The Latest from Boing Boing |  |
- Among Others: extraordinary, magic story of science fiction as a toolkit for taking apart the world
- Goblin War Machine: flashgame is all about crushing humans!
- Real world magical security thinking
- Art-mageddon: Artistic impulses in post-war Munich
- Attempting to prolong time perception by doing something new or uncomfortable every day
- 10-second video of filmmaker Ross Harris' house
- Yawn (Boing Boing Flickr Pool)
- Wikileaks: Turkey granted US airbase access for extraordinary renditions
- Wikileaks: Fomer Swiss banker hands off Swiss bank data to Assange
- Cartoony ghost urns for cremains
- Papertoy Monsters, a fun cardboard creature making book
- Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have A Dream"
- Tunisia's "Jasmine Revolution" and the internet: Xeni on The Madeleine Brand Show
- Kraftwerk: "Pocket Calculator" live with Stylophone
- Rotary Signal Emittor: Zoetrope-esque picture disc LP
- The Sarah Palin Battle Hymn
- Vintage river baptism photo exhibition
- President Lyndon B. Johnson orders trousers, uses the word "bunghole"
- Stylophone for $9 and a documentary about it
- An important study on the use of self-experimentation in curing writer's block
- Buddhist temple inspired by superheroes and Keanu
- So close, and yet, so far
- Water bears ... in space
- Steve Jobs takes medical leave from Apple
- Canadians: 2 weeks left to tell Parliament how you feel about the Canadian DMCA!
- Salon retracts 2005 story linking vaccines and autism
- Kid's petition against school's "No hugging" policy
- Axe Cop: insane comic collaboration between 5 year old and his 29 year old brother
| Among Others: extraordinary, magic story of science fiction as a toolkit for taking apart the world Posted: 18 Jan 2011 04:28 AM PST  I've been wandering around for a week reading Jo Walton's Among Others, trying to think of how I'd describe it once I finished, and now I've just finished and I'm still stumped. So let me start with some adjectives. "Indescribable" for a starter. But more like "indescribably wonderful." And also "compassionate" and "sweet" and "magical." "Highly recommended" comes to mind. Now, let me tell you what this is all about. Among Others is the diary of Morwenna Phelps, a Welsh teenager whom we really meet just after her twin sister, Morganna, has died in an unspecified but terrible way. It's 1979, and Morwenna and her sister see fairies and do magic, and have done all their life. Their mother is a terrible and evil witch, and the death of Morganna is somehow related to a spell that they did together to protect themselves -- and maybe the world -- from her. And here's the important part: this is not a soppy book. Morwenna talks to fairies and does a kind of Earth-magic, but she isn't angst-ridden, she isn't treacly, she isn't mystical and spooky. She is, instead, a playground anthropologist, an outcast child who has Jane Goodall's keen eye for schoolyard social order. Morwenna has been crippled by the accident that took Morganna, and she has left her mother, left Wales, and gone to Shropshire to live with her father, Daniel, who ran out on the family when she was a baby. Her father may be a a child-abandoning bastard, but at least he isn't her mother. But her father's posh half-sisters are determined that Morwenna should go away to an exclusive girl's boarding school, and so off she goes, keeping touch with her father only through letter-writing and visits home at the holidays. Morwenna's greatest companions now are her books, science fiction and fantasy. It's one of the strange charmed moments when many cross-currents are whipping through the field, and great and bad books from The Hitchhiker's Guide the Galaxy to Thomas Covenant are seeing print. Through sympathetic librarians and interlibrary loan -- and magic -- Morwenna discovers a million new literary worlds and strange and challenging ideas. This is one of the places where Walton does something that made my head spin. For though Morwenna's life has much that makes her unhappy, from her family to her pariah status to her gamey leg, these books are not an escape for her. She dives into them, certainly, and goes away from the world, but she find in them a whole cognitive and philosophical toolkit for unpicking the world, making sense of its inexplicable moving parts, from people to institutions. This isn't escapism, it's discovery. This is such a remarkable trick, for Walton is retracing the intellectual progress of a clever, strange child with so much rigor and evocative language that you feel, really feel the mind-opening power of fantastic literature and the communities that sprang up around it. And the magic is tremendous, because Walton's heroine manages to make magic seem like it does in dreams, a nearly formless thing without rules that vanishes if you look at it too hard, a thing that is impossible to tell apart from coincidence, except you know it isn't. I'd rank this with such great stories of nerd awakening as Pinkwater's Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy From Mars, but less comic, more serious. It is an inspiration and a lifeline to anyone who has ever felt in the world, but not of the world. It is a beautiful book. |
| Goblin War Machine: flashgame is all about crushing humans! Posted: 18 Jan 2011 03:56 AM PST  Big Block Games's "Goblin War Machine" is a fun little flashgame that invites you to pilot the titular war machine over various human landscapes, crushing and shooting all in your path; over time, you upgrade your machine with all the necessaries to accomplish greater feats of crushery. I had a (Ral Partha?) D&D miniature called "Goblin War Machine" once; it was once of the most expensive figs I ever bought, and it took forever to paint and glue, and was absolutely worth it. I only wish I had it now, to pass on to my spawn. Goblin War Machine -- the game -- combines the thrill of big, crushy war machines with the upgrade fun of Car Wars and similar games. It's pretty awesome. Goblin War Machine (via Super Punch) |
| Real world magical security thinking Posted: 18 Jan 2011 02:33 AM PST  From Roger's Security Blog, a sterling physical embodiment of every stupid "security" measure we find online -- such as my bank, the Co-Op, which will only accept foreign transfers if you fax them; my former insurer, Hiscox, which will converse by email but not by phone (unless you give them a lot of personal information, for "security"), and innumerable other examples: * DRM on audiobooks, ebooks and music |
| Art-mageddon: Artistic impulses in post-war Munich Posted: 18 Jan 2011 02:35 AM PST
I am in Munich teaching a three week travel-course with some of my German majors. In preparation for this course, I have been digging through a number of items to use as examples of how the people of Munich dealt with the post war period from 1945-1949. I am particulary interested in the role that art played in the aftermath of war. One image I use is a small hand colored comic I acquired a few years back entitled "American Boys in Bavaria" by W.D. Zehetmair. It depicts a Jeep full of GIs driving through Munich. One of the GIs tosses a cigarette and four men appear to dive on it. It is reminiscent of the scene in Fassbinder's Marriage of Maria Braun (7:09) when Germans pounce upon a cigarette butt thrown by a soldier highlighting the value that cigarettes had as currency in post war Germany. Another form of currency in the Zero Hour was art. In many cases it was black-market, family owned, stolen, or 'procured' art sold to soldiers for cigarettes, food or in exchange for services. Occasionally, this art was created in this time and sold to soldiers as if they were tourists as Zehetmair did in 1945. This cartoon was drawn on dingy, fragile paper in contrast to the reddish frame. It would be interesting to see if this person created other art pieces during this time. The only reference I can find to the artist is to an illustrated children's book from 1910. As with this simple cartoon, post-war art has a way of traveling and ending up in the oddest places. Now the cartoon lives in Pittsburgh. Similarly, the appropriately entitled collection of hand colored etchings depicts a time gone by: "So was Munich" by Karl Winkel. It was meant to give the occupying American soldiers glimpse of Munich's architectural gems that they can only see as rubble. About 50% of the entire city was destroyed with a higher percent in the old part of town. Of all the German cities destroyed in WWII, perhaps none has been restored so painstakingly as Munich.
For the bibliophiles of the world, it shouldn't be surprising that book printing came back fairly quickly. One of my favorite zero-hour publications is the poetry anthology De Profundis: Deutsche Lyrik in dieser Zeit (De Profundis, German Poetry in this Time) published under license of the Office of Military Government of Bavaria by Kurt Desch in 1946. It is any early look at guilt and responsibility of the Nazi era with poems from camp survivors and others who wrote in the twelve years since the Nazis took power.
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| Attempting to prolong time perception by doing something new or uncomfortable every day Posted: 17 Jan 2011 03:27 PM PST Kelly Sutton says: The BBC writer, Matt Danzico, that wrote the original article on the Cult of Less has a new project he's started called "The Time Hack". It's his attempt to prolong his perceived life by putting himself through some new or uncomfortable experience every day.There was a character in Catch 22 who tried something like this, I recall. |
| 10-second video of filmmaker Ross Harris' house Posted: 17 Jan 2011 02:57 PM PST Filmmaker Ross Harris made a 10-second video consisting of a bunch of photographs of his house, yard, and studio. What a fun way to show off your environment! I want to try doing the same for my place. |
| Yawn (Boing Boing Flickr Pool) Posted: 17 Jan 2011 02:54 PM PST  Photograph contributed to the Boing Boing Flickr Pool by BEN+_+ / Lepley. |
| Wikileaks: Turkey granted US airbase access for extraordinary renditions Posted: 17 Jan 2011 02:23 PM PST "Turkey allowed the US to use its airbase at Incirlik in southern Turkey as part of the 'extraordinary rendition' program to take suspected terrorists to Guantánamo Bay, according to a US diplomatic cable." |
| Wikileaks: Fomer Swiss banker hands off Swiss bank data to Assange Posted: 17 Jan 2011 02:21 PM PST |
| Cartoony ghost urns for cremains Posted: 17 Jan 2011 02:02 PM PST  Which color ghost urn would I like my ashes to be placed in? Surprise me! |
| Papertoy Monsters, a fun cardboard creature making book Posted: 17 Jan 2011 01:53 PM PST  My seven-year-old daughter and I spent a couple of hours this weekend putting together a few cardboard creatures from a new book called Papertoy Monsters. It comes with 50 die-cut templates of different kinds of colorful and whimsical monsters. You just pop them out, fold along the lines, and glue them together.
We started with the monsters designated as "easy" and then moved on to the "intermediate" monsters. I think we are ready to tackle some of the "advanced" monsters next. After the jump you can take a closer look at some of the creatures we made.
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| Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" Posted: 17 Jan 2011 01:05 PM PST As my 4-year-old said, "He was a really nice guy who wanted changes." |
| Tunisia's "Jasmine Revolution" and the internet: Xeni on The Madeleine Brand Show Posted: 17 Jan 2011 02:41 PM PST  [ LISTEN: Direct MP3 link, and embedded audio. ] On today's episode of the Southern California Public Radio program The Madeleine Brand Show, I joined host Madeleine Brand for a discussion of the role technology and social media played in the recent political upheaval in Tunisia.
Some related reading today: • Tunisia: That 'WikiLeaks Revolution' meme (CSM)
(PHOTO at top of post: Students hold placards and flowers during a sit-in protest in Beirut January 17, 2011, organized by Lebanese activists Tunisians living in Lebanon to show solidarity and support for the people in Tunisia. REUTERS/Jamal Saidi)
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| Kraftwerk: "Pocket Calculator" live with Stylophone Posted: 17 Jan 2011 11:26 AM PST In the comments on my Stylophone post today, Alex_M kindly points to this excellent live performance from 1981 by Kraftwerk of "Pocket Calculator." As Alex_M says, "With Karl Bartos on Stylophone, apparently having a bit of a problem keeping a straight face." |
| Rotary Signal Emittor: Zoetrope-esque picture disc LP Posted: 17 Jan 2011 10:54 AM PST The Rotary Signal Emittor is a strange and marvelous Zoetrope-style picture disc LP by the multimedia performance group Sculpture (musician Dan Hauhurst and animator Reuben Sutherland). The video above gives the feel of a Rotary Signal Emittor live event, described as such: Sutherland 'DJs' with home-made zoetropic discs, intricate concentric rings of illustrated frames, projecting fragments of looping images at 33, 45 and 78 rpm - pre-Edisonian imaging technology combined with a digital video camera.Purchase digital download of Rotary Signal Emittor (Dekorder, via Strange Attractor) |
| Posted: 17 Jan 2011 05:58 PM PST [Video Link], Written by Tom Dempsey, sung by Gary Mcvay. Hold me. Hold me tight, internet. (Brought to our attention by Boing Boing commenter Edward Lewis/sharpshooteraa, thanks, Antinous)
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| Vintage river baptism photo exhibition Posted: 17 Jan 2011 10:48 AM PST  Next week, an exhibition of river baptism photos, titled Take Me To The Water, opens at New York City's International Center of Photography. The heyday of this ritual, and the majority of the photos, are from the 1880s-1930s. Apparently, photographs of the rites were made into postcards popular among the family of the baptized person and also tourists visiting the South and Midwest where the river baptisms were most popular. The photos in the exhibit were donated to the Center by Jim Linderman, whose collection was also the basis for the 2010 Grammy-nominated book and CD package "Take Me To The Water: Immersion Baptism in Vintage Music and Photography 1890-1950." (That book/CD was designed and published by Dust-to-Digital, makers of the phenomenal Goodbye, Babylon gospel box set and other top-notch historical music packages.) Over at Collectors Weekly, Linderman posts about his collection and the collector's spirit: Collecting anything is fun—somehow any group of objects always equals more than the sum of its parts. Personally, I prefer groups of three. That's enough to show differences and similarities at the same time.Over the course of 10 years, I collected every photograph I could find of people participating in the ritual of immersion baptism. Most of these original vintage photographs are pre-1950. Many are Real Photo Postcards, which is the focus of the exhibition, but there are numerous large albumens, too. One is a yard long and shows hundreds of spectators watching a mass baptism. It's quite a spectacle, and one of the show's centerpieces. Initially, I found my baptism photos at flea markets and such. If I spotted one while browsing through boxes and baskets of photographs, I treated it like a prize and filed it away at home... The point is that I collected in a very narrow field with a particular, specific project in mind. This can be done by anyone! I always tell my friends to pick one area and collect it relentlessly. "Total Immersion Collecting: Baptism Photos" (Collectors Weekly) "Take Me To The Water: Immersion Baptism in Vintage Music and Photography 1890-1950" (Amazon) Jim Linderman's blogs at Dull Toll Dim Bulb and Vintage Sleaze |
| President Lyndon B. Johnson orders trousers, uses the word "bunghole" Posted: 17 Jan 2011 09:57 AM PST [Video Link] Proud moments in internet history: today's episode of "Put This On," a haberdashtastic podcast by Jesse Thorn and friends about dressing like an adult, in which a former United States president is heard using the word "bunghole." |
| Stylophone for $9 and a documentary about it Posted: 17 Jan 2011 09:40 AM PST  Yesterday at Restoration Hardware in Berkeley, my son spotted a slew of Stylophones on final sale for $9 (marked down from $29)! For those not hip to the Stylophone sound, the little synthesizer was invented in 1967 and famously used on David Bowie's "Space Oddity" and Kraftwerk's "Pocket Calculator." We grabbed one and have had a great time making strange tweaky noises that delight and annoy the whole family! I don't see Stylophones listed in Restoration's online story anymore, so call your local shop before making the trip. If you miss out, they're $20 here. For more on the Stylophone, here's Brett Domino's documentary short 'Stylophoniac."
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| An important study on the use of self-experimentation in curing writer's block Posted: 17 Jan 2011 09:36 AM PST  I feel quite confident that this research remains as accurate today as it was when originally published. In fact, if you read the comments at the NCBI ROFL blog, you'll see that the results were successfully replicated, cross-culturally, as recently as 2007. |
| Buddhist temple inspired by superheroes and Keanu Posted: 17 Jan 2011 09:19 AM PST   Over at FEELGuide, Brent Lambert shows us the magnificent, and magnificently odd, Wat Rong Khun buddhist temple in Chiang Rai, Thailand. Designed by artist Chalermchai Kositpipat, it reminds me a bit of a Buddhist Sagrada FamÃlia enhanced with images of, er, Superman, Batman, Avatar, Keanu Reeves as Neo, and the Predator. From FEELGuide: "Buddhist Temple Design Inspired By Superman, Spiderman, Batman, And Keanu Reeves" |
| Posted: 17 Jan 2011 09:22 AM PST Good news, everyone! Thanks to a breakthrough in cloning technology, we can revive the woolly mammoth! Now, all we need is some surviving soft tissue from a woolly mammoth ... (Via Ferris Jabr) |
| Posted: 17 Jan 2011 09:17 AM PST Everybody's favorite adorably-monikered, microscopic invertebrate continues to prove that it's also one tough little "bear". Water bears*—long recognized as hardiest animals on Earth—can also, apparently, survive in the vacuum of space, according to a European Space Agency experiment published in the journal Current Biology. But, before offering the inevitable welcome speeches to our water bear overlords, it's worth noting a couple caveats. First, these water bears weren't just hanging out in open space, wriggling around. Instead, they were in a dehydrated state—a sort-of mega-hibernation that allows water bears to go without water, and appear dead, for years, before being revived. In the video above, you can see a water bear drying out into a little nub, called a tun. But he revives after water floods the petri dish. It was tuns that went to space, not active water bears. Second, the creatures didn't hold up nearly as well against the Sun, as they did against Space, itself. New Scientist explains:
Dried out, the bears can survive a cold vacuum just fine. But only a particularly feisty few made it past the UV exposure. Both pieces of information could prove useful, in the coming Water Bear Imperium. *Also known by the equally darling nickname "Moss Piglets", and by the technically correct, but boring, title of "Tardigrades". (Via Exoplanetology) |
| Steve Jobs takes medical leave from Apple Posted: 17 Jan 2011 08:25 AM PST Via Apple this morning comes word that CEO Steve Jobs today emailed the following to all Apple employees: Team, |
| Canadians: 2 weeks left to tell Parliament how you feel about the Canadian DMCA! Posted: 17 Jan 2011 08:32 AM PST Michael Geist sez, "Last month, the Bill C-32 Legislative Committee invited Canadians to provide their views on the bill. Even if you have spoken out before - an email or letter to your MP, a letter to the Ministers, a submission to the copyright consultation, or a posting online - it is important to speak out again. Make sure the committee studying Bill C-32 hear from Canadians about the importance of maintaining a fair approach that does not result in digital locks trumping consumer rights and that advances fair dealing for the benefit of creators, consumers, education, and business. The Committee has set the following parameters: 'In order for briefs on Bill C-32 to be considered by the Committee in a timely fashion, the document should be submitted to the Committee's mailbox at CC32@parl.gc.ca by the end of January, 2011. A brief which is longer than 5 pages should be accompanied by a 1 page executive summary and in any event should not exceed 10 pages in length.'" Speak Out on Copyright: The Bill C-32 Edition
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| Salon retracts 2005 story linking vaccines and autism Posted: 17 Jan 2011 08:54 AM PST Salon.com has retracted the flawed 2005 expose—co-published by that website and Rolling Stone magazine—which incorrectly linked autism to the vaccine preservative thimerosal. In fact, as Chris Mooney points out, Rolling Stone already removed the story from their online archive, but without mentioning the retraction publicly. Kudos to Salon for trying to make a serious correction like this as public as the original mistake. Worth noting: Salon's ongoing reporting on autism is much better, and interesting. |
| Kid's petition against school's "No hugging" policy Posted: 16 Jan 2011 10:34 PM PST On the Free Range Kids blog, a senior at a New England high school writes in to discuss the petition she's circulating to protest her school's "appropriate touch" policy ("the only appropriate touch is a handshake"). As she says, "As a college-bound 17-year-old, I am insulted by the presumption that I am too immature to decide which kind of touches are appropriate for school. If the administration seriously thinks we can't make that distinction ourselves, how do they expect us to survive in college?" Her petition is really good work, too: "No Touching" at High School? A Student Protests! (Image: sometimes, a hug is all what we need, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from eelssej_'s photostream)
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| Axe Cop: insane comic collaboration between 5 year old and his 29 year old brother Posted: 17 Jan 2011 03:10 AM PST  Dark Horse's Axe Cop: Volume One collects 130 pages' worth of the insane, hyperactive and absolutely delightful webcomic Axe Cop, created by five-year-old Malachai Nicolle and his 29-year-old brother Ethan Nicolle. Axe Cop began when Ethan visited his family for the holidays and found himself illustrating the madcap adventures of his little brother's imaginary hero "Axe Cop" -- basically a cop with an axe who has the power to behead, poison, explode and chop up his many enemies, often with the assistance of a super-team of shape-shifting giant babies, giant avocadoes, giant dinosaurs, giant robots, ninjas (including a pair of Vampire Ninja Werewolf Wizards From the Moon!) and so on and on, each superlative attracting another until they are daisy-chained into a synthetic molecule of pure, superdense awesome. Axe Cop became an Internet sensation, and sold enough merch to keep young Malachi in toy guns and action figures for quite some time, and it was only a matter of time until the book came out. Getting all your Axe Cop between covers in one concentrated blast is quite an experience, but in a very good way! Ethan's notes about Malachi's creative process and their extraordinary collaboration really help to frame the strips, and the best stuff of all are the reprinted Ask Axe Cop, in which Malachi fields questions from the Internet at large. There are plenty of comics artists who've tried to recreate the unbridled exuberance of a hyperactive kid's imagination, but this is the real deal. As Graham Linehan says in his cover-quote: "Axe Cop is actually a time machine. Through its pages, we can return to that state of intensely excited, unbound imagination-overload that we all shared as children, and lost bit-by-bit as the years progressed. Read Axe Cop, and you will remember the kid you once were."
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Designed in white with some use of mirrors, the color symbolizes Lord Buddha's purity, and the mirror stands for Lord Buddha's wisdom that "shines brightly all over the Earth and the Universe." The bridge leading to the temple represents the crossing over from the cycle of rebirth to the Abode Of Buddha. The small semicircle before the bridge represents the human world. The big circle with fangs is the mouth of Rahu is a representation of hell or suffering and the impurities of the human mind (similar to the Christian concept of original sin). All of the paintings inside the ubosot (assembly hall) have golden tones. The four walls, ceiling and floor contain paintings showing an escape from the defilements of temptation to reach a celestial "all seeing" state...
* Interpersonal touch is not inherently sexual, and to treat it as such is to make it so. Touch can be a powerful bonding mechanism between friends, and any rule that fails to differentiate between acts of sex and acts of friendship seems arbitrary and inherently draconian. 
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