If you justified your child’s excessive screen time over the pandemic period as a way for them to round out their STEM education (haven’t we all?), you’ll be pleased to know there are many skill-building coding games online that will teach them core coding skills, like collaboration and visualization.
Coding games also give kids an opportunity to improve critical thinking and creative problem solving, and the latest spate of coding platforms is designed to appeal to kids with varying interests. There’s text-based coding for creating art and animation, and puzzle games instructing a robot to move crates. We think you’ll find these preferable to those endless unboxing videos they keep asking to watch on YouTube…
Better yet, unlike expensive coding camps and classes, some of these games are free (and even those with a subscription cost typically offer users a free trial period).
What If…? is Marvel’s fourth series on Disney+, but don’t expect it to be like WandaVision, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, or Loki. For one, What If…? is the MCU’s first animated show. It also just might be Marvel’s most bonkers show yet.
That’s because What If…? takes iconic MCU moments and adds a reality-bending twist. We’ll get to see what would have happened if Peggy Carter had taken the super soldier serum instead of Steve Rogers, or if Yondu had brought T’Challa to space instead of Peter Quill.
Also, there are Marvel zombies, and a mysterious figure known as the Watcher who…watches over everything that’s ever happened. The possibilities for these alternate realities are endless (and very exciting). Many Marvel cast members return to voice their characters, including Chadwick Boseman in his final performance as T’Challa/Black Panther.
What If…? starts streaming August 11 on Disney+, with new episodes every Wednesday.
Don’t trust anything on the internet — until Mashable tries it first. Welcome to the Hype Test, where we review viral trends and tell you what’s really worth millions of likes.
A few years ago I started phasing graphic T-shirts out of my wardrobe. They had served me well, but I felt it was high time I graduated to clothes that require ironing. Then Nice Shirt! Thanks‘ customised T-shirts went viral on TikTok, and I decided I had to get just one more.
Launched last year by friends Hayden Rankin and Mason Manning (also known as Uncle Mason), Nice Shirt! Thanks is a small business that follows one simple ingenious premise. Provide a short written prompt to the good folks at Nice Shirt! Thanks, and they will design and print you a T-shirt based on it. Descriptions can be as detailed or vague as you wish, however you will have no idea what your fevered writings have wrought until your new garment arrives at your home.
“We wanted to monetise art and comedy, which is two things that we’re really big into,” Rankin said. “Finally, through a bunch of tweaking and adjusting, we finally came up with this idea that we thought was perfect.”
It’s a fun mix of chaos, art, individuality, and memes that seemed destined to go viral — and it did. A simple search for #niceshirtthanks on TikTok will unearth numerous clips of customers gleefully reacting to their T-shirts for the first time, and the company has been inundated with orders.
“There’s a comedic apparel market that I just don’t even think has really been tapped into,” said Rankin. “We’ve seen that a bunch of people like stupid apparel, they like funny shirts, they like garbage like that, and it’s this college group that we’ve really hit into that we really understand because we’re just a bunch of college meatheads.”
How to order from Nice Shirt! Thanks
Shirts currently range from $25.99 for a short-sleeved shirt to $30.99 for a long-sleeved one, plus an extra $2 added on to each if you want to upload your own image. Standard shipping within the U.S. costs $4.90, though Nice Shirt! Thanks ships around the globe — it’s just a matter of if you want to pay for it. Nice Shirt! Thanks provided my review sample, though shipping to Australia would generally cost $17.34.
Unfortunately, you can’t just order a nice shirt whenever inspiration strikes. High demand has caused Nice Shirt! Thanks to restrict sales to 150 shirts per day, with orders opening every day at 12:00 a.m. CT. Rankin and Manning eventually hope to increase the number of orders they can take, but for now they’re still busy working through the thousands still in their backlog.
If you’re fortunate enough to nab one of those coveted 150 daily spots, the ordering process is easy. Aside from the length of their sleeves, customers must also choose a size ranging from Small to 5XL (all measurements taken with the shirt laid flat), and from colours including “White,” “White again,” and “We only have white shirts.”
A wealth of variety. Credit: Amanda Yeo
Finally, once the shirt is in your cart, you have to type out a short prompt from which Nice Shirt! Thanks’ designers will draw inspiration, just as the old masters of yore were inspired by scripture. The business has a roster of over 400 designers, all of whom can access a database of prompts and choose to work on ones that spark their imagination. (Rates started at $5 per shirt, based on the cost of hiring a designer from Fiverr, but Rankin told Mashable they intend to raise prices further in order to better compensate their workers.)
The text I supplied for my prompt read: “My friends keep calling me a Space Lawyer. I am not a Space Lawyer. Please help me convey that I am not a Space Lawyer.” For context, I have a law degree and sometimes writeaboutspace. This does not make me a space lawyer, and nothing I say should be considered legal advice, space or otherwise. If you ever meet my friends, please tell them this.
I had very little idea of what design this prompt could possibly inspire, but I am not a designer so that was not my problem.
How long does it take for Nice Shirt! Thanks to ship?
My shirt took four weeks from order to arrival, which is on the shorter side of expected delivery times. Nice Shirt! Thanks’ website warns that it can take a minimum of four to six weeks from the time an order is placed to the time it’s simply shipped, with both the deluge of orders and the coronavirus pandemic slowing down operations. Then you have to wait for it to actually make the trip to you, which could add on even more weeks. Keep that in mind and consider a backup plan if you’re ordering a shirt for a specific occasion.
When my nice shirt finally came…it was genuinely the first thing to make me smile that day.
However, once mine did arrive, I found it worth the wait. I was having a truly awful week when my nice shirt finally came, and it was genuinely the first thing to make me smile that day.
Nice Shirt! Thanks doesn’t mess around with fancy packaging, which is good for keeping costs low. Shirts arrive folded in a mailing envelope, the only other contents being a print out of your prompt. It’s fairly handy, since the lengthy time between ordering and receiving means there’s a reasonable chance you’ll forget exactly what you asked for.
For my space lawyer prompt, I received a shirt depicting someone floating through space in a white suit and astronaut helmet, one fist holding the scales of justice and the other cocked back to punch. Next to them, the shirt has text that reads “Call me a space lawyer one more time.” I love it.
Nice shirt! Thanks. Credit: Amanda Yeo
What’s the quality like?
Though Nice Shirt! Thanks’ shirts are well chronicled on TikTok, there hasn’t been much discussion regarding the actual quality of the garments. I’ve had bad experiences with other customised T-shirts in the past, so I expected my Nice Shirt! Thanks order to be more of a novelty than a practical addition to my wardrobe. Worth a few wears, but not likely to stick around for long.
Instead, I was pleasantly surprised by my shirt’s quality. The label indicates the base T-shirt is from Hanes, made from 100 percent cotton, and it’s comfortably soft enough to sleep in. The printed design wasn’t plasticy as I’d feared, so there’s no danger of peeling, though it was the tiniest bit stiff when it first arrived. Fortunately it softens right up after a wash, which Nice Shirt! Thanks advises you do before your first wear.
That first wash did cause the design’s colours to slightly fade, but not more than would be reasonable or expected, and it isn’t something I expect to be a long-term issue. While I can’t definitively say Nice Shirt! Thanks’ shirts hold up in the long run, the look and feel of them indicate they probably will. I do wish I had gotten a size larger for a looser fit, but generally I found it true to size.
Thanks!
I was eager to surprise my friends with this shirt, and their delighted reactions did not disappoint. However, they also enthusiastically interpreted the shirt’s text as a request rather than a threat, so technically it failed the brief. I’m willing to let that slide though, because art is subjective and my friends will happily ignore authorial intent if it means I will suffer.
Of course, with so much of the shirts’ designs left to interpretation, there is always the risk that someone genuinely won’t like what they receive. In such cases, Nice Shirt! Thanks’ policy is to stand by their designers, and customers just have to literally wear it. Even so, there has been the occasional exception.
SEE ALSO:
That viral Selkie puff dress only works for the Instagram fantasy world
“The policy is that we don’t do refunds,” said Rankin. “But there have been times where people have emailed us and we’re like, ‘alright can you send us the shirt,’ and sure enough, it was something that I probably cleared that I shouldn’t have cleared. It just wasn’t up to par. And so there’s been times we’re like, you know what, I think we’re gonna go ahead and send you a new one.”
The very nature of internet meme art is that it is “bad,” but there is a difference between silly camp and just uninspired. Rankin and Manning have created a business out of knowing where that line is.
Manning and Rankin showing off their own nice shirts. Manning’s is a picture of him eating ravioli. Credit: Nice Shirt! Thanks
Though they could theoretically print as many nice shirts for themselves as they’d like, Rankin only owns one: an image of a cabbage below the word “cabbage.” So far, he’s had six people ask him where they can get it as well.
“That feels so good to have somebody ask that,” said Rankin. “It’s the most abstract stuff that people are just like, ‘That makes no sense. I want it.’ And I’m like, I couldn’t agree more.”
More from Hype Test
The Pink Stuff cleaner that’s all over TikTok lives up to the hype, but it’s not magic
Baked oatmeal review: How my TikTok obsession became a lifestyle
I tried TikTok’s viral lettuce water sleep aid. It was kind of gross and I slept horribly.
Elon Musk’s Boring Company got a step closer to building another tunnel to transport people in Tesla cars, this time in Florida.
On Tuesday evening, Fort Lauderdale approved a proposal from The Boring Company to build tunnels between its downtown and the beach, a route of about three miles. The dual tunnels (one to the coast, the other back) would be called the “Las Olas Loop,” named for the city’s beach on the Atlantic Ocean. The company’s first “Loop” is in Las Vegas.
Based on city council documents, The Boring Company proposed the beach tunnel (or “subsurface public transportation system”) on June 21. The agenda item says Musk’s proposal advances “transportation that prioritizes [s]afety and emphasizes multimodal mobility and accessibility.”
According to Fort Lauderdale Mayor Dean J. Trantalis, other companies have 45 days to propose alternative transit plans.
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Earlier this year, Elon Musk’s Boring Company opened a 1.7-mile Loop in Las Vegas. It uses Tesla vehicles to carry passengers through narrow passageways.
If Las Vegas is any indicator, The Boring Company might fall short of its lofty promises. The company initially promised that autonomous electric pods would run through tunnels under the Las Vegas convention center at high speeds. Instead, a fleet of Tesla Model X and 3 cars take passengers to various stops at normal driving speeds.
The Sun-Sentinel reported that the tunnels in Fort Lauderdale would be similar to those in Las Vegas at 12-feet wide.
SEE ALSO:
Transit officials checked out Elon Musk’s tunnel and tried very hard not to mock it
Trantalis told the Sun-Sentinel that The Boring Company estimated the project will cost more than $30 million. In Las Vegas, The Boring Company completed construction in about one year for more than $50 million.
A second Las Vegas Loop tunnel is also in the works, while a test tunnel in Los Angeles connects the SpaceX campus to a station 1.14 miles away. The Boring Company says it ultimately wants to build a Hyperloop between major cities with pods traveling at 600 mph, but obviously it’s not even close to that goal yet.
Data breaches are becoming more common — and so is the likelihood that your socials could be hacked. Here’s how to keep your Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and all the rest safe.
Password managers are a vital line of defense in the battle for internet security — which makes it all the more painful when they shit the bed.
The Kaspersky Password Manager (KPM), a free tool used to generate and manage online passwords, has long been a popular alternative to the likes of LastPass or 1Password. Unfortunately, according to security researcher Jean-Baptiste Bédrune, a bad coding decision meant that the passwords it generated weren’t truly random and as a result were relatively easy to brute force — a hacking technique using specialized tools to try hundreds of thousands (or millions) of password combinations in an attempt to guess the right one.
Bédrune, who is a security researcher for the cryptocurrency hard-wallet company Ledger, writes that when generating a supposedly random password, KPM used the current time as its “single source of entropy.”
While that sounds super technical, it essentially boils down to KPM using the time as the basis for its pseudo random number generator. Knowing when the password was generated, even approximately, would therefore give a hacker vital information in an attempt to crack a victim’s account.
“All the passwords it created could be bruteforced in seconds,” writes Bédrune.
Bédrune’s team submitted the vulnerability to Kaspersky through HackerOne’s bug bounty program in June of 2019, and Ledger’s blog post says Kaspersky notified potentially affected users in October of 2020.
When reached for comment, Kaspersky confirmed — but downplayed — the problem identified by Bédrune.
“This issue was only possible in the unlikely event that the attacker knew the user’s account information and the exact time a password had been generated,” wrote a company spokesperson. “It would also require the target to lower their password complexity settings.”
Kaspersky also published a security advisory detailing the flaw in April of 2021.
“Password generator was not completely cryptographically strong and potentially allowed an attacker to predict generated passwords in some cases,” read the alert. “An attacker would need to know some additional information (for example, time of password generation).”
That alert also noted that, going forward, the password manager had fixed the issue — a claim echoed by the spokesperson.
“The company has issued a fix to the product and has incorporated a mechanism that notifies users if a specific password generated by the tool could be vulnerable and needs changing.”
SEE ALSO: Why you need a secret phone number (and how to get one)
So what does this mean for the average KPM user? Well, if they’ve been using the same KPM-generated passwords for over two years (a habit that would typically be fine), they should create new ones.
Other than that? Keep using a password manager and enable two-factor authentication.
In the galaxy, it’s unlikely there’s a drummer as influential as Ringo Starr.
Many of the world’s top drummers — Dave Grohl, Questlove, Max Weinberg, and beyond — undoubtedly agree.
Indeed, a bright star was born 81 years ago, on July 7, 1940, when Ringo (aka Sir Richard Starkey) entered the world. Recognizing this, NASA wished Ringo “a happy 81st orbit around the Sun” via Twitter on Wednesday.
The Beatles’ drummer provided the rich backbeat that allowed the legendary band’s diverse songs, ranging from energetic rock ‘n’ roll to psychedelia, to thrive.
“He’s got the pocket, he’s got the swing, he’s got the feel.”
“So many drummers that I talk to started playing drums because of Ringo,” said drummer Gregg Bissonette, who now plays drums in Ringo’s supergroup, Ringo Starr & His All-Starr Band. “He’s got the pocket, he’s got the swing, he’s got the feel.”
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For a hint of Ringo’s NASA-approved greatness, check out the following Beatles’ tracks:
“Come Together”: Ringo kicks off the album Abbey Road with stellar creativity.
“Ticket to Ride”: In The Beatles’ early days, Ringo lays down a syncopated, tom-heavy rock groove. “Really cool. Very innovative,” noted Max Weinberg (of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, among others).
“A Day in the Life”: On The Beatles’ artistic triumph, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Ringo plays some of the most iconic, yet tasteful, rock fills ever put to tape.
“I Feel Fine”: Ringo lays down an R&B and Latin-influenced groove that drummers today still try to master.
“The End”: A lesson in how to play a drum solo that’s a melodic, compositional part of a song.
SEE ALSO:
Why the mega comet is so fascinating — and not a threat to Earth
Happy Birthday, Ringo, a bonafide blessing to the cosmos: A drummer with an ineffable swing, and almost undefinable groove.
“It is the coolest thing ever,” according to Abraham Laboriel Jr., who plays drums for a fellow named Paul McCartney.
With only one episode left of Loki, a lot still has to happen. Episode 5 was one of the show’s best yet, a vehicle that showcased the power of Loki the character and culminated in a spectacular battle in the void.
We know that the Timekeepers were fake and the TVA is a sham, but this raises so many other questions. So much of the MCU hinges upon this final episode, and we can’t wait to see it.
Here are some of our burning questions a week before the end of Loki.
1. Who’s controlling the TVA?
The prevailing theory for some time now has been that Loki will introduce us to Kang the Conqueror, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania‘s big baddie played by Jonathan Majors. Another theory has Miss Minutes behind it all (that mischievous scamp!), while some believe that yet another Loki is pulling the strings — less likely after episode 5’s Loki-fest, but still. And have we fully ruled out Mephisto?
It’s also possible that no one is pulling the strings, and that Ravonna Renslayer is acting entirely on her own…
The short answer is yes, but the long answer is she’s only sometimes bluffing about some things. She claims to be as in the dark about who runs the TVA as Sylvie and Hunter B-15, but conversely: She’s suspicious as hell!
This lines up with Kang being the master villain, given his history with Ravonna in the comics. Their relationship even spans timelines, and we have a few of those to spare.
3 . So like…what’s the deal with Loki and Sylvie?
Even the internet, the wayward moral compass of our times, thought Loki being in love with an alternate-timeline version of himself was too damn far. There is something poetic about Loki only being able to love himself, but it’s also shockingly reductive on a show where the protagonist is canonically genderfluid and bisexual to have him go for the pretty blond lady. Marvel and Disney have always been terrible at representing queerness, but we never thought they’d advocate timeline-crossed incest first.
The show itself seems to waver on what to do with this relationship. Tom Hiddleston could have chemistry with an alligator (in fact, he does), so it’s hard to dial down the electricity of Loki/Sylvia scenes. They went on a date at the end of the world, and then Mobius explicitly accused Loki of having a crush. Their moments in episode 5 teeter between platonic and romantic, and not in a fun way. They’ve certainly solidified a trust and friendship, but can we just leave it at that and not share a blanket?
4. What happens to the “Sacred Timeline” if the TVA is destroyed?
Say it with us: MULTIVERSE. Infinite timelines, infinite Lokis, infinite sequels. Opportunities to weave in more Marvel characters like the Fantastic Four, X-Men, and maybe all those Spider-Man actors who claim they’re not in No Way Home.
Basically you destroy the TVA and you destroy the rules, letting chaos reign just as Loki would have it. Marvel Phase 4 might look a whole lot more like the comics.
5. How will Loki affect Phase 4?
By cracking open time and space, you silly goose! Opening up the timelines means dead characters don’t have to stay dead and Marvel actors who left the franchise can come back for guest roles — like Hiddleston himself, lest we forget how we got here. As mentioned previously, the convergence of universes and timelines appears to be central to the next Ant-Man and the Wasp, Doctor Strange, and Spider-Man movies — and we don’t even know how Shang-Chi and The Eternals will factor in.
6. Will Mobius ever jet ski?
As long as he doesn’t die, hell yeah!
7. Who are those missing title cards for?
Which names will fill out the “Loki” credits? Credit: screen shot / marvel
The Loki credits fill up a little more every week, adding in new names as cast members reveal themselves. There are still a few gaps evenly spread throughout the existing names — who will they be?
8. Where is Casey?
Eugene Cordero’s TVA desk worker hasn’t been since since episode 2, when Loki poured his soda into Mobius’ salad to prove a point. Bring back Casey and someone explain to him what a fish is!
9. Where is Gator Loki’s spinoff?
the one true king Credit: Courtesy of Marvel Studios
