Brooklyn women who have bathing suits, are down for a 30 minute soak in a tub full of ramen noodles, and are looking to make a quick $175: Look no further.
There's got to be an anime about this already.
Woman to sit in my bath tub full of ramen noodles (brooklyn) Thanks Tessa!
Photo Illustration: Jason Foral
Facebook is buying VR headset company Oculus for $2 billion. The paycheck gets the founders a massive payday, but leaves a bitter taste for its Kickstarter backers, not least the indie game developers who thought they could be a bigger part of that future.
For decades, the idea of living inside a virtual reality has captivated developers' imaginations. People inspired by the dream have literally devoted their lives to making virtual reality a reality. It's a simple pursuit with a glorious promise: escape from this world, and into another designed just for you. But there's always been a dark cloud over that endeavor: The possibility that these virtual worlds might become tainted or be misused. It's a major concern, a warning regularly beaten into the minds of those who believed.
At long last, a hero emerged. Oculus made it possible to dip your head into the simplest of these worlds, to really feel like you had escaped our shared reality into another. The poetry written about its promise flowed deep and strong. Rabid fans clamored to throw their support and money at the project. They crowded around booths at trade shows to catch a glimpse, and built complicated software programs for the new platform– sometimes without even being able to try it out themselves. Suddenly, users were booting up and creating any virtual world they wanted, and that power made them think they might be able to influence the real world a bit. Hopes were high! Oculus seemed untouchable; the white knight of VR.
Well, fuck it. Facebook just bought the thing. (more…)
The Winter Olympics offer us a great lesson in GIFs–specifically, the power of a well-made GIF to condense much longer-form content into its highest-impact few seconds. Where you've got weeks of serious content and coverage, the GIF has to focus on what brings you the most oomph. Wipeouts.
4chan's worksafe GIF section has been collecting the best of the wipeouts from the 2014 Winter Olympics for the last week. It's an impressive thread. Not only is it emotionally wrenching to see these athletes try so hard and fail, but the wipeouts highlight the magnitude of what they're trying to do. One big crash puts all the perfect runs and tenths-of-a-second into perspective. Here are some of my favorites.
Robot Turtles– the board game for little programmers –is the most-sold board game on Kickstarter, and it's still going crazy as it nears 25,000 sales! All the backer copies have been sent out and the last thousand or so copies are available on Amazon, with just enough time to snag one for Christmas. I'm a huge fan of the game: the first backer on Kickstarter and an advisor on the project, grab it while you still can.
For those unfamiliar, Kerbal Space Program is a realistic spaceship building and flight simulator game based closely on real rocket engines and physics. It's an open-ended game with lots of asteroids and planets to explore, and some people develop a Minecraft-esque obsession to accomplishing wilder and wilder feats. My rockets mostly just make the Hindenberg look like a damp sparkler.
In the spirit of Hanukkah, CupcakesLanders flew to another planet, built a custom menorah out of rocket engines and fuel tanks, then ferried in a collection of Kerbins to watch the lighting ceremony. Now that's some real chutzpah!
This evening San Francisco's DNA Lounge is hosting 8bitSF for crashfaster's new album release at 8PM. Chiptune legends Trash80 and BitShifter are flying in for the event, and it's shaping up to be a great show. I'll be performing computer visuals for BitShifter's set with my partner Steve Dekorte as Controlling Transmission. All our visualizations are written in HTML5 and Javascript, and the undocumented source is available on Github if you want a challenge. If you're coming to see the show, bookmark this link on your phone for our set. [Facebook event]
This puzzle– a whopping seventeen-foot-long, forty-two-pounder that comes with its own hand truck –is clearly meant to be used for some form of existential penance. If you carry deep-seated hatred for yourself or are planning on departing from your sanity, you might take on the "extra challenge" of a puzzle that only has six colors, not counting black and white. And it's only $194.
This dramatic video from Bot and Dolly shows off their robotic camera systems by projection mapping a 3D animation onto two screens as they're waved around by one and a half ton robotic arms. In July, Boing Boing co-sponsored the Robot Film Festival held in their incredible studios. There I learned that while this film appears to be shot from a hand-held camera, it's probably made with a camera on a robot arm following a recorded path made by motion tracking a hand-held camera to a tenth-of-a-millimeter precision. Bot & Dolly had no comment on whether or not that's the case in this film.
Robot Turtles is "a board game you play with your favorite 3 to 8-year-old that sneakily teaches programming fundamentals." Created by entrepreneur Dan Shapiro and inspired by classic kids' programming language Logo, the board game lets kids ages 3-8 write programs with colorful playing cards. The game is brilliantly simple: kids play a row of action cards to control their turtle on the board, as moved by the adult game master.
Dan designed the game for his 4-year-old boy/girl twins, because "people who can program are going to be writing the future, and everybody else is going to be reading it." With 10,000 backers, Robot Turtles is nearly the most-backed board game on Kickstarter. It's available until Sept 27 for $29 and is scheduled to ship in time for Christmas.
Dan's a good friend of mine (I'm Robot Turtles' first backer), and we spent months discussing the strategy behind both Robot Turtles and my recent Kickstarter. If you're interested in some of the lessons Dan and I learned, he's got a great post up on the subject.
The following photos were taken from 1914-1918 by my great-grandfather Lt. Walter Koessler during his time as a German officer in the first World War. They're part of a collection of over a thousand photos, stereographs and their negatives that my family has been saving for a century. This is an unusually large and complete collection, and I've taken on the task of preserving it and printing it so other people can experience this history too. (more…)
The following photos were taken from 1914-1918 by my great-grandfather Lt. Walter Koessler during his time as a German officer in the first World War. They're part of a collection of over a thousand photos, stereographs and their negatives that my family has been saving for a century. This is an unusually large and complete collection, and I've taken on the task of preserving it and printing it so other people can experience this history too.
These photos have never been published before.
Walter's trenches were very well built, but they still couldn't keep out the snow and the rain.
Playing cards next to the garden.
Preparing makeshift mortars. These are grenades on sticks fired at the enemy by a blank round in the rifle.
The images above were all scanned from their original negatives. You can see more of this collection as I scan it on Tumblr. If you're interested in seeing the full collection and helping me preserve it, please support me in making a print copy of the book on Kickstarter.
Walter took advantage of some unique opportunities to capture WWI on film. His photos tell the stories of living in the trenches, visiting home with friends, his work as an aerial reconnaissance photographer and his increasing understanding of the horrors of war. Next week: Walter's exploration of demolished churches.
Photo credit: NOAA
NOAA's Arctic division maintains a couple of webcams at the North Pole, and one of them is showing a pretty impressive meltwater lake forming around it. Previous years show small ponds forming and refreezing throughout the summer, but this year nearly all the snow in view of the camera has melted into a lake-sized slush.
Check out this time lapse video of the lake forming. Much more photos and videos from this year and previous years at NOAA's website.
Ardent Industries, the crazy people behind such large art installations as Dance Dance Immolation and SYZYGRYD, are building a giant 3D Mario cloud stuck to the top of a forklift so they can rain on people's parades. Their Kickstarter is fully funded and they're starting production and getting their forklift licenses! Rad!
Chorebot, one of my favorite RFF submissions
Boing Boing is proud to be a media sponsor of the Robot Film Festival's premier in San Francisco this weekend. Join us tomorrow at Bot & Dolly for a series of three film screenings, live performances, and the Botskers Award Ceremony. It's an all-day event starting at 11:30 with lunch and dinner included, so prepare for a massive overdose of robots!
Today is your last chance to get tickets. Check out the full schedule of events on the Robot Film Festival website. See you there!
The 3rd annual Robot Film Festival is coming to San Francisco this weekend and Boing Boing is proud to be a media sponsor! This Saturday and Sunday (July 20-21), come explore the relationship between humans and robots through a series of film showings, live performances, and a day-long film workshop.
Here's why Robot Film Festival is a must see:
• It takes place in Bot & Dolly's incredible robotic camera equipment workshop
• BeatBots, maker of the adorable Keepon robot, is organizing the event this year
• Famed comedy robot Data is getting a new sidekick, Scotty
• Robots, people dressed as robots, people doing the robot, robots filming movies, robots robots robots!
Obviously it's bound to be a blast. Come welcome the Robot Film Festival to San Francisco with us!
Tickets available on Kickstarter
Robot Film Festival
UPDATE: Kickstarter finished successfully! You can still get tickets on EventBrite.
On May 10th, a completely naked man entered the 16th street BART station in San Francisco and began attacking people, spitting, urinating and doing gymnastics moves on railings and turnstiles. BART police eventually shut down the station to arrest the man.
Yesterday, this NSFW video of the incident hit YouTube. Be warned that it's no joke: it's a naked man attacking vulnerable passers-by in public.
The folks at Dollar Shave Club have a new product out: One Wipe Charlies, a peppermint-scented toilet wipe they claim is better than normal toilet tissue. Their video sure is flashy, but how much more will it cost me? Is this worth the cost?
One Wipe Charlies are selling for $4 for 40 wipes. That's a dime a wipe, and I'll buy the claim that it only takes one. At my house we order our TP in bulk from Amazon: Ultra Plush 3-ply double rolls from Quilted Northern for $25.94 per 48 pack. Shipping included. It's surprising how convenient it is to just have this show up at the door.
Each roll has 176 sheets, and with 48 rolls that comes to about $0.0031 per sheet. If you're allowing a dime a dump, you can run all the way up to 32.5 sheets before you match the cost of a One Wipe Charlie. That's a fifth of a roll! You're probably managing to get the job done in 10-12 sheets, around 3 cents per.
Sorry, Charlie. No fancy marketing is going to get me to triple my budget in this department.
Quilted Northern Ultra Plush 3-ply double rolls, 48 pack at Amazon
This is it, folks. Today at 6PM the SFMOMA closes to begin its three year long expansion. It'll be reborn sometime in 2016 clad in shining armor, engulfing the rest of its current city block. Get in your last run through the current exhibits, explore a new corner of the building before it changes.
Join me and David at the museum at 5:30 for the farewell procession. Local artist Desiree Holman is curating the procession, which recasts the Young American Patriots fife and drum core and Dance Sanctuary dancers as docents for the future. You're encouraged to come in your best future time traveler costume, and Teri Sage from TS I Love You Hats will be helping everyone make awesome tin foil future hats as well.
This will be my 56th visit to the museum. For the last year and a half I've been coming almost every week, writing software, meeting friends and making new ones on the rooftop sculpture garden. It's been a great pleasure to learn so much about art, people and myself. While it's painful to have to be away for so long, I have great faith that the museum's future will be spectacular. Come celebrate that with us.
SFMOMA Countdown Celebration: May 30 – June 2
RSVP on Facebook
Andrew Scott Reisse, one of the founding developers behind the incredible Oculus Rift virtual reality headset was hit by a car while walking yesterday. The car was being pursued by police, and struck two other cars before running a red light and hitting Reisse. Reisse was pronounced dead at the scene. [ABC Local]
After this Sunday (June 2), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art will be closed to visitors for three years as they begin their massive renovation to accomodate the incoming Doris and Donald Fisher Collection. But for the next four days they're celebrating the museum's future with free admission for everyone and lots of activities, culminating with a performance art marathon and farewell procession on Sunday co-presented by Boing Boing!
The final 24 hours are jam packed with activities and celebrations: the live performance marathon starts on Saturday evening and changes out every half hour. They'll also be finishing up their Sweded version of Christian Marclay's The Clock, and this is the last 24 hour showing of the real piece in the museum.
Finally, come join us for the farewell procession on Sunday to look to the future of the new building. Local artist Desiree Holman is curating the procession, which recasts the Young American Patriots fife and drum core and Dance Sanctuary dancers as docents for the future. You're encouraged to come in your best future time traveler costume, and Teri Sage from TS I Love You Hats will be helping everyone make awesome tin foil future hats as well. We hope to see you there!
SFMOMA Countdown Celebration: May 30 – June 2
RSVP on Facebook
