Category: junk thought

Tourism Of The Damned

It took me quite a while to track down, so I’m reposting this list of damned cities (neighbourhoods, suburbs, etc.) for future reference, but it should be noted that the original work of collecting them was all Kris Straub‘s.

  • Amity Park
  • Amityville
  • Arkham
  • Carcosa
  • Castle Rock
  • Celephais
  • Centralia
  • Crystal Lake
  • Cykranosh
  • Damascus
  • Dartmoor
  • Derry
  • Desperation
  • Dunwich
  • Eng’gha
  • Gomorrah
  • Hamelin
  • Hinamizawa
  • Innsmouth
  • Jericho
  • Jerusalem’s Lot
  • Kandor
  • Kingsport
  • Lavender Town
  • Leng
  • Lomar
  • Point Pleasant
  • Providence
  • R’lyeh
  • Rapture
  • Ravenholm
  • Roanoke
  • Sarkomand
  • Severn Valley
  • Shermer Il
  • Silent Hill
  • Sleepy Hollow
  • Sodom
  • Sunnydale
  • The Nameless City
  • Thebes
  • Threed
  • Ulthar
  • Yian

Omega Man Trial

Bone To Pick

Image from http://chachabowman.wordpress.comImage from this how-to on creating sugar skulls

As my brain slowly gathers momentum I’ll get back to posting things with a little more meat to them, but, for the moment, I have a number of random items to address, such as:

Jessica was asking me about the last Mulligan story – shouldn’t the skeleton have been burnt up in the crematorium as well?

It’s a common misconception.

Contrary to popular belief, the cremated remains are not ashes in the usual sense. After the incineration is completed, the dry bone fragments are swept out of the retort and pulverized by a machine called a cremulator to process them into “ashes” or “cremated remains”, although pulverization may also be performed by hand. This leaves the bone with a fine sand like texture and color, able to be scattered without need for mixing with any foreign matter, though the size of the grain varies depending on the cremulator used. Their weight is approximately 4 pounds (1.8 kg) for adult human females and 6 pounds (2.7 kg) for adult human males.

– Wikipedia

Knit Knots

The longest tentacles are 4-stitch icords, while all the others are 3-stitch icords. They started out as 3-inch, 4-inch, 5-inch, and 6-inch lengths. – Raving Toy Maniac

I have no idea how to read knitting instructions, but I do know what would make a great Christmas present for yours truly.
Cthulhu Scarf

– and, as a follow-up, a little holiday music:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ftld7Ohojg]

The Trouble With History

John Cabot - Detail from "The departure of John and Sebastian Cabot from Bristol on their first voyage of discovery, 1497." Oil on canvas by Ernest Board, 1906.I don’t know why I continue to be surprised by these kinds of things, but sometimes you don’t realize something that you’ve been told all your life is wrong until you’ve pulled it out of the drawer and given it a good shaking out.

Imagine I built a time machine and traveled back to the 1480s to give John Cabot a handshake and a thumbs-up. I’ve been informed all of my life that this fellow was the man who discovered the nation of my birth, Canada, but if I were to walk up to him on the street and say “Hey, John, good one,” he’d likely have no idea who I was even talking to.

Zuan Chabotto, on the other hand, would have no problem giving me a fist bump.

In Italy he is known today as Giovanni Caboto, in Spain as Juan Caboto and in England as John Cabot.
[…]
As for the way he described himself, only one set of documents has been found bearing his signature. These are Venetian testamentary documents of 1484, on which he signed himself as “Zuan Chabotto”, Zuan being a form of John typical to Venice. – wikipedia

“What’s the big deal?” you may ask, but I tell you this: If, five hundred years from now, I’m largely remembered for being the second fellow to land on a planet outside of our solar system but everyone keeps referring to me as JRD Скинер, I’ll be pretty angry.

Avoid the Noid

Have you heard of the Telenoid R1?

I would say it’s currently the creepiest robot humanity has managed to create.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9JyDQlHo1A]

From a BBC article:

Ishiguro’s system uses a motion-tracking webcam to transmit your voice, facial expressions and head movements to the Telenoid, via a high-bandwidth web connection.

The avatar produces only a rough approximation of real body language, but it is surprisingly easy to dupe oneself into regarding it as ‘human’. – more

Its intentions are relatively pure, but it’s impossible (for me, at least) to not find the idea of speaking to a naked, crucified, milky-white quadruple-amputee kind of disturbing.
Elfoid (Image From The BBC Article)

(Image from the BBC article linked above)

It certainly doesn’t help that the robot’s creator, Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro of Osaka University, is also attempting to create a miniature version he calls an ‘Elfoid’. These things just strike me as a little too close to the kodama from Princess Mononoke, and that’s a no go as far as a device I’d want to use to communicate to my loved ones with.
kodama

Junk Science

Chimney Sweep Van Dyke From Mary PoppinsWhile I was doing some research last night, I came across this nugget from Wikipedia:

The first cause of cancer was identified by British surgeon Percivall Pott, who discovered in 1775 that cancer of the scrotum was a common disease among chimney sweeps.
– more

This sparks so many questions that I don’t have the time right now to discover the answer to, foremost of which is “why”?

Is there some naughty secret to chimney sweeping that I’m not privy to?

Hall Pass

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tJF3qBWyUk]

This isn’t some crazy movie set-piece for the next Resident Evil film, this is actually a hallway defense system created by Applied Energetics Inc, (formerly Ionatron,) a company that deals in Military level considerations on how to electrocute things.

The tingling means it’s working!

Applied Energetics, Inc. is slowly going under, due possibly to their habit of paying their executives and not their scientists, but also possibly because they used their lightning wielding skills to create a device for the US Military that couldn’t actually carry out its job of destroying roadside-IEDs by throwing electricity at them.

Tromboneheads
Still – they certainly look neat, and I feel confident that, while the folks overseas may not be any safer, that hallway is hella defended.