We had bought a picture frame with the intention of putting a picture in it, but before we did someone fell on it and broke it so it was bent on the top. In an attempt to prevent more damage I hung it from the wall, just an elaborate picture frame, hanging on its wire from a hook, but with some serious damage to the top.
Various housemates kept sticking small postcards with bluetack inside the frame. My favourite was a white card with PERFORMANCE ART written on it. The frame definitely looked like a performance had been made.
A life-sized cardboard skeleton. I bought it as a kind of “paper model kit” with a lot of little plastic and metal clips included, and it used some clever tricks to get all those bones into their proper shape. Intended as a training / learning aid for medical students, it was labeled with all the latin names of everything.
It experienced several outings and trips in it’s “lifetime”, always riding shotgun and waving to the people I overtook. It attended a math and a computer sciene lecture in university (I doubt it understood a single thing from it), enjoyed a day at the “beach” (properly attired with a speedo), and a number of Halloween acts.
It lived in my room for a good decade, moved into the study in my house later, but started falling apart and requiring repairs so it was retired to the paper recycling bin one day.
Indeed I did. Not completly, as it started to dismantle itself (one leg was broken at the hips, and the arms were not much better), but of course I placed it into the recycling bin last, just before the pickup.
I have a section of metal pole. A group of mates went on holiday together, somewhere along the way we acquired this pole, long story that's not relevant, but on coming home we decided to break this pole and each take a bit home. I made an art piece with it and some other momentos from the holiday. It's a nice way of remembering a nice time but occasionally someone is sitting in my front room, does a squinty look and goes - "Is that a pole??"
My office at work has a number of mildly curious things decorating it. Nothing alarmingly strange, but silly all the same.
Our office is one of the few separated rooms in our building (most of it is a large open room), and it has a typical false ceiling covered in square foam tiles. Evidently, the previous tenant cut holes into several of these tiles to serve as drop points for cables that they had run through the ceiling. Prior to us moving in, they must’ve taken out all such equipment and, to restore the look of the main space, swapped out all damaged tiles with pristine ones from the ceiling in what would become our office. That means we have all of the ones full of holes. We also happen to be immediately below where the aircon is blown into the building (in short, the duct abruptly ends and vents directly into the cavity above the false ceiling, and no, I do not know why they did this), making our room exceptionally cold, to the point where we sometimes run space heaters in the summer. At one point, we jokingly hypothesized that the cold air was leaking through those holes in the ceiling tiles and making our room too cold, so as a joke solution, we crudely plugged the holes by stuffing them with random trash we happened to have lying around. That being, loose plastic bags from the gas station and grocery store, and some bulk toilet paper packaging wrap. Due to some of the bags being a burnt orange color, we came to refer to these eyesores as our “Halloween decorations”. For over a year, we had several people enter the office, ask about the bags in the ceiling, and become bewildered at our assertion that they were Halloween decorations, particularly because it was June.
Our office has a tall, narrow window looking out into the main room next to the doorway. We usually have this decorated with those cheap gel letters designed to stick to windows and spell out generic phrases that you can pick up at dollar stores. We amuse ourselves trying to come up with clever anagrams with the available letters. Currently, we have a set that is intended to spell out, “hello spring”, but is arranged to read, “no girls – help”.
On the wall in a cheap picture frame from Walmart is a printout of some of the dumbest code we’ve found in our repository (we’re software developers), to forever enshrine it in infamy. Sometimes when deep in thought about a complex problem, we ritualistically gaze upon it in hopes of receiving a blessing of inspiration.
My coworker, with whom I share my office, has a very small mirror frame photograph standing on his desk, perhaps about 8cm tall by 5 cm wide. It portrays an image of Kim Jong Il and Kim Il Sung (this one, specifically). He refuses to elaborate why. Hiding behind the tiny print is another nearly identical tiny print of the same image, except he has photoshopped it to give both of them fatter bellies and put a large, cartoonish dent in each of their heads. At random intervals, he swaps the two prints when no one is watching to gaslight people who visit his desk.
Not the most original punchline; I’m sure you’ve seen it before. We were just baffled to actually see it in the wild.
Judging from the way this function was used, there no evidence to suggest it ever contained extra logic that was refactored out over time. I’m wholly convinced someone wrote this as-is and thought it was okay. I also knew that there’s no way this was extracted for DRY purposes, as it was only called in one place, and the rest of the codebase was extremely allergic to DRY.
It was also formatted like complete garbage. Indentation level was not consistent line by line. And, presumably due to some carelessness handling line endings, the entire code file developed double-spacing. Somehow it was checked into version control in that state.
All these little nits, from the code’s utter uselessness to its appalling formatting, compelled us to preserve it. It was like the entire rest of the shitty codebase in microcosm.
An M72 LAW rocket launcher tube, sitting in the center of the living room, on end. No coffee table, just that sitting upright in between the couch and TV.
It’s not necessarily the weirdest, but it has a pretty great story behind it
I have a relative, I believe he’s like a second cousin or something along those lines who has an actual coffin that he uses as a Halloween decoration.
He decided he wanted a coffin, so he goes to one of the local funeral homes to see what they have around that’s not too expensive and looks a bit spooky.
It just so happens that he’s has a pretty nice wooden coffin that’s just been kicking around in storage for a couple decades.
Why has this coffin been kicking around in storage? Because some local guy died back in the late 80s while visiting family in Poland. They had to scramble a bit to figure out how to get his body back to the US and pretty much got the cheapest wooden box they could find to ship him back in, and then buried him in a different casket. And it had just been kicking around since then since he had no use for it but also didn’t want to get rid of it.
And that guy that died in Poland was my grandfather.
My mom’s a bit salty about the situation, she thinks it’s disrespectful or something. I personally think it’s a cool piece of family trivia, and although I never had the opportunity to meet him, from what I know of him I think my grandfather would have gotten a kick out of it.
Yeah, it’s who I suspect gets most of the taxidermy stuff. I mean, if you do it yourself, I guess there’s a pride in your craft thing, but it really does seem like insult to injury to go and kill something then display its carcass as a trophy. Seems barbaric. Really, the only kind of taxidermy I could support is vulture culture stuff, where the subjects are ethically sourced (read: Found on the side of the road already dead). Still weird if you go overboard, but there’s a grey area where you can have something between “propped up elk carcass designed to look alive” and “collection of pinned butterflies”
"i love my pet so much, I want them to be with me forever, bereft of everything I loved about them"
I've never understood taxidermy. I keep some pictures of one of my dead cats in the wall/as a wallpaper on my phone, and it still is sometimes upsetting to see him and remember that he's gone.
For real. I have a plaster cast of my dog’s paw print and that’s enough. It seems morose. You wouldn’t do that with a relative, right? “Sure am glad I got Grandpa stuffed and mounted here, next to the TV. It’s like he’s still with us”
I try not to judge people who like Dr. Pepper; it’s not like it’s your fault your preferences came out like that.
Ok I don’t actually judge anyone for that, I just personally dislike it so viscerally that the smell is a bit nauseating, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this is one of those things where N% of people have some gene that makes some Dr. Pepper ingredient taste different, like with the bitter super taster gene or the cilantro soap gene (both of which I have 😅 )
Honestly, I just chose Dr. Pepper for something anticlimactic. I do like Dr. Pepper, but it’s not my favorite beverage or anything. Still could be a genetic thing, though. My dad hates Pepsi because to him it just tastes like soap
If I’m gonna hate a soda, it’s gonna be Mountain Dew. That shit tastes and looks like it was harvested from the fertile grounds of Chernobyl
Heh, we can do a Classic Human™ and unite in hate: I really don’t like Mt Dew either. I think the US version is like even more toxic-looking (and possibly literally toxic for that matter) than what they sell over here in Urop, or at least I remember it looking exactly like you described.
I didn’t know the versions would be so different, but it makes sense. There’s no way they’d get away with selling Mt. Dew in Europe without getting rid of at least some of the alien blood and nuclear waste. I swear, if you put it next to a geiger counter, it makes a droning sound
their are a number of technical difficulties with taxidermizing humans that make the results usually not worth the effort. better to just get your bones interred in a ceramic skulpture of yourself.
they are specific to humans, though fur does help to hide (heh, get it) a lot, so it wouldn’t surprise me for there to be extra challenge to a pig. in addition to the lack of fur though, humans also have very thin skin, which tears easily.
furthermore, if you’re taxidermizing a human, you would generally want the end product to look like that person. most of what makes a human look like themself is not the skin. it’s the bones and muscles and fat in the face, and the perceptions of living humans are incredibly sensitive to subtle variations in those features. to have any hope of recognizability, you would probably need an extremely detailed sculpture of the subject’s head to be made ahead of time to be used as the form. at that point you really might as well just use the sculpture to commemorate the person, rather than wrapping their skin around it at all.
Pretty much what I suspected about “naked” skin vs fur, which just intuitively seems way more “forgiving.”
most of what makes a human look like themself is not the skin. it’s the bones and muscles and fat in the face, and the perceptions of living humans are incredibly sensitive to subtle variations in those features.
Ohhh this makes complete sense now that you say it; we’re incredibly well tuned for recognizing faces, so I guess not only would it be hard to make the person recognizable, but it might also be hard to not have imperfections in the face that give everyone an “uncanny valley” sort of feeling that something’s off about it?
I can definitely say that the problems with taxidermizing humans was definitely not something I expected to learn about today (or necessarily ever really), so thank you for taking the time to explain all that. It was honestly interesting to learn about something that I had absolutely no knowledge of beforehand.
If you don’t mind me asking, do you know this stuff via actually doing taxidermy, or are you just another infinitely curious person?
but it might also be hard to not have imperfections in the face that give everyone an “uncanny valley” sort of feeling that something’s off about it?
yep, precisely so.
do you know this stuff via actually doing taxidermy, or are you just another infinitely curious person?
the latter, i suppose. i’ve had a fascination with the history of sideshows, professional freaks, medical anomalies, and the like since i was a wee lass, and attempts at taxidermizing humans come up somewhat often in that course of study.
A ex took me to his relatives house which had two key features. One was a giant shed with rabbits in tiny hutches stacked 4 high, must have been 70 rabbits in there, absolutely disgusting, and she spoke about each of her beloved pets as if she cared. The second was her living room with 4 of her favourite deceased rabbits stuffed and on the shelf. She encouraged me to touch one of them to see how soft he was. Grim.
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