Last month an SFGate.com columnist explored plans for San Francisco's first NFT-based restaurant, an "ostentatious Japanese-themed restaurant and private club" featuring a members-only Sho Club Sky Lounge. What's more galling than the repeated use of the terms "immersive" and "experiential" to describe an actual restaurant is the fact that, as the group's website proudly proclaims, the astronomically expensive and exclusive eatery "is the only rooftop restaurant located on the Salesforce Transit Center's roof." As downtown San Francisco suffers through soaring homelessness, vacant storefronts and a deadly fentanyl epidemic, the idea of its newest public space only providing food for those willing to spend exorbitant sums is brazen. In a terrifying J.G. Ballard-like dystopian metaphor come to life, the private lounge, which will charge a top-tier membership fee of $300,000 a pop... will be situated 70 feet above surrounding homeless encampments. [The cheapest membership tier is available for a one-time fee of $7,500.]

In maybe a projection of the venture's deficits, the most common word used in interviews and marketing blurbs surrounding the decidedly exclusionary club is "community." The word, adored in the crypto world, is used relentlessly in all of Sho marketing materials, as though if said enough times this ultra-bourgeois establishment under the bright lights of Salesforce Tower's beaming helmet will somehow magically help the working man under Sauron's gaze.... Outside of the private members lounge, the restaurant will be open to the public. Sho told SFGATE over email that the number of seats and tables available to the public is not available at this time....

It's a smug celebration of the widening chasm of wealth disparity, planted in a time and a city that needs just the opposite.
Marketing materials note that paid memberships "will be minted on the Ethereum blockchain. As an NFT, the SHO Club membership will be an asset to the holder, publicly verifiable, and can later be sold or transferred on the secondary market."

So Friday SFGate.com paid another visit to "the empty husk of the building that will, if all goes smoothly, soon sell NFT memberships between $7,500 and $300,000 to join a hospitality club at a yet-to-be-constructed Japanese fine-dining restaurant in the middle of Salesforce Park." (Predicted grand opening date: September/October 2023.) The public will have allocated reservations too, [CEO Joshua] Sigel said, without revealing numbers. "Then what's the selling point for a membership?" a reporter interjected. There will be special events, a monthly membership dinner for certain tiers, and concierge service, among other benefits, Sigel said... Sigel said there's "fantastic" interest in Sho Club memberships, that they've had thousands of sign-ups on their website, and they anticipate rolling out a private NFT sale next week, followed by a public sale in mid- to late September....

Inevitably came web3 talk. Once the 3,275 NFTs memberships are sold, that's it, no more. If you want to become a member after that, you'll have to obtain a Sho Group NFT on OpenSea, a secondary market for NFTs.... Sho Group will get a 10% kickback on any secondary market sales of NFTs. A reporter astutely asked how the restaurant will keep tabs on who its new members are, once the NFTs start exchanging hands. In other words: What happens when a genuine piece of s — t snags a secondary market membership? Sigel assured us the restaurant will have a terms and conditions agreement to deal with unruly forces....

Someone abruptly asked Sigel if he'll be helping the homeless, a non sequitur of epic proportions that does, in fairness, loom over everything related to this fancy restaurant located in an ostensibly public park. "Great question," he started, announcing that in the next few weeks, his group will be rolling out a foundation of some kind. "For those who know Sho and I well, giving back and supporting the community is a very big thing for us. You specifically asked about the homeless — I have a family member who's homeless. It's near and dear to my heart, in terms of serving not only the unhoused, but also those who are in need of food."

Here's an interesting story from the Washington Post. (Alternate URL here...) When the Green Bay Packers walked onto the practice field this week, they were greeted by an unusual new teammate: a robot. In videos on Twitter, a 6-foot tall white robotic machine simulates a punter, kicking balls at a rapid pace to players downfield. The robot, which holds six balls in a revolving cartridge, could also imitate a quarterback's style including the speed, arc and timing of a throw.

The Seeker is a robotic quarterback, kicker and punter rolled into one. It's a modern day version of a piece of football equipment, called a JUGS machine, that's been used to simulate throws and kicks to football players for decades. The Seeker, company officials say however, is a more accurate thrower and runs software to let players practice more advanced gameplay scenarios. he robot, created by Dallas-based Monarc Sport, is starting to gain adoption. Top college football programs, such as Louisiana State University, the University of Oklahoma and the University of Iowa, all count the Seeker as part of their training strategy. The Green Bay Packers are the first team in the National Football League to try the technology.

The Seeker's software allows players to customize how they practice with it. Athletes can catch balls from close to the machine to improve hand-eye coordination. They can also program the robot to throw a ball to a spot on the field, or simulate more-lifelike conditions by over or underthrowing a ball. Players wear a pager-like tag which allows the robot to track their location on the field, and throw a ball accurately within inches. "It gives so much opportunity for our guys to get reps without the need of having a quarterback there," said Ben Hansen, the director of football administration at Iowa, where the technology was first tested. "That's a huge plus...."

One of the most helpful parts of the technology, he said, is being able to program it to throw passes that simulate game day conditions. Unlike the JUGS machine, he said, which doesn't have software to pass in random patterns, the Seeker can purposefully throw passes that aren't perfect.... A case study published in April by Microsoft, which provides the software ecosystem for the robot, noted that West Virginia University's dropped passes rate fell to four percent in 2021, down from 53 percent the past season after introducing the robot into training.

The university's senior athletic director said the robot deserved a "share of the credit" for that outcome.

Last year Rodolfo Castro made baseball history. Called up to the Major Leagues in April, the 22-year-old eventually recorded his first hit — a home run. But his next four recorded hits were all also home runs, something no player had done since 1901.

CBS News reports that this week, finally called back up to the Major Leagues, Castro again made history — of another sort: Modern technology has allowed people to take their phones, as well as the power of the internet, with them anywhere they go. Pittsburgh Pirates second baseman Rodolfo Castro took his around the bases against the Arizona Diamondbacks on Tuesday night.
Yep — an iPhone made a bizarre cameo in the 4th inning, reports the Associated Press: Castro and third base coach Mike Rabelo stood and stared, mortified.... Even third base umpire Adam Hamari had the perfect reaction, pointing at the phone that came flying out of Castro's back pocket during a head-first slide, trying not to giggle at the absurdity of the situation.

Those around the sport cringed along with them. "That's obviously not something that should happen," Yankees manager Aaron Boone said.... This faux pas just happened to be at a televised big league game, creating a video clip seen by millions.

"I just remember getting dressed, putting my pants on, getting something to eat, using the restroom," the 23-year-old Castro said through a translator Tuesday night after the Pirates lost 6-4 to Arizona. "Never did it ever cross my mind that I still had my cellphone on me...."

It's far from the first time a phone has made a cameo on a pro sports field. One of the most famous examples came nearly 20 years ago when New Orleans Saints receiver Joe Horn pulled out a flip phone — remember those? — that he had hidden in the padding around the goalpost and then acted like he was taking a call after scoring a touchdown.

"If you've been following Joe Barnard's rocketry projects for the past few years, you'll know that one of his primary goals has been to propulsively land a model rocket like SpaceX," reports Hackaday.

"Now, 7 years into the rollercoaster journey, he has finally achieved that goal with the latest version of his Scout rocket." Many things need to come together to launch AND land a rocket on standard hobby-grade solid fuel rocket motors. A core component is stabilization of the rocket during the entire flight, which achieved using a thrust-vectoring control (TVC) mount for the rocket motors and a custom flight computer loaded with carefully tuned guidance software. Until recently, the TVC mounts were 3D printed, but Joe upgraded it to machined aluminum to eliminate as much flex and play as possible.

Since solid-fuel rockets can't technically be throttled, [Joe] originally tried to time the ignition time of the descent motor in such a manner that it would burn out as the rocket touches down. The ignition time and exact thrust numbers simply weren't repeatable enough, so in his 2020 landing attempts, he achieved some throttling effect by oscillating the TVC side to side, reducing the vertical thrust component. This eventually gave way to the final solution, a pair of ceramic pincers which block the thrust of the motors as required.
"I have been trying to do what you just saw for seven years," Barnard says in the video, remembering that he started the project back in the fall of 2015. "Not because it's revolutionary or game-changing for model rocketry, but because it's a really cool project, and I knew I would learn a lot." (On Twitter, Barnard added that "I had no background in aero, electrical engineering, coding, etc so it took a lot of trial and error.")

And in the video Barnard made sure to thank his 690 supporters on Patreon — and also shared a surprise. He'd printed out a sheet of paper with the name of every one of his Patreon supporters, rolled it up, and inserted it into the hollow center of his rocket before the flight. "So if you support, you were part of this."

The Patreon account offers more details on Barnard's mission. "Learning by experimentation is the most effective way to gain a deep understanding of new concepts, which is why providing hands-on experience with advanced rocketry components is important for the next generation of scientists, engineers, and astronauts."

And the video ends with Bernard describing the next projects he'll attempt:

• More SpaceX-like vertical landings

• A 9-foot model of SpaceX's Starship Super Heavy rocket

• A special secret project known only as "the meat rocket"

• An actual model-rocket space shot — that is, a rocket that ascends over 100 kilometers

Professional baseball has a dirty secret, according to the New York Times. While a catcher may secretly signal for certain pitches using their fingers, "Multiple managers say there are clubs who use a dozen or more staff members to study video and swipe signs."

But should that practice be stopped with technology? Adding cameras in every ballpark and video monitors in every clubhouse opened the door to an unintended consequence: electronic cheating. The 2017 Houston Astros brazenly stepped through that door, developing an elaborate sign-stealing system that helped them win a World Series. Two years later, when that system was revealed to the public, it resulted in firings, suspensions and, ultimately, the permanent tarnishing of a championship.... This season, Major League Baseball took a big leap forward in distancing itself from the stain of sign stealing with the introduction of PitchCom, a device controlled by a catcher that allows him to wordlessly communicate with the pitcher about what pitch is coming — information that is simultaneously shared with as many as three other players on the field through earpieces in the bands of their caps....

There have been a few hiccups, with devices not operating, or pitchers not being able to hear, but so far this season, everyone in baseball seems to agree that PitchCom, like it or not, is working. Carlos Correa, a shortstop for the Minnesota Twins who has long served as the unofficial, and unapologetic, spokesman of those 2017 Astros, went as far as saying that the tool would have foiled his old team's systemic cheating. "I think so," Correa said. "Because there are no signs now."

Yet not all pitchers are on board. Max Scherzer, the ace of the New York Mets and baseball's highest-paid player this season, sampled PitchCom for the first time late last month in a game against the Yankees and emerged with conflicting thoughts. "It works," he said. "Does it help? Yes. But I also think it should be illegal."

Scherzer went so far as to suggest that the game would be losing something by eliminating sign stealing.

"It's part of baseball, trying to crack someone's signs," Scherzer said. "Does it have its desired intent that it cleans up the game a little bit?" he said of PitchCom. "Yes. But I also feel like it takes away part of the game."
That comment was called "a little naive" and "a bit hypocritical" by a relief pitcher in Seattle, who also had this to say about Scherzer. "I have a very good feeling that he's been on a team or two that steals signs."

For now, electronic pitch-signalling remains optional — and yet has been adopted by every one of the 30 teams in Major League Baseball, the article points out (attributing this to "a leaguewide paranoia".) And the League's executive vice president for baseball operations points out a second advantage.

Since catchers don't need to run through a long series of decoy signals, "It has actually sped the game up a little bit."

"I started playing pickleball more than 50 years ago," Bill Gates says in a new video — not long after the game was invented...

Now the 66-year-old Microsoft co-founder writes in a blog post that "I've been a little stunned — and delighted — by the sudden popularity of one of my favorite pastimes..." Largely confined to the Pacific Northwest for decades, it has now emerged as America's fastest-growing sport.... It's best described as a mash up of tennis, badminton, and ping-pong. And if you haven't heard of it, I expect you soon will....

Boredom was what got this sport started in 1965. Three dads living on Bainbridge Island, near Seattle, came home one summer evening to find their children complaining that there was nothing for them to do. So, they found a net, a Wiffle ball, some ping-pong paddles, and created a game on an old badminton court that the entire family could play together.... Over the next year, the three friends worked together to develop a set of rules, formalize the court layout, and introduce a larger plywood paddle that was good for striking the ball. And they decided to call it pickleball... Meanwhile, word slowly spread in Seattle of this odd new pastime.

My dad was friends with the game's inventors, Joel Pritchard, a state legislator and later Washington's lieutenant governor, Barney McCallum, and Bill Bell. He learned about their creation and by the late 1960s, he got inspired to build a pickleball court at our house. I've been playing ever since. At the time, the pickleball community was very small. I doubt there were more than a thousand people in the Seattle area who had ever seen the sport when my family picked it up. And I don't think anyone expected it would ever become a national phenomenon.

Today, there are more than 4.8 million players nationwide, a growth of nearly 40 percent over the last two years. And I expect it will only get bigger....

The best thing about pickleball, however, is that it's just super fun. I look forward to playing a pickleball game with friends and family at least once a week and more often during the summer.

"Ten years on from discovery, there's still a lot left to learn about the Higgs boson!" tweeted a researcher anticipating their experiment on the Large Hadron Collider.

But on Facebook, there's posts calling CERN "a demonic/Evil machine that opens up portals to other dimensions/Hell/other spiritual worlds" and "brings in demons wicked spirits/High Evil Principalities." And USA Today reports that similar posts making that same claim "have amassed hundreds of interactions on Facebook and Twitter." (Their article then goes on to assure readers that "the claim is baseless.")

In fact, USA Today's "Fact Check" feature spent some time investigating the claims of a demonic machine opening portals to hell, and after exhaustive research can report that at this time "There is no evidence scientists at CERN are engaged in anything other than scientific-related activities." Physics experts told USA TODAY scientists use the Large Hadron Collider to collide particles at very high energies to study matter. There is no truth to the claim that scientists at CERN are communicating with demonic entities and using the collider to open up a portal to hell, Dejan Stojkovic, a physics professor at the University at Buffalo, told USA TODAY in an email.
The physics behind his explanation is interesting: "To create a black hole or a wormhole, even microscopic ones, with our current technology, in the context of our standard theories of gravity, we need an accelerator as big as the whole universe," Stojkovic said. "So there is no chance whatsoever to create such a portal at the [Large Hadron Collider]."

"Since these are previously unexplored energies in a controlled environment, we might expect production of some new elementary particles that we did not know if they existed," Stojkovic said. "However, these are microscopic particles, so there is no chance such a portal would open."
Facebook has now attached a warning to its user's post about a demonic machine opening up portals to hell, notifying users that the post contains "False information." (It adds that this assertion has been "checked by independent fact-checkers," linking back to USA Today's article for support.)

USA Today ends its analysis with a definitive summation: Based on our research, we rate FALSE the claim that scientists at CERN are communicating with demonic entities and opening a portal to hell. There is no evidence scientists at CERN are engaged in anything other than scientific-related activities. The collider cannot open up portals to other dimensions. Experts said scientists use the machine to collide particles at very high energies to study matter....

Our fact-check work is supported in part by a grant from Facebook.

Thanks to Slashdot reader Iamthecheese for sharing the story!

"There's a new cryptocurrency in town," quips SFGate. "But the only crash you'll experience with this one is from sugar." Inspired by the recent headlines and discussion around cryptocurrency, Hostess decided to capitalize by debuting their own edible investment: Enter $TWINKcoin, the latest limited-edition Twinkie iteration to hit shelves.

"We saw an opportunity to release a new take on fan-favorite Hostess Twinkies, to create the best investment consumers can make to satisfy their snacking needs," a Hostess representative told Decrypt. "With more than 12,000 cryptocurrencies already in existence, $TWINKcoin is the first coin-shaped golden sponge cake of its kind. And, what's more, it's a currency with a stable value — it's always delicious!"

Compositionally, $TWINKcoins are indistinguishable from original Twinkies, with the same dense cake and synthetic cream filling; but instead of the classic cylindrical mold, the pecuniary pastries are formed into coin-shaped discs.

The British army is "investigating an apparent hack," reports Engadget, after its official Twitter and YouTube accounts were compromised Sunday: News of the breach was first reported by Web3 is Going Great . According to the blog, both accounts were simultaneously compromised to promote two different cryptocurrency scams.

Although it has since been scrubbed, the army's verified Twitter account was briefly changed to look like a page for The Possessed, a project involving a collection of 10,000 animated NFTs with a price floor of 0.58 Ethereum (approximately $1,063). During that time, the account tweeted out multiple links to a fake minting website....

Over on YouTube, the army's channel [had] been made to look like a page for Ark Invest...livestreaming videos that repurpose old footage of Elon Musk, Jack Dorsey and Ark CEO Katie Wood discussing cryptocurrency. The clips feature an overlay promoting "double your money" Bitcoin and Ethereum scams. According to Web3 is Going Great, a similar scheme netted scammers $1.3 million this past May. It's unclear who is behind the attacks.

"The dream of the 1990s internet is still alive, if you look in the right corners," argues the New York Times' newsletter On Tech: More than 17 million Americans regularly use MapQuest, one of the first digital mapping websites that was long ago overtaken by Google and Apple, according to data from the research firm Comscore. The dot-com-era internet portal Go.com shut down 20 years ago, but its ghost lives on in the "Go" that's part of web addresses for some Disney sites.

Ask Jeeves, a web search engine that started before Google, still has fans and people typing "Ask Jeeves a question" into Google searches.

Maybe you scoff at AOL, but it is still the 50th most popular website in the U.S., according to figures from SimilarWeb. The early 2000s virtual world Second Life never went away and is now having a second life as a proto-metaverse brand....

There is something heartwarming about pioneers that shaped the early internet, lost their cool and dominance, and eventually carved out a niche. They'll never be as popular or powerful as they were a generation ago, but musty internet brands might still have a fruitful purpose. These brands have managed to stay alive through a combination of inertia, nostalgia, the fact they've produced a product that people like, digital moneymaking prowess and oddities of the rickety internet.

If today's internet powers like Facebook and Pinterest lose relevance, too, they could stick around for decades.
The article quotes Bloomberg Opinion columnist Ben Schott calling the older sites "almost cockroach brands. They're small enough and resilient enough that they can't be killed."

The New York Times tells the story of crop circles, "the mysterious patterns that regularly intrigued people around the world in the 1980s and '90s, prompting speculation about alien visitors, ancient spiritual forces, weather anomalies, secret weapons tests and other theories."

They call the phenomenon "a reminder that even before the era of social media and the internet, hoaxes were able to spread virally around the world and true believers could cling stubbornly to conspiracy theories despite a lack of evidence — or even the existence of evidence to the contrary." In the case of crop circles, the most important contradictory evidence emerged on Sept. 9, 1991, when the British newspaper Today ran a front-page story under the headline "Men who conned the world," revealing that two mischievous friends from Southampton had secretly made more than 200 of the patterns over the previous decade.

Doug Bower, then 67, and his friend Dave Chorley, 62, admitted to a reporter, Graham Brough, that in the late 1970s they had begun using planks of wood with ropes attached to each end to stamp circles in crops by holding the ropes in their hands and pressing the planks underfoot. They had then watched with amusement as their anonymous antics eventually attracted media attention and began being copied by imitators around the world... The real-life pranksters phoned the newspaper to come clean, according to Mr. Brough, now 62, who says he verified their claims by checking an archive of more than 200 crop circle designs stored in a shed behind Mr. Bower's home. The designs were clearly aged and matched the patterns they had made over the years, Mr. Brough said.

"I spent a week getting them to show me how they had done it all, and I have never laughed as much in my life," he recalled. "The prevailing wisdom at the time was that aliens were about to land any day, but it had all been kicked off by these two blokes who'd have a couple of pints at their favorite pub and then head out into the night to have a bit of fun...."

"The people who wanted to keep believing in aliens and everything else just ignored the evidence, no matter how obvious it was," said Rob Irving, who had begun emulating the two pranksters' work in 1989 and befriended them after they went public.... "The power of the art came from the mystery, and Doug forever regretted coming forward because the mystery was lost."
A professor of psychology at the University of Bristol in Britain explains to the Times the thought process of believers (which he says predated the internet). "instead of admitting that we live in a world we can't control, they take comfort from believing that there is agency involved and someone who can be blamed." The Times finds an example in a crop circle proponent who now believes, to this day, that even if crop circles are all man-made, the people making them have unwittingly "been prompted by an independent nonhuman mind."

Although after a new crop circle appeared, the Times obtained an alternative perspective — from a neighboring farmer. "It is just so irresponsible to be trespassing and destroying food in the middle of a global wheat shortage."

"Yes, it's possible to get the game Doom running atop this system firmware," reports Phoronix.

Tom's Hardware explains: Originally known as LinuxBIOS, which provides a better clue to its utility value, Coreboot 4.17 supports new motherboards, delivers a new bootloader, supports AMD Platform Secure Boot (PSB), comes with a handful of fixes, and... a port of Doom.

Coreboot is a free and open-source BIOS implementation that supports numerous extensions known as Payloads. These Payloads add functionality to the minimal code that is the basis of Coreboot. Therefore, a great deal of customizability is available to Coreboot users to determine exactly what their BIOS ROMs contain via Payload choices.

To configure Coreboot for a usable setup, one might typically start by adding a bootloader, with a choice of eight available currently according to the official Wiki. Then there is support for various popular OSes, a handful of utilities provided as Payloads, and even some games. If your BIOS flash memory space is large enough, you could even shoehorn in a Linux distribution.
There's a few caveats. (There's no sound or "save game" feature, "and your system will hang on exiting the game.")

But their article still calls Doom "a great new choice if you are bored of the Grub Invaders (Space Invaders) and Tint (Tetris) clone Payloads, bringing 3D gaming to your BIOS."

Would you drink a glass of Klingon Blood Wine? Or Cardassian Kanar Red Blend? Maybe you'd prefer the Andorian Blue Premium Chardonnay, or the United Federation of Planets Special Reserve Sauvignon Blanc...

Star Trek wines — a collaboration between CBS Consumer Products and Wines That Rock — has now added those four new flavors to their original two (which Ars Technica described as "far better than we expected, although very much over-priced.") So Ars hosted a wine tasting including the new wines, with their six testers joining "Q himself — aka actor John de Lancie." Also taste-testing was The Orville writer Andre Bormanis (a former science advisor for Star Trek: The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager and Enterprise).

"Wine assessments were anonymous, in keeping with the gathering's super-casual vibe. And the wine was purchased out of pocket, not gifted for promotional purposes."

They'd tried this once before in 2019. Their three-year mission? To explore strange new wines... Next up: A Bordeaux blend from Chateau Picard (although the label claims it's a 2386 vintage to keep the conceit going): 85 percent cabernet and 15 percent merlot. As I noted [in 2019], this is a bona fide winery, with a centuries-old vineyard in the St.-Estephe region. It just so happens that Jean-Luc Picard's family has long run a fictional vineyard of the same name, albeit in the Burgundy region rather than Bordeaux — it features prominently in Picard. The real winery agreed to collaborate on a special edition of their cru bourgeois vintage for the Star Trek collection.

The Bordeaux blend also came out on top with the 2022 tasting crew, who declared it "perfectly quaffable" and "surprisingly good." The wine is light and dry, "easy on the palate," with "a clean finish," and fairly well balanced. It's almost as if Bordeaux wine makers have had centuries of experience to draw upon. This was the only bottle the tasting crew polished off completely.

Alas, the four new varieties in the Star Trek wine collection fall far, far short of their predecessors....

I will give the Star Trek Wine folks props for creative bottle design, especially the corkscrew shape of the Cardassian blend. The broad consensus was that the Klingon Blood Wine is trying to be a pinot noir and falling short; it's basically a very fruity California cabernet, with perhaps a hint of pepper. "Whoever supplied this blood ate nothing but fruit salad the week prior," one taster noted, with another simply writing, "Way too sweet." The most generous assessment was that it is "drinkable but not extraordinary...."

With the evergreen caveat that taste in wine is highly subjective, here's our recommendation. Stick with the original two bottles for your Star Trek wine, or save yourself some money and get something comparable for a fraction of the price — unless, of course, you're really keen to collect the whole set of unusual bottle designs. Or you're a Cardassian who loves really sweet wine.
Meanwhile, William Shatner himself is raising money for charity by auctioning off a bottle of "James T. Kirk" whiskey — the actual prop used on Star Trek: Picard. "The bottle does not contain real Bourbon just a colored liquid," its description notes — but the bottle has actually been autographed by 91-year-old Shatner.

"Serial entrepreneur" Gary Vaynerchuk launched a four-day conference "exploring digital ownership and the way emerging technologies could interact with art, sports and entertainment," reports the Pioneer Press: It's billed as an event "featuring icons of business, sports, music, arts, Web3, and popular culture in conversation to build lasting relationships, share ideas, and connect with the community." VeeCon is expected to draw over 10,000 visitors from around world who will hear from 150 speakers, from New Age guru Deepak Chopra to filmmaker Spike Lee and the ubiquitous rapper Snoop Dogg. [Also speaking: Randi Zuckerberg, Mark Zuckerberg's sister]

Tickets were sold in the form of NFTs, which are non-fungible tokens sold on the blockchain, a digital ledger of transactions. Much of the conference will dive into the potential applications for NFTs.

Ami Barzelay, chief product officer of Crinkle, a shopping rewards optimizer, described NFT ownership as "digital bragging rights." An NFT, which could be an image, song or video, can be copied and enjoyed by anyone in the world, but it may have just one owner. The NFT market, still in its infancy, has seen wild swings in what people are willing to pay for digital assets, which Barzelay has experienced first-hand. He said that for fun, he paid $100 for a video clip of Tiger Woods and later sold it for $5,000.

There is inherent skepticism and fear around buying and selling things that don't exist in the physical world, which VeeCon aims to address.
The article quotes Vaynerchuk as saying "Education and communication solve everything," adding later that "NFTs are really fun for collectability, but it is a tiny part of the consumer blockchain."

CNBC points out that holders of the NFT-format tickets "also are given exclusive access to the annual event for three years after the NFT's purchase." Though they also end on a skeptical note: "Right now the overwhelming energy of the space is very short term. I would call it greed. Many are not spending their time on education," Vaynerchuk said.

"The reality is that all that behavior is going to lead to 97-98% of these current projects losing value over the next 24-36 months because the supply and demand curves will not work out."
The event's schedule included happy hours that were officially hosted by Johnnie Walker and Captain Morgan.

On Twitter one attendee reported from the festival that digital artist Beeple "just got caked in the face in front of 7,000 people by Steve Aoki and it was incredible."

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: Today sees an event celebrating the 50th anniversary of 1970s children's programming giants Sid & Marty Krofft. (Born in 1929, Sid Krofft will turn 93 in July). And reportedly Marty Krofft has now partnered with NFT producer Orange Comet "in a multiyear contract to release NFTs based on the often enigmatic and much-beloved television shows they have brought to us since 1969."

The first one commemorates Land of the Lost — dropping sometime after September.

Today I learned their big break in America came from making puppets for Dean Martin's show, followed by designing and directing the Banana Splits and a string of successful children's shows on Saturday mornings. ( Land of the Lost, H.R. Pufunstuf, Lidsville, Sigmund and the Sea Monsters...) Looking back, Krofft muses that even today somewhere in New York City, "some guy 50 years old, remembers the damn theme songs. Because there were only three networks, so basically every kid in America saw our shows." In the article Marty Krofft describes their style as "a nightmare and bizarre" — or, more pragmatically, as "Disney without a budget" (while crediting future Disney CEO Michael Eisner for being their mentor).

Yet the article adds that "They were nearly unstoppable with styrofoam, paint and cloth. In a digital universe of truly endless possibilities, there is no telling where they could take their stories."

What did you think of Twitter Data Dash?

The Guardian describes it as "a Super Nintendo-style browser game that recaps Twitter's private policy."

And the Verge applauds the game — released Wednesday — for its "delightful pixel art aesthetic." "Welcome to PrivaCity!" reads a description of the game on the site. "Get your dog, Data, safely to the park.

"Dodge cat ads, swim through a sea of DMs, battle trolls, and learn how to take control of your Twitter experience along the way...."

The game itself is a pretty straightforward side-scrolling platformer. Each level is themed around what I can best describe as Twitter Things — one features cats wearing ad boards, another has you avoiding trolls — and your goal is to collect five bones as quickly as you can. If you get the bones, the game will explain something about Twitter's privacy settings related to that level and even offer a button linking to Twitter's settings. When you beat the cat ad level, for example, you'll see a message about how Twitter customizes your experience on the platform and points to where you can turn personalized ads on or off....

Twitter introduced the game as part of a bigger push around its privacy policy, which the company has rewritten. "We've emphasized clear language and moved away from legal jargon," Twitter said on its Safety account.
Gizmodo calls the game "adorable," but also "buggy". And they also have some quibbles with its ultimate message: It's a bit rich that Twitter made a game about avoiding faceless advertisers when the platform is actively doing everything it can to make ads tougher to avoid....

[A]fter watching our personas bounce from level to level with our lil blue dog in tow, it became clear that this game is less for us — or any Twitter user, really — and more for the company itself. It's a way to paper over uncomfortable topics like "privacy" and "consent" and "ownership of our personal data" with a lil blue dog, collecting lil bones by hopping across lil stages. Just promise you won't think about where those bones came from in the first place.

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: He was the co-publisher of the first popular digital culture magazine, MONDO 2000, from 1989–1993. Now as R. U. Sirius approaches his 70th birthday, a San Francisco-based writer conducts a rollicking interview for the Berlin-based Spike Art Magazine. ("I wanted to speak with someone who had weathered the shakedown of history with art, humour, and a dose of healthy delusion. Or derision. Whatever arrived first...")

That interview itself was star-crossed. ("What came first, R.U.'s stroke or the Omicron surge? As I recovered from a bout of corona, R.U. fell ill with his own strain.. ") But eventually they did discuss the founding of that influential cyberculture magazine. (Editor Jude Milhon is credited with coining the word "cypherpunk" for an early crytography-friendly group co-founded by EFF pioneer John Gilmore.) Asked about the magazine's original vision, Sirius says "I was pretty much diverted by Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson and their playful, hopeful futurisms, their whole shebang about evolutionary brain circuits being opened up by drugs and technology."


I needed something to get me out of bed at the end of the 1970s. I mean, punk was great – rock and roll was great – but it wasn't inspiring any action. I remember my friends stole some giant lettering from a sign at a gas station and some of it hung behind the couch in our living room where we took whatever drugs were around and tossed glib nihilisms back and forth. The letters read "ROT".... I couldn't sink any deeper into that couch, so there was nowhere to go except up into outer space.

The surrealism and so forth were influences that travelled with me when I moved to California to create this new thing based on psychedelics, technology, and incorrigible irreverence that eventually became Mondo 2000.


It's a funny interview. ("The 'R.U. a Cyberpunk' page from an issue of Mondo is the only thing most people below a certain age have ever seen from the magazine and we were taking the piss out of ourselves....") They scrupulously avoid mentioning Mondo's undeniable influence on the early days of Wired. But inevitaby the conversation comes back around to that seminal question: whither cyberpunk?


Q: The internet, which was a prime source of Mondo subject matter, is home to many eyes, rabbit holes, and agents of algorithmic manipulation. Where is cyberpunk culture alive and well in our contemporary moment? Are you still invested and engaged with cyberpunk as a means of exploring radical possibilities and ideas...?

RUS: [T]here's not really a cyberpunk movement... Surrealism was a movement for a number of years because an anguished control freak named André Breton maintained it in various formations. We didn't have that person, and if we had, he or she or they probably would have been laughed out of the sandbox for the attempt....

I'll remain influenced by playful spontaneity from ancient 20th-century moments not because of any dedication, but only because that's probably the only way I was ever going to be able to write or create. I lack rigor and once declared it a sign of death.


And Sirius jokes at the end that "usually my attitude is that the world today is bloated with people opinionizing so, this interview is a mistake!"

In 1972, photo prints that developed before your eyes were "downright magical," argues Fast Company — "and still meaningful today."

A new article at Fast Company points out that while Polaroid went bankrupt twice, and stopped making cameras in 2007, "Then an unexpected thing happened: It turned out that even Polaroid couldn't kill Polaroid." Even as instant photography's eulogies were being written, a band of enthusiasts known as The Impossible Project bought the last Polaroid factory that hadn't been hastily dismantled and started producing film packs again. The task required reformulating its own chemistry from scratch, and it was years until the results reached the vicinity of original Polaroid quality. Fans were very patient.

Eventually, the Impossible Project and Polaroid came under the same ownership, adopted Polaroid as the unified brand, and started making instant cameras again. The new models start at $100 and look a lot like that 1977 OneStep, even when they're adorably miniaturized. It's almost as if Polaroid's years in limbo were a bad dream.... Polaroid and several smaller companies refurbish old models, replacing worn parts and otherwise returning them to optimum performance. Repairing an SX-70 generally involves permanently removing its leather, but replacement skins are available in an array of styles, from the traditional to the psychedelic.

Increasingly, yesteryear's Polaroid cameras are springing back to life in surprising ways. Wisconsin-based Retrospekt not only revives old models, but also encases antique innards in new plastic shells, allowing it to sell branding crossovers such as Malibu Barbie and Pepsi-themed Polaroid cameras. Hong Kong's Mint offers a camera called the SLR670 that's really a restored SX-70 accompanied by a gizmo that plugs into the flash port to allow for manual settings. And Open SX-70 is a project to smarten up the SX-70 by replacing its 1970s circuit board with a tiny Arduino computer.
Other things I learned from the article:

• "Each film pack contained its own battery, so the camera would never run out of juice at an inopportune moment."
• Kodak was forced out of the instant photography market in 1986 by a Polaroid patent infringement suit in which Polaroid won $925 million in damages.
• Edwin Land's "final gambit to revolutionize photography" was 1977's wildly unpopular Polavision instant home movies.
• There's a 1974 ad for the cameras narrated by Laurence Olivier.

Streaming right now on Hulu: a three-hour live special in which two members of something called the "Red Bull Air Force" try to make aviation history, reports People: On Sunday, April 24, Aikins and Farrington will try to switch planes mid-air in a stunt at Sawtooth Airport in Eloy, Arizona, that can be seen exclusively on Hulu, according to a press release from Red Bull. The planes will be "completely empty" and facing the ground when Luke Aikins and Andy Farrington attempt the daring switch, which will air during a three-hour livestream event.

To complete the feat, Aikins and Farrington will fly a pair of Cessna 182 single-seat aircraft up to 14,000 feet before putting them into a vertical nosedive and jumping out, with the goal of skydiving into each other's planes.

The cousins will stop the planes' engines and aim them toward the ground as they complete the stunt. A custom airbrake with the ability to hold the planes in a controlled-descent terminal velocity speed of 140 mph will also be utilized to complete the trick. After catching up to the opposing stuntman's plane, Aikins and Farrington will enter the cockpits and turn the planes back on as normal, piloting them to land.

Aikins is an experienced skydiver, having completed more than 21,000 jumps throughout his career. Farrington, meanwhile, has completed 27,000 jumps.
"I call it more calculated than crazy," Aikins says in an interview with the web site Complex. "We work really hard to make sure that everything's going to be okay. We don't flip a coin and fingers crossed and hope it all works out. We mitigate the risk down to something that's acceptable and what's acceptable to me."

Slashdot reader alaskana98 writes: In what has become a stubborn sibling to the 'Face on Mars' phenomenon, the legend of the Dark Knight alien satellite has persisted for years and is the fascinating story of a seemingly mundane NASA photo tied together with reports of seemingly mysterious radio waves captured in the early days of radio, all combining to make the ultimate space conspiracy theory.

It goes something like this — an ancient alien space probe, dubbed the 'Dark Knight, has been long orbiting Earth and covertly monitoring its blissfully unaware inhabitants for mysterious purposes for roughly 10,000 years. Flash forward to the 1899, where technological pioneer Nikola Tesla, while experimenting with radio technology in his Colorado laboratory supposedly captured mysterious emanations from an unearthly object. Later in the 1920's, Norwegian engineer Jørgen Hals found that radio signals he transmitted were being echoed back to him a few seconds later, something called 'long delayed echoes' — still unexplained to this day. It has been proposed that these echoes were signals being relayed back to earth by something called a 'Bracewell Probe', a hypothetical automated spacecraft sent out with the goal of making contact with other intelligent species.

Flash forward to 1998, an unassuming photo from the STS-88 mission in 1998 to attach the U.S. module to the Russian portion of the ISS captured a tantalizing glimpse of an unnaturally geometric shape menacingly loitering toward the bottom of the frame. To true believers, this was evidence of an ancient probe keeping tabs on the earthly locals. Combined, these disparate events swirl together to create the stuff of dreams for the ardent conspiracy theorist and even the causal sci-fi buff. Ultimately, the object in the STS photo was most likely a thermal cover. The radio waves Tesla heard? Likely natural radio emisions of a natural or terestial source.

Space.com took a deep dive into this myth and explored how it — and the - dark knight myth has taken a hold on the imaginations of those who find themselves peering out into the inky blackness of the night and wonder to themselves "are we being watched from above"?