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The Dinner - Over the course of a dinner in a restaurant in Amsterdam, we learn a secret shared by two brothers and their wives. The story is told by an unreliable narrator, and it’s hard to tell what he is making up. Reminiscent of Roald Dahl's stories for grown ups.

The Blighted Eye - Samples from the world’s greatest comic book art collector.

Citizen Keane: The Big Lies Behind the Big Eyes - A juicy biography of Walter and Margaret Keane, famous for the “big eye waif” paintings of the 1960s. Walter Keane was a sociopathic liar who couldn’t paint. Margaret did all the paintings herself. Tim Burton has a movie coming out about the Keanes.

Show notes:

The Double Lift Project: a terrific DVD that teaches you the most essential card magic sleight.

The Hidden Mother: "1,002 photographs of a now redundant practice -- to cloak or hide a parent within the background of a child’s portrait, a common procedure from the advent of photography up until the 1920s, when exposure times were relative slow, and a hidden parent was required to hold the child still."

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Learn more about The Knowledge.

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Help Gweek by completing this short, anonymous survey. It will take no more than 5 minutes. Your answers will help match our show with advertisers that best fit the sensibilities of our podcast and its listeners, like you. Listeners who complete the survey will be entered in an ongoing monthly raffle to win a $100 Amazon Gift Card. We promise not to share or sell your email address, and we won't send you email unless you win.

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Here's what we talked about:

Maria:

Don’t Point That Thing at Me, by Kyril Bonfiglioli. I’ve recently discovered his work and it is brilliant and hilarious.

The Magician’s Land, by Lev Grossman. Out in August. A conclusion to the trilogy that more than lives up to the first two.

The Gist, Slate’s new podcast, with the wonderful Mike Pesca.

Dean:

How to find four-leaf clovers

National Parks Passport

Mark:

The Outfit, by Richard Stark. In the 3rd Parker novel, Parker goes up against the mob.

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Here's what we talked about:

Kent:
Calculators for everything

Dean:
Brooks Brothers 346 non-iron shirts
Blank playing cards
Tower Cranes of San Francisco Tumblr

Mark:
Forbidden Island - a fun cooperative board game

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You can also help us by subscribing to Gweek via iTunes (even if you use another service to listen to Gweek) and write an honest review there. Thanks!

In each episode of Gweek, Dean Putney and I invite a guest to join us in a discussion about recommended media, apps, and gadgets. Our guest is Olga Khazan. She's an associate editor at The Atlantic, where she writes about health and health policy. She’s also covered global affairs, and technology.

Here's what we talked about:

Olga:

Scope ads

Inside Amy Schumer

Priceonomics blog

Zensah Compression Leg Sleeves

Dean:

Fog of World

4into1

Mark

She’s Leaving Home, by William Shaw. Murder mystery set in Swinging London of 1968.

Smartphone USB chargers: Mophie vs Anker

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Here's what we talked about:

Hawkeye by Matt Fraction. Eric calls it "The Rockford Files of superhero comics."
https://youtu.be/zya5kG_9cFw

[Video Link] Finding Vivian Maier

The Man with the Getaway Face. The second Parker novel by Richard Stark. Excellent 1960s crime fiction about a cold-blooded heist artist. And don't miss Darwyn Cookes' fabulous graphic novel adaptations of the Parker books.

And much more!

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After dropping out of college at nineteen to apprentice under Robert Greene (author of The 48 Laws of Power) Ryan Holiday became a strategy advisor for bestselling authors and multiplatinum musicians. He served as director of marketing at American Apparel for many years, where his campaigns have been used as case studies by Twitter, YouTube, and Google and written about in AdAge, the New York Times, and Fast Company. Ryan's first book, Trust Me I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator -- which the Financial Times called an “astonishing, disturbing book” -- was a debut bestseller and is now taught in colleges around the world. (Here's my interview with Ryan in Gweek 061). Ryan's latest book is The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph.

In our interview with Ryan, we talked about his new book, as well as the Gregory Hays translations of Meditations, by Marcus Aurelius, and Ryan's monthly reading newsletter, which you can sample here. It's free to subscribe.

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Jared's picks:

Flesh & Steel: The Art of Russ Heath

Ultra Q: The Complete Series

MeshFusion modeling plugin for Modo 701.

Dean's picks:

New album release from George and Jonathan with a cool visualization of all the notes.

govtrack.us, a website for tracking US Congress bills, congresspeople, voting records and committees. Email notification system. I found it while looking up H.R. 1852: Email Privacy Act

Giggle Blossom, the Fiverr Clown. A very sweet clown that will record a video of any message you like.

Mark's picks:

Boing Boing has a new podcast! Futility Closet is a celebration of the quirky and the curious, the thought-provoking and the simply amusing. This podcast is an audio companion to the popular website that catalogs more than 7,000 curiosities in history, language, mathematics, literature, philosophy, and art.

New books at Wink

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Dean's picks:

Wizard People Dear Reader

Mark's picks:

Blinkist book summaries. 15 minute versions of popular non-fictions books $3/month for all you can read

Ruben Bolling, author of the weekly comic strip Tom the Dancing Bug, which premieres each week on Boing Boing, and pre-premiers for members of his Inner Hive, which you can join by going to tomthedancingbug.com.

Nick Carr who is a New York City movie location scout. On his blog, Scouting New York, Nick says he’s been pretty much everywhere, from the highest rooftops to the deepest subway tunnels, from abandoned ruins to zillion-dollar luxury penthouse apartments.

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The Boondocks. Season 4 starts on Monday April 21 on Adult Swim.

Nick's picks:

Best Bathroom - Highly recommended app for anyone coming to NYC

K2 - Great board game from Poland I’ve been playing recently

Ruben's picks:

Paul has a Summer Job, by Michel Rabagliati

Henry Speaks for Himself, by John Liney

Dean's pick:

Love and a Sandwich -- stuffed animal monsters

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This episode is brought to you by NatureBox, makers of delicious, wholesome snacks delivered to your door. Go to NatureBox.com/gweek to get 50% OFF your your first box.

In each episode of Gweek, Dean Putney and I invite a guest to join us in a discussion about recommended media, apps, and gadgets. Our guest this time was James Altucher. He's an entrepreneur, chess master, investor, and writer. I am a huge fan of his his writing, which he posts on on his blog.

Show Notes:

Dean Putney is now the co-host of Gweek! I'm excited that he'll be joining me each week to have conversations with our guests. In addition to being Boing Boing’s software developer Dean is the author and publisher of a a book of his great-grandfather’s World War I photos.

We talked about James's latest book called Choose Yourself! I read it over the holiday break, and found it to be a wonderful guidebook for a balanced life, with practical advice for a daily practice for achieving mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual health. The title comes from Jame's advice to avoid depending on large organizations to provide you with a living in exchange for work. Those days are over. Instead, you have to operate as a free agent, even if you are working for someone else. James has made a fortune and then lost it all more than once, and has experienced some pretty extreme highs and lows in his life. He's learned a lot from his experiences, and shares them in a way that is captivating and inspiring.

We also talked about Michael Wolff's 1998 book Burn Rate, which is about his attempt to take his Web 1.0 era business public, and how it failed spectacularly. The book is still fresh and valid today, even though the names of the companies are long forgotten: Magellan, Excite, @Home, etc. Wolff didn't bother spearing anyone's feelings, and wrote a very gossipy, juicy book that reveals some atrocious behavior of rich and powerful people. James said he enjoyed the book, but felt that Wolff expected too much of others, and was too bitter about his experience. Fair points!

Ramez Naam, a computer scientist and the H.G. Wells Award-winning author of three books, including the sci-fi thriller Nexus, which has been optioned as a film by Paramount and director Darren Aronofsky. The follow up title, Crux, came out in August.

Dean Putney, Boing Boing’s software developer and Gweek regular, who’s self published a book of his great-grandfather’s World War I photos.

Danimal Cannon, a touring chiptune and heavy metal musician who occasionally composes music for indie video games. His album Parallel Processing was recently launched as the soundtrack for the new game Wave Wave on iOS.

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Show Notes:

Ramez's picks:

Geekomancy and Celebromancy by Michael Underwood: Fun, witty, insider-joke filled geek urban fantasy.

How to get the most out of Facebook & Twitter: It’s all about Lists. And an app: TweetDeck.

rubtr: A browser plugin that lets you rebut pages that are inaccurate, and see rebuttals that have been made.

Dean's picks

Wave Wave - upcoming iOS game by Thomas Janson built around a fantastic chiptune album by Danimal Cannon.

The ArtisanVideos subReddit

Mark's picks:

From Russia With Doubt: The Quest to Authenticate 181 Would-Be Masterpieces of the Russian Avant-Garde A couple of amateur art collector brothers buy $40,000 worth of paintings on eBay, and they are appraised at $50 million.

My Passport Ultra 2TB Portable External Hard Drive I have replaced my external desktop hard drives with these. They are small, quiet, and inexpensive.

And much more!

Janelle Hessig, a bay Area cartoonist and writer and the marketing director at Last Gasp Publishing.

A.J. Jacobs, a writer, a human guinea pig, and the author of four New York Times Bestsellers, including the Year of Living Biblically, for which he followed the hundreds of rules of the Bible as literally as possible, from the 10 commandments to growing a huge beard.

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Show Notes:

Janelle's picks:

Prisoner art & inventions. I used to receive a lot of unwanted mail from prisoners in the 90s. An exhibit of prisoner inventions assembled by the Chicago artist collective Temporary Services collaborating with an incarcerated artist named Angelo changed my outlook and, in time, the quality of my prisoner mail. From bedsheet murals to paper mache chess sets, I’m fascinated with the ways that artists adapt with limited resources and compromised humanity while incarcerated.

"This Moment in Last Gasp History" is a video series I’m launching next week. Ron Turner regularly stops by my desk at Last Gasp and tells me crazy stories about Last Gasp history (smuggling comics into the Hanoi Hilton, smuggling comics to Fidel Castro, Last Gasp sponsoring a Formula 1 race car, goats in taxi cabs, weird 70s sex parties, you name it). I don’t have the means to write Ron’s biography so I’m turning some of these stories into short videos. Read The Origins of Last Gasp.

A.J.'s picks

There's lots of new stuff to report about the Global Family Reunion The crowdsourced genealogy movement is fascinating. I wrote a piece about it for the NYT. I'm a big fan of the World Family Tree (which is now up to 75 MILLION people) but it's very controversial, because of invasion of privacy concerns and also accuracy concerns.

The Horrors of Ancient Medicine. I'm writing a piece for Mental Floss about the horrors of ancient doctors. My favorite: the smoke enema. Where you literally blow smoke up the ass. That's where the phrase comes from. It was supposed to cure all sorts of things, like stomach ailments.

Mark's picks:

Wink is a new website from Kevin Kelly, Carla Sinclair (my wife), and me. It’s about remarkable books that belong on paper and wouldn’t be good as an ebook. We review one new paper book each weekday.

Figurines of Fletcher Hanks’ comic book characters from Golden Age Figurines

Devo: Hardcore: 4-track Demo tapes made in Akron from 1974 to 1977. Fantastic early work. The members of Devo were peaceful hippies until the Kent State massacre (Amazing interview with Jerry Casale).

And much more!

Michael Goodwin, a freelance writer and the author of the comic book Economix: How the Economy Works (and Doesn’t Work) in Words and Pictures. Like many freelance writers, he lives in New York City with cats.

New York Times best-selling novelist Scott Sigler, author of Ancestor, Nocturnal, and the Infected Trilogy (consisting of the books Infected, Contagious and Pandemic).

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Show Notes:

Michael's pick:

Health Care Reform: What It Is, Why It's Necessary, How It Works, a comic book by Jonathan Gruber and Nathan Schreiber
Scott's pick

The First Law, Joe Abercrombie

Mark's pick:

Sugru Magnet Kit

And much more!

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Show Notes:

Peter's picks:

Feeling more nostalgic than usual with the recent death of my dad, so have been looking at some cool stuff from the 70s that my father turned me onto at the time, such as Aurora monster models, and the Warren Publishing archives on archive.org. On that note, Ares Magazine successfully completed a Kickstarter campaign to relaunch the magazine and you can pre-order one now.

Raagnagrok’s Man Women Death Birth Infinity by Mark Pilkington and Zali Krisha. Related, this is a good time to browse Pilkington’s press Strange Attractor for the best in the underground occult-weirdness.

Mark Waid just completed his run on Daredevil, one of the best superhero comics in years.

Dean's picks

Really3D YouTube Channel

Whoever runs @DietCoke’s twitter account is a master of the absurd

Mark's picks:

Shelf Space: Modern Package Design 1945-1965This era was a golden age for package design - cereal boxes, plastic soap bottles, TV dinners, motor oil. It’s not about retro, it’s about better. You can buy this book for one cent on Amazon. I run an occasional “Then and Now” post on Boing Boing/ The Voyeurs by Gabrielle Bell. Funny autobiographical comic books stories written by an introvert.

Frazettagirls on Instagram.

And much more!

In each episode of Gweek, I invite a guest or two to join me in a discussion about recommended media, apps, and gadgets. This time my guests were Clive Thompson, a science and technology journalist, whose new book is Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better, and Ruben Bolling, author of the weekly comic strip Tom the Dancing Bug, which premieres each week on Boing Boing, and pre-premiers for members of his Inner Hive.

This episode of Gweek is brought to you by:

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Show Notes:

Clives's picks:

The Gorgeous Nothings, a book that reprints 52 of Emily Dickinson’s poems that she wrote on the backs of used envelopes. They’re incredibly beautiful, and it’s fascinating to see the way she wrapped her writing around the contours of each scrap of envelope.

Tombow 100th anniversary Drawing Pencils: I am a total pencil fetishist, and recently bought a box of these things -- they’re lovely.

Ruben's picks

A graphic novel called Life With Mr. Dangerous, by Paul Hornschemeier

Rip Kirby, by Alex Raymond

Mark's pick:

I got a Minecraft server running on a Raspberry Pi (a credit card sized computer). It actually works! I’m reminded of Staislaw Lem’s short story, ”The Seventh Sally or How Trurl’s Own Perfection Led to No Good,” from The Mind’s I.

And much more!

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ProFlowers. Get a special Gweek listener discount by clicking this link.

Squarespace, the all-in-one platform that makes it fast and easy to create your own professional website or online portfolio. For a free trial and 10% off, go to squarespace.com use offer code GOLDENGOOSE.

99designs. the world’s largest online marketplace for graphic design. Visit 99designs.com/gweek and get a $99 Power Pack of services for free.

This episode of Gweek is brought to you by ProFlowers. Get a special Gweek listener discount by clicking this link.

And by Squarespace, the all-in-one platform that makes it fast and easy to create your own professional website or online portfolio. For a free trial and 10% off, go to squarespace.com use offer code BOING.

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Rob's picks:

The Beast: Riding the Rails & Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail, by Oscar Martinez

New York Dolls by New York Dolls (re-discovered via Morrissey’s autobiography… a recommendation in itself!)

Books on Options: Options for the Beginner & Beyond (Edward Olmstead) and Trading Option Greeks(Dan Passarelli)

Option websites: TradeMonster, Dough.com, and LiveVol

Josh's picks

12 Best Novels for Older Kids from 1964: posted this week at Unbored.net

King Goshawk and the Birds, a 1926 satirical science fiction novel by the Irish writer Eimar O’Duffy. I’m serializing it at HiLobrow this winter, one chapter a week.

Mark's pick:

Wham-O Super-Book - lavishly illustrated history of the greatest toy company ever - frisbee, hula hoop, super ball, slip-and-slide, Hacky Sack, Silly string.

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Rob's picks:

The Prisoner on DVD -- weird/interesting British TV series from the 1960s, there weren’t many episodes but has a cult following and I finally decided to check it out, pretty enjoyable so far. (Actually, remember last time I was on I talked a little about “old” “unsocial” entertainment that we all consume but don’t “share”? I actually started a recurring Yahoo Tech feature called The New Old Thingwhere someone recommends something like that once a week, and this was recommended by Seth Godin, so that’s how I ended up buying it.)

Speculative Everything, a book by Anthony Dunne & Fiona Raby on “design, fiction, and social dreaming.” They are designers and profs at Royal College of Art, I just got this and am really excited about it. It’s their work but also a broader look at “design fiction.”

Holly Herndon’s new single is super cool: She sampled audio from random browsing/web interactions and sculpted the results into an impressive piece of electronic music. Videois really cool too.

The Obit Headline Poem!

Michael's picks

Golden Age of the Solar Clipper Series by Nathan Lowell - Science fiction series on space cargo haulers - mix of Horatio Hornblower and early Heinlein - started as an audio podcastand move into book form - no dramatic battles but a lot about the people behind the scenes and the intrigues of the workplace in space.

PCGen- open source software for RPG players

Eve Online - Internet spaceships MMORPG - recently celebrated 10 years in operation - Battle of B-R5RB over 3,000 players in one battle that lasted over 20 hours, thousands more in side battles.

Mark's pick:

The Martian -- realistic SF novel about a guy stuck on Mars.

We discussed:

Power pop’s creepiest anthems, from Piper’s “Who’s Your Boyfriend?” to 90% of The Knack’s pedo-discography to the obscure but clearly blue ribbon winner for all-time creepiest song, “Daddy’s Girl” by The Secrets.

The artist Clayton Baileyand his new roadside attraction/ art gallery in the tiny town of Port Costa, CA.

Joshua's recent stay in the Congo, where he's been living on and off for the last two years with a group of Mbenzele pygmies to research his next book, on the world’s last hunter-gatherers.

Why Josh built a full-scale reproduction of Agostino Ramelli’s Bookwheel.

A great book on the value of building with hand tools called the Anarchist’s Tool Chestby Christopher Schwarz.

The book The Horror! The Horror!: Comic Books the Government Didn't Want You To Read, which has over 200 horror comic book covers and complete stories that depict dismemberment, disfigurement, sadism, bondage, torture, electrocution, blinding with red hot pokers, decapitation, and cannibalism. No wonder kids loved comics so much in those days.

And much more!

In each episode of Gweek, I invite a guest or two to join me in a discussion about recommended media, apps, and gadgets. My guests this time were Veronica Belmont, the co-host of The Sword and Laser podcast (now on Boing Boing!), and Clive Thompson, a science and technology journalist, whose new book is Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better. Veronica recommends the third season of Sherlock ("I love the parallels the show makes with the original stories... it's all very fun for people who have been Sherlock fans for ages.") and Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag ("I am totally obsessed with the latest AC game for Xbox One. I play for several hours a day, and I'm still only 50% done!"). Clive recommends Orphan Black ("an insanely cool TV show about a woman who discovers she’s a clone, part of some crazy scientific experiment.") and the smartphone game Badland ("you have to guide a little flying creature through a set of obstacles. It’s extremely well-designed in terms of play; it’s very addictive, lovely, great visuals and sounds. But it also has something more: It has physics that are incredibly witty.") I recommend Lexicon, by Max Berry ("Science fiction novel about students who are taught neurolinguistic programming techniques to persuade people. Focuses on a girl who was a 3 card monte hustler and her rebellion against the creeps who run the organization.") and the Kindle Paperwhite ("I’m sure a better e-reader will come along one day, but even if it didn’t I’d be happy with the Paperwhite for the rest of my reading days.") These are just a few of the things we discuss in this episode.

My guests are author Peter Bebergal and cartoonist Jim Woodring. We talked about the eccentric genius Polish artist Stanislav Szukalski, Jim's oeuvre of incredible wordless graphic novels about "The Unifactor" including his latest book, Fran (and the beautiful Spanish edition of Fran), the Brand Library in Glendale, CA, Peter Bebergal's favorite albums of 2013 (records by The Sons of Kemet, Fuzz, Teeth of the Sea), Boing Boing's upcoming feature film The Immortal Augustus Gladstone, the book God is Disappointed in You (the Bible as told by a know-it-all teenager), and lots more!

This episode of Gweek is sponsored by Rick and Morty the new Adult Swim animated comedy from Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon, the creator of Community.

We discussed the T-shirts of Seibei, Jeopardy champ Bob Harris' books: The International Bank of Bob: Connecting Our Worlds One $25 Kiva Loan at a Time and Prisoner of Trebekistan: A Decade in Jeopardy!, The Android Netrunner card game, Richard Garfinkle's science fiction novels: Celestial Matters and All of an Instant, Hatch, Ed Piskor's Hip Hop Family Tree book, Brooklyn Radio's The Rub's Hip-Hop History, the Kerbal Space Program computer game, the iPhone game Hatch, and much more!

Any year that Adam Koford (aka Ape Lad) publishes a new book is a good year. The Disney artist joined Dean Putney and I to talk about his newest book of cartoons, Down with the Laugh-Out-Loud Cats, which he self-published so he could have more control over its design. And Dean tells a similar story about his forthcoming book of World War One photos taken by his great-grandfather, called Walter Koessler 1914-1918.

We also talked about the amazing Briggs & Riley Domestic Carry-On Expandable Roller, and the equally amazing Kickstarter project for the Heirloom Chemistry Set. And much more!

We also talked about: Paul Kwiatkowsi's photobook/novel about "delinquent magic and chaotic adolescence" in "South Florida's lush and decaying suburban landscape," And Every Day was Overcast; and the singer/songwriter of The Shaggs' first album in 44 years, called Ready! Get! Go! And lots more!

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Joshua Klein is an internationally known technology expert who studies systems, from computer networks and institutions to consumer hardware. His recent projects have included an acclaimed new television series on the history of innovation on the National Geographic Channel, called The Link, one of the most watched TED videos of all time (about vending machine to train crows to exchange found coins for peanuts) and the development of a cell phone application to create a virtuous cycle of education and employment in South Africa. Joshua joined me on Gweek to talk about his new book, Reputation Economics: Why Who You Know Is Worth More Than What You Have. I also welcomed the return of Michael Pusateri, a television technologist, inveterate tinkerer, cooking geek, and cycling enthusiast. He blogs at Cruftbox.

We talked about: Jim Woodring's hallucinatory comic book masterpiece, Fran; The Daedalus Incident, by Michael J Martinez; and L-Theanine, a pill I take when I drink coffee, and more!

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In 1981, Robert Crumb launched Weirdo, a magazine-sized comic book that was inspired by Crumb's own underground comics and the post MAD-era magazines of Crumb's mentor Harvey Kurtzman. Weirdo was a launch pad for many talented cartoonists, including Peter Bagge, Dori Seda, and Dennis Worden. Crumb's own comic stories were the highlight of every issue, and Last Gasp (publisher of Weirdo) just released all of Crumb's Weirdo comics in a handsome 256-page anthology, entitled The Weirdo Years by R. Crumb: 1981-'93. I spoke to Janelle Hessig, a Bay Area cartoonist and writer and the current marketing director at Last Gasp Publishing, about Weirdo, and what became of some its the lesser-known contributors. Janelle also recommends the scandalous Life and Times of Little Richard, by Charles Wright. She calls it a "truly great oral history which includes a three-way with Buddy Holly, a childhood spent pooping in jars, and heeding the call of the Lord."

We were joined by returning Gweekster Rob Walker. He's a technology and culture columnist for Yahoo News, a regular contributor to Design Observer, and he recently started a new “watercooler therapy” advice column called The Workologist for the New York Times Sunday business section. His Procrastinaut blog is a must-read.

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In this episode of Gweek, I interviewed Kevin Kelly about his upcoming book, Cool Tools: A Catalog of Possibilities an oversized book that reviews over 1,500 different tools, explaining why each one is great, and what its benefits are (Kevin is my partner at the website Cool Tools). Stewart Brand, the creator of The Whole Earth Catalog, calls it "The real deal." Read Kevin's essay about the Cool Tools book here.

I also interviewed Joshua Glenn about his Best Ever Adventure series of posts at HiLobrow. He says, "This month, I’ve been making two kinds of lists of my favorite adventures: the 21 best adventure novels of each decade (of the 20th century), and adventure novels and movies that best typify the genre’s 20 key themes and memes (e.g., treasure hunt, hunted man, conspiracy theory, DIY, frontier epic)." Josh is also working with Singularity & Co., the Brooklyn science fiction bookstore that runs the book club Save the Sci-Fi. They are preparing to launch a second book club dedicated to rescuing out-of-print adventure stories from copyright limbo. "The new book club will be called Save the Adventure," says Josh, "I’ll be the club’s editor! With 23 days to go on our Kickstarter campaign, we’ve raised $4,300 of the $12,000 we need to cover costs."

Links to other things we talked about: APE (Guy Kawasaki best guide to self publishing), 99Designs (crowdsourced professional design), CreateSpace (on-demand publishing), Martian Dice(customized dice game), and much more!

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In this episode of Gweek we talk about DIY book publishing vs traditional book publishing, music designed to trick your lizard brain, software that turns photos into talking cartoon characters, a board game that teaches preschoolers about computer programming, and more!

This episode's guests:

Dean Putney, Boing Boing’s software developer and Gweek regular, who’s now self-publishing a book of his great-grandfather’s World War I photos thanks to Kickstarter.

Rob Reid, a writer and technology entrepreneur based in California. He wrote Year Zero -- a novel about aliens with a mad passion for human music – and founded the company that built the Rhapsody music service.

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Here's what we talked about in this episode:

Rob's novel, Year Zero is on sale for 99 cents in ebook formats. Get it here on Amazon, or other formats here.

Dean's self published book about his great-grandfather's collection of a World War I photos, Walter Koessler 1914-1918.

Focus@Will. Rob: "An intriguing online audio app that purports to help you … focus. It doesn’t work for everyone, but it works for me!"

Robot Turtles. A board game to teach pre-schoolers about programming. Made over $600,000 on Kickstarter.

Crazytalk. Mark: "An automatic lip-sync application for Mac and PC that lets your turn photos and images into animated characters that speak what you say. My daughter used it to animate a portrait of Socrates for a classroom project."

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In this episode David and I interviewed Brett Gurewitz, the guitarist and songwriter for the band Bad Religion. Brett joined the band when he was a high school student in 1979. Today, he is still in the band and still writing and recording music with Bad Religion, but he also runs the Epitaph record label as well as a number of other labels, with an impressive artist roster including Tom Waits, Nick Cave, Booker T, and Mavis Staples. More recently, Brett became a partner in a new comic book company born out of the Occupy Comics kickstarter, called Black Mask Studios. We talked to Brett about all this and more.

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Gweek is a podcast where the editors and friends of Boing Boing talk about comic books, science fiction and fantasy, video games, board games, TV shows, music, movies, tools, gadgets, apps, and other neat stuff. This episode's guests:

Peter Bebergal, the author of Too Much to Dream: A Psychedelic American Boyhood and writes frequently on the speculative and slightly fringe. He is currently writing Season of the Witch: How the Occult Saved Rock & Roll to be published by Tarcher/Penguin. He blogs at mysterytheater.blogspot.com.

Denis Kitchen began his career in the late '60s as one of the pioneering underground cartoonists and quickly became publisher. Over three decades his Kitchen Sink Press published such artists as Robert Crumb, Will Eisner, Harvey Kurtzman, Art Spiegelman, Charles Burns, Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, and countless others. He founded the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund in 1986 to protect 1st Amendment rights in the comics industry. He still wears many hats: author, artist, curator, literary and art agent, and coming full circle, to publishing again. The Oddly Compelling Art of Denis Kitchen is out from Dark Horse Books, and he co-authored two biographies of famous cartoonists: Harvey Kurtzman for Abrams, and Al Capp for Bloomsbury.

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Peter Bebergal's interview with Denis Kitchen at HiLobrow

Best of Comix Book: When Marvel Comics Went Underground, by Stan Lee and Denis Kitchen. "In 1974, legendary Marvel Comics publisher Stan Lee approached underground pioneer Denis Kitchen and offered a way for them to collaborate. Their resulting series was called Comix Book and featured work by many of the top underground cartoonists including Joel Beck, Kim Deitch, Justin Green, Harvey Pekar, Trina Robbins, Art Spiegelman (first national appearance of Maus), Skip Williamson, and S. Clay Wilson. The Best of Comix Book showcases 150-pages of classic underground comix (printed on newsprint, as they originally appeared), many never before reprinted, and features an essay illustrated with correspondence, photographs, and unpublished artwork. Featuring an Introduction by Stan Lee, The Best of Comix Book is the first collection from the new collaboration between Dark Horse and Kitchen Sink Books."

Al Capp: A Life to the Contrary, by Denis Kitchen and Michael Schumacher

The Art of Harvey Kurtzman: The Mad Genius of Comics, by Denis Kitchen and Paul Buhle

1960s-era Thor by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee

The Alabaster Hand, by A.N.L. Munby

Legend of Korra. Peter: "Spinoff of the beloved Last Airbender cartoon and probably the best animated TV show since Batman: The Animated Adventures."

Revolt of the Apes Peter: "Beautifully curated site of current psychedelic music, with terrific interviews by Ryan Muldoon."

Magic Transistor Radio “An exploratory collective of DJs, artists, and musicians based in New York, San Francisco, and London. We seek to shed light on exceptional artifacts of cultural significance, and are primarily focused on organizing and disseminating interesting and compelling music. We source classic & rare recordings, digitize out of print vinyl, and retain very high standards of audio quality. We are interested in the sublime and enigmatic relationships between seemingly unrelated media, and seek to cultivate a unique discovery experience for our users and listeners.”

Gweek is a podcast where the editors and friends of Boing Boing talk about comic books, science fiction and fantasy, video games, board games, TV shows, music, movies, tools, gadgets, apps, and other neat stuff.

My guest today Chip Kidd. For more 26 years Kidd has designed over 1000 iconic award-winning book covers that have revolutionized and inspired jacket design. He’s the author of The Cheese Monkeys, The Learners, the graphic novel Batman: Death by Design, and many other books about comics and design. Hailed by USA Today as "the closest thing to a rock star" in graphic design you can find him online at ChipKidd.com.

I talked to Chip about his new design principles book for children aged 10 and up called, GO: A Kidd’s Guide to Graphic Design.

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Gweek is a podcast where the editors and friends of Boing Boing talk about comic books, science fiction and fantasy, video games, board games, TV shows, music, movies, tools, gadgets, apps, and other neat stuff.

This episode's guests:

Clive Thompson is a science and technology journalist, whose new book just came out: Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better (website). He’s a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine and Wired, and blogs at Collision Detection, and can be found on Twitter as @pomeranian99. (Photo of Clive by Tom Igoe)

Joshua Glenn is a Boston-based writer, publisher, and semiotician. He is co-author of Significant Objects, published by Fantagraphics, and Unbored, the kids' field guide to serious fun. He edits the website HiLobrow, which as HiLoBooks is now publishing classics -- by Jack London, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle, and others -- from what he calls science fiction's Radium Age.

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Clive:

iOS game: Dodonpachi Resurrection. "I am a huge fan of fast-paced japanese “bullet hell” games, where the screen is filled with a simply ridiculous amount of adversaries and projectiles. I’ve recently been trying to figure out what it means that I love these so much …"

Book: Robert Fagle’s 1997 translation of The Odyssey. Hilariously, the last time I was on Gweek I was reading Mitchell’s translation of The Iliad, which I’d never before read. After I finished that I decided that I should read The Odyssey, which I’d never read either … so I started on it about a month ago and am about halfway through now.

Gadget: Google Glass: I just spent two months wearing them for a story I wrote for the New York Times Sunday Magazine.

Joshua:

Book: The HiLoBooks edition of E.V. Odle’s 1923 sf novel The Clockwork Man (Introduction by Annalee Newitz). Official pub. date is September 23, but it’s available now.

Essays: HiLobrow’s recent series on Old-School (pre-1984) hip hop: “Herc Your Enthusiasm.” 25 hop hop scholars and critics and fans each writing about one favorite track from before hip hop’s New School era.

Books: I’ve just posted a list of my favorite 32 adventure novels from the 19th century to HiLobrow. Many of them famous, some of them obscure. It’s the first post in a series I’m running this month where I’ll list the top 21 adventure novels from each of the 20th century’s first eight decades. I recently did a lot of thinking about the best adventure novels of the past 200 years because of a digital publishing project I’m planning to Kickstart later this fall.

Mark:

Book: Fooling Houdini: Magicians, Mentalists, Math Geeks, and the Hidden Powers of the Mind. Boy did Ricky Jay ever hate this book. But I enjoyed it, and I found author Alex Stone’s chapters about the psychology of deception, memory, sleight of hand, and perception to be interesting.

Gear: Otterbox Defender iPad case. After dropping my iPad on a tile floor and shattering the screen, I sent it to a guy on eBay who replaced the display for $100. He told me to buy an Otterbox Defender iPad case, which I did. It is heavy, but I like it. It also nice built-in stand.

This episode's guest:

Joshuah Bearman. In 2007 Joshuah wrote the now-famous Argo article for Wired, which Ben Affleck turned into a movie that won Best Picture at the 85th Academy Awards. He has also written for for Rolling Stone, Harper’s, Wired, Playboy, GQ, and The New York Times Magazine. He also recently co-founded Epic, an online longform journalism site.

Today, I spoke to Josh about a 30,000 word story he wrote for GQ and The Atavist about a group of Southern California high schoolers who started one of the largest marijuana smuggling rings in the world. It's Coronado High, and is available on Kindle for $1.99, or for $2.99 as a multimedia iOS piece from The Atavist.

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Here's The Atavist's description of Josh's article:

Nobody would’ve figured the kids from the sleepy beach town of Coronado, California, for criminal masterminds. They were just some hippie surfers, high school friends who’d come up with the idea of swimming bundles of marijuana across the border from Tijuana during the summer of 1969. Within a decade, however, the Coronado Company had become the largest pot-smuggling operation on the West Coast, a $100 million empire with outposts from Mexico to Morocco to Thailand. And sitting at the top of it all was the most improbable of kingpins: Lou Villar, a former Spanish teacher and swimming coach at Coronado High School.

Drawing on exclusive interviews with Villar and his partners in crime, Joshuah Bearman—author of the Wired article that became the film Argo—tells the inside story of the Coronado Company’s unlikely rise and the intrepid DEA agents who brought its principals to justice. Coronado High is an epic saga of daring escapades, hedonistic excess, and friendships betrayed, played out across the era when the innocence of the Summer of Love curdled into the paranoia of the drug war.

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This episode's guest:

Peter Bebergal, the author of Too Much to Dream: A Psychedelic American Boyhood and writes frequently on the speculative and slightly fringe. He is currently writing Season of the Witch: How the Occult Saved Rock & Roll to be published by Tarcher/Penguin. He blogs at mysterytheater.blogspot.com.

Koichi is the editor of the Japanese language and culture blog Tofugu and the author of Japanese language resources, WaniKani and TextFugu.

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Koichi:

TextExpander for Mac. Old news, but I discovered it recently and I’ve never felt so emotionally attached to an app. I’m textexpanding everything I can. Answers to dumb / repeating questions, kaomoji, html/code, etc. According to it I’ve saved ~8 hours of time just by using it, which doesn’t seem like a lot… actually it seems like a lot.

Project Phoenix. The big JRPG on Kickstarter.

I’ve been playing a lot of Faster Than Light recently, but I know that’s an old game, so everyone probably knows about it already, yeah? I’m also terrible at it and feel bad that I keep naming my crew after my friends and colleagues only to watch them get burned up by spaceship fires. FTL soundtrack is also the best music since Mozart… ish.

Peter:

Archive.org. I been spending an inordinate amount of time digging through the texts and have uncovered a treasure trove of amazing things, including old Heavy Metal, punk zines, comics, pulp science fiction etc.

Julian by Gore Vidal. Somehow I had missed this all these years. A remarkable historical novel about the last pagan emperor of Rome and one of the most damning accounts of the Holy Roman Empire I have read. It’s also a great piece of speculative fiction.

Moon with Sam Rockwell

Mark:

Ulmon City Maps for iOS. These free iOS maps of major cities work without an Internet connection and use GPS to show where you are. They have metro information and Wikipedia articles included. They were a lifesaver on my recent vacation.

This month, IDW released Feldstein: The Mad Life and Fantastic Art of Al Feldstein!, a 320-page biography written by Grant Geissman . Al Feldstein began working at EC comics, publishers of Weird Science, Weird Fantasy, Tales from the Crypt, The Vault of Horror, and The Haunt of Fear in 1948. Soon he became editor of most of EC's titles. He typically wrote and illustrated a story in each title and drew many of the covers, a mind-bogglingly prolific output. Eventually he stopped doing the art for stories and stuck with editing, writing, and cover illustrations. According to Wikipedia, from "late 1950 through 1953, he edited and wrote stories for seven EC titles." After MAD creator Harvey Kurtzman got in a fight with publisher William Gaines over ownership of the comic and left EC in 1956, Gaines put Feldstein in charge of the humor magazine, where he remained as editor until 1985.

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Martin Olson and his daughter Olivia Olson do so many cool things that it’s hard to know where to start. Martin is the head writer for the fantastic Disney animated series Phineas and Ferb. Not only has he written for every episode of the show, he’s also written over 200 songs for the series.

Martin’s 21-year-old daughter Olivia, plays the character Vanessa Doofenshmirtz on Phineas and Ferb, and she plays Marceline the Vampire Queen on Cartoon Network's animated series Adventure Time!, a cartoon my daughter Jane and I are obsessed with. Olivia sings on both series. (Here's Olivia singing “All I want for Christmas” in the movie Love Actuallywhen she was 11).

Martin is the author of two terrific books, which I’ve reviewed on Boing Boing: The Encyclopaedia of Hell (published by Feral House) and The Adventure Time Encyclopaedia, which he writes as the character he plays in the series, Hunson Abadeer, aka the Lord of Evil, who coincidentally happens to be Marceline’s father..

Olivia has a new EP of her music out, called Beauty Is Chaos, and she and her father just put out a full-length CD of songs called The Father Daughter Album of Unspeakable Beauty.

Martin and Olivia came over to my house for the interview, and Jane joined us for the discussion. Before we get started, here’s a part of a track from The Father Daughter Album of Unspeakable Beauty called “There is in China.”

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This episode of Gweek is brought to you by Bespoke Post, a monthly box of cool-stuff for guys. Visit bespokepost.com/boing or use the code BOING at checkout to get 20% off your first box.

Guests:

Adrian Tomine is a cartoonist whose books include Shortcomings, Summer Blonde, and his ongoing comic book series Optic Nerve. He’s also a regular contributor to The New Yorker, and the first ten years of his work for that magazine was recently collected in the book New York Drawings.

Rob Walker is a technology and culture columnist for Yahoo News, a regular contributor to Design Observer, and he just started a new “watercooler therapy” advice column called The Workologist for the New York Times Sunday business section. His latest book is called Significant Objects: 100 Extraordinary Stories About Ordinary Things, co-edited with Joshua Glenn.

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Show notes:

Optic Nerve #13. The most recent issue of Adrian Tomine's long running comic book, published by Drawn & Quarterly.

The New Yorker Fiction podcast. A monthly reading and conversation with the New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman.

Procrastinaut, a spinoff blog to Rob's Yahoo gig.

Piper Kerman, author of the memoir Orange Is The New Black: My Year In A Women’s Prison, and the Netflix TV series based on it. She told a story about her life in prison at a Moth event.

The Best of EC Artist’s Edition, Vol 1. Full size original art from old EC comics show with fanatically obsession for detail, and printed on bristol board pages.

Rob: "I got a lot out of the recent book On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes, in which Alexandra Horwitz takes walks with experts on typography, insects, and whatnot, to learn to see her city in a new way." Read Rob's review on Design Observer.

Adrian: "I just plowed through My Lunches With Orson, the book of conversations between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles. I would love to see the comic-industry equivalent."

Everybody Is Stupid Except for Me: And Other Astute Observations. Mark: "Fantagraphics has reprinted Peter Bagge’s comic strip reporting for Reason magazine. I’m not a libertarian, but I am a civil libertarian, so I agree most of the time with Bagge’s viewpoint. Even when I don’t he’s terrifically entertaining."

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Guests:

David McRaney creator of the the blog You Are Not So Smart, where he writes about the psychology of self-delusion. He also hosts the podcast of the same name and is the author of the book based on the blog, You Are Not So Smart, and the sequel, You Are Now Less Dumb, which was released July 30.

Dean Putney, Boing Boing's coding and development wizard.

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Show notes:

David's books about the psychology of self-delusion: You Are Not So Smart, and You Are Now Less Dumb.

The Last of Us. The new game from Naughty Dog. David: "It raises several bars in the world of character-driven, strongly narrative, realistic video games. It’s also maybe the best zombie-genre exploration in the last few years. Made by the company that gave us the Uncharted series."

My dad and the Oculus Rift. David: "My dad is 65, and is still a hardcore gamer. He used to take me around the backwoods of Mississippi and visit all the pirates who traded games for the C-64 when I was a little kid, and he’s never since stopped being deeply involved in PC gaming culture. I try to buy him a new game every few months if he hasn’t beaten me to it, and I’m really, really, really, hoping I can get him an Oculus while he still can enjoy it. It’s the realization of his greatest geek desires."

Bittorrent Sync. Dean: "Decentralized Dropbox via Bittorrent. Share your files to lots of people much faster by sharing directly to all of them and letting them share to others. Much more flexible than Dropbox, any folder can become a shared folder, install it on a server and sync to S3."

The Daniel Clowes Reader: A Critical Edition of Ghost World and Other Stories, with Essays, Interviews, and Annotations. Mark: "Like Robert Crumb, Daniel Clowes is a cartoonist whose interviews are are interesting as his comics are."

The Love and Rockets Companion. Mark: "One of the greatest comic series ever. 30 years and counting!"

Walt Disney's Donald Duck: The Old Castle's Secret. Mark: "I’m so glad Fantagraphics is making the work of Carl Barks’ available in low -cost, high-quality hardbound editions."

Bulkr. Mark: "An app that lets you download anyone’s Flickr photos in bulk."

This week's episode of Gweek is sponsored by Rickshaw Bagworks, manufacturers of San Francisco-made messenger bags, backpacks, and laptop sleeves. Use the discount code boingboing for 15% off an entire order through August 15th.

Joining me in this episode:

Gareth Branwyn writes on art, technology and culture. He is the former Editorial Director of MAKE and has been an editor at Mondo 2000, Wired, and bOING bOING (print). He has written seven books, including Jamming the Media, co-authoring Boing Boing's Happy Mutant Handbook, and Jargon Watch. He is currently putting together a collection of his best work, called Borg Like Me (& Other Tales of Art, Eros, and Embedded Systems).

Jim McCann is an award-winning playwright and comic book writer. He is the writer & co-creator of Return of the Dapper Men, which garnered 5 Eisner nominations and won the Eisner for Best Graphic Novel. This award-winning team has reunited to launch Lost Vegas from Image in March 2013, a universe filled with intrigue as one gambler-turned-slave has 24 hours to go all in and pull off the greatest heist the universe has seen. In 2012 McCann launched Mind the Gap, an ongoing paranormal thriller/mystery series from Image. McCann has also written the following titles: New Avengers: The Reunion; Hawkeye & Mockingbird: Ghosts; Widowmaker; Hawkeye: Blindspot; and Marvel Zombies Christmas Carol. He writes in Los Angeles and believes Mac & Cheese should be at the top of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.

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Mind the Gap, written by Jim McCann. Volume 2 (issues 6-10) is out now.

Borg Like Me (& Other Tales of Art, Eros, and Embedded Systems), Gareth's Kickstarter project.

This episode of Gweek is brought to you by Igloo, an intranet you'll actually like. Go to igloosoftware.com/boing to start building your Igloo.

Joining me in this episode:

Andy Ihnatko, technology journalist for the Chicago Sun-Times, and host of The Ihnatko Almanac, a weekly discussion that mostly focuses on the Clickable Arts: the movies, music, books, comics, articles, and other bits of entertainment and news.

Joshua Glenn is a Boston-based writer, publisher, and semiotician. He is co-author of Significant Objects, published by Fantagraphics, and Unbored, the kids' field guide to serious fun coming from Bloomsbury this fall. He edits the website HiLobrow, which as HiLoBooks is now publishing classics -- by Jack London, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle, and others -- from what he calls science fiction's Radium Age.

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Andy: "This gorgeous Millennium Falcon pin I picked up at Denver Comic-Con last month."

Josh is writing a series called Regression toward the Zine: "It will run all through the summer, sporadically, and into the fall. 25 posts about the Zine Revolution of 1984-93, including several about the origin of zines as we know them."

The World of Fanzines: A Special Form of Communication, by Fredric Wertham M.D.

Andy: "The original Broadway recording of Sweeney Todd, which I’ve been listening to endlessly alongside reading Stephen Sondheim’s two books of annotated show lyrics (Finishing The Hat and Look, I Made A Hat). Filled with doubleplus big love for Stephen Sondheim especially now that I’m looking at how meticulously he assembled these shows. The patter song in Company, for instance: words selected to be pronounceable quickly, and the architecture is selected so that it intentionally doesn’t rhyme when the character is frenzied. Also see: ALl of the YouTube videos from Stephen Sondheim's televised classes at the Guildhall School. They’re all intensely satisfying looks into how a creative work is constructed and meant to be performed."

The Survival Book, by Paul H. Nesbitt, Alonzo W. Pond and William H. Allen. Mark: "I read this when I was 10 years old and it is still one of the most engrossing books I’ve ever read. How to survive in any climate in any part of the world -- stranded on an island, in a forest in the winter, in the desert. Great stories about surviving on blueberries and trout, a failed attempt at drinking seawater."

Tom Brown's Guide to Wild Edible and Medicinal Plants

An Island to Oneself, by Tom Neale. "Neale was a New Zealander bushcraft and survival enthusiast who spent much of his life in the Cook Islands and 16 years in three sessions living alone on the island of Anchorage in the Suwarrow atoll, which was the basis of this autobiography."

Andy: "I’ve been sorting through Roger Ebert’s collection of pulp SF magazines."

Josh: A list that I recently posted to Unbored.net of the Best Ever Kids Books from 1963. Fifty years ago this year! What I enjoy so much about books from this era is how they anticipate certain progressive Sixties themes, while still retaining a Fifties-ish sweetness and innocence.

Photomatix HDR software. Andy: "I’ve been slightly more obsessed with it over the past few months, even though I’ve been using it off and on for years. Impressed with the photos coming out of my little Panasonic GX1 camera." Andy's photos using the software: 1 | 2 | 3

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Joining me in this episode:

Ben H. Winters is the author of six novels, including The Last Policeman, an Amazon.com Best Book and a 2012 Edgar Award winner. His other books include Bedbugs, Android Karenina, the New York Times bestseller Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, and the middle-grade novels The Mystery of the Missing Everything and The Secret Life of Ms. Finkleman, a Bank Street Best Book of 2011 and an Edgar Award nominee. Ben is also the author of many plays and musicals for children and adults, and he has written for national and local publications including the Chicago Tribune, Slate, and the Huffington Post. His second book in The Last Policeman trilogy is called Countdown City and it came out July 16.

Joshua Glenn is a Boston-based writer, publisher, and semiotician. He is co-author of Significant Objects, published by Fantagraphics, and Unbored, the kids' field guide to serious fun coming from Bloomsbury this fall. He edits the website HiLobrow, which as HiLoBooks is now publishing classics -- by Jack London, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle, and others -- from what he calls science fiction's Radium Age.

Here's what we talked about:

Ira Levin, author of Rosemary's Baby and The Stepford Wives.

Countdown City, Ben Winters' second novel in the Last Policeman Trilogy, which takes places in a world where a cataclysmic asteroid is months away from impact.

Josh on the 10-minute film "Dr Easy" (created by the London-based art group Shynola), which is an expansion of the first chapter of Matthew De Abaitua's cult 2007 sf novel The Red Men.

Josh on the Tributes to Kim Thompson page at The Comics Journal website. "Thompson edited many of Fanta's most popular titles, including Peter Bagge's Hate, Chris Ware's Acme Novelty Library, Joe Sacco's Palestine, Stan Sakai's Usagi Yojimbo, Linda Medley's Castle Waiting, and anthologies like Critters and Zero Zero. Thompson translated comics by: Joost Swarte (Dutch); David B., Jacques Tardi and Lewis Trondheim (French); Jason (Norwegian or French); and many others. I corresponded with Kim about Franco-Belgian comics that have never been published in English, and brought some examples in."

The HiLoBooks edition of J.D. Beresford’s 1913 sf novel Goslings “At once a postapocalyptic adventure, a comedy of manners, and a tract on sexual and social equality, Goslings is by turns funny, horrifying, and politically stirring,” says Benjamin Kunkel. “Most remarkable of all may be that it has not yet been recognized as a classic.”

William Shakespeare’s Star Wars. Ben: "A new book from Quirk (my publisher) where the guy took the original film and did the whole thing a la Shakespeare (alternating iambic pentameter and free verse, etc.) Pretty fascinating. Subtitle: 'Verily, a New Hope.'"

MAD: Artist’s Edition. Mark: A massive (22” x 15.5” -- same size as drawn, 13 pound) book of early Mad comic book art. They photographed the original pages so you can see the white-out, blue lines, zip-a-tone, paste-ups, etc.

Pocket Spotlight. A grid of LEDs that provide a continuous light source for smartphone photography. I hardly ever use my point and shoot any more. I take almost all my photos with my iPhone because I love filter apps.

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This episode of Gweek is brought to you by Squarespace -- the all-in-one platform that makes it easy to create your own website. Sign up for a free trial and use the offer code boing6 to get 10% off.

Joining me in this episode:

Peter Bebergal, the author of Too Much to Dream: A Psychedelic American Boyhood and writes frequently on the speculative and slightly fringe. He is currently writing Season of the Witch: How the Occult Saved Rock ‘n’ Roll to be published by Tarcher/Penguin. He blogs at mysterytheater.blogspot.com.

Dean Putney, Boing Boing’s coding and development wizard.

Here's what we talked about:

Soldier of the Mist by Gene Wolfe

Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats

FF by Mike Allred

OSR (Old School Renaissance) RPG games:

• Lamentations of the Flame Princess
• Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea

Candy Box and A Dark Room. New types of games popping up: minimalist in-browser text adventure/RPG hybrids

Dean’s text adventure on Omegle

Robot Film Festival.

The Ononeon

Satechi Bluetooth speaker

Metzger’s Dog, by Thomas Perry

Skooba Laptop Weekender duffle bag

The New Way Things Work

Memrise

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In this episode, I talked to Mark Dery, a cultural critic and frequent contributor to Boing Boing. Mark's books include The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink and Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century. His latest book is the essay collection I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-by Essays on American Dread, American Dreams. Recently, Boing Boing debuted its publishing imprint, Boing Boing books, with Dery’s longform essay for Kindle, All the Young Dudes: Why Glam Rock Matters. He is at work on a biography of the author, illustrator, and legendary eccentric Edward Gorey (Little, Brown: 2014). Follow @markdery.

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In this episode, I talked to A.J. Jacobs, the author of some of my favorite books. In his 2005 book, The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World, A.J. committed himself to read the entire print edition of Encyclopedia Britannica. In 2007 he wrote The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible, he lived by the rules of the Bible, and ended up wearing a white robe and a very full beard. And in Drop Dead Healthy: One Man's Humble Quest for Bodily Perfection, A.J. followed a bunch of extreme self-improvement techniques, including a raw food diet, the paleo diet, libido boosting techniques, and unusual exercise regimens.

Here's what we talked about:

A.J.'s new advice column for Esquire. "I post a quandary from a reader on my Facebook page, and then my 100,000 followers weigh in with advice, rants, wisdom, encouragement, condemnations, etc. Then I curate the best/most interesting/funniest advice and put it in a column, along with my own take on the topic. So it's like a stadium-full of Ann Landerses and Dan Savages."

A.J.'s latest article for Esquire. "It was called The Overly Documented Life, and it was about the delights and hazards of video-recording your life 24 hours a day for three months. It’s a peek at what life will be like in the Google Glass era. When I had an argument with my wife, and she said, 'You never told me that!' I could say, 'Well, let’s go to the videotape.'"

My other advice column for mental_floss, Modern Problems. This one is about putting your problems in perspective. Modern life is filled with annoyances and hurt, but compared to yesteryear, most of us live in earthly paradise. Nostalgia can suck it. The past was A mind-bogglingly dirty, painful, fetid, smelly, sickly and boring place. So if my reader complains about the dentist, I very gently tell him/her about what it was like to go to the dentist in the 1700s.

Update on A.J.'s treadmill desking and other health habits from Drop Dead Healthy.

Mark's experience using a $100 Samsung Galaxy Pocket and a local SIM card when he went to Japan instead of buying AT&T's expensive international data plan.

And a whole lot more!

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John Hodgman's comedy special is airing tonight (June 20th) on Netflix. It's called John Hodgman: Ragnarok. Carla and I were given early access to the special, which we watched last night and enjoyed very much. John kindly spent his lunch hour on the set of The Daily Show yesterday to talk with me about the special.

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This episode of Gweek is brought to you by 23andMe, the leading health and ancestry DNA service. Order your 23andMe DNA kit today for just $99.

This time, I talked to:

Hugh Howey, the author of the award-winning Molly Fyde Saga and the New York Times bestselling Wool series. The Wool Omnibus won Kindle Book Review's 2012 Indie Book of the Year Award.

Dean Putney, Boing Boing’s development wizard and everyone's favorite Manic Pixie Dream Coder.

Giveaway! Hugh kindly offered to give away a brand new Kindle Paperwhite with his signature on it! To be considered for the giveaway, subscribe to @GweekPodcast on Twitter. We'll pick the winner at random on June 25 at Noon PT.

Here's what we talked about:

Hugh discusses his unique independent publishing model and why he turned down a seven-figure book advance to retain ownership of e-book rights.

Oculus Rift

virtual reality goggles.

Exec, Lyft and the informal economy.

7 Minutes Workout Mark: "I checked out six different free iPhone apps based on research into High Intensity Interval Training. The best one is called 7 Minutes Workout."

Kingdom Rush Frontiers Mark: "I loved the the first Kingdom Rush, a tower defense game with nice cartoony graphics. This follow up is great fun, too."

Why Knot?: How to Tie More Than Sixty Ingenious, Useful, Beautiful, Lifesaving, and Secure Knots, by Philippe Petit. Mark: "The Man on Wire guy who illegally walked across the World Trade Center in 1974 has written and illustrated a great book about tying knots."

And a whole lot more!

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Ramez Naam is a computer scientist and the H.G. Wells Award-winning author of three books, including the sci-fi thriller Nexus.

Jason Snell is editorial director at IDG, the publishers of magazines and web sites about technology such as Macworld, PCWorld, and TechHive. He was the editor of Macworld for eight years. He's also the host of The Incomparable, an award-winning podcast about geeky cultural topics including movies, TV, books, and comics.

Here's what we talked about:

Real-life cyborg tech Ramez: "In the last couple years we’ve seen the approval of the first bionic eye, trials on implants that let paralyzed people move robot arms via their thoughts, and brain implants that make rats and monkeys smarter. What’s going on here? Are we headed towards The Matrix?"

Star Trek: Into Darkness Jason: "A lot of complaints I see about this movie (which I really liked) seem to involve fans who are offended by divergences from continuity, or because the movie dares to tread over (and rewrite or subvert) old ground." Ramez: "How much do we expect our sci-fi to be scientifically accurate? Or even self-consistent? I enjoyed Avengers despite it being very silly and at times illogical. But much more minor flaws in logic ruined Prometheus for me."

Feedly Mark: "A replacement for Google reader, which is going away."

Morning Glories Jason: "Just started reading this comic, which just began its second "season." As a big fan of Lost, I'm intrigued by this time-bending combination of Lost and Buffy or Runaways."

Mark: "I'm buying a $100 Samsung Galaxy Pocket and a local SIM card when traveling to Japan instead of buying AT&T's expensive international data plan."

And a whole lot more!

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Kevin Mack is a pioneering digital artist and Academy Award winning visual effects designer. Kevin also uses science and technology to make psychoactive abstract art. His work is currently featured in the "Imagined Realities in New Media" exhibit at the PS Zask Gallery in Southern California.

Dave Finkel is a Los Angeles based TV comedy writer. He’s currently an Executive Producer on the Fox comedy, New Girl starring Zooey Deschanel. His past credits include 30 Rock, United States of Tara and Just Shoot Me!

Here's what we talked about:

Rayman Jungle Run: addictive game for iOS and Android

Inkodye: Amazing sunlight sensitive dyes

Foldify: Fun paper craft iPad app for kids

Melon: Kickstarter for an EEG neurofeedback transmitting headband

Nanoflowers: Beautiful microscopic flower sculptures

Deep Learning: The next stage of neural networks

Cloud Face: Computers seeing faces in clouds

Chris Bathgate: Sculptor

HUMN Wallet: Two flat metal plates with an elastic band around them. Your stuff gets sandwiched between.

Pxlbots: Aggressively grainy pixel art of monsters and robots. Excellent DIY vinyl stickers.

The New Disruptors podcast: Glenn Fleishman's fantastic interview podcast about the end of organizational advantage.

And more!

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Ruben Bolling is the creator of “Tom the Dancing Bug,” the weekly comic strip that premieres every Wednesday on Boing Boing. “Tom the Dancing Bug” has won many awards and is a multiple Harvey Award nominee for Best Comic Strip. You can join the INNER HIVE, the comic strip’s subscription service.

Nate DiMeo is the creator of the Memory Palace, a podcast and public radio segment. He’s an on again off again journalist and has written for the TV show Parks and Recreation and was a finalist for the Thurber Prize in American Humor for co-writing a companion book for Parks and Rec called Pawnee: the Greatest Town in America.

Here's what we talked about:

Cinebook, a line of European comic books, including Lucky Luke, Yakari, Blue Coats

Marble Season, by Gilbert Hernandez

Waze, a traffic and GPS app

The Books of Beginning series, a middle-grade fantasy adventure trilogy by John Stephens

Super Flat Times, a kinda lost, unheralded, terrific collection of short stories about a bonkers dystopian world by Matthew Derby

The Hunter, by Richard Stark

Wikireader, $20 gadget contains "the entire English Wikipedia with 3 million topics"

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Ned Vizzini is an award-winning author and television writer. He’s the author of the novels Be More Chill and It's Kind of a Funny Story, and he was on Gweek 069 last year when his delightful young adult novel, The Other Normals was published. He’s also written for TV, including MTV’s Teen Wolf.

Chris Columbus is the writer, director, and producer of many award winning movies, including Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Mrs. Doubtfire, The Goonies, Gremlins, The Help, and Home Alone.

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Thanks to Soundcloud for hosting Gweek!

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What we talked about in this episode:

Fun & Games

Hell & Gone

Point & Shoot

The Wheel Man

The Blonde

Frauds, Scams, and Cons

Thanks to Soundcloud for hosting Gweek!

Lucy is an illustrator, comic artist and author. Occasionally she is a puppeteer, ukulele player and food/travel writer. She likes books, sewing, bicycles, food you can eat with a spoon, ornery cats, art you can climb on, manatees, nice pens, costumes, baking, television, cheese and Oscar Wilde.

Her first published book, French Milk, is a drawn journal about living (and eating) in Paris with her mother. (From Touchstone Publishing from Simon and Schuster), August of 2008.

Her newest book, Relish, from First Second Books, is about growing up in the food industry. (First Second Books, April 2013.)

Beginning with a love for Archie comics, Tintin and Calvin and Hobbes, she has been making comics in some form or another since she could hold a pencil.

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What we talked about in this episode:

Mailbox

Primates

Pretty Girls Ugly Faces

Record!!

Moves

Candy Crush Saga

Jiro Dreams of Sushi

Thanks to Soundcloud for hosting Gweek!

One day in 1990 I was scanning the racks of my local comic book store in Boulder Colorado, and I came across the first issue of a comic book called Real Stuff. The cover was drawn by Peter Bagge, who was the creator of a comic book series called Neat Stuff. I assumed Real Stuff was a new comic written and illustrated by Bagge, so I pulled it off the shelf without scrutinizing it further, and added it to the other comics I’d selected to buy that day.

When I got home, I sat down to read it. It turned out not to be a new comic book by Peter Bagge, but a series of autobiographical short stories written by a man named Dennis Eichhorn.

From the very first story, I knew I was going to love Real Stuff. Dennis has had some of the strangest life experiences you can imagine, and he comes across as a person who is adventurous, compassionate, curious, and enjoys laughing at himself. Best of all, he is a terrific storyteller.

Real Stuff is one of my favorite comics of all time, and I have some good news to share. Boing Boing is going to start running the amazing stories from the pages of Real Stuff, once a week. I’m immensely excited that a new audience is going to be able to read Real Stuff on Boing Boing, free of charge. I hope you’ll enjoy reading, or re-reading them.

Melissa is profiled in today's Chicago Reader article about a supper club run by amateur chefs.

Thanks to Soundcloud for hosting Gweek!

When Marina Gorbis was a child, growing up in the Soviet Union, she lived with her sister and widowed mother, a medical doctor at a government clinic in Odessa. Her mother’s salary was meager, and her mother wasn’t a member of the privileged communist party elite, and yet Marina says she and her sister enjoyed a life filled with the arts, good food, fashionable clothes, travel, and education. It was all possible, she says, because her mother knew the value of social capital. “Social connections,” Marina writes, “were a powerful currency that flowed through [my mother’s] network of friends and acquaintances, giving her access to many goods and services and enabling our comfortable, if not luxurious, lifestyle.”

Marina never forgot this lesson about the incredible power of networked individuals, and it directed the course of her professional life. For the past 7 years, Marina has been the executive director of the Institute for the Future, an independent, non-profit research organization and creative design studio in Palo Alto California where David is also a researcher. IFTF helps organizations think about the future to make better decisions in the present.

Thanks to Soundcloud for hosting Gweek!

Nick provided a list of enjoyable books he's read while on tour:

• A Darkness More Than Night, by Michael Connelly
• The Cabinet of Curiosities, by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child (I dig the character Agent Pendergast)
• The Guards, by Ken Bruen
• Out, by Natsuo Kirino
• The Night Gardner, by George Pelecanos
• Print The Legend, by Craig McDonald
• In The Woods, by Tana French
• Dark Places, by Gillian Flynn [Boing Boing interviewed Gillian on Gweek 073 in 2012]

Nick says: "Pretty much anything by these authors is great reading. Other notable go-to authors for me include: James Ellroy, Elmore Leonard, James Sallis, and Walter Mosley to name a few."

Thanks to Soundcloud for hosting Gweek!

In this episode:

The Art of Doing: How Superachievers Do What They Do and How They Do It So Well

Ye-Ye Profile: Gigi Gaston

Fathom Butterfly - the notorious beauty queen, showgirl, Hammer horror actress, porn star, felon and feminist filmmaker tweets her memoirs

Unbored: The Essential Field Guide to Serious Fun, by Elizabeth Foy Larsen and Joshua Glenn.

Katana, by Ann Nocenti and Alex Sanchez

Science-Fiction: The Early Years, by Everett Franklin Bleiler

In Praise of Messy Lives, by Katie Roiphe

Geek Battle: The Game of Extreme Geekdom

Flow Free

In this episode:

A Man of Misconceptions: The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change, by John Glassie

Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything, by Joshua Foer

Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology, by Lawrence Weschler

"Utopian for Beginners: An amateur linguist loses control of the language he invented," a New Yorker article by Joshua Foer

"Want to Remember Everything You'll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm," a Wired article by Gary Wolf

Atlas Obscura is the definitive guide to the world's wondrous and curious places.

Language learning apps and websites: Memrise, iAnki, Dr. Moku's Hiragana Mnemonics, Dr. Moku's Katakana Mnemonics

Gweek is a podcast where the editors and friends of Boing Boing talk about comic books, science fiction and fantasy, video games, board games, TV shows, music, movies, tools, gadgets, apps, and other neat stuff.

My guests in this episode:

Peter Bebergal (left), the author of Too Much to Dream: A Psychedelic American Boyhood and a writer for various online and print magazines. He blogs at mysterytheater.blogspot.com. Glenn Fleishman (right), executive editor of The Magazine, a periodical for technology-minded readers that isn’t always about technology, the host of the podcast The New Disruptors, and one of the writers of The Economist magazine’s Babbage blog.

Peter talked about the "lack of pop culture for that once powerful consumer: the 10-13 year-old boy." He said, "I spend so much time with my son trying to figure out the appropriateness of media, from TV to movies to video games. There is so little directed to his age (11). everything is either dumbed down or too violent and mature. My son gave me a list of his favorite things this past year." Peter shares his son's list in this episode.

Other things we talked about:

Maximum Ride novels, about mutant kids who have spy-like adventures.

Justified: It's back and continues to be one of the great network shows.

Sony NEX6: The prospect of a compact camera with most of the characteristics of a DSLR, but at a lower cost and in a more compact form factor. The differences between a smartphone and anything but a DSLR are eroding. Cameraphones have nearly caught up to some of the better point-and-shoots. (And some cameras are becoming phones or running Android.)

PrintrBot Jr., a $400 3D printer.

Saga by Brian K. Vaughan and artist Fiona Staples: the weirdest comic you'll ever read right now for a mainstream audience

Strange Aeons magazine Wreck-It Ralph Soundtrack

This morning David and I spoke with with Carrie Brownstein: musician, writer, actor. She’s a founding member of the bands Slayter-Kinney and Wild Flag, and the co-creator, co-writer, and co-star of Portlandia, the hit sketch comedy series on IFC, currently in its 3rd season.

Previously:

Portlandia: A Guide for Visitors

Portlandia: Artisanal popcorn

Portlandia just keeps getting better

Portlandia holiday preview video: "Vagina Pillows"

SPOILER ALERT: New Portlandia preview clip is called "Spoiler Alert"

(Image of Carrie Brownstein: Wildflag - SXSW Music 2011 - Austin, TX, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from kk's photostream)

Rum Doings Podcast

Marvel NOW!

Dresden Files: Cold Days

The Art of Wreck-It Ralph

Nexus7

My co-hosts for this episode:

Joshua Glenn, a Boston-based writer, publisher, and semiotician. He is co-author of Significant Objects, published by Fantagraphics, and Unbored, the kids' field guide to serious fun coming from Bloomsbury this fall. He edits the website HiLobrow, which as HiLoBooks is now publishing classics -- by Jack London, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle, and others -- from what he calls science fiction's Radium Age.

Kevin Kelly, senior maverick at Wired, editor of Cool Tools, co-founder of Quantified Self, and author of books.

In this episode, we talked about:

About Love: Three Stories by Anton Chekhov, illustrated by Seth. Three interlinked stories about hunters who are stuck in a hut during a snowstorm. Joshua: "Seth is not only great at illustrating, he's also great at decorating books. It's a beautiful pleasure to hold this book." Seth also illustrated two books that Joshua co-wrote: The Idler's Glossary and The Wage Slave's Glossary.

Vela Quadrant Task Force. A long-running webcomic. Kevin: "The art in it looks like folk art painting. There's a kind of cramped feeling to it. There's an offbeat, slightly skewed sensibility … there's something outsider about it."

Kevin gives us an update on the successful Kickstarter campaign for the second volume in The Silver Cord graphic novel series. Download the first issue for free as a PDF here.

Finish This Book. Joshua: "It's a very neat book kids. The author, Keri Smith, pretends that she's found a bunch of scattered pages in a park that she's assembled. There is a mystery involved, and you have to figure out what this manual was. And in order to do that, you have a bunch of creative exercises on each page."

The People of the Ruins, by Edward Shanks. The fifth book in the Radium Age Science Fiction Series, published by Josh's HiLoBooks. "Trapped in a London laboratory during a worker uprising in 1924, ex-artillery officer and physics instructor Jeremy Tuft awakens 150 years later — in a neo-medieval society whose inhabitants have forgotten how to build or operate machinery."

The Yeti USB Microphone by Blue. Mark: "There are many reasons to use the Yeti microphone for podcasting instead of a USB headset. You can change the directionality with a knob. There's a knob for the game. You can plug headphones into it and get instant monitoring of what your voice sounds like, so you can modulate your voice -- it really helps to keep me from yelling into the microphone."

Reflective Zero Messenger Bag from Rickshaw Bagworks.

And lots more: Lens reversal rings for macro photography, 21 truly great movies for parents and kids to watch together (that you can watch instantly on Netflix), Finding Bigfoot, Waze GPS collaborative navigation app, Banksy Bristol Tour app, Werewolf/Mafia, the parlor game.

He was editor of Co-Evolution Quarterly, the magazine that grew out of the Whole Earth Catalog. When Co-Evolution Quarterly evolved into Whole Earth Review, Jay wrote an article for it in 1987 called, "If Software Companies Ran the Country," in which he likened digital media to the replicating Shmoos in L'il Abner, and the article remains as fresh and powerful today as it did 25 years ago.

Jay was the founder and publisher of the late, great Gnosis Magazine, and more recently the author of several books on Western esoteric and occult traditions, including The Masonic Myth, "a journey of discovery into the real facts (and mysteries) of Masonry's history and symbols."

We also discussed the newly-published anthology of Anarchy Comics, yet another terrific creation by Jay. Though it ran only four issue from 1978 to 1987, the series remains one of my favorites, and I treasure my original copies.

In this special edition of the Gweek podcast I interviewed Milo Danger, the guy who installed a paintball handgun into an unmanned drone and shot cardboard targets shaped like human torsos. Milo has other videos on his Danger Info YouTube channel about lock picking and how to grow medical marijuana.

David and I interviewed Tim Ferriss, author of the new book The 4-Hour Chef. This is Tim's 3rd book. He's also the author of: The 4-Hour Workweek, and The 4-Hour Body.

Tim is a broad-spectrum enthusiast,” and his sense of curiosity drives him to learn about and participate in a dizzyingly large number of activities. He’s developed a system of sorts to quickly pick up enough skills and knowledge to understand, participate in, and appreciate crafts and practices such as learning languages, game hunting, martial arts, body building, tango dancing, and startup investment. His latest book, The 4-Hour Chef, reflects Tim’s interest in the culinary arts, but more importantly, it describes how Tim goes about learning new skills in a way that others can use to pursue their own interests.

We talked about many things, including smart drugs, the Paleo Diet vs the Slow Carb Diet, and a strange experience in China.

My co-hosts for this episode:

Michael Pusateri, a lifelong tinkerer and former television tech executive for Disney who blogs at cruftbox.com

Fred Van Lente, the author of the Comic Book History of Comics, Valiant’s Archer & Armstrong comic book series, the Marvel iOS game Avengers Initiative, and much more.

Here are some of the things we talked about:

Dirt Candy, by Amanda Cohen. "Shares the secrets to making flavorful dishes—from indulgent stone-ground grits with pickled shiitakes and tempura poached egg, to hearty smoked cauliflower and waffles with horseradish cream sauce, to playfully addictive popcorn pudding with caramel popcorn."

Leviathan Wakes: The Expanse, by James Corey. Michael: "Great space opera sci-fi with a mix of detective who-dunnit and realistic characters."

I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution. Mark: "A great oral history of MTV. Filled with amazing anecdotes about the improbable rise of a channel that almost didn’t happen."

The Secret History of DB Cooper, the recently-wrapped psychedelic spy series from Oni Press by Brian Churilla. Posits an early 1970s in which Soviet and American agents war in a trippy psychic realm, of which the famed “skyjacker” was one (but on which side)?

Blackwing/Palomino Kum Pencil Sharpener. Michael: "Great manual sharpener for pencil enthusiasts."

How to Sharpen Pencils: A Practical & Theoretical Treatise on the Artisanal Craft of Pencil Sharpening for Writers, Artists, Contractors, Flange Turners, Anglesmiths, & Civil Servants, By David Reese.

Perma-Proto Breadboards from Adafruit. Mark: "An easy way to make a permanent version of your solderless breadboard prototype."

Borderlands 2. Fred: "Because Borderlands 2, that’s why. Pretty much the perfect game (in my own, admittedly highly biased view) from a writing sense, and something I think a lot about these days, as I’ve started writing games."

And much more, including three excellent picks by Gweek listener Tyler Dewald: Write or Die, White Noise Lite, Law and the Multiverse.

When I was living in London in my early 20s, I found a book in the hallway of a university in Hampstead. It was a nonfiction story about a group of people who had become literally frozen with Parkinson's disease from an encephalitis outbreak. The book was written by a doctor who treated the people with a substance called L–dopa. The drug was like magic. It gave the formerly paralyzed people the ability to move around, talk, dance, and do most everything they could do before they became sick. Unfortunately, the effect of the drug tapered off, and the patients needed greater and greater amounts of L-dopa to receive the benefits. Eventually, The dosage required to obtain positive results exceeded the toxicity threshold, and so the doctor had to stop administering L-dopa to them. And one by one, all the patients became frozen again for the rest of their lives.

The book is called Awakenings, and it was written by Oliver Sacks, a physician and professor of neurology at the New York school of medicine. Dr. Sacks is the author of twelve books, including Uncle Tungsten, The Mind's Eye, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, and most recently, Hallucinations, which was published earlier this month.

Dr. Sacks' books are fascinating explorations into the way the human mind works, usually through studying abnormal minds and surprising ways in which they give us clues about perception, consciousness, and behavior. Interestingly, Dr. Sacks himself has face blindness, Asperger's syndrome, is blind in one eye, and is slightly deaf, which might explain in part why matters of the human mind are of great interest to him. He's one of my favorite authors, and because my coeditor at Boing Boing, David Pescovitz, is also an ardent admirer, he joined me in the following interview with Dr. Sacks.

Here is our interview with Dr. Sacks.

David and I spoke with Jon Ronson about his new book, Lost at Sea. Jon is the author of several first-person narrative books that David and I love: Them: Adventures with Extremists, The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry, and The Men Who Stare at Goats, (which was made into a movie by George Clooney). If you are unfamiliar with Jon's work I recommend that you get your hands on every book he's written.

Lost at Sea collects 22 Guardian articles Jon's written over the years, and they are fascinating portraits of people and groups a few standard deviations away from the middle of the normalcy bell curve.

Subjects include: Insane Clown Posse and their announcement that they are born-again Christians who have encoded secret messages in their songs for the last decade, the billionaire transgender woman who invented satellite radio and her attempt to create a lifelike robot of her partner, the culture of Indigo Children, a British pop star's fascination with UFOs and aliens abductions, the contents of Stanley Kubrik's archival boxes, the tiny town of North Pole, Alaska, where Christmas is celebrated 365 days a year and where a group of high school students were caught trying to duplicate the Columbine high school massacre, a profile of Neuro-linguistic Programming co-creator Richard Bandler, a Children of God offshoot that donates kidneys as part of their religious practice, a profile of psychic Sylvia Browne, and many more stories. I was enthralled by every one.

David and I spoke to Jon last year on Gweek. Listen to that episode here.

My guest this episode is Gillian Flynn, the New York Times Bestselling author of Gone Girl, Sharp Objects, and Dark Places. I had a terrific time talking to her about why she enjoys writing creepy books with twisted characters. It was interesting to learn that her father is a retired film professor who loves the work of David Lynch, because the teenagers in Dark Places reminded me of the kids in Twin Peaks.

See my review of Gone Girl here.

Click here to play this episode. Gweek is Boing Boing's podcast about comic books, science fiction and fantasy, video games, board games, tools, gadgets, apps, and other neat stuff.

My co-hosts for this episode:

Joshua Glenn, a Boston-based writer, publisher, and semiotician. He is co-author of Significant Objects, published by Fantagraphics, and Unbored, the kids’ field guide to serious fun coming from Bloomsbury this fall. He edits the website HiLobrow, which as HiLoBooks is now publishing classics -- by Jack London, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle, and others -- from what he calls science fiction’s Radium Age.

Adrian Tomine, a cartoonist and illustrator best known for his long running comic book series Optic Nerve and his stunning New Yorker covers. This month, publisher Drawn & Quarterly is releasing New York Drawings, a decade of covers, comics, illustrations, and sketches from the pages of New Yorker and beyond.

In this episode, we talked about:

New York Drawings, by Adrian Tomine. This beautiful coffee table book published by Drawn & Quarterly includes every illustration Adrian has done for The New Yorker.

Unbored: The Essential Field Guide to Serious Fun, by Elizabeth Foy Larsen, Joshua Glenn. I wrote the introduction to Unbored, and it is the coolest kids' activity book I've ever seen. It's packed with how-to projects, activities, games, and other instructions for leading a varied and fulfilling life.

Building Stories, by Chris Ware. Adrian: "This is the project Chris Ware has been working on for 10 years… it's a giant box, almost like a board game. You open it up and there's a big stack of booklets and books of different sizes… it's just an amazing package altogether."

The Hive, by Charles Burns. Adrian: "It's the second part of a series of his Tintin-influenced graphic novels and it's very much Charles Burns. It's quite a departure from his previous book, Black Hole. It's just gorgeous work as always and it's in color, too."

Barbarella: Queen of the Galaxy. Glenn: "A very cartoony science-fiction themed movie starring Jane Fonda, directed by Roger Vadim that was based on a French comic book. It's about a woman exploring her sexual power in a metaphorical way, having experiences as she goes around the galaxy."

Elenco AmeriKit Learn to Solder Kit

And much more!

Past episodes of Gweek: 001, 001, 002, 003, 004, 005, 006, 007, 008, 009, 010, 011, 012, 013, 014, 015, 016, 017, 018, 019, 020, 021, 022, 023, 024, 025, 026, 027, 028, 029, 030, 031, 032, 033, 034, 035, 036, 037, 038, 039, 040, 041, 042, 043, 044, 045, 046, 047, 048, 049, 050, 051, 052, 053, 054, 055, 056, 057, 058, 059, 060, 061, 062, 063, 064, 065, 066, 067, 068, 069, 070, 071

Click here to play this episode. Gweek is Boing Boing's podcast about comic books, science fiction and fantasy, video games, board games, tools, gadgets, apps, and other neat stuff.

My co-hosts for this episode:

Glenn Fleishman. Glenn is a long-time tech reporter, a hacky perl programmer, and one of the writers of the Economist’s Babbage blog on technology and culture.

Kevin Mack. Kevin is a visual effects supervisor, an artist, and the true son of Tinkerbell. (Here's a video profile of Kevin and me.)

John Hodgman. Among other things, John’s the resident expert on The Daily Show and the judge on the Judge John Hodgman Podcast. The third and final installment in his trilogy of Complete World Knowledge -- called That Is All -- comes out in paperback and audiobook today. John and Jonathan Coulton are performing together Boston and Northampton on November 2nd and 3rd. Learn more about the events here.

In this episode, we talked about:

That is All. John Hodgman brings us the third and final installment in his trilogy of Complete World Knowledge. The paperback is loaded with new material!

Skype is owned by Microsoft now, and the latest version stinks. Glenn: "Microsoft reengineered its security infrastructure to make it easier to tap Skype calls. I maintain and others maintain, and that process caused worse phone connections."

Postsingular, by Rudy Rucker.

Glenn: "Jo Walton’s Among Others just won Hugo. Terrific novel. Also recently read her Small Change trilogy (from 2006, 2007, and 2008)"

John recommends Reamde, by Neal Stephenson: "A thriller of international espionage but it puts the cliches of international espionage thrillers so far behind it."

How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character, by Paul Tough

DenTek Slim Brush Cleaners: "Like tiny bottle brushes. Much better than dental floss."

Samsara. A non-narrative documentary shot in 25 countries.

And much more!

Past episodes of Gweek: 001, 001, 002, 003, 004, 005, 006, 007, 008, 009, 010, 011, 012, 013, 014, 015, 016, 017, 018, 019, 020, 021, 022, 023, 024, 025, 026, 027, 028, 029, 030, 031, 032, 033, 034, 035, 036, 037, 038, 039, 040, 041, 042, 043, 044, 045, 046, 047, 048, 049, 050, 051, 052, 053, 054, 055, 056, 057, 058, 059, 060, 061, 062, 063, 064, 065, 066, 067, 068, 069, 070

Click here to play this episode. Gweek is Boing Boing's podcast about comic books, science fiction and fantasy, video games, board games, tools, gadgets, apps, and other neat stuff.

My guest this week is Ned Vizzini, an award winning author and television writer with a new young adult novel called The Other Normals. He’s written for the New York Times, Salon, and the L Magazine. In television, he has written for Season 2 of MTV's Teen Wolf and currently writes for ABC's Last Resort. He is the co-author, with Chris Columbus, of the forthcoming fantasy-adventure series House of Secrets. (The drawing above is from Ned's Flickr account. It was drawn by his wife, Sabra Embury, and is in the set "Art from and Inspired by 'The Other Normals.'" Ned says: "This is a fish-monster (or batrachian) in the book drawn by my wife. In the book they actually have legs. My wife says, 'That was my attempt to help you visualize one of the characters.'")

In this episode, we talked about:

The Other Normals, by Ned Vizzini. "It's about a 15-year-old role-playing game geek who goes to summer camp and falls into an actual fantasy world and has to put all his gaming knowledge to the test against monsters."

Be More Chill, by Ned Vizzini. "It's about a kid who gets a pill in his brain that tells him how to be cool all the time."

Stranger Magic: Charmed States & The Arabian Nights, "a new nonfiction overview of the 1,001 Nights. I took a lot from 1,001 Nights in writing The Other Normals. I love the John Payne translation which Sir Richard Burton is alleged to have plagiarized -- one of those cases where the flashier author who was better at self-promoting got the credit."

Last Resort "It's about a nuclear submarine captain who gets questionable orders to fire Pakistan. When the caption asks to have those orders clarified he is fired upon. He has to take his nuclear submarine to a South Pacific island and take refuge there and set himself up as the world's smallest nuclear nation."

"One of the books we have in the 'Last Resort library': The 48 Laws of Power. Really scary must-read for anyone who wants to get ahead -- or understand sociopaths. (Last Resort is a political thriller, so it helps)."

Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms

"I got Johnny Ramone's Commando on Kindle (released this year) and I think it's an interesting example of a book that some claim MUST BE enjoyed as a hardcover which is actually just fine on digital."

Slash, by Slash

And much more!

Past episodes of Gweek: 001, 001, 002, 003, 004, 005, 006, 007, 008, 009, 010, 011, 012, 013, 014, 015, 016, 017, 018, 019, 020, 021, 022, 023, 024, 025, 026, 027, 028, 029, 030, 031, 032, 033, 034, 035, 036, 037, 038, 039, 040, 041, 042, 043, 044, 045, 046, 047, 048, 049, 050, 051, 052, 053, 054, 055, 056, 057, 058, 059, 060, 061, 062, 063, 064, 065, 066, 067, 068, 069

Click here to play this episode. Gweek is Boing Boing's podcast about comic books, science fiction and fantasy, video games, board games, tools, gadgets, apps, and other neat stuff.

My co-hosts for this episode are:

Jamie Frevele, Boing Boing's entertainment editor, comedian, and former editor of The Mary Sue.

Actor Matthew Modine, who has lent his voice talents to a new interactive book for kids called Punky Dunk and the Gold Fish, which is designed to make learning to read fun and something parents and kids can share. Matthew also recently released the Full Metal Jacket Diary app, which is an amazing iPad app that includes Matthew’s on-set photos and diary entries of his experiences during the time he was in the Kubrick movie.

Here's a demo of the Full Metal Jacket Diary app:

FULL METAL JACKET DIARY iPad App Demo Video from Cinco Dedos Peliculas on Vimeo.

Past episodes of Gweek: 001, 001, 002, 003, 004, 005, 006, 007, 008, 009, 010, 011, 012, 013, 014, 015, 016, 017, 018, 019, 020, 021, 022, 023, 024, 025, 026, 027, 028, 029, 030, 031, 032, 033, 034, 035, 036, 037, 038, 039, 040, 041, 042, 043, 044, 045, 046, 047, 048, 049, 050, 051, 052, 053, 054, 055, 056, 057, 058, 059, 060, 061, 062, 063, 064, 065, 066, 067, 068

Click here to play this episode. Gweek is Boing Boing's podcast about comic books, science fiction and fantasy, video games, board games, tools, gadgets, apps, and other neat stuff.

My co-hosts for this episode are:

Glenn Fleishman. Glenn is a long-time tech reporter, a hacky perl programmer, and one of the writers of the Economist’s Babbage blog on technology and culture.

Our guest is comedian, actor, writer, and filmmaker Eugene Mirman. He played the character Eugene in the HBO television series, Flight of the Conchords. He currently plays a Russian hit-man/comic in the Adult Swim Series Delocated and does the voice of “Gene” on Fox’s animated series Bob’s Burgers, which has a new season launching on September 30. Eugene was named Best New York City Comedian by the Village Voice and one of the 10 best comedians of the last decade by Paste Magazine. Rolling Stone calls him a “Hot Twitterer,” and he created, curates, hosts, and performs at the hugely popular Eugene Mirman Comedy Festival, now in its 5th year! It took place in Brooklyn Sept 13-16.

In this episode:

Studio 360 Live: Eugene Mirman vs. Time Warner Cable

Using CancelWizard.com to cancel SiriusXM's impossible-to-cancel subscription

Glenn says: "Flaming Carrot is back! Sort of. A Kickstarter project by Bob Burden and his cohorts will bring the early stuff to digital form, and he’s also offering a limited-edition hard-cover of a collection of semi-early stuff."

Bill Griffith: Lost and Found: Comics 1969-2003

Fables Vol. 1: Legends in Exile

Astro City

Super Scratch Programming Adventure!: Learn to Program By Making Cool Games. Mark: "Scratch is a drag-and-drop programming language for kids that was developed at MIT. My 9-year-old daughter loves it because she can create interactive cartoons. Scratch also hooks up to the Picoboard, which has various controls and sensors on it."

Economix: How and Why Our Economy Works (and Doesn't Work), in Words and Pictures

And much more!

Past episodes: 001, 001, 002, 003, 004, 005, 006, 007, 008, 009, 010, 011, 012, 013, 014, 015, 016, 017, 018, 019, 020, 021, 022, 023, 024, 025, 026, 027, 028, 029, 030, 031, 032, 033, 034, 035, 036, 037, 038, 039, 040, 041, 042, 043, 044, 045, 046, 047, 048, 049, 050, 051, 052, 053, 054, 055, 056, 057, 058, 059, 060, 061, 062, 063, 064, 065, 066, 067