Thomas Edison once took a break from electrocuting animals to turn his attention to making dolls for little girls.
Because he was the go-to guy at the time for recording voices, he thought it might be cool to make those dolls speak.
And just like his animal displays that weren’t really the thing anyone who loves animals should watch…
His dolls weren’t really the thing that anyone who loves children enough to get them a talking doll should ever consider giving…
Inside the dolls rests a fragile wax cylinder with grooves on it like a vinyl record. Using a microscope and computers to study the cylinders and create an accurate image that can be virtually played and heard, an engineer and a physicist have, unfortunately for those of us who sleep, brought the sounds of the dolls back to life…
Oh…goody.
You can hear the complete recordings in the video below.
That nightmarish thing in the photo above isn’t a screen-used graboid prop from Tremors.
Nope.
That’s an actual creature that lives in our oceans…you know…that giant mass of water that you swim in when you vacation?
Caught off the coast of Australia by a fishing trawler, that thing is a six-foot long monster known as a frilled shark.
Frilled sharks haven’t evolved in almost 80 million years simply because a nightmare is always going to be a nightmare. On very rare occasions frilled sharks are found close to the surface because they’re dying. “Close to the surface” is around 4,000 feet below the surface.
Simon Boag of the trawling company that caught the creature:
“It does look 80 million years old. It looks prehistoric. It looks like it’s from another time! It has 300 teeth over 25 rows, so once you’re in that mouth, you’re not coming out.”
According to a marine conservation society in California there is a report of a frilled shark from 1880 measuring in at 25 feet.
Next time you go splashing around in the ocean for fun just remember…
The next time someone goes crazy in the Stanley Hotel and begins hunting someone with an axe in the snow, you could possibly be the level designer.
Because a kid thwarted someone suffering from cabin fever all those years ago, the folks over at the Stanley have decided to crowd-source the refurbishment of their next level hedge maze by having a competition to see who can build a better people-trap.
In a small town in California called Wasco something odd has quietly started appearing…
Clowns.
You’d read that and think, “That’s great! My kids LOVE clowns!”
Then you’d hear the more of the story and say, “They only come out at night?”
We’d share a few more details about the clowns, how they don’t talk to anyone, just quietly wander around town, smile all the time with menacing teeth and then we’d watch your smiling expression disintegrate as you draw your children closer to you and vow to never visit Wasco at night.
Ever.
Or at least until the whole clown thing blows over.
Robotics design is continually making all those creepy robot-takeover concepts part of our future reality. Check this thing out. It’s a ‘robot’ that imitates the actions of a worm but has the uncanny creepy factor of a maggot when you continue to watch it move. As soon as someone attaches some kind of weird syringe-probe thing? We’re done.
From MIT:
Earthworms creep along the ground by alternately squeezing and stretching muscles along the length of their bodies, inching forward with each wave of contractions. Snails and sea cucumbers also use this mechanism, called peristalsis, to get around, and our own gastrointestinal tracts operate by a similar action, squeezing muscles along the esophagus to push food to the stomach.
Now researchers at MIT, Harvard University and Seoul National University have engineered a soft autonomous robot that moves via peristalsis, crawling across surfaces by contracting segments of its body, much like an earthworm. The robot, made almost entirely of soft materials, is remarkably resilient: Even when stepped upon or bludgeoned with a hammer, the robot is able to inch away, unscathed.
Watch it again….it’s creepy little self gets stepped on and hit with a hammer! And it KEEPS GOING!
Got an event coming up real soon? Maybe a wedding? Maybe a birthday?
Well in case you are and you’re wondering where to find memorable entertainment for your party? Look no further than Ebay.
Right now, because of a ‘changed business model’, you can now have an entirely Hillbilly band play at your event!
A petting zoo/amusement park in Massachusetts has decided to bid farewell to this frightening group of robotic performers designed and built by an ex-Disney Imagineer (we kinda get why he’s an ex-Imagineer).
Originally this band cost the company $15,000. They’re letting go of the whole group, including the porch if you dismantle it yourself, for a steal at $5,000! Total deal.
You only have a couple of days left to snag the entire group so you’ll have that special ‘something’ that leaves an impression on your event’s guests that they’ll never forget..
Like when they all suddenly stop playing, turn their heads to look at you with their unblinking stares and then quickly return to playing one of their beloved jigs.
Because death and urns with your loved one’s ashes aren’t surrounded by enough creepy stories, a fun company called Cremation Solutions has decided to knock the creep factor over the wall. How?
By using a 3D printer to create an amazingly creepy look-alike head of your loved one that contains said loved ones ashes.
No…really…This isn’t a fun, faux site put up as a joke. This is legit, kids. You can now sit home and stare lovingly at the lifeless eyes of a remains-stuffed replica head of your loved one. These things make great conversation pieces too!
Guest: “That’s interesting. Are you into cosmetology?”
You: “No. That’s my ex-wife.”
Fun, right?
Before you get excited and click that Paypal button, there are some things to consider. The head doesn’t come with hair. It can either be added digitally (we’re not really sure what that means…but we’re guessing it’ll end up a lot like putting hair on those little Lego figures) or you can purchase a wig. We’re also not sure about the following line:
The full sized personal urn can hold all the ashes of an adult. For holding just a portion of the ashes, we recommend the keepsake sized personal urns.
Does that mean mini versions of your loved ones are available? We’re not sure.
Unveiled in the UK at the annual Designing Interactive Systems conference, the egg-like device has been dubbed Kissenger. Hidden inside Kissenger’s eyeless, Humpty-Dumpty-like body is a pair of pressure-sensitive soft plastic lips that peek through a smooth plastic casing about the size of an Easter egg.
The lips contain pressure sensors and actuators. When you kiss them, the shape changes you create are transmitted in real time over the net to a receiving Kissenger. There, the actuators reproduce the mirror image of the pressure patterns you created– magically transmitting your smacker to your partner.
“People have found it a very positive way to improve intimacy in communications with their partners when they are apart,” claims Hooman Samani of Singapore-based Lovotics, which developed the device.
The device is a prototype and Samani says it will not be commercialised until “all the ethical and technical considerations are covered”. He adds: “I am not interested in sexual uses for it.”
Remember that part where he stated, “I am not interested in sexual uses for it”? He’s obviously been locked away in his lab for far too long and has forgotten what people are like.
Best part of the story from the New Scientist article? THIS little excerpt:
“I think that approach is too much and I find it kind of creepy,” says Samani. “You don’t need to transmit all the parameters of a kiss. The main aim is to improve long-distance relationships. We’ve taken several steps to minimise the creepiness.”
Two things: We’d hate to see this dude’s idea of what he considers creepy and what did this thing look like BEFORE he minimized the creepiness?
We all just collectively shuddered together.
Here’s Lovotic’s actual company video for an earlier version of the device (in case you were wondering about that ‘before’ design mentioned above)…which makes us wonder how going from a cute rabbit-like design to the disembodied mouth of a Cenobite is ‘minimizing the creepiness’. Again…can someone get a search warrant for this dude’s basement? Or are we just not ready for that?
Let’s imagine Mother Nature wanted to create a wasp to remind us that she’s still very much in charge of things. Let’s say she’s been looking at a lot of HR Giger’s work for inspiration. Now let’s say that she’s already finished it and released it into the wild.
That horrifying looking thing pictured above is actually real….and it’s called a couple of equally terrifying things; “King of Wasps”, “Horror Wasp” and “Warrior Wasp”. It’s also one more piece of evidence that suggests Mother Nature is getting ready to maybe shake off all the helpless human beings that keep putting up strip malls.
Discovered only as recently as 2011 by Lynn Kimsey of UC Davis in California, the wasp has been dubbed Garuda, the name of a mythical figure that is part-human, part eagle. Garuda is not the biggest known wasp in the world (that award goes to another wasp commonly referred to a the ‘Tarantula Hawk’) but it is the most intimidating-looking wasp out there.
Kimsey discovered the wasp in the Mekongga Mountains of Indonesia and says that they weren’t very common.
That’s great news. We’re sure TSA’s meticulous searches (read that with oozing sarcasm, folks) found any that might’ve stowed away in her luggage, right?
Many of you might remember Teddy Ruxpin as something of a tech marvel of the 80s. Teddy Ruxpin was like having your own Disney animatronic as a kid. Insert a cassette tape into his back, press play and Teddy Ruxpin would lip-sync to recordings of stories featuring his adventures…or to any of your favorite bands…or to Eddie Murphy’s Raw standup act. Any audio you could pipe into him, he’d lip-sync to.
Teddy Ruxpin is back…in probably the oddest, almost creepiest way possible…an art installation that reads posts from Twitter out loud.
Eighty Teddy Ruxpin’s have been wired and attached to a wall by Sean Hathaway as part of an installation called TED ( “Transformations, Emotional Deconstruction” ).
Here’s Hathaway’s explanation taken from his official site:
TED is a large, wall-based installation consisting of an array of 80 Teddy Ruxpin dolls that speak emotional content gathered from the web via synthetic speech with animated mouths. The speaking of the emotional content is accompanied by one of twenty-four musical vignettes that have been paired to the emotional content being spoken. Each vignette, representing one of twenty-four subtle variants of human emotion, have been composed in such a way that the beginnings and ends of the short pieces will seamlessly dogleg in any possible configuration and stream endlessly as a unified whole. The installation is allowed to drift about freely through the emotional landscape being driven only by those who are contributing content to the piece whether unwittingly or consciously. As such the overall presentation of the piece can vary greatly based on external conditions such as seasons, world events and even time of day.
Hathaway also states that, “The piece is essentially taking the instantaneous emotional pulse of the internet and this collective pulse, like a human pulse, varies over time,”
Below is a video of the installation at work.
Just don’t watch it before you lay your little precious head down for the night…it’ll probably change your pulse as well…but not in a good way.
It’s called the Hugvie. You put your cell phone inside of it and then talk to whomever you might like to chat with. The vibrations from the voice simulate a heart beat so you can clutch your Hugvie to you like an inanimate baby while feeling the life pulses from your call.
This seems fine if you are having a really calm conversation with a long distance loved one. It would not be ideal for the following chats:
• Confronting a significant other with proof that they are screwing around with their personal trainer
• Negotiating a good wholesale price on red beans
• Complaining to Comcast customer service that your internet is out and you’ve already reset the modem and the router
But other than those, it would be WAY less creepy.
[YouTube] via Tony Ley
Posted in Creepy | Comments Off on Creepy Smartphone Enabled Body Pillow Let’s You Feel “Heartbeat”
Normally I would write up an overly dramatic intro to a story like this. However, the article on Mysterious Universe for which it’s based on does it so well, I am just going to paste it here:
You look up from your steering wheel or cautiously pull back the curtain to see… wait for it… a pair of thin, trendily dressed, usually olive skinned teenagers.
Sounds pretty anti-climatic, right?
These aren’t your average, ordinary scallywags. These adolescents have something horribly wrong with them — something almost none of the witnesses notice at first glance — it’s their eyes. These “creatures” have no white corneas, no colorful irises, just a pair of big, black, shark-like eyes that inspire abject horror in all who have claimed to have seen them.
What’s worse is that these bizarre younglings aren’t content to scare you and continue on their merry way; no they are insistent that you help them. They stare through you with those dull ebony orbs and demand you let them in your car and give them a ride home or that they be allowed into your house to use your phone. The most horrifying aspect of all of this is that those who claim to have encountered these sinister kids swear that they’ve had to actively resist the temptation to do their bidding, as if their voices carried some sort of hypnotic influence.
Here are the common characteristics.
• Young
• Tan
• Lifeless eyes, black eyes. Like a doll’s eyes.
• Some degree of mind control
• A desire to enter your house, car, tent
• An inability to just walk in without an invitation
Stories catalogued include kids waiting outside the tent of a lone camper, a startled Marine on a military base who ends up slamming the door on two 10 year olds, an elderly woman terrorized by a pair of them who roll up in a new van and a child skateboarder who is physically accosted by two Black Eyed Kids
The creepiest thing about all these stories is that we have no examples of what happens if you agree to these creepy teens wishes. This leads us to two possible conclusions. A) They have the worst form of mind control in the world. B) What happens to those who fall for their tricks is so horrific, no word escapes past the void.
Also interesting is the speculation on what the Black Eyed Kids could be. Vampires? Lost Souls? Demons? Kids Who Really Need To Use Your Bathroom?
