Just remember the WD-40. Pictured here: position 01010100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01010010 01100101 01110110 01100101 01110010 01110011 01100101 00100000 01010000 01100001 01110010 01110100 01101001 01100011 01101100 01100101 00100000 01000001 01100011 01100011 01100101 01101100 01100101 01110010 01100001 01110100 01101111 01110010.
What happens to web pages that live on past their owners’ deaths? They wind up at MyDeathSpace.com.
Behold a community spawned from twin American obsessions: Memorializing the dead and peering into strangers’ lives. Anyone with Internet access can submit a death to the site, which currently lists nearly 2,700 deaths and receives more than 100,000 hits per day.
The tales are mostly those of the very young who died prematurely. Here, death roams cyberspace in all its spectral forms: senseless and indiscriminate, sometimes premeditated, often brutally graphic. It’s also a place where the living — those who knew the deceased and those who didn’t — discuss this world and the next.
There’s a boy, 16, who passed out in the shower and drowned. There’s a 20-year-old whose body was discovered burned to death on a hiking trail; and woman, 21, who overdosed on drugs and was found dead in a portable toilet, authorities say.
Their fates have been sealed, but their spirits remain very much alive — frozen in time, for all the world to see.
Citizens dutifully hand over free cash to police….
On Wednesday, bills worth 960,000 yen were inexplicably seen “falling” in front of a convenience store.
“We can just say the money came from the skies,” a puzzled police official said. “There were other passers-by outside and customers in the store but the incident caused no confusion,” he said.
“People thought it was too eerie to touch.”
The world of Japanese host men. (YouTube link.)
The online world Second Life has become a popular meeting place for people whose interests are not widely accepted in Real Life — such as furries. Of course, some of them are just experimenting, but what happens when the experimentation crosses over to virtual bestiality? (Images possibly NSFW.) A brave new world indeed.
what if someone looks for an avatar that looks less like a cartoon and more like a real animal? With some shopping, one can find avatars that will turn one into an anatomically correct dog or horse. Having sex with one of these creatures for real in many US states and foreign countries is a crime. Certainly many people find the idea of coupling with a dog or horse to be offensive. Will these avatars soon be banned? Can we logically assume that if the realistic animal costumes are banned then a case can be made to ban all furries in order to avoid the “gray area†that would ensue should the Lindens choose to ban “realistic†animal avatars?
The Telegraph takes a tour of multimillion-dollar homes (aren’t all homes in L.A. millions of dollars?) with some “high-end” estate agents.
Stars can be exacting. Their fame allows them to indulge in idiosyncrasies that probably wouldn’t be accommodated in a regular buyer. John Travolta likes to takes his shoes off and lie on the master bed to see what the view would be if he were waking up there in the morning. Madonna insists on a closed set: houses must be cleared of owners, employees and children before the star will set foot inside. Actors and actresses are more likely to venture out alone or with one or two ers, whereas music-industry types often travel with retinues of assistants, friends and a bodyguard or two.
The article also mentions The Real Estalker, a blog dedicated to getting you inside the homes of celebrities.
The latest trend among the rich and powerful is owning dinosaur bones.
The bidding war between the two Hollywood stars was intense as the price soared for the 67 million-year-old dinosaur skull.
Dinosaur bones the new ‘must-have’
The Black Hills Institute of Geological Research has unearthed a jumble of dinosaur remainsOnly when it reached $276,000 did Leonardo DiCaprio blink – and Nicolas Cage walked away from the Beverley Hills auction with a ferocious-looking addition to his fossil collection.
As this recent battle of the celebrities for the head of a tyrannosauras bataar — the Asian cousin of T-rex — proved, dinosaur bones are emerging as the new, collectible must-haves for the multi-millionaires of Hollywood, Wall Street and Silicon Valley.
The Google News Cushion. (Did Irak actually beat Iraq for searches?) (Via Gizmodo.)
Finger vein money. (Via BoingBoing.)
Finger vein money relies on Hitachi’s finger vein authentication technology, which verifies a person’s identity by reading the pattern of blood vessels in his or her fingers. These blood vessel patterns are unique to each individual, much like fingerprints or retinas, only they are hidden securely under the skin, making them all the more difficult to counterfeit. Hitachi’s finger vein authentication technology is already being used to verify user identities for ATMs, door access control systems and computer log-in systems in Japan and elsewhere.
In the finger vein money system, consumers first register their finger vein pattern data with the credit card company. The data is then entered into a database along with the individual’s credit account information. Later, when shoppers want to pay for something, they simply go to the cash register and place their finger in a vein reader, which uses infrared LEDs and a special camera to capture a detailed image of their vein structure. The image is converted into a readable format and sent to the database, where it is checked against the records on file. When the system verifies the identity of the shopper, the purchase is charged to the individual’s credit account.
There’s a lovely post over at Metafilter about acts of vandalism against famous works of art. Pictured above: two performance artists piss on Marchel Duchamp’s Fountain.
  
  
If you’ve ever made a sex tape, don’t be surprised if it turns up on new video-sharing websites such as YouPorn or PornoTube.
She’s naked and posing suggestively, but otherwise she doesn’t resemble the average Playboy model. Yet this “ex-girlfriend” has been viewed by 138,629 people on YouPorn, the new, German-based Internet aggregator of amateur-generated porn.
She’s not the only one to have a former lover post her most intimate moments for the world to google. There are over 250 ex-girlfriends currently featured among the tens of thousands of sex videos on YouPorn.
Some people hike for the scenery, others hike for the plane wrecks:
He’s been to more than 250 wrecks since he found that P-38 back in 1984. He’s looked for planes up and down the PacificCoast and across the Southwest, climbing mountains, scouring deserts, once even trying to haul scuba equipment by hand up to a remote alpine lake in Nevada. He sometimes searches alone, but more often hooks up with other wreck chasers, members of a far-flung community that stay in touch through the Internet.
Professional comics vs. professional comics professional joke thieves.
While most comics take pride in performing their own material, many have built lucrative careers on borrowed bits. Robin Williams, for example, has long been lauded for his ability to instantaneously improvise scenes and gags. But while few question his gifts as a live performer, there’s no way to know how much of his sharp-minded inspiration over the years has been provided by an unwitting writing staff. “I’ve been in clubs in L.A. where Robin’ll walk in the room and whoever’s on stage will just get off,” says Boston comedian Kevin Knox. Ritch Shydner, a former Improv regular and coauthor of the book I Killed: True Stories of the Road From America’s Top Comics, agrees. “Robin is a ferocious performer,” he says, “but he isn’t the kind who can generate material, material, material. His style is to watch people and regurgitate what he sees.”
Documentary about “the American style of debt.” (Google video.) Interesting viewing in these subprime disaster days and worth watching just for the yuppie pawn shop. Also comes in book form for just one low payment. (Image is of the national debt clock.)
Here are a few more Che parodies I had kicking around a folder on my computer.
Edge has posted details about the Tesseracts Eleven anthology, due this November, on its website. My story “Beat the Geeks” is included in it. Here’s a tidbit from the introduction by Cory Doctorow:
I grew up on the Tesseracts anthologies. I was 14 when Judy Merril’s first edition of this series shipped, in 1985. I remember reading it, curled into myself on a TTC bus, heading home on a cold winter night, nothing visible outside the windows except the lightsPaolo of snowed-in houses streaking past as we shushed through the awful, grey snow. In that volume, I found stories that were not quite like anything I ever read before. Of course, I’d read “Canadian” authors all my life — I was already a Spider Robinson fan, I’d always liked AE Van Vogt, and I had really enjoyed Phillis Gotleib’s Sunburst. But I’d never read a collection of works whose unifying theme was that they were written by Canadians. It was a heady experience. It’s not that Canadians write quiet, introspective stories while Americans write stories about kicking ass. It’s not even that Canadian stories are particularly incisive on the subject of what it means to be Canadian. But there’s one thing that Canadian stories get right more than American stories — and it’s the same thing that defines Aussie sf (Aussies being a sort of antipodean Canadian with a higher propensity for skin cancer): we’re good at looking at figuring out what makes other cultures tick.
By now you’ve all seen the Chetrooper that’s taken the web by storm. But have you seen Che as corporate logos? I’m partial to the Che coffee cup myself.
Are we becoming overcaffeinated?
Everywhere you look, people are wired on caffeine or touting its benefits—or both. Tabloids run images of celebrities sipping Red Bull or toting Starbucks venti lattes; Dunkin’ Donuts ads feature a coffee-swilling Rachael Ray, who moves so fast she leaves tread marks on the floor. There’s no shortage of ways to get your caffeine fix. Sales of energy drinks like Red Bull and Full Throttle have grown tenfold since 2001, and new ones enter the market weekly. Products that already have caffeine are adding more—in the past few months Diet Pepsi, Jolt and Mountain Dew have all rolled out extra-caffeinated versions. Novelty items, like caffeinated lip balm, caffeinated sunflower seeds, caffeinated beer and even caffeinated soap (”Tired of waking up and having to wait for your morning java to brew?”) are also popping up in retail stores and nightclubs.
Image is a tattoo of the chemical symbol for caffeine.
A couple of people have pointed out to me that Amazon.ca already has an entry for my new book, The Warhol Gang. I better get working on those edits.
In 1996, a BBC film crew accompanied Russian scientists inside Chernobyl. The resulting documentary (45 minutes) could have been an inspiration for Silent Hill. And here’s Chernobyl 20 years later. (Pic is Ratcliffe Power Station by Michael Kenna.)
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