Last month, I wrote about a Japanese husband who confessed to his wife that he had a virtual girlfriend, a character from an addictive Nintendo DS game called Love Plus. Now, another man is planning to hold a wedding ceremony with his Love Plus girlfriend this coming Sunday. The man, who calls himself SAL9000, was so in love with Nene Anegasaki that he decided to marry her and take her on a honeymoon to Guam. Of course, this means that he literally just took his Nintendo DS to Guam... while there, he took photos, livecast their adventures on popular video-sharing site Nico Nico Douga, and documented their adventures using the augmented reality iPhone app Sekai Camera. In any case, the guy plans on having a public reception in Tokyo this Sunday. It will be livecast on Nico Nico Douga, but in case you miss it, we'll be bringing you an update early next week. Stay tuned!

via IT Media News (Japanese)

Cake Wrecks has a gallery of horrendous cakes with a Big Bird theme. To be fair, it seems really difficult to decorate a cake to look like Big Bird, what with that long beak of his.

Big Bird cakes disasters

In Japan, we eat soy all the time. For breakfast we have rice with natto and miso soup with tofu; for dinner we pop edamame into our mouths in between chopsticks-full of vegetables sauteed in soy sauce. I always assumed it was good for you, until I came to California and my health-conscious American friend told me that soy was actually really bad for you. So which is it?

Here's what we know about soy: unprocessed, it's a great source of digestible protein and has tons of vitamin B, calcium, and folate — all things that are good for you. It also contains isoflavones, and here's where things get tricky. Some studies prove that isoflavones are beneficial, while others have shown that it promotes breast and prostate cancer. Soy has also been called out as an agent of brain cell aging and thyroid dysfunction, too.

In her recent book The Jungle Effect, San Francisco-based physician Daphne Miller — who studied low cancer rates in Okinawa extensively — writes:

While Okinawans take in over 80 percent of their soy in a relatively unprocessed form as tofu, edamame, soy flour, soy milk, or miso, people in the United States eat a similiar percentage of their soy in a processed form. Our soy foods are heated, mashed, and denatured to create a vast array of substances ranging from Tofurky to fillers for tuna fish to ice-cream sandwiches... while whole foods offer valuable protection, concentrated or denatured derivatives of these foods are having the opposite effect.

The bottom line, at least for now, seems to be that good soy prevent cancer and bad soy might promote cancer. Good soy = tofu, soy sauce, miso, natto, edamame. Bad soy = soy protein powder, energy bars made with soy, fake hot dogs, tofurky.

A lot of Western people think natto — fermented soy bean — is gross because of it's gooey texture and stinky smell, but it's one of my favorite things to eat for breakfast. It's filled with protein and great for a post-workout snack, too. If you're still iffy about it, why not combine the foreign with the familiar and cook some natto spaghetti? The slippery texture of the pasta cuts the gooeyness a little, and in my opinion this is a gentle way to ease natto into your culinary life.

Every installment of Taste Test will explore recipes, the science, and some history behind a specific food item.

Images via Jasja Dekker's Flickr and Gaku's Flickr

Make blog doesn't know where these origami money-heads-in-hats come from, but they want to. So do I. This looks like the best currency mod I've seen in ages.

Money hats

The Chicago Sun-Times is offering a suggestion that could vastly improve your Thanksgiving meal, or turn this year's family gathering into a disaster of Michael Bay proportions. Depending on your point of view. Behold, the recipe for slider stuffing, which calls for "18 White Castle hamburgers (no pickles), chopped into 1-inch pieces," along with more usual suspects like button mushrooms, chicken stock, butter, onions, celery and sage.

Nutrition facts per serving: 162 calories, 10 g fat, 5 g saturated fat, 22 mg cholesterol, 13 g carbohydrates, 6 g protein, 259 mg sodium, 1 g fiber

Oddly, the recipe does not seem to clarify what the size of a serving is, just that the recipe makes 12 of them. Whatever they may be.

Article about the couple who came up with this wonder/abomination in Chicago Sun-Times

Image courtesy Flickr user Marshall Astor - Food Pornographer, Via CC

Autumn sez, "DJs at local underground parties have been losing their laptops to police raids - even when they're not DJing. They're being told that they'll lose their laptops - and often their livelihood - for an indefinite period of time, with no information on when or how to get their property back. The EFF has taken on the defense of several local DJs, but this is having a huge effect already on the local dance scene."

Over the past six months, music fans who have been spinning records -- or even just attending friends' events -- claim their laptops, soundboards, and mixers have been taken by the cops in police raids. The busted gatherings include an illegal dance party, an artist fundraiser, and a private Halloween bash. While it's unclear whether the lack of official permits was enough reason to close down all these parties, the bigger question is why the police are seizing and holding private property that DJs and attendees use as valuable tools for making their art and living.

Mike Holmes, aka DJ White Mike, was a recent victim of an SFPD sweep. On Halloween night, he DJed at the Beauty Bar and then hit a friend's costume party at a SOMA loft. He stored his bag, which held his laptop, in the DJ booth to prevent it from getting swiped. Ten minutes later, around 2:30 a.m., he says the police arrived and announced that they were taking all the laptops in the warehouse space. "I tried to explain that I wasn't even playing at the party," he says. Nonetheless, his computer was seized by a cop who identified himself as part of a "task force," who told him that he shouldn't expect to get his laptop back "for at least three months." Other DJs at the party claim to have received similar warnings -- as well as threats of jail time, if they were seen DJing at warehouses again -- from officers who said they were part of a task force.(The SFPD claims it does not have a specific task force looking at underground parties, but it does routine checks in the SOMA area, sometimes with other agencies such as the California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control, for permit and other violations.)

S.F. cops may have gone too far in seizing DJ gear at underground parties

Stop the War on Fun

(Thanks, Autumn!)

A new video game called Mass: We Pray brings new family fun to those who can't wait until Sunday to go to church. It has a cross-shaped motion-sensing controller reminiscent of a Wiimote, and you can collect "grace points" in order to unlock holy mysteries. The release date is slated for Spring 2010, but it's available for pre-order now.

Mass: We Pray main page via The Raw Feed

I'm delighted to introduce a new occasional guest blogger on Boing Boing, Dr. Jacques Vallee, who will contribute posts every so often. In the world of computer science, Jacques is best known for his pioneering database research in the 1960s at Stanford Research Institute and then, during the next decade, for leading the development of the the world's first network-based computer conferencing system for the ARPANET. He launched that project, called PLANET, in 1972 at Institute for the Future (IFTF), the non-profit thinktank where I'm a researcher. At IFTF, Jacques and his colleagues studied the social impact of online communication and explored its applications in industry. In 1976, Jacques founded InfoMedia, the first computer conferencing and groupware company. I met Jacques in person several years ago when he popped into IFTF for a visit. It was quite exciting for me as I was quite familiar with his work, albeit in a very, very different context.

For nearly fifty years, Jacques has studied the history and culture of the UFO phenomena and written a slew of fantastic books on the subject, always calling for a scientific investigation of reports rather than an approach rooted in belief. Among ufologists, Jacques is very much a "heretic among heretics" for opposing the typical opinion that UFOs are nuts-and-bolts spaceships piloted by extraterrestrials. Jacques once said, "I'll be disappointed if (UFOs) turn out to be only spacecraft from outer space." Whenever I see the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind, I get a kick out of François Truffaut's character Claude Lacombe insisting that the UFO phenomenon "is an event sociologique!" That is exactly something Jacques would say, and indeed Steven Spielberg based the character on him. My favorites of Jacques' books are Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers, Messengers of Deception, and The Invisible College, where he considers whether we're living inside an information-based control system, a mind-spinning idea that's now embraced by many physicists.

Recently, Jacques published the second volume of his personal journals, titled Forbidden Science, and is now completing a new book about ancient UFO sightings. He also works as a partner in a venture capital firm investing in emerging technologies with potential space applications. Jacques's intellectual rigor around anomalous phenomena and weird science has inspired me since I was a teenager. I'm thrilled to have his voice on Boing Boing.

Lucy Knisley's comic "Downloading Optimism: Pessimism Detected" is a thoughtful response to a panel where great indie comix creators (Linda Barry, Jules Feiffer, Matt Groening, Chris Ware) decried online comics and online reading. Click through for the whole thing.

Downloading Optimism

(Thanks, Ape Lad!)

"Bhaiya," a Hindi word meaning "big brother," has remarkable nuance, depending on how it is spoken and to whom. Dave Prager catalogs some of these inflections in a recent article on his life-in-India blog, "Our Delhi Struggle."

Jenny tasted the power of bhaiya while watching friends negotiate with autos, seeing housewives beat down stubborn vegetable wallas, observing clever coworkers convincing recalcitrant art directors to meet impossible deadlines. A woman takes a simple bhaiya--"buy-yaa", to transliterate--and bends the word around the fulcrum of the "y", modulating the final syllable to do her dastardly bidding.

Making that final syllable short and sharp expresses contempt ("Who do you think I am to quote me such a price?").

Adding a long, upward-fluctuating suffix feigns shock ("You would take such advantage of the sweet, innocent girl standing so humbly before you?").

And turning that final syllable into an angry cadenza up and down three different octaves--think John Coltrane at the end of Giant Steps, an animal howl, the fire in her belly that would have singed the quivering beedi right out of the hapless auto driver's mouth if she hadn't stuck a bhaiya in front of it--chastens even the most determined male foe...

on Hindi: the power of "bhaiya" (Thanks, Dave!)

Here's a mid-1980s CBC News scare-story about Dungeons and Dragons driving kids to suicide featuring (at 2:49 onwards) me and my classmates (the video is dated 1985, but I'm pretty sure this couldn't have been later than my graduation from Junior High in 1984). Ignoring the crazy-ass fearmongering, it's incredibly nostalgic to see all those kids I grew up with, playing with their minis and rolling their dice.

Dungeons & Dragons D&D Canadian Doc 1985 Part #2 (Thanks, Tim!)

It is old news that Facebook has a language option for Pirate English. But the mundane and bemusing juxtapositions it creates in the ad column never grow old. [Thanks, Heather!]

10 Mpixel di finissimo cioccolato by Latente.

Hey, Bostonites! I'll see you tonight at the Harvard Bookstore (1256 Mass Ave) at 7PM for the US launch of my new novel, Makers! (New Yorkers, and Philadelphians -- see you later this week!)

US/Canada tour

Jon Skovron's debut novel, the YA book Struts & Frets, is a dynamite, nuanced story about fannish love, musical obsession, first romance and true friendship. It follows the adventures of Sammy Bojar, a small-town, midwestern high-school senior who's life revolves around his band, a trainwreck of ego and conflict called "Tragedy of Wisdom." The band means everything to Sammy because music means everything to him. He frames his whole world with indie pop, seeking out authenticity with a driven, blinding passion.

Sammy's at the turning point in his life. His best male friend is coming out, his best female friend is in love with him (and it turns out it's mutual, though he didn't know it). The frontman for his band is a roiling, angry bully who is ever on the verge of physical violence. His beloved grandfather, a minor jazz legend, is sliding into incapacity as age and a hard life catch up with him.

The plot-points are all pretty standard YA set-pieces, but there's never a stale (or dull) moment in Struts & Frets. That's thanks to the incredible nuance and heart that Skovron brings to the interpersonal relationships, using these familiar emotional scenes as pivots for a deft emotional acrobatic act that is as moving as it is engrossing.

I was never a (good) musician, but I've always been passionate about music. I remember what it was like to be in the band, to be wrapped up in all the issues around creativity, friendship and identity; to seek out answers to life's big questions in music, to worry at the unanswerable questions of commercialism, success and popularity. Struts & Frets will feel instantly authentic to anyone who's ever felt the pride and shame of being an outsider.

Struts & Frets

You can find a lot of crap on YouTube, but you know what? You can find gems like this, too. I don't know much about the origin of this video, but it's one in a series of three ten-minute chunks on YouTube -- rare color footage of Tibetan tantric masters meditating, in retreat. Looks a few decades old. Start at 0:39 and just zone out. According to the notes from the uploader, the last 3 faces you'll see in the video are:

1) His Holiness Dudjom Rinpoche, head of the Nyingma lineage in India
2) Venerable Kalu Rinpoche, great realized master in the Kagyu lineage.
3) His Holiness, the 16th Karmapa Lama (...) head of the Karma Kagyu lineage.

Video: Part 1. Part 2. Part 3.

The Times Labs blog takes a hard look at the data on music sales and live performances and concludes that while the labels' profits might be falling, artists are taking in more money, thanks to the booming growth of live shows. The Times says that they'd like more granular data about who's making all the money from concerts -- is there a category of act that's a real winner here? -- but the trend seems clear. The 21st century music scene is the best world ever for some musicians and music-industry businesses, and the worst for others. Which raises the question: is it really copyright law's job to make sure that last years winners keep on winning? Or is it enough to ensure that there will always be winners?

Why live revenues have grown so stridently is beyond the scope of this article, but our data - compiled from a PRS for Music report and the BPI - make two things clear: one, that the growth in live revenue shows no signs of slowing and two, that live is by far and away the most lucrative section of industry revenue for artists themselves, because they retain such a big percentage of the money from ticket sales.

(It's often claimed that live revenues are only/mostly benefitting so-called 'heritage acts'. Unfortunately, the data doesn't shed any light on this because live revenues are not broken down by type of act, gig size or ticket price.)..

It's interesting too that, overall, industry revenues have grown in the period - though admittedly not by much - which arguably adds strength to the notion that, when the BPI releases its annual report claiming how much 'the music industry' has suffered from the growth in illegal file-sharing, what it perhaps should be saying is how much the record labels have suffered.

The graph the record industry doesn't want you to see (via We Make Money Not Art)

[PHOTO: "Jessie," a CC-licensed image by LeTiger.]

A few weeks ago, I blogged a funny video created by a Canadian high-school student titled "Hiding Your Sexual Orientation From Your Parents 101." One of the many people who commented on that post was an anonymous commenter who wrote:

Ok, my parents found out i was gay by myspace (which i regret for putting my sexual orientation) and my parents will never accept cause my parents are really realigous for our christianity. They are so realigous, that i'm now homeschooled and going to a private school. Also i have no internet unless for emergencies, no friends houses, no phone, no boy friends til i'm 18. The only times i can get out is to christian youth groups so i have no life for the next 5 years ( cause i'm 13). Oh and my parents think all the wrong things in the world about gays, they even use the gay f word. I need help and i'm typing this from my PS3 cause they don't know it has internet. HELP!!! =O

It's hard for jaded internet people like me to know when someone's pulling your leg online, but I'll take this one at face value. Many other teens read Boing Boing, and perhaps one of them is in a similar predicament. So, Dear Anonymous:

Boy, that sucks. I don't have a way of contacting you privately, so I'll say it to the world. You are fine just as you are. There is nothing wrong with being gay, and everything right with being true to yourself, no matter who tries to tell you otherwise. But being gay and a teen is very hard when your family isn't cool with it. My friend Maggie suggests that you might want to check out these helplines and Web resources, so you can talk to someone who can help you sort stuff out:

♦ amplifyyourvoice.org (a teen LGBTQ site)
♦ billwilsoncenter.org (Web chat based teen counseling service)
♦ glnh.org (National LGBTQ help center, with phone counseling lines manned by other LGBTQ people. They've got a special youth line, online peer support and access to local services and organizations.)

If you are reading this post, Anonymous, I bet some other people will be writing suggestions for other good resources in the comments. Check them out. Good luck. There are many of us in the world who welcome you just as you are. Don't believe anyone who tells you that who you are is anything less than beautiful.

Keep your head held high, little happy mutant.

Prompted by a new GQ article about Ayn Rand (The Bitch is Back with this great illo by John Ritter), our friend Richard Metzger wrote about his relationship with her writing and ideas.

Via mail order I collected single issues of The Objectivist and The Ayn Rand Letter until I had them all and I kept them in bound cases like holy relics. This is what can happen when bright kids read Ayn Rand, they get obsessed, but hopefully, like me, they will grow out of it. Discovering Lenny Bruce, Marx, Marcuse, Crowley, Burroughs and the Firesign Theatre deprogrammed my teenage ass but good and by that time I was 14 and I soon stopped caring about Ayn Rand altogether.

...

It’s Rand’s dialogue that seals her reputation as an author you just can’t take seriously. To be fair, she was writing in her second language, but the problem with her books is that no one actually speaks to one another, they just make speeches at each other. Hectoring, long-winded speeches. It’s fine to read stuff like that as a teenager, but when I crack open one of her books today, I shake my head in disbelief at how bombastic and horrible her writing is.

Ayn Rand Assholes

The title is a mouthful: Hocus Pocus Junior The anatomy of legerdemain. Or, The art of iugling set forth in his proper colours, fully, plainly, and exactly; so that an ignorant person may thereby learn the full perfection of the same, after a little practise.

The publication date is 1634. Although it's the earliest book devoted to magic as a performing art, it apparently takes its text almost exactly from a 1584 book called The Discoverie of Witchcraft. The Witchcraft book was meant to be a debunking text, proving to people that witches didn't exist and, thus, that we shouldn't go about condemning other people for witchcraft. Hocus Pocus Junior took the chapters on sleight of hand and slightly (heh) reworked them as an instructional manual.

Comparing Hocus Pocus Junior and the Discoverie of Witchcraft at Early Modern Whale.
Two Posts on the History of Hocus Pocus Junior from Bookride.com

Thanks to Holly Tucker!

2012 angst got you down? Hankering for another harmonic convergence? Former BB guestblogger Mark Dery has got just the medicine for you. Over at h+ Magazine, he shreds the 2012 "carnival of bunkum" spread by folks who are banking (literally) on people believing that some sort of spiritual singularity is less than two years away. Wanna see Xeni riled up? Read the piece. Special bonus: quotes from BB pal Erik Davis. From Mark Dery's writing in h+:

Much of the 2012 shtick is a light-fingered (if leaden-humored) rip-off of the late rave-culture philosopher Terence McKenna's stand-up routine, without McKenna's prodigious erudition, effortless eloquence, or arch wit, and Pinchbeck is no exception. For Quetzalcoatl's sake, if you're going to start a religion, at least invent your own cosmology.

...The worst of the 2012 bandwagon, epitomized by (Daniel) Pinchbeck's lectures and writings, is the blithe cultural arrogance and staggering anthropological ignorance evident in the movement's appropriation of Mayan beliefs and history. In a discussion hosted by Pinchbeck's online magazine Reality Sandwich, the cultural theorist Erik Davis puts his finger on the minstrelsy implicit in the ventriloquization, by white, first-world New Agers, of the Maya. "[I]t seems to me that there is very little concrete sense of what 'the Mayans' (whoever that grand abstraction represents) thought about what would happen in the human world on 2012," he writes. "To my mind it is kinda disrespectful to the Mayans to force them into our own narrative."

The technoculture journalist Xeni Jardin sharpens the point of debate. While Jardin is no expert on, or spokesperson for, the Mayan people, she is well-positioned to reveal the 2012 phenomenon for the carnival of bunkum it is. Her adoptive father is "of indigenous descent," she told me in an e-mail interview, and working with his nonprofit in Guatemala, "doing cultural and philanthropic work" for the country's indigenous peoples, has brought Jardin into close contact with the Maya. "We work to help these communities sustain their culture and social integrity," she says, providing microloans and scholarships, working to bring clean drinking water and healthcare to the villages. When I asked her what she thought of Pinchbeck's invocation of Mayan beliefs, and of the 2012-ers' use of the Maya in general, she was blunt. "What makes me angriest about Pinchbeck's bogus, profiteering bullshit isn't so much him, but the fact that that many people are racist enough to believe any asshole white guy who declares himself an expert in Mayan culture. Did it ever occur to anyone to ask practicing Maya priests out in the villages?"

2012: Carnival of Bunkum

Diesel Sweeties' R. Stevens and Ariana Osborne are offering this wordy Venn diagram shirt showing the bittersweet territory between happiness and sadness for $18-19, and taking pre-orders now.

(Happy()Sad) Diagram Shirt (via Warren Ellis)

Theme Park Brochures, a superb gallery of theme-park maps from the 30s onwards -- I especially love the hand-drawn ones.

Theme Park Brochures (via MeFi)

Ladies and Gentlemen, the 1987 Crystal light National Aerobic Championship. (Thanks, Bloggy!)

Guestblogger Arthur Goldwag is the author of "Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies: The Straight Scoop on Freemasons, The Illuminati, Skull and Bones, Black Helicopters, The New World Order, and many, many more" and other books.

No, not really. But when I was a freshman in college in 1975, the Poli Sci 101 course that I took was Straussian and neo-conservative to its core. Kenyon College's political science department was (and still is--or at least it was three years ago, as this story in the far right wing journal Human Events confirms) an "oasis" of Straussian and conservative theory. The first text we read, as I recall, was Socrates "Apology." Most of us assumed that Socrates' persecutors were the bad guys, that freedom of thought was strictly good and the suppression of free speech categorically bad. But using Socrates' own mode of questioning, our teachers challenged our blandly liberal presuppositions. Precisely what's good about Democracy? Why shouldn't the state protect itself? Are we sure we understand what the Founders of our own country really meant when they wrote about "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?"

A reader writes, "Passengers riding Walt Disney World's updated Space Mountain attraction will be able to play video games as they wait in line. Each game lasts about 90 seconds with a 90-second interval and the games can accommodate 86 players at one time."

Space Mountain is a notorious slow loader (all coasters are, since they can't do that lovely continuous belt thing that characterizes, say, the Haunted Mansion; nor do they support giant boats like Pirates of the Caribbean). Anything to make the queue less dull is great news!

Walt Disney World's Classic Space Mountain Attraction to Reopen with a Few Surprises

Guestblogger Arthur Goldwag is the author of "Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies: The Straight Scoop on Freemasons, The Illuminati, Skull and Bones, Black Helicopters, The New World Order, and many, many more" and other books.

Pesco requested that I write about some of the books that inspired me as I was writing CULTS, CONSPIRACIES AND SECRET SOCIETIES. I'll need to ask for your indulgence, because I'm going to flash back to my boyhood. When I was in the sixth grade, I came across a mass market paperback called IMPOSSIBLE: YET IT HAPPENED, which, I just learned from the magic of the Internet, was written by R. Dewitt Miller in 1947. It was a prime exemplar of what is sometimes called Forteana, after Charles Fort (1874-1932), a failed novelist, close friend of Theodore Dreiser, and avid collector of news clippings about the eerie and the unexplained--he also gave his name to the magazine The Fortean Times (its cover story this month is about Masonic symbols in Washington, DC). Miller's yarns about spontaneous human combustion, ghosts, premonitory dreams, ESP, apparitions of air-born crucifixes in the smoke-filled skies over World War I battlefields, a fortyeight hour-long midnight that enveloped Colonial New England and I don't know what else, scared the living daylights out of me--but at the same time, I couldn't stop reading it, especially at night, by flashlight. It was an addiction and I eventually had the wisdom to go cold turkey, by giving the book away.

Channel 4's documentary-style drama, The Execution of Gary Glitter, imagines an alternative Britain that reintroduces the death penalty. Celebrity sex offender Paul Gadd—AKA glam rock star Gary Glitter—is re-tried for his crimes and hanged. It's a story about the moral quandary of capital punishment, generously garnished with the British media's obsession with pedophilia.

This Shapeways tutorial on "Prepping Blender Files for 3D Printing" is not only useful for 3D printers, it is a treasure-trove of 3D printing jargon.

If you have a model created from several objects or meshes, first make sure that each individual mesh is manifold (water-tight). You can tell this by going into edit mode, pressing A (once if any vertices are selected or twice otherwise) to select none, then hit ctrl-alt-shift-M (on a Mac it's ctrl-opt-shift-M).

Any vertices that get selected when you press that key combination are non-manifold vertices that have to be fixed. Often, fixing these is just a matter of creating new faces (F key) out of sets of 3 or 4 vertices. Sometimes these are stray vertices that are unattached to anything, or are attached to just one vertex by an edge. These can usually be deleted, unless they are intentional (such as those vertices uses to affect the shape while using a subsurf modifier), in which case you want to wait until after you've applied your modifier to delete them. Another possibility are vertices that are part of more than one overlapping faces...

Open the copy of the file, and select each object, one at a time. In object mode, apply all modifiers, then switch to Edit mode, hit A once or twice to select all vertices, then press ctrl-T to triangulate all faces. I don't know why, but Blender does a much better job with Boolean operations if the meshes are triangulated.

Prepping Blender Files for 3D Printing (via Beyond the Beyond)

We'll never know what was originally intended for this Techdirt tee, but we can see the aftermath of the takedown notice it attracted!

DMCA Takedown T-shirt (Thanks, Dennis!)

My latest Locus column, "Teen Sex," explains why I think young adult literature should have sex -- and other "mature" topics -- in it.

There's really only one question: "Why have your characters done something that is likely to upset their parents, and why don't you punish them for doing this?"

Now, the answer.

First, because teenagers have sex and drink beer, and most of the time the worst thing that results from this is a few days of social awkwardness and a hangover, respectively. When I was a teenager, I drank sometimes. I had sex sometimes. I disobeyed authority figures sometimes.

Mostly, it was OK. Sometimes it was bad. Sometimes it was wonderful. Once or twice, it was terrible. And it was thus for everyone I knew. Teenagers take risks, even stupid risks, at times. But the chance on any given night that sneaking a beer will destroy your life is damned slim. Art isn't exactly like life, and science fiction asks the reader to accept the impossible, but unless your book is about a universe in which disapproving parents have cooked the physics so that every act of disobedience leads swiftly to destruction, it won't be very credible. The pathos that parents would like to see here become bathos: mawkish and trivial, heavy-handed, and preachy.

Cory Doctorow: Teen Sex

It's been a good 20 years since I had a real hankering to wear Doc Marten's around, but I have to say I'm tempted by these skeleton boots whose bones glow in the freaking dark!

1914 BONES 14 EYE BOOT BLACK LAMPER (via Street Anatomy)

The following is an update to this previous post. So here's another video gem from Supreme Master TV, uploaded and blogged by Robert Popper.

Why doesn't every television news network run stuff like what's in this clip? Say what you will about "God's Direct Contact," at least her broadcast devotees say thank you to journalists and photographers for doing all we do for "humans and animals," and "especially while on duty." I'd like to hope they think that what we do here at Boing Boing "uplifts the atmosphere of the world."

A number of Boing Boing readers responded to my earlier post with personal stories of (apparently quite tasty) meals eaten at the vegan restaurant chain owned by personality cult leader Supreme Master Ching Hai. But BB reader HiTek LoLife takes the tofu cake, with a personal anecdote re-blogged in full after the jump.

Tin House, a literary magazine, asked me to introduce the current science fiction issue with an overview of the field. I wrote them an essay called "Radical Presentism," about the way that science fiction reflects the present more than the future.

Mary Shelley wasn't worried about reanimated corpses stalking Europe, but by casting a technological innovation in the starring role of Frankenstein, she was able to tap into present-day fears about technology overpowering its masters and the hubris of the inventor. Orwell didn't worry about a future dominated by the view-screens from 1984, he worried about a present in which technology was changing the balance of power, creating opportunities for the state to enforce its power over individuals at ever-more-granular levels.

Now, it's true that some writers will tell you they're extrapolating a future based on rigor and science, but they're just wrong. Karel Čapek coined the word robotto talk about the automation and dehumanization of the workplace. Asimov's robots were not supposed to be metaphors, but they sure acted like them, revealing the great writer's belief in a world where careful regulation could create positive outcomes for society. (How else to explain his idea that all robots would comply with the "three laws" for thousands of years? Or, in the Foundation series, the existence of a secret society that knows exactly how to exert its leverage to steer the course of human civilization for millennia?)

For some years now, science fiction has been in the grips of a conceit called the "Singularity"--the moment at which human and machine intelligence merge, creating a break with history beyond which the future cannot be predicted, because the post-humans who live there will be utterly unrecognizable to us in their emotions and motivations. Read one way, it's a sober prediction of the curve of history spiking infinity-ward in the near future (and many futurists will solemnly assure you that this is the case); read another way, it's just the anxiety of a generation of winners in the technology wars, now confronted by a new generation whose fluidity with technology is so awe-inspiring that it appears we have been out-evolved by our own progeny.

CORY DOCTOROW: RADICAL PRESENTISM

Robert Popper has posted an appreciation of Supreme Master Television, a cult-backed satellite television network I've seen advertised in airports around the world, but never before bothered to google. There's a lot to love in this clip. Robert: I'd like to know when we can say "hebbo!" to a Tarvuist Faith television channel.

Supreme Master TV has a website, the cult behind it operates a chain of vegan restaurants, and they have offices in Southern California. Their leader is one Supreme Master Ching Hai, and Rick Ross says it's more like ka-ching. That's her, at left (click for large size), and here's a Wikipedia article. She sells hair extensions and stuff. She has opinions on global warming. She sings spiritual lounge music. She designs "celestial clothes and sleeping mattresses for dogs," which are spiritually themed costumes designed to bring your "blessed canine friend" closer to enlightenment. If you do one thing today, please: watch the dog video.

Shanghai will host the World Expo next year, and city officials are preparing for the influx of foreigners with a campaign to ban citizens from wearing their pajamas out in the streets. An article in the Chengdu Business Daily expresses outrage over the campaign as a civil rights abuse. Snip:

Many Shanghai residents are used to loitering around the streets in their pajamas. But now the municipal government is making every effort to stop them from doing so, because it would be a "loss of face" for city authorities if a foreigner sees people walking the streets in pajamas during the 2010 World Expo. (...)

As a modern international metropolis, Shanghai has been playing host to foreigners for decades. So why have pajamas become embarrassing only now? And will it be okay for people to walk the streets in pajamas after the World Expo? Why should we change our habits and customs to suit foreigners' taste when we travel abroad as well as when we play host to them? Do we suffer from a sense of inferiority?

What's wrong with a person in pajamas? [via Rebecca MacKinnon]

A quick Google of "shanghai" + "pajamas" reveals many articles in Western media over the past decade about Shanghai's pajama-wearing citizenry, and their government's fruitless attempts to mandate their fashion choices. Apparently, walking around in the street in your jammies is a familiar part of local culture in old neighborhoods there, in part because the realms of public and private space are so blurred in daily life.

Rudy Rucker sez, "'Unfurling' is a graphic novel drawn on a scroll of paper by Isabel Rucker, going on display from November 5-27, at the SOMArts gallery in San Francisco. 'Unfurling' stretches over 400 feet long, is a foot high, and is drawn in black ink pen with watery washes. The comic panels vary in length (up to ten feet long) to mirror pauses, vast scenery, or thought patterns. The seven-year project began in 2002, when Isabel decided to free herself from the size of regular pieces of paper, canvas or sketchpad. The opening party for the 'Unfurling' show " is Thursday, November 5, 2009, 6 p.m.-11 p.m."

"Unfurling" by Isabel Rucker (Thanks, Rudy!)

John Young says:

Randy Schmidt and I just released our sixth Nerd Merit Badge: FULL STACK WEB DEVELOPER.

This is the merit badge for folks that can turn a pile of loose electrons into a fully operating, styled website.

Just like that mythical date in the eighteenth century when there was too much scientific knowledge for one person to learn in a lifetime, we're approaching the event horizon of the full-stack web developer.  But until then, this badge is for those folks that aren't scared of "sudo" AND know how to make rounded corners in CSS!

Latest Nerd Merit Badge: "Full Stack Web Developer"

The man widely considered to be the father of modern anthropological study has passed away at 100 years of age. NYT, Bloomberg, Wikipedia, AFP.

"Among the more striking conclusions of his work was the idea that there is no fundamental difference between the belief systems and myths of so-called 'primitive' races and those of modern western societies."