The Latest from Boing Boing |  |
- @PREPRESSHULK: TWITTERER SMASH PREPRESS COMEDY
- Knitted skeleton
- Dolly bookcase
- UK copyright reforms sound sane, useful
- Life with Ubuntu and a ThinkPad
- Frank Lloyd Wright-style PC case
- Guatemala: 27 massacred, decapitated in Petén by paramilitary drug gang Los Zetas (UPDATED)
- Patent troll Lodsys explains itself
- Umetaturou's hyper-cute snapshots of a dog with stuff on its head
- The Sixth Gun - fun supernatural western comic book
- New Order covered on ukulele: "Bizarre Love Triangle," by Witchger Boys
- Gentleman sports unique and excellent hairstyle
- British Library: history of science fiction exhibit
- Space Shuttle Endeavour's launch, as seen through the clouds from a plane
- Surveillance cams at elementary schools monitor food intake
- Mondo Vanilli: RU Sirius's 1993 album for Trent Reznor's label
- Stephen Hawking imagines there's no heaven
- Gweek podcast 003: Toys in space, a supernatural Western comic book, and 250 indie games you must play
- Scalzi's Fuzzy Nation: a masterful, likable reboot of one of the great sf classics
- Figuring out how much Congress really thinks education should cost
- Studio Ghibli Minecraft world
- Nanolaw: raising kids in an era of bulk-litigation
- Space Shuttle Endeavour STS-134 launches on final mission
- Star Wars stages of grief
- Alternatives to the MacBook Air
- Piracy sends "Go the Fuck to Sleep" to #1 on Amazon
- Dingy, glorious shop-signs of New York City
- Terraria Online, a 2D multiplayer Minecraft
- Shoes
- Interview: Seth Godin
| @PREPRESSHULK: TWITTERER SMASH PREPRESS COMEDY Posted: 16 May 2011 09:40 PM PDT  It's been many years since I worked in prepress, but @PREPRESSHULK is giving me gigglefits: "HULK LOVE SUBTLE SPACING OF OPTICAL KERNING AND OPTICAL MARGIN ALIGNMENT!!" "HULK SURE CUSTOMER SECRETARY OR NEPHEW WITH COMPUTER SEND HULK BEAUTIFUL PRESS-READY FILE!! HULK WAIT EXPECTANTLY!!" "HULK LAUNCH QUARKXPRESS. DREAD FILL HULK OVERSIZED HEART." (via Making Light) |
| Posted: 17 May 2011 02:50 AM PDT  I'm agog at Ben Cuevas's knitted skeleton installation -- as @laurenbeukes says, "Check out the vertebrae!" "The installation piece Ben Cuevas chose to showcase at The Wassaic Project features a knitted skeleton seated atop a pyramid of Borden's condensed milk cans and a cloud of screen prints on Plexi glass suspended above it. The knitted skeleton is seated in the lotus position. The prints are of disembodied anatomical parts photographed in high resolution with diagrammatic illustrative overlays. Ben conceives of the piece as a reference to material culture and Wassaic's local history (The Borden Company had a condensed milk factory in Wassaic) and a meditation on transcendence." -Bora MiciTranscending the Material (via @laurenbeukes) |
| Posted: 16 May 2011 09:44 PM PDT  Etsy seller StudioDz made this lovely bookcase/dolly: "Another great attention grabber. Also great for reorganizing. Simply wheel it into place. Moving is a breeze as well." It's not cheap, but it's the kind of thing I would have killed for when I worked at a library. I have a friend whose policy is "every piece of furniture must have bookshelves built into it." Talk about a perfect gift! Dolly Bookshelf (via Cribcandy) |
| UK copyright reforms sound sane, useful Posted: 17 May 2011 02:39 AM PDT The Hargreaves report on UK copyright reform sounds pretty sensible: it endorses a Fair Dealing exception to copyright for parody; a format-shifting exemption to legalize loading MP3 players; and an orphan works clearing house to make it easy to clear rights for works whose creators can't be identified. The devil will be in the details (especially in for orphan works, where a corrupt process could make it easy for big companies to rip off creators by claiming they couldn't find them), but this is some pretty sane-sounding stuff: Last year's viral hit Newport State of Mind - a parody of Alicia Keys and Jay Z's hugely successful single New York State of Mind - was forced off YouTube after the seven co-writers of the original declined to give their permission for this use of their IP.Report calls for overhaul of UK copyright law (Thanks, lewisjamieson!) |
| Life with Ubuntu and a ThinkPad Posted: 17 May 2011 01:49 AM PDT My new Guardian column, "My new Ubuntu-flavoured ThinkPad is computing heaven," describes the miraculously drama-free life I've discovered by buying ThinkPads with extended warranties and running the Ubuntu flavor of GNU/Linux on them: The problem with writing about switching to Ubuntu is that there's very little to report on, because it is just about the least dramatic operating system I've used, especially when paired with the extended warranties Lenovo sells for its ThinkPads. By this I mean that Ubuntu, basically, just works as well as or better than any other OS I've ever used, and what's more, it fails with incredible grace.My new Ubuntu-flavoured ThinkPad is computing heaven |
| Frank Lloyd Wright-style PC case Posted: 16 May 2011 05:39 PM PDT  The Usonian is a computer enclosure designed in the architectural style of Frank Lloyd Wright, with window walls modeled on the Bachman-Wilson house. Creator Jeffrey Stephenson (previously, previously) adds: "The colors are FLW's favorite, Cherokee Red, and Covered Wagon, the color of Falling Water's cantilevered balconies." Usonian [Slipperyskip] |
| Guatemala: 27 massacred, decapitated in Petén by paramilitary drug gang Los Zetas (UPDATED) Posted: 16 May 2011 11:27 PM PDT  Written in the blood from a victim's severed leg, in Spanish: "What's up, Otto Salguero, you bastard? We are going to find you and behead you, too. —Sincerely, Z200." Guatemalan media reports Otto Salguero is the owner of the ranch where at least 27 workers were killed, 26 of whom were decapitated, yesterday. Salguero is believed to be linked to the drug trade, and in conflict with the Zetas. Update, 10:45pm PT: Guatemalan President Álvaro Colom has declared a state of martial law in the Péten region, in response to Sunday's massacre.
On a cattle ranch in the northern Petén region of Guatemala yesterday, at least 27 agricultural workers were murdered, 26 of whom were decapitated, after dozens of armed commandos (reported numbers vary between 30 and 200) stormed the ranch and demanded to know where owner Otto Salguero was. Guatemalan authorities say none of the victims were involved in drug trafficking, all were innocent laborers, none knew where the ranch owner was. Among the confirmed victims: two women and two children. One man is reported to have survived by pretending to be dead after the attackers stabbed him in the stomach. He told a reporter the killing began around 7 pm Saturday, and ended around 3 am Sunday. He escaped two hours later, badly wounded, encountering a pile of human heads along the way. Another survivor, possibly the only other survivor, was a pregnant mother. According to various reports, the armed men let her go because her little girl was screaming so loudly. What happened to her child, and other children at the scene not confirmed dead, is unclear. A spokesman for Guatemala's police described what they found on Sunday morning: "One whole body, 26 bodies without heads, and 23 heads." This is the worst single incident of violence since the country's 36-year civil war ended in 1996, and is seen by many in the country as a symbolic act of political terror, while the nation prepares for presidential elections. Messages at the scene written on a wall in the victims' blood (various reports say they were scrawled with a severed leg) make clear who is responsible: Los Zetas, a paramilitary Mexican drug gang that in recent years has expanded throughout Central America and operates with particular impunity and freedom within Guatemala. The organization has long recruited from the ranks of kaibiles, the elite special forces division of the Guatemalan army trained in jungle warfare who carried out massacres of indigenous peasants during the civil war. The brutality evidenced in this massacre, even the killing techniques, brings to mind the worst of the death squad attacks in the 1980s. The leader of the armed group that carried out this massacre is reported to have identified himself to the workers as "kaibil." Renata Avila at Global Voices has a thorough roundup of news links and updates from people in Petén who posted first-hand observations and photos to Twitter. The violence continued today. AP: Two men were killed and one suspect in the massacre was taken into custody after a confrontation with police Monday morning, while grenades were tossed at a home and business in a town near San Benito, where the bodies were taken for identification. At the top and inset of this post, above: photographs tweeted from the scene by Twitter user Tekandi Paniagua, who traveled there today, as did Guatemalan president Alvaro Colom with senior members of the Guatemalan government and military police. Tweeting from the site, Tekandi described what he saw as "scenes from a horror movie," with the farmworkers' residences torn apart, belongings shredded, blood everywhere. Tekandi described what he witnessed as "unforgettable and horrendous," adding, "I honestly believe that [now] only God can rescue Guatemala."
The massacre took place in a small pueblo in the jungle about 275 miles (440 km) north of the nation's capital, Guatemala City. The site is close to the Mexican border, and not far from the town of La Libertad: Google Maps link here. The Péten region has become increasingly lawless in recent years as the power and presence of drug cartels grows; some refer to it as the country's "Wild West." As regular readers of this blog know, I have traveled and worked as a volunteer extensively in Guatemala. I have avoided the Petén over the past couple of years as security conditions grew poorer, for locals and foreigners alike. This region is rich in pre-Columbian history: it's where some of the greatest ruins of the ancient Maya are located, including Tikal. In much of the sparsely populated Petén, there are more plants and wildlife than there are humans. The infrastructure throughout is limited. Narcos aside, the people here are among the country's poorest and most marginalized. News coverage: Prensa Libre (Spanish, includes video); BBC News, Reuters, Associated Press a second AP item, CNN, WSJ, AFP. Below, graphic photos from Reuters taken today that show Guatemalan police standing by the decapitated bodies, and forensic workers in a field of severed heads. Click to un-mosaic and view photos unaltered.
[WARNING, GRAPHIC IMAGES] [Click for un-mosaiced version]
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| Patent troll Lodsys explains itself Posted: 16 May 2011 04:11 PM PDT Lodsys, a patent troll who threatened mobile developers over their use of in-app upgrade/purchase buttons, started a blog to explain itself—and why it targets small companies that can't afford to fight back. There is a misalignment in the market where the litigation costs greatly influence the incentives. At the low end, the cost of litigation exceeds the value of the license and this puts strong pressure on small vendors to take a license rather than litigate. However, above a certain threshold, there is a perverse incentive for the larger market players to not pay (even if they should) and to force the rights holder into litigation since the higher expenses of litigation and the risk may knock out the need to pay. This cost of doing business often means that individual inventors cannot afford to attempt to license (or they don't have the expertise), and so they sell to companies that specialize in rights licensing and which have the economic reserve to deal with the litigation costs and/or they partner with contingency law firms. Ironically, contingency law firms take a % that is in the range of what Apple and Amazon charge to retail digital goods.Emphasis added. Here's the pricing: In the case of an Application doing an in-application upgrade (and only this scenario), Lodsys is seeking 0.575% of US revenue over for the period of the notice letter to the expiration of the patent, plus applicable past usage. So on an application that sells US$1m worth of sales in a year, the licensee would have an economic exposure of $5,750 per year.The implication is that it's cheap. But any price is too high when your patent is thin air. Also on offer at the blog is a rambling explanation of intellectual property, offered to address the question, "Why is something as obvious as an upgrade/purchase icon a patentable innovation?" The honest answer -- "because it is" -- emerges only implicitly as Lodsys prattles on and on about the role of IP in tech history. Indeed, the most direct reference to the patent in question is to note that the original filer "visualized/created metaphors." The jokes about vague patents write themselves: Lodsys can't even find a word to singly describe what the inventor even did. Given that these upgrade buttons are a built-in element of Apple's mobile development platform, the assumption's been that Apple didn't know about Lodsys and would maybe kick its ass or something. Lodsys, however, writes that Apple, Google and Microsoft have already entered into licensing agreements with it. Given that fact, the quote posted above -- ostensibly a no-nonsense explanation of IP outfits' legitimate place in the market -- starts to look more like a strategy guide for patent trolls. Forget the more spectacular method of demanding huge sums directly from "larger market players." Recognize that they have "perverse incentives" to refuse, and instead secure deals that leave them unfleeced, but less able to protect their dependent markets. Then launch the real attack: threats sent to the "low end," where media exposure and outrage is guaranteed, but huge numbers of victims, unable to afford litigation, will pay handsomely in aggregate. |
| Umetaturou's hyper-cute snapshots of a dog with stuff on its head Posted: 16 May 2011 02:41 PM PDT  Oolong has reincarnated! @umetaturou is a Twitter and Instagram user who posts fantastic and adorable photographs of a two-year old border collie: in many of them, the doggie is balancing things on its head. Perhaps someone who reads Japanese can tell us more? The bulk of the images are on @umetaturou's instagram feed, some are on Twitter. Pretty sure these images are precisely what Instagram was invented for. (via Matt Forsythe) |
| The Sixth Gun - fun supernatural western comic book Posted: 16 May 2011 12:04 PM PDT [Video Link] Last week I ended up at Oni Press's website and found a comic book series called The Sixth Gun. It's a supernatural western that takes place shortly after the Civil War. The idea is that there are six revolvers, each of which has a special power, and once you touch one of these guns you are bound to it for life. (It'll burn the hand of anyone else who tries to use it.) In the first issue we learn that a young woman accidentally gets bound to one of the guns (the most powerful gun) when her father dies. A posse of monstrous creeps, led by an undead Confederate Army general, comes after her to retrieve the pistol. This gang already has the other five cursed weapons, and the general wants the sixth one to complete the set. Cullen Bunn's script for The Sixth Gun is fast moving, without too much dialogue or narration (which has bogged down many an otherwise good comic book series). The art by Brian Hurtt is excellent. You can download the first issue as a PDF for free to see if you like it. I'm on the fourth issue and really digging it. So far there are 14 issues in print, and they've been anthologized so you can pick up all the issues at once. |
| New Order covered on ukulele: "Bizarre Love Triangle," by Witchger Boys Posted: 16 May 2011 12:23 PM PDT [Video Link] Via Clayton Cubitt. Not a new upload (2009), but it's new to me. Buy the original |
| Gentleman sports unique and excellent hairstyle Posted: 16 May 2011 11:57 AM PDT  From MediaTakeout.com. Not Photoshop. It's a thing with the young folks these days, the zipper on the head thing. Two questions: 1) How long before Lady Gaga rips this off? 2) How long until LVMH sues him, too? (Thanks, Susannah Breslin) |
| British Library: history of science fiction exhibit Posted: 16 May 2011 11:46 AM PDT   On Friday, the British Library opens a new exhibition about the history of science fiction. Titled "Out of this World," the free exhibit runs until September 25. The Guardian has a slideshow of some pieces from the exhibit. Above right, April 1926 cover of Amazing Stories by Frank R. Paul. Above left: Novelas by E Gaspar, 1887"Science fiction: Images from other worlds – in pictures" (The Guardian) Out of this World: Science Fiction but not as you know it (British Library) |
| Space Shuttle Endeavour's launch, as seen through the clouds from a plane Posted: 16 May 2011 11:43 AM PDT  Stefanie Gordon shot this striking snapshot of Space Shuttle Endeavour lifting off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida this morning. Video of the same view follows...
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| Surveillance cams at elementary schools monitor food intake Posted: 16 May 2011 11:28 AM PDT Some elementary schools in San Antonio, Texas are installing videocameras in their cafeterias to track what the young people are eating. Funded by a US Department of Agriculture grant, the project is meant to collect data that could be used to fight childhood obesity. According to the San Antonio-based Social and Health Research Center, the hope is that the information will lead to better menus at home and at school. Seems like one way to reduce the intake of crap food at elementary school cafeterias (and at home) would be to not serve crap food. From Reuters: Officials will receive information on the nutrient and calorie counts of the food children have actually consumed."Cameras in U.S. schools to record calorie counts" |
| Mondo Vanilli: RU Sirius's 1993 album for Trent Reznor's label Posted: 16 May 2011 08:26 PM PDT In 1993, cyberculture prankster/provocateur/publisher RU Sirius, founder of Mondo 2000 magazine, composer Scrappi DuChamp, and performance artist Simone Third Arm, recorded an album for Trent Reznor's record label. They had met at Reznor's Los Angeles rental home, the house where the Manson Family killed Sharon Tate and others. Tim Leary had brought RU along to a housewarming party there and RU gave Reznor a demo tape of his band, called Mondo Vanilli. Reznor quickly signed the band to his then-nascent Nothing Records. Unfortunately, this great work of curious and quirky synth-industrial-pop, titled "IOU Babe," never made it to the record stores. Almost two decades later, Mondo Vanilli has officially released "IOU Babe" for free online. A CD with bonus material is coming shortly. I was lucky enough to catch a Mondo Vanilli concert at a San Francisco art gallery and I can assure you that it was as absurd as one might expect. RU, wrapped in Christmas lights, was spinning on a rotating gurney of some kind. Simone was mostly frozen in a strange Butoh-esque dance. And Scrappi operated the audio, and also a blender on a pedestal. Ah, those were the daze. From an interview about Mondo Vanilli at The Unheard Music: Mondo Vanilli: "IOU Babe" (SoundCloud)
Mondo Vanilli: "IOU Babe" (Internet Archive)
Mondo Vanilli: "IOU Babe" (Pirate Bay) "R.U. Sirius on Mondo Vanilli and music" (The Unheard Music) |
| Stephen Hawking imagines there's no heaven Posted: 16 May 2011 09:43 AM PDT  In a new interview with The Guardian, Stephen Hawking dismisses heaven. (Image from Imaginary Foundation's Cosmic High Roller t-shirt.) So here we are. What should we do?"Stephen Hawking: 'There is no heaven; it's a fairy story'" |
| Posted: 16 May 2011 09:55 PM PDT  Rob Beschizza, Joel Johnson, and I recorded a new episode of Gweek, a podcast about comic books, science fiction and fantasy novels, video games and board games, tools, gadgets, apps and other neat stuff. Here are the show notes for episode 3: NASA's Fermi Telescope Finds Giant Structure in our Galaxy Facebook hired public relations firm Burson-Marstellar to conduct anti-Google PR smear campaign Lodsys patent troll shakes down mobile devices rpgKIDS: a role playing game for kids and parents Castle Ravenloft Thank You for Removing Story from the Role-Playing Game, Dungeon Raid 250 Indie Games You Must Play, by Mike Rose Dirty Jobs creator on the need for skilled tradespeople in America Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work At a Distance: The Best Weird Video Game I Played Yesterday -- and Hope You Play Next Download Gweek 003 as an MP3 | Subscribe to Gweek via iTunes | Subscribe via RSS | Download single episodes of Gweek as MP3s |
| Scalzi's Fuzzy Nation: a masterful, likable reboot of one of the great sf classics Posted: 16 May 2011 08:04 AM PDT  Last year, John Scalzi announced that he'd been commissioned by the estate of H Beam Piper to write an updated version of the classic sf novel Little Fuzzy. I'm very fond of this novel (here's my review of last year's award-winning audiobook adaptation), not least because it was the first sf novel I bought with my own money, from the used section of Bakka Books in Toronto (I was nine, and Tanya Huff was working behind the counter; she listened seriously to my enraptured discussion of the Asimovs and Heinleins I'd read from my Dad's shelves and went and got me the Piper. I never looked back). Scalzi's novel, Fuzzy Nation, came out last week and I read it over the weekend. I went to it cold, not sure if it was a sequel or what. There were two Fuzzy novels for some time (Piper having committed suicide before writing a third). Then there was a third volume written by another writer, and then, years later, they recovered a lost Piper manuscript for his own third book, making the whole sequence a little confused. It turns out that Scalzi and the Piper estate have swept the slate clean with Fuzzy Nation -- this isn't a sequel, prequel, or retelling. It's a new novel that reboots the Little Fuzzy story, writing it from a thoroughly modern place that takes account of our present-day consensus on the future. For all that Scalzi completely rewrites Piper's story (only a few characters survive, and several of them undergo personality, gender, and professional reassignments), he is remarkably true to Piper's original appeal -- like Little Fuzzy, Fuzzy Nation is a story about good people trapped in a big organization, and how some of them choose to go along to get along and some of them buck the system, and what it all means for a race of "primitive" sentient beings who've just made potentially disastrous first contact with the human race. In Fuzzy Nation, Jack Holloway is an independent contractor working as a mining surveyor on a distant world, trying to recover valuable geological oddities called sunstones. After inadvertently blowing up a cliffside (and triggering harsh environmental penalties for the company that has the exclusive license to mine the planet), he is fired. A few minutes later, he shows the company rep the massive lode of sunstones he's just uncovered, and he is quickly recontracted, with a handsome bonus, much to the company man's humiliation. Jack -- a disbarred lawyer and misanthrope who lives with his dog in the middle of the jungle -- is feeling pretty good about this when he gets back to his isolated cabin and discovers a kind of large, bipedal cat in his cabin. His dog goes crazy, and he puts it outside, and discovers that his visitor is smarter than any cat he's ever met -- smart enough to befriend the dog when he's allowed back in. Here begins the two entwined struggles in Jack's life: first, the struggle to hold onto his claim (which turns out the be one of the biggest in the history of interplanetary exploration) in the face of the rapacious, authoritarian company that runs the planet; second, the struggle over the destiny of the Fuzzys, who, if sentient, will trigger an evacuation of the planet and a cancellation of Jack's claim a staggering fortune. Told in Scalzi's trademark snappy, sarcastic style, Fuzzy Nation is an absolute delight, full of great set-pieces in which the clever and bright outmaneuver the crass industry barons, thuggish private security muscle, and an entire ediface of interplanetary law that is pretty ambivalent about the role of sentient aliens in the universe. Jack (and his frenemies, like his ex-girlfriend who happens to be the company's on-planet xenobiologist; and her new boyfriend, who is the company's chief counsel on-planet) run one caper after another, generally one step ahead of the bad guys, except when they aren't, and even though you know they're going to get out of it -- this is a book with "happy ending" written all over it from page one -- you're never sure how. Scalzi's version of Jack Halloway is an interplanentary, futuristic Travis McGee: a likable, quick-thinking, brawling lunk whose cynicism can't quite triumph over his internal goodness. Add to that the insanely cute Fuzzys (Scalzi's deep affection for critters is on full display here) and a real affection for Piper's original material, and you've got a book that can't miss. This is a perfect swinging-in-the-hammock, summer-weekend novel -- and the perfect novel to give to a clever young person of your acquaintance to spark a lifelong love affair with science fiction and all it has to say about how we treat one another, how we treat the rest of the universe, and what we do when the circumstances offer us the chance to sell out our integrity for fortune. Scalzi is on tour with Fuzzy Nation right now, with upcoming stops in Portland (tonight!), Seattle, Salt Lake City, Scottsdale and Washington, DC. Update: John Scalzi clarifies: "One small point of fact: I wasn't commissioned by the Piper Estate to write the novel; I actually wrote it for myself, as (more or less) fan fiction and for fun. And in fact I wasn't even originally planning to sell it. But when I showed it to my agent he asked if he could talk to the Piper estate about it (it's now administered by Penguin) and he asked them to read it and if they liked it to give us their blessing and endorsement. Which they did. " |
| Figuring out how much Congress really thinks education should cost Posted: 15 May 2011 10:09 PM PDT Beth Pratt has a provocative suggestion for determining how much Congress really believes should be spent on each kid's education, based on a kind of theory of revealed preferences: 1 Do you have children? (If no, end of questionnaire.)In which I solve the problem of how much funding schools should have |
| Posted: 16 May 2011 06:59 AM PDT Oz Workshop has created a giant fan-tribute to Japanese animation company Studio Ghibli, whom you'll likely know from films such as Kiki's Delivery Service and Howl's Moving Castle, using Minecraft. The blocky Minecraft world beautifully recreates some of the most striking scenes and characters from Ghibli classics. ■ MINECRAFT GHIBLI WORLD ■ - O Z W O R K S H O P (YouTube) ■ MINECRAFT GHIBLI WORLD ■ (world files) (Thanks, Doctoe!) |
| Nanolaw: raising kids in an era of bulk-litigation Posted: 16 May 2011 06:54 AM PDT Paul Ford's short science fiction story, "Nanolaw with Daughter" is a heartful, smart story about the future of bulk litigation and what it will mean for parenting. Nanolaw with Daughter (Thanks, Kevin!) (Image: Ultrasound Week 21 09-2, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from abbybatchelder's photostream) |
| Space Shuttle Endeavour STS-134 launches on final mission Posted: 16 May 2011 06:46 AM PDT |
| Posted: 16 May 2011 06:31 AM PDT |
| Alternatives to the MacBook Air Posted: 16 May 2011 06:10 AM PDT Melanie Pinola offers 7 alternatives to Apple's MacBook Air. Lenovo's X1 looks very promising indeed. |
| Piracy sends "Go the Fuck to Sleep" to #1 on Amazon Posted: 15 May 2011 10:01 PM PDT  Mark reviewed a funny parody of a kid's picture book called Go the Fuck to Sleep late last month, and it's since gone to be the number one bestseller on Amazon. Except, it hasn't been published yet. It's reached the number one slot on the strength of pre-orders. How did this remarkable thing occur? Piracy. In an age of e-books, piracy has been a rising concern amongst publishers for a few years, although none of the publishers contacted by The Bay Citizen could recall a PDF of a book going viral in the vein of "Go the Fuck to Sleep." This volume had a few key properties that enabled its electronic popularity: an undeniable title, a good-looking cover and a short length, making it easy to read, post and pass on. Also, the long lag time between the book's pre-sale (it was originally scheduled to go on sale in October) and the buzz made online sharing necessary.'Go the F--- to Sleep': The Case of the Viral PDF |
| Dingy, glorious shop-signs of New York City Posted: 16 May 2011 01:53 AM PDT  How To Be a Retronaut has a large gallery of images from Store Front: The Disappearing Face of New York, a new book by James and Karla Murray that documents the vanishing golden-age shop signs of New York City, including interviews with the shop owners. The Associated Press review says, "They tell the story of the 20th century in New York, with wisps of the 19th and hints of the 21st. If you want to understand the aesthetics of the country's most famous city at street level, this is the best way to do it short of actually going there." |
| Terraria Online, a 2D multiplayer Minecraft Posted: 16 May 2011 05:53 AM PDT Terraria Online, out today, is a side-scrolling action and exploration game where you can build, dig and fight: think Minecraft meets Metroid. The game-worlds are randomly generated, and you can play together with friends. Keep an eye out for it at Steam for ten bucks. [via Indie Games] |
| Posted: 16 May 2011 05:36 AM PDT Though the agency claimed that Bacon Shoes would be a perfect way for Sketchers to overcome the branding disaster precipitated by marketing weight-loss shoes to pre-teen girls, public reaction proved negative and the product was not a success. [Washington Post; vid via John Biggs] |
| Posted: 16 May 2011 04:55 PM PDT  Seth Godin writes about the post-industrial revolution, the way ideas spread, marketing, quitting, leadership and most of all, changing everything. Avi Solomon: You inspire millions of people. What inspires you? Seth Godin: I would say that I'm inspired by two things. The first is the opportunity. This is the first time in human history that somebody sitting in their living room has a chance to contact more than just a couple of people at a time. And more important than that, the revolution that's going through our world right now is opening more doors for more people than ever before. When I look at the combination of those two things, I see an opportunity, and I wake up every morning hoping I won't waste it. The second thing is that I'm totally addicted to helping people grow and watching the power that breakthroughs have with people, when you can see somebody doing something that they used to be afraid or used to believe they couldn't do. I find that really at the core of what it means to be a successful person. Avi: You made a post about the Kindle. What you would like the Kindle to be? Seth: Two, actually. Yes. Avi: Two. And I think it was read by Bezos or somebody high up there because it's really... you can see how the strategy changed right after you posted. A few months after you posted the post about the Kindle. Seth: I'm pretty sure that anything I say right now will end up causing me grief with my friends in Amazon. So I'll just let it sit at that. Avi: OK. More generally, you could talk a bit about how books are changing. You're one of the first people who realized that books were souvenirs? Seth: Yes, I started writing about books as souvenirs 11 years ago, when I did a book called "Unleashing the Idea Virus." What I discovered is that when I separated the idea from the book by giving the entire text of the book away for free online, it had a transformative effect on the idea as well as on my career. So far that book has been downloaded probably more than 4,000,000 times. It's one of the most popular e‑books ever because it launched at the right time, it was easy to spread, it was easy to share, it was worth talking about. People would then say, "That's fine but how do you make a living doing that?" Well, my original answer was that I wasn't trying to make a living, I was trying to make a point. Then I discovered that if you make a point, making a living takes care of itself. That book, when we came out with the souvenir hardcover edition which had no extra words in it at all, and cost $40, that book went to number five on the Amazon bestseller list, number four in Japan; was sold in dozens of foreign languages and I actually made more money on the book that I gave away than on the bestseller I had had before that. I think that most people in the publishing industry show up every morning to do their job instead of showing up every morning to fulfill their mission. And their mission ought to be connecting readers and writers. And as soon as you can get rid of paper, that job becomes infinitely easier. Avi: Yes. So now for example, can you describe your experiment now with Amazon? Seth: Well, the new publishing company I started is run by me. It's called the Domino Project. It is powered by Amazon in that they take care of a lot of the things that publishers used to have to do. It ensures, for example, that we are able to be reached around the world at various Amazon sites with preferential promotion and marketing and things like that. The impacts... so far the first two books has been terrific. They are both bestsellers. The new one, which is called "Do the Work" by Steve Pressfield was the number one most popular Kindle book of any kind, fiction or non‑fiction, paid or free, last week. The ability to have a manifesto like that reach that many people just weeks after it was finished being written is unheard of in the publishing industry. Just giving an example of how flatfooted the industry is: the New York Times refuses to measure success like this so we will not show up on their bestseller list even though our books are being read and shared by more people than traditional bestsellers. For us, the goal is not for traditional media to apply what we're doing. The goal is to put ideas in the hands of people who can use them, and to do it in a way that helps the publishing industry see how they can grow and transform before it's too late. Avi: It's like they refused to put Amanda Hocking on the list either. Well, she's earning a lot of money just by self‑publishing. But they ignore her, except running an article about her somewhere. Seth: Right. It's interesting because some people have pooh‑poohed her for taking a multi‑million dollar payment from St. Martin's to publish her next bunch of books the old‑fashioned way. And in fact, that's a symptom. Every industry, when it's dying, opens its checkbook to pay money to try to stay relevant. I can't blame Amanda for taking the cash. If I were in her shoes I would do exactly the same thing. That doesn't mean that she's on the wrong path and there's a right. What it does mean is that there are violent tremors and shifts going on in the publishing industry. And it's inconceivable to me that five years from now, paper is going to be the dominant form for books. Avi: But paper will still be there because it's actually acquiring more value... like a treasure. You could actually choose very carefully what do you want to put on paper. Seth: Yes. There's a scarcity when it comes with paper. I will admit that I get more pleasure knowing I sold a hardcover book than knowing I sold a Kindle book. There shouldn't be a difference, but there is. Paper feels like you have used up a scarce resource to commit to something permanent. And digital doesn't feel that way. "Boing Boing" is a great example of that. The magic of "Boing Boing," the wonder of "Boing Boing," is in that you don't have to worry about whether every post is perfect or for the ages because it is inherently a time‑based, disposeful medium. But it turns out that that freedom that you have is what leads to some of the very best work that you do. So I think we're going to see a shift where e‑books will be... there will be ten times as many e‑books as hardcover books next year and a hundred times year after that. The same way there are way more YouTube videos than there are studio films. But that doesn't mean YouTube videos are worthless. It just means that it's more of an experimentation platform. Avi: I find that Steven Pressfield's book and your "The Dip" book are related because they are both concerned with forging through "the dip." Explain the connections between the two. Your book is more of making a smart choice about what dip to forge through. Steven's book is more like how to get it done. Seth: For the first time ever I was impressed by the work of Haley Barbour. He quit the presidential campaign. I thought that was a great example of "the dip." Understanding "the dip." What he saw was that getting all the way through the end of a presidential campaign and winning is great. Quitting right after New Hampshire is stupid because you go through all the pain and the suffering and the money and the dislocation and you get nothing. So the best time to quit the presidential campaign is before you start, which is what he did yesterday. The only other time worth quitting is if you have no choice and you've either won or you've lost. It's quitting in the middle that's so common. So what I wrote about in "The Dip" which was a few years ago was understanding this insane cost that we pay for quitting in the middle. And pushing people instead to quit at the beginning or make the commitment to stick through the dip ‑ because it's when you stick through it that you get all the benefit. But doing your best and quitting in the middle is not a smart choice. I followed up with that in my Domino Project book which is called "Poke the Box," which is about the fact that our culture now, our society now, rewards people who initiate. It is about living in a project‑world instead of a factory‑world. Steve picked up the idea that he talked about first in the "The War of Art" where he says the reason that we quit at the wrong time, the reason that we have writers' block, the reason that we don't like to initiate, is resistance. That resistance is that voice in our head that tells us we'll be made fun of; that voice in our head that tells us to slow down; that voice in our head that says just have a whisky instead of doing that thing that you're afraid of. What he tries to do in "Do the Work" is establish once and for all, who's at fault and what to do about it. Avi: So for example, if you're afraid of doing something, that's a good guide to actually choosing to do it because it's an indicator of something of value to you? Seth: That's right. That's exactly right. And it goes even one step further which is that if you feel like quitting something, that's a sign that you shouldn't quit because everyone is going to quit in this moment and the one who doesn't quit is the one who's actually going to benefit. So, the messages are aligned, which is the economics of the situation makes it clear that what you ought to do is the opposite of what you feel like because that is where scarcity lies and scarcity creates value. Avi: Once you take the initiative, the other thing you can do is you build a tribe around that initiative. It takes a lot of work. What can guide you through the initial lonely stage? Seth: Well of course building a tribe takes a lot of work. If it didn't, everyone would do it. This idea of scarcity comes back again and again. We don't hesitate, some of us, to go get a job in a coal mine or a factory or working for an insurance company even though we've just signed up for 10,000 hours of mind‑numbing, finger‑grinding hard work with no for real upside. And yet, we look at this prospect of building a tribe of 5,000 or 10,000 or 500,000 people who want to hear what we have to say, who want to go where we are going, who are looking for a leader, and we hesitate. Actually, you're not hesitating because you fear the work. You're hesitating because the resistance fears failure. Getting a job, shredding tires at the factory, we don't feel that same fear because we know we're not going to fail. My argument is that we're walking into this new culture, this new era, where tribes are so valuable and they're going to get harder and harder to build. So if you care, and it only works for people who care, then you really have no choice but to go start building your tribe. Avi: So when you started Squidoo, was the charity part, was that built in from the first, from the get go? Seth: In fact that's the only thing I wanted to have. The biggest mistake we probably made in starting the company was leaving in the other option. We started Squidoo.com which is now the 88th biggest website in the United States to raise money for charity. And the idea behind it is there are plenty of ad networks in Amazon and eBay and others who will pay tiny amounts of money to people who build content online. We wanted to bundle them all up, make them easy to use, leverage them, and make it a tool available to individuals who want to build pages about things they are passionate about. There is now more than two million pages built by more than a million people and it helps people every day to find what they're passionate about. And it also generates millions of dollars in revenue of which we send half of it to our users. The users, the default setting, is for them to give that money to the charity of their choice. The reason I like it, is that it lets you feel like a philanthropist, even if you're not taking money out of your pocket. Some of our best users and many of our happiest users have kept that setting on the charity setting. And everyday are sending thousands of dollars to charities they care about. Avi: There's a whole new revolution in high school education. This guy Salman Kahn, he has the Kahn Academy. You look at his page with the listings of all the lessons he has online for free, it's actually making teachers more... taking the burden off teachers' shoulders and also making them more responsible for initiating stuff in the classroom. Seth: Yes, I saw how he's generous and brilliant and his big insight is simple, which is we should do homework during the day and have lectures at night. And the reason is this: lectures are one way so we can find the best lecturers in the world and let them lecture and have students all over watch the same lecture. Homework, on the other hand, requires interactivity. Homework is where we build the synapses that help us understand. And that needs hand‑to‑hand combat. That needs the teacher to help us. So his argument, which is living, is send your students home every night, tell them which video to watch. And then the next day, give them problems and help them. Avi: So, this is very threatening to the current system. Also, home school enrollment is gaining strength. The whole Maker movement, the Maker Faire, Make magazine and stuff like that. How relevant do you think the current curriculum is going to be, is it relevant at all? It is obviously... it's good to know, and it's good to have that qualification but theoretically you could just learn at home and then just get, do the exam at the end and actually learn a lot more. Seth: Well, I think we need to ask a different question. School's been irrelevant for a while. The question is what do we want school to do? What do we need to create in our next generation? And I've argued we need to create two things: we need to create leaders, and we need to create people who can solve interesting problems. Anything we do in school that doesn't help with those two things we should stop doing. So homeschooling isn't necessarily the answer, unless homeschooling is going to come up with a way to work on those two problems. My biggest problem with homeschooling is that it makes it very hard to teach leadership because you're isolated. But with the right parents, it is much better at teaching people to solve interesting problems. My argument is that every parent should homeschool at night, and then send their kids to school during the day. The homeschooling at night should consist of intelligent conversation, asking difficult questions, as opposed to watching television. Avi: What do you think college is for? Seth: The difference between high school and college ought to be that college is a place people go to because they want to, and it's a place where they explore something with passion, to learn how to be the best in the world at what they do. If you don't graduate from college on the path to be the best in the world at something, then you've wasted college. You're supposed to, I think, use college to explore without risk, to understand what it is to develop mastery. Then when you combine those two things, you would have developed the pattern that can pay off for a long time to come. When I look at one of my heroes, two of my heroes, Cory and Mark at Boing Boing, what I see are two people who explore without fear. What I see are two people who know when something is done. This notion of being able to say, "Yup, I'm done working on this. I'm handing it off to the world" is incredibly rare and we need more of it and we need it right now. Avi: You were obviously pissed off at the current MBA structure because you started your own MBA. Could you describe what it involved? Seth: OK. Well, I think "disappointed" is probably a better word. Disappointed that universities are wasting this opportunity. Disappointed that they are stealing so much cash and opportunity cost from our best and brightest business people and putting them through a two‑year program that trains them to do very little other than work at Goldman Sachs or be a management consultant. I think that it's largely wasted on most of the people who attend and certainly if you're not in one of the top ten most famous business schools ‑ I'm not going to say best, I'll say most famous ‑ your degree has a very hard time paying off in a post‑industrial economy. For all those reasons, I wanted to put my money where my mouth is. So for free, for a program of six months in my office, 500 or so people applied. It was a difficult application. I picked nine or 10 people and it was a magnificent experience. It was a lot of fun and an enormous amount of work. I've since done it two more times. One, for people in the non‑profit and government sector, and that one lasted a few weeks. And then, the most recent one was called the FeMBA, which was for women entrepreneurs, and that one lasted five days. My guess is that the women in that program, and 1,000 applied, the 10 women in that program, maybe 12, got more out of it than they probably would have gotten from six months of sitting in a classroom at Wharton or at Stanford or Harvard because the hard part about business today is not knowing how to do the Black Scholes option pricing model. The hard part about business today is knowing how to take a leap. Avi: What's involved, what's the method, is it live simulations of real‑life business situations or... Seth: Well, it keeps changing. But what I've had a lot of success with is peer support, putting people on the spot, reading an enormous amount and then asking very hard questions about its true meaning, and mostly, real life case study, not reading about someone else's case study, but defending your own. Having people start a business in front of everyone else. Having people defend their past businesses in front of everyone else. Only when you can put your soul on the line and your heart on the line are you going to be able to get over the resistance and start doing work that you're truly proud of. Avi: Do you have any tips for being comfortable with failure and bouncing back? Seth: I think the people who have read my work, it doesn't feel right to them, but over time you get used to it, which is failure is the point. That if you're going to say "failure is not an option" then you've just ruled out success as well. Because the only way you get to success is by learning what doesn't work. So my goal for 20 years has been to fail more than anyone before me. And I'm succeeding that almost nobody in my industry has failed as many times as I have. If you can fail more than anyone else, then you win. Because if you fail really monstrously large, you don't get to play again. So there's no way you're going to be able to fail more than anyone else. The goal is to fail new, to fail in an interesting way, to fail in a way that you learn from that you don't repeat, and to fail not so badly so that you get to do it again. Avi: What advice would you give your smart kid who's in high school right now? Seth: That's easy. Go start something. Right. There's no locks on the door. The world marketplace is right there. Go on Craigslist, go on eBay, build a blog, build a website, build a following on Twitter, start a tribe, organize things. You will learn as you go. No one needs to know you're in high school. But the benefits that you will get from leading in that way and connecting in that way are very very hard to overstate. Don't wait for permission. Just start.
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by New Order. Covered above by The Witchger Boys. I love it! 
I'm sitting outside at a coffee shop one morning reading the local newspaper and there's a big fuss being made about Milli Vanilli. Their Grammy award had been rescinded because they had been caught lip-synching at their performances. To my Virtual Reality-bent brain, this demand for authenticity seemed completely ludicrous. First of all, this was obviously a prefabricated band making the most absolutely crappy, bland corporate music imaginable, so why did they get a Grammy in the first place... and who fucking cares if they lip-synched? 
My daughter was first sued in the womb. It was all very new then. I'd posted ultrasound scans online for friends and family. I didn't know the scans had steganographic thumbprints. A giant electronics company that made ultrasound machines acquired a speculative law firm for many tens of millions of dollars. The new legal division cut a deal with all five Big Socials to dig out contact information for anyone who'd posted pictures of their babies in-utero. It turns out the ultrasounds had no clear rights story; I didn't actually own mine. It sounds stupid now but we didn't know. The first backsuits named millions of people, and the Big Socials just caved, ripped up their privacy policies in exchange for a cut. So five months after I posted the ultrasounds, one month before my daughter was born, we received a letter (back then a paper letter) naming myself, my wife, and one or more unidentified fetal defendants in a suit. We faced, I learned, unspecified penalties for copyright violation and theft of trade secrets, and risked, it was implied, that my daughter would be born bankrupt. 
Space shuttle Shot this morning, at Kennedy Space Center in Florida: "Endeavour soars by its flag, flying for a last time, as the orbiter embarks on its final mission." | You are subscribed to email updates from Boing Boing To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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