Author: Robert

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“Black lives matter,” said Mark Zuckerberg today.

“We’re building a voter hub to double down on our previous get-out-the-vote efforts,” wrote the Facebook founder and CEO in a lengthy blog post on Friday after a week of protests throughout the U.S.

“In 2016, we ran one of the largest get out the vote efforts in history. I expect us to do even better in 2020.”

Huge if true.

Skeptical, based on all we know.

From the Facebook blog post:

Mark Zuckerberg

I just shared the following note with our employees, and I want to share it with all of you as well.

—

As we continue to process this difficult moment, I want to acknowledge the real pain expressed by members of our community. I also want to acknowledge that the decision I made last week has left many of you angry, disappointed and hurt. So I am especially grateful that, despite your heartfelt disagreement, you remain focused on taking positive steps to move forward. That can’t be easy, so I just want to say I hear you and I’m grateful.

I believe our platforms can play a positive role in helping to heal the divisions in our society, and I’m committed to making sure our work pulls in this direction. To all of you who have already worked tirelessly on ideas to improve, I thank you. You’re making a difference, and together we’ll make a difference. And while we will continue to stand for giving everyone a voice and erring on the side of free expression in these difficult decisions — even when it’s speech we strongly and viscerally disagree with — I’m committed to making sure we also fight for voter engagement and racial justice too.

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We live in a disposable era. If you can’t fix a broken item with a wrap of duct tape, there’s a very strong likelihood that its next destination is the trashcan. However, that probably leads to a trigger-finger death sentence for many household items that could be saved with just a bit more ingenuity. 

Before you toss broken sunglasses, ceramics, splintered wood, or anything that’s taken some minor damage, the sneaky resourceful Sugru Moldable Glue might just be able to bring it back from the dead.

Sugru comes out of the package soft and malleable like Play-Doh, but after a little molding, it can be shaped to stick permanently to all kinds of materials, including ceramics, glass, metal, wood, rubber, and most plastics and fabrics. With its versatility, Sugru can be pressed into service to fix all kinds of broken, torn, or frayed items or used in a host of creative DIY projects. 

Sugru is freezer-proof, heatproof, dishwasher-proof, weatherproof, waterproof, UV-resistant, and electrically insulating, so its applications are as vast as your imagination.

Once you expose it to air, you’ve got 30 minutes to mold the Sugru into its desired shape. Just wrap it or contour it the way you want, let it set for 24 hours, then it’s ready to go. Sugru doesn’t dry like a rock, retaining some flexibility while preserving the bond to the item, so it won’t crack or get brittle.

You can use this high-tech putty to fix a refrigerator shelf, earbuds, leaky hoses, or even torn shoes or clothing. Read the rest

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This interview presents a conversation with Xeric Award-winning Canadian cartoonist Kevin Mutch about The Rough Pearl (Fantagraphics, 2020), his new graphic novel which addresses issues surrounding the intersection of class and race privilege in the “precariat” creative communities in and around New York City.

Jeffery Klaehn: Thanks for the interview, Kevin!!  Please tell me about The Rough Pearl.

Kevin Mutch: The Rough Pearl is an autobiographical fantasy — a mixture of truth and fiction in roughly equal parts — about a would-be artist named Adam in New York City in the 1990s. He has a crappy adjunct teaching job, a wife who makes a lot more money than him, and an ill-advised crush on a student. And he seems to be losing his mind — he keeps seeing zombies and aliens and ghosts!

Adam is someone who grew up being told that the world was full of possibilities, but he’s come to see that it isn’t that way anymore (if it ever was). He had all these romantic ideas about being an artist, living in New York, being with beautiful women, and now he realizes all of those dreams have become impossible — until suddenly they all become possible again, all at once.

Unfortunately, he’s been having a harder and harder time determining what’s “real” and what isn’t — either he’s going crazy or he’s bleeding into parallel universes, the book is sort of ambiguous about that, heh — so he has a very difficult time navigating all of this. Read the rest

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I live in a house with three other people, who have long hair. A lot of it ends up going down the bathroom sink and clogging the drain.

I used to use Zip-It drain cleaners, but I recently tried a Drain Weasel and found it to be much better at getting all the gunky hair out of the pipe.

The business end of the Drain Weasel has a tip of velcro-like fabric. You stick it down the drain and then turn the crank. It will grab all the hair.

The drain cleaning wands are meant to be replaced after each use but the Drain Weasel people said you can clean off the tip, if you dare, and re-use it. As a cheapskate, I cleaned off the tip and it looks good as new, ready for the next clogged sink. Read the rest

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University researchers from Hong Kong and China created an application called DeepFaceDrawing that “allows users with little training in drawing to produce high-quality images from rough or even incomplete freehand sketches.”

Image: YouTube Read the rest

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This video for Elvis Costello’s new song, No Flag, is like a blast from the 1980s, and yet it’s also tailor made for 2020.

From Rolling Stone:

Although he recorded the track in February, according to a statement, the song is fitting for the current frustrations plaguing the world. “No time for this kind of love/No flag waving high above,” Costello sings. “No sign for the dark place that I live/No God for the damn that I don’t give.”

He recorded the track in three days in Helsinki, Finland at Suomenlinnan Studio, which is about a 20-minute ferry ride away from downtown. “I wanted to go somewhere nobody knew me,” Costello said in a statement. “So, this is ‘The Helsinki Sound.’”

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Director Stanley Kubrick wanted a transparent monolith for 2001: A Space Odyssey. He asked a UK plastics company to cast one from clear acrylic, but he didn’t like the way it looked in a screen test. Instead, he used a monolith made of wood and painted black.

According to Amusing Planet, the unused acrylic monolith [sat unused] in a warehouse for a number of years until an artist acquired it to make a carving for the Queen of England.

The rejected Monolith sat in the Boreham Wood film studios for several years, gathering dust, until famed Slovak-born, London-based sculptor Arthur Fleischmann acquired it. Fleischmann, who pioneered the use of acrylic in sculpture, had received a commission to make glittering crown sculpture for the Queen’s Silver Jubilee Celebrations in 1977. At two tons, it was the largest block of acrylic ever cast. For three months, Fleischmann patiently chiseled away at the block inside a polythene tent near St. Katherine’s Docks, in London. In June the same year, the Queen herself unveiled the sculpture.

The recycled prop has been on public display ever since at St Katherine Docks.

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Boing Boing welcomes Real Tested CBD as a sponsor!

We at Real Tested CBD are continually striving to bring you information about the best CBD brands and their respective products available in the market. The CBD industry is thriving due to new-found awareness amongst the consumers. Thanks to the Internet and the laws allowing legal use of CBD and hemp-based products. 

At Real Tested CBD, we run thorough lab tests on each brand and product on our platform, and it includes checking the authenticity of their claim to be a CBD product. Plus, we also test these products for any traces of industrial pesticides and solvents. Today, we bring you another review of one of the most popular brands in the CBD industry.

CBDfx is a manufacturer of CBD products and oils from Chatsworth, California. They carry a wide variety of CBD products extracted from full-spectrum, broad-spectrum, and isolate hemp plants. 
These products include CBD oils, CBD vape juice, CBD capsules, CBD products for pets, and more. Here are our reviews of six of their products. It’s always better to review before you buy!

CBDfx’s Hemp Gummies 40 Mg

Image Source: RealTestedCBD

Our top choice to review a CBDfx product is their Mixed Berry Hemp Gummies. It is an excellent CBD product that comes from broad-spectrum hemp extract. It is a non-GMO product that is 100 percent vegan and gluten-free.

These yummy gummies contain 40 mg of hemp-based cannabinoids, and our lab results found this claim to be spot on – kudos to CBDfx. Read the rest