Posts Tagged ‘happy-mutants’

Underground power-boxes nestled beneath the pavements* of London keep blowing the hell up. In its defense, UK Power Networks reminds us that there’s a lot of these boxes, and only a few of them explode catastrophically every year, blowing huge, dramatic holes in the streetscene.        

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London’s exploding pavements*

Molly sez, “I wrote this short essay over at iO9 on what the future of civil disobedience could look like. Though in the past civil disobedience was enacted in the streets, with people placing their bodies in harm’s way for their cause, now online activists can engage in digitally-based acts of civil disobedience from their keyboards.        

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Civil disobedience and the Internet

Wade sez, “Wolfgang Baur, roleplaying game designer and publisher of the late, lamented Kobold Quarterly magazine (successor to Dragon) has launched the Deep Magic Kickstarter bringing 300 new spells to Pathfinder Roleplaying Game.        

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Kickstarting a spellbook for Pathfinder RPG

Rejoice! For Carl Hiaasen, author of the funniest crime novels in the business, bar none, has a new book out! Bad Monkey has just arrived on shelves and it is every bit as hilarious as you could hope — I spent the weekend reading choice bits aloud to whomever I could grab, and giggling noisily to myself when no one was around.        

Originally posted here:
Carl Hiaasen’s Bad Monkey

Chris Weston’s poster for a notional “Carry On X-Men” has me wanting very badly to inhabit his alternate universe. He says of the film, “Despite the bawdy humour, ‘Carry on X-Men’ is in many ways more faithful to the source material than Bryan Singer’s films.        

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Carry On X-Men

Here’s a photo from Jacob Riis’s 1890 classic ” How the Other Half Lives ,” “an early publication… documenting squalid living conditions in New York City slums in the 1880s.” It shows “Bandit’s Roost, at 59½ Mulberry Street (Mulberry Bend), was the most crime-ridden, dangerous part of all New York City.” Those guys are clearly total bad-asses.        

Link:
Scary NYC neighborhood, 1888

When the 17th Walking Dead collection came out last December, I called it “grim,” and mentioned that Kirkman and co had introduced some new bad guys that made the Governor seem like a Smurf. Well, now Book 18: What Comes After is out, and the new badguy, a psycho named Negan, is back, and holy.        

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Walking Dead 18: a magnificent villain who makes Hannibal Lecter look like Mr Rogers

Here’s some wonderful musical news: djBC has revived the Beastles, the inspired Beastie Boys/Beatles mashups that resulted in two spectacular albums, ultimately censored off the Internet thanks to legal threats from EMI. The new double, 20-track Beastles album, “Ill Submarine,” is about to drop, and djBC has a lot of teasers to get you ready for it.        

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Beastles are back: double-album of Beastie Boys/Beatles mashups imminent

Here again is a clip of the amazing Ross Sisters performing a wonderful song about potato salad while performing the most amazing contortions and acrobatics — like Cirque du Soliel crossed with Hee-Haw performed by the Andrews Sisters. It’s from 1944′s Broadway Rhythm .        

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Ross Sisters sing Solid Potato Salad

I reviewed Lauren Beukes’s time-travelling serial killer novel The Shining Girls back in May, and mentioned at the time that the US release was today. And here we are! Here’s some of that review: Shining Girls is the story of a serial killer named Harper Curtis, a savage psychopath who hunts the alleyways of a stinking Hooverville in Depression-era Chicago.        

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Lauren Beukes’s Shining Girls serial killer novel is out in the US

The new Deluxe Edition of Watchmen landed in my post-box today. It’s a very well-made hardcover edition of one of the canonical modern graphic novels. Everyone should have at least one edition of Watchmen on the shelf, and this is a pretty nice one to have — the classy, matte-finish dustjacket goes over a set of full-color boards with the traditional Watchmen cover-image.        

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Deluxe hardcover of Watchmen

A 50-year-old man was upset that the sign in front of the Oregon Teacher Standards and Practices Commission read “Oregon Teacher Standards an Practices Commission” (the D had fallen off the sign or been worn away), so he resolved to explode it with a pressure-cooker bomb.        

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Bomber enraged by spelling error can’t blow up sign because his bomb instructions were riddled with typos

Local People, Arms Crossed : exactly what it sounds like. A Tumblr full of hometown heroes, posed by unimaginative newsies with their arms crossed for extra competence. ( via Waxy )        

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Arms folded: a study in local reportage

“Here’s that bad advice you were hoping for” is a Tumblr that picks out letters to advice columns (as well as direct requests from readers) and writes scathing, hilarious responses: NYT, Social Q’s, 24 May 2013: Our group of close friends has spent the last few years attending one another’s weddings. More        

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Excellent bad advice

Ars Technica has a beautiful, mouth-watering gallery of the stuff for sale at Silicon Valley’s Weird Stuff Warehouse , a high-tech surplus store of epic proportion: “There is a need for a place you can walk around and get parts and older technology—or even newer technology,” said Chuck Schuetz, the man behind the Weird Stuff Warehouse. More        

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E-waste porn: a tour of Silicon Valley’s Weird Stuff Warehouse

Mat Ricardo sez, “Here’s what happened last time Piff The Magic Dragon (and Mr. Piffles the dog!) was a guest on Mat Ricardo’s London Varieties. What’s going to happen when he pays us a return visit, this Thursday night at London’s Leicester Square Theatre?        

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Doing a tablecloth yank from beneath a dog in a dragon suit

Margaret Killjoy sez, “Steampunk Magazine #9 is out and available for order. The pdf is up as well. New orders and pre-orders will be going out this weekend! 118 ad-free, Creative-Commons pages of steampunk mad science, lifestyle, fiction, and history. Including an interview with Cory Doctorow and how to make hydrogen airships out of condoms.”        

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Steampunk magazine #9

I reviewed Ronald Diebert’s new book Black Code in this weekend’s edition of the Globe and Mail. Diebert runs the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto and has been instrumental in several high-profile reports that outed government spying (like Chinese hackers who compromised the Dalai Lama’s computer and turned it into a covert CCTV)        

Link:
Black Code: how spies, cops and crims are making cyberspace unfit for human habitation

Kristen sez, “The DoomBuggies website has released a version of the Haunted Mansion Corridor of Doors wallpaper in fabric, wallpaper and gift wrap, and according to the DoomBuggies facebook page, it’s the same graphic that has been used by Disney. ‘This is created from the same artwork that we created for Disney’s official Haunted Mansion        

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Haunted Mansion wallpaper and fabric

What better subject for a t-shirt than an Adventure Time/Katamari Damacy mashup? Adventure Time Ball        

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Katamari Adventure Time

Stephen sez, “I recently helped set my grandad get set up on his new PC and spotted a photo of him from when he was about 20 years old. It was in a sorry state, so I emailed it to myself and posted it on Reddit, where the community came together and restored it beyond        

Excerpt from:
Grandson explains reddit-restored, 60-y-o navy portrait to amazed Grandad

An undated ad for a punk store in Newcastle offers batty punk tees for a mere £4.50 — mid-1980s punk revival? MY GEAR FIXATION IS BACK IN FULL EFFECT. I’M LOSIN’ IT. (via Goths and Punks)        

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Supplies for all your punk and punk-related needs

Here’s a quick and fascinating look at “Robot Self-Assembly by Folding: A Printed Inchworm Robot,” presented at the 2013 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation. The authors demonstrated a foldable inchworm robot that actually folds itself into shape. The goal is to have all the components placed on the robot’s shrinky-dink surface using a        

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Self-assembling foldable inchworm robots

A chain of Osaka cafes sells a crazy parfait, topped with a ginormous piece of cake: On a recent day out in Osaka, our reporter stopped by a café and ordered a truly hard-core parfait. It wasn’t that the parfait was so big, and no, it didn’t contain any shocking ingredients. What blew our minds        

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Cake-topped parfait

Kevyn Jacobs snapped this knit (crocheted?) Dalek bollard cover at the corner of West Magnolia Street and Commercial Street in Bellingham, WA. No clue as to the manufacturer of said confection, but bravo. #Knitted #Dalek bollard cover (Thanks, Hagrid!)        

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Bollard transformed into yarn Dalek