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Below are 20 journal entries, after skipping by the 20 most recent ones recorded in
Boing Boing's InsaneJournal:
| Friday, August 25th, 2017 | |
| 2:00 pm | This dino-shaped aquarium is filled with thousands of bioluminescent new friends!
For the uninitiated, dinoflagellates are the single-celled organisms behind the eerie algal bloom known as red tide. But some of these tiny marine creatures are capable of producing a beautiful bioluminescent glow, and you can harness their natural light with a Dino Pet, available now in the Boing Boing Store. This dinoflagellate-filled aquarium is shaped like an apatosaurus to give your home some charming, punny decor thats also a low-maintenance marine ecosystem. Just give it a shake, and theyll instantly put on a dazzling blue-green light show that works any time of the day or night. Their reaction is powered only by sunlight, water and the small amount of nutrients included in the Dino Food blend. Just feed your microscopic friends once a week, and you can enjoy their alluring glow for years to come. You can grab a Dino Pet from the Boing Boing Store for $49.99. |
| 12:47 pm | Learn to make corn and eels just like mom's great-grandma's grandma made 
If you've had a hankering for 18th-century eel succotash, you'll love the early American cooking and crafts on the James Townsend & Son channel. Aside from the recording gear, they commit completely to old school living. (more…) |
| 12:47 pm | Trucker gets tattoo of himself driving his own body
Tattoo artist: What you want? |
| 12:47 pm | As bacteria build fortresses, scientists seek weak points for attacks
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| 12:47 pm | Gorgeous and fascinating look into the science of animal schooling 
Animal collective behavior is not well understood, but thanks to new technologies, it's possible to isolate individual animals in order to understand how flocks, swarms, herds, and schools move as a group. (more…) |
| 1:05 pm | Half-Life 3 synopsis posted by series writer -- or maybe it's just fanfic
Half-Life 3 is a running joke (or tragedy) among fans of the series who waited more than a decade for it to exist. With publisher Valve's business shifting to its Steam platform and key writer Marc Laidlaw leaving the company, the writing seemed on the wall. Turns out, though, it's on his blog: Epistle 3 is a lightly-cloaked synopsis (already edited by fans to remove obfuscating elements) of what was, in another world, the greatest game of 201A.
Laidlaw describes it as "fanfic":
https://twitter.com/marc_laidlaw/status/9 "Isn't everything you have written about half life technically a fanfic?" a twitter user asks. "Psych!" Laidlaw replies. |
| 1:14 pm | My Little Ponies generated by neural network
Janelle Shane trained a neural network on the names and attributes of My Little Ponies, then shared "some of the worst ones."
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| Thursday, August 24th, 2017 | |
| 7:17 pm | Mondo 2000, influential 90s cyberculture magazine, returns online
A few years ago, I started seeing evidence of the beginning swells of a nostalgia wave for the iconic 90s "cyberdelic" magazine Mondo 2000 and all things early 90s cyberpunk/cyberculture. One person on Facebook unearthed an old copy of Mondo, photographed it, and gushed all over it in a post. They asked (something like): "What could be cooler than a slick art magazine about virtual reality and cyberpunk, hacking, drugs and mind-alteration, weird art and high-weirdness?" I loved being able to respond: "Writing for it."
[caption id="attachment_542988" align="alignright" width="750"] I also noticed, in 2014, when I published my writing collection, Borg Like Me, a lot of the focus in reviews was on the pieces reprinted from that era, from Mondo, bOING bOING (print), and my own zine, Going Gaga. People waxed nostalgic about that birth-of-cyberculture era, the creativity and promise that infused it, and the revolutionary dreams it inspired. Several reviews said: We need to bring some of this back. Stat! It is perhaps that rising sentiment that has prompted Mondo's equally iconoclastic creator, RU Sirius, to resurface Mondo 2000 as an online blogazine. RU tells Boing Boing about the launch: It seemed like time. What the world needs now is MONDO sweet Mondo. I mean, its the only thing that theres just too little of&. aside from wealth distribution, attention spans, and lots of other stuff.So far, I've found what RU has posted a surprisingly satisfying mix of reprints of old magazine content, summaries/commentaries on the print magazine (and its predecessors, High Frontiers and Reality Hacker), and new content, including new music from RU Sirius and friends. I'm really interested to see where he takes it. He's not able to pay for contributions at this time, but so far, the response of interest to get involved, to write for it, seems high.</p> Some of the new content includes "cyberpunk patient zero" (as William Gibson once called him) John Shirley, on how we may have to figure out a way to regulate the web after all, an appreciation for Tina Fey's controversial post-Charlottesville sheet cake bit on SNL, and a conversation between Doug Rushkoff and RU Sirius on the early potential and promises of the network revolution and how the bad guys figured out how to hack reality first. The online premier of Mondo featured a pretty funny annotated editorial from the first issue of the magazine:
MONDO 2000 is here to cover the leading edge in hyperculture. Well bring you the latest in human/technological interactive mutational forms as they happen. (COULD PROBABLY RERUN SOME TECH ARTICLES FROM MONDO 2000 MAGAZINE HERE SINCE MOST OF THE THINGS THAT WERE GONNA HAPPEN IN FIVE YEARS ARE STILL GONNA HAPPEN& IN 5 YEARS) Sci-fi author and mathnaut Rudy Rucker has contributed a new cyberpunk short story, Fat Stream. It's always a trip and a treat to mainline Rudy Rucker's imagination for a while:
Its three am, and Zik is vamping a torch song, winding things down. The kazoo raver morphs his razz into big-band swing. The surfer is sculpting cold-light waves. Szex in the boots and gown is doing tai-chi moves. Fine, phine, phyne, vyne. But then Jumpy points his finger at me and oopsy daisy Im screaming. Im not in control. Ive been pwned. My voice has rhythms like sentences but none of the words sounds familiar. My visual field is sweeping in a circle. I see an old-world city. Im hearing bells.
[caption id="attachment_542987" align="aligncenter" width="800"] For you devout post-literate types, you can hear Rudy reading "Fat Stream" on his blog here. The snark, the high-weirdness, the viewing of things from oddly askew angles, it's all here. I'm sure the singular yippie showmanship of RU Sirius will fully reveal itself too as the new publication accelerates to speed.
I asked RU what sorts of things he has in store for the future of this new incarnation of his beloved brand:
Id like to do some rematches. People doing the same conversations with the same people these many years later. J.P. Barlow and Jaron Lanier? Ill see if I can make some of thes happen. Maybe you could re-interview Trent! [I interviewed Trent Reznor from the first Lollapalooza for Mondo No. 5] I honestly have to say, when I first saw the launch, I thought it might be a simple exercise in nostalgia (which isn't necessarily a bad thing). But this looks far more promising than that. I love hearing these old voices from the magazine again, filtered through Sirius's unique editorial eye. So far, it's been a fun "Where are they now?" (or more accurately, "What are they thinking now?"). I do hope that the contributor's roster expands to include younger, more contemporary voices. It's a fun exercise to think what a publication with the "pirate mind station" mentality of 90s Mondo would look like today. Hopefully, we're about to find out.
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| 8:34 pm | KFC's phenomenally creepy Bio-Shock-esque VR training video 
This is insane. RELEASE THE BIRDS! KFC has given us a lot of really odd advertising, but this really something. |
| 9:23 pm | Kellyanne Conway says media arent 'afraid enough'
Interviewed by Fox and Friends, Trump surrogate Kellyanne Conway had thoughts on the general response to his rally rage meltdown in Arizona. The media, she says, aren't "afraid enough here." |
| 10:34 pm | Hurricane Harvey could be strongest storm to hit U.S. in over a decade, and a first for Trump's FEMA 
#HurricaneHarvey could hit landfall late Friday night along the Texas coast as a Category 3 hurricane. |
| 10:54 pm | Ex-CIA Dir. Brennan: I briefed Congress on Russian election interference, they didn't get 'importanc
Former CIA Director John Brennan sent an internal memo to CIA employees last December in which he said some of the members of Congress he'd briefed on the CIA's conclusion that Russia interfered in the 2016 elections did not understand and appreciate the importance and gravity of the issue. |
| Friday, August 25th, 2017 | |
| 2:52 am | The wrong way to put a motorcycle in a truck 
"Got it!" |
| Thursday, August 24th, 2017 | |
| 4:50 pm | Jesus spotted in sonogram image along with baby
Alicia Zeek and Zac Smith of Franklin County, Pennsylvania were surprised and delighted to see Jesus looking at their baby girl in this sonogram image. From Fox43:
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| 4:56 pm | Review: Anker's PowerHouse is a beefy brickful of electrons
Anker's PowerHouse is the beefiest portable battery I've owned, with 120,000mAh coming though four USB ports, 110V AC and 12v DC. At $500 and weighing in at 9 pounds, though, it's also an big expensive box with a thin range of practical uses, aimed sharply at people willing to pay high premium for a user-friendly appliance that replaces buckets of lead and bagfuls of power bricks. Anker pitches it as a general-purpose multi-device charger, or for keeping a specific power-hungry appliance online for a day at a time. CPAP machines, PA systems and mini-fridges are among bullet-list examples. It can run a 15V lamp for almost a week, Anker claims, and reader-reviewers have found many interesting street uses. The downside is that it's way too heavy and bulky for any kind of casual portable use, and it's a gadget, not a tool. You won't be servicing it (as you might a similarly-priced generator), and the 18-month warranty is unnervingly suggestive of a lifespan under regular use. But the upside is that whatever needs you bring to it, it can likely handle them. For example, I found it useful as a tripod weight, keeping energy-hungry video cameras (such as the Blackmagic Cinema Camera) continuosly charged in the wilds of Pittsburgh. It also kept an all-in-one workstation on its feet during a blackout. These are great if you're working somewhere with intermittent power, where a noisy generator is out of the question. It took about 6-8 hours to charge from empty. It came with a five-inch power brick of its own, a 10m cord, and a USB cable. The battery display can be read a mile away and it worked without problem over a month of lightweight general use. The feature list poses a 120W maximum draw, the spec sheet 160W, but either means no heaters or AC, cooking appliances, serious gaming computers, big TVs, laser printers or heavy motorized tools. It can't jump a car, though you could use it to charge up something that can. It outputs 110V only; you can charge it in Europe, but don't expect to run local equipment with it. All in all, it's a blandly useful power appliance for those looking to avoid bigger, uglier worksite battery boxes like it. Anker found a sweet spot--the limit of what's reasonable to just leave lying around in an RV kitchen or stuff in a backpack--and stuck a just-works gadget in it. Anker PowerHouse [Amazon] |
| 5:10 pm | Watch: KFC has a spooky VR escape room as part of their training program 
KFC is the coolest when it comes to their training program. New employees are given an Oculus Rift headset and asked to complete an eerie escape room, which is narrated by a sinister-sounding Colonel Sanders. The mission is to make the Original Recipe fried chicken from beginning (cutting open a bag of frozen chicken) to the end (picking up a pressure-fried drumstick), all in a futuristic kitchen that feels like the entrance room of Disneyland's Haunted House. "Only one step left. Will you escape or be trapped with me foreeeveeer," Sanders asks when the game is almost finished. According to Eater:
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| 5:14 pm | Art project: How to make instant photocopy transfers with a blender pen
Instant Photo Transfers With Blender Pens (BLDG25) Prismacolor Colorless Blender Marker 3533 ($6 on Amazon) (via MAKE:) |
| 5:29 pm | Martin Shkreli bought a domain with my name in it
You can find me at beschizza.com, but Martin Shkreli registered "robbeschizza.com" as part of what seems to be a quixotic effort to bother people who write about him. Cyrus Farivar reports that I'm in his Godaddy grab bag.
Robbeschizza.com was registered the same day I linked to a Business Insider story about his initial round of reporter-name domain registrations. Perhaps he just has a bad sense of humor! I wonder if he'll post anything silly there.
https://twitter.com/Beschizza/status/900 |
| 5:57 pm | Watch: 71-year-old drunk driver sideswipes cars, then crashes into truck
71-year-old Carol Rose thought it was a good idea to drink alcohol until she was twice the legal limit, and then get into her car. Oh, and according to the Daily Mail, she claimed she has problems with her sight. Her dash cam took this video of her side-smashing a bunch of cars, destroying parts of them along the way, and passing strolling kids and adults who were fortunate not to get in her way. For the grand finale, she crashes into what looks like a delivery truck, which causes her car to roll. The drunk driver, from Ainsdale, England, got eight months in prison and is banned from driving for three years. |
| 6:11 pm | Can you speak dog? Please tell us what this samoyed is trying to say
Coconut Rice Bear has an important message for the humans, but no one knows what it is. |
Original Mondo 2000 t-shirt design.[/caption]
Picture of Rudy Rucker from "Fat Stream," Mondo 2000.[/caption]
Shkreli has been offering to sell at least one of the domain names back to the reporters for thousands of dollars. In a public Facebook post, Shrkreli has offered to sell Emily Saul of the New York Post her domain for $12,000. She declined to comment further on the incident.
