirty tricks, the TSA has lost its case against Dr Rahinah Ibrahim, a Malaysian academic who had been wrongly put on the no-fly list.    ...

Most of our coverage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership has focused on its Internet-regulating provisions. But the treaty -- which has been negotiated in unprecedented secrecy, with heavy-handed shoves ...

As a helpful observer notes at 1:01, "It sounds like he's saying 'no.'" [Video Link via Laughing Squid]    ...

Without Pesco, she'd be making half that. Monster Porn Is the Latest Wrinkle in Self-Published Smut    ...

Fantagraphics has announced the latest volume in its exemplary Carl Barks Disney Library. These full-color hardbound anthologies contain some of the very best comic book stories of all time. &nbs...

Behind the scenes shot of the "opening crawl" filming from Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back. The Star Wars opening crawls were inspired by those used in the Flash Gordon (at right) and B...

The Sword and Laser (S&L) is a science fiction and fantasy-themed book club podcast hosted by Veronica Belmont and Tom Merritt.    ...

Rhian Jeremiah, 26 of Cardigan, Wales caused $360 worth of damage to a Fiat 500 when she bit into the roof during an argument with the driver.    ...

Yesterday, the DC Circuit Court of Appeals invalidated the FCC's Open Internet Rules. These were the closest thing to a set of Net Neutrality rules America had: rules that were supposed to ensure that...

Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg is doing a Reddit AMA right now. The topic sparked from news that Edward Snowden is joining the board of Freedom of the Press Foundation (I'm also a member).&nbs...

Several months ago, I was thrilled to interview hypertalented musicians Bryce Dessner, also of The National, and David Harrington of Kronos Quartet about Aheym, a stunning LP of four of Bryce's compos...

Takayo "Tama-cha" Kiyota is a Japanese chef who specializes in makizushi art: artistic sushi-rolls that use cunningly arranged food to create illustrations in the rolls' cross-sections.  &nb...

Blackphone is a secure, privacy-oriented mobile phone company co-founded by PGP inventor Phil Zimmerman. It integrates a lot of the privacy functionality of Zimmerman's Silent Circle, which makes And...

photo: "White Peony" by Katinka Matson What scientific idea is ready for retirement? Read responses to that inquiry from the likes of Jared Diamond, Richard Dawkins, Alison Gopnik, Max Tegmark, Freem...

Now you can listen to wax cylinder recordings of Aleister Crowley (The Great Beast!) that were first transferred to 78s and were just reissued on an LP from Suitable records.    ...

Spencer Chen did an A/B test on the efficacy of "booth babes" at a big trade-show, staffing a booth in one part of the floor with scantily clad models, and another with older women recruited for their...

Yesterday, I told you about new research involving Tiktaalik, an ancient sort-of-fish that represents the first known example of legs.    ...

In an NPR report from 1984, a revelation: There are people who do not like to go shopping and some of them might enjoy buying things from the comfort of their own home with the help of a computer.&nbs...

Christine McVie has rejoined Fleetwood Mac! As regular BB readers know, I'm a huge fan of Fleetwood Mac's California cocaine trilogy of LPs and, while I know this isn't 1979, I can't wait to hear thos...

Data shows that people with a wide range of diseases and health issues — from weight gain to multiple sclerosis — also have lower-than-normal levels of Vitamin D in their system. &nbs...

Rogrio Soares In the first photograph, a young lady runs through the storm, heading for the water by Guaruja Beach in So Paulo state, Brazil.    ...

In the fish market.    ...

A prcis from the New York Times on what the courts' apparent rejection of FCC network neutrality rules meant, and what happens next.    ...

MPHJ are the notorious patent trolls who claim that any business that scans documents and then emails them owes them $1,000 per employee.    ...

*coughs* *smacks lips*. [Video Link]    ...

After a passenger bus crashed into a footbridge in Lancaster, England, a man attempted to pose a Kermit the Frog puppet alongside the wreckage for a photo opportunity.    ...

The sets are sold out, unfortunately, but you can still buy favorite elements individually. [via JWZ]    ...

A couple of years ago inventor Steve Hoefer wrote a how-to project for MAKE called the Secret Knock Gumball Machine.    ...

Canadian tennis pro Frank Dancevic collapsed on the court during the Australian Open yesterday when temperatures went above 105 degrees fahrenheit.    ...

Attention BlackBerry refugees! Joanna Stern of the WSJ says that Typo is the best one so far. [via Daring Fireball]    ...

British comics creator Isabel Greenberg's Encyclopedia of Early Earth is a deceptively simple, lyrically told set of interlocking stories of creation, hubris, magic and destiny.    ...

Bruce Schneier leads a discussion of HEADWATER, the NSA's tool for compromising Huawei routers over the Internet and turning them into snoops.    ...

One year ago today Bowling Solitaire: a smarter solitaire game: Bowling Solitaire, a "smarter solitaire" invented by Eurogame design legend Sid Sackson in the 1970s.    ...

Funny viral video of a scary prank in NYC promoting the new horror film Devil's Due. (Thanks, Kelly Sparks!)    ...

The UK's Intellectual Property Office has opened a consultation into orphan works -- works that are still in copyright but whose copyright holder can't be ascertained or located.   &nbs...

David E. Sanger and Thom Shanker in the Times today, with a report based in part by documents leaked by Edward Snowden: The National Security Agency has implanted software in nearly 100,000 computers ...

Tim "Undercover Economist" Harford's column "Casinos worrying knack for consumer manipulation," takes a skeptical look at business and markets -- specifically their reputation for offering a fair trad...

In his book Fooling Houdini: Magicians, Mentalists, Math Geeks, and the Hidden Powers of the Mind (reviewed here), Alex Stone starts by recounting his tragically humiliating disqualification at an in...

The Verge's Nilay Patel on "a match made in heaven, unless you're on the outside".    ...

The Freedom of the Press Foundation, an organization of which I am a proud board member, today announced that Edward Snowden has joined its board of directors.    ...

Xeni and I are both freaking out about how much we loved this series as kids. Sid and Marty Krofft's Land of the Lost is truly a classic that provides even more entertainment now than it did as a chi...

"The Times reporter James Risen took his case to the Supreme Court on Monday, asking that his effort to protect his confidential source be protected," writes NYT Public Editor Margaret Sullivan. ...

Associated Press: "Police in Connecticut say they're looking for a man who smashed his vehicle into a gas station in Newington, swiped a banana from a shelf and ate it before leaving early Wednesday m...

Neal Barrett, Jr, one of science fiction's funniest and cleverest writers, died on January 12. He was 84. Though he was best known for his short work (which has been collected several times, most rece...

Adermatoglyphia is a very rare genetic condition causing you to be born without fingerprints. In 2011, a small group of researchers pinpointed the genetic mutation behind it.    ...

Above, Bart's "apology" on behalf of The Simpsons writers for referring to Judas Priest as "death metal" which infuriated the group's very vocal fans.    ...

The Beatles In Comic Strips    ...

Here's an excellent 1956 RCA Victor promotional documentary about how vinyl records are made. More than 50 years later, the basic process remains the same even as the number of pressing plants has dw...

Dust & Grooves is a fascinating project in which Eilon Paz travels around interviewing and photographing vinyl music collectors in their listening rooms.    ...

Scott Teplin posted Bile to the Boing Boing Flickr Group, along with a link to his wonderful series of watercolors called Future Trash, full of wolvertonian, anatomical oddments.   &nbs...

Tom the Dancing Bug, IN WHICH newly-elected President Chris Christie apologizes for a few unfortunate events in his first 100 days.    ...

Redditor Unspeakablefilth lives in northern Ontario, where December was plenty cold (daytime highs of -25C!). He made the best of an icy situation by freezing blocks of coloured ice in shifts, a new b...

In Evolutionary origins of sensation in metazoans: functional evidence for a new sensory organ in sponges, Danielle A Ludeman and her team at the University of Alberta document the heretofore unsuspe...

Adam Sterbergh's debut novel, Shovel Ready, "has the grimy neon feel of Warren Elliss Transmetropolitan combined with a touch of Philip K. Dicks gonzo cyberpunk," says Austin Grossman, author of You a...

Adam Sternbergh's debut novel, Shovel Ready, "has the grimy neon feel of Warren Elliss Transmetropolitan combined with a touch of Philip K. Dicks gonzo cyberpunk," says Austin Grossman, author of You ...

The Electronic Frontier Foundation continues to publish its excellent series of Copyright Week posts (here's yesterday's installment). Today, Corynne McSherry describes the fight over copyrighted laws...

A website dedicated to high-quality, accurate, free science videos on the Internet? Yes, please.    ...

In 1971 the Young Socialist Alliance ended its policy of barring gays. The FBI's San Diego office seized on this announcement "to play on people's bigotries to dissuade them from joining a political o...

Consider making a donation to Kasese Humanist Primary School — a secular school emphasizing science education and critical thinking in western Uganda.    ...

The answer is cuticle — a protein that makes up the exoskeletons of many insects.    ...

Two more high-profile patent cases are headed to the US Supreme Court, which has already agreed to hear a patent case this year.    ...

Or, alternatively, society could stand to think a little bit more about whether, in our efforts to understand mental illness and get help for people who need it, we're leaning a bit too far towards m...

Tiktaalik, a fish-like creature that lived 375 million years ago, is a prime example of a transitional species — something between the ancient fish that swam in the seas and the ancient primiti...

Nine women who were either born without a uterus or lost it as part of cancer treatment have successfully received transplanted uteruses and are in the process of trying to get pregnant via IVF. ...

Mikael Vejdemo-Johansson converted my story When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth (from the collection Overclocked) into .mobi and .epub for easy viewing on an e-reader or mobile device.   &nb...

One year ago today Dread Cthulhu Leads His Cult to Milestone Year: Under His unforgiving majesty Cthulhu, the Order of Dagon expanded more in 2012 than in any 12 months of its 180-year history. &...

Read the rest of the Hip Hop Family Tree comics!     ...

Nidhogg, the weird, spectacular fencing game from Mark "Messhof" Essen, is finally ours. After years being exhibited--and refined--at game tournaments and other public events, the dueling simulator i...

Irish Garda charged an Italian man with murder after a dispute over a chess move ended in his opponent's death. Saverio Ballente, 34, of Castlenock, was accused of murdering Thomas O'Gorman, 39, with ...

The work at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) on adding DRM to HTML5 is one of the most disturbing developments in the recent history of technology.    ...

Here's the second, concluding part of my reading of my 2003 short story "Flowers From Al," written with Charlie Stross for New Voices in Science Fiction, a Mike Resnick anthology (Here's part one).&nb...

Shareable rounds up 20 Open Source Furniture Designs -- ingenious plans for home furnishings that you can make yourself, improve upon, and share.    ...

During an NPR interview, the NSA's outgoing deputy director John C Inglis -- the top civilian official in the NSA hierarchy -- admitted that the NSA's mass surveillance program had foiled a total of o...

Our friends at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories painted a leather bomber jacket with the 1970s and 80s Classic Lego Space logo.    ...

I love that individuals now have the tools and technology to affordably make their own consumer electronics. Michael Caster built a tablet with a Raspberry Pi (a credit card sized Linux computer) that...

Boing Boing reader Robert Steven Connett shares this painting in our Boing Boing Flickr pool: "MICROVERSE 1" ~ 30" x 24", Acrylic on wood panel ~ Jan 2014.    ...

Madeleine Holden maintains Critique My Dick Pic [NSFW], a site where she offers to "critique your dick pics with love." After a season of looking at photos of strangers' penises, she has come up with ...

Laughing Squid: "Greg Keating claims he was conceived while his mother was working for NBC at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in 1993 (the year OBrien began hosting Late Night with Conan OBrien at NBCs 30 Rock s...

Hoang Tran hails from Sunnyvale CA, where he carves beloved characters from crayons. Look how he used a regular-sized crayon to carve BMO and large crayons to carve Finn, Jake and the others! &nb...

Ukrainian protesters from the #Euromaidan movement have faced brutal police violence. A moving demonstration on December 30th included a line of protesters who held up mirrors to the riot police who f...

This week is Copyright Week, and every day this week, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and its allies in the fight for a fair, balanced copyright will be posting new article explaining how to fix co...

In my latest Locus column, "Cheap Writing Tricks," I ruminate on what makes fiction work -- why we perceive stories as stories, why we care about characters, and how the construction of stories intera...

Most of the vintage ads in this Collectors Weekly round-up were designed to shame women into buying a product that would make them more attractive to their mate.    ...

This incredible video shot at Izatys Resort at Mille Lacs Lake, Minnesota shows an "ice shove," where currents, winds, or temperature differences push chunks of lake ice onto land like a drifting ice...

Renato Orara makes astonishingly-lifelike illustrations with a ballpoint pen. (Thanks, Bob Pescovitz!)    ...

In which Donald Duck teaches kids about family planning. If you've been following the Internet's ongoing fascination with duck sex, you should be very disturbed right about now.    ...

It's been three years since India had a case of polio. There are now only three countries where polio is still endemic: Nigeria, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.    ...

Etsy seller Wearableplanter has a wide range of 3D printed planters: rings, jewelry -- even bicycle vases! They're intended for use with succulents, small flowers, and sprouts.    ...

Image: West Virginians line up at a water filling station at West Virginia State University. A chemical spill prevents them from using tap water.    ...

3D Systems' display at this year's CES included the ChefJet 3D printer, whose output medium is flavored (chocolate, vanilla, mint, sour apple, cherry and watermelon) sugar (it's softened with water an...

Tonight, on FX at 10PM EST, Archer returns! The worlds most self-centered secret agent, Sterling Archer, and the rest of the ISIS crew will be back to bumbling.    ...

"This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others." — Harry Anslinger, the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (an early pre...

Emmanuel Goldstein from 2600 magazine writes, "The HOPE X conference (July 18-20, New York City) is now accepting Bitcoin for preregistration.    ...

Former New York Times editor Bill Keller criticizes terminally-ill Lisa Adams' blogging of her experience as a cancer sufferer. He writes that it elevates a misguided "heroic measures" ideal of cancer...

One year ago today Fermi's Paradox, the tapeworm-and-anus versus: Fermi's Paradox speculates that the fact that our civilization has not yet encountered evidence of alien civilization implies that suc...

Ever since RSA got caught sabotaging its own products to aid the NSA for a piddling $10M, it's been corporation-non-grata in the security world.    ...

Rogue archivist Carl Malamud sez, "On Tuesday, January 14, 2014 at 10AM, the House Judiciary Committee will be holding hearings on the Scope of Copyright Protection.    ...

David Weinberger has published a short personal memoir of what blogging meant to him in the early years, and how it contrasted with the media of the day.    ...

Nemo and Pretzel love toys. On rainy days and lazy afternoons I am always trying out toy, after toy. The Treat Triad and the Kibble Nibble were both good finds, but nothing has eclipsed the entertainm...

The rise of Marvel's Comixology has meant that DRM -- Digital Rights Management -- has become the norm for comics, meaning that your collection is forever locked to Marvel's platform, and it is illega...

Hai! From Funky Forest, apparently.    ...

Boing, Boing, Boing. pic.twitter.com/miprSWnoB2— Peter Mayhew (@TheWookieeRoars) January 10, 2014 We all go a little crazy, sometimes. pic.twitter.com/TJpxRk9YaG— Peter Mayhew (@TheWookiee...

And good riddance, writes Lee Hutchinson, "because almost all of it was crap."    ...

One year ago today RIP, Aaron Swartz: My friend Aaron Swartz committed suicide yesterday, Jan 11. He was 26.    ...

A leaked Scotland Yard report disclosed in The Indepedent documents the near-total corruption of the British government and justice system by organised criminals.    ...

Michael Mapes's Dutch Masters series recreates 17th century paintings as blown-mosaics composed of "photographic prints, insect pins, pinning foam, gelatin capsules, glass vials, optomotrist lens, pai...

Hats off to Canadian Molly Schuyler, who undertook a record-breaking 72-oz steak consumption on a whim at Sayler's of Portland, OR.    ...

The Communication Security Establishment of Canada -- a secretive spy agency that's already been caught lying to a judge and illegally spying on diplomats at the Toronto G20 -- has admitted that it il...

Al-Shabaab, the Al Qaeda-affiliated faction in Somalia, has ordered the nation's ISPs to shut off the Internet, or else. The Somali government has ordered the ISPs not to shut down.   &...

Quietnet is a free/open Python program that uses your computer's speakers to encode text messages as near-ultrasonic chirps that can be received and interpreted by other, nearby computers.  ...

Notwithstanding the good reasons to be forgiving of CES, I still find it difficult to work up enormous enthusiasm for most gadgets, representing, as they so often do, small incremental improvements o...

Via StuffJournalistsLike twitter feed. Appears the sign is stolen so often that the Colorado Department of Transit settled on this. Thanks, Ryan!    ...

Artist/programmer Lauren McCarthy has undertaken an interesting experiment in networked romance called Social Turkers. McCarthy sets up dates with men using OK Cupid, and uses her phone to stream a l...

"Responding to inquiries about a possible data breach involving customer credit and debit card information, upscale retailer Neiman Marcusacknowledged today that it is working with the U.S.  ...

"Hand Rail Cat," a photograph shared in the Boing Boing Flickr Pool by reader Benjamin G. Levy. "This handsome cat sat himself down on a handrail post of a busy path in Zermatt so that every passerby ...

Since 2010, Kristen A. has maintained a website where she documents the legal hassles she's undergone with Baybrook Remodelers, Ken Carney's Connecticut company, who has sued her for posting a negativ...

Maybe don't drink bottle of water at press conf when you're at fault for 300,000 people not having any. #wvchemleak pic.twitter.com/sSuYf0YjLI— Rod Snyder (@RodSnyderWV) January 11, 2014...

The US Trade Representative is pushing Congress hard for "Trade Promotion Authority," which would give the President's representatives the right to sign treaties like the Trans-Pacific Partnership wit...

It's been a year since Aaron Swartz killed himself. The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Parker Higgins has posted a memorial to him that I found quite moving.    ...

One year ago today Struggle for Catan: cutthroat card game for family fun/fights: Similar to the Settlers of Catan, except there's no board, and no pieces to accidentally knock around (which is my 9-y...

The Making of Raiders of the Lost Ark, aired on PBS in 1981.    ...

College Humor's Every Cocktail Bar Menu Ever pretty much nails the experience of trying to parse out fancy, overblown booze descriptions -- but for the true experience, the whole thing should be print...

As I've written, the Canadian Harper government's purge of environmental and scientific libraries has been a horrific shambles, as priceless and irreplaceable books and documents going back centuries ...

In each episode of Not Playing, Lex Friedman and Dan Moren watch movies they've never seen but that everyone else has.    ...

The City of London is a curiosity; it's the financial district within London proper, and it has its own local government, which is elected by the banks and other corporations within the district. ...

This one was written in 1992 by the first real, true blue cartoonist I ever met, the perpetual self publisher Doug Holverson. (He also colored this page, just for Boing Boing.)    ...

Kevin McFarland reviews the latest episode of Dan Harmon's beloved television series.    ...

"Target on Friday extensively revised the number of customers whose personal information was stolen in a widespread data hack during the holiday season, bringing the total to from 70 million to 110 mi...

Richard Branson's commercial spaceline Virgin Galactic today completed the third rocket-powered supersonic flight of its passenger carrying reusable space vehicle, SpaceShipTwo (SS2).   ...

Shared in the Boing Boing Flickr Pool by artist Hin Mizushima: "My 8 critters for the group show, In The Palm of Your Hand, starts on Jan 10th at EMP Collective in Baltimore.    ...

Gonzo is a fantastic collection of personal stories about time and experiences with Hunter S. Thompson, curated and arranged from over 100 incredibly interesting people by Jann S.   &n...

Last month, around Christmas, a sixteen-year-old Australian named Joshua Rogers living in Victoria told the Transport Department that its Metlink website was exposing the sensitive details of over 600...

For nine years the popular website Futility Closet has collected arresting curiosities in history, literature, language, art, philosophy, and mathematics. This book presents the best of them: pipe-smo...

Pastor Daniel Castle could make a good living as a MST3K-style commenter, provided he remains ignorant of the programs he's talking about.    ...

Google continues to try and cram its users into Google Plus, its also-ran social network. The latest move allows people who don't have your Gmail address to send email to your Gmail account by using y...

A broad coalition of organizations -- including Boing Boing -- have joined forces to declare February 11 a day of action in memory of Aaron Swartz and against NSA Internet spying and mass surveillance...

One year ago today Cover for new edition of Orwell's 1984 is brilliant: Love this cover art for the new Penguin edition of 1984.    ...

Dr Oluyombo Awojobi founded the hospital at Eruwa, Nigeria, a rural location without consistent access to electricity. Dr Awojobi is an accomplished maker, and over 27 years, he's built a variety of ...

    ...

Stroz Friedberg, a risk-management consultancy, commissioned a survey [PDF] of information handling practices in businesses that concluded that senior managers are the greatest risk to information sec...

When Brian Wood's brilliant America-at-war comic DMZ completed its six-year run in 2012, I wished for Vertigo to bring out a single edition collecting the whole series.    ...

Redditor Mthomaseddy snapped this photo of the elegantly packaged "gas mask" (apparently an air-filter mask, not something to be used in gas-attacks) that was waiting in his room at the Shanghai Fairm...

I've posted before about Ben "Ben and Jerry's" Cohen's Stamp Stampede project: Cohen is calling on enemies of corruption to stamp messages opposing the Citizens United Supreme Court decision on dollar...

Len sez, "Back in 2010, I spent one year interviewing and drawing 52 geeks. I called the project Geek A Week.    ...

You are Not So Smart is hosted by David McRaney, a journalist and self-described psychology nerd. In each episode, David explores cognitive biases and delusions, and is often joined by a guest expert ...

In the above clip, O'Reilly is seen arguing with Columbia University neuroscientist Carl Hart (author of High Price: A Neuroscientist's Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know A...

It's amazing how quickly a forest can grow back on clear-cut ground. I've written here before about a National Seashore in Wisconsin that looks like forest primeval today, but was, less than a century...

Kristin and her kid decorated their frozen walkway with these colored ice-balls, made by filling balloons with water and food-coloring and then letting them freeze outside (it took about 10 hours).&nb...

Ever wonder what some of the 1950s cookbook horrors Cory posts here would look (and taste) like in real life? That's what the Midcentury Menu blog is for — cooking and eating (or, at least, tast...

My post yesterday about the ugly "Get Out of Jail Free" card in the recent version of Monopoly led to an interesting discussion in the comments.    ...

Take a picture and put it under glass, but not quite the way you think. The folks at Fracture have a built a business that connects several different technologies into one new way to make large-format...

I think I may have been waiting all my life to see Space Battleship Yamato done just like this. The movie is so true to the feel of the 1974 Starblazers I adored as a child, I really got to enjoy bot...

Jeff writes, "Filtered is a new free/open source IMAP mail filtering application which provides automated routing of email based on per sender settings.    ...

Mark "Coonrippy" Brown, the Tennessee man whose pet raccoon was seized after video of him playing with the furry creatures went viral, is running for governor.    ...

I learned resistor color code values as a kid by memorizing a racist mnemonic that a friend taught me. Today, there's a much better way.    ...

One year ago today NYC's new parking signs are great information design: The NYC Department of Transport has revamped its notoriously complex parking-rules signs, so that they're slightly less cryptic...

Drew Friedman is one of the best portrait artists alive. I once had the opportunity to see a few pieces of his original art and was surprised to see how small they were.    ...

In The human penis as a semen displacement device, a 2003 paper published in Evolution and Human Behavior, a group of SUNY Albany psych researchers investigated the shape of the human penis to discove...

There is a chicken lurking in the geography of our continents. A giant chicken. The worlds countries can be arranged to form a giant chicken.    ...

Sony's "4K Camcorder with 1" sensor"— that is its actual name!—shoots up to 4K video, at up to 120 fps, in the new XAVC-S codec.    ...

"I shot this film over 12 days around the San Pedro de Atacama region of Northern Chile," writes videographer Nicholas Buer.    ...

After a week of anger, "Team Snapchat" apologizes for letting hackers walk off with more than 4 million phone numbers: "This morning we released a Snapchat update for Android and iOS that improves Fin...

They fill the water just off the shore like a swarm of jellyfish — if jellyfish were round, dirty brown, and frozen solid.    ...

"I want to apologize," the former basketball star and self-appointed North Korea envoy said in a statement. "I take full responsibility for my actions.    ...

Chimpanzees are omnivores and not just in the sense of eating grubs or enjoying a little meat when they can scavenge it.    ...

Nico Sell is the CEO of Wickr, a privacy-oriented mobile messaging system that's been deliberately designed so that the company can't spy on its users, even if they're ordered to do so.  &nb...

Choire Sicha reports on Mediaite managing editor Jon Nicosia, who turns out to be a con artist, Zachary Hildreth, with form.    ...

There's a possibility that the auroras could be visible as far south as Denver.    ...

John Gurche is a "paleoartist" who reveals the faces of our ancestors for the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History's Hall of Human Origins.    ...

Kenneth Anger is a legendary underground filmmaker, actor, chronicler of 1960s Hollywood scandals, and occultist. He's perhaps best known for his book Hollywood Babylon (1965) and the Magick Lantern ...

Brad Davis, 33, of McCloud, Oklahoma was arrested for allegedly killing his stepfather, Denver Lee St. Clair with an "atomic wedgie." An argument led to a fistfight in which Davis said he knocked St.&...

    ...

French firm Funeral Concept creates custom crypts wrapped in glossy art of your design. My immediate thought is that marketers may be interested in these monuments as a new form of advertising! &...

On the left, Chris Foss's cover for Isaac Asimov's book, Stars Like Dust. On the right, a painting by Glenn Brown, sold at auction for $5.7m.    ...

Cormac McCarthy's ex-wife Jennifer McCarthy was arrested on Saturday for threatening her boyfriend with a handgun she pulled from her vagina after a heated argument about space aliens.  &nbs...

Anaria covered Ed Sheeran's "I See Fire", the end credits from The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug, in rockin' style. Here's the band's YouTube Channel.    ...

Nominative determinism--one's name influencing oneself--is real. Alice Robb, for The New Republic, recaps research from the last decade or so.    ...

The ACLU and members of the Insane Clown Posse have filed a lawsuit against the FBI over its classification of the Juggalos (ICP fans) as a gang.    ...

Thomson Reuters' chart about business buzzwords is perfect storm of game-changing interactivity. A disruptive deep-dive into what is, admittedly, a low-hanging fruit, it's a win-win for the web. ...

Ina Fried, reporting for the new Recode: The rest of the mobile industry may have moved on, but BlackBerry CEO John Chen is betting the future of the companys device business on smartphones with keybo...

We've had the first four volumes of Sardine in Space on our bookshelf since Poesy was born, five years ago, but we've only just started reading them at bed-time (it's great to have wonderful books on ...

The EU's Civil Liberties Committee has MEPs seek video link with Snowden for NSA spying probeinvited Edward Snowden to give it testimony by video-link from Russia.    ...

This episode is brought to you by: Squarespace, the all-in-one platform that makes it fast and easy to create your own professional website or online portfolio.    ...

On IO9, Charlie Jane Anders takes an advance look at Questionable Practices, the first new collection of Eileen Gunn's short fiction since 2004's Stable Strategies and Others (which I called the best ...

In my latest Guardian column, I explain how UK prime minister David Cameron's plan to opt the entire nation into a programme of Internet censorship is the worst of all worlds for kids and their parent...

On Christmas Day, F-Secure's Mikko Hypponen pulled out of RSA's annual security conference in protest over RSA's collaboration with the NSA (they weakened their own security to make NSA spying easier)...

Osvaldo Oyola: "Oglaf uses humor and fantasy to throw off the banality of typical sexual fantasy by taking it to its absurd ends.    ...

"[David Brooks'] ignorance about this subject is vast. I hope hes on more solid ground with the other things he writes about in the New York Times," says Dr.    ...

Stephen Levy's Wired feature How the NSA Almost Killed the Internet is a masterful summary of the NSA scandal to date and its fallout, but even better are Christoph Niemann's graphics, which are the b...

Best viewed while listening to Kind of Bloop. Nightpix, by BJ Heinley    ...

A new info-sheet issued by the FBI redefines the bureau's primary mission, dropping "law enforcement" and replacing it with "national security." The bureau has not made any formal announcements regard...

While I like to bake bread, I hate to drag out my standing mixer. That'd be fine except I've found that properly kneading sourdough is really important.    ...

Singaporean macrofocus photographer Nicky Bay produces wonderful portraits of insects in their natural setting. Particularly fascinating are the photos of bugs eating each other, particularly the shot...

My daughter was playing Monopoly this morning and I noticed the new design for the "Get Out of Jail Free" card (lower image).    ...

What's better than tossing boiling water out your back door (and possibly burning yourself in the process)? How about making ice cream?    ...

I was surprised to discover that Robyn Miller played the lead role in The Immortal Augustus Gladstone. Robyn's look and mannerisms are so different from the character he plays.    ...

Announced at CES, the Lynx Smart Grill, which offers voice recognition, a recipe database, and online notification. The grilling process begins with a couple of simple questions from the grill about w...

Jeffrey sez, "The renowned 360 photographer Andrea Biffi has posted complete instructions for building your own Nixie Tube clock, even including how to etch your own circuit board.   &n...

Matthew says: "A massive traffic jam on the George Washington Bridge was caused by the closure of two toll booths for a 'traffic study,' but neither the head of the Port Authority was told about the c...

A new mobile app called "Nametag" adds facial recognition to phone photos; take a pic of someone and feed it to the app and the app will search Facebook, Twitter, sex offender registries and (if you'd...

Mark Marino writes, "At the 2013 MLA Convention in Boston, I revealed that I and my writing partner Rob Wittig created the fictional protest movement OccupyMLA.    ...

Brooklyn-based artist/designer Scott Albrecht has a new show of his wonderful woodworking, collage, and hand-drawn typography opening tomorrow (1/9) at New York City's Ace Hotel.   &nbs...

Today marks the release of We Cause Scenes, a feature-length documentary on the the legendary Improv Everywhere troupe, which was pieced together from over twelve years' worth of footage of daring, c...

In Doylestown, Pennsylvania, there is a poured-in-place castle made of concrete and filled with archaic technology — a museum of tools that people no longer use because they've all been replaced...

If The New York Times were for sale, it would have an interesting billionaire bidder: Guangbiao Chen, said to be China's most influential person, most prominent philanthropist, moral leader, earthqua...

Desmids are a type of green algae, usually single-celled, and known for being extremely symmetrical and nifty to look at. In this video, you can watch a desmid divide and grow into two new individual...

The final scenes of Justifieds fourth season emphasize that neither Raylan Givens nor Boyd Crowder can escape their Harlan County roots.    ...

Benjamin Bratton, Associate Professor of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego, explains what's wrong with TED—at a TEDx event in San Diego.    ...

Photo: Gage Skidmore (cc) A constant stream of settlements, penalties and legal fees spews out of the tax coffers in Maricopa County, Arizona, all racked up by Sheriff Joe Arpaio.   &nb...

Starfish have eyes — not just light-sensitive "eye spots", but real, honest-to-Poseidon eyes, one at the end of each of their arms.    ...

The paperback edition of Delia Sherman's The Freedom Maze is out today. It's a subtle, nuanced, uncomfortable and brave young adult novel about racism and time-travel.    ...

Zak Ziebell, then a 17-year-old San Antonio senior, challenged 30 people to sketch a map of the world, then combined them into a vague smudge.    ...

Amber: It's not just a medium that allows crazy old rich men to make bad decisions about de-extinction. It can also capture flowering plants, preserving delicate parts well enough that scientists can...

Tom the Dancing Bug, IN WHICH young Cap runs afoul of the laws that discourage the productivity reducing effects of PUFFERFISH CHOMPING.    ...

Cryoseisms are what happens when very wet soil freezes and the water (now ice) in that soil expands — cracking the ground with a boom.    ...

There was a time when more than half of the men had sideburns; then there was a time when they became vanishingly rare.    ...

Which system won the first holiday season of the new console generation? Sony's Playstation 4, by a significant (if not runaway) margin: 4.3m sold, compared to 3m Microsoft Xbox Ones.   ...

Scientists have been able to levitate objects with the power of sound waves since the 1940s. But modern researchers are taking that trick to the next level.    ...

Thinkgeek's Tardis shower rack looks pretty useful -- lots of little shelves and baskets that make it bigger on the inside than it is on the outside -- and, needless to say, it's also awesomely cool.&...

A startlingly low price. Current 4K monitors are very expensive and, just yesterday, Sony's Kaz Hirai warned that it was going to take years for consumers to haul themselves up onto the latest rung on...

The Lay-N-Go Traveler is a water-repellent polyester drawstring bag that opens out to lay flat, making it ideal for carrying small, fiddly travel-stuff that you're forever losing in the dark corners o...

Viaframe's renders of armor for your organs are sure pretty. I think they'd be a little terminal for everyday use, but they'd make great canopic storage for the old burial chamber-oonie.  &n...

The Guardian has been blocked in China since Tuesday, though no one (apart from China's censors) knows why.    ...

Nicky Wishart is a 12 year old from Eynsham, a village in Oxfordshire, England, where the local youth club is slated to close due to austerity.    ...

As I wrote in December, I'm a great fan of the Welcome to Night Vale podcast. As I listened to the New Years episode this morning, I was reminded that the podcast has a great store with a wide variety...

All-American Marine/YouTube CBS reports on the 150-passenger boat Google has rented to get some of its staff into work. Just as Bay Area high-tech firms such as Google have been using private shuttle ...

All-American Marine/YouTube CBS reports on the 150-passenger boat Google has rented to get some of its staff into work. Just as Bay Area high-tech firms such as Google have been using private shuttle ...

MPHJ is America's most notorious patent troll. The company -- whose owners are shrouded in mystery through a network of shell companies -- claims a patent on scanning documents and then emailing them,...

Boars, Gore, and Swords is hosted by stand-up comedians Ivan Hernandez and Red Scott. In each episode they break down HBO's Game of Thrones and George R.R.    ...

The Sword and Laser (S&L) is a science fiction and fantasy-themed book club podcast hosted by Veronica Belmont and Tom Merritt.    ...

What's in store for the universe? This BBC infographic shows what could happen, from the extinction of humans in 5 million years, to the end of photosynthesis in 600 million years, to the death of all...

Creative Commons is hiring a new CEO [PDF], who'll run the organization which currently has a $3M budget and a staff of 20.    ...

"Dale and I weren't real close friends in high school, so I was a bit surprised one day when he invited me to dinner at his house." Illustrated by Julie Doucet. Originally published in Real Stuff #6, ...

Recommended if You Like is Boing Boing's weekly podcast of Brian Heater's cafe conversations with musicians, cartoonists, writers, and other creative types.    ...

This is my new FemSkin. they call it the HD model. It's brighter than my other FemSkin. Brighter color. I added the hair to make the vagina look a little more realistic.    ...

Tell Me Something I Dont Know is Boing Boing's podcast featuring artists, writers, filmmakers, and other creative people discussing their work, ideas, and the practical side of how they do what they d...

I'd been running my series-one Drobo (a home RAID-like storage device) since 2007 or 2008 and finally one of the aged 7200 rpm HDDs decided to give up the ghost.    ...

I have been running my series-one Drobo (a home RAID-like storage device) since 2007 or 2008. Recently, one of the aged 7200 rpm HDDs finally decided to give up the ghost.    ...

The Hugo awards nominations process is now officially open. You'll recall that there are several lists of eligible works, including the one on John Scalzi's blog, the one on Charlie Stross's blog, and...

Jap does a gorgeous line of Star Wars rings in silver and gold. There's no pricing info and they date from 1999, so I fear they're long gone, which is a pity, as that R2D2 ring is particularly inspire...

One of the signs of the apocalypse is at hand: the seal has been opened and the daemonic elder headlines are loose upon the world.    ...

Last month, I was privileged to see the incredible 40th Anniversary Concert of Kronos Quartet, the pioneering avant-garde classical group who has collaborated with such diverse artists as Philip Glas...

Last month, I was privileged to see the incredible 40th Anniversary Concert of Kronos Quartet, the pioneering avant-garde classical group who has collaborated with such diverse artists as Philip Glas...

Babs has posted another slew of personal and found snapshots from the 1980s and 1990s over at the Internet K-Hole.    ...

Maggie Sergio shares US Fish and Wildlife Service plans to drop 1.3 tons of rat poison onto the Farallon Islands to kill non-native mice.    ...

State officials inspected an Acapulco, Mexico prison and were surprised to find 19 prostitutes, 100 plasma TVs, two sacks of marijuana, and 100 cockerels for fighting, according to the BBC News. ...

K'Nex master Austron is constrcting the world's largest K'Nex ball machine. It's located at Bloomington, Minnesota's The Works museum. Austron says: The machine stands 23.5 feet tall and 40 feet long...

K'Nex master Austron is constrcting the world's largest K'Nex ball machine. It's located at Bloomington, Minnesota's The Works museum. Austron says: The machine stands 23.5 feet tall and 40 feet long...

It's made of 21 half-meter-long strips of bamboo that were preserved for 2500 years in a tomb.    ...

A NYC group called the Satanic Temple hopes to install a 7-foot statue of Baphomet, seen in an artist's model above, at the Oklahoma State Capitol building.    ...

Maybe not what you think, says Dan Kahan, a professor of law and psychology at Yale. In an interesting piece about the findings of a new Pew survey, he makes a case for why saying you don't believe in...

Prions — the misfolded proteins implicated in mad cow disease — have always seemed to be inherently a bad thing. But new research suggests that some kinds of prions may actually be benefic...

The Doggie Diner heads, icons of San Francisco's underground culture, are in desperate need of restoration. For twenty years, John Law -- pictured above with the Boing Boing crew and Adam Savage -- ha...

At the Brain Watch blog, Christian Jarrett explains why that "reading a novel changes your brain" study really matters. Turns out, it has big implications for neuroscience.    ...

Rodong Sinmun, courtesy photo    ...

Vladi Rapaport's Skull Chair isn't the first one we've posted (cf: stacking chair; armchair), but it's my favorite so far.    ...

Olive oil was his key to freedom. The slippery condiment was used to get a naked Australian man out of a top-loading washing machine into which he had climbed, apparently as part of a game of hide-and...

I recently re-read Tim Powers' absolutely fantastic, 1985, Dinner at Deviant's Palace, where troubled musician Gregorio Rivas struggles to extract his former love from the clutches of a mad cult in t...

In an excellent editorial, Bruce Schneier explains how the NSA weakens American security (because the NSA relies upon weaknesses in American technology to permit it to spy) without stopping terrorism ...

The UK's proposed new Antisocial Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill creates a new kind of injunction, the Ipnas ("injunctions to prevent nuisance and annoyance"), which judges can hand down without pr...

Underwater archaeologists usually aren't big fans of the stubbornly clingy creatures that attach themselves to the sides of sunken vases and other shipwreck detritus.    ...

Clipboard-sized, unsettling, endlessly mutating pseudolore with dark and scary themes. Creepypasta is going mainstream. [Aoen Magazine]    ...

Cabinet Magazine profiles the a polish immigrant who revolutionized Hollywood makeup in the 1920s. Pictured above is the "Beauty calibrator", a nightmarish machine he invented to measure your face and...

Finally. [dogeforall.biz] Update: and here's a Doge translator.    ...

Cruella, a child-sized mannequin, has an unusual appearance. It sold for 700, about $1150, at an auction in England. "Auctioneer David Lord of Stroud Auction Rooms acknowledged they had 'hugely undere...

Kim Jong Un, the North Korean boy dictator who executed his uncle last month, has a friend: former NBA player and self-appointed international diplomat Dennis Rodman.    ...

Read the rest of the Hip Hop Family Tree comics!     ...

One year ago today Minecraft torch torch: ThinkGeek's Minecraft Light-Up Torch is funnier if you speak one of the Commonwealth English variants where "torch" is a synonym for "flashlight" -- but even ...

Mat Ricardo writes, "Very happy to announce that my new one man show 'Showman' is running for a week in London's West End as part of the London International Mime Festival.    ...

Yesterday at CES, Makerbot CEO Bre Pettis announced three new 3D printers, including a massive, fifth-generation Replicator capable of producing objects that are 45.7" tall and 30.5" wide/long. &...

Yesterday at CES, Makerbot CEO Bre Pettis announced three new 3D printers, including a massive, fifth-generation Replicator capable of producing objects that are 45.7cm tall and 30.5cm wide/long. ...

Take a moment and listen to these words by Alan Watts, on what would have been his 99th birthday. Video Link    ...

Here's part one (MP3) of my 2003 short story "Flowers From Al," written with Charlie Stross for New Voices in Science Fiction, a Mike Resnick anthology.    ...

The annual best-of collections from Passive Aggressive Notes are always a great read, and this year is no exception (pedantic pre-emption: Passive Aggressive Notes also collects notes that are merely ...

Matthew says: "An American Airlines flight made an emergency landing in Kansas City after a passenger left a USB flash drive in the bathroom.    ...

I've been puzzled by the Nikon Df myself, and I'm a long time Nikon shooter. Same sensor as their most advanced camera, the D4, with dials and knobs Mike Brady would feel comfortable with.  ...

Inside Llewelyn Davis is a movie. Its producers ran a full-page ad (price: $70k!) in the NYT which featured litte more than the above tweet, from critic Tony Scott.    ...

In each episode of Not Playing, Lex Friedman and Dan Moren watch movies they've never seen but that everyone else has.    ...

Hot Socks does a nice line of multicolored socks embroidered with all sorts of fine-art images. Hot Sox (via Pipe Dream Dragon)    ...

"Michael Bay just walked on stage, flubbed his lines, and walked off at a Samsung CES press conference," reports Gizmodo's Leslie Horn.    ...

The Hired Hand is a 1971 western directed by and starring Peter Fonda. I've never seen the film but today I heard the score and it is absolutely fantastic.    ...

Every January, Bruce Sterling and Jon Lebkowsky take to the WELL's public "Inkwell" conference for a "State of the World" discussion that ranges far and wide over the previous year and the year to com...

MacRumors shares this CES 2014 announcement from LaCie. As last year's 'Little Big Disk Thunderbolt' clocked in at a mere 780MB/s this years model boasts speeds of 1375MB/s, now Rob's at home 4k editi...

Here's an analysis of the New America Foundation's Federal Education Budget Project, a wide-ranging and thorough look at the way the government spends on education.    ...

Hemp is a useful crop. It's used to make paper, cloth, food, fuel, and many other products. But hemp farming in the United States has been illegal for 56 years.    ...

At The New York Times, Amy Harmon has a fascinating long read about the battle over banning GMOs on the island of Hawaii, and the story of a county council member who came to believe GM plants, as pla...

Here's a fascinating idea for how people could board a high speed train without it ever having to slow down.    ...

A lesson in classy customer service, New Zealand style. A sign with the cake read: "Eat shit!". After it was picked up, [Oh Cakes owner] Mrs McDonald posted on Facebook: "Your (sic) left with a $30 vo...

(Via Steve Silberman)    ...

The central fact concerning the death of Keith Vidal, 18, does not seem to be in dispute: after the schizophrenic youngster was tased and restrained by two officers, a third stepped up, said "we don't...

On Practical Machinst, there's a fascinating thread about the manufacturer's lockdown on a high-priced, high-end Mori Seiki NV5000 A/40 CNC mill.    ...

Theodore Ross on Google Glass: "Glass will free your hands, but your eyes, let alone your ass or mind, may not follow.    ...

It's been twenty years since Tonya Harding's crew had Nancy Kerrigan cracked in the knee, spurring the most lurid, sensational, and bizarre brouhaha in the history of figure skating.   ...

Sean Gallagher identifies the following as companies unlikely to reach 2015 in one piece: Radioshack, BlackBerry, HTC, Zynga and AMD.    ...

Photographer Ron Risman taught a group of newbies how to create timelapse photography. Here are the dramatic results of the four-day workshop.    ...

Meet Richard Meinertzhagen, a fascinating and disturbing character from the golden age of Edwardian science. I first learned about him last weekend, reading the Extinction Countdown blog.  ...

It's been 14 years since MAD Magazine's Don Martin passed away, and if there's one way you can be sure he'd want to be remembered, it's with this alphabetical listing of all the weird noises that ever...

It's been two years since I first blogged Communicore Weekly, a great Disney podcast. Now, two years and 104 episodes later, they've launched an ambitious new project: Communicore Weekly: The Musical!...

Project Loon's consumer-side antenna i.e. the thing that bolts onto users' houses to receive an Internet signal from balloons in the stratosphere Working at Google X is a dream job for makers and des...

I spent some of my holiday catching up on S.M. Stirling's really fun Change Series, his latest being The Given Sacrifice.    ...

Carlo Squin is a computer science professor at UC Berkeley who explores the art of math, and the math of art.    ...

Meanwhile, in Minnesota, it's surfing season. What I find particularly nifty about the Great Lakes surfing community is the way they're driven to amateur meteorology.    ...

Dave writes, "You were kind enough to post my round-up of Canadian politics' dumbest moments last year. Well, this year it seems things have gotten even crazier as we head towards Banana Republic stat...

In addition to wearing All The Gear, All The Time, I'm always looking for new tips and tricks to help me keep my motorcycle upright.    ...

Portlan-based photographer Lanakila MacNaughton created the Women's Motorcycle Exhibition of her photos "to document the new wave of modern female motorcyclists." It's currently on view at the Riversi...

Sometimes before an earthquake, strange bright orbs and glows are seen in the sky, like the scene visible in this video clip captured a half hour before the 2008 quake in Sichuan, China.  &...

Back in April, a redditor complained that a simple plastic cable-comb (used to bundle cables) was too expensive at $45. Later that day, WillySF modelled a printable cable comb and linked to the shape ...

BB pal Scott Matthews took this magnificent photo of New York City during the last sunrise of 2013. The view is looking east from Morningside Heights, across Harlem and Central Park, toward the smoke...

Councilman David Waddell of Indian Trail, North Carolina resigned from his position with a letter written in Klingon. According to Reuters, he wrote in Klingon "because the fierce-looking science fict...

Rick Dyer claims to have killed a Bigfoot after luring it with some pork ribs he purchased at WalMart. "Every test that you can possibly imagine was performed on this body -- from DNA tests to 3D opti...

In perhaps the most Portlandian combination of talents, a unicyclist wears a Darth Vader mask while playing flaming bagpipes, as Chris Higgins relates.    ...

In an escalating international war of words, Chinese and Japanese diplomats are having a fine old time comparing one another to Lord Voldemort, the evil wizard and antagonist of J.K.   ...

You will never believe this. It's just too damn cute. They're porcupettes, people. Baby porcupines are porcupettes.    ...

Paul Hellyer was Canada's Minister of Defense in the mid-1960s. He is now a critic of the United States' willingness to trigger an interstellar war with aliens—aliens who might give us more adv...

Deep Sea News, a blog written largely by professional ocean scientists, has been doing a really good job of debunking bogus stories about Fukushima radiation affecting ocean wildlife near North Ameri...

One year ago today If a corporations are people, do they qualify as carpool-lane passengers?: Corporations are people, I had a corporation in the car with me, therefore I had two people in the car, an...

sta Helgadttir, reserve MP for the Icelandic Pirate Party, writes, "The European copyright reform is here -- and we have the chance to influence policy reform in this area for the first time in at lea...

"It will cost less than a fancy dessert" FaceRig is a program enabling anyone with a webcam to digitally embody any character they want.    ...

Riccardo sez, "Snake is an end-to-end encrypted social network running in a browser (standard Web page or plugin) or as a mobile application.    ...

The American Dialect Society's 2013 Words of the Year (PDF) (voted on earlier this week -- "because" won, because Internet) had some fascinating entries.    ...

What a thrill it is to learn that there is a new Tales of the City novel coming out -- and what a crushing disappointment to discover that it will be the last one.    ...

Here's a collection of gorgeous high-magnification photos of grains of sand, taken by Dr Gary Greenberg, whose site is full of astounding macrophotography shots (check out the moon dust and discover w...

Anjin Anhut's concise explanation of why gender representation sucks in games and geeky movies (see this and especially this) sounds solid -- if depressingly entrenched -- to me.   &nbs...

A photograph shared by Boing Boing reader JKG, shared in the Boing Boing Flickr Pool.    ...

The Dick Dynasty deluxe Wild Dick Caller, as seen on television, which Phil Robinson says is practically guaranteed to attract wild dick.    ...

One year ago today Pedagogy of the Depressed: my experiences as a special ed student in the 1990s: I was diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome in 1998.    ...

The Library of Congress's website hosts a high-resolution scan of a rare edition of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" illustrated by Gustave Doré.    ...

The Library of Congress's website hosts a high-resolution scan of a rare edition of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" illustrated by Gustave Doré.    ...

James Meek's essay "Where will we live?" is a detailed, passionate history of the housing timebomb that is detonating in England today.    ...

Fergus Wilson, one of England's largest landlords, has announced that he will no longer rent to people receiving welfare benefits, and has served all of his benefits-receiving tenants with eviction no...

"Segundo," a photograph shared in the Boing Boing Flickr Pool by reader Bill Benson, who says: "5 days home from the vet and with a little help from the nip, all is well."    ...

When Senator Bernie Sanders asked the NSA whether it was spying on Congress, he was very clear: "gathering metadata on calls made from official or personal phones, content from websites visited or ema...

We're coming up on award season in science fiction and fantasy -- nominations are open or opening for the Hugo Award, the Locus Award, the Nebula Award, and a host of others.    ...

Back in 2012, when Canada's Harper government announced that it would close down national archive sites around the country, they promised that anything that was discarded or sold would be digitized fi...

Back in 2012, when Canada's Harper government announced that it would close down national archive sites around the country, they promised that anything that was discarded or sold would be digitized fi...

One year ago today Best-of Canadian Conservative government blunders for 2012: Such as "A Conservative Minister who attempted to destroy Internet privacy but threw a hissy fit when the details of his ...

Future versions of Ubuntu -- my preferred flavor of the GNU/Linux operating system -- will include a search tool for torrents that will include results from The Pirate Bay.    ...

Catriona tumbled these enraging statistics about gender and representation in games and films for 2013: Women make up 45% of the gaming community and 4% of the protagonists of the 25 biggest ga...

Hey, found this on my computer. No idea what I made it for, but it appears to feature an evil cat god summoned to our plane by the power of Wardenclyffe Tower.    ...

At PandoDaily, entrepreneur Bryan Goldberg pens a surprisingly unpleasant item about San Francisco natives, crafted "satirically" as a dressing down of the tech workers moving in and driving rents up....

Brandon Wiley -- a P2P developer I've known and respected for more than a decade -- writes, "The Operator news reader project was started in order to protect the most censored content on the Internet:...

Liftlabs makes a $300 cutlery handle that uses stabilization technology to cancel out tremors (such as those arising from Parkinson's disease).    ...

Tim Bray's "Content-free" is a great piece on why the term "content" is so objectionable. He raises some good arguments, but misses my favorite one -- one of the origins of the term "content" in techn...

On-screen code from the flicks, with its prop purpose compared to what the program actually does. Above, Julian Assange changes the world in The Fifth Estate by reading the source code of a disk usage...

CJR's Michael Mayer profiles Evgeny Morozov, who "wants to convince us that digital technology cant save the world" but has instead kinda picked up a reputation as an axe-grinding polemicist. &nb...

Fourteen-year-old Jillian Bernstein got herself published in the Journal of the American Medical Association by comparing the transparency of medical costs at Philadelphia hospitals with the transpare...

This very clever Popeye tattoo has unclear provenance -- apparently the artist is Russian tattoo artist Alina Fokina from Ufa, Russia, possibly with help from Jaksic Milan.    ...

In California, it's the contents of tidepools, revealed by particularly strong low tides that are happening now through February. Octopuses, sea stars, and other creatures usually covered by water are...

Turns out, they make lots of noises, but their movement through the water is associated with a sound akin to a cross between a squeaky door closing and high-pitched cow moo-ing.    ...

An private contractor to student debt-holders has a special legal department that goes to bankruptcy court to argue that student loans shouldn't be discharged in bankruptcy, ever.   &nb...

Okay, seriously. They're just trolling us now, right?    ...

1. Contrary to what you might have learned from Star Trek and Star Wars, planets do not have a single climate.    ...

1. Contrary to what you might have learned from Star Trek and Star Wars, planets do not have a single climate.    ...

Seth Godin's daily thoughts are always provocative and thoughtful, but today's is a particularly timely and apt one for the new year.    ...

On Monday October 21, 2013, rock-poster artist Alan Forbes was standing outside a bar in the Lower Haight neighborhood of San Francisco, minding his own business, when someone coldcocked him, complete...

In September, Ryan Lee Carroll won a national contest to watch the Breaking Bad finale with the cast of the show.    ...

Chris Walker created a fascinating interactive graphic of migration patterns within the United States. It's based on US Census Bureau's 2012 American Community Survey estimates.   &nb...

This is an $84,000 belt buckle. The R22 Mark I Mechanically Performing Belt Buckle Bugatti Edition" (via Uncrate)    ...

Mike Vraney, founder of Something Weird Video, has died of lung cancer. He was 56. For decades, Something Weird has been the preeminent source of cult psychotronic and exploitation films that would ha...

Back in October, I predicted that I would love the long-awaited Hyperbole and a Half book, adapted from Allie Brosh's absolute treasure of a webcomic.    ...

Repilot and Introduction To Teaching Im at a loss on how to properly describe something like the fifth season of Community.    ...

David Charles, 21, was arrested for allegedly stealing jars of brain tissue from the Indiana Medical History Museum. Police tracked Charles down after a California fellow purchased the jars for $100 e...

On February 4, Bill Nye "The Science Guy" will debate Ken Ham, Creation Museum founder and Answers In Genesis president/CEO, at The Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky just across the river from C...

One year ago today Excerpt from Jim Woodring's Problematic sketchbook: "an idea battery loaded with shorthand references to long game insights": There are many reasons to be grateful to be alive, and ...

Are you the next Shia LeBoeuf? Pro-folio creates fake art portfolios for anyone smart enough to type their name in a box, complete with bullshit artist statements.    ...

"North Korean leader Kim Jong Un's powerful uncle was stripped naked, thrown into a cage, and eaten alive by a pack of ravenous dogs, according to a newspaper with close ties to China's ruling Communi...

Here's patrician blatherskite David Brooks with an "I smoked weed, but you should be jailed for it" sentiment: Weed, Been There.    ...

It's been nearly a year since my friend Aaron Swartz killed himself, and it's a year his friends and family have passed by trying to make sense of his death and trying to decide what to do about his l...

Published weekly here at BB, Hip Hop Family Tree is now a hit book from Fantagraphics, with    ...

Yesterday's New Statesman published a long, nuanced profile of Paul Dacre, editor-in-chief of the despicable Daily Mail. Dacre's a remarkable and contradictory character, profiled with some sympathy b...

The team's former punter, Chris Kluwe, writing for Deadspin, believes he was fired for his gay rights activism. But he knows what team coach Mike Priefer said to him.    ...

GOP power-brokers have raised a $50M war-chest to fight the nomination of "fools" to GOP seats in the upcoming mid-term elections.    ...

Repilot and Introduction To Teaching Im at a loss on how to properly describe something like the fifth season of Community.    ...

(via Bruce Sterling) Apropos of this.    ...

The Antarctic Heritage Trust of New Zealand announced (PDF) that it had discovered a century-old box of photographic negatives from Captain Scott's last expedition base at Cape Evans, depicting Ernest...

The Boing Boing Happy Mutant Mobile creative conceptualizing continues!    ...

In America, more under-6 kids go to the emergency room from accidental overdose than from car-accidents -- they get hold of medicine and drink the whole bottle.    ...

Game developer Brianna Wu explains that women haven't yet made headway in the critical landscape of game culture, a fact exposed by 2013's Game of the Year lists.    ...

The Boing Boing Happy Mutant Mobile creative conceptualizing continues!    ...

I was a midnight birth, born somewhere between 7/16/71 and 7/17/71 (the doctor let my mom choose my birthday). For New Years babies born around midnight, the choice is more momentous -- a whole year's...

MIT researchers built a 70-pound robot "cheetah" meant to demonstrate the high efficiency of a new electric motor design. Among other improvements, the design enables the impact energy of the robot's...

Boing Boing reader Daniel P. Neal shares this photo of a Lasiurus cinereus (hoary bat) in the Boing Boing Flickr Pool.    ...

Legendary underground artist Paul Mavrides, part of the ZAP Comix axis, co-creator of The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, and a founder of the Church of the SubGenius (praise Bob!), is holding his firs...

Above is the cast of Futurama, as illustrated by an artist named Unrellius. See it larger over at deviantART. "The Cast of Futurama"    ...

When Canadian flute virtuoso Boujemaa Razgui flew to JFK en route to Boston, his 13 handmade flutes, made from rare reeds, did not arrive with him.    ...

Michigan Tech physics professor Robert Nemiroff and grad student Teresa Wilson scoured the Interent for evidence of time travelers. They found none.    ...

Mount Everest isn't the only natural wonder experiencing a ridiculous increase in tourism (and, with it, trash, ecological damage, and risk).    ...

On January 1st, around 1:30 in the morning, astronomers spotted an asteroid heading straight for Earth. The good news is that it was probably only between 6.5 and 14 feet long.    ...

Say dragons did exist. In that alternate universe, how would they breathe fire? (Where the answer is not "magic".) Kyle Hill has a nice explanation for how real-life fire breath might work, and how it...

Say dragons did exist. In that alternate universe, how would they breathe fire? (Where the answer is not "magic".) Kyle Hill has a nice explanation for how real-life fire breath might work, and how it...

Eat lead, ducks! Aaron Smith, at CNN: The gunmaker Mossberg has teamed with Duck Commander, the company owned by "Duck Dynasty's" Robertson clan, to release nine different shotguns, as well as two sem...

For once, the answer to a question in the headline is, "Well, quite possibly." It's been 100 years since a well-documented case of penis captivus — i.e., penis-stuck-in-vagina syndrome — ...

Hobo Nickels, a subject we've been doting on for 12 years now, had a bumper year in 2013, as is evidenced by this gallery of Mr The's nickel-carvings (not all the coins are nickels, but the term is ge...

Double Union is a new community workshop in San Francisco designed for women, and intended to provide a comfortable, welcoming environment to make things.    ...

Did you know that Albert Einstein and Le Szilrd once invented a refrigerator? And a life-saving refrigerator, at that.    ...

Little Maddie is Big Shot Toyworks's first character in a new toy line called "Friendship is Maddness." (via Laughing Squid)    ...

Emmanuel Goldstein from 2600 Magazine sez, "It shouldn't be that surprising, but Volume Three of The Hacker Digest contains all kinds of news items and articles concerning the National Security Agency...

Niemandshand (paywall) [De Volkskrant via @hansaarsman]    ...

Great tech journalism headed up by Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg. Day one at Recode is packed with good stuff: • Kara with the latest from Nest, the company that's finally cracking home automat...

Great tech journalism headed up by Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg. Day one at Recode is packed with good stuff: • Kara with the latest from Nest, the company that's finally cracking home automa...

One year ago today You need a 1.5 ton gamelan, and I know where you can get it: Jon Singer is custodian of a traditional Javanese gamelan (~1.5t worth) and it needs a home.    ...

Bravo, New York Times! Considering the enormous value of the information he has revealed, and the abuses he has exposed, Mr.    ...

A paper in Frontiers in Zoology claims that dogs can sense the Earth's magnetic field, and preferentially align to it when pooping.    ...

Jennifer Jenkins from the Duke Center for the Public Domain writes, "What could have been entering the public domain in the US on January 1, 2014?    ...

Clive Roddy's Etsy store has a number of beautiful landscape rings made from stacked thicknesses of laser-cut birch, which you can mix and match -- there are houses, trees and mountains (there's also ...

"Happy 2014! bread at Noveau Bakery," a photograph shared in the Boing Boing Flickr Pool by rupeegroupie. Share your photos if you want to maybe see 'em on the blog.    ...

PBS science correspondent Miles O'Brien reviews the year's big science developments and headlines with Judy Woodruff. Concerns about energy, climate change and warmer oceans creating stronger storms ...

It's Public Domain day again -- the day when music, books and movies enter the public domain in countries where copyright lasts for the life of the author plus 50 years (hint: not the USA).  ...

This year, I resolve to minimize my use of incaps when writing about commercial products and companies. An incap changes a word into a logo, and has no place in journalism or commentary -- it's brandi...

Antoin sez, "Digital Rights Ireland has done great work challenging mass surveillance laws before the European Court of Justice. But it could now be shut down by the music industry if it can't pay leg...

TIL: The coconut crab can live for 120 years, likes to steal silverware, and eats kittens.    ...

All this month, Turner Classic Movies will be having a special "Science in the Movies" spotlight on Friday nights, with a weekly marathon of science-themed classics hosted by physicist Sean Carroll.&n...

What's better than new shots of Mount St. Helens? How about some new photos of the Ross Sea Party — a group of men who traveled to Antarctica to set up supply depots for Ernest Shackleton in 19...

What's better than new shots of Mount St. Helens? How about some new photos of the Ross Sea Party — a group of men who traveled to Antarctica to set up supply depots for Ernest Shackleton in 19...

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Kurt Opsahl -- a brillliant digital civil liberties attorney who has been suing the US government and the NSA over spying since 2006 -- took to the stage at the 3...

In the 1950s, America's burgeoning space program goosed the science fiction writers and fans who'd already been enthusiastic and optimistic about space, sparking a frenzy of onward-and-upward-looking ...

My friend Erik Vance lives in Mexico City and writes about science. But, in the past year or so, his work covering ocean fisheries has brought him into contact with some of the fallout from the cocain...

It's a nice-looking vest, but it does make a rather strong point about humans' role in animal extinctions. The Formosan Clouded Leopard was one of the animals declared extinct in 2013.  &nbs...

Pot became legal in Colorado today and the AP is on it, with a slice of life piece showing different perspectives on the new marijuana industry's first day on the job.    ...

The Sword and Laser (S&L) is a science fiction and fantasy-themed book club podcast hosted by Veronica Belmont and Tom Merritt.    ...

"Circuits," a photograph shared in the Boing Boing Flickr pool by reader Michael Matise. Share your shots here if you'd like to see 'em maybe show up on the blog.    ...

After months spent merrily ignoring and dismissing warnings about a security problem in their service, Snapchat got told today: 4.6m usernames and phone numbers leaked alongside a claim that 10 lines ...

Tom the Dancing Bug, IN WHICH United States citizens are advised how to submit to the Surveillance State.    ...

The Cops in Bike Lanes tumblr is just what you'd expect: photos from around America of police cars illegally stopped in bike lanes, a practice that forces cyclists to abruptly and dangerously enter th...

One year ago today XKCD on New Year's resolutions: Wise advice for those of us contemplating New Year's resolutions. One year ago today Report: FOIA'd FBI documents point to secret, nationwide Occupy ...

Back in 2009, we held a "Digital Open" contest for teens around the world. One of the winners was Harry Lee, a 16 year old from Melbourne, Australia, who created a game called "Sneaky Cards" that "spr...

"Stars over Portage, Wisconsin," a photograph shared in the Boing Boing Flickr pool by reader Ken Fager. Share your shots here if you'd like to see 'em maybe show up on the blog.   &nbs...

Bloo sez, "With the advent of the US election cycle, it's a great time to reference a remix featuring Lessig - a blues featuring prolific ccmixter contributor    ...

This episode is brought to you by: Squarespace, the all-in-one platform that makes it fast and easy to create your own professional website or online portfolio.    ...

Brian sez, "Lawrence Lessig, former EFF board member, chair of the Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University, founder of the Center for Internet and Society, founding board member of Creative Com...

(Click to embiggen) Woody Guthrie's New Year's resolutions from 1942/43 are just great. I came for the doodles, stayed for the heartfelt sentiment, humanity and wisdom.    ...

A US Federal Court sided with the "DHS Civil Rights/Civil Liberties Impact Assessment of its electronics search policy, concluding that suspicionless searches do not violate the First or Fourth Amendm...

At a talk at the 30C3 in Hamburg, Ryan Lackey proposed an ingenious solution to detecting tampering with your computer, phone or tablet: paint the seams and screw-tops with glitter nail-polish and sna...

One year ago today GIF is word of the year: GIF has been named the Oxford American Dictionarys word of the year.    ...

When I lived in Boulder, Colorado my friend moved into the basement of an old house on University Hill. A couple of months earlier, the previous tenant went to prison for killing his roommate with an ...

Artist Nate Hallinan has a good tutorial on painting creature fur in Photoshop.    ...

Ringclock is an Indiegogo-funded, LED-lit stainless steel fidget ring that tells the time. It has a wireless charger and is very handsomely styled -- reminiscent of Kinekt's brilliant gear rings.&nbs...

The Verge's Kyle Chayla tracked down the real-life dog from the Doge meme! When 51-year-old Japanese kindergarten teacher Atsuko Sato started seeing strange pictures of her eight-year-old Shiba Inu do...

Freedom of the Press Foundation, the pro-transparency organization I serve as a proud board member, is holding a year-end donation drive to support encryption tools for reporters: Protecting the digit...

Yesterday I posted an epic collection of the "Best News Bloopers 2013." But here's a last minute great one in which KUTV Utah reporter Brooke Graham faints during a live report and instantly recover...

Like the T. rex skeleton at the American Museum of Natural History, the blue whale model at London's Natural History Museum is the institution's unofficial mascot.    ...

"Through the Buffalo: A view of the Great Salt Lake, Utah," a photograph shared in the Boing Boing Flickr pool by reader James Losey.    ...

Michael Thomasson, 31, has the world's largest collection of video games. The Buffalo, New York man's basement is filled with approximately 11,000 games (and consoles to play them).   &...

Sunday's Snowden leaks detailing the Tailored Access Operations group -- the NSA's exploit-farming, computer-attacking "plumbers" -- and the ANT's catalog of attacks on common computer equipment and ...

As posted to the twitter account of Texas Repulican congressman Steve Stockman. TIL conservatives lubricate their cheap AK knockoffs by spraying the springs with salt water.    ...

Benjamin Curtis, guitarist for the band School of Seven Bells, has died of cancer. He was 35 years old. (Oklahoma Rock)    ...

The Lapka Bam breathalyzer is a discrete ceramic tube that communicates with iOS or Android to help you keep track of your swilling.    ...

Check out some of the great videos we've blogged lately, which you can watch in our video archives: • The best news bloopers of 2013 • One-minute doc on a man's love for thrifted sweaters ...

Ive been reading books on mobile devices since 1997 when my first daughter was born and I learned that I could hold a Palm Pilot and her at the same time.    ...

Brickbaron's LEGO rendition of The Joker's Fun House is decidedly Gotham's coolest evil lair. See photos over at Flickr. (via Devour)    ...

Mat Honan, for Wired: "I wanted to wear Google Glass during the birth of our second child. My wife was extremely unreceptive to this idea when I suggested it.    ...

iFixit bought one of Apple's tiny but powerful new desktops, then took it apart. For being so compact, the design is surprisingly modular and easy to disassemble.    ...

According to a leaked NSA document, the spy agency can snoop on personal iPhone communications such as SMS messages, location and cellular data.    ...

Nacho Punch created a contrafactual Star Wars/1980s anime adaptation from an alternate timeline that is pretty funny and eerily plausible (especially given the poor grade of animation adaptations und...

The BBC: "The collection has launched with games from five early home consoles, including the Atari 2600 and Colecovision." Even better: the full MAME romset, complete with Internet Copyright Experts ...

It's a hefty $299, but it's moulded leather (rrrr), and it's the Batman backpack. A senior toy industry person said to me recently, "Do you know why Batman is such a killer toy, an evergreen seller, a...

The UK Ministry of Defense has introduced by-laws in the vicinity of bases in the UK, making it a detainable offense to take pictures or make any image of any person or thing; to graze livestock; or t...

At last, a tiny piece of good news for free speech from England and Wales: the Defamation Act 2013 goes into effect tomorrow, and will make it substantially harder for rich, powerful people to sue the...

Read the rest of the Hip Hop Family Tree comics!     ...

Sticker Robot's selling a new pack of great die-cut stickers from Hydro74, featuring five stylized animal heads of daemonic mien, limned and pinstriped and full of empty-eyed menace.   ...

(Click to embiggen) Tor.com has republished a great chart from Bad for You: Exposing the War on Fun!, forthcoming in on January 7.    ...