"Who bought this? Who wanted this?"

Seattle-based novelty company Archie McPhee is bringing out the weird with a new web series that is reminiscent of the low-budget cable shows of yore, and I mean that in the best way possible. The Archie McPhee Archives with Mr. Q premiere starts with a guy in a leopard-print fez and a black sweatshirt emblazoned with a big white question mark ("Mr. Q") digging through cryptically-marked banker boxes in the company's warehouse. We're then shown each of the bizarro items he chose, one by one. Of course, he saves the best for last. Two words: Mutant. Farm.

As someone who has toured that very warehouse and has dreamt about rifling around in each one of those boxes, I really appreciate this new show. Can't wait to see what they showcase next.

The series was inspired by the items they share in their "too weird" for their "main [Instagram] account," Cult of Bibo. Here's a taste:

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Inspiration for 2020

A post shared by Bibo Weirdmaker (@cultofbibo) on Sep 1, 2019 at 10:12am PDT

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Usually everything is better with googly eyes. Usually. #thrifthorror

A post shared by Bibo Weirdmaker (@cultofbibo) on Nov 7, 2019 at 8:59am PST

Long live, Archie McPhee! Read the rest

This Sunday, November 10th, see the wonderful science fiction writers Charlie Jane Anders (previously) and Annalee Newitz (previously) in conversation with Terry Bisson at the always-great SF in SF lecture series; doors open at 6PM at the American Bookbinders Museum (366 Clementina Alley) ($10/$8 students) with a post-show podcast from Somafm, and books on sale from our friends at Borderlands Books. Read the rest

Facelesstech created a fun pair of "smart glasses" with an embedded a miniature attiny85 Arduino controller, and followed it up with a pair that concealed a TV-B-Gone (Mitch Altman's open source hardware gadget that cycles through all known switch-TV-off codes, causing any nearby screens to go black). It's a much less creepy use than the spy glasses with embedded cameras sold by Chinese state surveillance vendors. I'd certainly buy a pair! (via JWZ) Read the rest

I've been a fan of cartoonist, novelist and memoirist Lynda Barry for decades, long before she was declared a certified genius; Barry's latest book, Making Comics is an intensely practical, incredibly inspiring curriculum for finding, honing and realizing your creativity through drawing and writing.

My latest Locus Magazine column is Jeannette Ng Was Right: John W. Campbell Was a Fascist, which revisits Jeannette Ng's Campbell Awards speech from this summer's World Science Fiction convention. Read the rest

Pete Tridish and pals made a hell of a Hallowe'en haunt this year: on their "porch of doom," trick-or-treaters were sent to a Mars colonized by billionaires where they were expected to mine Mars rocks and put them in Amazon Mars boxes at a sweatshop Amazon Mars warehouse; Pete notes that the haunt was partly inspired by my 2011 young adult novella Martian Chronicles, which was recently podcast in two parts by the excellent Escape Pod podcast! Read the rest

In 2016, Cloudflare was targeted by a notorious patent troll called Blackbird Technologies; rather than capitulate, the company set up a fund called "Project Jengo" to pay bounties to researchers who documented prior art that could be used to invalidate the patent in question -- and all of Blackbird's patents, and began to file to have additional patents invalidated based on that crowdsourced research. Read the rest

"Improving Automobile Safety by Removing Blind Spots" is 14 year old Alaina Gassler's prizewinning science-fair project, which uses cameras mounted to the exterior of the car and feeding their video to internal projectors, which projection-map them onto the a-pillars that otherwise obscure the driver's view. Read the rest

Loot is a Brooklyn comics "store" (463 Court St, Floor 2, 11231) that is oriented around encouraging local kids to become comics creators. Adults are only admitted if they're with kids, and the store sells $30/month memberships that entitle kids to use copious art supplies and meet with artist-mentors, as well as to borrow comics from the store's library. Read the rest

Brian Van Slyke writes, "STRIKE! The Game of Worker Rebellion is a board game about building a city-wide rebellion to stop a mega-corporation's takeover. It was created in collaboration between The TESA Collective, a publisher of games about changing the world, and Jobs with Justice (JWJ), a leading labor rights organization. It has just launched on Kickstarter. Read the rest

Mark Anderson is the proprietor of Aethervision, which has a simple premise: "Each week, I release a weekly news recap which covers 5 news items using nothing but footage from pre-1924 footage." These are spectacular and mesmerizing. Read the rest

Since 2013, Richard Littler has been publishing Scarfolk, a darkly comic series of brilliantly photoshopped artifacts from a dark and brutal English town trapped in a loop between 1969 and 1979; Littler published his first Scarfolk book in 2014, a pretty straight-ahead best-of anthology that was a sheer delight, and since then, he's taken a brilliant detour into animation, while still keeping up on Scarfolk, which has now spawned its second -- and even better -- book: The Scarfolk Annual.

[Last spring, I ran into Nikola Richter at the Republica Festival in Berlin; she told me about Sina Kamala Kaufmann, a celebrated German climate activist and sf writer whose debut short story collection, Bright Matter, had been published by Richter's independent publisher Mikrotext to great critical and public success. I offered to run one of Kaufmann's stories here in English as a way of exposing her work to a new audience. -Cory] Read the rest

From Ross Wolinsky's "The Millennial Raven" in McSweeney's: Once upon a midnight dreary, Tinder swiping, buzzed and weary/I asked Siri about my sushi ordered one hour before/ While I chewed some pretzels, snacking, suddenly there came a tapping/As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my apartment door/“’Tis my roommate,” I muttered, “walking ‘cross the hardwood floor/Only this and nothing more.” (via Kottke) Read the rest

History has been kind to Fred Rogers' legacy; the beloved children's entertainer does not have the intergenerational staying power of Sesame Street (thanks in large part to Rogers' relentless focus on making programming aimed exclusively at small children, without any pretense to entertaining their grownups), but touchstones like his Congressional testimony on public TV funding, his remarks after 9/11 and his look for the helpers speech continue to bring a smile and a tear to all who see them, whether for the first time or the five hundredth; Mr Rogers was exactly what he appeared to be, incredibly, and the riddle of how someone could be so sincere and loving has sent rumormongers off to the land of conspiracy looking for an answer. But the real Mr Rogers story -- as chronicled in Gavin Edwards' new book, Kindness and Wonder: Why Mister Rogers Matters Now More Than Ever -- is both more mundane and more amazing than any outlandish story.

Mark Taaffe is a Toronto institution, whose Fort York Auctions were the best junk auctions I've ever seen (they inspired my short story Craphound, which was the first story I ever sold to a professional market); Mark has moved online and is now selling his finds through a social media account. Though these listings lack his charming patter and colourful auctioneering, his eye is as good as ever and his prices are still amazeballs. (Thanks, Paul Mercer!) Read the rest

Volunteers at Novosibirsk's Wild Animal Rehabilitation Centre put trackers on 13 wild eagles to track their migration patterns; the trackers connected to cellular towers and message the researchers with the birds' location. Read the rest