Xbox wants more Fallout, and after a yearslong drought of new games, Bethesda Softworks is making it happen. Bethesda plans to release remasters of both Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas for modern platforms, the company said in July in a massive roadmap of the developer's future. Those remasters are part of a larger plan to reinvest in Fallout games — including Fallout 5, which is currently in pre-production — and a new untitled project at Obsidian Entertainment.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act makes it a crime to remove the encryption from software. That means you can't customize or repair your applications or devices if they are encrypted. Consumer electronics manufacturers abuse this dumb law by encrypting invasive spyware. — Read the rest

The post A dumb copyright law makes it illegal to remove the spyware from your own TV appeared first on Boing Boing.

Darth Vader's hero dueling lightsaber that was used in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi sold for $4.875 million. It's the highest price ever paid for a Star Wars item at an auction. 

Experts screen-matched the lightsaber to the same prop in the films to guarantee its authenticity. — Read the rest

The post Darth Vader's lightsaber sells for a record $4.875 million appeared first on Boing Boing.

Thank you, America, you understood the assignment.

But also, Jesus, what a faceplant for Trump and all of the Republican party. Do you understand how much you have to have fucked up that Kansas elected a Democratic senator? That literally hasn’t happened since the New Deal. Do you know how much you have to have fucked up to have Mississippi still in play as of the writing of this post? MISSISSIPPI. You don’t get any more Republican territory than Mississippi, goddamn. Except maybe South Carolina, which just elected a Democrat to Lindsey Graham’s old seat. North Carolina elected a Democratic senator and flipped one of their state legislative bodies to Democrat.

And holy shit, Texas! Not just senator Talarico, not just Governor Hinojosa, but as far as I can tell every single statewide office went blue, down to and including the railroad commissioner. The Democrats look like they’re going to flip the Texas house, too. FUCKING TEXAS WENT BLUE Y’ALL. Not just a little, but a lot.

(And Ohio, too, where I live, but I’ll get to that in a second.)

Now, credit is due to the Democrats actually fielding decent candidates this year and doing the work — you don’t get Abdul El-Sayed into the senate (as an example) without Abdul El-Sayed being a generationally sensational candidate. But let’s make no mistake that this blue wave is a response to an administration and political party so corrupt and awful and, yes, actually fucking evil, that a certain number of people who have perennially voted red either voted blue or stayed at home, and a lot of blue-voting people who might have stayed home for a mid-term went out of their way to get to the polls this time around.

This election was a rebuke and a repudiation, and I hope to the sweet and merry God above that the Democrats remember that when they’re seated in January. They were not elected to office to play nice with the fascists in the halls of power. They were elected to punch them in the face, repeatedly, the president most of all, but, be assured, not only him. There is to be a lot of punching going on.

Now, Ohio. When I went to bed last night Amy Acton was elected governor and Sherrod Brown senator, but all the other statewide offices were still showing as red. Well, I just checked this morning, and holy buckets, every state office but auditor, including the Ohio Supreme Court seats, looks to have gone to the Democrats. By extremely small margins, to be sure! But you know what you call a win by an extremely small margin? A win.

And the US House races, with a new map that the state GOP designed to be gerrymandered as fuck to their advantage? Seven seats went to Democrats, which brings them to near parity with the GOP in a state with fifteen congressional districts. Shit, in my district, OH-8, Warren Davidson, who since 2016 has won his seat with between 60%-70% of the vote every election, scraped by this time with just 52% of the vote. The GOP nearly just gerrymandered themselves out of a state congressional majority. The GOP also looks to have lost its supermajority in the Ohio house, so, goodbye ignoring the governor’s veto for them. This is all excellent news.

As I noted the other day, and without taking away from the work of Acton, Brown and all the rest of the Democrats, it’s the fact the GOP voters, in their infinite wisdom, chose Vivek Ramaswamy as their candidate for governor in the primary, largely on the endorsement of Trump, that helped tip Ohio back into purplehood. It’s hard to overstate what a historically bad candidate Ramaswamy was, and ultimately how poor a fit he was for the Ohio GOP (much less any other Ohio voter). And even then he still got 44% of the vote, because tankies gonna tank. But 44% was not enough. So much for the power of a Trump endorsement in 2026.

Speaking of Trump, I have no doubt if the Democratic margins had been smaller this year that Trump would be doing his usual thing of belching about fixed elections and other such nonsense, but at the end of the evening the wave was high enough that even he couldn’t pretend that it was anything other than a wipeout. He rather meekly went on record that he would “respect the results” and then went on Truth Social to bluster that if he had been on the ballot things would have turned out differently. Motherfucker, you were on the ballot. Everything you’ve done in the last two years is why this election went the way it did.

I still expect Trump and his odious cronies to pull hijinks, and never forget that he is actually still president for two more years, unless he dies, resigns, is impeached, or just one day boards a plane for Russia just for fun and never comes back. We’re still stuck with him through January 2029. Adjust expectations accordingly.

But no matter what, last night was the beginning of the end of the Trump era. I’ve said such things before, mind you, and have been wrong. But I feel pretty good about this time. This wasn’t a normal election. Ask Texas about that. It’s not just a wave. It’s a sea change.

— JS

If you missed it, here’s a link to the NPR site and the audio of the interview. The transcript is not yet up but when it is, I’ll post it too. It’s a good interview! But then I am biased.

Just two days until the book is out!

(Update: Transcript is up.)

— JS

Earlier today, a really fun memory surfaced that I wanted to share, because I haven’t had an opportunity to tell a story in a little while. It’s an older memory, so I’m sure some of the specifics aren’t entirely correct, but this is way I remember it.

In the early 2000s, I worked on a couple of movies that were direct-to-DVD, low budget versions of successful, big budget movies of the moment. Call it the Roger Corman model.

In the first one I did, Deep Core, the whole Earth is going to explode or something, unless an unlikely band of misfits can drill to the Deep Core of the planet and set off the bomb or whatever. It’s sort of like Armageddon but underground, and also like The Core, but for about sixteen dollars and some wire from the bin behind the hardware store.

Now, having said that, it’s a charming and silly and extremely fun movie where my character eventually turns into a flaming skeleton with the help of an unexpected gout of magma in the third act. It understands the assignment, because we all understood the assignment. It was a fun set, where we got to just play our scenes to the best of our ability.

And I got to work with some lovely castmates. The unlikely band of misfits, collected from an oil field of questionable legality, were played by me, Craig Scheffer, Bruce McGill, and Terry Farrell.

At some point in the story, the four of us are in this drilling machine thing that looks suspiciously like a shuttlecraft from a popular 1990s science fiction program. It’s a practical set that comes apart in the middle, longways, and is set atop a system of boards and other boards that create a poor man’s gimbal to simulate the exciting motion while we are flying through space drilling toward the Deep Core. It was cool, especially for a low budget set. You could only see some of the nails, and the parts that weren’t supposed to wobble mostly didn’t. I recall the console having lots of practical toggles and buttons, which is always a lot of fun.

We filmed in this thing for about a week. On the first day, during our first rehearsal, those extremely safe and union-approved levers were tested out while we all sat in our places. Terry and Craig were in the driver’s seats, Bruce and I faced away from each other down the sides of the thing, behind them. I liked to imagine I was the Spock of this crew.

So the director gets us all together on the first day. We talk about the whole “drilling Deep into the Core ” of it all. He says, “So this isn’t a smooth ride, as you drill through the rocks. We’re going to move the set a little bit, but you’ll need to sell it with your own motion.”

Craig asks what that motion should look like and the director says it’s sort of like being in a tank over a dirt road.

At this point, I look at Terry over my shoulder, and find that she is already looking at me.

“So you think this is about a 3?” She says.

“Yeah, that seems about right,” I agree, and we both turn back to take our positions for rehearsal.

This is when Craig holds up a hand and says, “Hold on. What was that? You two just communicated something to each other, using words I understand, and I have no idea what you said.”

Terry and I burst out laughing.

“It’s the Star Trek shake scale,” I tell him. “When there are nine actors in a scene and we get hit by a photon torpedo, we all need to react with the same intensity, so we have the scale.”

“We weren’t even on the same show, and we both use the scale,” Terry added.

“Yeah, it’s standardized across all series,” I said. “First week at the Academy stuff.”

This makes Terry and me laugh, all over again.

“So are you guys going to teach us?” Bruce asks, his voice bright with amusement.

Terry and I look at each other and play out the bit just a little longer. “Sure,” I say, “a 3 looks like this.” I nod at Terry and we both start doing an identical level of shimmy and shake. “This is a 6,” she says, and we both flop over our consoles before we right ourselves.

“Damage report!” I say. As I remember this moment, even though my memories are a quarter century old and I’ve certainly gotten some of the specifics wrong, I can so clearly see and feel how much fun we had while we were doing this. When I talk about how Star Trek is a family that you never leave unless you want to, this is what I am talking about. Moments like this that only a few hundred people, in the history of the world, have experienced in this specific way. It’s such a blessing, such a gift.

At this point, the director and the whole crew are watching us. The director asks us for a 1, and we do it. Bruce asks for a 5, and we shake side to side before we steady ourselves on our consoles. Someone asks for a 10, and in the literal blink of an eye, we silently agree we are not doing that. They can’t handle a 10. They think they can, but they have no idea.

“Sorry, that only happens when we crash the Enterprise,” I say.

Everyone laughs, and the first AD asserts that we have to get to work, guys. The director gets ready to call action on rehearsal.

“Okay, everyone,” he pauses for a moment, then continues with purpose, “this is a 3,” he says. “And, action!”

I glance over my shoulder and see Craig is doing about a 2, but he’s getting there. Bruce is a solid 3, cheating a little bit with a sideways glace toward Terry, who makes it look easy.

I suppress a grin and gently rock side to side, as I match their tempo, a perfect 3.

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