The Latest from Boing Boing |  |
- Kerry Tribe's H.M.
- Felt Game Boy with vintage game charms
- Game uses fun as incentive to solve hard chip-design problems
- Movie/record industry rep says that you shouldn't expect to be able to play your media for as long as you own it
- Katamari Damacy wedding!
- Star Wars Cantina song, a capella
- Kids' tees featuring characters with crazy mouths and off colors
- Steampunk cosplayers at ComicCon
- Steampunk dystopian Disneyland game -- Offworld
- Coincidence?
- The Most Elephantest Switch You've Ever Seen
- Money-related posts at Credit.com
- More Griping About Advertising: Bing Edition
- How to make kombucha
- Amsterdam: O'Reilly Factor vs. reality
- Double Nickels on the Dime by the Minutemen turns 25.
- Old Ad for Fake Guns
- Karl Schroeder on "rewilding" -- openness, government, and autonomous nature as an economic actor
- Sketches of the Drug Czars in Vanity Fair
- The Sweetly Diabolic Art of Jim Flora -- "one of the great overlooked paintbox fantasists of the twentieth century"
- Recently on Offworld: the 16-bit arthouse, chiptunes dance parties, real-life Wasteland clutter
- Associated Press DRM diagram demystified (with cuss-words)
- Primer on "high frequency trading" -- AKA stockbots
- Daniel "Robot Uprising" Wilson's debut story: "The Nostalgist"
- Tales Designed to Thrizzle: comic anthology, a cross between MAD and McSweeney's
- New book on viral culture: And Then There's This
- Top 10 Ironic Ads From History
| Posted: 30 Jul 2009 12:58 AM PDT Jason Torchinsky is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Jason has a book out now, Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is a tinkerer and artist and writes for the Onion News Network. He lives with his partner Sally, five animals, too many old cars, and a shed full of crap. Earlier this year, I did a bit of technical work for an artist, Kerry Tribe, on her installation/film project called H.M. It was a remarkable piece. At its core, it was a documentary about a man who had some experimental neurosurgery that left him with an active memory of 20 seconds. What made the piece so remarkable was that it played back on two 16mm projectors, the film being delayed by exactly 20 seconds from one to the other. The film was shot in such a way that the two projections, displaced in time by 20 seconds, worked together uncannily well, sometimes displaying complementary images, and even, in one visually notable part, forming a complete image that spanned over the two screens. It's pretty great. Kerry and I are in the early stages of a collaboration I'm quite excited about, but even if I wasn't I'd encourage everyone to check out more of her work. There's not really a good way to see H.M. online, since the mechanical projectors and the maze of looped film form such an integral part of the piece, but I think it is traveling around a bit, so the best I can tell you is to keep your eyes open for it.  |
| Felt Game Boy with vintage game charms Posted: 29 Jul 2009 11:43 PM PDT   Jill sez, "This handcrafted (Etsy) 'real world' take on Game Boy consists of a felt 'Game Boy' console with little clay marios, luigis, mushrooms, turtles, tetris pieces and other iconic video game characters, and instructions to create scavenger hunts and active play in real physical space - encouraging couch potato gamer kids to spend some time moving around. " iSpy Gameboy Bag with video game charms FREE Shipping (Thanks, Jill!) |
| Game uses fun as incentive to solve hard chip-design problems Posted: 29 Jul 2009 10:38 PM PDT A new game prototype called FunSAT from University of Michigan computer scientists Valeria Bertacco and Andrew DeOrio marries human intuition to computerized chip design to solve problems that computers are bad at by making it fun for humans to help them: By solving challenging problems on the FunSAT board, players can contribute to the design of complex computer systems, but you don't have to be a computer scientist to play. The game is a sort of puzzle that might appeal to Sudoku fans.Game Utilizes Human Intuition To Help Computers Solve Complex Problems |
| Posted: 29 Jul 2009 10:35 PM PDT Glyn sez, "Buying DRMed content, then having that content stop working later is fair writes Steven Metalitz, the lawyer who represents the MPAA, RIAA in a letter to the top legal advisor at the Copyright Office." "We reject the view," he writes in a letter to the top legal advisor at the Copyright Office, "that copyright owners and their licensees are required to provide consumers with perpetual access to creative works. No other product or service providers are held to such lofty standards. No one expects computers or other electronics devices to work properly in perpetuity, and there is no reason that any particular mode of distributing copyrighted works should be required to do so."I've got 78RPM records from my grandparents' basement that play just fine today -- and I've got Logo programs I wrote in 1979 that I can run today. I own a piano roll from 1903 that I can play back if I can clear the space for a player piano. I've got books printed in the 17th century that can still be read -- and if they can't be read, they can be scanned and the scans can be read. This is what an open format means. It's hilarious that the same yahoos who argue for perpetual copyright (implying that copyrighted works have value forever) also argue for time-limited ownership (implying that people who buy copyrighted works should be content to enjoy them for a few weeks or years until the DRM stops working). Remember: when you buy DRM, you really rent, until such time as the DRM company goes bust or changes its mind. When you buy DRM-free, you get something your great-grandkids can enjoy. Big Content: ludicrous to expect DRMed music to work forever (Thanks, Glyn!) |
| Posted: 29 Jul 2009 10:29 PM PDT  Elissa sez, "These folks did a Katamari Damacy wedding, and it's totally adorable." It certainly is! Look at the centerpieces! Bravo! Aidra and Ernest (Thanks, Elissa!) Previously:
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| Star Wars Cantina song, a capella Posted: 29 Jul 2009 10:24 PM PDT Here's an a capella version of the Star Wars Cantina music performed by Sixteen Feet -- what an awesome cover! (via Making Light) |
| Kids' tees featuring characters with crazy mouths and off colors Posted: 29 Jul 2009 10:21 PM PDT  French kids' clothes maker Underten has a sweet line of baby tees with crazy-mouthed TV characters. |
| Steampunk cosplayers at ComicCon Posted: 29 Jul 2009 10:18 PM PDT  This year's ComicCon featured a strong contingent of steampunk cosplayers, as evidenced by this gallery at KPBS. Steampunks At Comic-Con International, 2009 (Thanks, Fipi Lele!) Previously: |
| Steampunk dystopian Disneyland game -- Offworld Posted: 29 Jul 2009 10:16 PM PDT Over on Offworld, our Brandon's spotted something custom-made to make me slaver: concept art for a steampunk dystopian Disney parks game called Epic Mickey: Gallery: the broke-down steampunk dystopian Magic Kingdom of Epic Mickey |
| Posted: 29 Jul 2009 06:34 PM PDT Jason Torchinsky is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Jason has a book out now, Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is a tinkerer and artist and writes for the Onion News Network. He lives with his partner Sally, five animals, too many old cars, and a shed full of crap.  This is something I found a good while ago, and have posted at other places online; but it's just one of those things that I think merits looking back at, periodically, to help better understand the mysteries of existence. The top, of course, is that famous picture of Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald. The bottom is the cast of Bagger Vance, horsing around at the opening night party, as seen in Variety. Were they trying to recreate this image? If so, why the hell would they do that? Did the photographer see the resemblance? There's so many questions here, all vastly more interesting than anything Bagger Vance normally produces. Man. It gives me chills. |
| The Most Elephantest Switch You've Ever Seen Posted: 29 Jul 2009 04:23 PM PDT Jason Torchinsky is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Jason has a book out now, Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is a tinkerer and artist and writes for the Onion News Network. He lives with his partner Sally, five animals, too many old cars, and a shed full of crap. This is a power switch salvaged from an old PC. It is also the switch that most resembles an elephant, beating out its nearest competitor by a factor of 5. In fact, on the SPRS (Standardized Pachyderm Resemblance Scale) it scored an incredible 8.4-- a mammoth only scores 8.2!  Remember this day. One day, your kids will ask where you were when you saw it. |
| Money-related posts at Credit.com Posted: 29 Jul 2009 04:14 PM PDT Here are some of my recent posts about money for credit.com. Why Tightwads Marry Spendthrifts: "People tend to be attracted to mates with opposing emotional reactions toward spending." How to Trick Yourself Into Producing the Sense of "Quasi Elation Associated with Pleasurable Experiences": "People prefer pay raises with inflation over pay cuts with stable prices -- even when the two scenarios are financially identical." Think Being Rich, Good Looking, and Famous Will Make You Happy? You're Wrong: "Achieving 'materialistic and image-related' goals, such as wealth and fame, can have negative consequences like 'headaches, stomachaches, and loss of energy'" Feeling Blue? Try Counting Some Money: "The next time you find yourself down in the dumps, grab a stack of money (it doesn't even have to be your own) and count it. According to the results of a new study, it'll cheer you up." Avoid Unplanned Charges with Single Use Credit Cards: "A website called DazzleWhite Pro lures you into filling out a form for a "free" sample of a teeth whitening product, then starts charging your credit card $58.76 per month for the stuff." How to Succeed by Not Eating Marshmallows: "I'm going to leave the room for fifteen minutes. When I return, if you have not eaten the marshmallow, I'll give you another one and then you can eat them both." Our Tendency to Believe Confident People Over Cautious People: "People have a statistically significant tendency to prefer the advice of confident advisers even after those advisers demonstrate themselves to be unreliable." |
| More Griping About Advertising: Bing Edition Posted: 29 Jul 2009 03:36 PM PDT Jason Torchinsky is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Jason has a book out now, Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is a tinkerer and artist and writes for the Onion News Network. He lives with his partner Sally, five animals, too many old cars, and a shed full of crap. My previous rant about an advertising campaign had pretty mixed results, so let's try again. This time I want to talk about the television campaign for Microsoft's new search engine, Bing. My problem with these ads is that they rely on one of the oldest, hoariest advertising tricks in the book: make up the disease, then sell the cure. This has been done for years; occasional bad breath became the dread disease "halitosis" in the 1930s, thanks to Listerene (which had previously been sold as, among other things, a dandruff tonic), for example. Now Microsoft is going to save us from "Search Overload Syndrome." Now, I know they're not thinking I'm going to take this literally, that using (implied) Google is going to make me into some free-associating loon with no self-control, but that doesn't mean I have to like it. It feels like they're just trying a bit too hard to find something to gripe about. What are they suggesting? Google gives too much information? And all that information will destroy your brain? They could have been onto something if Bing actually did anything remarkably different. I've been playing with it, trying to see if normal searches returned something profoundly more relevant, but so far I can't tell the difference. Now that I'm nice and terrified of getting Search Overload Syndrome (SOS), I'd be a fool not to be equally afraid of Bing. In fact, to be really safe, I should just start calling the reference desk at my local library and let that smug librarian risk her brain and social life with all that mind-destroying web searching. I guess the real lesson here is that if you're going to make up a disease to scare people with, it should have at least some kind of plausibility, otherwise, who's going to be scared? It's like trying to sell a pill to keep people from getting Dutch Elm Disease; we're just not worried about it. |
| Posted: 29 Jul 2009 02:36 PM PDT I first started making kombucha in 1995, but when we had our first child in 1997, I was knocked out of many patterns, including making this tasty fermented beverage. About a month ago I started making it again. It's really easy. Before you make your own kombucha, here are a few reasons why you might not want to:
Why do I drink it? Because it's fun to make and the flavor is almost addictive. The benefits outweigh the risks, at least for me. Here's how I make it. (Click on photos for enlargement.): 1. Get some live kombucha. I foolishly paid $25 to an online store that sells the culture in little vials (as seen above). As I later found out, you can buy a bottle of kombucha for a few dollars at grocery store and use that as your starter. If you have a friend who makes it, ask them for a "mother" (the floppy, blobby, disc that floats on top of a batch of kombucha) and a cup of the kombucha tea. 2. Collect the ingredients: sugar, vinegar (or a half cup of the kombucha tea from your last batch), tea bags (any kind). I used green tea for my first batch, but I'm now using decaf black tea. 3. Add 4-8 tea bags into a little less than one gallon of water. I used filtered water and a ceramic crock. I've heard you shouldn't use metal containers to make kombucha. Let it steep for a while. You can use hot water to steep the tea, but let it cool down before you add any culture (to prevent killing it). 4. Stir in 1 or 1 and 1/2 cups of sugar. The sugar is the fuel for the kombucha microbes. I have been using one cup of sugar, but in the batch I started yesterday I used one and one-half cups because I want it to be stronger and more vinegary. I have heard that the more sour it is, the more resistant it is to bacterial infection. (How do you like my hand carved spoon?) 5. Stir in 1/2 cup of kombucha from your last batch, or 1/4 cup of vinegar and a vial of expensive kombucha culture you foolishly purchased over the Internet. 6. Cover crock with cloth for a week. If a "mushroom" (not a real mushroom) has grown on the surface, that means it worked! Save the mushroom and use it to cover your next batch. In a week, the mushroom will have another mushroom attached to it that you can peel off and use, discard, or give away. 7. Transfer the tangy, fizzy beverage into a bottle and refrigerate. Some websites say not to store kombucha in plastic but I like this one gallon bottle.
If you have any tips to share about kombucha, please put them in the comments. |
| Amsterdam: O'Reilly Factor vs. reality Posted: 29 Jul 2009 12:45 PM PDT Bill O'Reilly recently invited a couple of pert blond Republican strategists to frighten Fox viewers about Amsterdam's lax pot laws, which have made the city a "mess," and "cesspool of corruption." The video above was made by a citizen of Amsterdam who used real statistics about drug use in his city compared with drug use in the US. |
| Double Nickels on the Dime by the Minutemen turns 25. Posted: 29 Jul 2009 11:18 AM PDT
Update: Below, a shot taken of the Minutemen back in the early days, by photog Glen E. Friedman (whose work we've covered in multiple BBV episodes, and who is thanked in the liner notes on Double Nickels). "It's a photo taken backstage at the Whisky where they were practically the house band in the early 80's," Glen tells us. "They usually had full heads of hair but as a joke shaved them just before this show." One of Glen's favorite Minutemen songs is after the jump.
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| Posted: 29 Jul 2009 10:29 AM PDT Jason Torchinsky is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Jason has a book out now, Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is a tinkerer and artist and writes for the Onion News Network. He lives with his partner Sally, five animals, too many old cars, and a shed full of crap. You know how hard it is to find that perfect gift for that special someone in your life who really wants to get killed by a cop, but doesn't want to actually endanger anybody? I think I may have the answer right here. All you need is $44.95 and probably a time machine back to 1977, because I can't imagine this is legal now. This ad brings up so many questions: who is this targeted at? Even in a theater prop sort of context, I don't see how the weight and feel would matter. Is it for potential criminals, who want the intimidation of a gun but are hedging their bets if they get caught, it won't be with a deadly weapon? It does say "will fool experts," I bet especially if the "expert" is looking down the barrel of it. The best line is, of course, "Decorate your den, office, rec-room." I can just imagine it. "Oh, your potpourri bowl artfully strewn with pistols is absolutely wonderful!" A few handguns tossed around in just the right spots really makes a rec-room, too.  |
| Karl Schroeder on "rewilding" -- openness, government, and autonomous nature as an economic actor Posted: 29 Jul 2009 12:18 PM PDT Here's writer, futurist and all-round dude Karl Schroeder's talk from this year's O'Reilly Open Source Con: "The Rewilding: A Metaphor." In his inimitable style, Karl first describes a semi-human future in which things as abstract as "nature" and "politics" participate directly in the economy and in online discussions, then connects this to open source and open government. It's a hell of a mind-bender, as only Karl can manage. Bravo! OSCON 09: Karl Schroeder, "The Rewilding: A Metaphor" (via Futurismic) Previously:
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| Sketches of the Drug Czars in Vanity Fair Posted: 29 Jul 2009 09:30 AM PDT Mike Hogan says: "Ricardo Cortes, author of the pro-pot children's book It's Just a Plant, created an illustrated history of America's Drug War for vanityfair.com. It tests the assumptions that have led the US to spend $50 billion a year on a military campaign against an unhealthy habit and questions whether Obama's drug czar, Gil Kerlikowske, has the will or the ability to follow up on his pledge to end the Drug War at long last."
In 1980, Ronald Reagan shifted responsibility for the anti-drug effort from the health department to the Department of Justice. "I would say that this is the most intense federal effort ever against drugs," said Associate Attorney General Rudolph Giuliani, who oversaw the D.E.A. and the Bureau of Prisons and who orchestrated expansion of the F.B.I. into drug enforcement. Senator Joe Biden began advocating for a Cabinet-level position to coordinate federal agencies—a "drug czar." So began the era of "zero tolerance." Reagan's presidency reversed his predecessors' drug-control policies, and funding for law enforcement rose to three times that for abuse-prevention and treatment programs. |
| Posted: 29 Jul 2009 09:21 AM PDT The Sweetly Diabolic Art of Jim Flora, edited by Irwin Chusid and Barbara Economon, was published today. Jim Flora was best known as a jazz record cover artist, but he also created many sweetly diabolic magazine illustrations in the 1940s and 1950s. Until Irwin Chusid started curating and assembling art books about Flora several years ago, it was hard to find examples of Flora's work. Tim Biskup told me the the first time he saw Flora's work (when he was in a used record store) he felt his brain rewiring on the spot, forever changing his approach to art. Irwin Chusid sent me a PDF of the book a while back and I gave him the following blurb: "Jim Flora's artwork is ultraviolet radiation in tempera and ink — it crackles with such energy, it practically sizzles ozone." Jim Flora (1914-1998), long admired for boisterous 1940s and '50s record cover illustrations and a later series of best-selling children's books, has been rediscovered in recent years as an alchemist of bizarre and politely disturbing imagery. The Sweetly Diabolic Art of Jim Flora burnishes the reputation of one of the great overlooked paintbox fantasists of the twentieth century. |
| Recently on Offworld: the 16-bit arthouse, chiptunes dance parties, real-life Wasteland clutter Posted: 29 Jul 2009 09:11 AM PDT  Recently on Offworld we went deep into the virtual arthouse, as McSweeney's DVD offshoot Wolphin screens a faux-16-bit short, Ledo & Ix, we discovered a quarter-square-mile Second Life art/vinyl toy gallery that never was (above), and we watched the first video of Fig. 8, a game where a bicycle wends its way through "the surreal world of an 'architectural' diagram." We also listened to the delightful electro-pop space opera soundtrack of Sidhe's recent PS3 Breakout/shooter Shatter, poked our head into a recent and awesomely Wareheim-ian chiptunes dance party, and saw Ubisoft officially announce Scott Pilgrim, the game (but offer frustratingly few additional details). Finally, we saw footage of Cryptic Sea's terrifyingly sparse Lunar Lander tribute, a plan to bring Sonic CD to the iPhone, another Japanese indie freeware hit coming to WiiWare, a project to MS Paint a Pikachu, and our 'one shot's for the day: Fallout 3 Wasteland clutter in real life, and an 8-bit dark castle from the depths of the Cube Kingdom. |
| Associated Press DRM diagram demystified (with cuss-words) Posted: 29 Jul 2009 08:13 AM PDT  In the comments for today's earlier post, Associated Press claims to have discovered magic anti-news-copying beans, BB reader Dequeued points us to this marvellous remix of the Associated Press's DRM system (click through for the whole glorious NSFW thing!). |
| Primer on "high frequency trading" -- AKA stockbots Posted: 29 Jul 2009 07:29 AM PDT Ars Technica gives us a look into the world of "High Frequency Trading" (HFT), a lightspeed quick automated style of stock-market trading that uses semiautonomous systems to buy and sell assets in a fraction of a second, for a fraction of a cent more than they paid, a billion times, and make real money: Some categories of "predatory algos" closely monitor the markets in order to sniff out exactly these types of hidden large orders, so that the algo can trade against them. For instance, if a predatory algo detects that someone is trying to hide a large sell order for INTC by trickling it out into the market in small blocks, it might work to bid down the price of INTC just a bit so that it can pick up those blocks at a discount and then sell them for a profit when the share price floats back up to the market's earlier, non-manipulated valuation...The Matrix, but with money: the world of high-speed trading (via Futurismic) |
| Daniel "Robot Uprising" Wilson's debut story: "The Nostalgist" Posted: 29 Jul 2009 06:54 AM PDT Tor.com has just published Daniel H Wilson's debut short story, "The Nostalgist," and it's a lovely, sweet and sad piece of pinnocchiopunk. You probably know Wilson from his immensely popular nonfiction books, How To Survive a Robot Uprising: Tips on Defending Yourself Against the Coming Rebellion and Where's My Jetpack?: A Guide to the Amazing Science Fiction Future that Never Arrived . Daniel's got a PhD in robotics from CMU, and a poet's soul, which is an unbeatable combination. Liz Gorinsky, Daniel's editor at Tor, adds, "Within the next few days, we'll also be running a video/visual arts/poetry contest that asks our readers to demonstrate why they should be spared by the incoming robot overlord." The Nostalgist (Thanks, Liz!) |
| Tales Designed to Thrizzle: comic anthology, a cross between MAD and McSweeney's Posted: 31 May 2009 06:43 AM PDT  The first four issues of Michael Kupperman's awesome comedy comics zine Tales Designed to Thrizzle have been collected into a single hardcover volume that is a superdense wad of funny, surreal, bent humor, including The Buzz Aldrin Mysteries (the radio operator has been murdered, any one of the seven people on the moon could have done it!); two cowboys kicking the hell out of each other for 10 panels while shouting "I'd say comics are serious literature" and "I say they ain't"; the World Famous Apairy Hat (Girls Love it, Bears Want to Stick Their Paws In It!); a thirties nostalgia comic about an unemployed former courtroom ghost who is shrunk down and has nothing but amoebas to eat for two years; and a video game called Big City Marathon ("Keep your finger on the forward arrow key for 26 hours to win"). This is weird, funny, Subgenius-esque toilet reading that will keep you very regular. |
| New book on viral culture: And Then There's This Posted: 29 Jul 2009 06:17 AM PDT Carrie McLaren is a guest blogger at Boing Boing and coauthor of Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture. She lives in Brooklyn, the former home of her now defunct Stay Free! magazine.  My friend Bill Wasik has a book out now that should appeal to Boing Boing types, And Then There's This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture. Several years ago, Wasik started the Mob Project, which launched flash mobs as an insanely popular fad in New York, then globally. We interviewed him in Stay Free! about it a while back.Wasik's book looks at how ideas spread online through social networks and other media channels. In each chapter, Wasik, who is an editor at Harper's magazine, conducts some sort of prank to explore the ways single messages can evolve and have massive ripple effects. I especially dug his observations on how the internet and mp3 swapping have affected indie rock (since, as a clueless middle-ager, I haven't kept up): with bands and their careers now playing a much smaller role than individual songs and musicians. |
| Top 10 Ironic Ads From History Posted: 29 Jul 2009 06:00 AM PDT Carrie McLaren is a guest blogger at Boing Boing and coauthor of Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture. She lives in Brooklyn, the former home of her now defunct Stay Free! magazine.  Earlier this month, Jason and I guest blogged at Consumerist. Here's something I posted there that might interest you all as well: Remember when you could buy barbiturates for the baby? Cover your house with asbestos? Or get heroin from the doctor? Okay, probably not, but thanks to the immortal beauty of advertising, you can take a trip back in time. Here's our pick of some of the most ironic ads in American history.(with apologies to my writing partner, Torchinsky, who loves Corvairs) |
or 
. R.I.P., D. Boon. (via 
He was an old man who lived in a modest gonfab, and over the last eighty hours his Eyes™ and Ears™ had begun to fail. In the first forty hours, he had ignored the increasingly strident sounds of the city of Vanille and focused on teaching the boy who lived with him. But after another forty hours the old man could no longer stand the Doppler-affected murmur of travelers on the slidewalks outside, and the sight of the boy's familiar deformities became overwhelming. It made the boy sad to see the old man's stifled revulsion, so he busied himself by sliding the hanging plastic sheets of the inflatable dwelling into layers that dampened the street noise. The semitransparent veils were stiff with grime and they hung still and useless like furled, ruined sails. 
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