It’s a little early to be thinking about Halloween, but then again these animatronic wonders are more than a little cool.  I imagine you would probably use them all year round, especially given the price.  There’s lots of engineering and imagination has gone into these friggin scary wonders.  I saw the link on Boing Boing Gadgets and it’s incredible the variety of scary crap they have here.  Have a gander at these bad boys on FrightCatalog.com.

From the simple vomit barrell gag (get it?) to the best death scene I’ve seen they have it all.  Now, they aren’t cheap, but clearly these props go beyond the usual plastic skeleton hanging on the front door.

I can see Lockrey already clutching the credit card with the phone in her hand trying to decide….

For example of the awesomeness, here’s a Giant that wakes up when you come close and stands up to over 11 feet tall, screaming at you.  Methinks you would be saving some money on candy if you installed this bad boy on the front porch….

 

Wow wow wow wow.  I want the kind of music industry Seth Godin is talking about.  One that doesn’t sue you, but rather leads you into better experiences and a closer sense of community with the artist and other fans.  I have blathered on about this far too often, but I must say I never really thought about exactly how the music industry could move past their dying business today and on to something really new, and really sustainable.

His speech is funny and very pointed, and filled with stuff that resonates with me strongly.  It’s probably the best advice I have heard for them in a while.

 “…if I asked you for the name and address of your 50,000 best customers, could you give it to me? Do you have any clue?”

I love this next part, because that’s what I do to people, but oh so rarely it makes me sad.  I bolded the best part.

“The next idea is this idea of liking. There is a lot of music I like. There is not so much music I love. They didn’t call the show, “I Like Lucy”, they called it “I Love Lucy”. And the reason is you only talk about stuff you love, you only spread stuff you love. You find a band you really love, you’re forcing the CD on other people, “you gotta hear this!”. We gotta stop making music people like. There is an infinite amount of music people like. No one will ever go out of the way to hear, to pay for, music they like. “

Here’s more on the anti-piracy, control the uncontrollable, dam the flood, etc.

“It’s not that you need to say “no, no, no, I can’t let you hear this” it’s “I want you to hear this”. Because if you hear it you might join the tribe, and if you join the tribe then over time I’ll take care of you so well you’ll want to pay me. And then people will be passionate when they hear what you do for a living, they’re going to die to have you help them meet other people in the tribe.”

Of course this next quote ties into the first point: they have no real idea what I listen to, or not a very good idea.  They should be buying me my iPod, letting me fill it for free and keep track of what I am listening to.  Isn’t that more than radio ever gave them?  They have no idea what songs I rate highly, what songs I listen to over and over, what artists I love.  In effect they have no idea what “tribe” I belong to, so they have no easy way to suck the money from my pocket. 

“And so we look at these phrases, “paying attention”. That’s what you’ve wanted people to do all along. “Pay attention to this artist”. Paying is a weird word isn’t it? You want me to pay you something-my attention. And if you’re wrong, I get nothing back. I had to listen to the Backstreet Boys…AHH! I want those three minutes back. So, it’s a weird relationship.” 

I highly recommend you read this and think about how we might eventually, maybe, be paying the music companies for something completely different than the actual music they sell today.

I really love this paper (PDF) that discusses the unexpected talents of a whole mob of people when they put themselves to a task.

When Halo2 was going to be released, they leaked a trailer for the game. At the end of the trailer there was a flash of a link to a website, Ilovebees.com. It was supposed to be the website of a beekeeper, but there was something obviously wrong with the site. A plea for help from the supposed webmaster was the beginning of an Alternate Reality Game that drew 600 000 participants (!) into the search to figure out whatever was happening there. The company behind the whole thing strung everybody along with a masterful set of clues and puzzles that were really hard (basically impossible) for any one person to do, but were achievable for a large group if everybody worked together, hence the bees reference to a hive mind.

Here’s a great example of what they pushed these people to do:

As the players pushed themselves to succeed at every challenge, we were forced to present them with a problem that we ourselves weren’t sure they could successfully solve. We called it the “relay mission”, and it was designed to make or break their collective intelligence. Shortly after sunrise on a Tuesday late in the game, we directed the voice actress playing Melissa the Operator to start making live calls to phones on the East Coast. She asked whoever answered the phone tell her something personal—for instance, a five-word phrase that described something they are very, very good at. The Operator then informed the player that she would be calling another payphone somewhere in the world, as soon as one hour from that moment. Whoever answered the phone needed to repeat back to her the same five-world phrase. Then she hung up, providing no information about which phone she intended to call.

Our plan was, over the course of the day, to repeat this relay mission up to a dozen times, shortening the time increments until we would posed our final, seemingly impossible challenge: to relay an improvised personal message worldwide with only a fifteen-second time differential between the first call and the second. But we were fairly certain the players would never get that far. We had designed a number of failure responses so that we could reward players for however close they came, fully expecting them to eventually hit a wall past which they could not coordinate and perform.

The players, however, never hit that wall. By using their early axon coordination spreadsheets—they knew which players lived near which phones, and had their mobile contact information—and by consulting the timeline of GPS coordinates for that day, and crossreferencing that data against their knowledge of which payphones the Operator had favored in the past for live calls, they were able to deduce which phones were likely to ring, and who was most likely to answer those phones in the time window the Operator presented. They then set up a relay team of online players broadcasting each secret five-word phrase as it was invented to all players known to be in the field; hundreds of players online called hundreds of players at payphones so that they could update each other virtually instantly.

….

Before we saw what the players were capable of, we never imagined that a massively multi-player team of young Halo fans would be capable of building, in one day, a worldwide, instantaneous, mobile broadcasting platform. The idea to ask them to do just that was only possible after the players’ brilliant coordination efforts emerged.

The best part is how the company kept changing and improvising the next steps in the puzzle to keep the players challenged and interested. I love the potential here for collaboration and working together that this kind of thing shows humans are capable of doing. I wonder what kind of problems, challenges, and obstacles we will overcome together in the future with technology allowing us to work together effectively in groups of thousands, even millions? That kind of thing just hasn’t been possible before now, it’s awesome to imagine.