The Latest from Boing Boing |  |
- Record company embraces use of its music in YouTube wedding video, makes money
- Call for submissions for an event to honor Toronto's venerable, shuttered Pages Books
- Creepy Russian high-voltage towers
- Matrix Online goes out with a party, not a whimper
- People Like Angry Car Faces. I Don't.
- How to avoid ads in Gmail (or not)
- Electro-Mechanical Arcade Games
- Oil well rule of thumb
- Blue Food Coloring Un-Paralyzes Rats
- Susan Blackmore: "Genes, memes, and now what?"
- Shrink: I will create a WoW guild of shrinks to treat WoW addiction
- How-To: Rubber hose chair
- Woman and dead husband live together
- Bill Maher: Birthers must be stopped
- Photos of unusual animals
- Water-fueled "jet pack"
- A Few More Questions
- Last chance for Mark and Sarina's hamburger bunny T-shirt
- Awesome jump blues/swing duo doing "Nagasaki"
- Here's an index for our book, Ad Nauseam
- Recently on Offworld: sex and death at Nintendo, zombie concubines, Facebook on DS
- Web Zen: gnome + garden zen
- Music downloads offered on Chinese military's new website
- India's airlines to ground all planes and press for bailout
- Steampunk monkey cigarette card set
- Geektastic: anthology of nerdy fiction and comics
- Routines are easier to remember when combined with complex "silly" motor tasks
- HOWTO make a prison soldering iron
- Canadians vow mass-mooning of US spy-blimp
- Rich NY town tries to shut down children's library because poor kids might use it
| Record company embraces use of its music in YouTube wedding video, makes money Posted: 31 Jul 2009 11:47 PM PDT The video of a couple's awesome dance-number wedding entrance I posted last week featured Chris Brown's song "Forever," used without permission. Instead of suing or having the video taken down, Brown's label opted to add a link to buy the track to the page. And made a truckload of money. So many of the record industry giants are publicly traded companies. Why aren't their shareholders howling for more stuff like this -- which actually makes money -- and less pointless Grand Guignols to extract a couple grand from some hapless teen, alienating a future customer and her family and friends for life? I now pronounce you monetized: a YouTube video case study |
| Call for submissions for an event to honor Toronto's venerable, shuttered Pages Books Posted: 31 Jul 2009 11:43 PM PDT Evan from Toronto's Coach House Books sez, "After three decades in business, indie bookstore Pages Books and Magazines is shutting its doors on August 31, but not without a proper farewell from Toronto. On Tuesday, September 8, 'Afterword: A Celebration of 30 Years,' will bring together friends and family of Pages to share their stories and images, which we're asking you to submit for consideration for the event." Pages requests memories for send-off bash (Thanks, Evan!) (Image: Matthew Kim) Previously: |
| Creepy Russian high-voltage towers Posted: 31 Jul 2009 11:38 PM PDT  These beautiful high-voltage towers in Istra, Russia, near Moscow are the Experimental Grounds for High-Voltage Generation. They still light up and fire streaks of lightning into the night. Creepy High Voltage Installations (Thanks, Bill!) (Image: Master Z Great) |
| Matrix Online goes out with a party, not a whimper Posted: 31 Jul 2009 11:34 PM PDT Sony Online's multiplayer game The Matrix Online is now dead, as of yesterday. But rather than simply announcing that they were pulling the plug and then watching the players dwindle away as D-day approached, Sony decided to work the shutdown into the storyline of the game, changing the game's graphics so that they decayed and crumbled. The last weeks of The Matrix Online were a party, with all players -- past and present -- invited along. It's a rare institution that contemplates its own orderly demise. Think of all the clubs and mailing lists and communities you've been a part of that have gone out with a whimper, bleeding out by drips, until there's nothing left. Kudos to Sony for giving a proper send-off to a place that so many people had loved and played in. Reminder: Check out The Matrix Online before it decompiles (via Wonderland) |
| People Like Angry Car Faces. I Don't. Posted: 31 Jul 2009 04:59 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. First off, I love cars, I own an odd one, and, thanks in part to Make: magazine, I've even raced them a little bit. That's why I've deluded myself into thinking my opinion on this has any relevance here at all. So, if you don't mind, indulge me. Recently, a study showed that people tended to prefer cars with "angry" faces. Auto designers have known this for a while, as the vast majority of cars available today have "faces" (you know, the front end arrangement of headlights, grille, and shapes that we tend to read like a face) that are at least aggressive, and at most absolutely freaking livid. This is across the board, too-- from entry-level cars to minivans to expensive sports sedans-- they all look like pissed-off turtle robots. There are exceptions, of course, but many of the most notable ones (New Beetle, Mini) are modern updates of vintage designs.  Now, I think there is absolutely a place for aggression, determination, and even a bit of anger in auto design-- some of my favorite cars use this as a major styling inspiration-- it's more about raw power and aggression becoming the default look for all cars that disturbs me. Personally, the visual character I've always sought out in a car is a certain degree of plucky fun-- something upbeat, capable, but not so damn serious all the time. Now, I don't expect everyone to have the same tastes as me, but there seems to be a growing homogenization in auto design to favor these cars that look like douchebags. The fact that the statement everyone wants to make by the vehicle they drive is one of intimidation and power seems like it's the symptom of something unpleasant going on in our culture. Maybe someone smarter than me can shed some light on this; I know people want to seem successful and powerful, to some degree, so maybe that's it. I don't think this is the case in all cultures, as Japan seems full of cars so confusingly cute you want to spit. Cars form part of the constant background of our visual lives, so it's worth taking a look at them every now and then and seeing how they make you feel. Lately, when I look around a parking lot, it feels more like I've stumbled into a den of demented robot land-sharks. If I had it my way, the land sharks would still be there, but there'd be a good assortment of other faces out there, some of which would be looking like they just want to chug some 87 octane, go fast and have fun. Oh, and maybe get your ass to work on time. |
| How to avoid ads in Gmail (or not) Posted: 31 Jul 2009 06:57 PM 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. Someone called Joester is purporting to show us how to block out gmail ads by using magic words in email messages, such as 9/11 or "suicide." In other words, the ads that appear when your email is catastrophe-free: ...are gone when the email you receive contains trigger words: But it's not as easy as it sounds. Putting the key words in a signature file doesn't work; the ads return. Also, writes Joester:If the message runs long google turns the ads back on. However, if you add another "sensitive" word they go off again. After extensive testing I've discovered you need 1 catastrophic event or tragedy for every 167 words in the rest of the email.Questions remain. What are all the trigger words? How do you avoid scaring the people who receive your emails with your seemingly pointless references to incest and gang rape? More importantly, shouldn't this be more accurately described as a method for helping the people who you email who have gmail avoid ads? |
| Electro-Mechanical Arcade Games Posted: 31 Jul 2009 02:29 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. Before computers became small, cheap, and reliable enough for this purpose, people still had the desire to stand in front of armoire-sized cabinets, stare into a glass panel, and pretend to do things they normally didn't do, like kill aliens, drive like a madman, or work in a junkyard. The way they did these things was with wonderful, complicated electromechanical arcade games. These electromechanical games are incredible contraptions, using every kind of trick-- projections, spinning drums, remotely articulated models, whirring discs, mirrors, lights-- to give the illusions of speed, action, explosions, distance, and more. Looking at them, it's amazing they worked so well in such a high-abuse public environment. These are real engineering gems, long gone, and very rare now. Luckily, there's a bunch of videos out there, since stills really don't do these justice: Speedway, Hill Climb, Invaders, Haunted House. Enjoy! |
| Posted: 31 Jul 2009 02:16 PM PDT From the Rules of Thumb website: A deep oil well has the same proportions as a human hair ten feet long. -- Harold E. HaynesPicturing an oil well |
| Blue Food Coloring Un-Paralyzes Rats Posted: 31 Jul 2009 01:05 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 article at National Geographic gives a good gist of what's going on: apparently, regular old blue food coloring, like the stuff you find in Gatorade or M&Ms, has been found to reduce spinal cord trauma and inflammation, leading to at least a partial reversal of paralysis, at least in some mice. And, unlike other treatments, there's no toxic effects. And the best part? They turned blue! Now there's hope for anyone hoping to both regain use of paralyzed limbs and a desire to look like a really cold guy in a cartoon.  |
| Susan Blackmore: "Genes, memes, and now what?" Posted: 31 Jul 2009 12:06 PM PDT Susan Blackmore, author of the excellent book The Meme Machine, has suggested that beyond genes and memes, there is a new evolutionary "replicator" on the scene. She doesn't have a name for it, but it's related to the difference she sees between memes and digital information. From New Scientist: Memes work differently from genes, and digital information works differently from memes, but some general principles apply to them all. The accelerating expansion, the increasing complexity, and the improving interconnectivity of all three are signs that the same fundamental design process is driving them all. Road networks look like vascular systems, and both look like computer networks, because interconnected systems outcompete isolated systems. The internet connects billions of computers in trillions of ways, just as a human brain connects billions of neurons in trillions of ways. Their uncanny resemblance is because they are doing a similar job."Evolution's third replicator: Genes, memes, and now what?" Previously: |
| Shrink: I will create a WoW guild of shrinks to treat WoW addiction Posted: 31 Jul 2009 11:54 AM PDT A London-based shrink named Dr Richard Graham wants to create an all-psychiatrist guild for World of Warcraft to treat "addiction" to the game, in the game. And he wants them all to get free accounts. He has called on Blizzard Entertainment, the company that makes World of Warcraft, to waive or discount the costs associated with joining the game so that therapists can more easily communicate with at-risk players in their preferred environment.Addiction therapists signing up to World of Warcraft (via Futurismic) |
| Posted: 31 Jul 2009 11:44 AM PDT  This handsome chair looks like a prototype you'd find in the workshop of a mid-century furniture designer. Instructions are at Instructables. |
| Woman and dead husband live together Posted: 31 Jul 2009 11:42 AM PDT A 66-year-old woman lived with her dead husband for two months in their home near Copenhagen. The man had cancer and his death was only discovered by authorities after family members called police. The Copenhagen Post reports that the "woman will be charged with failing to ensure medical assistance for her husband." "Woman lives two months with dead husband" (via Fortean Times) |
| Bill Maher: Birthers must be stopped Posted: 31 Jul 2009 11:54 AM PDT Bill Maher is seriously funny in this LA Times op-ed about the growing threat of the birther movement. (Maher wrote this before poll results came out showing that a majority of Republicans either don't believe or aren't sure Obama was born in the United States). No matter how dumb, the people who are questioning whether Obama was born in the U.S. could eventually cause real problems. UPDATE: This graph shows the geographical breakdown of birthers and fact-based thinkers.
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| Posted: 31 Jul 2009 11:23 AM PDT  Who needs to explore outer space when our own world has so many wonderfully weird animals! |
| Posted: 31 Jul 2009 11:13 AM PDT The Jetlev-Flyer is a tethered jet pack that uses water instead of rocket fuel. The pressurized water is pumped up a hose attached to a custom Jet-Ski. From Popular Science: "A Water-Powered Jetpack" Previously: |
| Posted: 31 Jul 2009 10:39 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. 1. If you were designing your own superhero costume, how would you accessorize? a. Cape b. Scarf c. Sidekick d. Gun e. Stack of fliers saying you are a superhero 2. What part of Canada would you most like to sleep with? a. Victoria b. Regina c. Moosejaw d. Calgary e. Prince Edward Island 3. Burrito is to Chimichanga as a. Jonathan Silverman is to Matthew Broderick b. Gary Busey is to Nick Nolte c. Paul Rieser is to Richard Lewis d. Kelsey Grammar is to anyone else with an enormous freaking forehead 4. What's the worst thing you can say to a mugger? a. Mom? b. Don't forget to check my other shoe. c. I don't think you're man enough to fire that gun d. Now that you mention it, there may be something in my rectum 5. Your butler tells you that your yacht cleaner will take two hours longer than expected. What do you do? a. Shoot them both in the face. b. Shoot just the yacht cleaner in the face, cause hey, it's not your butler's fault. 6. You fall into a space-time portal and land in Hitler's 7th birthday party. What do you do? a. Devote the rest of your life to mentoring him, so that he'll grow to be a right and just member of society. b. Molest the shit out of him. (Thanks, Van Gogh-Goghs!) |
| Last chance for Mark and Sarina's hamburger bunny T-shirt Posted: 31 Jul 2009 10:09 AM PDT  This may be your last chance to buy the T-shirt my daughter Sarina and I designed for Woot. It's ranked at 26 and if it doesn't make it to the top 20 by next week it'll go out of production. A steal at $15! |
| Awesome jump blues/swing duo doing "Nagasaki" Posted: 31 Jul 2009 09:48 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. I was all set to post the Philharmonicas doing Raymond Scott's "Powerhouse" but just realized that Mark already did. Fie! Well, here's an equally swank soundie: the Don Redman Orchestra featuring a curious duo known as Red and Struggie, who = the bomb. Totally hilarious. (Both of these appeared on a 1994 MGM swing compilation.) |
| Here's an index for our book, Ad Nauseam Posted: 31 Jul 2009 09:05 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.  It's a long (or, rather, uninteresting) story but our book, Ad Nauseam, doesn't have an index. I was hoping that Amazon's "search inside" feature could help fill that gap, but our publisher says it takes a while for Amazon to make it functional. So I've gone ahead and made an index myself. I have no idea how to make an index, frankly, and there are no doubt a number of typos, but for those of you who have bought the book or are considering buying it, it's better than nothing. And if anyone wants to list typos in the comments, I'll update the index accordingly. Thanks. |
| Recently on Offworld: sex and death at Nintendo, zombie concubines, Facebook on DS Posted: 31 Jul 2009 09:01 AM PDT  In the history of the company, there's only been one Nintendo-published game that has been overtly about "fighting and fucking": GameCube game Animal Leader (Cubivore in the states), and it's the subject of Margaret Robertson's latest One More Go column, where she peers into Nintendo's heart of darkness and prods at some of the company's more whitewashed ugly truths (see: the true relationship between Mario Bros' Bowser and Peach). Elsewhere, we see artist Jude Buffum reflect on the financial crisis also through Mario's lens (and made an open plea for more financial system gaming), saw how Shigeru Miyamoto lifted ancient Japanese legend when creating Super Mario, and wolf-whistled at PopCap's Plants Vs. Zombies doing an absolutely phenomenal job of parodying the ubiquitous bosomy banner ads for free-to-play game Evony (above). We also took a guided tour through the Nintendo DS's new Facebook Connect features, saw more mind-melting footage of "type anything" DS puzzle game Scribblenauts and Left 4 Dead invading The Sims, found new official Monkey Island fashion, and watched the latest fantastically expressive 50x50 pixel video from Garth + Ginny. And, for the final few that haven't seen it, we also saw the first concept art of the Magic Kingdom's steampunk dystopia in Disney's upcoming Wii project Epic Mickey, and our 'one shots': an ode to Fallout's Nuka-Cola Quantum, the domestic bliss of Mr. and Mrs. Pac. |
| Posted: 31 Jul 2009 08:15 AM PDT  how to pick the right gnome Permalink for this edition. Web Zen is created and curated by Frank Davis, and re-posted here on Boing Boing with his kind permission. Web Zen Home and Archives, Store, Twitter. (Image courtesy Eric Curry. Thanks Frank!) |
| Music downloads offered on Chinese military's new website Posted: 31 Jul 2009 08:13 AM PDT |
| India's airlines to ground all planes and press for bailout Posted: 31 Jul 2009 06:56 AM PDT India's ailing private aviation companies have agreed to suspend all domestic flights for one day -- Aug 18 -- to see if they can coerce the government into bailing them out. |
| Steampunk monkey cigarette card set Posted: 31 Jul 2009 06:51 AM PDT  Chet sez, "Steampunk Monkey Nation is a 20 card set inspired by turn-of-the-century cigarette card design. These portraits, with biographies on the reverse, explore an alternate world of Simian Steampunk." Chet Phillips Illustration Steampunk Monkey Nation (Thanks, Chet!) |
| Geektastic: anthology of nerdy fiction and comics Posted: 31 Jul 2009 11:41 AM PDT  Holly Black and Cecil Castellucci's wonderful anthology of nerdy fiction and comics, Geektastic: Stories from the Nerd Herd was a great read: the short fiction ran the gamut from soul-searing angst to high comedy and all the territory in between. Of particular note were Scott Westerfeld's "Definition Chaos" (a story about a gun-toting gamer and his nutsy ex-girlfriend transporting $80,000 by train to Florida to pay for a con's hotel deposit); Garth Nix's "The Quiet Knight" (a disabled LARPer finds his true self in boffer armor); Lisa Yee's "Everyone But You" (a baton-twirling midwesterner reinvents herself in a Hawaiian high school); Kelly Link's "Secret Identity" (the book's top piece; a novella about a girl who travels to New York to hook up with a man she met in an MMORPG, despite the fact that doing so will reveal to him that she has lied about her identity); and Libba Bray's heartbreaking "It's Just a Jump to the Left" (a girl discovers she can't escape her life at Rocky Horror) Intercut with the stories is a series of charming one-page comics drawn by Hope Larson and Brendan Lee "Scott Pilgrim" O'Malley. All told, Geektastic is a cliche-busting, smart, and funny book about celebrating your inner mutant. Highly recommended. Geektastic: Stories from the Nerd Herd Previously: |
| Routines are easier to remember when combined with complex "silly" motor tasks Posted: 31 Jul 2009 03:36 AM PDT A study by an international team published in the journal Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition finds that when seniors do odd, complex motor tasks while taking medication, it increases the likelihood that they'll remember to take their meds next time. I love this stuff -- the idea that thinking takes place in the body as well as the brain -- and I bet it works for non-seniors just as well. "In extended medication-taking situations, the habitual nature of the task may make it difficult for older adults to remember whether or not they took the medication on a particular day, especially if pill boxes are not used," explains Mark McDaniel, Ph.D., lead author of the study and a professor of psychology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University.A Silly Pat On The Head Helps Seniors Remember Daily Medication Previously:
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| HOWTO make a prison soldering iron Posted: 31 Jul 2009 03:23 AM PDT Jared sez, "Prison Proxy is a blog maintained by an acquaintance (friend?) of an inmate serving a life sentence in an unspecified "Texas Penitentiary." The blog, purportedly based on daily snail-mail letters from the prisoner, provides fascinating, 'live' insight into prison life. The July 30th post explains how inmates create soldering irons to 'fix headphones and alter radios.'" To make the soldering iron, one must first fill up his hotpot with water. Then, he laces each prong of the hotpot's plug with wire, the left side of which is readied to be inserted in the plug, and the right side of which is for the iron.How It's Made: Soldering Irons (Thanks, Jared!) Previously: |
| Canadians vow mass-mooning of US spy-blimp Posted: 31 Jul 2009 02:51 AM PDT 70+ Canadians in Sarnia, Ontario have committed to dropping their pants and mooning a spy balloon that a US company is launching to surveil the border, including their town. In a letter to the PM Thursday, Mike Bradley said the camera hovering over Port Huron, Mich. is scanning Sarnia's waterfront, which includes many homes, private businesses and government offices.'Moon the Balloon' protest grows, mayor writes PM (Thanks, Gord!) |
| Rich NY town tries to shut down children's library because poor kids might use it Posted: 31 Jul 2009 02:09 AM PDT Marilyn sez, "The East Hampton Library on Long Island wants to add a children's room, but the East Hampton Village Zoning Board has blocked it for a year, even though the money for the expansion ($4 mil) has been already been raised by private donations. What's their objection to a children's room at the library?" Library Director Dennis Fabiszak has said that the East Hampton Village Board of Zoning Appeals has expressed concern that an expanded children's collection would lead to more library usage by those who live in the less affluent areas of Springs and Wainscott...Library Expansion in Posh NY Hood Goes On (Thanks, Marilyn!) |
It took four prototypes and more than 200 flight tests to get it right. But now, with a mere 30-pound pack, the Jetlev-Flyer is almost ready for production, generating 430 pounds of thrust and letting (Raymond) Li fly forward at 22 mph up to three stories high. His next unit will get up to 35 mph. Want one? Late this year, the craft will go on sale—just be ready to dish out close to 130 grand.
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