Simian Uprising by Jer Clarke

expect something pretty to look at in the near future.

Lifted from BoingBoing but was just too good to pass up.

This Spartan Life is a full featured latenight-style talkshow filmed entirely within an active online multiplayer game of Halo (a popular first-person shooter). Riding the coattails of super-popular fiction videos like Red vs. Blue, which uses the same technique known as Machinima, This Spartan Life really pushes the medium by having real, important new media artists and thinkers appear on the show to do interviews about their work and the implications of gamespaces and VR on communication, all while touring through the Halo universe and avoiding attacks from unknowing gamers just looking for a fight.

Add in the live 8-bit dj (DJ Octobit) and the impressive dance troupe and you have a really fun and genuinely interesting tv show. More than worth the 15 minutes or so it runs.

From the BBC, via Snowmit:

Developments in tissue engineering mean that cells taken from animals could be grown directly into meat in a laboratory, the researchers say. . .

To industrialise the process, researchers suggest the cells could be grown on large sheets that would need to be stretched to provide the ‘exercise’ for the growing muscles.

“If you didn’t stretch them, it would be like eating mush,” said Mr Methany. . .

The new techniques could also provide a dilemma for vegetarians.

Some may feel able to eat meat that has been grown without an animal being harmed.

The whole fake meat thing has always seemed just around the corner, the way we grow and produce flesh at this point just isn’t scaling well enough into a 6 billion human market. I for one will be willing to try the stuff at least once, if only for the transhumanist/neophillic implications and cause meat that is less real is meat that I can get behind.

My favorite part, though, is the stretching of the muscles to keep them toned. Thinking about the giant sheets of muscle fibre, completely out of context, being “worked out” by robots gets me all grossed out and excited at the same time. It’s just one of those things that actually feels like the future.

I can’t wait to chew on some bovine cell replicate jerky while soaring through the sky with my new jetpack. The jetpacks are coming any day now right?

I’ll get back on the ball any day now. While you wait, why not try an “I’m feeling lucky” search in Google for “Peeing in bucket”?

[Hint: I am the special kind of popular where all the most innapropriate ideas lead straight back to this site.]

I’d like to take this moment to point out that Joey‘s new novella, Lockpick Pornography, is good in all the ways that a genderqueer activist humor novel always should and must be. It’s thoughtful, heartwarming, excessively funny and above all challenging in that special way that makes me want to wear dresses and kiss boys when I know all my friends from grade school are looking.

At the link above you can find both the full text of the novel online (Joey posted the chapters for donations a few months ago) and a link to a professionally (real) bound copy. It’s only 13$C.A.D (shipping included) for the pre-order and it looks like it’ll be a good artifact to add to your sexy collection. I’ll lend you my copy if you want, though.