Minecraft, the world's most successful video game and now a blockbuster movie series, will soon bring its blocky voxelated world into reality. Minecraft World, first revealed in March, will open in 2027 at Chessington World of Adventures, just outside London, and will include a 70-room themed hotel. — Read the rest

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In 2013, Politizane explained America's untenable and growing wealth gap in what would become an all-time classic of data visualization. Thirteen years on, they're back with a four-part update. It makes for grim viewing: the wealth gap has become runaway income inequality, with the world's first trillionaire in the mix, a fast-sinking middle class, and a tax system that offers elites a myriad of legal dodges. — Read the rest

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The remote Pacific island of Nikumaroro, Kiribati, has been a candidate for the aviator's final resting place since she and her navigator, Fred Noonan, disappeared en route to Howland Island, 400 miles to the north, on July 2, 1937. A recent satellite image stoked new interest as it appeared to depict an angular, plane-sized object beached inside the lagoon. — Read the rest

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Researchers tasked six top AI assistants with getting a £350 train-ticket refund after it was too late. The LLMs operated as normal, but were sandboxed so that all outgoing comms were intercepted and answered by the research team. Here's the prompt:

"Get me a refund for my train ticket by the 4th January HARD deadline.

— Read the rest

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Tiny Brutalism is a $5 game for Windows, MacOS and Linux that brings utilitarian mass to the relaxing sandbox genre. Whether you're designing your next sandcastle or a Marcel Breuer deathmatch arena, it's got you covered.

Create strange monuments, impossible structures, concrete towers, or just a really big wall.

— Read the rest

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Nidhogg, Mark Essen's wonderfully-animated 2D fencing game, now has an improved online multiplayer mode—an upgrade added more than 12 years after the indie classic's original release (in 2010, when it was in development, I described it as "Mechner on acid," which it is). — Read the rest

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A stark graph showing a 1,533% increase in terror arrests in the U.K. this year comes with an interesting asterisk: it's mostly protestors whose "terror" offense occurred at pro-Palestinian marches, typically in the form of spoken or printed messages supporting Palestine Action and related slogans. — Read the rest

The post Britain's typical "terrorist" now a 60 year-old woman appeared first on Boing Boing.

Mark Stephens, better known under the pen name Robert X. Cringely, died last week at 73. Stephens chronicled the tech industry of the late 1980s and early 1990s—the age of Bill Gates' rise, Steve Jobs' repose, the dawn of the world wide web—and produced the famed documetary Triumph of the Nerds, based on his own bestselling Accidental Empires. — Read the rest

The post Watch Triumph of the Nerds, the 1996 documentary about the rise of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs appeared first on Boing Boing.

Here's a wild shot at getting voters to turn out for the midterm elections: have them vote for their favorite gun. The question "Which of the following guns should be designated as the state gun of Idaho?" will be on ballots there after legislators unanimously approved it and Governor Brad Little signed the measure. — Read the rest

The post Spud gun not on ballot as Idaho Voters choose official state firearm appeared first on Boing Boing.

A Peruvian man named after two European despots won election in Queropalca, a district with about 730 residents in the south American nation's Huánuco department. Hitler Mussolini Simeón Flores, 45, won the race by just 25 votes as the candidate of the center-left Ahora Nación party. — Read the rest

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An OpenAI engineer and Saudi national faces criminal charges after plugging an audio recorder into an executive conference room's TV set. Crudely wrapped in toilet paper, the device was soon found, and after security footage was reviewed, so was the culprit. — Read the rest

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Skincare products promising youthful glows and wrinkle-free smiles regularly lead to unexpected charges for the customers pressured or tricked into buying them, reports NPR. It seems there's not much anyone can do to stop the scammers, who often work out of mall kiosks and suburban salons, beyond filing lawsuits and complaining to disinterested authorities. — Read the rest

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Theo Jaffee made a Weather Atlas that shows where in the world has the right weather for you. Set the sliders to your perfect day and the international heat map will shift to show which areas get it the most times a year. — Read the rest

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In the video below, Facebook founder and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg enjoys a nice pint of Guinness, the renowned Irish stout ale brewed since 1759 in Dublin and elsewhere. Prost!

Watch Mark Zuckerberg enjoy plain toast.

Watch Mark Zuckerberg enjoy smoked meats. — Read the rest

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Kiwibank unveiled its new mascot Buck this year, hoping the adorable cartoon sheep would convince people to move their accounts there. Now the New Zealand-based bank is struggling to contain Buck's success as consumers make deposits of a different kind. — Read the rest

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A man who broke into a tech company in Tempe, Arizona, made off with what he "likely" thought were Apple computers. But the Mac Mini boxes were empty, and he left the computers on the desks there.

"I come in, the window was smashed to pieces," employee Curran Rose told Fox 10 news in Phoenix. — Read the rest

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Nanolathe is the latest example of a fascinating subgenre of real-time strategy game: Chris Taylor's 1997 hit Total Annihation but with something more. Nanolathe offers an open source MIT-licensed 2.5D RTS engine reimplementing the original plus three decades of the quality-of-life tweaks: a perfect access point for anyone who played it way back when but might now be intimidated by Beyond All Reason's sprawling 150-player Götterdämmerungs. — Read the rest

The post Classic real-time strategy game Total Annihilation is 30 years old—and everyone is remixing it appeared first on Boing Boing.

Last week, a clone of Adobe's Creative Suite appeared, said to be reverse-engineered and recreated using AI. Adobe's bad reputation made it easy for the internet to take perverse joy in its misfortune. Out with Adobe's surveillance technology, in with a fast and efficient replacement! — Read the rest

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No longer will Americans have to go without delicious and inexpensive industrial dyes in their foodstuffs. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is reportedly to allow additives to be added to food without safety review so long as they aren't proven to be carcinogenic and introduced at levels below 0.5 parts per billion. — Read the rest

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Doom running on toothbrushes is old news. The new thing is porting Doom to ancient systems. Few offer a more starkly-different experience to the original's low-res pseudo-3D than the vectorbeam Vectrex, already a vintage curiosity by the time Id software's 1993 FPS came out. — Read the rest

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