cybergeisha

Introduction

Readers, fans, random passers-by…. I would like to welcome you to cybergeisha.net’s world première episode of NEWS OF THE WEIRD - weird things I’ve found on the Internet lately. It could be a website, a product, a news story, even a photo or a quote. But above all else, it’s weird, and I’ve got plenty to say about it.

Here, we have our first offering,.

The Crustastun – World’s first Humane Electronic Crustacean Stunner

A revolutionary system For the first time ever a humane, simple and effective way to stun and kill shellfish prior to cooking.

It goes on to explain why they developed this product, further into the website. Let’s take a look, shall we?

To many, present methods of killing (chopping, drowning in freshwater, boiling, frying & basting - alive) are barbaric and the recommended methods (cooling in ice-slurry or spiking the several nerve centres) unproven, difficult and impractical. The Crustastun applies an instant current which anaesthatises the Crab, Lobster or other shellfish within a fraction of a second and kills within seconds.

First of all… If you bought fresh live lobster… You have *GASP* to kill it yourself. You’re setting out to do the age old act ingrained in our DNA — slaughtering something for food. That’s not pretty. I understand that.

But I can’t understand all of this wibbling about “how much pain they can feel” or “what gives them the least pain.” Why? Why focus on this? They will not suffer any more than if they’d been eaten (ALIVE) by another animal. Let’s keep that perspective for a second. Given the choice between “Body Torn Limb from Limb As I’m Eaten Alive” and “Head Chopped Off” and “Boiled Alive” I’d take “head chopped off” or “immediately immersed in boiling water” any day.

The question isn’t, to me, what the lobsters feel or think. It’s what we project onto the lobsters. What WE find horrifying, inhumane, humiliating, mean and wrong, from the perspective of whether we would want to endure it. That’s how we figure out how HUMANE it is.

applies the humane slaughter principles currently applied to higher food animals such as cows, sheep and pigs to shellfish, […]

Higher food creatures. That brings up a really good point. How good ARE our “standards” for “higher” creatures? Pretty good in general. Know why? You don’t usually slaughter a pig, cow, or sheep at your home. Lobsters, fish, shellfish and the like are small enough to be slaughtered at home. So do they need to be held to meat-packing “Standards?”

It’s just a lobster, people.

What was that? You, in the audience. Oh, I see. No, no, it’s a good question. No, I do not eat lobster. It’s not because I think it’s inhumane or too expensive or too messy or anything… I just don’t like them. I don’t like the meat of crustaceans/arthropods so I don’t eat it. It is that simple — no moral high ground here.

The way I see it, they are bugs. Big, ocean-dwelling, arthropods that crawl around in the sea mud. Some people could make the argument that “well, you kill spiders and stomp cockroaches (a very close relative of the lobster), and a lobster is pretty much a bug, too, so…..”

I think it’s more than that. I don’t even know that it’s about “how much pain” a lobster can handle or being “humane.” It seems like it’s more about how much projected pain WE perceive the lobster as going through. How sorry we feel for the lobster through empathy - would you want to be in a tank with your hands tied together, bored, with nothing to do but wait for someone to come and buy you? No. That would be inhumane. But….

————   N E W S   F L A S H ! ! !   ————

LOBSTERS ARE NOT HUMAN

It’s true. As I mentioned before… crustaceans/arthropods are not human and I’m not sure why we keep trying to say that they need to be humanely killed — I view all of the listed methods of lobster slaughtering to be acceptible for what is being achieved.

Maybe we should start “putting down” cows, sheep, and pigs before we kill them, similar to how we do with our pets, rather than inhumanly driving them into a Meat Machine where they will be killed by robots and dismantled ad come out the other side as a side of bacon.

Or maybe as a whole, people should just get over it!

Do we NEED a device SOLELY MADE to “humanely” electrocute lobsters?

My friends, I do not think we need this. It’s just… well, it’s unnecessary, and it makes us seem like we’re a bunch of wussies.

You may have noticed back in the beginning of December that I suddenly stopped posting here. I had been posting a travel journal of my and Erik’s November road trip to San Francisco, but abruptly stopped about halfway through with no explanation. Any work on my site or Internet presence sort of went silent.

Well, I have an explanation - but I couldn’t let everyone know at the time. It was actually a much bigger secret than my Internet absence of the past few weeks. A huge secret, over which I was giddy for months, but required to maintain confidentiality until the project was public.

And now, it is. I can finally share this incredible, unbelievable awesomeness with the whole world.

I was finishing the Official Information Society Website!

I’ve taken on duties as the site administrator, so I will be doing the updates and such, in addition to having done the visual design and layout of the site - but the meaty tasty code underneath was only possible once I brought Erik on board to help. So indeed, I had somewhere to be. ;)

The Whole Story

Since August, I’ve been in communication with Paul Robb, of Information Society. When InSoc played in Portland last summer, I was so there. The day after the show, I visited the Information Society MySpace and clicked over to the “Official Website” link. There wasn’t anything there except a “coming soon” type splash page.

So, being the type of person I am, I clicked “E-mail This Person!” on the MySpace profile and sent an e-mail to Information Society saying I noticed they didn’t have a site up, and that I’m a web designer and would love to help out, gave a link to my portfolio and my e-mail address, and sent it off into cyberspace, thinking I’d never hear anything.

Not more than a few days went by before I found an e-mail from Paul in my inbox saying he liked my work, and I’ve been in contact and working with him on the project ever since. Given the confidential nature of the project, I couldn’t tell anybody - except Erik, who came onboard the project in October to do the high-level coding and debugging to get the site to be what I’d envisioned.

An Excused Absence

So why did I disappear? Because in early December, Paul said “Okay, let’s do this thing,” and we said “You got it,” kicked it into high gear and said we’d have the site ready to go live by the first week of January - and on 07 January 2007, the Official Information Society Website is finally online, and Erik and I have never been more proud of something we’ve produced.

visit the site now!

Welcome to Peace and Love, Inc.

Well, my birthday has not been the relaxing, lazy day that I’d planned, but nonetheless it has been fairly mellow. We had to go to work, even though it is quite the wintery, icy, snowy day. If I’d wanted to I suppose I could have cut work, but I kind of like that whole “paycheck” thing, and also the concept of “keeping my job.”

I suppose that it turned out to be a good thing, overall.

I knew, almost as soon as we stepped out the door, that it was going to be an interesting day. On the walk downtown to catch the bus, we saw the most awesome snowman in the history of snowmen. Some inspired people built a snowman on their front porch’s wide stone railing, and as we walked by they were just putting the finishing touches on their snowman/revolutionary/protester - complete with a “The End is Near!” type of sign on a pole. He even had on some sunglasses - probably to look cool.

But the best part was the message written on his sign. Since it’s hard to read in the picture, but too funny not to share, I typed up the the dire message from the snowman’s sign:

THE ICE AGE IS COMING!
EMBRACE YOUR ICY DEMISE!

…bitches.

After laughing riotously and high-fiving a few times, we asked the “artists” if we could photograph their snow-creation. They said “Sure!” so we did, and continued on our way. The streets were slushy and slick, but once we got to downtown it was less so - in places. That was somewhat expected, though - the steep incline of Capitol Hill, where we live, keeps it much more icy than other parts of the city.

The bus was late, but we’d expected it would be at least a bit late - if it came at all. Once we were on the bus, we just kind of kicked back and rode to work. I nearly slipped down the hill walking from the bus stop to work, but other than that, the morning was wholly uneventful. Uneventful, that is, until the UPS delivery man arrived with a very large package for me.

I’d been expecting two things delivered to me at work, since my shift does not allow for me to be at home to sign for packages during delivery hours. The first item was my new camcorder, which I picked up last night at the UPS center after they couldn not deliver it - they’d tried at home, though I had asked they deliver it to work and they confirmed it. That was a little puzzling. But at least I was finally united with the wayward electronic device without much frustration.

What I was waiting on, and was expecting, was my GameCube, which I’d found (new!) on Amazon.com for a bargain price. So, after signing for the oddly huge box I brought it back to my desk, curious to get at the goodies inside. When I tore open the top, I couldn’t have even attempted to come up with something more baffling and hilarious to find instead of a video game console.

In the box, under a mountain of packing peanuts, was a box. The box did not contain a GameCube. It was not even from Amazon. The box I pulled out in front of my astonished coworkers, was… some sort of kitchen appliance. Shaped like… a chicken. A big, plastic chicken! It was a Henrietta Hen Egg Cooker. Apparently, you can put up to seven eggs inside, and set it to either hard- or soft-boil the eggs and also to poach up to four eggs at once… and it clucks when the eggs are done. A clucking chicken shaped egg-cooker.

Ordered from QVC, no less.

I checked the order receipt and was relieved to see that it really was delivered to me in error and wasn’t the wrong item - if I’d gotten an egg-cooker (chicken shaped or not) rather than a GameCube, I’d have been really upset.

After a short perusal of the order slip, and the box, I pieced together what had happened. The original recipient lives in the building next to mine - so when I had my package redirected and sent to my work, rather than home. Well, at some point it would seem that someone at UPS screwed up and put the sticker for my camera onto the egg cooker box since the addresses are so similar.

My last bit of worrying about the bizarre shipping mishap and turned to total hilarity when not even a few minutes later, a coworker brought me a package from the front door. It was, indeed, my gamecube. so, now, I’m actually the proud owner of a chicken-shaped doo-dad that cooks eggs, as WELL as a Gamecube.

What a birthday surprise.

Thank you to everyone who’s wished me a “happy birthday” today. I appreciate it.

There are actually pictures of Erik and I from Halloween this year (click for make bigger!).

My outfit should have left no reason to guess who I was supposed to be (The Devil), and most were able to figure it out, but nobody gave in to temptation or sold me their soul. Lame.

Erik time traveled back to when he was 17 and dressed like that but ended up saying he was a “80s New Wave Punk.” His hair was incredible. He has amazing powers of styling his hair to be The Sex.

The rest are below, please click to go to the larger version!

View Original Size

Oh man, the Information Society references just don’t stop.

This is my cubicle at work - not bad, huh? Yeah, I’m pretty much a big hotshot executive… *cough* Okay, that’s not true. But it’s a pretty good desk setup, and the chair is comfy!

It was not this nice to begin with. Before, I had a really crappy tiny little desk - like one of those study cubbies at the library. This cubicle is huuuuuuge!!! It’s new, actually. The entire client care section just moved downstairs within the building in which we operate, so we got huge new desks and nice chairs. I have a window! I personalized my cube with all the awesome stuff I could, but it’s still… well… work.