Last minute geek

1. "Ayn Rand is a Dick" - excerpt from a new book by Mike Monteiro
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

... about Objectivist philosopher Ayn Rand's influence on Silicon Valley. He's a funny writer! Welcome to Silicon Valley. A libertarian stronghold at the very end of America. (Literally.) Silicon Valley, and ...

2. Ars Technica is looking for a "technology and society" reporter
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

If you've got 3+ years of experience and want to cover "the growing political and cultural Big Tech backlash,' copyright clashes, the culture of Silicon Valley firms, tech-policy battles, and important ...

3. Excellent prank featuring a creepy porcelain doll
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

From Drayton Valley, Alberta, Canada comes this devilish prank. A woman noticed that her sister was selling a porcelain doll through Facebook's marketplace so she secretly bought it and sneaked it back ...

4. Parents and college prep agent allegedly deepfaked photos of kids to make them look athletic
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

... of an athlete via Photoshop, prosecutors said. The two most famous parents of those indicted are actresses Lori Loughman and Felicity Huffman, but the full list also includes a number of Silicon Valley ...

5. Watch: The Inventor documentary trailer about the rise and fall of Theranos grifter Elizabeth Holmes
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, HBO's documentary about fraudster Elizabeth Holmes, who started her multi-billion-dollar healthcare company Theranos when she was 19-years-old, airs on March ...

6. Palmer Luckey wins secretive Pentagon contract to develop AI for drones
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

... a “vocal minority” that empowers American adversaries abroad. Moreover, he said that the Defense Department has failed to connect with top tech talent because many engineers are “stuck in Silicon Valley ...

7. The best quote from Aminatou Sow's interview in The Cut is about Elizabeth Holmes's "fake blood machine"
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

"The thing I learned in Silicon Valley is that there’s a pot of money bigger than I ever imagined. That’s when I realized I don’t need to feel some sort of way about asking for $70,000 at work when Elizabeth ...

8. Farming RPG ‘Stardew Valley’ finally comes to Android
(English/engadget)

About five months after the "delightful farming RPG Stardew Valley" came to iOS, it's ready for Android. The now three-year-old game will be available on the Google Play Store for $8 on ...

9. Speakout Tech: a call for tech worker whistleblowers
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

... why we're launching a new campaign calling on employees of Silicon Valley companies to blow the whistle on unethical uses of technology. And poetically, we're crowdfunding and using Facebook's own microtargeting ...

10. Oakland's tech startups are reportedly being gentrified out of their spaces by deep-pocketed marijuana growers
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

... valley." Read the rest Read all  ...

11. Ascii World: minimalist pseudo-3D game in ASCII characters
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

Ascii World isn't a 3D shader, nor is it is a graphical toy. It's a complete "isometric"-style game, like Monument Valley, that uses basic ASCII characters to draw (and define) all its forms and geometries. ...

12. Trailer for new Moomins TV show
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

Coming to Finnish and British TV this spring—and hopefully soon to the U.S. too. MOOMINVALLEY [YouTube] is a brand new adaptation of the much-loved Moomin stories of Tove Jansson, a Finnish-Swedish writer ...

13. This was the first US mainstream television commercial featuring a gay couple
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

... Silicon Valley start-up disaster Theranos!) From a 1994 article in the Los Angeles Times: A few East Coast Ikea stores have been targeted by angry protesters who have jammed phone lines since last ...

14. Photographing computers to show the art inside the black box
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

[Editor's note: I was utterly taken with the gorgeous photos in the new edition of Core Memory, photographer Mark Richards's lavish survey of the vintage computing hardware in Silicon Valley's gem, the ...

15. Turn-based strategy game 'Wargroove' arrives on Switch February 1st
(English/engadget)

Wargroove, a turn-based strategy game from the publisher of Stardew Valley, is coming to the Nintendo Switch on February 1st. That's also when it will land on Steam and Xbox One for $19.99. Strangely, ...

16. Handheld Oregon Trail game on sale at a deep discount
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

... Missouri to Oregon's WIllamette Valley circa 1848. Fill your covered wagon with supplies and prepare to cross rivers and mountain ranges along the way - hunting for food and trading for supplies as you ...

17. Get your geek on with NatGeo’s new series Valley of the Boom
(English/the-gadgeteer)

... 90s when regular people like you and I first started learning about the World Wide Web, @ … Get your geek on with NatGeo’s new series Valley of the Boom Read More Read all  ...

18. Billionaire Beach Villain Vinod Khosla has a thought concerning Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

Vinod Khosla is a Silicon Valley venture capitalist who chose to define his legacy through a spectacular legal battle to block access to the public part of a beach are he owns in California. Alexandria ...

19. Mysterious repeating signal from distant galaxy detected by new radio telescope
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

... been reported once before, by a different telescope. ... The CHIME observatory, located in British Columbia's Okanagan Valley, consists of four 100-metre-long, semi-cylindrical antennas, which scan the ...

20. Silicon Valley real estate asking prices fall 12% from peak
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

... in Silicon Valley and San Francisco combined skyrocketed by 455% from a year earlier to 444. Read the rest Read all  ...

21. Califonia's haunted wineries host different kinds of spirits
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

... there in the old hospital, going on to become the Sonoma Valley Wine Museum and then the Bartholomew Park Winery in 1992... This rather grim past came back to haunt the winery in the 1970s, perhaps literally, ...

22. Tech isn’t coming to save us
(English/engadget)

It's easy to believe that something new is naturally better than what we've already got, with the exception of the second Darrin on Bewitched. It's the Silicon Valley mind-set, that you've ...

23. "Um, Actually," there is a game show of nerd pwnage
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

... with "Um, actually..." Many of the contestants on the show are familiar faces from Geek & Sundry, The Nerdist, CollegeHumor, and shows like Silicon Valley. When "Um, Actually" first showed up on YouTube ...

24. 'Stardew Valley' creator is working on more content and a new game
(English/engadget)

In a blog post and a few tweets, solo game developer Eric Barone laid out plans for 2019 that will expand his hit indie game Stardew Valley and extend to a new title. Now that he has regained the right ...

25. New music video by Dominque Pruitt: "High In The Valley"
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

Six ago I posted singer Dominique Pruitt's first music video, "To Win Your Love." Since then, she's released a number of country-inspired tunes and I like them all. Her latest is "High In The Valley." ...