Boing Boing, October 07, 2025
Leaked Epstein files, rainbow crosswalk drama, and a haunted house for rent
Happy Tuesday! Here’s today’s stories: Trump’s shocking consideration of a pardon for Ghislaine Maxwell while his allies suppress the Epstein files, plus DeSantis destroys Miami’s rainbow crosswalk despite its proven safety record. On a lighter note, the notorious Lizzie Borden house is taking overnight reservations (ax not included), and Taylor Swift faces fan backlash over suspected AI use in her latest promotional videos. Plus: A fascinating archive reveals NATO’s surprisingly stylish paranoid propaganda posters from the Cold War era.
AOC demolishes Stephen Miller, and Fox responds by critiquing her sweatshirt
Jason Weisberger / 10:06 am PT Tue Oct 7, 2025
Fox News’ Laura Ingraham forced Screamin’ Stephen Miller to sit through a video of Congressperson Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez encouraging people to laugh at him, because he is a clown. The best retort Ingraham could come up with was to critique AOC’s sweatshirt.
Miller seems uncomfortable, and his laughter doesn’t seem very genuine. Remember that this is the same guy who sent his wife out to declare him a “sexual matador” on Jesse Watters’ show. It appears AOC gets under his skin, as he’s trying to downplay her influence amongst liberals. Why Ingraham is so focused on “hoodies” is beyond me. Why is casual wear a problem? I am wearing a hoodie right now.
A high-speed Don Jr is mad at Fox News
Jason Weisberger / 9:51 am PT Tue Oct 7, 2025
Part of the campaign to discredit any news source not his father, Donald Trump Jr, launched into a 200 mph critique of not-conservative-enough Fox News.
Fox News is anything but unfriendly to the Trump Administration. Suspected of using AI to pump up claims of “antifa abuse,” and inviting mysterious, unidentified guests to represent non-existent terrorist organizations, any attempt to paint Fox as not onside is pretty hilarious. That is, however, the strategy.
Next, NewsMax and OAN will likely come under fire for hosting Marjorie Taylor Greene too frequently. At least Don Jr seems to be maintaining his usual high-energy performances.
Yet another Russian falls out yet another window
Jason Weisberger / 9:24 am PT Tue Oct 7, 2025
The publisher of Pravda, 87-year-old Vyacheslav Leontyev, continued the Russian tradition of influential or wealthy people falling out of windows.
Leontyev was believed to have the dirt on many rich Russians and the sources of their wealth. Police are investigating to determine if the traditional form of murder was accidental, suicide, or possibly foul play.
Malgin, who knew Leontyev well, added: “He gave the impression of a sort of underground millionaire. He also knew a lot about the party’s money — the Pravda publishing house was the most profitable enterprise in the business empire of the CPSU [Communist Party of the Soviet Union] Central Committee.”
Russia has seen a spate of such deaths involving business leaders, journalists and former officials, often involving falls from windows, poisonings, or shootings.
The number of such cases has intensified since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Many victims were critics of the Kremlin or individuals with insider knowledge, leading to speculation about possible state involvement, although the government in Moscow has routinely denied involvement.
DeSantis’s war on rainbows finds another victim
Jason Weisberger / 9:06 am PT Tue Oct 7, 2025
Florida Gov. Ron “Pudding Fingers” DeSantis has destroyed Miami Beach’s rainbow crosswalk honoring the LGBTQ+ community, sparking outrage over what critics call Florida’s latest attack on inclusion and visibility.
The crosswalk, installed in 2018, had become a spot for tour guides to stop as they showed folks the joys of Miami. Designed to exacting Federal standards, the crosswalk boasted half as many crashes as its closest neighbor. The crosswalk “represented decades of people who endured housing discrimination, expulsion from the military, workplace discrimination, the stigma of HIV and AIDS, the fight for marriage equality, all the hard-won battles that took the LGBTQ community from being marginalized to now being a visible, celebrated part of the community,” Miami Beach Commissioner Alex Fernandez said. So, DeSantis had it destroyed.
The Department of Transportation under Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis had ordered communities to remove the crosswalks and other street art by early last month and threatened to withhold state transportation funding for noncompliance.
Critics say it’s the latest attack on the LGBTQ+ community by the DeSantis administration and Republican-controlled Legislature, including restrictions on gender-affirming care and Florida’s measure commonly referred to as Don’t Say Gay, which bans classroom instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity in public schools.
DeSantis has previously explained his administration’s rationale: “I think the street art got out of hand. I think it’s much better that we use crosswalks and streets for their intended purpose.”
Trump feels compelled to review pardon for a friend convicted of sex trafficking a minor
Jason Weisberger / 8:50 am PT Tue Oct 7, 2025
Held liable for sexual assault, real estate fraud, and President of the United States Donald Trump feels compelled to consider pardoning convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell.
While MAGA Mike Johnson is busy blocking the release of the Epstein files, Donald Trump finds no issue in considering a pardon for a known sex-trafficker and accomplice of Jeffrey Epstein. Trump held a well-documented friendship with Epstein and is apparently very afraid of the evidence contained in the files.
Trump has already arranged a much nicer location for Maxwell to serve her sentence. Why not just set her free?
Xbox’s new handheld will run you a cool thousand dollars
Grant St. Clair / 8:19 am PT Tue Oct 7, 2025
Have you noticed that every time Xbox has been in the news lately, it’s because of intense sticker shock? This is a rare marketing maneuver called ‘shooting yourself in the foot’. Xbox clearly isn’t taking that blood-dripping foot off the gas, between that infamous Game Pass price hike and their newest announcement: a thousand-dollar handheld.
Rumors had swirled about a handheld Xbox developed in collaboration with ASUS for a while, but none of them happened to mention the price before it finally arrived:
Slick marketing graphics aside, the ROG Xbox Ally X will run you a full thousand dollars for what is, in essence, a Steam Deck with an Xbox logo slapped on it. Even the “budget” option has an asking price of $600 (more than even the controversially expensive Switch 2). For a full thousand dollars, I’d at least expect a better aesthetic for the console than “fake Xbox stand-in a TV show props department fabricates to avoid paying licensing fees”.
Archive of paranoid NATO security posters
Rob Beschizza / 8:19 am PT Tue Oct 7, 2025
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was founded in 1949 to provide collective security guarantees to Western countries and deter Soviet expansion into its sphere of influence. Over the years, there were many posters. Most are magnificently paranoid yet handsomely designed. [via John Scalzi: “Scarfolk vibes”]
I think my favorite is the one with the fox and the crow.
Stay the night (if you dare) at Lizzie Borden’s haunted bed and breakfast
Séamus Bellamy / 8:14 am PT Tue Oct 7, 2025
American democracy has been driven right into the ditch. There’s a genocide happening, and no one with the means cares to stop it. More people than ever must choose between paying the rent and buying food and medicine. 9-1-1 is still, somehow, on TV and highly rated. So much is going wrong right now. Being kind to ourselves and one another has never been more critical. Isn’t it time that you got away from it all, just for a little while? Somewhere charming, storied, and twee.
You know, like Lizzie Borden’s house.
Yep, they’ve made it into a bed and breakfast. While the infamous axe aficionado’s digs, located in Fall River, Massachusetts, operates as a museum during the day, the reputedly haunted three-story house also welcomes guests to stay overnight and stay for a bit of nosh if they make it to the next morning. Before you turn in, why not do a little ghost hunting? You’ll fall asleep, totally not thinking about the terrible murders that took place in the building you plan on resting in, vulnerable and unprotected, for eight or nine hours. In the dark. In the night.
According to Google, the price for a night’s stay is around $500. So, if you’re not scared by your room’s atmosphere, the price to poop in its bathroom will definitely put the fear in you. Last I checked, the joint was all booked up for Halloween. However, Christmas and New Year’s Eve are wide open.
Taylor Swift can’t shake off rumors of AI use
Séamus Bellamy / 8:05 am PT Tue Oct 7, 2025
You either die a hero or live long enough to become the villain. It could be that Taylor Swift has decided to veer way the hell into the latter. Indulge with me, if you will, in the delicious potential irony of her using artificial intelligence—technology that’s built on the stolen labour of creatives—when she’s been hellbent on the control and preservation of her own work:
Taylor Swift once said, “You deserve to own the art you make.” Apparently, that doesn’t apply to the millions of artists who have had their works fed into the data wood chipper that is generative AI tools. In the lead-up to the release of the world’s biggest pop star’s latest album, “Life of a Showgirl,” fans were treated to easter egg videos designed to build hype. Instead, sharp-eyed Swifties started to spot what appeared to be AI-generated imagery within the teaser videos, and launched full Swift-vestigations into the situation.
Allegedly, the fingerprints of AI can be found smudging up several promotional videos for her new record. To view the videos, people needed to locate an orange door in several cities and scan a QR code. I can imagine that her fans would have been thrilled to find those doors. However, it appears that a number of them were less than pleased with the fact that something seemed off in the videos. This one, uploaded by Swifties in London, England, is one of the promos under suspicion. Twitter X user @HappiiFunTime claims that if you look closely, one of the hangers disappears as the camera pans and zooms in. And you know what? They’re right. Watch the top right corner of the screen, near the end of the film. The hanger goes poof:
So, let’s say the promo was made using AI. Swift either knew about it being used to in the video’s production and was fine with it. She’s a busy professional. This leads to one of two conclusions.
She’s the hardworking musician that she claims to be. Swift watches over her empire and art, careful to see that it all stays under her careful control. She vets her staff, what they do and, every iota of her online presence. She cares so much about how her work is being used by the record companies that she signed with that she used her own money to buy the rights to her songs back. Alternatively, she’s full of shit: The earnest belief she claims in artists maintaining control of their creations only applies to her. It’s less expensive to use AI than it is to employ a crew to create promotional videos. If that means that other artists’ work is stolen to train the tools that help her bottom line, so be it.
Documents show Flock license plate search by sheriff was abortion investigation
Rob Beschizza / 8:03 am PT Tue Oct 7, 2025
Flock Safety, whose cameras provide realtime license plate data, let deputies with the Johnson County Sheriff’s Department in Texas search for a woman suspected of having an abortion. Flock and the department claimed that it was a missing person investigation, but new information shows otherwise. The EFF’s Dave Maass and Rindala Alajaji: “This documented account runs completely counter to what law enforcement and Flock have said publicly about the case.”
Since 404 Media first reported on this case, King has perpetuated the false narrative, telling reporters that the woman was never under investigation, that officers had not considered charges against her, and that “it was all about her safety.”
But here are the facts:
• The reports that have been released so far describe this as a death investigation.
• The lead detective described himself as “working a death investigation… of a non-viable fetus” at the time he interviewed the woman (a week after the ALPR searches).
• The detective wrote that they consulted the district attorney’s office about whether they could charge her for “taking the pill to cause the abortion or miscarriage of the non-viable fetus.” They were told they could not.
• Investigators collected a lot of data, including photos and documentation of the abortion, and ran her through multiple databases. They even reviewed her text messages about the abortion.
• The death investigation was open for more than a month.
Flock’s CEO, Garrett Langley, claimed that those reporting the story were “purposefully misleading.“ Such posturing seems characteristic of its PR efforts since.
Flock has promoted this unsupported narrative on its blog and in multimedia appearances. We did not reach out to Flock for comment on this article, as their communications director previously told us the company will not answer our inquiries until we “correct the record and admit to your audience that you purposefully spread misinformation which you know to be untrue” about this case.
Consider the record corrected: It turns out the truth is even more damning than initially reported.
As reported, Flock’s network was used to hunt a woman by a sherriff now facing unrelated charges of sexual harassment, based on a report from a man who is now charged with violently abusing the investigation’s target. And this is how Langley characterizes this:
So when I look at this, I go “this is everything’s working as it should be.” A family was concerned for a family member. They used Flock to help find her, when she could have been unwell. She was physically okay, which is great. But due to the political climate, this was really good clickbait.
Before he was arrested and charged, sheriff Adam King was a problem for Johnson County. Flock is a problem for everyone.
Update: it may not surprise you to learn that ICE is using Flock too.
Data from a license plate-scanning tool that is primarily marketed as a surveillance solution for small towns to combat crimes like car jackings or finding missing people is being used by ICE, according to data reviewed by 404 Media. Local police around the country are performing lookups in Flock’s AI-powered automatic license plate reader (ALPR) system for “immigration” related searches and as part of other ICE investigations, giving federal law enforcement side-door access to a tool that it currently does not have a formal contract for.
Giving game NPCs memories to make you feel guilty for killing them
Grant St. Clair / 8:01 am PT Tue Oct 7, 2025
With violence in video games somehow a major national talking point again thanks to pearl-clutching boomers, it’s good to see modders doing their part to cut down on it. Red Dead Redemption 2‘s campaign sees you cut a bloody swath across the southern United States, stacking hundreds if not thousands of bodies in your wake. Would you still be so eager to pull the trigger on an O’Driscoll if you knew his life story and had looked into his mother’s eyes?
Modder and streamer Blurbs has cooked up a mod that gives NPCs memories and forces you to watch them when you kill them for maximum guilt. Keep those guns holstered, pardner, unless you want to witness the happiest times of your victim’s life.
This should make a pacifist run easier, at least.
I am grateful for my Continuous Blood Glucose Monitor
Séamus Bellamy / 7:38 am PT Tue Oct 7, 2025
I didn’t have a good relationship with my father when he was alive. But he was sure to impart a couple of gifts to me before he passed: the warm fuzzies that come with having a dad who thinks your birth was a terrible mistake and heart disease. Imagine my surprise when, almost two decades later, I found that he had willed another gift to me as I neared my 50th birthday. I would never have assumed he’d have enough forethought to pass along the genetics that led to me being told that I’ve got the diabeetus—such a treat.
Honestly, it’s so bad: My diet has changed very little. My sugars are now under control, and there are worse things than having to stab yourself in the love handle daily with a wee needle. But I do have some anxiety around this exciting new opportunity to eat way fewer potatoes. I’m already on eight different medications every day. Some to keep my ticker going. Others to keep the crazy that comes with my PTSD at bay. While healthcare is free in Canada, medications are not. I’m already paying $200 each month for the privilege of popping pills. Adding the stuff I need to keep my blood sugars at bay (and also, not go blind, lose a foot, or turn my kidneys to goo) into the mix has doubled that cost. It feels a little bit spooky as I’m on my own.
And then, there’s my memory. Head trauma and my mental health have turned me into a fucking goldfish. Anywhere you look, there are sticky notes in my home. Obsessive attention to my calendar and apps like OmniFocus are my only hope for staying on top of my life. I’ve forgotten to call the people I love the most, to bathe, and to take medications. It’s a constant nightmare. I didn’t get upset over my diagnosis. But the thought of having to remember to test my blood sugar multiple times a day and how to figure out insulin dosages made me cry.
I stay on top of a lot of nerd stuff: computers, phones, tablets. It’s my job. But health tech has never been in my wheelhouse. I don’t subscribe to streaming services with ads, and I don’t have cable. I seldom see ads for medications and similar products. So, I’d like to think you can imagine my relief when I was told that I could wear a sensor on my body that constantly measures my sugar levels while sampling from my sweet, sweet blood.
Seriously, it’s way too sweet.
Continuous Blood Glucose Monitors (CBG) have been around since the late 90s. Battery tech sucked back in the day, as anyone with a turn-of-the-century laptop will tell you. So a CBG would only last for a couple of days before it ran out of juice and needed to be replaced. The one I’ve got stuck to the back of my arm, a Freestyle Libre 2, can go for 14 days before I have to crack open a new one. It’s just as well, as the things aren’t cheap. Without a drug plan, you’re looking at over $200 a month for the things. But holy shit, what a relief it is not to have to worry about having to check my sugars using the traditional finger-prick method.
I check in with the app multiple times each day to see where I stand. I’ve eaten something, my numbers go up. I get ready to sleep, and the numbers go down. If my Blood sugar drifts too low, I get an alarm well before I’m in danger of hypoglycaemia. And, because I still have little clue of what I’m doing where management is concerned, this is the one time that I’m cool with being surveilled. My data can be accessed at any time by the nurse practitioner who’s helping me navigate my new condition. To me, it’s magic like something you’d find in The Hammer of Arthur Gauntlet.
I’m not trying to sell anything here. If you’ve got what I’ve got, you know what you need to do to stay healthy. But in the 20 years that I’ve been typing about technology, I’ve never run across a piece of hardware that I can honestly say has changed my life. I had to share.
Microsoft doubles down on Game Pass price hikes
Grant St. Clair / 7:34 am PT Tue Oct 7, 2025
Ever since Xbox Game Pass, a deal too good to be true, was announced I’ve been wondering when the other shoe would drop. That day has finally come. If you’re at all tuned into the gaming space, you’ll doubtlessly have noticed this week’s biggest news: a 50% jump in Game Pass prices, bringing the “Ultimate” option up to an eye-watering $30 a month that’s still likely not going to cover the costs of maintaining and expanding the service’s catalogue.
To say backlash has been intense might be an understatement. The service page to cancel Game Pass was overloaded to the point of crashing within hours of the announcement, with some even declaring that the “Game Pass dream was over.” Indeed, the “best deal in gaming” seems to have lost its luster, especially as the astronomically high player counts it requires have led to missed quotas and shuttered studios across Microsoft’s portfolio.
Not that it’s stopped them from doubling down, of course. Microsoft’s director of gaming and platform communications, Dustin Blackwell, had this to say in a press statement:
“We understand price increases are never fun for anybody, but we’re trying to reinforce by adding more value to these plans as well. It’s something we don’t take lightly, and we’re listening to the feedback of players and the community to try to provide them with more of what they’re asking for.”
I don’t recall anyone asking for three Xbox price hikes in a row.
Doomsday scoreboard still at zero, but don’t worry — we’ve got eight more chances to die screaming
Popkin / 7:30 am PT Tue Oct 7, 2025
The Doomsday Scoreboard is a website that keeps track of people’s failed doomsday predictions. The site has a list of past doomsday predictions and ones that are pending to be posted until the date has passed. You can search for predictions by category ( religion, technology, war, ect.) and you can also search by era.
The latest doomsday prediction was quite recent. Here’s the description of the prediction from the scoreboard:
“September 23rd, 2025
South African preacher Joshua Mhlakela circulated videos claiming the Rapture would occur Sept 23–24, 2025, sparking #RaptureTok trends with “left behind” prep tips and history threads.”
In total, the site lists 201 failed predictions. The site also makes sure to let us know that there have been 0 successful predictions so far, in case you weren’t sure. Don’t let your guard down yet though, because apparently, there are 8 pending apocalypses at this time.
When doomsday predictions fail, followers often become more devoted rather than less. This happens because admitting they were wrong is harder than finding ways to justify their belief, especially after investing so much of themselves in the group.
See also: Mark Zuckerberg reportedly building a self-sustaining doomsday bunker in Hawaii
Just how alien is the CEO abducted by conspiracists in Bugonia’s trailer?
Rob Beschizza / 7:07 am PT Tue Oct 7, 2025
In Bugonia, Emma Stone stars as a tech executive kidnapped for a peculiar reason: her abductors think she is an alien. The movie, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos and co-starring Jesse Plemons, opens in limited release on October 24 and goes wide for Halloween.
Written by Will Tracy, based on a 2003 South Korean film called Save the Green Planet, Bugonia stars Emma Stone as the CEO and Jesse Plemons and Aidan Delbis as the conspiracy nuts. It opens in limited release on October 24 before expanding wide on October 31. And while we’ve seen several trailers so far, as well as some mostly stellar reviews, this latest one leans heavily into that wildly intriguing question. Is Emma Stone an alien?
The trailer, embedded, sets everything up nicely. A high-flying tech CEO whose every word is a confident corporate platitute? Sure is alien! But what kind? The trailer suggests this timely subject will be treated with levity, which seems the right way to do it.
Why you more likely to die around your birthday
Popkin / 7:00 am PT Tue Oct 7, 2025
I had a lot of fun looking through snippets from these wikipedia pages about various “effects” with funny names. These were shared by the fantastic instagram account called Depths of Wikipedia. There are a lot of effects out there, and now that I know about them, I’m going to be extra careful around my birthday and cautious about who I do favors for.
The Ben Franklin Effect says that doing a favor for someone could make you think you like them more than you really do. The Birthday Effect says that we’re all more likely to die near our birthday due to: 1) alcohol-related causes like binge drinking, accidents, drunk driving, and worsening of health conditions, 2) psychosomatic effects where terminally ill people either hold on until their birthday or succumb to mortality awareness stress, 3) psychological factors including the “broken promise effect” where suicidal individuals wait for birthdays before acting, 4) possible physiological “circannual” biological rhythms triggered by birth date conditions, and 5) some statistical artifacts from death certificate processing errors.
The Bambi Effect makes people feel kinder towards animals that are cute looking, instead of unattractive ones.
Most of these effects have to do with some kind of cognitive bias. They show how our brains try to make sense of the world in weird, often irrational ways. These effects are great to know about because they are totally entertaining, and they underscore the importance of critical thinking in understanding our own behavior.
See also: One man’s search for the least-viewed article on Wikipedia
Renewables overtake coal as world’s top energy source
Rob Beschizza / 6:19 am PT Tue Oct 7, 2025
Energy think tank Ember claims that renewable energy sources such as solar and wind power provided more electricity than coal in the first half of 2025. They met 100% of the demand placed upon them despite growing usage, allowing fossil fuel use to decline. The shift is driven by China, reportedly “way ahead in clean energy growth.”
Developing countries, especially China, led the clean energy charge but richer nations including the US and EU relied more than before on planet-warming fossil fuels for electricity generation. This divide is likely to get more pronounced, according to a separate report from the International Energy Agency (IEA). It predicts renewables will grow much less strongly than forecast in the US as a result of the policies of President Donald Trump’s administration.
According to the International Energy Agency, coal was the world’s top source for energy for more than 50 years. Here’s the press release from Ember.
“We are seeing the first signs of a crucial turning point,” said Małgorzata Wiatros-Motyka, Senior Electricity Analyst at Ember. “Solar and wind are now growing fast enough to meet the world’s growing appetite for electricity. This marks the beginning of a shift where clean power is keeping pace with demand growth.”
And here’s the study: Global Electricity Mid-Year Insights 2025.
Falling prices of solar and wind give governments an increasing opportunity to set more ambitious targets and policies to speed deployment. Doing so would maximise the economic, social, health and environmental benefits of clean power, in addition to reducing carbon emissions and keeping climate change targets within reach.
Half of the world is past a peak in fossil generation, and the tools to accelerate the transition are available. However, some emerging economies still face higher costs of capital and other capacity constraints. Support from mature economies, particularly those with historic emissions, is crucial to overcoming these barriers and keeping the pathway to net-zero within reach.
Silent film from 1901 perfectly captures how we all feel about mornings
Popkin / 6:00 am PT Tue Oct 7, 2025
In Birth of the Pearl, an early silent film (1901) by Frederick S. Armitage, a woman slowly rises from a giant oyster shell. She looks annoyed to be awake, rolling her eyes, and striking a halfhearted pose. This is exactly how I feel every morning when my alarm goes off, minus the looking like a sea goddess part.
The film was inspired by Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, and was part of a “living picture” series, where actors recreated famous artworks on stage or screen. These performances blended art, theater, and burlesque, with the tease coming not from movement, but from stillness and anticipation as the curtain parted.
This film truly conveys the universal pain of being forced to get up and shine before you’re ready. I’d be extra grumpy if I had to sleep inside a giant shell that opened before I was ready to see the daylight. My obnoxious morning alarm isn’t much better, though.
See also: ‘Bear’ is a delightful short film that turns ADHD into a literal bear
Sure, Jan: Stephen Miller has his finger on the pulse of Black Americans
Jason Weisberger / 2:37 pm PT Mon Oct 6, 2025
Low-Rent Cobra Commander, Screamin’ Stephen Miller, claims to know somehow that Black Chicagoans are “thrilled” the ICE Gestapo is terrorizing the streets, raiding homes, and abducting their neighbors.
Perhaps Trump’s ghoul, Mr. Miller, reached out to his very Black friend George Tropicana, er, I mean Glass. George Glass. He lives in Canada, which is very close to Chicago, and has gained a great deal of insight into how Black Americans there feel. He also thinks Miller is “super cool.” These social media posts suggest otherwise:
