I'm not much of one for energy bars, and I don't think I've ever had a Clif Bar before, but I just bought a Cool Mint Chocolate Clif Bar on a whim and let me tell you: Wow. It's basically a giant oatmealy crunchy Thin Mint. I realized that as soon as I cracked the wrapper, it smells so good. And apparently it has a little caffeine in it.

Get one. Then do what I'm doing and go on Amazon Prime and get two dozen.

Clif Bar Energy Bar, Cool Mint Chocolate, 2.4-Ounce Bars, (Pack of 24)

I spied this cozy crocheted cruiser on Balboa Street just outside Shanghai Dumpling King in San Francisco. Bundle up, winter's coming!

Illustration: 凌[Pixiv]

9/7/2012: Updated with feedback from moot

4chan, the Internet's long-time dumping ground and butt of many a joke, is getting serious about software by making their biggest public-facing code change in nearly a decade, introducing an API and a bunch of new functionality.

Given its reputation, many commentators have already written this off with a shrug and a laugh. But 4chan is also one of the web's most popular and influential communities. It's the source of so many Internet-age cultural trends that even your grandma may be dimly aware that the clever picture she posted on her Facebook was trawled a thousand copies ago from the dark depths of /mlp/. Given that there's big money in all this, the API offers businesses a direct line to the heart of the machine.

As a professional software developer and long time 4chan user, I think this is a pretty interesting development. I talked yesterday afternoon to some of those who worked on 4chan's code over the years and know a little about why this is such an important development.

Unicorn Mountain is a collective of Pittsburgh artists that publishes anthologies of local art, comics, music and literature. Their third anthology, The Black Forest, takes a different tack from their previous collections by exploring much darker, stranger themes. My friend Tara Helfer did the layout and supplementary illustrations for The Black Forest and sent me a copy to check out.

The collection covers a broad range of styles, and is packed with more than twenty different artists' work. Some parts are creepy and scribbly. Others are intricate and mysterious. I've picked some samples of a few of my favorites here.

Read the rest

People are posting photos of their debit and credit cards on Twitter. Some of them are lightly blurred– such as the one above which has a fake tilt shift effect added to it –but most are just straight photos of the cards with all the information unobscured. Mostly these are new cardholders bragging about their newly-acquired financial freedom, a few people shared photos of cards they'd snapped in half.

They're all publicly available photos, and the Twitter account @NeedADebitCard dutifully collects them all in one place, ostensibly to teach people not to post their goddamned financial information all over the Internet. Why bother with ATM skimmers when you can just search the web?

@NeedADebitCard's Twitter Thanks, DeMarko!

Last weekend I sunk into the depths of chiptune music at Blip Festival. I quickly noticed that a lot of the bands had the same visualists managing the projected artwork behind the stage. It turns out that there's a substantial shortage of visualists for chiptune shows, so the best ones are highly sought after and hard to find. I grabbed three of the most interesting ones from the festival and asked them to tell me how they're making their images.

I'm at Blip Festival in New York this weekend checking out all the bleeps and bloops people are making. Blip Festival itself starts tonight, but last night NY Pulsewave had an open mic night and I decided to grab a few of the artists to photograph their instruments: mostly custom modified Game Boys. I've included a few highlights here, and the full set is on my Flickr.

Pictured above is Andrew Gould's (AKA andaruGO) GBM1 Game Boy Classic. It's a great example of the two most popular mods: He's got a custom backlit screen that helps him see the music in the dark, and a wiring modification called Prosound which bypasses the standard headphone jack and wires directly into the device's audio chip for better quality sound. He's using the LSDJ cartridge, pretty much the standard for the Game Boy Classic performers. There's also a custom blue screen protector he received as a gift from an internet friend.

Read the rest

I'm in New York this week and today I dropped in on Boing Boing pal and co-curator of Boing Boing's Virgin America in-flight channel Joe Sabia. Joe's in the middle of directing a series of short musical thank you note videos for people who request them online as a promotional campaign for AT&T's Facebook fan page. They're short and sweet, but I was surprised by how much there is going on behind the scenes here.

These guys are making about 30 videos an hour, it's a pretty impressive production line. Netziens request a song through a form on AT&T's Facebook page, then the staff here reads through them all and writes them on whiteboards for the band to perform in the sound booth. The music is prepared in advance with a few different variations, and the lyrics are all ad libbed by UCB comedians. Immediately afterwards, the videos are edited together and uploaded to YouTube. There are about forty people in the whole production line. Yesterday they made about two hundred videos, and today they'll probably make three hundred more. Silly songs are serious business!

They'll be making videos for a few more hours, so send one in if you want them to make one for you. Thanks Joe!

The Artisans Asylum in Somerville Massachusetts is holding a class called Project Hexapod. Their mission is to build this car-sized two-person hexapod robot and ride it through town in about four months. They've just posted the first set of schematics and named the robot "Stompy".

I'm putting this on my "potential overlords to welcome" list.

Stompy is coming - Project Hexapod Thanks Joe!

The fabulous Emmy Cicierega points out this cautionary tale about wandering in Shia LaBeouf's woods at night. One part comedy, two parts spooky: look out, it might happen to you!

Shia LaBeouf on SoundCloud

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Creative Commons licensed image courtesy of the awesome Hyperbole and a Half