Bewarethewumpus

Author : Gray Blix

The first one I saw was at the auto repair. My neighbor, Al, recommended Hans, who fixed a problem even the dealer couldn’t find and did it in one afternoon for only fifty bucks.

“I hope the guy’s still in business,” Al said. “I told him he needs to charge more. Offered him a hundred, but he wouldn’t take it.”

“You’re a lousy bargainer,” I said. I’m a kidder, you know. “You’re supposed to offer less and then agree on something in between.”

“Nah, I was glad to find an honest mechanic who knows what he’s doing. Oh, I almost forgot about his dog. Wait’ll you see that cute little mutt. I asked him where to get one, but he said it just wandered into his shop.”

Apparently Hans was counting on volume to make up for his low prices, because his shop was full of cars. Only one mechanic darted from vehicle to vehicle. I flagged him down, explained the symptoms, and he said he could fix it in a couple of hours for fifty dollars.

Oh yeah, the dog. It was snuggled on his chest in one of those baby carriers. All I could see was its head, a ball of white fur with two black dots that looked up at him or towards me as we conversed.

Hans was busy, so I tagged along for a few minutes while he worked to ask some questions.

“Is that a German accent, Hans?”

“Ya, German.”

“Cute little mutt ya got there. What kind of dog is it?”

He said something that seemed to be all consonants, like “frbllxtmph.”

“That first part sounds a little like ‘fur ball.'”

“Ya, frbll.”

“Why do you keep it strapped to your chest?”

“We are, how do you say, inseparable.”

My wife arrived and tried to pet the dog, but Hans recoiled and the dog’s eyes retracted deep into its fur. As we left the shop, its eyeballs seemed to extend to follow us, almost as if they were on stalks.

When I returned to pick up the car, sure enough, it was fixed and he only charged me fifty dollars.

I didn’t haggle about the price, but I said, mischievously, “Merci, mon ami. You did say you’re from France, right?”

“Oui, France,” he said, handing me the keys.

Well that wasn’t the response I expected. The dog’s eyes narrowed as if it was glaring at me.

“And your little dog, did you say it’s a shit-zu?” I mispronounced it purposely.

“Oui, shit-zu.”

I couldn’t get a rise out of that guy.

A few days later, I saw Al taking out the garbage, and I noticed he had one of those baby carriers on his chest. “Is that one of your grandkids?” I shouted.

“Yeah, grandkids” he said.

I came closer and realized it was a frbll. “You can’t kid a kidder,” I said. You bought that from Hans, right?”

The thing glared at me with those beady little eyes and then looked up at Al.

“Yeah, Hans.”

But when I drove past the auto repair, I saw that Hans still had his frbll attached. In weeks to follow, they popped up on people all over town. Yesterday on the TV news from Des Moines the guy and gal both had frblls strapped to their chests.

Then the lightbulb went off in my head. I said to Marge, “Boy, whoever makes those baby carriers is raking in the dough, huh?”

Author : Jae Miles, Staff Writer

“Did you really think this was going to be scenic?” I cannot help it; disgust oozes around my words.

He swallows hard. Tearing his gaze from the spectacle, he fastens wide eyes on mine: “This is horrific. What law would allow this?”

Every time. Every. Damn. Time. I’d really like one person to come up here with a clear view.

“You fought tooth and nail to come here, and you have the gall to ask me that?”

Titan is Earth’s penal colony, and it was carefully designed. Prison shuttles arrive on the peak of a mountain in the Dilmun range. From there, a dropslide deposits the convicts into Titan One, the main ‘processing’ area.

I use the term loosely, because that is what it is labelled as on the designs. Since Titan has no inhabitants that are not criminals, I would guess that it may best be regarded as a nightmare cross between slave market and the gateway to hell.

Britain established HMP Titan 180 years ago, at the height of the Elite Regime. That may have fallen in fire and summary executions, but its legacy is this monument to human squeamishness. Every nation on Earth pays Titan Corp to use this place. The laughable element of that is the discrepancy between vast sums of money paid and miniscule expenditure required to maintain the transports and the crews: people like me.

Titan needs no budget. It is a frigid hell over a billion kilometres from Earth. The humanitarian campaigner I am escorting has just seen the plain on the Adiri side of Shangri-La. It’s littered with macabre sculptures: the dead. Some of them were corpses before they were deposited out here. Most got shot out of the waste chute as the losing side of an argument. No-one knows who – or what – rearranges them into these hideously fascinating patterns. Personally, I never want to meet the Iceghosts of Titan. I suspect they are non-too chuffed at having their home host the cesspit of Terra.

“I think I’ve seen enough. It is obvious that this place is beyond any rational intervention.”

Another do-gooder bottles it. I snort my low opinion and swing the scout shuttle around. While he organises his excuses, I look down at the field of dead and, once again, get the terrible feeling of being watched by something of unforgiving malice.

If that feeling is true, it’s not an Iceghost. It’s the spirits of the dead, levelling their hatred at me. Why? Because when Titan Corp came to me and said I could fly the convicts, or remain as one of them, I took my thirty pieces of silver and a lifetime exile from Earth. Apartment on Mars, girlfriend on the Titan Corp Penal Flight cleaning crew: ‘we the damned’ can only tolerate each other.

HMP Titan exists because the ruling powers of Earth have to be seen to be ‘fair’. No summary executions, just banishment. This place is far crueller than a death sentence, yet public sensibilities – and a craving to stay in power – force the establishments to keep this horror story going.

Author : David Botticello

“How was your vacation, Professor?” Huxley asked, glancing from the display in front of her.

“Oh, you know the Paradise Worlds, they always leave you feeling so relaxed…and yet unfulfilled at the same time,” responded Professor Tibbetz, nodding in acknowledgment to the other lab assistants. There were two of them—cosmology just didn’t attract the same crowds as physics, chemistry, biology, or actually any of the other disciplines. Even economics.

The professor sighed, nostalgic already. “So, how fares the monkey habitat? Have they done anything interesting in my absence?”

At this Huxley brightened—the monkeys were her pet project, so to speak. It was an effort to silence the critics really. See, theoretical cosmology was all well and good, but every so often the religious organizations would react to pure theory in a manner that was..less than encouraging. The last time, several years ago now, the critics had gone and done something rather rash. They had asked for proof. It was a new tactic, to be sure. And so, the cheerily dubbed ‘Infinite Monkey Project’ began. The hubbub all centered on a thought experiment: in theory, if infinite monkeys were given infinite typewriters and infinite time, they would eventually type out the entire works of the great poets, completely by accident.

Funding had been a nightmare, but eventually, a pocket universe was created and a world placed there. The trick was spinning up the time cycle so that it wouldn’t take forever.

And then a week before Professor Timmetz’ sabbatical, it was ready. An infinite number of monkeys was, sadly, beyond their meager budget—they went with ten thousand, figuring that the monkeys could reproduce and they could always warp in new typewriters.

The horrible little creatures had promptly smashed their typewriters, and by the time he was leaving on vacation they were busy sharpening the debris into weapons. He let the students handle it. It was an annoying project anyway.

“So, you remember how they broke all the typewriters we gave them?” asked Huxley.
Her professor nodded gravely.

“Well, we didn’t want to give them more; they were killing each other with the ones they already had. So we left them alone, hoping their violence was a temporary phenomenon. And when I came in on Wednesday, they had discovered fire, and were busy torching their forests.” Noting the professor’s unimpressed face, she continued on hurriedly, “but then yesterday, just when I was leaving, they started making their own typewriters. Not as good as ours, to be sure, but really, quite impressive. I was just going to look into it when you came in.”

“Ah, yes Huxley, good. Carry on.” Professor Timmetz had almost escaped into his office when the student spoke up again.

“Uh, professor? They…I think they did it. I’m getting text here. The script is a bit strange but, this is systematic, metered…it’s poetry.”

Professor Timmetz turned, surprise and alarm measuring simultaneously on his face, much to the amusement of the other students. His brow furrowed as a scanned the data hurriedly, moving inexorably toward the same conclusion the student had made. “Um…what…hmmm. Which monkey did this, exactly?”

“Right,” Huxley tapped a few parameters into the console. “Here it is, it looks like,” she paused, pondering at the pronunciation of a monkey language before deciding it didn’t really matter, “his name is Shakespeare.”

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“Do you solemnly swear or affirm to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?”

He left without remembering to take his money. I've done that before.

Would-be thief's plan to blow up ATM knocked him off his feet

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Please don’t be sad, it’s for the better. The life I would’ve lived isn’t worth living in… because I’m transgender. I could go into detail explaining why I feel that way, but this note is probably going to be lengthy enough as it is. To put it simply, I feel like a girl trapped in a boy’s body, and I’ve felt that way ever since I was 4. I never knew there was a word for that feeling, nor was it possible for a boy to become a girl, so I never told anyone and I just continued to do traditionally “boyish” things to try to fit in.

When I was 14, I learned what transgender meant and cried of happiness. After 10 years of confusion I finally understood who I was. I immediately told my mom, and she reacted extremely negatively, telling me that it was a phase, that I would never truly be a girl, that God doesn’t make mistakes, that I am wrong. If you are reading this, parents, please don’t tell this to your kids. Even if you are Christian or are against transgender people don’t ever say that to someone, especially your kid. That won’t do anything but make them hate them self. That’s exactly what it did to me.

My mom started taking me to a therapist, but would only take me to christian therapists, (who were all very biased) so I never actually got the therapy I needed to cure me of my depression. I only got more christians telling me that I was selfish and wrong and that I should look to God for help.

Watch as programmer Pekka Väänänen plays the 1996 first-person shooter game Quake on a Huawei V-422 oscilloscope.

Have you ever been so fed up by life that you just wanted to run amok in a retail store, ripping items off shelves and pulling down displays? No? Well, you’re apparently not the youngster in this video.

The above clip [via Reddit] (Note: NSFW language in the cameraman’s spirited play-by-play narration) features a young boy laying waste to the shelves of a dollar store.

He pulls items off the shelves, throws them to the floor, without any attempt to disguise his actions or any apparent fear of being caught.

When people, presumably store employees, catch on to what’s going on, they try to corner the kid, but he tries to escape through the stockroom (into which the vertical videographer follows). There’s no exit, but he is able to avoid capture.

At this point, he actually begins running through the store until he once again pauses to tear down a cardboard display.

Eventually he’s trapped in an aisle between two young men.

“Get back!” he warns the one man in front of him, while threatening to throw an object at him. “I’m not afraid to do it!”

What he didn’t notice was the bigger man walking up behind him, who was able to snatch the kid, saying “I ain’t either” as he uses the youngster’s shirt to take him out of the building and into the parking lot.

We’re trying to find out more about this video. If we get any additional info, we’ll let you know.

For some people, Dec. 31 is the night to send out the old year with a blast, celebrating and partying into the early hours of the new year. But for others, it’s a day marked on the calendar to lock oneself in the basement with enough sustenance and water (and access to a toilet and sink) while waiting the debauch out.

HBO’s John Oliver is one such person who believes that New Year’s Eve is just too much after a holiday season that is glutted with Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa.

“If you celebrate any of those holidays, you’re undoubtedly exhausted,” he says in the above video. “If you celebrate all of them, your last name probably has several hyphens in it.”

Oliver likens New Year’s to the death of a pet: “You know it’s going to happen but somehow you’re never really prepared for how truly awful it is.”

The annual event combines what he views as “three of the least-pleasant things known to mankind” –
• Forced interaction with strangers,
• Being drunk, cold and tired,
• Having to stare at Ryan Seacrest for five solid minutes, waiting for him to tell you what the time is.

Oliver then gives suggestions on how to get out of different types of NYE invites. Like the recently divorced pal who wants to get together for a night of “guy stuff.”

“‘Guy stuff,’ as we all know is code for strip clubs,” explains Oliver, “and you should absolutely not spend New Year’s Eve in a strip club, unless ebola goes airborne and the only cure is glitter.”

His suggestion is to say that your cousin Paul Smecker has suddenly become ill and that he needs some of your “bonezymes.”

“Bonezymes are a thing I just made up and Paul Smecker is the name of Willem Dafoe’s character in The Boondock Saints,” he explains. “If your friend knows that offhand, cut him out of your life forever.”

Then there is the dreaded invite to a party at your friend’s house.

“That’s a five-hour commitment, if you leave at 12:01,” says Oliver. “Do you really want to sit on your friend’s sofa and watch hummus turn brown all night?”

His answer: Tell your friends that you’re “doing a cleanse.”

“Technically, that’s not an excuse,” he admits, “but the beauty is there will be no follow-up questions because nobody wants to hear about your f**king cleanse.”

Oliver points out that the first line to “Auld Lang Syne” is “Should Old Acquaintance be forgot,” which he thinks is a great suggestion for how to spend the evening.

“There’s no better way of doing that than completely blowing off all your friends and family,” he concludes. “And if you do this right, you will be in bed on New Year’s Eve at 11:45 after watching all five Die Hard movies.”

We couldn’t disagree more. There is no reason on Earth to watch Die Hard #2 or #4.

There are a couple of humans there, too.
(via BBC)

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Yup. That's pretty much the entire experience, right there.

Ferhod might be using the Heavy from Team Fortress in this video, but they manage to nail the hilarious spirit of Skyrim anyway. Amazing.

Skyrim in a nutshell - SFM [Ferhod]

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Author : Lawrence Buentello

Five billion years ago, two members of the Fraca species stood staring at the stars from the balcony of their laboratory.

They had worked ceaselessly, along with thousands of other scientists and technicians, to formalize the seeding project many thought impossible. On the following morning all the orbiting engines would release their rocky projectiles into space toward precisely determined celestial targets. A thousand projectiles would travel untold light years toward a thousand other stars, and the planets orbiting these stars.

The two astronomers had been discussing the philosophical implications of such an endeavor.

“If even a few succeed,” the one called Jangus said, holding his long arms before him like a priest from their ancient past, “we will be the creator of these species.”

“A millions years,” the one called Zoris said, “or a billion years hence.”

“We will have created all these beings.”

“Yes.”

“I hope our people are still alive when these others are capable of contacting us.”

The Fraca were the single intelligent species on their planet; and they had never, in the course of their twenty thousand year-old civilization, found evidence of another intelligent species in the universe. Their science was highly refined, but the stars remained silent.

And so it became imperative to the Fraca that they not remain the solitary intelligent species in their galaxy, or perhaps even the universe. Once their biological sciences had refined the means by which to manipulate their genetic material masterfully, a great plan was drawn to deliver carefully coded amino acids and other chemical combinations to other planetary systems suspended in the corpus of comets.

If their extensive calculations were correct, the introduction of the coded sequences would initiate the creation of complex organic forms, leading to a long, slow evolution of increasingly complex organisms, culminating in a subtly programmed intelligence.

When the galaxy was filled with new species, and sentient beings, the Fraca would no longer be alone.

“Do you ever wonder,” Jangus asked his colleague, “if this was the manner in which our species was created?”

“Wouldn’t we have found others like ourselves by now?” Zoris replied.

“That’s a logical assumption. But perhaps the equations are not in our favor.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Perhaps,” Jangus said, nodding at the stars, “time is a barrier a sentient species simply cannot surpass.”

“Time is an illusion.”

“But entropy is not.”

“If you’re correct,” Zoris said, considering the stars, “then we’ll never know, will we?”

“I very much hope that we do.”

The next morning, the mission proceeded as planned. The launch was a magnificent success, and the Fraca waited a hundred thousand years to receive even a primitive communication from another species.

But the Fraca never did; they died alone, never knowing if they had brought light or darkness to the universe, and never realizing that they had brought both.

Neil deGrasse Tyson on Christmas

An entrance gate to Sony Pictures Entertainment at the Sony Pictures lot is pictured in Culver City, California April 14, 2013. Reuters/Fred Prouser

The New York Times' Nicole Perlroth writes about an alternate theory emerging around the Sony Pictures hack, which the FBI and the president himself have blamed on North Korea--and which much of the American public now perceives as an "act of war" by North Korea, as John McCain put it.

Computational linguists at Taia Global, a cybersecurity consultancy, performed a linguistic analysis of the hackers’ online messages — which were all written in imperfect English — and concluded that based on translation errors and phrasing, the attackers are more likely to be Russian speakers than Korean speakers.

Such linguistic analysis is hardly foolproof. But the practice, known as stylometry, has been used to contest the authors behind some of history’s most disputed documents, from Shakespearean sonnets to the Federalist Papers.

Shlomo Argamon, Taia’s Global’s chief scientist, said in an interview Wednesday that the research was not a quantitative, computer analysis. Mr. Argamon said he and a team of linguists had mined hackers’ messages for phrases that are not normally used in English and found 20 in total. Korean, Mandarin, Russian and German linguists then conducted literal word-for-word translations of those phrases in each language. Of the 20, 15 appeared to be literal Russian translations, nine were Korean and none matched Mandarin or German phrases.

Mr. Argamon’s team performed a second test of cases where hackers used incorrect English grammar. They asked the same linguists if five of those constructions were valid in their own language. Three of the constructions were consistent with Russian; only one was a valid Korean construction. “Korea is still a possibility, but it’s much less likely than Russia,” Mr. Argamon said of his findings.

New Study Adds to Skepticism Among Security Experts That North Korea Was Behind Sony Hack [nytimes.com]

Previously on Boing Boing:

• North Korea did not hack Sony, says security researcher
• Schneier on Sony Hack: It's not terrorism or war. We don't know North Korea did it.
• Obama on hack: "Sony made a mistake" in killing 'The Interview'
• Sony to Twitter and media outlets: stop spreading hacked/leaked email contents, or else

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Just before the Christmas holiday, a judge in Oakland, California ruled that Facebook does indeed have to face a class action lawsuit charging that the social media firm violated user privacy when it scanned the contents of users' messages for the purposes of targeting advertising to those users.

From the Los Angeles Times:

Judge [Phyllis] Hamilton denied Facebook’s bid to dismiss the lawsuit, which was filed by Facebook users Matthew Campbell and Michael Hurley in 2013. The suit alleges that until October 2012, when the social network says it stopped the practice, it scanned the content of private messages sent between users for links to websites, which were then used for delivering targeted advertising. The complaint alleges that this violated the federal and state privacy laws by “reading its users’ personal [and] private Facebook messages without their consent."

Facebook had argued that the practice was covered by an exception under the federal Electronics Communications Privacy Act, and that it disclosed to users that it “may use the information we received about you” for “data analysis." But Judge Hamilton said the company had “not offered a sufficient explanation of how the challenged practice falls within the ordinary court of business,” and that the disclosure was not specific enough to establish that users expressly consented to the scanning of the content of their messages.

Facebook will have to face lawsuit over scanning of users' messages [LA Times]

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