The Latest from Boing Boing

Lavie Tidhar: sf story about the way that sf stories see aliens
The Curfew: a game about civil liberties and teenagers
Undercover video from North Korea: starving children, hungry soldiers
Billy The Kid photo sells for $2.3 million
Man found dead in toilet at rock festival
Time Travel web-lecture with Connie Willis and Ted Chiang
TSA asked 95 year old woman in a wheelchair in terminal stage of leukemia to remove adult diaper for pat-down
Snappy answers to freaky job-interview questions
Report: Skype and investor Silver Lake screwed employees out of stock options
HP readies 7" tab
Broccoli treehouse

Lavie Tidhar: sf story about the way that sf stories see aliens

Posted: 27 Jun 2011 03:25 AM PDT

Lavie Tidhar sez, ""As soon as I wrote this story I realised I would most likely have to self-publish it. To my delighted surprise, though, an editor at one of the big online [SF] magazines offered me, shortly after, to publish it. Two days later, however, the publisher of the same magazine declined the story, not wanting to deal with any potential fallout. I then showed it -- unofficially -- to a handful of people, and got a potential offer to publish it in another big magazine, if only I were to change some of the references in the story. I decided, instead, to publish it here."

There had been another boy at the school, called Ender, but he'd attacked and seriously hurt and in at least one case we knew of killed one of the other boys, and they finally had to put him down, though he kept protesting, the day they came for him, that it wasn't his fault.
No-one wanted to be put down at the school. They bred us very carefully, lines of genetic lineage, great-great-grandparents and parents all down the generations selected by the board and certified and mated to produce us. If we were an aberration we were put down and our progenitors were mated again, to try and create a better version.
My earliest memory is of white men in white coats holding clipboards, examining me. They measured my skull and prodded me with thick pink fingers and made careful notes. There was a war coming, they kept saying, and we had to be prepared.
Because of aliens.

The Story They Wouldn't Publish (Thanks, Lavie!)

The Curfew: a game about civil liberties and teenagers

Posted: 26 Jun 2011 09:50 PM PDT

Play This Thing reviews The Curfew, a game about civil liberties and teenagers that my wife, Alice Taylor commissioned for UK broadcaster Channel 4. The game, produced by Littleloud and written by Kieron Gillen, just won Best Educational Game at the Games for Change awards (it's a free-to-play Flash game, so you can judge for yourself -- or bring it into your classroom, or talk about it with your kids or friends).

Back in the early CD-ROM era, when the ability to do filmed video in a game was novel and the graphic adventure was still a commercially viable genre, there were a slew of mostly horrible games that tried to merge the adventure genre with filmed video. When I say "mostly horrible," imagine interminable, badly acted cut scenes with zero actual interaction, held apart by inventory puzzles in fairly crude graphics, or played out on photographs with a handful of lifeless interactions. Until playing The Curfew, I had come to the conclusion that merging video with the adventure game was an obviously bad idea, proven so by experience.
I have to say, however, that the combination works here, and works quite well. Part of the problem, back in the day, was the need to change what area of the disc was being read when a choice was made, so that there was always a perceptible lag whenever you made any choice that branched the video. Here, the clips are preloaded by the Flash framework, and the transitions are seamless. Also, the use of photography for the graphic adventure interactions themselves, coupled with small looped animations of characters drawn from video, makes the game feel alive even when you are not in the video itself. And finally, the developers have had the good taste and sense not to make the non-interactive sequences too lengthy or sententious.

The Curfew (Play This Thing)

The Curfew (game site)

Undercover video from North Korea: starving children, hungry soldiers

Posted: 26 Jun 2011 09:58 PM PDT

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation has released undercover video depicting living conditions in North Korea. The video shows grimy children begging, laborers building a private rail system intended to serve as a wedding gift for Kim Jong-un (son and heir of dictator Kim Jong-il), and an official shaking down a private market stall for rice for hungry soldiers. The ABC's analyst says this last is the most significant part of the video: "This footage is important because it shows that Kim Jong-il's regime is growing weak... It used to put the military first, but now it can't even supply food to its soldiers. Rice is being sold in markets but they are starving. This is the most significant thing in this video."

The video shows young children caked in filth begging in markets, pleading for scraps from compatriots who have nothing to give.
"I am eight," says one boy. "My father died and my mother left me. I sleep outdoors."
Many of the children are orphans; their parents victims of starvation or the gulag...
In the footage, a party official is demanding a stallholder make a donation of rice to the army.
"My business is not good," complains the stallholder.
"Shut up," replies the official. "Don't offer excuses."

N Korean children begging, army starving: exclusive (via Reddit)

Billy The Kid photo sells for $2.3 million

Posted: 26 Jun 2011 10:33 PM PDT

This here is Billy The Kid. And this here photo of Billy just sold at auction for $2.3 million. To one of them Koch brothers. From Brian Lebel's Old West Show and Auction:

130 years ago, legendary outlaw Billy the Kid had his "picture made" in Fort Sumner, New Mexico, posing for what is now considered the most recognizable photo of the American West. A single, original tintype is the only authenticated photo of the Kid in existence today...
Nearly as legendary as the kid himself, the photo has been studied, copied, scrutinized, portrayed in films, re-imagined, and immortalized. Once thought to prove Billy was "The Left Handed Gun," it later proved he was not.

Billy the Kid is Coming to Denver (auction site)

"Billy the Kid photograph fetches $2.3 million at auction" (CNN)

Man found dead in toilet at rock festival

Posted: 26 Jun 2011 02:14 PM PDT

A local Conservative party politician was found dead in a portable lavatory at Britain's Glastonbury rock festival Sunday morning. [Telegraph]

Time Travel web-lecture with Connie Willis and Ted Chiang

Posted: 26 Jun 2011 10:44 AM PDT

Tony C Smith from StarShipSofa sez,

Come along and listen to two award-winning SF writers at the top of their games, Connie Willis and Ted Chiang, as they give a live online talk/lecture on the idea and literature of time travel. Connie Willis has a staggering ten Hugo Awards and six Nebula Awards to her name; as an author of multiple time travel novels and stories herself, including Blackout/All Clear, which won the 2011 Nebula Award, she is especially well suited to address this fascinating subject. Ted Chiang is one of the world's leading SF short story writers, with stories like the Hugo-winning "Exhalation" and the Nebula and Hugo-winning time travel story "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate" to his credit, and thus he is a key voice in any discussion of the subject of time travel.
Joining them is award-winning genre scholar Amy H. Sturgis, Ph.D., who will share her top picks for "Must Read" time travel fiction. Her most recent critical essay related to time travel will appear in the summer 2011 collection Fringe Science: Parallel Universes, White Tulips, and Mad Scientists. You'll leave this event with fresh insights into the SF theme of time travel and a terrific reading list, as well!

Time Travel Lecture (Thanks, Tony!)

TSA asked 95 year old woman in a wheelchair in terminal stage of leukemia to remove adult diaper for pat-down

Posted: 25 Jun 2011 09:39 PM PDT

Jean Weber has filed a complaint with the TSA over the way they treated her mother prior to boarding a Northwest Florida Regional Airport-Michigan flight last weekend. Weber's mother is 95 years old and in the terminal stages of leukemia; she was flying to Michigan so as to be closer to her family in her final days. The woman, who is wheelchair bound and weighs 105 pounds, was made to remove her adult diaper during the pat-down procedure.

Her mother, who was in a wheelchair, was asked to remove an adult diaper in order to complete a pat-down search.
"It's something I couldn't imagine happening on American soil," Weber said Friday. "Here is my mother, 95 years old, 105 pounds, barely able to stand, and then this..."
"I'm not one to make waves, but dadgummit, this is wrong. People need to know. Next time it could be you."

Elderly woman asked to remove adult diaper during TSA search (via Reddit)

Snappy answers to freaky job-interview questions

Posted: 25 Jun 2011 09:58 PM PDT

Responding to a CBS Moneywatch column on the 20 Craziest Job Interview Questions, The Morning News's Giles Turnbull has attempted to answer them:

Enterprise Rent-A-Car: Would you be okay hearing "no" from seven out of 10 customers?
HA HA HA HA HA! I wish it was only seven out of 10! HA HA HA HA HA. No thanks, I have a handkerchief right here. Seven out of 10. You're killing me.
Lubin Lawrence: If you could describe Hershey, Godiva, and Dove chocolate as people, how would you describe them?
I went to school with Hershey. He thought he was so special, and people were all like "Ooooh Hershey," but then I went to college and forgot all about him. Last I heard, he was cleaning windows for a living. Godiva inherited the house after her aunt died, and tried making a career as an artist. No-one liked her work--too much violence, not enough humanity. We're still in touch, but our Facebook conversations are about trivia and crap on TV. I don't think I have much to say to her anymore. Dove does telephone sales calls. I think she got married to some guy from Denver. They don't have kids.
Pottery Barn: If I was a genie and could give you your dream job, what and where would it be?
Shit, anything? Oh man. Well, I'd get out of Pottery Barn faster than you could say "Breakages must be paid for," and I'd become an executive in the music industry. No wait, it gets better: I'd be a music executive who also understands the internet. I'd be like, Hey, you, release your album as DRM-free MP3s from some random blog, but keep your band name secret, and we'll rely on word-of-mouth, it'll be huge. And there'd be drugs and free music everywhere and pornography and shit. And yellow stretch limos, the ones with drinks cabinets and tables in them. And swimming pools, and free phones, and trips around the world, and it would all be mine, every last lazy minute of it. Either that, or I'd like to be a chocolate taster.

Define the Ratio of People to Cake (via Kottke)

(Image: IMG_1991, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from usfbps's photostream)

Report: Skype and investor Silver Lake screwed employees out of stock options

Posted: 26 Jun 2011 08:44 AM PDT

Skype and Silver Lake, a large investor, recently fired a bunch of senior executives, allegedly to prevent their stock gaining real value in a forthcoming acquisition by Microsoft. Digging into the contracts' legalese reveals an obfuscated clause that decodes to something like "we can buy your stock back at the grant price, even if it has vested, prior to any sale of the company." Felix Salmon at Wired:

I no longer think that what Skype did here is pretty evil: I now think it's downright evil, and destroys the balance of trust on which Silicon Valley has been built. What's more, I simply don't believe that Skype did all of this itself, without detailed input from Silver Lake. ... I don't know where they got these techniques from, but they're very alien to Silicon Valley and indeed the rest of the business world. And they do no good at all for the reputation of private equity companies more generally.