Designer Yuri Suzuki of Pentagram and killer Japanese killer electronic kit maker Gakken collaborated on this fantastic-looking Easy Record Maker. The US$81 (!) device enables you to cut and play your own (very) lo-fi 5" albums! Susuki will demo the device on his Instagram tomorrow. From DesignWeek:

The machine comes with ten blank five-inch discs [with more available for purchase]. You can plug in the audio source from any device, such as a computer or phone and then “engrave sound directly from the recording stylus,” Suzuki tells Design Week. You can then instantly playback sound using the tone arm and in-built speaker...

“When I was a high school student, I was in a punk band – my friends and I always dreamed of pressing a record, but we knew how expensive it was,” he explains. “Personally this device is my teenage dream machine!”

You can also design your own label and sleeves, which is another “platform to express yourself”, Suzuki adds.

Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/04/02/cut-and-play-your-own-vinyl-re.html

It turns out Zoom is super useful in these trying times. You can use it to fire 406 people at once! From Dot.la:

Then, after five minutes of dead air that seemed like an eternity, a robotic-sounding, disembodied voice came on the line.

The woman began by acknowledging "this is a suboptimal way to deliver this message." Then she cut to the chase: "COVID-19 has also had a massive impact on our business, one that has forced our leadership team and our board of directors to make extremely difficult and painful decisions. One of those decisions is to eliminate a number of roles at the company. Unfortunately your role is impacted by this decision."

The meeting was scheduled to last half an hour but ended up going for only two minutes. Towards the end of the monologue, as the woman started talking about the future of Bird, she sounded like she was getting choked up and was trying to hold back tears.

"It felt like a Black Mirror episode," Alvauaje said. "This ominous voice came over and told us we were losing our jobs."

While we sympathize with the workers who were laid off, we are not surprised. Bird is, after all, the company that sent Boing Boing an intimidating, bizarre, and baseless legal threat last year, which they retracted after our lawyers at the Electronic Frontier Foundation told them how wrong they were.

Image: Mark Frauenfelder Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/04/02/it-felt-like-a-black-mirror.html

In the late 1980s, Nancye Ferguson, then-wife of DEVO's Mark Mothersbaugh along with Bob Mothersbaugh, his daughter Alex, and then-DEVO drummer David Kendrick, formed Visiting Kids. Mark Mothersbaugh wrote some of the tunes and he and Bob Casale (Bob 2) produced their self-titled sole LP. Above is Visiting Kids' wonderfully weird music video for the track "Trilobites" and below is the band's TV appearance on The Late Show.

(Thanks, UPSO!)

Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/04/02/dig-this-weirdo-devo-family-gr.html

Georgia Governor Brian Kemp admitted yesterday he was unaware that coronavirus could be spread by infected people who don't show any symptoms —– a common fact he knew nothing about "until the last 24 hours." Where has this so-called leader been for the last two months since this basic information was first made public? My guess is in front of Fox News, but it's just a hunch.

According to Gizmodo:

On January 31, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told reporters, “there’s no doubt [...] that asymptomatic transmission is occurring.”

As February continued, and the number of cases started to rise in the U.S., we learned more and more about asymptomatic transmission. There were still questions, but the CDC director confirmed by mid-February that people without symptoms were spreading the disease.

Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/04/02/clueless-georgia-governor-had.html

There will always be people who think the Moon landings were a hoax, that the Earth is flat, that vaccines cause autism, and that fire didn't cause the World Trade Center's buildings to collapse. This month, a group called Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth published a report from researchers at the University of Alaska Fairbanks about a "four-year computer modeling study on the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7," which was not hit by one of the jets piloted by al Qaeda terrorists.

The 47-story WTC 7 was the third skyscraper to be completely destroyed on September 11, 2001, collapsing rapidly and symmetrically into its footprint at 5:20 PM. Seven years later, investigators at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) concluded that WTC 7 was the first steel-framed high-rise ever to have collapsed solely as a result of normal office fires.

Contrary to the conclusions of NIST, the UAF research team finds that the collapse of WTC 7 on 9/11 was not caused by fires but instead was caused by the near-simultaneous failure of every column in the building.

I'm not an architect and I have not used my mechanical engineering degree since 1990 or so, so I am in no position to argue with Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth. But if I had to bet, I'd put my money on The National Institute of Standards and Technology, which investigated the matter in 2017 and concluded "WTC 7 collapsed because of fires fueled by office furnishings. Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/04/02/9-11-truthers-are-still-at-it.html

Reddit:

Chandra Oppenheim’s story is one of the most innocent but interesting stories to come out of post-punk NYC.

After glam moved into punk and punk moved into post-punk/new wave/no wave/noise/outsider disco/mutant disco/art punk/etc/etc, it was a musical free for all. So it makes sense that an unassuming 12-year-old from Brooklyn would enter the scene backed by a post-punk, outsider disco group under the name Chandra.

Chandra Oppenheim was just twelve years old when her debut album ‘Transportation’ was released. Musically encouraged by her father from a young age Chandra was writing songs by age nine.

Her father was conceptual artist, Dennis Oppenheim, who caroused with the artists and musicians of the late '70s Lower East Side. Dennis was friends with Eugenie Diserio and Steven Alexander, who had been playing the NYC post-punk circuit with the Model Citizens.

The Model Citizens signed to John Cale’s Spy Label and then broke up to take things in another direction with their new band, The Dance, featuring drummer Fred Maher (who later joined Material)

Chandra Oppenheim had been writing music and performing for some time, often doing songs and performances at her father’s parties. Having met Chandra when she was 11, Diserio, Alexander and Maher formed a band with Chandra and started to rehearse in a studio in Hell’s Kitchen. The result of these rehearsals was their debut EP ‘Transportation’ on the band’s own record label GOGO/ON; a mix of dissonant weird disco, bass-heavy dance grooves and Chandra’s unmistakable chant-singing.

Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/04/02/1980s-12-year-old-post-punk.html

Revenger, a fast-paced space opera by Alastair Reynolds with strong women as protagonists and few surprises certainly took my mind off things for a bit.

Worldbuilding galore takes place in Revenger's galaxy, a place littered with the detritus of humanity and other species. Kind of steam-punky and certainly the baubles offer a lot of 'Roadside Picnic'-style Zones which I find ironic as I, and other Boing Boing editors, have been reading the Strugatsky Brothers this month.

Revenger is 400 pages of good solid sci-fi fun.

Revenger (The Revenger Series Book 1) by Alastair Reynolds via Amazon Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/04/02/alastair-reynolds-revenger.html

Parasite director Bong Joon-ho drew out beautiful storyboards before rolling film. He's combined his drawings and all of the movie's dialogue into Parasite: A Graphic Novel in Storyboards coming out in May. In the videos above and below, Through the Viewfinder compared the storyboards and the scenes from the actual film.

(via Kottke)

Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/04/02/the-incredible-storyboards-of.html

There are plenty of productive ways to spend time while stuck indoors. While it’s undoubtedly fun to binge all 15 seasons of Supernatural or sink days of playtime into an Overwatch campaign, learning something new is definitely a more meaningful and long-term beneficial use of  open hours.

And if you’re going to invest time in learning something new, you better make sure it sticks. More than half a million Apple App and Google Play users have given the Babbel Language Learning system a 4.6 out of 5-star rating for its innovative and impactful methods in helping students learn a new language. So you know it works.

Right now, they’re making their award-winning services available again at 60 percent off the regular lifetime subscription price, just $159.

With this deal, you can learn 14 of the world’s most popular languages at your own pace with Babbel, the top-grossing language learning app around the globe.

Developed by over 100 linguistic experts, Babbel even says they’ll help you start speaking confidently in your new language in only 30 days. Just choose the language you’d like to learn, and you’ll immediately get access to more than 8,500 hours of high-quality language education.

Before you get overwhelmed, all those hours are broken down into easily digestible 10- to 15-minute lessons, so you can also find time to fit them into your day naturally.

The focus of the Babbel method is building your basic conversational skills, working you through real-world scenarios on real-world subjects like your family, your business, ordering a meal, booking transportation and more. Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/04/01/babbels-deal-on-a-lifetime-o.html

Rolling Stone is reporting that Adam Schlesinger, co-founder of Fountains of Wayne, and a prolific songwriter for film, television, and theater, has died of COVID-10. He was 52-years-old.

Schlesinger had one of the most unique and busiest careers in pop. With Fountains of Wayne — a group that blended power-pop delight with indie and alt-rock sensibilities — he released five albums between 1996 and 2011. During the same period, he released six albums with his other group, Ivy, all the while building a portfolio of TV and film music. His first hit came in 1996, but it was a song engineered to sound like it was actually from the Sixties: “That Thing You Do.” The track served as the sole hit for the Wonders, the fake band at the center of Tom Hanks’ film That Thing You Do!; in real life, the track charted well and earned Schlesinger an Oscar nomination for Best Original Song. Seven years later, Schlesinger and Fountains of Wayne would notch their own career-defining hit, “Stacy’s Mom.”

Read the rest here.

Written by Schlesinger:

It is staggering to try and comprehend how many of these obits we are going to be seeing in the coming weeks and months.

Image: CC 2.0 Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/04/01/fountains-of-wayne-co-founder.html

When I started seeing all of the posts on social media (and here on Boing Boing) about "pandemic baking," it made instant and perfect sense to me. But then, I started seeing people asking "why?" on Facebook and Twitter. My first thought was "this is clearly a question from non-bakers." If you've baked bread with any regularity, I bet you know why.

The next thing I thought of was this piece I wrote for my 2014 book, Borg Like Me. In it, I talk about my time as a baker, living in a commune in my youth, and another apocalyptic event, a massive snow-in in 2010, that left me trapped alone in my house with dwindling food stocks.

So, I decided to share this story here. TL;DR: Bake some bread. It's hands-on, can be grounding, therapeutic, and fresh-baked bread is one of life's great simple pleasures (for those of us who partake).

Bread of the Snowpocalypse

I’ve always been attracted to the ancient roots, the homely honesty, of bread. When I first moved to Twin Oaks Community in Louisa, VA as a teenager, I lived in a satellite group, called Tupelo. The first Tupelo dwelling was in an old ramshackled farm house that adjoined the main Twin Oaks property. For the farmhouse, we purchased a gorgeous antique cast iron wood-burning stove that I'd lobbied obnoxiously hard for us to get. I really wanted it to be our sole stove, but less ridiculous heads prevailed (I was 17 and full of hippie revolution fervor). Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/04/01/why-is-everyone-suddenly-bakin.html

Last week, I made the first book in my EMU Club Adventures series, Alien Invasion in My Backyard, available for download for free. And today the second book, Ghostly Thief of Time, is also available for download. Free.

I hope these books can offer some respite, and fun and excitement, for families under the stressful conditions of quarantine. After all, they are about three bored kids who find an amazing adventure just by being exceptionally creative and curious.

Next week, check out my social media for a little project kids can do once they've finished the books.

Information on how to download both books is HERE.

Stuart Tennemeier, his best friend Brian Hrzincz, and his sister Violet want to start a mystery club like the ones they read about in books, but they have no idea how to even find a mystery in their suburban neighborhood. They settle on trying to solve a mundane mystery from their lives – what happened to the game controller they lost – and they find that when you look really, really closely at your world, you can find absolutely amazing things. And maybe even save the world. The EMU Club Adventures series, for kids aged 7-11 (and adventurous, curious spirits of all ages), is by cartoonist Ruben Bolling, the author of the award-winning comic strip Tom the Dancing Bug. Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/04/01/another-free-book-for-kids-th.html

$5,179 was earned last week at the United States box office. Not $5.179m, not $51.79k, but just over five thousand dollars. It's the worst week in history for the American theater industry, due to coronavirus restrictions and company policies that all but ended public movie attendance.

Okay, did some math. A movie ticket was ~35c in the 40s, which means collectively all theatres in America would only need to sell 14.5k tickets in a week to clear $5100

So now I'm thinking probably the box office hasn't been this low since the late 20s.

 Dan Olson (@FoldableHuman) April 1, 2020

A silver lining, perhaps: most movies on general release were shunted immediately to television-on-demand, and gave home movie services their best week ever. Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/04/01/record-week-at-the-box-office.html

If you’ve ever had any musical aspirations -- or even if your talent extends no further than turning on the radio -- you’ve probably dreamed the “impossible” dream. You dream that maybe you could record some of your songs at home, post them online, build an armada of fan support, attract major label attention and ultimately become a global music powerhouse all in one fell swoop.

Look, it’s an unlikely dream, but it isn’t impossible. That’s the career arc that now 17-year-old Billie Eilish just rode to pop megastardom last year. And what program did she (and her brother-slash-producer Finneas O’Connell) use to capture and edit Billie’s now chart-topping tracks? Logic Pro X.

The Mac-based app is just one of the programs that has taken music production from opulent, expensive studios right to anyone’s bedroom. And since you’ve got a bit more home time on your hands recently, The 2020 Music Production with Ableton Live 10 and Logic Pro X Bundle can be just the ticket to the big time you’re looking for.

These nine courses are a 56-hour master class in breaking into the music industry, including everything from songwriting and producing to recording to back-end production and distribution that can compete with the big boys of the recording game.

The training centers on how to use Logic Pro X or its equally lauded competitor Ableton Live 10 to do all the digital sequencing, recording and editing needed to produce your tracks. This training doesn’t come with the software, but it’ll show you how to use it to create all the auditory scope and wonder you experience from today’s top artists. Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/04/01/get-this-9-course-training-bun.html

You've probably received spam emails inviting you to join class action lawsuits against the makers of over-the-counter heartburn medicine Zantac (ranitidine) as it contains a likely carcinogen. Today, the US Food and Drug Administration requested that all ranitidine products be pulled from store shelves and that consumers properly dispose of any they've already purchased. You should expect even more Zantac class action spam. From CNN:

The FDA noted that an ongoing investigation has determined that levels of a contaminant in the heartburn medications increase over time and when stored at higher-than-normal temperatures, poses a risk to public health.

The contaminant, N-nitrosodimethylamine or NDMA, is a probable human carcinogen and the FDA has been investigating levels of it in ranitidine since the summer of 2019.

"We didn't observe unacceptable levels of NDMA in many of the samples that we tested," Dr. Janet Woodcock, director of the FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, said in Wednesday's announcement.

"However, since we don't know how or for how long the product might have been stored, we decided that it should not be available to consumers and patients unless its quality can be assured," Woodcock said in part.

More: "FDA Requests Removal of All Ranitidine Products (Zantac) from the Market" (FDA)

image: "Ball-and-stick model of the ranitidine molecule" from A. Hempel, N. Camerman, D. Mastropaolo and A. Camerman (2000).(public domain) Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/04/01/throw-away-any-zantac-you-have.html

Osamu Tezuka's iconic Astro Boy TV series premiered on New Year's Day, 1963. (First episode below.) By some accounts, the cartoon was watched at its most popular point by 40% of Japanese people with a TV. I love watching cartoonists draw familiar characters and the above behind-the-scenes footage from the Astro Boy production is a real delight.

(via r/ObscureMedia)

Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/04/01/video-behind-the-scenes-of-th.html

It's always great to see a master craftsperson at work. From Vanity Fair: "Watch as Tom Kenny seamlessly improvises the voices to 5 random cartoon characters that he has never seen before. Using his skills from decades as the voice of SpongeBob, The Ice King (Adventure Time), The Mayor (Powerpuff Girls), Heffer (Rocko's Modern Life) and many others, Tom is able to create amazing characters in the blink of an eye."

Image: YouTube

[via Dooby Brain] Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/04/01/voice-of-spongebob-asked-to-im.html

My favorite smartphone weather app is Dark Sky because it has a graph that shows you when it is going to rain, for how hard, and how long. Apple just bought Dark Sky and the first thing they did was pull the app from Android phones. Android users who subscribed to Dark Sky were informed that they will continue to receive service until July 1, 2020, after which they will be forced to throw their Android phone in the trash and buy an iPhone.

Former Dark Sky fans expressed their sentiments on Twitter:

So, @apple has bought my favourite forecast provider, #darksky. Now they will: * Leave the iOS app * Remove the Android app * Eliminate forecast and maps from the website in July * close the API at the end of 2021

No explanation provided.

Fuck you all.https://t.co/3JVrRtIGjj

— insomniac (@insomniacslk) April 1, 2020

My email to the #DarkSky team after the announced that they will be "Apple Exclusive"

I think it's wrong that they have done this. pic.twitter.com/mqhjb69FYH

— Matthew Wright (@MatthewW191) March 31, 2020

Just gutted that #darksky have sold out to Apple and are killing BOTH the Android app (of which I am a multi year subscriber) and their API. This is a huge blow to open technology. All at https://t.co/sELZt8Tz99 should hang their heads in shame.

— thebaldgeek (@thebaldgeek) March 31, 2020

Apple buying Dark Sky is a good test for my general "acquisitions are bad" instinct: iOS having a great weather app is a good market solution, as people won't download any of the extremely shady third-party weather apps that sell location data.

Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/04/01/apple-buys-excellent-dark-sky.html

The Brass-A-Holics offer this fantastic rendition of "I'll Fly Away" to help comfort those who can not give their loved ones a proper jazz funeral.

I have been in love with jazz funerals since I was a teen. I only recently learned there are also jazz weddings. Should I ever remarry this will make things interesting. Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/04/01/jazz-funerals-in-the-time-of-d.html

Another day, another round of Trump anxiety-tweets.

“Iran or its proxies are planning a sneak attack on U.S.,” the impeached president and noted serial liar tweeted today.

Upon information and belief, Iran or its proxies are planning a sneak attack on U.S. troops and/or assets in Iraq. If this happens, Iran will pay a very heavy price, indeed!

Okie doke. Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/04/01/iran-or-its-proxies-are-plan.html