Watchismo is the first watch retailer offering SISU Watches, some of the boldest looking watches to fly into the horological stratosphere. SISU is a powerful Finnish philosophy - translated into English as strength of will, determination, perseverance, and acting rationally in the face of adversity.
Liberated Pixel Cup: Creative Commons and Free Software Foundation contest to produce free-as-in-freedom games and game elements Interview with cardboard arcade creator, 9-year-old Caine Monroy Zazzle removes mug for hypothetical copyright infringement Maggie on Skeptically Speaking — Live on Saturday night The threat of intelligent space dinosaurs 80s arcade classic gets near-perfect port to 80s PC Hunger-striking Bahraini dissident Abdulhadi Al-Khawaja near death; Formula One president still plans to run races in Bahrain Mark Dery's Season in Hell Privacy-first ISP raising money for online services that can't and won't fink you out to spy agencies Sponsor Shout-Out: Watchismo ACBF, an open/free digital comics format Nokia expects €126m loss Soft Swells - "Put It On the Line" (MP3 download) High-tech border crossings stymie spies Where story ideas come from The motion of the ocean Apple, publishers accused of price-fixing ebooks Giants Beware: kids' graphic novel that will delight adults too Having a Blast With New Driving Technology Robots could help manage forests The Instagram buyout: charts! Call for diversity in D&D rulebooks Igloo made of stacked books HOWTO make a novice-baker TARDIS cake Fox News whistleblower begins anonymous tell-all series Contest celebrates paperback for Welcome to Bordertown Roger Ebert on losing friends Mr. Rogers defends PBS in congress, 1969 Watch an adorable 3 year-old kid sing the periodic table Zimmerman charged with second-degree murder Liberated Pixel Cup: Creative Commons and Free Software Foundation contest to produce free-as-in-freedom games and game elements
By Cory Doctorow on Apr 12, 2012 12:57 pm Rob sez, "Do you like classic game graphics? Do you support free culture and free software? Can you see where this is going? Creative Commons, the Free Software Foundation, and OpenGameArt have launched a free-as-in-freedom game design competition, the Liberated Pixel Cup:" Liberated Pixel Cup is a two-part competition: make a bunch of awesome free ...
Read in browser Interview with cardboard arcade creator, 9-year-old Caine Monroy
By Mark Frauenfelder on Apr 12, 2012 12:11 pm [Video Link] Shira Lazar of What's Trending visited 9-year-old Caine Monroy and his father to interview them about Caine's now-famous cardboard arcade. [Caine] became an online sensation this week for building an elaborate cardboard arcade inside his dad’s used auto parts store. At first, business was slow -- that is, until his first customer, filmmaker ...
Read in browser Zazzle removes mug for hypothetical copyright infringement
By Rob Beschizza on Apr 12, 2012 12:04 pm Instapaper creator Marco Arment used Zazzle to sell a mug. The mug was emblazoned with a fictional Amazon/Appstore-style review lampooning foolish, entitled users. Zazzle removed it because the "design contains and image or text that may be subject to copyright", and cancelled more than 100 outstanding orders. [Marco]
Read in browser Maggie on Skeptically Speaking — Live on Saturday night
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Apr 12, 2012 11:57 am Join me Saturday at 7:00 Mountain time for a special edition of the Skeptically Speaking podcast. I'll be talking with host Desiree Schell about my new book Before the Lights Go Out. Tune into the live recording to learn more about electricity, infrastructure, and the future of energy—plus jokes. If you can't make the live ...
Read in browser The threat of intelligent space dinosaurs
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Apr 12, 2012 11:52 am Chirality is an interesting concept. The best way to explain it quickly is an analogy to being left-handed or right-handed. Molecules don't have hands, but they do have an inherent orientation that can be compared to having a dominant hand that you do most of your work with. Sugars are mostly right-handed. Amino acids: Left-handed. ...
Read in browser 80s arcade classic gets near-perfect port to 80s PC
By Rob Beschizza on Apr 12, 2012 11:21 am A while back I wrote about game developers who are recoding terrible 8-bit versions of arcade games, to take full advantage of the era's home computer technology. Given that the games and hardware are decades old, it's a particularly melancholic form of nostalgia, wrapped up in youthful disappointment and adult mastery of obsolete platforms. But, ...
Read in browser Hunger-striking Bahraini dissident Abdulhadi Al-Khawaja near death; Formula One president still plans to run races in Bahrain
By Cory Doctorow on Apr 12, 2012 11:00 am Tuesday night's As It Happens program on CBC radio featured a segment on the terrible human rights situation in Bahrain, opening with an archive interview with Zainab Al-Khawaja, daughter of the dissident Abdulhadi Al-Khawaja, who was snatched, beaten and indefinitely detained by Bahraini police a year ago. Abdulhadi Al-Khawaja is now on a hunger-strike and ...
Read in browser Mark Dery's Season in Hell
By David Pescovitz on Apr 12, 2012 10:55 am 
From the "Obscure Pleasures of Medical Libraries" to the "Aphrodites of the Operating Theater," cultural critic Mark Dery is never one to turn a blind eye at our own gross anatomy. In 2006 though, Mark couldn't look away even if he wanted to. That year, the author of the new essay collection I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts, spent his summer vacation at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center suffering through the poisonous cure of chemotherapy before punctuating his year with hours under the surgeon's scalpel. Boing Boing is honored to publish for the first time Mark's intense, moving, and deeply personal account of his "Season In Hell":
On the wall at the foot of my bed, a poster displays the Faces Pain Scale, a series of earless, genderless every men arranged, from right to left, in increasing degrees of agony.
"The faces show how much pain or discomfort someone is feeling," the caption explains. "The face on the left shows no pain. Each face shows more and more pain and the last face shows the worst pain possible. Point to the face that shows how bad your pain is right NOW." The blurb adds, helpfully, that your face need not resemble the cartoon visages in the Pain Scale.
It's August 2011. I'm lying in a room at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, waiting to undergo surgery for a small-bowel obstruction, an intestinal blockage resulting from postoperative adhesions caused by my 2008 surgery for my first small-bowel obstruction, itself the result of my 2006 surgery for a rare and virulent cancer. Abdominal surgery begets scar tissue. Which gives rise to adhesions. Which sometimes cause bowel obstructions. Which may necessitate surgery. Which begets more scar tissue, which…
Read Mark Dery's "Season In Hell"
Read in browser Privacy-first ISP raising money for online services that can't and won't fink you out to spy agencies
By Cory Doctorow on Apr 12, 2012 10:50 am Jon sez, "Nicholas Merrill, who previously first challenged the expansion of the National Secret Letter in the Patriot Act, is working on building a ISP infrastructure based on privacy. Help him raise funds on IndieGogo." Here's Declan McCullagh on CNet: "The idea that we are working on is to not be capable of complying" with ...
Read in browser Sponsor Shout-Out: Watchismo
By Rob Beschizza on Apr 12, 2012 10:49 am Our thanks go to Watchismo for sponsoring Boing Boing Blast, our once-daily delivery of headlines by email. Gutted of clutter and completely exposed, the limited edition & numbered mechanical Storm Mekon watches (released exclusively at Watchismo) have totally deconstructed the basic wristwatch while maintaining traditional boundaries. The case frames no physical dial but instead supports ...
Read in browser ACBF, an open/free digital comics format
By Cory Doctorow on Apr 12, 2012 10:21 am Robo Pastierovic has created Advanced Comic Book Format (ACBF), a free/open format for online comic books. ACBF has a lot of cool features: support for creator metadata; per-panel/page definitions; multiple text-layers for multiple languages; text formatting and style data; auto-indexing and more. The format is CC-BY-SA, and can be found on Launchpad, along with GPL'ed ...
Read in browser Nokia expects €126m loss
By Rob Beschizza on Apr 12, 2012 10:16 am Nokia's in dire straits despite launching the well-liked Lumia smartphone, writes Charles Arthur: "the rise first of Apple and more recently of cheap handsets running Google's free Android software has devastated the Finnish firm's profits and sales, cutting its share of the smartphone market from about 40% a few years ago to less than 10% ...
Read in browser Soft Swells - "Put It On the Line" (MP3 download)
By Amy Seidenwurm on Apr 12, 2012 10:00 am Sound it Out # 24: Soft Swells - "Put It On the Line" Soft Swells' debut album sounds exactly like what it is: a duo of New York musicians transplanted to LA. It's a collection of sunny songs that sound just perfect for spring. "Put It On the Line" is a deliciously simple love song ...
Read in browser High-tech border crossings stymie spies
By Rob Beschizza on Apr 12, 2012 09:56 am The CIA fears high-tech customs checks, writes Jeff Stein: "The increasing deployment of iris scanners and biometric passports at worldwide airports, hotels and business headquarters, designed to catch terrorists and criminals, are playing havoc with operations that require CIA spies to travel under false identities." [Wired]
Read in browser Where story ideas come from
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Apr 12, 2012 09:52 am "Stories live on the landscape like geologic strata," — Krissy Clark, public radio journalist on California's KQED, talking about the realizations that originally drew her into journalism. Clark spoke Tuesday at the Conference on World Affairs on a panel about alternative jobs in journalism. Her passion project: Stories Everywhere, an effort to produce journalism with ...
Read in browser The motion of the ocean
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Apr 12, 2012 09:42 am Yesterday, at the Conference on World Affairs, I went to a panel about science and the movies. I'll have more on that later, but I wanted to share this short video recommended by Sidney Perkowitz as an excellent example of how the video medium can be used to allow people to explore and understand their ...
Read in browser Apple, publishers accused of price-fixing ebooks
By Rob Beschizza on Apr 12, 2012 09:39 am Nilay Patel breaks down the Department of Justice's price-fixing case against book publishers and Apple. It appears that the government has quite a case, as Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and HarperCollins have all quickly settled. Apple and the others appear to be in for the long haul, so we'll see how they respond in the ...
Read in browser Giants Beware: kids' graphic novel that will delight adults too
By Cory Doctorow on Apr 12, 2012 09:30 am Rafael Rosado and Jorge Aguirre's Giants Beware is an absolutely delightful kids' graphic novel about a brave young girl who dragoons her friends into going off in search of giants to hunt. Claudette and her friends live in the fortress town of Mont Petit Pierre, whose most famous story is of how the old marquis ...
Read in browser Having a Blast With New Driving Technology
By Advertiser on Apr 12, 2012 09:28 am ADVERTISEMENT The following post is sponsored by Chevy Volt: Note: The 2012 Chevy Volt offers an EPA-estimated 35 miles on a single charge based on 94 MPGe [electric] and 35 city, 40 MPG highway [gas]. Actual range varies with conditions. The Chevy Volt is unique among electric cars because it runs on two sources of ...
Read in browser Robots could help manage forests
By Rob Beschizza on Apr 12, 2012 09:19 am Jared Keller on the new science of forestry robotics: "The vast majority of forests are destroyed by wild forest fires, and current methods of sylvan vigilance -- mainly those involved individual personnel on foot patrol -- are grossly inefficient in identifying emerging threats.
Read in browser The Instagram buyout: charts!
By Rob Beschizza on Apr 12, 2012 09:09 am Andy Baio breaks down Facebook's $1bn buyout of tiny image-sharing competitor Instagram. It reveals much about the rationale behind what appears to be an inflated price: while the cost per employee acquired is high, the cost per user is surprisingly low. Instagram is, put simply, unbelievably successful. [Waxy]
Read in browser Call for diversity in D&D rulebooks
By Cory Doctorow on Apr 12, 2012 12:23 am On Tor.com, Mordicai Knode asks Wizards of the Coast to consider a more diverse set of portrayals of fantastic personages in the next edition of Dungeons and Dragons. That being said, I think it is useful for some rough generalizations. Like the fact that in the Fourth Edition Player's Handbook there are only four black ...
Read in browser Igloo made of stacked books
By Cory Doctorow on Apr 11, 2012 11:19 pm "Home," an installation at NYC's MagnanMetz Gallery by Colombian artist Miler Lagos is a stable igloo made of carefully stacked books. HOME. 2011. . New York - EE.UU (via Colossal)
Read in browser HOWTO make a novice-baker TARDIS cake
By Cory Doctorow on Apr 11, 2012 10:12 pm Bruce sez, "How Stella made her own Doctor Who themed TARDIS cake at home on her own with no previous experience. Includes pictures throughout the process." I wanted a TARDIS cake that actually had the shape of the police box. I didn't want to just draw a TARDIS on top of a cake. The TARDIS ...
Read in browser Fox News whistleblower begins anonymous tell-all series
By Cory Doctorow on Apr 11, 2012 08:50 pm Gawker has launched a new column written by an anonymous Fox News employee who posts under "The Fox Mole." S/he claims to have been with Fox for "years," and claims that s/he can't find work elsewhere because other news organizations view Fox alumni with suspicion. The Mole's first column describes a particularly nasty piece of ...
Read in browser Contest celebrates paperback for Welcome to Bordertown
By Cory Doctorow on Apr 11, 2012 08:21 pm The paperback for Welcome to Bordertown is out, this being the most excellent, long-awaited volume of short stories set in the Bordertown shared world, where Faerie has returned to Earth, and the Bordertown is the place where magic and technology meet and mix. To celebrate, the editors are holding a contest: So you've already found ...
Read in browser Roger Ebert on losing friends
By Rob Beschizza on Apr 11, 2012 08:20 pm "We exist in the minds of other people, in thousands of memory clusters, and one by one those clusters fade and disappear."
Read in browser Mr. Rogers defends PBS in congress, 1969
By Rob Beschizza on Apr 11, 2012 07:40 pm President Nixon wanted to halve funding for PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Here is one Fred McFeely Rogers, making a better case. [CBP] Previously: Mister Rogers -- Podcast appreciationMr. McFeely's purple panda terrifies children
Read in browser Watch an adorable 3 year-old kid sing the periodic table
By Rob Beschizza on Apr 11, 2012 07:30 pm Includes newly-discovered stable transuranics Ytterby, Actinny and Rubiddy. [Matt Gallant via Gizmodo]
Read in browser Zimmerman charged with second-degree murder
By Rob Beschizza on Apr 11, 2012 07:12 pm George Zimmerman, the Florida man who killed unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin, was charged today with second-degree murder. [Wapo] Previously.
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