I hear BBTV is planning to spin off a new cable channel: BoingBoing News - We Report, You Complain!

But in any case, my bitching was directed at the Federal Way Mirror, from whence the story originally came.

Huh. It sounds like a pretty standard case of sleep paralysis. Is this news? Oh wait... no, it's just reprinting the police blotter verbatim, slapping on a headline without context, and leaving all analysis to the reader. Yay, modern journalism!

Mmmmm.... Dylar.

Finally, photographic proof that Xeni and Cory are just two different heads of the same happy mutant!

Sounds an awful lot like the sleeve that I already use to carry my laptop around inside my backpack. And yet I still have to remove the laptop from the sleeve for the security theater x-ray, because... why?

I fully expect to hear an answer that involves filing a 27B/6 or a TPS report or something, along with the usual nonsense about the "enemy that lurks."

Also, what's up with the "preview" function for comments here? Shouldn't there be a "post" button that appears on the preview page?

Personally, I hope that once they hand the Lama the torch, he throws it long, into a ten-thousand foot crevasse, right at the base of a glacier, saying "Gunga galunga... gunga, gunga-galunga..."

Seriously, the Olympics are such a corrupt spectacle that it seems like anyone with spiritual affiliations would be better off just staying the hell away from the whole affair.

Those writers, I tell ya... Nothin' but a bunch of bike-riding villains.

Also, in a fun bit of trivia, the original name of LA was "El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles del Río de Porciúncula."

So while the river may be the city's "namesake" now, it was originally the other way around. Kind of...

Autobiography:

My name's on Mars - Hell yes!

Biography:

Illegible microscopic scribble. Who's this chump?

I hope Obama is our next president, but I just can't get over how wrong those posters look.

I'm tempted to make an "Emmanuel Goldstein" poster of Bush's face in counter-propaganda style, to be pasted up across the street.

Cognitive dissonance for all...

Recently, I met a guy who took part in an ayahuasca ceremony, had a grand revelation that he wasn't living the life he wanted, and subsequently ditched his wife and kids to move to Peru and marry a local. So, yeah, clearly not a thing to be taken lightly.

I love these shows. I found a bunch of them through TV Links shortly before if got shut down (damn the Man, I say), and I thought they were so interesting that I watched six of them in a row.

I actually like the fact that Theroux doesn't try to remain completely neutral and objective. To admit one's own biases is probably the most honest stance one could take in presenting a documentary. I do wonder sometimes whether his "concerned" moments are a bit manufactured, but overall, the presentation is very even-handed. I wish that there was more room for this kind of "reporting" in regular TV programming.

I like Obama, and I often like Fairey's designs, but I really dislike this one. For one thing, it looks kind of half-assed, like a barely-modified result of using a Photoshop cutout filter. That's kind of a minor quibble, though. My main reason for not liking it is just that it seems to work against it's own purpose (presumably supporting Obama).

The communist propaganda aesthetic has become a pretty central part of the "Obey" brand, and I think that part of the reason the designs are so successful is that they contain some mixture of earnestness and irony. The ones that contain a hopeful message are made somewhat sinister by their transparently manipulative aesthetic. That's a great combination for mild subversion, but it's a horrible combination for expressing political support.

It's interesting to consider how a similar image expressing support for Hillary might be perceived.

I hear that John Edwards is re-envisioning his campaign, and he'll be kicking off the next few stops backed by the upbeat strumming of Minor Threat.

Pass it on, kids...

There was a library in East St. Louis that had tons of books left abandoned for years, during which time the place got trashed by squatters and the elements. There are some pictures of it here.

It sounds like in that case, the city somehow forgot to transport all the books from the old library to a new one, then even after they were salvaged, forgot to pay the bill on the storage space where they were keeping them. Mismanagement at its finest...

Maybe this was already linked somewhere, but Pollan had a nice lengthy article in the NY Times Magazine last year covering much of this same material. Most of his suggestions just sound like common sense, and I suppose that explains a large part of their appeal, given that so many diets seem to be plucked straight from the loony bin.

That is so neat. Nothing says "It's great to be alive" like banging on a drum.

Machine sex fetishes seem to rely in part on the active knowledge that it's a machine you're interacting with. I'm sure that bots could be "hot" within this limited realm, but how far is this robo-desire likely to, um, extend into the general population?

The comments here seem to be envisioning some Stepford Wife/Husband that can really convincingly equal or surpass a human partner. I'm with jjasper on this one, in that I don't think that fooling the ancient parts of the brain into making an object seem "alive" would be quite enough to make sex with said object seem "real." There's a lot of information that gets passed via subtle physical cues, and even with really fancy AI, I doubt you'd be able to overcome the knowledge that you're interacting with a machine. It brings a whole new layer of meaning to the "uncanny valley."

People find all sorts of ways to get off, but no matter how sophisticated a sex toy you build, I think it's only going to be a certain segment of the population that will find it "hot."

If you want to really wallow in the creepiness and sadness of attachment to inanimate objects, there's a documentary about Realdoll owners and their relationship to their "girls." It's so weird I don't even have a proper description for it. Parts of it are NSFW, obviously. Watch it like a trainwreck, and try to imagine a sunny day in our bright, transhuman future.

Just last week, I saw a boxed copy of Netscape Navigator Gold in a thrift store. It was kept in a glass case along with all the other (mostly outdated) software. I had to wonder whether they thought it was a valuable program or an antique. Maybe it'll show up in a museum soon.

Netscape was the best game in town for a while, but there were a couple years in the early '00s where IE seemed far more usable and reliable (to me, at least). IE6 was lousy enough to put an end to that reign for good, and IE7 was just the nail in the coffin. I'm glad that Firefox is around to carry the torch now, in spite of its obscene propensity for memory leakage in Windows (just checked, and mine is currently taking up 1.2 Gb of memory - that may be a new record!).

Xarker, I love your description of the N logo as this mysterious portal to a better world. I imagine it as the symbol of some vast underground network, like Pynchon's muted post horn. The net was like that for a while, when things were new and hard to find. Surfing the web wasn't just checking in on what's new in the world; it was the discovery of arcane lore from parts unknown. My nostalgia for the big N is a nostalgia for that time. I'd say that I miss it, but it was already gone long ago.

If there's Christian symbolism in the unicorn, it was probably shoehorned in after the fact (kind of like the rest of Christian symbolism, come to think of it).

Unicorns of a sort have existed in Chinese mythology for a lot longer than any recorded European legends, though Chinese unicorns tend to look more like deer with a short, fat horn rather than horses with a long spiraling (and suspiciously narwhal-like) horn.

I always thought the medieval European incarnation of the unicorn legend was an excuse for randy hunters to get impressionable young maidens out into the forest and show their breasts. Sort of like pedophilia meets snipe hunting.

There is a skew toward sexualized female figures on BB. It's obvious enough that I knew what this conversation would be about before I even clicked on the "comments" button.

That said, while I think that the criticisms of the art are valid, I don't see much point in criticizing BB for blogging about what they like. It's not as if they're bound by some kind of curatorial responsibility to represent the whole of contemporary art. They represent their own tastes, which are not shared by everyone.

I don't personally care for steampunk, vinyl toys or cutesy, candy-colored chimeras, so I tend to just skim past most of the "art" posts that focus on those subjects unless they have some more interesting hook. Those of us who don't like absolutely everything that gets posted on BoingBoing can find what we do like elsewhere.

I realize that this "if you don't like it, don't watch it" argument can ring a little hollow, since we're talking about a large blog that arguably has some pull in influencing the web-culture zeitgeist, but really, what do you want them to do about it? We can vent all we want about the skew in the bloggers' interests, but is that going to make anyone change their tastes? Probably not, and it probably shouldn't.

So, does that mean that waterboarding is also like riding a bicycle, if it's being employed by those who still remember it from their days in training?

If Cory blogs from a hot air balloon while wearing goggles and a cape, Mark blogs from a cricket-drawn sunshine cart wearing clogs and a red elf hat.

Can you imagine what the speed and motion lines would look like on that figure if she were shown using the jackhammer?

That's what the repeated boingboing pattern in the background is supposed to represent, isn't it? Oh, right, it's the site that's named BoingBoing. Sorry... I guess my adolescent snicker reflex is in overdrive today.

More seriously, I'm guessing that the design gives a rather different impression to the vast majority of the general population who are unfamiliar with BoingBoing's iconic logo.

While it's not my style to wear t-shirts that prominently feature sexy babes (no matter how wonderful, intelligent or skilled in road construction they may be), I still recognize the skill behind Coop's drawing. I'm sure that the shirts will sell out quickly and be enjoyed by fans the world over.

The most striking thing about those images is the fact that Disney's designers have gone to such great lengths to capture the messiness and realism of the garage. The past, it seems, is so much less shiny than the future.

I can only wonder if riders in the 60s had any idea that their chrome-plated tomorrow would contain so many greasy pizza boxes...

And here all this time, I'd been thinking that the mascot was a lumberjack on a pogo stick. Now that is a t-shirt that I'd actually wear.

Ernie, I don't know whether the Sesame Street video music was ever released on its own, but the "Dance" pieces mentioned in the post (I'm assuming they're the ones on this album) have some very strong resemblances to the music in the video.

I've always been of two minds about Philip Glass. Whenever I hear one of his pieces, it either seems heavy-handed and annoying or it completely blows me away. This one gives me chills, and the visuals fit perfectly.

There's also something about knowing that it was intended for children that adds this new layer of strangeness and wonder.

Some of the underlying concepts are interesting, but the presentation is really awful. The circles don't do enough to differentiate the various kinds of interactions, and who the hell wants to read a bunch of tiny boxes written in ALL CAPS?

Clearly, this is science fiction of a sort, but without any connection to a larger, more meaningful story, it's just a bunch of cloyingly futuristic babble.

When I first saw the headline, I expected the article to read more like this:

November 28, 2007, WASHINGTON, DC: Tired of all the killing, George Bush today made the first tentative steps toward peace in Iraq by adding Muqtada al Sadr to his friends list on MySpace.

I knew something positive would come out of this social networking thing, eventually...

I don't know about everybody else here, but I get all my news from Boing Boing. The mainstream media outlets have a well-known anti-steampunk bias.

This seems to set up a kind of weird implied dichotomy, comparing what is essentially a consumer choice with a productive economic activity. It's like saying "ZOMG, there are more Hello Kitty fans than steel workers in the US!!! Why are politicians ignoring this crucial demographic?"

The answer, of course, is that Hello Kitty fans do not vote as a block (bloc?), since their common interest has jack squat to do with what they do every day to survive. As obsessive as some of them may be, there isn't really any political issue that would unite them at the polls. Any politician who honestly thought they would get more votes by lowering tariffs on Sanrio memorabilia than by raising tariffs on imported steel* probably wouldn't be a politician for very long.

I might well end up being proven wrong here. I mean hell, everybody knows that liberals drink lattes and drive Volvos. Does that mean that we'll see Democratic candidates drawing battle lines by coffee preference, trying to court the all-important half-caf-soy-double-mochaccino-with-whip demographic? 'Round about that time would probably be when I'd run off and hide on a small island in the South Pacific, so I really hope that's not the case.

*Of course, you'd be forced to repeal the steel tariffs after the WTO rules that they're illegal, but by that point, you've probably made your political hay.

@Treepour

Yeah, the Ellison voice is running through this like a ghost. More than anything, it makes me wish that there we still had people out there writing with the heart and the humanity that Ellison displayed in his non-fiction prime.

Some people express their beefs with the direction of the culture using numbered lists.

Others express their beefs using rollers and spraypaint, largely to piss off the ones who express their beefs using numbered lists.

This discussion warms my heart.

Well they don't get my respect until they release their entire catalog on a 5.25" disk full of chiptunes

And don't go telling me that it would be too lo-fi. If it's good enough for Timbaland to rip off, it's good enough for primetime, i say...

@MattX

It's worth pointing out that both of those compounds are perfectly legal to own. I mean, potassium nitrate is fucking saltpeter, which you can buy at any drugstore last time I checked (in the US at least). And a web search reveals that calcium chloride is used as an ice melter and a concrete additive among other things, so it's not exactly a controlled substance.

As a kid, I played around a fair bit with making my own "explosives," which were more like glorified fireworks than anything else. The pharmacist got a little nervous the first time I approached the counter with a bottle of saltpeter in one hand and sulfur in the other, but even when I explained what I was going to do with them, he still sold me the stuff.

If there's anything I learned from those experiments, it's that store-bought flammables give you way more bang for your buck than anything that you can easily home-brew with a few chemicals from the drug store. I never bothered with the Anarchist's Cookbook, though my brother tried unsuccessfully to follow a few of its recipes, which really are crap.

Since I'm no mind reader, I'm not going to speculate on whether this kid was trying to make bombs, or how big, or for what purpose (though I do have sympathy for the desire to experiment with things that go boom). I just think it's ridiculous that they're prosecuting him for the possession of a book, and a pretty ineffectual one at that.

LOLzekiel 25:17

i flip out wit invisible kung fu stilz on dem hoo try 2 take mah kittahs bukkit
and u wil know i iz teh LORD wen i'm in ur base killin ur d00dz!!!11!!

Or perhaps...

Have you had your finger lickin' break today?
We love to see you do chicken right.

I don't think that there's really much of a link between religion and these kinds of structures. The first example of a similar structure that springs to my mind is Watts Towers, which doesn't have any particularly religious significance, and the second is Carhenge, which may point in a tongue-in-cheek way to a religious monument, but definitely was not driven by religion.

On the other hand, my favorite junk art experience of all time was the 24 Hour Church of Elvis in Portland (alas now defunct), so maybe there's something to this religious angle after all.

Come on people, this is some seriously cutting-edge stuff. How can you possibly be mocking such an important contribution to string theory?

I mean heck, if we throw a cat in the box with all those strings, we might even be on our way to a grand unified theory...

This design reminds me of Twenty-7, this rail-riding graffiti artist from Minneapolis whose style is heavily influenced by pinstriping. My favorite pieces of his are the more minimalist ones done in oilbar and one-shot, very pinstripey.

@Noen

It sounds like you didn't read the whole discussion. Near the end, Greenspan gives a more substantive criticism of Klein's approach. It boils down to: governments that pursue capitalist programs focused on long-term growth leave their citizens better off than than those that pursue populist programs focused on short-term benefits (at the expense of long-term growth). Historically, this is true, even if it doesn't address Klein's entire argument. Klein believes that there is "another way," but in the interview, she doesn't do a very good job of describing just what this other way would entail. It would be interesting to see if she presents a clearer picture in her book, with data to back it up.

@Phasor3000

Do you seriously think that your "disaster socialism" interpretation of climate change policy holds any more water than Klein's "disaster capitalism" interpretation of development policy? Or are theories about vast international conspiracy only imaginary when they come from the left?

Crap. Now I don't know who to be afraid of - the people who are telling me to be afraid, or the people who are telling me not to be afraid...

I don't know art, but I do know awesome. And this is unambiguously awesome.

My guess was going to be that they were part of a guerrilla marketing campaign for a werewolf dating service.

But unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately?) for the werewolves, it was just some bloke with a chisel and too much time on his hands.

Boy, leave it to the web news cycle to crush your dreams before they can even get started.

Bummed that I won't have a chance to see the installation, because jerry-rigged space romanticism is great. I love this stuff.

The artist Aleksandra Mir also performed a rather different remake of the moon landing on a beach in The Netherlands, called "The First Woman on the Moon," which I first read about in this great interview in The Believer.

Also, I love Radiohead and all, but what sort of eye-bleeding nonsense is that web site foisting upon us, anyway? I realize that design is one of those cyclic things, but I'd really rather prefer that we not revive the mid-90's rave flyer aesthetic on a mass-culture scale. Please, oh ye gods of hipness, not yet, not yet...

@Setharian, this approach seems to give the artists a mite bit more control than they would have by leaving distribution up to the labels, don't you think? I hope it works, and I hope Radiohead rakes in loads of cash.

More importantly though, I hope there's a future for this model in the market at large. This is an easy (and, yes, somewhat gimmicky) route for Radiohead to take at this point in their careers, since they already have an enormous, loyal fan base. But the real question is whether a group of unknowns with great music but no backing from the industry publicity machine could reach Radiohead's popularity based solely on home-spun marketing and online donations (aka "sales").

The RIAA are a bunch of thugs, but they still play a real role in laying down the "venture capital" that can turn lesser-known talents into "stars." They used to play an essential role in music distribution as well, but of course the 'net made short work of that.

Once artists can pay for their own production and promotion using funds from fan loyalty alone, they'll be able to cut out the middlemen altogether. Will getting there be easy? Of course not, but you'd better believe that it would give artists far more "control" than they currently have.

@Anon#1: Yes, it's an awesome movie, but I think I'm going to hold out for the 17-disc Definitive Real Ultimate Power Deluxe Edition, to be released in 2019. It's going to include two copies of all previous versions as well as a bloopers reel and never-before-seen footage of Harrison Ford's dressing room. We're going to settle this replicant business once and for all.