We spoke about transitions from "big media" to independent internet media; the importance of government funding for youth science education and for science news in broadcasting; and Miles shared some wonderful stories from his 30-year history as a television news reporter (17 of which were as an anchor and reporter on CNN, now he's with PBS NewsHour). There were some great stories about Space Shuttle launches (he covered 45 of them), News Anchors Behaving Badly, and how Miles almost became a Space Shuttle astronaut during his CNN years.
Where not otherwise specified, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution. Boing Boing is a trademark of Happy Mutants LLC in the United States and other countries.
PHOTO, click for larger size without mosaic: Jean-Marie Anigbishe, 45, who was attacked by Ugandan Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) rebels near Ngalima sits with gaping head wounds at hospital in Ngalima in northeastern Congo February 21, 2009. Anigbishe was fleeing LRA massacres and left for dead on the road after he and his brother were attacked by LRA fighters. His brother in law was shot and killed and Anigbishe was found unconscious five days later with maggots eating away at his gaping head wounds. Thousands of Congolese fled their villages as LRA rebels roaming the bush carried out massacres. Picture taken February 21, 2009. (REUTERS/Finbarr O'Reilly)
At the New York Times Lede blog, Bob Mackey writes about Rush Limbaugh's new position of public support for the Central African warlords known as the LRA, or the Lord's Resistance Army. This is the military entity described by the Times as "a notorious renegade group that has terrorized villagers in at least four countries with marauding bands that kill, rape, maim and kidnap with impunity.”
It seems Limbaugh just likes the "Lord" part, and opposes president Obama's recent decision to get involved militarily. The U.S. recently announced a contribution of 100 Special Forces to deal with LRA. Now, any number of reasonable people might disagree with the administration's decision to send a token show of troops, but supporting the LRA is something only someone as stupid and evil as Limbaugh would do.
The vast majority of those killed were adult men, whom LRA combatants first tied up and then hacked to death with machetes or crushed their skulls with axes and heavy wooden sticks. The dead include at least 13 women and 23 children, the youngest a 3-year-old girl who was burned to death. LRA combatants tied some of the victims to trees before crushing their skulls with axes.
Where not otherwise specified, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution. Boing Boing is a trademark of Happy Mutants LLC in the United States and other countries.
Seen at New York Comic-Con, which I'm presently attending: the forthcoming "Create Your Own Zombie Action Figure" kits, which are available for pre-order, and sport arms, legs, torsos, heads, chest prosthesis, and wardrobe items that you can mix and match to make the perfect zombie toy. The box-art is fantastic -- the whole package stopped at 20 feet and sucked me in. The gentleman working at the booth is also the mad genius behind the reissue of the classic Mego action figures, which include a number of contrafactual toys that were never released but should have been, "re-created" with pitch-perfect packaging and design.
Where not otherwise specified, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution. Boing Boing is a trademark of Happy Mutants LLC in the United States and other countries.
Harkinson was nearly arrested in the course of filming this, as you can see for yourself towards the end, when he identifies himself as a member of the press who wishes to document the arrests. The NYPD clearly did not want any such documentation.
The police officer who approaches protesters initially is sympathetic and respectful. He pleads with the protesters to go home; all the officers have been at it since 8AM and are tired, and want to go home to their families. The protester replies by reading out the First Amendment. A protester is singing the 1940 Woodie Guthrie anthem, "This Land Is Your Land."
Unlike the park that houses the original OWS occupation near Wall Street, Washington Square is a publicly-owned space that's subject to a 12 a.m. closing time imposed by New York City's Department of Parks and Recreation. As midnight approached, the New York City Police Department dispatched more than 100 police officers in riot gear to push out the occupiers. Some of them chose to resist, and I was there inside the police cordon to capture this exclusive video (the confrontation with police happens near the end).
"This land is your land, this land is my land, From California to the New York Island."
Where not otherwise specified, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution. Boing Boing is a trademark of Happy Mutants LLC in the United States and other countries.
By Cory Doctorow at 5:39 am Sunday, Oct 16 A tip for New York Comic-Congoers: don't miss the Romanian booth for a look at some of the weirdest, coolest comics being made in the world today. See my piece in Forbes from a few years back on Romania's "otaci." Tags: Comics, nycc, romania
Where not otherwise specified, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution. Boing Boing is a trademark of Happy Mutants LLC in the United States and other countries.
On Vimeo, Robino Films did this "fair" test between the iPhone 4S and the Canon 5D MK II. I've been shooting video and stills with the iPhone 4S for a couple of days, and I've been pretty blown away by the image quality. Was planning to do a side-by-side analysis like this myself, but this guy beat me to it, and the results are visually informative. Snip:
I made a little rig that allowed me to shoot both cameras at the same time side by side. All scenes are perfectly synced together so you can pause and scrutinize the frames! See photo of the makeshift rig in the photo area. Exposure, shutter speed, frame rate and picture style were matched as close as possible between the two cameras. (I used the Zacuto Z-finder to help me adjust exposure for both iPhone and 5D)
This test shows that the tiny F2.4 lens and sensor on the iPhone are pretty nice. It even got a little depth of field!
I did not overlay the exact ISO and Stops 5D settings per shot. It was too much to keep track for this simple test. To be fair I matched 5D exposure to the iPhone so no "Cinestyle" / 24p here.
Where not otherwise specified, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution. Boing Boing is a trademark of Happy Mutants LLC in the United States and other countries.
French urban climber Alain Robert, also known as the French Spiderman, climbs to the top floor of a 22-story hotel building in Bucharest October 14, 2011. Robert's climb was part of an advertising campaign for a local electronics retailer.
Robert first climbed a building at the age of 12 when he got locked out of his apartment and decided to mount the eight stories up to an open window. He has since climbed more than 80 buildings around the world including Chicago's Sears Tower and Taipei 101 in Taiwan.
More photos of his ascent follow, courtesy of Reuters.
(NB: I'd link to the man's website, but the front door is a horrible auto-audio-blasting Flash abomination which redirects to what looks like malware. Maybe he can take a look at that when he climbs back down to Earth.)
Where not otherwise specified, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution. Boing Boing is a trademark of Happy Mutants LLC in the United States and other countries.
Derek Slater is my former colleague at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, now serving as a policy analyst at Google. He's just published a barn-burning essay called "#noimnotgoingtolawschool: Or, Why I Love Legal Clinics as well as Lawyers and Law Professors That See Their Primary Job As Helping Students Reach Their Goals, Or, Disrupting Law Schools." Slater indicts the legal education industry as a system that produces debt-ridden, half-trained half-lawyers who have to go on to firms in order to actually learn to practice law. He calls for a refactoring of the legal education system around legal clinics, which, he says, will prepare lawyers to actually help clients.
If the thing you want to have an impact on is politics and/or the legal system:
then I’d still recommend you probably be an engineer, and that you direct your engineering talents to politics.
In the alternative: I would recommend you focus on where you have passionate beliefs, and surround yourself with really smart engineers and really smart lawyers. I would apprentice with those types of people, and show a willingness to get your hands dirty and work hard toward what they’re passionate about...
The first model I’d look at is how colleges are training really amazing software engineers. There is nothing inherently special about the people who are software engineers that make them better or more able to change the world. They’re not inherently smarter than lawyers. They are not unique or special snowflakes either.
They have just been trained better. The difference is that they have been trained to be immediately effective in the world. They are trained in ways that allow them to contribute to the companies they join right out of the gate. They know how to code.
Law students are currently the equivalent of someone asking Google or Facebook for a job, and saying “I don’t know how to code, but I know a lot of theory about the Web and I’ve looked at a ton of websites. I’m really smart. So hire me and teach me how to code, ok?”
Where not otherwise specified, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution. Boing Boing is a trademark of Happy Mutants LLC in the United States and other countries.
Writer Doranna Durgin sez, "For eighteen months, publisher Fitzhenry & Whiteside has refused to honor the contract reversion clause for one of their fantasy titles; they have persistently demurred, ignored, and rebuffed attempts to discuss the situation, whether approached via agent, SFWA GriefCom, or directly. At this point, silence is their friend--but not in the interests of anyone else, including writers who are actively submitting YA works. The linked post presents a summary based on saved emails, the contract clause in question, and screenshot evidence."
Some context for non-writers out there: while creators in other fields (music, say) are typically required to assign their copyrights to their publishers/labels/studios, fiction writers have a much less oppressive arrangement with our publishers. We typically license our works to our publishers, and the publishers only get to keep those licensed rights for as long as the book is "in print." The definition of "in print" has evolved over the years, but typically it means, "the publisher has copies that it supplies to bookstores through its fulfillment system." The exact details of "in print" are spelled out in each book's contract.
According to her version of the story (a version corroborated by independent sources, like the Science Fiction Writers of America's Grievance Committee) Durgin's publisher is most certainly not keeping her book in print per the terms of their contract. The fact that they've demanded that Durgin buy back their leftover copies of book as a condition of holding up their end of the contract is without precedent -- indeed, it's a breathtaking violation of publishing norms, the sort of thing you're more likely to encounter from ripoff vanity publishers and not a respected house like Fitz and Witz. Writer Beware indeed.
After another nudge—which included the reminder that the publisher could continue to sell warehoused copies in their usual fashion, as well as a reminder of the boilerplate changes–we were finally told: “This book is in stock, on sale on our website, it continues to sell albeit in lesser quantities. [my note: yes, a handful of copies a year] We have some 1,600 in stock with no reason to revert rights.”
How about because it’s a contractual obligation?
...Early the next day, I heard from the GriefCom chair that he had received a phone call, and that the unidentified caller took him to task in no uncertain terms–claiming harassment, declaring there would be no reversion on the title, and warning that she would “report” us to [prominent Canadian SF writer #1] and [prominent Canadian SF writer #2]—all before hanging up on him.
Where not otherwise specified, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution. Boing Boing is a trademark of Happy Mutants LLC in the United States and other countries.
The state of Victoria, Australia is considering legislation making it an offense to "assault, obstruct, hinder, threaten, abuse, insult or intimidate" the state's Gaming Minister Michael O'Brien or his staff. Laws against insulting government ministers are not customary in liberal democracies, a fact that has not escaped the opposition in Victoria's Parliament:
State Labor has seized on the extraordinary amendment, with Opposition gaming spokesman Martin Pakula branding the minister "Windscreens O'Brien - because this proves he's got a glass jaw".
"Is the minister so precious that he now needs legislation to protect him from insults?" he said.
"I thought I better make these comments before the Bill passes in case I breach the new rules and insult Mr O'Brien."
Where not otherwise specified, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution. Boing Boing is a trademark of Happy Mutants LLC in the United States and other countries.
Futility Closet is a blog about surprising passages found chiefly in out-of-print books. It's one of my favorite blogs. Greg Ross, who runs it, describes it as "An idler's miscellany of compendious amusements."
Mark Frauenfelder You find such wonderful material to post on Futility Closet. Where do you find it all?
Greg Ross Most of it comes from university libraries. I live in the Research Triangle in North Carolina, so there are a lot of big libraries to work in. About 80 percent of the job is prospecting and fact-checking. I keep a big list of story ideas, and the readers submit some great ideas, too, for which I'm grateful.
Mark How do you go about "prospecting?" Do you browse aisles looking for interesting titles?
Greg No, I've tried that, and it's just too hit-and-miss. I experiment with strategies like surfing catalog metadata and reading bibliographies, and then I track down each title in the stacks and evaluate it directly. Once I've decided on the most promising ones, I take them home to read more closely. Then I start the whole process over again. It takes a lot of time, but in the end I find there's no substitute for just reading a lot of books. And there's a surprising amount of luck involved; I think I've stumbled over most of my favorite books while looking for something else.
Mark Tell me a bit about yourself: your interests, your background, your occupation, etc.
Greg I'm basically a magazine editor, working mostly on science and engineering magazines. For the last 10 years I've been an editor at American Scientist magazine in Research Triangle Park. I started the blog six years ago, mostly as a way to mess around with web development, but it's grown so popular that now it takes up most of my free time.
I think most of my interests are reflected in the blog. When I started it I resolved to make a site that I myself would want to read, following O. Henry's dictum "Write what you like, there is no other rule." I'm continually surprised that other people like it so much.
Mark You seem to have discovered a secret world of literature about surprising things. Could you name 3 favorite books that most people don't know about but should?
Greg I haven't been able to find a general collection of interesting facts that's reliably accurate, alas, which is why I'm reduced to such wide reading -- the facts are out there, but they have to be gathered. My favorite books tend to be written by specialists who are passionate about their topics -- here are some:
Bad Acts and Guilty Minds, by Leo Katz, is a collection of puzzles in criminal law. "When a traveler smuggles some French lace past customs, and the lace is in fact duty-free, should he be punished for attempted smuggling?" Katz, who teaches law at the University of Pennsylvania, began collecting legal conundrums while clerking for Anthony Kennedy, and his fellow clerks "endured many a lunch hour conversation about cannibalism, overcrowded lifeboats, the killing of ghosts and the shooting of corpses." The book is wonderfully thought-provoking, and Katz's enthusiasm makes it great fun to read.
In the same spirit, There Are Two Errors in the the Title of This Book, by Dalhousie University philosopher Robert M. Martin, is a collection of 250 philosophical enigmas, puzzles, and conundrums. It reminds me of a book I loved as a kid, How to Torture Your Mind, by Ralph L. Woods, a collection of classic paradoxes, sophisms and fallacies. Woods gave no discussion, and he offered no answers -- he trusted you to see the point of each problem and to puzzle it through for yourself. In that way the book was a compliment to its audience, a model I've tried to follow with Futility Closet.
Where not otherwise specified, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution. Boing Boing is a trademark of Happy Mutants LLC in the United States and other countries.
This is an incredibly rare cyclops shark embryo. Sadly, this dusky shark never even had a chance to live. A fisher caught its momma in the Gulf of California and when cut her open, he found the curious creature inside. From National Geographic:
Once (Interdisciplinary Center of Marine Sciences biologist Felipe) Galván-Magaña and colleague Marcela Bejarano-Álvarez heard about the discovery—which was put on Facebook—the team got the fisher (Enrique Lucero) León's permission to borrow the shark for research. The scientists then x-rayed the fetus and reviewed previous research on cyclopean in other species to confirm that the find is indeed a cyclops shark.
Cyclops sharks have been documented by scientists a few times before, also as embryos, said Jim Gelsleichter, a shark biologist at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville. The fact that none have been caught outside the womb suggests cyclops sharks don't survive long in the wild.
Where not otherwise specified, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution. Boing Boing is a trademark of Happy Mutants LLC in the United States and other countries.
Designer Joey Roth is auctioning a limited run of 24-karat gold Sorapots to help out BB pal Amit Gupta, who recently fell ill with leukaemia: "South Asians are severely underrepresented in the pool of registered bone marrow donors. 100% of profits from the auctions will go to drives, both here and in India, to find and register potential donors."
The odds of someone of South Asian descent finding a match are only 1 in 20,000.
Where not otherwise specified, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution. Boing Boing is a trademark of Happy Mutants LLC in the United States and other countries.
[Video Link] Becky Stern says: "MAKE Volume 28 hits makers’ passion for play head-on with a 28-page special section devoted to Toys and Games, including a toy “pop-pop” steamboat made from a mint tin, an R/C helicopter eye-in-the-sky, and a classic video game console. You’ll also build a gravity-powered catapult, a plush toy that interacts with objects around it, and a machine that blows giant soap bubbles. Play time is a hallmark of more intelligent species– so go have some fun!"
Where not otherwise specified, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution. Boing Boing is a trademark of Happy Mutants LLC in the United States and other countries.
Where not otherwise specified, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution. Boing Boing is a trademark of Happy Mutants LLC in the United States and other countries.
"They’ve been anonymously commenting on the web for years, but some of the Internet’s most prolific commenters reveal themselves and share why they do it." (Via Laughing Squid)
Where not otherwise specified, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution. Boing Boing is a trademark of Happy Mutants LLC in the United States and other countries.
I like these lenses. If I tried to install them in a pattern like the one shown above, the lens holes would be non-collinear and unevenly spaced, and I would have to buy a new door.
Craft-Modern introduces the Doorlenz. Made of anodized aluminum and tinted acrylic, the Doorlenz requires no additional hardware to hold it in place. Simply drill the required hole into your existing door and attach the Doorlenz with a few twists. The Doorlenz is available in three sizes and five colors to allow for a unique and endless number of designs.
Where not otherwise specified, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution. Boing Boing is a trademark of Happy Mutants LLC in the United States and other countries.
Seattle prosecutors decided not to press charges against Seattle superhero Phoenix Jones. As I posted yesterday, Jones was arrested over the weekend for allegedly pepper spraying a group of people. His "spokesman" says he was attempting to break up a fight. From CNN:
"If you see something that warrants calling 911, call 911. You don't need to dress up in a costume to do that," police spokesman Mark Jamieson said.
In court Thursday, Fodor arrived wearing a hood, which a judge's assistant asked him to remove. When told that charges had not been filed against him, Fodor put the rubber hood back on and exited the court with a swarm of media cameras following him.
Outside the courthouse, Fodor told reporters he would continue his anti-crime patrols.
"In addition to being Phoenix Jones, I am also Ben Fodor, a father and brother," he said, removing his hood. "I am just like everybody else. The only difference is that I try to stop crime."
Where not otherwise specified, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution. Boing Boing is a trademark of Happy Mutants LLC in the United States and other countries.
Where not otherwise specified, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution. Boing Boing is a trademark of Happy Mutants LLC in the United States and other countries.
Where not otherwise specified, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution. Boing Boing is a trademark of Happy Mutants LLC in the United States and other countries.
Author William Gibson discusses Victorians, John Shirley and the early days of his career. A longer version of this interview appeared in the 197th issue of Paris Review
Do you think fiction should be predictive?
No, I don’t. Or not particularly. The record of futurism in science fiction is actually quite shabby, it seems to me. Used bookstores are full of visionary texts we’ve never heard of, usually for perfectly good reasons.
You’ve written that science fiction is never about the future, that it is always instead a treatment of the present.
There are dedicated futurists who feel very seriously that they are extrapolating a future history. My position is that you can’t do that without having the present to stand on. Nobody can know the real future. And novels set in imaginary futures are necessarily about the moment in which they are written. As soon as a work is complete, it will begin to acquire a patina of anachronism. I know that from the moment I add the final period, the text is moving steadily forward into the real future.
There was an effort in the seventies to lose the usage science fiction and champion speculative fiction. Of course, all fiction is speculative, and all history, too—endlessly subject to revision. Particularly given all of the emerging technology today, in a hundred years the long span of human history will look fabulously different from the version we have now. If things go on the way they’re going, and technology keeps emerging, we’ll eventually have a near-total sorting of humanity’s attic.
In my lifetime I’ve been able to watch completely different narratives of history emerge. The history now of what World War II was about and how it actually took place is radically different from the history I was taught in elementary school. If you read the Victorians writing about themselves, they’re describing something that never existed. The Victorians didn’t think of themselves as sexually repressed, and they didn’t think of themselves as racist. They didn’t think of themselves as colonialists. They thought of themselves as the crown of creation.
Of course, we might be Victorians, too.
The Victorians invented science fiction.
I think the popular perception that we’re a lot like the Victorians is in large part correct. One way is that we’re all constantly in a state of ongoing technoshock, without really being aware of it—it’s just become where we live. The Victorians were the first people to experience that, and I think it made them crazy in new ways. We’re still riding that wave of craziness. We’ve gotten so used to emergent technologies that we get anxious if we haven’t had one in a while.
But if you read the accounts of people who rode steam trains for the first time, for instance, they went a little crazy. They’d traveled fifteen miles an hour, and when they were writing the accounts afterward they struggled to describe that unthinkable speed and what this linear velocity does to a perspective as you’re looking forward. There was even a Victorian medical complaint called “railway spine.”
Emergent technologies were irreversibly altering their landscape. Bleak House is a quintessential Victorian text, but it is also probably the best steam-punk landscape that will ever be. Dickens really nailed it, especially in those proto-Ballardian passages in which everything in nature has been damaged by heavy industry. But there were relatively few voices like Dickens then. Most people thought the progress of industry was all very exciting. Only a few were saying, Hang on, we think the birds are dying.
++++++++++++++++++
You wrote your first story for a class, didn’t you?
A woman named Susan Wood had come to UBC as an assistant professor. We were the same age, and I met her while reconnoitering the local science-fiction culture. In my final year she was teaching a science-fiction course. I had become really lazy and thought, I won’t have to read anything if I take her course. No matter what she assigns, I’ve read all the stuff. I’ll just turn up and bullshit brilliantly, and she’ll give me a mark just for doing that. But when I said, “Well, you know, we know one another. Do I really have to write you a paper for this class?” She said, “No, but I think you should write a short story and give me that instead.” I think she probably saw through whatever cover I had erected over my secret plan to become a science-fiction writer.
I went ahead and did it, but it was incredibly painful. It was the hardest thing I did in my senior year, writing this little short story. She said, “That’s good. You should sell it now.” And I said, “No.” And she said, “Yeah, you should sell it.” I went and found the most obscure magazine that paid the least amount of money. It was called Unearth. I submitted it to them, and they bought it and gave me twenty-seven dollars. I felt an enormous sense of relief. At least nobody will ever see it, I thought. That was “Fragments of a Hologram Rose.”
How did you meet John Shirley?
Shirley was the only one of us who was seriously punk. I’d gone to a science-fiction convention in Vancouver, and there I encountered this eccentrically dressed young man my age who seemed to be wearing prison pajamas. He was an extremely outgoing person, and he introduced himself to me: “I’m a singer in a punk band, but my day job is writing science fiction.” I said, “You know, I write a little science fiction myself.” And he said, “Published anything?” And I said, “Oh, not really. This one story in this utterly obscure magazine.” He said, “Well, send me some of your stuff, I’ll give you a critique.”
As soon as he got home he sent me a draft of a short story he had written perhaps an hour beforehand: “This is my new genius short story.” I read it—it was about someone who discovers there are things that live in bars, things that look like drunks and prostitutes but are actually something else—and I saw, as I thought at the time, its flaws. I sat down to write him a critique, but it would have been so much work to critique it that instead I took his story and rewrote it. It was really quick and painless. I sent it back to him, saying, “I hope this won’t piss you off, but it was actually much easier for me to rewrite this than to do a critique.” The next thing I get back is a note—“I sold it!” He had sold it to this hardcover horror anthology. I was like, Oh, shit. Now my name is on this weird story.
People kept doing that to me, and it’s really good that they did. I’d give various friends stuff to read, and they’d say, “What are you going to do with this?” And I’d say, “Nothing, it’s not nearly there yet.” Then they’d Xerox it and submit it on my behalf, to places I would have been terrified to submit to. It seemed unseemly to me to force this unfinished stuff on the world at large.
Do you still consider that work unfinished?
I had a very limited tool kit when I began writing. I didn’t know how to handle transitions, so I used abrupt breaks, the literary equivalent of jump cuts. I didn’t have any sense of how to pace anything. But I had read and ad- mired Ballard and Burroughs, and I thought of them as very powerful effect pedals. You get to a certain place in the story and you just step on the Ballard.
What was the effect?
A more genuine kind of future shock. I wanted the reader to feel constantly somewhat disoriented and in a foreign place, because I assumed that to be the highest pleasure in reading stories set in imaginary futures. But I’d also read novels where the future-weirdness quotient overwhelmed me and simply became boring, so I tried to make sure my early fiction worked as relatively solid genre pieces. Which I still believe is harder to do. When I started Neuromancer, for instance, I wanted to have an absolutely familiar, utterly well-worn armature of pulp plot running throughout the whole thing. It’s the caper plot that carries the reader through.
What do you think of Neuromancer today?
When I look at Neuromancer I see a Soap Box Derby car. I felt, writing it, like I had two-by-fours and an old bicycle wheel and I’m supposed to build something that will catch a Ferrari. This is not going to fly, I thought. But I tried to do it anyway, and I produced this garage artifact, which, amazingly, is still running to this day.
Even so, I got to the end of it, and I didn’t care what it meant, I didn’t even know if it made any sense as a narrative. I didn’t have this huge feeling of, Wow, I just wrote a novel! I didn’t think it might win an award. I just thought, Phew! Now I can figure out how to write an actual novel. Tags: carousel, william gibson
Where not otherwise specified, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution. Boing Boing is a trademark of Happy Mutants LLC in the United States and other countries.
Where not otherwise specified, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution. Boing Boing is a trademark of Happy Mutants LLC in the United States and other countries.
Within days, Erwin--a Jeopardy champion--saw his story receive its own subreddit, where readers created fan-art and fiction to augment his official story updates. There are even mockup movie trailers. According to Variety, WB's Chris Gary encouraged the studio to 'move agressively' to acquire the rights.
Where not otherwise specified, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution. Boing Boing is a trademark of Happy Mutants LLC in the United States and other countries.
My latest Guardian column, "Adult content filters can't replace good parenting," is a critique of the media coverage of Britain's new national "adult content" filter. The reporting on this story all led with uncritical repetition of the government's line that this would block "all adult content" -- nevermind that no two people agree on a definition of "adult content" and even if they did, the filter would inevitably miss loads of "adult content" and block lots of stuff that wasn't "adult."
Presenting a parent who is trying to keep their children safe with the question: "Would you like to block all adult content on your internet connection?" is terribly misleading, designed to play on parental fears and bypass critical judgement. Better to ask: "Would you like us to block some pornography (but not all of it), and a lot of other stuff, according to secret blacklists composed by anonymous third-party contractors who have been known to proudly classify photos of Michaelangelo's David as 'nudity?'"
It's simplistic to say that governments should abide by the principle "do no harm", but it's perfectly reasonable to demand that policies should at least do some good. When our national information policy is turned over to anonymous, unaccountable censorware vendors, we fail to deliver a safe online environment for our children and we undermine our own free access to information. It's a lose-lose proposition.
As a parent, I worry about what my kid finds on the net. At three and a half, my daughter is already old enough to drive a little tablet and check out cartoons on YouTube. Just the other day, I heard some odd dialogue emerging from across the sofa, and I had a peek at my daughter's screen. To my surprise, I found that she had discovered a little interlinked pocket of aggressive, kid-targeted Barbie adverts, uploaded by the official Mattel account, masterfully wrought pester-power timebombs designed to convert my kid into a nagging doll-acquisition machine. What's more, my kid had heretofore only watched ripped DVDs, YouTube cartoons, and CBeebies and had literally never seen a video advert before.
Where not otherwise specified, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution. Boing Boing is a trademark of Happy Mutants LLC in the United States and other countries.
Where not otherwise specified, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution. Boing Boing is a trademark of Happy Mutants LLC in the United States and other countries.
That is the graffiti in one of the destroyed streets in this Saturday's "indignati" demonstration. It ended in violence against the police, city security, and last but not least the pacifist organizers of the manifestation, in tune with the world wide movements OCCUPY.
The graffiti sounds like some epic motto of ancient Rome when power struggles burned palaces, libraries, and streets.
Roman life may not be too different after all, except that 2000 years later, we somehow believe that those conflicts should be resolved without arson. Maybe we are wrong. Maybe the fact that people are organized using web networks does not free them from timeless forms of treachery and palace intrigue, or the manipulation and destruction of good political intent.
Anyway, after the mayhem, the search was on for the hooded arsonists, organized through the Internet and through private video shots by participants.
Italy remembers very well the violent "Years of Lead" (late 60's to early 80's), when red and black terrorists planted bombs in public places, blasting innocent citizens in the name of their distorted concept of supreme justice. For years they rampaged beyond the reach of police, courts and other institutions.
Even today, after many years, some cases of public terrorism have not been resolved. Books have been written by important authors to explain the supposedly important difference between a red and a black bomb detonated in public. The Nobel prize authors Dario Fo wrote a play where he showed how easily the police could frame anarchists for terrorism, killing them by legal means. There was a famous question about crime: a chi giova, who profits from it?
Today decades political violence is less sophisticated and ideological. Rome on fire Oct 16 2011 could have been Belgrade Feb 18 2008, when nationalist hooligans, upset about Kosovo, burned foreign embassies.
This is how Italian press reported:
"Black bloc, the day after.
Rome woke up after the nightmare of violence. Devastated, injured, the city counts the wounds. In the streets cars are burned, roads left without precious sanpietrini stones used as bullets, the facades of banks hotels and shops destroyed, black from smoke: at least one million of euros is the damage.
135 injured people, luckily no dead. 500 violent intruders destroyed a protest of 300 000 pacific protesters: the battle lasted for 5 hours in Rome downtown: a boy has lost one eye, one men has lost two fingers and a policeman suffered a heart attack.
International day of anger, Roman version"
"You can recognize them immediately by they clothes: pants, hoodies, helmets, masks, backpacks. All in black. Sometimes they even hold a banner in front of them: we are not asking for the future we are taking the present. They individuate the target, make a cross, take off they backpack , take out their hammers and other tools and hit. They started with the cars…"
Eugenio Scalfari , in La Reppublica editorial commented:
And who are the indignitati? They are neither right or left winged., in the traditional sense of those words. They are however not conservative, they have concrete objectives: they want public goods for everybody, they have no faith in private property including the state administrated property by political and power elites.People should possess and rule the goods they have where they live as water food forests, communication networks, houses, factories hospitals. And banks should stop to exist except for elementary transactions based on use and exchange value."
It' s a sad end of an attempt in Rome of the globalized protest starting from Madrid through Occupy Wall street in NY and other 80 cities which managed a peaceful protest.
It all happened while the usual protestors where on the streets; in somewhat a bigger number: plus a feminist , an angry teacher, a perky granny, a guy who lost his job hand in hand with an extracomunitario and finally a indignado youngster. Then black bloc stormed in and all hell broke loose: the spectre of bloody Genova riots between the protestors and the police ten years ago, anni di piombo of public terrorism and police mafia 40 years ago and Rome in flames 2000 ago.
A chi giova, who profits from all this? Premiere Berlusconi has been confirmed in power again after months of public sex and corruption scandals as if nothing happened. As if indignity did not exist or protest. The Italians seem not to need a foreign enemy: they bring it all alone on themselves.
Where not otherwise specified, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution. Boing Boing is a trademark of Happy Mutants LLC in the United States and other countries.
Every year, intrepid Ph.D. students face off in a high-stakes competition for honor, glory, and the intermingling of science and art. The goal: Dance your Ph.D. thesis. I showed you the finalists last year. This year, Science magazine has posted all 53 entries online, before the finalists are chosen. I'll confess, I've not yet watched them all. So I can't say this is my favorite, but it is well-done and did immediately catch my attention.
The dissertation research began with a two-choice, forced-interval experiment in which 29 humans were asked to rate isolated sounds from most to least percussive. The sound characteristic of rise time was found to be the most correlated with percussion of the characteristics tested. The experiment is represented in the dance by the first two interactions between Alain and Shiny, during which Shiny expresses his inability to correctly choose the stronger percussion sound.
... The final stage of the dissertation research was to use the detection algorithm with real-world music to discover self-similarity in the percussion patterns. By using auto-correlation analysis, the detection algorithm can be used to time the repetition and near repetition in music percussion. Shiny demonstrates the self-similarity of the music by several final repetitve dance moves, repeating appropriately at the time scale of beats, measures, and phrases.
Where not otherwise specified, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution. Boing Boing is a trademark of Happy Mutants LLC in the United States and other countries.
This custom silver ink, developed by materials researchers at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, allows you to draw working circuits out on paper. It's extremely cool, and the video shows you step-by-step how they make it. Bonus: This ink provides an actual reason to use cursive.
Where not otherwise specified, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution. Boing Boing is a trademark of Happy Mutants LLC in the United States and other countries.
Government workers are dying to get their hands on tablet computers, according to documents released under the Freedom of Information Act and published by Government Attic. The files show, however, that security protocols may result in a slow roll-out at some agencies.
The Federal Trade Commission, National Archives and Records Administration, Deparment of Veterans Affairs, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and Tennessee Valley Authority each produced internal records which discuss the merits of iPads and similar devices.
Another federal agency, the General Services Administration, said that it would charge $113,680 to yield its internal discussions.
Though Apple's market-leading tablet appears to be the clear choice among rank-and-file workers, emails show security-focused IT staff leaning toward RIM's BlackBerry Playbook instead—at least until they get a closer look at it.
At the National Archives, released documents[PDF] included a proposal to "extend the availability of tablets to potentially all NARA staff," a capital planning review, and various memos and emails between staff.
"We have found the iPad for be very useful in investigating work at the OIG," wrote one agency official. "For example, instead of taking a bulky laptop to the collector shows where we have a display, or in some cases just walk around to meet and greet, the iPad works much better. It is light, has great battery power and is super fast."
The capital planning review saw nearly universal enthusiasm in the feedback garnered: "The iPad has dramatically improved my productivity," says one worker. " ... It would be great if we could find an iPad use for staff tied to our hard core busines functions - record centers, pulls/re-files, description, reference, etc. That would yield a big productivity gain and demonstrate a solid business case for more widespread use of tablets for our staff."
Adds another: "NARA should start building [iPad] apps for customers."
In the VA's disclosures[PDF], a memo dated August 22 describes a a pilot program established to determine the viability of iOS. The program, conducted with the help of Agilex, a government IT services contractor, was scheduled to end Oct 1. The memo prohibited field operations staff from purchasing more iOS devices: "VA currently has enough pilot users to determine viability..."
In another letter, the VA's assistant IT secretary writes that its remote access solutions are not compatible with devices such as the iPad, and discusses the measures they might take to allow workers to use them.
At the NHTSA, the BlackBerry Playbook is seen to have security advantages over the iPad[PDF]: "Given that Blackberry has built a strong reputation in enterprise security for movile deices in the federal sector, it does give it a leg up over Apple in the Enterprise Security space," writes one staffer in an email.
Responding to reports of increased interest in Apple's iPad by other government agencies, a senior IT project manager suggests Apple's portables are insecure due to the ability of users to "jailbreak" them.
"It's pretty obvious that with a security flaw clearly known, these devices should not be distributed beyond the R&D group," he writes. "I guess I have to ask the obvious, how is this an authorized piece of hardware at this point in any gov't shop?"
Unfortunately, RIM's alternative suffers from its own disadvantage: no-one seems to want one.
"I'm not hearing a huge uproar for the Playbook, probably 'cause of the downsides ... mentioned below," writes on staffer.
"I'm going to skip it," writes the project manager, concluding one email thread released to the public. "I only had a passing fancy." Tags: foia, government, governmentattic, ipad, tablets
Where not otherwise specified, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution. Boing Boing is a trademark of Happy Mutants LLC in the United States and other countries.
By Xeni Jardin at 6:53 am Monday, Oct 17 Apple Inc says today that 4 million iPhone 4S have been sold since it went on sale October 14. In-store sales began Friday in Japan, Australia, France, the UK, Germany, Canada and the US. Over 1 million orders were received online in the first 24 hours, up from 600,000 for the iPhone 4.
Where not otherwise specified, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution. Boing Boing is a trademark of Happy Mutants LLC in the United States and other countries.
If you thought your mobile carrier was a pile of shit, it's understandable -- after all, the phones themselves are festering hives of E coli:
Researchers said that 16% of the devices were contaminated with E coli, which can cause food poisoning, most probably because people fail to properly wash their hands after going to the toilet. The study by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and Queen Mary, University of London, also found that Britons tend to lie about their personal hygiene.
While 95% of the 390 people surveyed said they washed their hands with soap where possible, 92% of mobile phones and 82% of hands were contaminated with bacteria.
Where not otherwise specified, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution. Boing Boing is a trademark of Happy Mutants LLC in the United States and other countries.
An unwise individual has made a wager that involves inserting a cotton bud soaked in the world's hottest pepper into his rectum. He has asked Reddit how to minimize the harm that might arise as a consequence of this undertaking. Redditors have reacted with a perfect mixture of horror and fascination, as you might expect.
Above, video of a man consuming one of these peppers.
Out of the sheer morbid curiosity of it all, I did a bunch of research for you. Here's what I came up with; The anus is a very delicate piece of skin equipped with a fair amount of capsicum receptors. It is very easily irritated, and is rather unforgiving. There is a staggering amount of Capsicum in the Bhut Jolokia pepper http://www.livestrong.com/article/188934-the-dangers-of-bhut-jolokia/ in question, so I read the toxicity sheet http://npic.orst.edu/factsheets/Capsaicintech.pdf and found that in high enough doses it causes dermal lesions. We're talking big angry open sores...
Which brings me to my point. Why on earth would you risk damaging the only bit of skin and muscle that keeps you from pooping yourself on a daily basis for life?
You're better off tattooing a dick to your forehead, or streaking through a crowded mall, or something that doesn't directly affect the well being of your sphincter because buddy, if this goes horribly wrong it could haunt you forever... And really, honestly, nobody here wants you to wind up the Bhut of this Jolokia.
Where not otherwise specified, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution. Boing Boing is a trademark of Happy Mutants LLC in the United States and other countries.
Where not otherwise specified, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution. Boing Boing is a trademark of Happy Mutants LLC in the United States and other countries.
Where not otherwise specified, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution. Boing Boing is a trademark of Happy Mutants LLC in the United States and other countries.
We're honored to be first to present the video for MC Frontalot's Critical Hit, starring Brian Posehn alongside the nerdcore rapper. The track's from Frontalot's latest album, Solved, which is available from iTunes and Amazon for less than a tenner. You can download the single and read the lyrics at the official website.
Where not otherwise specified, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution. Boing Boing is a trademark of Happy Mutants LLC in the United States and other countries.
By Xeni Jardin at 12:28 pm Tuesday, Oct 11 Reuters: "Tahrir Square in Cairo, Green Square in Tripoli, Syntagma Square in Athens and now Zuccotti Park in New York -- popular anger against entrenching power elites is spreading around the world."
Where not otherwise specified, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution. Boing Boing is a trademark of Happy Mutants LLC in the United States and other countries.
By Xeni Jardin at 11:37 am Tuesday, Oct 11 I will be joining a group of speakers in Boston on Friday and Saturday for the Shorenstein Center's 25th Anniversary Weekend, at Harvard. Others on the bill whose names have appeared in Boing Boing before include Ken Auletta (The New Yorker), Vivek Kundra (Former U.S. CIO), Miles O'Brien (PBS NewsHour), Clay Shirky (New York University), Rebecca MacKinnon (New America Foundation), David Carr (The New York Times), danah boyd (Microsoft Research), and Joi Ito (MIT Medialab).
Where not otherwise specified, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution. Boing Boing is a trademark of Happy Mutants LLC in the United States and other countries.
My friends Joshua Glenn and Mark Kingwell wrote a gem of a book called The Wage Slave's Glossary, which was designed and edited by the great cartoonist Seth. They've kindly permitted me to run a few entries from their very entertaining little book.
The Wage Slave’s Glossary (Biblioasis) criticizes and analyzes what the Lowell Mill Girls were the first to name wage slavery. Joshua Glenn’s glossary of over 200 terms interrogates not only office jargon (from Bandwidth to Telecommuting) but labor-related slang and workplace terminology (from After-Dinner Man to Workbrickle) used to naturalize wage slavery from the dawn of industrial capitalism to the present day. Mark Kingwell’s philosophical Introduction criticizes the “work idea” itself, and its corollaries — including bureaucracy and bullshit.
Where not otherwise specified, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution. Boing Boing is a trademark of Happy Mutants LLC in the United States and other countries.
Over the past week, I've been tuning in to various live video streams from cities around the US on OccupyStream. An excellent resource for "live television by the people," from protests all over. When the police in Boston cracked down on demonstrators last night, arresting more than a hundred, all of the action was live-streamed here.
Where not otherwise specified, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution. Boing Boing is a trademark of Happy Mutants LLC in the United States and other countries.
The Phantom Time Hypothesis, developed by Heribert Illig, proposes that error and falsification have radically distorted the historical record. In his analysis, we have dilated the course of true events, so that they appear to cover far greater lengths of time than in fact passed. The so-called dark ages, for example, only appear that way because those centuries were mere decades.
Respectable historians give this idea no credence. Rightly so, because the truth is even stranger. It is not the case that we have invented historical periods that do not exist. In truth, there are ages which we have so completely forgotten that modern textbooks exclude them entirely. In our research, we have identified at least three such periods.
Firstly, there appear to be several decades unaccounted for during the fifth century A.D., which may reveal the true circumstances of the Western Empire's final decline. Secondly, it is clear to us that the Mongols invaded northern Europe and conquered the Holy Roman Empire in the 13th century. The astounding deathtoll, and that of the crusades that subsequently dislodged the invaders, is now attributed to the plague.
Finally, evidence is mounting that points to a "lost decade" between what we now remember as the 1970s and 1980s, a time whose full cultural trauma and resulting suppression from memory was so complete as to effect itself even on the living.
Some of those who have recovered seek to reveal the secret history through unusual media such as fashionable tumblogs and private filesharing forums. By sharing elements of an intricate and rigorous symbology drawn from this interstitial history, this cabal works quietly to prepare us to learn the truth and its astonishing consequences.
Here for the first time we believe we can tentatively identify but a few of them.
Röyksopp of Norway presents itself as a successful electronic music duo, releasing a string of international hits, often in collaboration with other artists. Just as arab scientists carried the torch of classical knowledge during Europe's early medieval period, scandinavian electronica—especially that produced on home computers—offers the most durable thread linking our modern dark age with the lost secrets of disco.
Close readings of videos such as Eple help us trace the outlines of events that occured between February 1978 and December 15, 19831, the time span at hand (i.e. it is currently 2017 -- not 2012 -- if for the sake of illustration this period is taken to be the only "lost" span of years).
Their achievement here is more than mere technique. There is no greater vantage point than the cultural periphery, where one may absorb and reflect the character of the larger society upon whose fringes one stands. Just as Kasuo Ishiguro's insight into the English psyche offered Remains of the Day an incisive simplicity sharper than any native text's, Röyksopp's Epie is both medium and method, illustrating a pattern of rediscovery, of moving between moments in search of all that we have lost and missed. It embodies the intermediary nature of memory.
The artwork of James White, all neon boldness and sharp contrasts, has a powerful appeal to those already drawn to the past. A fastidious draughtsman, his intent goes beyond mere appearance; the work, once fully understood, will yield a trove of detailed information. White's secret history is encoded as complex crypographic patterns of colors, shapes and vectors, and is yet to be completely deciphered. That said, he is more than willing to hide stark truth in in plain sight. One series, for example, openly references well-known events of 2005 under their true date.
Perhaps the most surprising and instructive work is the footage referred to as DVNO, which purports to be an ironic meditation on classic logo design. It is in fact nothing less than a systematic catalogue of suppressed psuedo-corporate indicia. This roadmap to the past reveals not just the dramatis personae of the "lost decade", but the nature of their attack on the status quo.
It hints at a greater picture: the rapid growth of a revolutionary-semiotic front which explicitly mirrored the plutocracy that it sought to replace. But why? Though surely funded by foreign interests--the Soviet Union's "precipitous" economic decline corresponds intriguingly with the lost years--the movement and its offshoots display an ineluctably homegrown character. Moreoever, the utter completeness of the establishment counterrevolution is testament to the power of vested interests. But for whom did DVNO act? Who, indeed, was Printed in Gold?
Unlike the chan network's conversation-driven culture, canv.as's impetus to remix or the intracontextual nature of services such as mlkshk and imgur, the contemplative landscape of FFFFound is not fertile ground for action. It is instead a place to explore, imposing an almost numinous quality upon the act looking at stuff on the Internet. Thumbnails offered beneath each image guide the consumer through a garden of forking clicks. Carefully arranged to encourage an awareness of its secrets, all click-paths at FFFFound lead eventually to a final, astounding revelation that makes sense only after repeated failed expeditions. A stopping point on every route, however, is Vincent Viriot's 3 wolves with laser background, a critical memetic staging point on the road to enlightenment.
The space: do we not all feel it? The space. It may be said that the consumer cultures of the 1980s and 1990s, successively exhorting us to embrace artifice and then soul-crushing blandess, were manufactured to "cure" the residual confusion and cultural inconsistency that resulted from the methods used to effect mankind's collective psychic displacement. The hidden "space," however, manifests itself in curious ways -- the obsession with youth and physical condition in those born in the 1960s and 1970s; oddities in climate change data; the apparently freakish pace of economic change in what we believe now to be the 1980s; and so forth.
Seen in glimpses between the lines of works by Sakke Soini, patterns of light and shadow reveal themselves as mere reflection and void. Though the affect of his work exalts the presumptively geometric nature of space-time, the closer one approaches, the less tangible it becomes: surface becomes light, form becomes space, and intricate structures fall away to a tantalizing illusion of self-similarity.
Though he may present himself as a crass, arrogant, self-indulgent, pompous, vain, irritating, clueless, and profoundly daft pop star, Kanye West's video productions present the cabal's most subtle critical structures. Most intriguing is the Welcome to Heartbreak video presentation, in which our easily-corruptible apprehension of history is illustrated as a tangle of shifting and decaying visual impressions, an insight into the mutability of knowledge itself. The inherently lossy character of compressed data is seen to become its own essential nature, transforming from defect to design as it is destroyed and remade in increasingly confusing and hypnotic patterns. Likewise, no-one familiar with the Lost Decade hypothesis can fail to grasp the religious significance of shutter shades.
IT KNOWS AS IT GROWS
The pyramid is the movement's central motif, represented in both its shorthand name -- the 19A0s2 -- and in countless examples of cryptic artwork. In this collaborative rendering by Jonathan Mitchell and James White, mankind's greatest symbol of historical permanence is captured at a moment of explosive self-reproduction. At first blush a statement on the crude reproductive character of mass culture, it also serves as a warning about what allowed the lost decade's final psychohistorical destruction: stagnation after revolution, the failure to remix. The now-supernumerary pyramid no longer changes, even as it iterates uncontrollably, embodying the destiny of fractal cultural artifacts insulated from the need to mutate. Crushed by its own infinite potential, all that is left is to utter a desperate paradox: "Stop the monuments." Until, finally, they are gone completely.
It is true, however, that the suppression is incomplete. Cultural product strongly flavored by the 19A0s lurk either side of it within the realm of permitted history. This may be due to the necessary rapidity with which the suppression was accomplished, but is more likely a considered effort at "smoothing out the meat" with a sufficient quantum of 19A0s culture. It is all too easy to inoculate collective memory from digging too deep into the spaces between sanity, madness, and radically bad taste.
1. The terminus ad quem of the interstitial history is identified by the earliest-dated reference to it the esoterica: footage broadcast in the early hours of the morning on an obscure television station to commemorate (in the 'new' timeline) the date that the "lost decade" was brought to an end.
2. Finally revealed, terms such as "19A0s" can now be searched for and uncovered in countless seemingly innocuous documents archived online, exposing them as critical ciphertexts of the movement.
Seen at New York Comic-Con, which I'm presently attending: the forthcoming "Create Your Own Zombie Action Figure" kits, which are available for pre-order, and sport arms, legs, torsos, heads, chest prosthesis, and wardrobe items that you can mix and match to make the perfect zombie toy. The box-art is fantastic -- the whole package stopped at 20 feet and sucked me in. The gentleman working at the booth is also the mad genius behind the reissue of the classic 
After another nudge—which included the reminder that the publisher could continue to sell warehoused copies in their usual fashion, as well as a reminder of the boilerplate changes–we were finally told: “This book is in stock, on sale on our website, it continues to sell albeit in lesser quantities. [my note: yes, a handful of copies a year] We have some 1,600 in stock with no reason to revert rights.” 
State Labor has seized on the extraordinary amendment, with Opposition gaming spokesman Martin Pakula branding the minister "Windscreens O'Brien - because this proves he's got a glass jaw". 
"If you see something that warrants calling 911, call 911. You don't need to dress up in a costume to do that," police spokesman Mark Jamieson said. 
Rome Sweet Rome, a historical sci-fi saga published as comments at Reddit, was 
Researchers said that 16% of the devices were contaminated with E coli, which can cause food poisoning, most probably because people fail to properly wash their hands after going to the toilet. The study by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and Queen Mary, University of London, also found that Britons tend to lie about their personal hygiene. 
