According to The Buffalo News, the alleged perpetrator of the racist mass shooting in Buffalo offered to share his plans with several online friends in the half hour before the massacre — including one online friend who is believed to be a retired federal agent from Texas. The shooter and the retired federal agent "regularly communicated … in an online chat room where racist hatred was discussed."

The retired federal agent was one of six friends who are alleged to have received advanced notice of the shooting, including an offer to view the shooter's plans. None of them warned authorities.

"These were like-minded people who used this chat group to talk about their shared interests in racial hatred, replacement theory and hatred of anyone who is Jewish, a person of color or not of European ancestry," said one of the two law enforcement officials with close knowledge of the investigation. "What is especially upsetting is that these six people received advanced notice of the Buffalo shooting, about 30 minutes before it happened.

[…]

Agents from the FBI are in the process of tracking down and interviewing the six people, including the retired agent, and attempting to determine if any of them should be charged as accomplices, the two sources with close knowledge of the probe told The Buffalo News.

So it's not that the retired federal agent was undercover or sharing information with authorities; they just happened to be a part of the same online community for white supremacists.

This reminds me of that ancient proverb — what was it? Ahh, yes: "Some of those who are employed by law enforcement organizations are the same people who set crosses on fire."

Something to that affect.

Authorities investigating if retired federal agent knew of Buffalo mass shooting plans in advance [Lou Michel and Dan Herbeck / Buffalo News]

Image via Google Street View

I was already looking forward to Disney's Andor miniseries, focusing on Rogue One's token badass, Cassian Andor. But the newly released teaser trailer makes me even more excited. Just as Rogue One leaned (gently) into the radicalization side of freedom fighting, Andor looks like it's not shying away from tackling colonialist oppression — in other words, the literal imperialism of the Imperial forces.

Will the Mouse neuter that a little bit? Probably. Will Andor return us to the forest moon of Endor? Probably not. But I'm still looking forward to it anyway.

Andor is out in August.

Oregon romance novelist Nancy Brophy, author of How to Murder Your Husband—previously at Boing Boing—has been found guilty of murdering her husband. From The Daily Beast:

The damning evidence poured in: surveillance footage showing Brophy driving to and from the crime scene, during the exact window her husband was shot, contradicting the writer's claim that she'd been at home in bed the whole time. Research she conducted on her own computer, about how to buy and assemble an untraceable "ghost gun," then the purchase of an already assembled Glock from a Portland gun show, and an untraceable replacement slide and barrel on eBay. 

There was also the cell phone data showing her traveling pretty close to a gun range that doesn't require anyone to check in to do some shooting. […] In all, the prosecution said, the Brophys were spending more than $1,000 on various life insurance policies, even when they couldn't pay their mortgage.

Womp Womp.

'How to Murder Your Husband' Author Guilty of Hubby's Slay [Winston Ross / The Daily Beast]

Image: Nick Youngson / Pix4free.org (CC BY-SA 3.0)

From The Information:

Some employees at [cryptocurrency trading firm Coinbase] have been using a real-time evaluation app invented by Bridgewater Associates, the well-known hedge fund founded by Ray Dalio, which helped enforce a culture of "radical transparency" that encourages blunt honesty, according to two people with direct knowledge.

The app, Dot Collector, is sold by Principles, a company Dalio founded. Coinbase's version lets employees evaluate co-workers, including their managers, on how well they exemplify the crypto firm's 10 cultural tenets—which include clear communication, efficient execution and positive energy—during meetings and other interactions, these people said. After an interaction, an employee can give their colleague a thumbs-up, thumbs-down, or neutral rating.

I suppose "de-centralized HR blockchains" were inevitable.

Coinbase Tests App for Employees to Grade Each Other During Meetings [Mark Matousek and Amir Efrati / The Information]

Image: Public Domain via PxHere

At a recent My Chemical Romance concert, an excited fan was seen thrusting their Nintendo DS into the air, capturing video of that inevitably epic moment when "I'm not oh-fucking-kay!" is said and everyone goes apeshit.

person with the DS at my chemical romance you are my hero #MCREDEN2 pic.twitter.com/74zGb1HyhS

— cousin gonzo (@gnomesona) May 18, 2022

The fan found this tweet, and decided to share some of the video clips that they captured evening, which are, um, well, it's certainly an interesting experimental film.

lmfaoa thank u i love it pic.twitter.com/T4Gi0hffeA

— loz (@cottonxhollow) May 18, 2022

I UUST FOUND THIS ONE IT's THE BEST ONE YET AHAHA pic.twitter.com/gYOjGfj7bA

— loz (@cottonxhollow) May 18, 2022

Props to this person for keepin' it real with that circa-2005 vibe.

In a new paper in the scientific journal Cretaceous Research, researchers claim to have discovered the fossilized remains of a humongous pterosaur that may in fact be the largest flying vertebrate yet known.

Thanatosdrakon amaru gen. et sp. nov. is a new azhdarchid found in the upper-most levels of the Plottier Formation (upper Coniacian–lower Santonian, Neuquén Basin), Mendoza, Argentina. Two specimens were identified, the holotype (UNCUYO-LD 307) and the paratype, with an estimated wingspan of ∼7 m and ∼9 m, respectively. 

Thanatosdrakon amaru is believed to predate birds, and might possibly be the first winged creature to hunt its prey. Hence its name, which basically translates to "Dragon of Death."

More from the BBC:

When fully extended, its wings measured a massive nine metres (30 ft) from one tip to the other.

The sheer size of the predator paints a "terrifying vision", the scientist behind the find told the BBC.

"This species had a height similar to that of a giraffe," project leader Leonardo Ortiz said, with a wingspan that "defies the limits of our biological understanding". 

Its remains had been preserved in rocks in the Andes mountains for 86 million years, which means the flying creature lived alongside dinosaurs.

Thanatosdrakon amaru, gen. et sp. nov., a giant azhdarchid pterosaur from the Upper Cretaceous of Argentina [Leonardo D.Ortiz David, Bernardo J.González Riga, Alexander W.A.Kellner / Cretaceous Research]

Flying reptile: Remains of scary prehistoric creature discovered [Leo Sands / BBC]

In a recent press release containing new images captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, the National Aeronautic and Space Administration said that something weird was going on in outer space. No, really, that's what they said:

In recent years, thanks to data from Hubble and other telescopes, astronomers found another twist: a discrepancy between the expansion rate as measured in the local universe compared to independent observations from right after the big bang, which predict a different expansion value.

The cause of this discrepancy remains a mystery. But Hubble data, encompassing a variety of cosmic objects that serve as distance markers, support the idea that something weird is going on, possibly involving brand new physics.

Since the discovery of dark energy in the 90s, researchers have been able to account for the total sum of matter in the cosmos. This data, with help from the powerful Hubble Space Telescope, has helped scientists to track the expansion rate of the universe. Which is pretty cool! Except now — as this press release explains — something is off. Because their calculations have been right, until they weren't.

The expansion rate of the universe was predicted to be slower than what Hubble actually sees. By combining the Standard Cosmological Model of the Universe and measurements by the European Space Agency's Planck mission (which observed the relic cosmic microwave background from 13.8 billion years ago), astronomers predict a lower value for the Hubble constant: 67.5 plus or minus 0.5 kilometers per second per megaparsec, compared to the SH0ES [Supernova, H0] team's estimate of 73.

Given the large Hubble sample size, there is only a one-in-a-million chance astronomers are wrong due to an unlucky draw, said Riess, a common threshold for taking a problem seriously in physics.

So it's not quite Lovecraftian cosmic weird, but it's still pretty weird.

Hubble Reaches New Milestone in Mystery of Universe's Expansion Rate [NASA]

Back in 2015, a group of researchers discovered a volcano full of sharks. Dubbed "Sharkcano," the underwater magma crater heated up the water around it — and rather than kill off the local marine life, it mutated them so they could survive in the extreme conditions.

More recently, NASA captured the active volcano actually erupting:

Kavachi Volcano in the Solomon Islands is one of the most active submarine volcanoes in the Pacific. According to the Smithsonian Global Volcanism Program, the volcano entered an eruptive phase in October 2021 and satellite data showed discolored water around Kavachi on several days in April and May 2022.

The image above, acquired on May 14, 2022, by the Operational Land Imager-2 (OLI-2) on Landsat 9, shows a plume of discolored water being emitted from the submarine volcano, which lies about 24 kilometers (15 miles) south of Vangunu Island (shown below).

[…]

Prior to this recent activity, large eruptions were observed at Kavachi in 2014 and 2007. The volcano erupts nearly continuously, and residents of nearby inhabitated islands often report visible steam and ash. The island is named for a sea god of the Gatokae and Vangunu peoples, and it is sometimes also referred to as Rejo te Kvachi, or "Kavachi's Oven".

Since its first recorded eruption in 1939, Kavachi has created ephemeral islands on several occasions. But the islands, up to a kilometer long, have been eroded and washed away by wave action. The summit of the volcano is currently estimated to lie 20 meters (65 feet) below sea level; its base lies on the seafloor at a depth of 1.2 kilometers (0.75 miles).

No word yet on how the sharks are holding up.

Submarine Eruption of Kavachi Volcano [NASA]

'Sharkcano': Eruption of underwater volcano home to mutant sharks pictured by Nasa satellite [Jeff Parsons / Metro]

From the Sacred Seltzer website:

Get crunk on Christ! Sacred Seltzer contains 95% real holy water* and 5% alcohol.

*Blessed according to the official Catholic procedure on March 31, 2022 in LA County, CA

Sacred Seltzer is a product of the art/marketing collective MSCHF; unfortunately, they only made one batch, and it's already sold out. That's probably for the better — both Uproxx and Input reviewed the hard holy seltzer and said it was not that great, even with the obligatory caveat of "being a hard seltzer."

Finland, along with their Nordic neighbors in Sweden, have recently made the bid for official NATO membership. To celebrate this news, the Olaf Brewing out of Savonlinna, Finland has brewed a special NATO-themed lager, dry-hopped with Cold War military tensions. No, seriously — the brewery's CEO says the beer has "a taste of security, with a hint of freedom." From the Associated Press:

Olaf Brewing's OTAN lager features a blue label with a cartoon version of a beer-drinking medieval knight in metal armor emblazoned with NATO's compass symbol. 

The beer's name is a play on the Finnish expression "Otan olutta," which means "I'll have a beer," and the French abbreviation for NATO, which is "OTAN." The North Atlantic Treaty Organization has two official languages, English and French.

CEO Petteri Vanttinen told The Associated Press on Thursday that the craft brewery's ad hoc decision last weekend to start producing the beer was motivated by "worries over the war in Ukraine" and its consequences for Finland.

The company did a Twitter thread about the beer as well:

An independent nation is about to make an independent decision about its security. Our small hometown Savonlinna has always lied in the borderlands between east and west. Many battles have been fought in the town area and at St. Olafs Castle.

Hopefully battles will never ever take place again in our beautiful city. Anyway – historic times are present in our beers – and again we live in historic times. Olaf is always there to raise a toast to cooperation and to beautiful new friendships!

OTAN Beer is now available at the brewery shop and ready for deliveries to shops and restaurants. Contact: sales@olafbrewing.com And yes – the pun is intended. OTAN Olutta in Finnish = I drink beer.

Nearly 50 years ago, Steven Spielberg travelled to Martha's Vineyard off the coast of Massachusetts to film an upcoming movie about a great white shark. A local kid named Jonathan Searle scored a small role in the film as a young prankster, spooking locals by swimming through the water with a fake shark fin.

In 1986 — 11 years after the film's release — Searle ended joined the police force in Edgartown, which is part of the Vineyard. And as of Monday, May 16, 2022, he's been elected as the chief of police in the neighboring town of Oak Bluffs.

The local newspaper offered a highlight reel of Searle's career leading up to this new appointment — but curiously left out any details about his acting career:

An Island native, Mr. Searle has served in the Edgartown department since 1986, rising through the ranks. His community work is wide-ranging and includes serving as town meeting constable for many years. More recently he helped lead an initiative called Project Outreach, teaming up police officers with recovery coaches to help get Islanders struggling with addiction into treatment programs.

He is also the son of a police chief; his father George Searle served as chief in Edgartown from 1981-1995, and had been in the department since 1966.

According to Sky News, Searle also charged a man for disorderly conduct in 2008 after the man … tricked tourists into thinking they were about to be attacked by a great white shark.

Oak Bluffs Selects Jonathan Searle as New Police Chief [Aidan Pollard / Vineyard Gazette]

Jaws Child Actor Becoming Police Chief in Martha's Vineyard, Where Iconic Movie Was Filmed [Maria Pasquini / People]

"Rye The Lightning" is a new straight rye whiskey from Metallica's whiskey brand, BLACKENED. Named for and inspired by the band's sophomore album, which sold some six million copies, the whiskey was aged through BLACKENED's proprietary "Black Noise" process. Basically, they blast the barrels with the sonic strength of a live recording of Metallica performing "Ride The Lightning" in its entirety.

Here's the fancy marketing way they explain it:

We set out to craft a whiskey that brings the uniqueness of the collaborators together in a bottle. A whiskey born of innovation, and unlike any other in the world. From the time Dave was a cadet at West Point, he was fascinated with the effects of sound – the way an organ can play a note that shakes an entire building. As he honed his craft over the years, the thought of what sound could do to whiskey at a molecular level stayed with him. As it so happened, Metallica and Meyer Sound innovated a subwoofer employing that same range, harnessing the vibrations that make a Metallica concert the resonant, visceral experience their fans know and love. The convergence of these ambitions have resulted in a sonic-enhancement method that utilizes a variation of the band's song-determined frequencies to disrupt the whiskey inside the barrel, causing increased wood interaction that kicks up the wood-flavor characteristics in the whiskey. We call this proprietary sonic-enhancement process BLACK NOISE™.

Sure, okay.

It's not entirely clear how long the whiskey is subject to this sonic assault. According to Rolling Stone, the rye base is aged 5-8 years in traditional Kentucky whiskey barrels, then finished in Madeira wine and Caribbean rum casks for 2-14 weeks each. I'm guessing the Black Noise process only happens at the end there, where it's good for marketing.

According to the distiller, Rye the Lightning has, "notes of dried fig, hay, pinewood, pear, and rum cake on the nose, and on the palate, clover honey, mint, corn husk, sugar cane, walnut, and cinnamon."

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It's $80, if you want to buy a bottle.

Metallica Unveil 'Rye the Lightning,' a Straight Rye Named After Iconic Sophomore Release [Tim Chan / Rolling Stone]

Image: Terence Faircloth / Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Pastor Mark Huges of the Church of the Rock in Winnipeg has a tendency to … update the Easter story for his annual sermon. He's done Back To The Future parodies, and Lion King remakes. But perhaps his greatest achievement was in 2019, when he had the Devil as Loki performing REM's "It's The End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)" before crucifying Jesus as Iron Man on the cross — who in turn responds to Loki's musical interlude by singing "Tubthumping" by Chumbawamba.

"The Prayer" by Diemut Strebe is, "an experimental set-up to explore the possibilities of an approximation to celestial and numinous entities by performing a potentially never-ending chain of religious routines and devotional attempts for communication through a self-learning software."

In other words, it's a creepy-ass robot mouth that prays like the brazen head once conferred upon by Pope Sylvester II, and the Eschaton is nigh.

A little more from the artist's website:

The Prayer is an art-installation that tries to explore the supernatural through artificial intelligence with a long term experimental set up. A robot – installation operates a talking mouth that is part of a computer system to try to connect to 'the divine' the supernatural or 'the noumenal' as the mystery of 'the unknown', using deep learning, a method of machine learning, that attempts to mimic human brain circuits with a self learning software.

According to the conviction of most scientists within the research about artificial intelligence, robots as self-learning software running on so called neuronal networks of deep learning should in principle be able to mimic or generate any form of human consciousness even in a superior way. We want to test and explore this ability on religious experiences, thoughts and behavior with a long term experimental set up.

How would a divine epiphany appear to an artificial intelligence? The question may sound absurd but the focus of the project could maybe shed light on the difference between human and AI machines in the debate about mind and matter and reflect on the potentials and implications of deep learning AI within both its narrow setting and general state.

The Prayer [Diemut Strebe]

Monsters of California is the directorial debut of Tom Delonge, the ex-Blink-182/current Angels v Airwaves frontman who recently began a second career as a high profile UFOlogist (using money borrowed from a literal hot dog cart, according to their SEC filings). Here's the setup:

Described as a coming-of-age adventure with a sci-fi twist, Monsters of California follows teenager Dallas Edwards and his misfit friends as they attempt to unearth answers to a series of mysterious, paranormal events happening around Southern California. As they peel back the layers on this onion of the unexplainable, they unravel the extraordinary secrets held within the deepest levels of the Government.

In addition to his musical work, Delonge has also co-written several sci-fi novels, and also produced and scored the 2012 sci-fi movie Love. Given that resume, it makes sense that he'd direct a sci-fi movie. It's certainly a more logical career trajectory than emailing John Podesta about aliens and helping to expose the Pentagon's UFO confirmation videos, or collecting and studying UAP-related rare metal alloys and other bizarre materials through a cooperative research and development agreement with the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command. But then again, as Delonge explained in 2016, this was basically his pitch to the government all along — "Let me be your PR hype man for alien stuff." Or, in his own actual words:

And I go, "UFOs, sir. Now, this is what I wanna try and do. […] Over the past 30 years, there's been a program to indoctrinate people to the idea that this might be real, but the problem is, is all the young adults of the world, they use the Internet, they have iPhones, they talk to each other much quicker than people ever have, so this program that everyone's been following from the '50s is far out-dated, it's antiquated, people have surpassed it and now they don't trust you guys, now they don't like you guys. Now they graduate from MIT and they wanna work for Elon Musk and they don't wanna work here. Help me help you guys. […] If you allow me to do this, what I'm trying to do, then I'm gonna ask you for some help. I need advisors, I need people to help guide me, so I don't keep dis-informing people, I will not do that anymore. We need to tell the truth."

Did I mention that Tom Delonge's To The Stars Academy was co-founded by Hal Puthoff, the parapsychologist who claimed to have achieved remote viewing, and helped to pimp Uri Geller's psychic scams to the world?

Anyway, Monsters of California looks like a fun modern UFO flick. I'll see it when it's out.

UK-based photographer Barry Webb recently published a collection of slime mold images that capture the strange organisms at various stages of their mindboggling lives — and wow, they're pretty incredible. As he explains in his artist statement:

I discovered my first Slime Mould in October 2019. Neither fungi nor plant, it's a Myxomycetes. These organisms go through different stages. At one stage in their life cycle they are single cell amoebae. Most of my images show them as fruiting bodies which are the spore bearing stage. They are extremely small, averaging 1-4mm. This is probably the reason I had never noticed them before, during many years of photographing fungi.

Here are a few selections from his Instagram page, but you should really click through to view the full collection. If nothing else, it's given me a new appreciation for the horrifying beauty of Area X from Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy (aka Annihilation and its sequels which are really all just one big story about a sort-of Myxomycetes-esque extraterrestrial invasion, maybe).

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Slime Moulds (Myxomycetes) [Barry Webb]

Earlier this month, a group of fishermen in Cambodia accidentally caught a rare endangered giant stingray that was nearly 12 feet long and weighed in around 400 pounds.

From Reuters:

The stingray was accidentally caught by fishers in an 80-metre (260ft) deep pool in the Mekong in Cambodia's north-eastern Stung Treng province. The visiting scientists helped return the animal alive.

Zeb Hogan, a fish biologist at the University of Nevada, said finding the 180kg (397lb) stingray, spanning 4 metres, was important.

"This catch was significant because it confirms the existence of these big fish in the stretch of river," said Hogan, who led the United States Agency for International Development-funded Wonders of the Mekong expedition that wrapped up last week.

"This is a very remote stretch of river, it's not well studied, it's incredibly important for fisheries and biodiversity, and it's also a stretch of river that is under threat," he said.

I have no other commentary to offer here but holy shit, that's a huge-ass stingray.

Biologists buoyed by discovery of 4-metre endangered stingray in Cambodia [Reuters]

From The Guardian:

Warnings that a new statue of Margaret Thatcher would attract egg-throwing protests came true within two hours of it being installed in her home town of Grantham on Sunday.

The bronze statue was, without ceremony, placed on a 3-metre (10ft) high plinth to make it more difficult for protesters to inflict any damage.

Shortly afterwards a man was seen throwing eggs from behind a temporary fence and, when one connected, a cry of "oi" could be heard.

Nature is healing.

Margaret Thatcher statue egged within hours of it being installed [Mark Brown / The Guardian]

Die is a Hugo-nominated horror/fantasy comic series written by Kieron Gillen with stunning painted artwork by Stephanie Hans that originally launched in 2018. The basic premise is that a group of teenagers discovered and played a strange new tabletop roleplaying game — and ended up getting trapped inside of the game as their avatars. Eventually, all but one of the teenagers escape. But that's just the backstory: the series actually begins decades later, when the traumatized teens are now disappointed adults, and they're forced to go back into the game that took their friend all those years ago.

In the early promotion for the book, Gillen would often elevator pitch it as "Goth Jumanji," which is both hilarious, and surprisingly accurate.

One of the most fascinating parts of DIE is how much time the creative team put in to developing the rules for the RPG-in-the-story. The characters are technically playing a game (albeit one that's now become life-or-death) and therefore must abide by its rules — which means that you as a reader also need to understand the rules of the game as they go along. Each of the character classes in the world of DIE is only allowed to use one kind of die, for example. If you play as a Godbinder, you make all your rolls on a D12, whereas a Neo player gets a D10, and so on (each dice powerset has its own pros and cons).

As long as they put all that effort into designing the game-within-the-story, Gillen decided to turn DIE into an actual game, and recently launched the RPG rulebook as a Kickstarter campaign. But the DIE tabletop game is not just the game from within the pages of the comic book. Instead, it's more of a gamified adaptation of the comic book. Yes, you're playing the game DIE from the comic book DIE — but part of the IRL RPG of DIE is that you have to create a character both in and out of the game. Basically, you control a traumatized-teenager-turned-disappointed-adult who's playing a character within the game of DIE. Get it? Look, I'll just the Kickstarter explain the meta-aspect better:

In DIE you play a group of authentically flawed people from the real world who gather together to play an RPG and are dragged into a fantasy realm. They then have to find their way home… or not.

DIE begins on Earth, as the players create flawed, unique real-world Personas who gather together to play a roleplaying game. These obsessions are mined and externalised when on their involuntary adventure into the world of DIE. They're not just going to a fantasy world – they're going to their fantasy world, twisting their shame and frustration back at them. What do you do when the dragon speaks to you in the voice of your angry, long-dead father? What happens when the orcs taunt you with the same insults as your childhood bullies, now you're armed with a greatsword? When your beloved ex-partner returns to you in the form of an emotion-draining vampire, will you resist them?

It's a pretty cool concept — and I, for one, am very much looking forward to experiencing it for myself!

Reward tiers begin at $25 for a PDF of the DIE RPG, with other cool perks including specialized dice sets and more.

DIE: The Roleplaying Game [Kieron Gillen and Stephanie Hans / Kickstarter]

Mystery Incorporated is a new YouTube web series that basically applies the CW's Riverdale formula to the Scooby Doo gang, injecting new life into a beloved children's franchise with beautiful performers and heightened melodrama that corrupts your nostalgic memories with sex, violence, and substance abuse. What's not to love?

When the small town of Coolsville becomes a hot bed for unexplained supernatural activity, a grief-stricken star athlete, a brainiac, a socialite, a rebellious loner, and his Great Dane must form an unlikely team to hunt down and stop the evil that has befallen their town.

This particular series began its life as a concept trailer back in February 2020 — you remember that month, right? The End of the Beforetimes? — which lead to an incredibly successful IndieGoGo fundraising campaign. Series creators Dade Elza and and Jessica Chancellor also play the roles of Fred Jones and Daphne Blake, respectively.

Here's the setup for the hour-long pilot episode, which you can watch above:

The journey begins as Fred Jones sets out to investigate the creature who murdered his parents. His search leads him into resident skeptic Velma Dinkley and the two must form a quick bond to fight back against the evil they have accidentally unleashed.