Twitter is appalling, but I finally found an account I like: Can You Pet The Dog?
A catalog of pettable and non-pettable dogs in video games. Manual input resulting in visual representation of petting is required for affirmation.
As noted in the latest tweet, you cannot pet the dog in Shadow of The Collossus. You can pet the horse. Read the rest
Frank Sidebottom was a peculiar stage character defined by his enormous papier-mache mask, immortalized in countless UK TV appearances and a fictionalized biopic produced after the 2010 death of creator-performer Chris Sievey (previously at Boing Boing). Sievey included fascinating codes with Frank's promotional material, and British intelligence officers finally cracked it. It was hard to crack because half the characters were nulls. Read the rest
This ain’t it, chief.
Previously: Fire at Notre Dame cathedral
UPDATE: Ryan Broderick points out the plain fact: YouTube's little truth widget is algorithmically-generated fake news.
I'm not sure there's a better metaphor for the state of the tech industry right now than an American social platform slapping an algorithmically-generated related article about an American terror attack on to a live stream about a completely unrelated French news story. pic.twitter.com/KLWGlg5NEc
— Ryan Broderick (@broderick) April 15, 2019
Alistair Wooldrige's MacBook Air died after a drop. So he popped it in the oven. Read the rest
Scammer software is usually quite crude and, as demonstrated here, vulnerable to clever victims aware of their shortcomings.
Engineer Man: "Taking it to another scammer using some nmap analysis and a common exploit to save 105 people. Mission accomplished."
Note that what he's showing here is not necessarily what he's doing, and doing it without due care and attention to the risks is gonna get you in trouble.
UPDATE: The video disappered. For posterity, it showed a scammer getting their just desserts because the server they used to log marks' passwords used an unsecured SQL database, allowing an intended victim to get in and wipe it. Read the rest
Jonathan Frakes, the actor and director associated most strongly with his Star Trek role as bearded lothario William Riker but with many other feathers in his cap, here informs you that you are wrong for a solid 47 seconds. Read the rest
Enjoy the sense of scale in this image, stitched together from 16 smaller images and 1060 hours of exposure.
Read the restThe image is a mosaic made of 16 smaller fields of view, which, once stitched together form a high-resolution image of 204 Million of pixels! As of matter of fact, this is not the work of a single person but by a team of five french amateur astronomers called "Ciel Austral": Jean Claude CANONNE, Philippe BERNHARD, Didier CHAPLAIN, Nicolas OUTTERS et Laurent BOURGON.
Pete Buttigieg, the first openly gay Democratic candidate and a proponent of "democratically influenced capitalism", has his own campaign brand typography. Faces include Aktiv Grotesk ("sleek lines [that] feel equally modern today as they would have in an old Studebaker ad"), Industry ("the visual language of American manufacturing ... industrial, sporty or military") and Domaine Text ("a sophisticated companion to the modern geometry of Aktiv and the stark boldness of Industry")
Here's the (since removed) placeholder text, as spotted by Brett Banditelli.
Says it all, really. Read the rest
Bon appetit. Read the rest
After earlier denying that it had considered dumping migrants in sanctuary cities to "punish" Trump's political enemies, the White House today confirmed that it is considering doing so.
"Due to the fact that Democrats are unwilling to change our very dangerous immigration laws, we are indeed, as reported, giving strong considerations to placing Illegal Immigrants in Sanctuary Cities only," Trump posted on Twitter.
Trump's tweet came a day after The Washington Post reported the White House tried to pressure immigration authorities into releasing captured immigrants into sanctuary cities, particularly targeting liberal strongholds in hopes of hurting Democrats.
Straight from "immigration president" Stephen Miller's pen, I hazard. Read the rest
Isaac Chotiner interviews Bret Easton Ellis, author of American Psycho and an evidently half-hearted believer in the idea that America has overreacted to Donald Trump's elevation to the presidency.
[Chotiner] There are a lot of things to get angry about: children being separated from their parents, Trump saying nice things about marchers in Charlottesville. What is it that bothers you about this?
[Ellis] You do know that plenty of people don’t think that? You do understand that?
Don’t think what?
Don’t think all these things you are saying about Charlottesville. What does he have, a ninety-three-per-cent approval rating, or, let’s say, a hundred per cent, from his base? Let’s say it is, over all, way up, from thirty-eight per cent to fifty per cent, or even higher. And let’s say Latinos are now fifty-per-cent approval for Trump.
That’s not true, but O.K.
Well, whatever.
The tendency for Chotiner's interview subjects to unravel under his fair but persistent questioning (Giuliani, Buruma, take your pick) is genuinely amazing. Chotiner is journalism's Chigurh on the stairs. His targets surely sense that their rules have led them to a murderer, but the same rules impose upon them a strange duty to go back to their rooms with him, to talk and die. Read the rest
From her clubbing-a-home-invader form to the way she glares off the bovine golf fans encroaching onto her fairway, after nailing them twice, this golfer knows exactly what she's doing. Read the rest
I always find there's a surreal quality to footage of SpaceX's self-landing rockets. It's the "living in the future" moment for my reptile brain, irrespective of what it really means for mankind or where it truly sits in the spectrum of discovery and progress.
Read the restSpaceX launched the company’s Falcon Heavy rocket on its inaugural commercial mission on Thursday evening. This was the second flight for Falcon Heavy, which became the most powerful rocket in use in the world after SpaceX’s successful test flight in February 2018. That launch was purely demonstration — Thursday represents the first revenue-generating flight of Falcon Heavy. Falcon Heavy launched from SpaceX’s launchpad at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Built out of three of the company’s Falcon 9 rockets, Falcon Heavy’s three cores stand side by side to create a 27-engine colossus. Together, those engines create about 5.1 million pounds of thrust.
Named the Can Opener due to its ravenous appetite for tall trucks, the 11' 8" bridge in Durham, N.C. has cameras trained on to capture incidents. This week, however, it captured something else: the sound (and blast wave) of a nearby industrial explosion.
It is operated by Jürgen Henn who runs 11foot8.com -- a website that compiles videos of trucks getting stuck under the bridge. The website is called 11foot8.com because the clearance of the bridge is 11 feet, 8 inches.
In Wednesday's video, you can hear the sound of the explosion and see the camera shake.
The explosion killed 1 and injured several more.
[h/t Justin Runyon] Read the rest
Chobani's new custom typeface heralded a headlong return to swirly 1970s type.
It's not just nostalgia. Blame high DPI displays, too!
Today’s movement toward fonts reminiscent of the ’70s is partly a matter of advancing technology, Jen says: As phone and TV screens have improved, designers don’t have to worry as much about pixelation when working with curves. But nostalgia is a powerful factor, too. Elizabeth Goodspeed, a graphic designer who works at the branding agency RoAndCo, believes that for many consumers, ’70s-esque fonts represent a safe retreat into the past — a safer retreat, importantly, than the one currently offered by midcentury Swiss Style, which inspired all of those minimalist startup logos with its grid layouts and sans serif fonts.
The recent use of 70s type in corporate branding is showy in a way that suggests a fad rather than a sustained trend, but such a trend does exist toward more utilitarian typefaces from the era. You might be seeing a lot of Windsor, Souvenir and chunky Caslons in the next few years. However ugly and cheesy you might consider all this, it's a merciful antidote to 2010s tech culture anglegrinding every logo into the same sort of bland, soulless sans-serif font.
Off you go to the groovy section of dafonts for your new side-hustle logo! Read the rest
A man with a "long, long history" of wanking on horses was arrested, released, and then arrested again within hours after claiming his second alleged victim in a day.
The man, 61,
Read the restsaid he had been planning to see his doctor for libido suppressing drugs but instead went to a field after being freed from prison. ... During a police interview he told detectives: ‘I was sat on a bench. I was feeling sexy so I started to…’
His lawyer Stephen Robinson said: ‘The defendant is very disappointed to be back before the courts again for precisely the same sort of behaviour he’s been convicted of in the past. ‘The defendant was of the view he’d been doing quite well.’
