In other free-form gaming developments, Farbs — the mind behind local favorite 'Game To Get', Captain Forever — has officially unveiled PlayPen, a community site that harnesses the scale and… Read the rest of the article: PlayPen: an open-ended adventure game made of Wiki

By Adam Savage Good evening. I hope you don't mind, but I'm going to read my speech from my new iPad. Yep. I'm not only a humanist, I'm also an… Read the rest of the article: Food for The Eagle – Adam Savage's speech to Harvard Humanism Society

Even though Jason Rohrer's mediated-multiplayer storytelling engine Sleep is Death — first featured here on Boing Boing — has only been in the hands of early buyers for just over… Read the rest of the article: SIDTube: Watch Sleep Is Death stories, play online

Amazing volcano pictures. Boston.com's Big Picture has them all.

Penguin Group Australia accidentally published copies of the Pasta Bible containing an unfortunate spell check error. A recipe calling for "salt and freshly ground black pepper" actually read "salt and… Read the rest of the article: Cookbook typo: "salt and freshly ground black people"

The most famous of carnivorous plants, the Venus flytrap, is surprisingly rare in the wild. The plant is only found on the 100-mile-long wet pine savannas on the edge of… Read the rest of the article: Venus flytraps in the wild, and in danger

Rocketry hobbyist John Coker created an 8-pack of rockets, designed and painted to mimic those crayon packs your folks used to buy you back in grade school. They were first… Read the rest of the article: Crayon rockets

Robotic mouth recites vowels, but doesn't seem too happy about it. (Via Robert Popper)

Needs tighter editing, but it's still a little mind bending. (Via Zany Pickle)

Behold the Alot, a large, shaggy beast found principally in internets. [Hyperbole and a Half via Ectomo]

The New Yorker's Ken Auletta has a feature about the current power struggle between Apple, Amazon, and Google for the ebook market. "By the end of last year, Amazon accounted… Read the rest of the article: Amazon's plans to kill book publishers thwarted by Apple

Several years ago, I posted about a funny series of finance videos Daniel Rubin created for Motley Fool. Lately, Daniel has been drawing celebrity caricatures that remind me a bit… Read the rest of the article: Daniel Rubin's celebrity caricatures

Vann Hall writes: In Mark Helprin's "Winter's Tale," a war breaks out between two NYC newspapers. One, the Sun, is a serious, NY Times-ish publication, while the other (the Ghost)… Read the rest of the article: Cocaine smuggler's bestiality farm

Ben Greenman of The New Yorker says Sly Stone's exceedingly bizarre Coachella performance was an act of "obliterating rebellion."

Many U.S. voters were outraged in the 2000 presidential election when Bush Jr. won despite losing the popular vote. But Britain's electoral map is even weirder. After a spectacular TV… Read the rest of the article: Lib Dems soar in UK polls after debate

Photo: Troy Holden Harvard Secular Society conferred lifetime achievement awards on MythBusters' Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman this weekend. Adam's splendid acceptance speech follows. Food for The Eagle – Adam… Read the rest of the article: Adam Savage's speech to the Harvard humanists

Engadget gets shots of the new iPhone. But is it real? Gizmodo confirms the curious new design: it has the actual thing in hand. Glass on both sides? Gruber finds… Read the rest of the article: iPhone 4G details emerge

It Often Begins with a Smile, 1930s. By Jin Meisheng (19021989). Chromolithograph on paper. Collection of the Shanghai History Museum. The Asian Art Museum in San Francisco has a great… Read the rest of the article: The Asian Art Museum does Shanghai: opium hulks, Communist propaganda, and neon brush strokes

GoogleSharing is a pretty ingenious new plugin and service for mixing up your search and browsing history with other net users and transmitting it to Google, so that you are… Read the rest of the article: GoogleSharing: blending your net-activity with others to trick Google

TOR (The Onion Router, a technology for bouncing your traffic all over the net so that your ISP can't spy on you) is now available for Android phones. Just take… Read the rest of the article: TOR for Android: anonymize your phone's data-connection