Indie comics publsher Boom! Studios is putting a bunch of its backlist comics (including the excellent Zombie Tales) online as free downloads:

The titles they’re offering include Ninja Tales, Zombie Tales, Hero Squared, 2 Guns, Shmobots and Cthulhu Tales.

“This is a great way to get the word out about BOOM! titles,” said Chip Mosher in a press release. “When people come to the site for free comics, they’ll be able to take a look at the other quality books we’re putting out. The interface ties all the parts of our website - the store, current titles, free stuff - into one beautiful package. New fans who might be stopping by for cool zombie or Cthulhu content can get turned on to what BOOM!’s doing across the board and check out the print editions in local comic book shops or at Amazon.com and mass market bookstores via our distribution deal with Perseus Books. We expect that people who aren’t BOOM! fans will discover our series and titles and be excited to own print copies.”

Link (Thanks, Dr. Webcomics!)

See also: Zombie Tales: comics anthology

Worldchanging's challenged its readers to complete the sentence "Imagine no..." with scenarios for a world where the suckitude has been removed:

Imagine no hurry. Imagine no hectic deadlines, frantic commutes, meals on the go, or interrupted vacations. Imagine having more time. It’s not a pipe dream. Living more sustainably, in more compact communities with more innovative tools will save us enormous amounts of time that we waste today -- time that we can use to spend with our family and friends. So the next time you find yourself grabbing food at the drive-thru, imagine a world where you have time for a long lunch with friends. Imagine no hurry.

Imagine no maintenance. Imagine not needing to own your own car to enjoy the benefits of driving. It's not a pipe dream. Already car sharing companies and other business like them that allow you to drive a car when it’s convenient, while they handle the maintenance, insurance, fuel and parking. And it’s not only cars. Sharing services have sprung up for everything from lawn mowers to bicycles to designer handbags. So the next time you find yourself waiting at the mechanic's garage for an oil change, imagine it was your last. Imagine no maintenance.

Link

Joi Ito points us to a new video just released by Radiohead for the song "House of Cards" from the album In Rainbows. Snip from a blog post at the Google Developer site, which has videos and images about the making of...

No cameras or lights were used. Instead two technologies were used to capture 3D images: Geometric Informatics and Velodyne LIDAR. Geometric Informatics scanning systems produce structured light to capture 3D images at close proximity, while a Velodyne Lidar system that uses multiple lasers is used to capture large environments such as landscapes. In this video, 64 lasers rotating and shooting in a 360 degree radius 900 times per minute produced all the exterior scenes.

And Joi, who is the CEO of Creative Commons, adds...

Exciting for Creative Commons is that the data (although not the music) used to produce this music video are being made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License on the Google Code site. The Source code to the software used is being made available under a Apache License 2.0. This combination of Open Source licenses for code and Creative Commons licenses for data/content is very "good idea".

Radiohead "House of Cards" and Creative Commons [ joi.ito.com ]

RA DIOHEA_D / HOU SE OF_C ARDS [ Google Code ]

(Disclaimer: the writer of this post is the hugest Radiohead fan ever, and will personally whup all comers who may hit me up on my Myspace to dispute said claim. Aight? Later.)

More than two dozen people in Moscow were partially blinded by lasers at a rave. Apparently, rain forced the Aquamarine Open Air Festival into tents where the lasers meant to be pointed at the sky were, er, pointed at the crowd. From New Scientist:

"They all have retinal burns, scarring is visible on them. Loss of vision in individual cases is as high as 80%, and regaining it is already impossible," (daily newspaper) Kommersant quoted a treating ophthalmologist as saying....

"I immediately had a spot like when you stare into the sun," attendee Dmitry told Kommersant.

"After three days I decided to go to the hospital. They examined me, asked if I had been at Open Air, and then put me straight in the hospital. I didn't even get to go home and get my stuff," he said.

Lasers blind ravers (New Scientist)

Artist Brian Major created an impressive chalk-by-number Sasquatch artwork in Longview, Washington. Loren Coleman has more at Cryptomundo.
Chalk bigfoot (Cryptomundo)

This video of a lovely and strange bird formation is quite amazing.
Amazing bird formation (Yahoo!, thanks Brad Keech!)

Chris Blake says:

For my latest music video, I compiled some of the weirdest, funniest and most touching real-life regrets I found on the Web. Then I set them to my new song 'Someone Else' about unrequited love.

Andrew Heart of Panopticist says:

Amateurs are doing amazing things these days with consumer-grade high-def camcorders, especially Canon's HV30 MiniDV unit (which retails for about $800) and its predecessor, the HV20. [This] impressive clip is the work of a Memphis college student named Kyle Shields, who acquired a new audio library and wanted to test out some of the gunshot sounds.

There's a whole channel on Vimeo devoted to people's experiments with Canon's HV30 and HV20 camcorders.

I like this one. You keep expecting it to be a commercial for insurance or some kind of medicine, but it's a guy trying out his camera techniques on his annoyed wife, who just wants to be left in peace so she can go through the coupons in the Sunday paper. Link

Jeff Simmermon recounts his recent experience with a snobbish barista at Murky Coffee in Arlington, VA.

I just ordered my usual summertime pick-me-up: a triple shot of espresso dumped over ice. And the guy at the counter looked me in the eye with a straight face and said “I’m sorry, we can’t serve iced espresso here. It’s against our policy.”

The whole world turned brown and chunky for a second. Flecks of corn floated past my pupils, and it took me a second to blink it all away.

“Okay,” I said, “I’ll have a triple espresso and a cup of ice, please.” He rolled his eyes and rang it up, took my money, gave me change. I stood there and waited. Then the barista called me over to the bar. I reached for it, and he leaned over and locked his eyes with mine, saying “Hey man. What you’re about to do … that’s really, really Not Okay.”

Murky Coffee, Arlington: Hold That Espresso Between Your Knees (And I Am Not Lying)

(NPR photo by Jolie Myers of Mister Jalopy astride his iron steed at Coco's Variety)

Professional amateur and Make contributor Mister Jalopy was profiled on NPR today.

Like many of his fellow makers, Mr. Jalopy is simultaneously an artist, a tinkerer and a craftsman. For him, it's a lifestyle. His garage is lined with cabinets full of parts, an unimaginable number of widgets, wires and springs. There are broken sculptures, pinball machines and dozens of bicycles and old cars in various states of transformation.

Next to the giant iPod is his version of a drive-in movie theater: a sturdy wooden box, which he has wired with various found parts and mounted on a Schwinn adult tricycle. The result: He can project movies onto a 12-foot surface anywhere within riding distance.

...

Mr. Jalopy has been consulting with Disney, Apple and other major corporations, preaching the gospel of open source manufacturing. He tells them to use screws instead of glue, and to make schematics readily available so consumers can fix and re-imagine the objects they buy. He also urges technology companies to create forums for consumers to share ideas, and pushes car companies to sell patterns so people can create accessories like seat covers.

Mr. Jalopy: Are You Sure You Own Your Stuff? (NPR)

Elizabeth Kolbert's article in The New Yorker called "Turf War" is about the history of lawns, and the price people pay (in dollars and costs to the envirnoment) for the chemically-fortified, water-ravenous living carpets adored, but rarely used, by suburbanites.

I've been slowly replacing my lawn with a vegetable garden and am getting ready to take the plunge and get rid of my entire lawn. Later this month I'll be attending an instructional seminal called "Kill Your Lawn" at the Theodore Payne Foundation in Sun Valley, CA.

The greener, purer lawns that the chemical treatments made possible were, as monocultures, more vulnerable to pests, and when grubs attacked the resulting brown spot showed up like lipstick on a collar. The answer to this chemically induced problem was to apply more chemicals. As Paul Robbins reports in “Lawn People” (2007), the first pesticide popularly spread on lawns was lead arsenate, which tended to leave behind both lead and arsenic contamination. Next in line were DDT and chlordane. Once they were shown to be toxic, pesticides like diazinon and chlorpyrifos—both of which affect the nervous system—took their place. Diazinon and chlorpyrifos, too, were eventually revealed to be hazardous. (Diazinon came under scrutiny after birds started dropping dead around a recently sprayed golf course.) The insecticide carbaryl, which is marketed under the trade name Sevin, is still broadly applied to lawns. A likely human carcinogen, it has been shown to cause developmental damage in lab animals, and is toxic to—among many other organisms—tadpoles, salamanders, and honeybees. In “American Green” (2006), Ted Steinberg, a professor of history at Case Western Reserve University, compares the lawn to “a nationwide chemical experiment with homeowners as the guinea pigs.”

Turf War (The New Yorker)

UPDATE: Original BB Gadget post about this video here.

An obnoxious TV reporter went to Burbank to ask stupid questions to people waiting in line for the new iPhone. I was delighted to see that my pal Jeff, or his identical twin brother (he really has one) told the reporter he was a jackass. (via Merlin Mann)

This fellow has figured out a way to dip his fingers into boiling oil to retrieve morsels of food.

Ram Babu, a small vendor in the busy by lines of Allahabad has been selling Pakoras for twenty years now. The fact that astonishes everyone is that though he uses his hands to take out the Pakoras from the frying pan full of boiling oil,but he has never burnt his hand.

(via Arbroath)

Kajima Corporation, a Japanese construction company, demolishes high-rise buildings from the bottom up. They install giant hydraulic jacks on the first floor, break up all the building material on that floor, then lower the jacks and repeat the process on the second floor (which is now resting at ground level.)

Informally, this method is called daruma-otoshi, the name of a Japanese game where you remove the lowest block on a stack by knocking it out with a small mallet.

According to Kajima, the daruma-otoshi demolition method — which is now being used to dismantle a 75 meter (246 ft) tall, 20-story building and a 65 meter (213 ft) tall, 17-story building — is safer and creates less noise and dust pollution because the work is kept close to the ground. In addition, this method cuts demolition time by 20% and makes it easier to separate and recycle the building materials.

Daruma-otoshi skyscraper demolition (Pink Tentacle)

Susan Rudat regularly scans her warm, textured, dimensional pen-and-ink sketches to her Flickr site. Link (via 'skine.art.)

Mary sez,

To raise money for the KGB Fantastic Fiction reading series, the hosts (Ellen Datlow and Matt Kressel) are holding a raffle. The prizes are unbelievable. Original art from Thomas Canty, Neil Gaiman’s keyboard (autographed), short story critiques by Ellen Datlow, Gardner Dozois… The list goes on and on. Seriously, one of the items is your own wormhole.

Between July 14th and July 28th, you can buy raffle tickets for only a dollar each. 1 buck. That’s nothing. And you can buy as many as you want.

If you aren't familiar with the KGB Fantastic Fiction reading series, Terry Bisson and Alice K. Turner started the series in the late 1990s, attempting to bring together mainstream writers with writers of speculative fiction in order to show, in Alice Turner’s words, “that at a certain level they were plowing exactly the same field.” In the spring of 2000 Ellen Datlow took over for Alice K. Turner and in August 2002 Gavin J. Grant, publisher of Small Beer Press, stepped in for Bisson when he moved to California. Matthew Kressel stepped in for Gavin in April of 2008.

The reading series features luminaries and up-and-comers in speculative fiction. Admission is always free.

Link (Thanks, Mary!)

Boing Boing tv's UK-based music correspondent Russell Porter takes a break at the recent Great Escape festival in Brighton to discuss the state of the British indie music scene with Toby from Transgressive Records, and Tom from the alternative music news and community website rockfeedback.com.

Transgressive was founded by two 20-year-old music fans who wanted to create a company that was "ethically sound and would release the best records in the world." Bands represented include The Young Knives (featured in previous BBtv episodes with Russell Porter, part 1, part 2), The Subways, Ladyfuzz, Jeremy Warmsley, and the Noisettes.

Snip from the Transgressive manifesto:

It would be a label not linked to a style or genre, but one which would be represented by a logo that would be simply a stamp of quality on each perfect disk.

After a couple of pints in a Holborn boozer (not too far away from where Andy Gill would later record the classic debut LP from the Young Knives – although neither of the Trans twins knew it at the time) they had planned the first three releases and strove to grow the label to the stage where they could fund and make records that otherwise would not be released, and build a community of like minded people who could realise that anything is possible…

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Link to Boing Boing tv post with discussion, downloadable video, and instructions on subscribing to the daily BBtv video podcast.

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Previous PORTER REPORT episodes on BBtv:

Russell Porter with Alice Russell, pt. 2

Russell Porter with Alice Russell

Russell Porter and Cadence Weapon, pt. 1.

Russell Porter and Cadence Weapon, pt. 2.

Russell Porter with George Pringle

Russell Porter with The Young Knives pt 1

Russell Porter with The Young Knives pt 2

Russell Porter with The Futureheads

Russell Porter with The Guillotines

Russell Porter with Peggy Sue and the Pirates

Russell Porter with Dockers MC

Russell Porter with Dan le Sac vs. Scroobius Pip

This BSD-daemon- taking-Tux-the- Linux-penguin -from-behind lighter was apparently offered for sale in a Barcelona minimart. One wonders if the manufacturer, distributor, or retailer are really that deeply invested in fights over free/open source licensing terms. Link (Thanks, Gerry!)

Kevin Kelly blogs about the Phaistos Disc, an archeological object some believe is the oldest historic example of moveable type -- the concept, of course, not the blogging platform. Snip:

The characters on the clay disc were stamped from a set of "seals" creating a text written in a spiral, although neither the text nor the language of the text has been deciphered.

(...) On my shelf I have a small bronze replica of this object simply because it is a beautiful mandala. The fired-clay Disc which it replicates was discovered in 1908. However this week a specialist in faked ancient art claims that the original object is ...well... faked ancient art. In other words that the Phaistos Disc is a hoax. In addition to this expert's technical reasons you can add two others: no other example of the writing has been found, and even the shape and format of the object is unique.

Is the "First Movable Type" a Hoax? [ The Technium ]

From the December, 1933 issue of Modern Mechanix, a "periscope for bridge kibbitzers":

AT A recent international bridge match the problem of letting people watch the play without interfering with the players was satisfactorily solved by the use of a horizontal periscope with one end suspended over the table and the other fitted through one wall of the room, so that the observers need neither be seen nor heard by the players.

From the observer’s standpoint this method of watching a bridge game is more satisfactory than standing by the table, as it permits a view of the cards held in all hands as well as a better look at those played.

Link