Princeton computer scientist and former White House Deputy CTO Ed Felten (previously) writes about the security lessons of the 2016 election: first, that other nation-states are more aggressive than generally supposed, and second, that you don't need to hack the vote-totals to effect devastation on an adversary -- it's sufficient to undermine the election's legitimacy by messing with voter rolls, "so there is uncertainty about whether the correct people were allowed to vote." Read the rest
Due to infrequent but insistent requests for my unpleasant Photoshops of various politicians, I'm putting as many of them as I can remember here in one place. Sweet dreams!
I'd make a calendar but the licensing fees involved would necessitate crowdfunding it, which sounds like hard work.
There are a couple of extras here not seen before, such as Donald McNugget; and I likely missed a few too. Read the rest
It's not done with you yet: Stereogum's Scott Lapatine assembled "The Worst Playlist of 2016," with all the year's most terrible tracks. Highlights include Eminem's "Campaign Speech," Corey Feldman's "Go 4 It," and "The Entire Genre of Simpsonwave," a full hour of which I have embedded here for your morning enjoyment. Read the rest
Adult tube site xHamster released its first comprehensive survey of porn viewership in 2016. According to them the most visited category moved from MILFs to Matures (women in their 40s and 50s). They also found that searches for "Melania" beat out "Donald Trump" and "Hillary Clinton" combined. Read the rest
Since I last presented a year-end videogame wrap-up for Boing Boing readers, it's become an exponentially harder task. The number of games released per day has - even just since 2014! - risen a few times over, so narrowing a list down means leaving amazing and creative work behind. That's not even to mention the herculean task of staying on top of the pile of games still unplayed.
2016 gave us a generous amount of powerhouse titles hoisted by massive budgets and massive marketing efforts: hello Overwatch, Dark Souls III, Doom, No Man's Sky, Pokémon Sun & Moon, and especially Uncharted 4. But I did my best to wander the far corners of the internet, searching and sometimes blindly stumbling upon weird, beautiful, thoughtful videogames.
Below you'll find 20ish games (actually quite a good number more) that sang to me the most, and I think exemplify the best that 2016 had to offer. You'll find interesting places to explore, unique achievements and re-inventions of old standards, and brilliant ideas executed simply. I hope you find them as surprising and delightful as I did.
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Beglitched
by A.P. Thomson & Jenny Jiao Hsia • Get it: Windows/Mac/Linux
Beglitched is, on its face, a fairly simple match-3 type game, on the same family-tree branch as Bejeweled or Candy Crush or any other number of similar clones you may have spent all your idle moments thumbing around with on your phone over the past few years. Read the rest
The Australian National Dictionary Centre has declared the two-word compound phrase "democracy sausage" to be its 2016 Word of the Year, defining it as "A barbecued sausage served on a slice of bread, bought at a polling booth sausage sizzle on election day." Read the rest
Lish Laynette posted her amazing Prince-themed Christmas tree on YouTube and Facebook. Read the rest
The European Parliament's Chief Negotiator plans to offer British nationals the right to opt into "associate citizenship" in the EU, with the right to travel and work in the continent. Read the rest
Ta-Nehisi Coates's 17,000-word history of the Obama presidency in the Atlantic is called "My President Was Black," but it's about the very special kind of blackness that Obama embodied -- not because whites saw the biracial politician differently, but because Obama's extraordinarily supportive white family and unique boyhood in Hawai'i spared him the racial trauma visited on other young black people in America. Read the rest
Ted Cruz, the right-wing psycho largely despised by his own party, prevailed yesterday over Donald Trump, the nativist inflatable Cheeto largely despised by everyone, to claim most of Iowa's Republican presidential candidate delegates.
On the Democrat side, Hillary Clinton, the shifty centrist who rarely says the same thing twice, narrowly edged a .3% margin over Bernie Sanders, the disheveled pinko grandpa.
With the whiff of Pyrrhic victory—22 delegates to Sanders' 21—it's a tantalizing suggestion of that rare thing in Anglosphere politics: interesting choices. Read the rest
