Alt Text: Going Green Into Death's Eternal Blackness
Last week, I took a look at interesting things technology can do with your remains once you're too dead to care. This week I'm going to follow up with a slightly different set of post-mortem services. These are companies that claim to make your death as eco-friendly as possible.
Now, I always assumed that dying is already one of the nicest things you can do for the environment. Dead people rarely drive Humvees. They don't purchase individually wrapped cheese slices. They probably use more than their fair share of air conditioning for the first couple days, but after that it's green all the way, baby.
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Well, apparently corpses just aren't carbon-neutral enough, because a bunch of people are willing to take money from your estate to make sure that your remains are more environmentally friendly than a hand-assembled hemp chicken tractor.
Here are some of their brightest ideas.
Neptune Memorial Reef
Apparently when Luca Brasi went to sleep with the fishes, he was proving himself one eco-friendly mafioso. The Neptune Society will happily provide your ashes with a set of concrete galoshes by interring them in an artificial reef off the Miami coast. The reef in question is a neoclassical affair with arches and lions and butterfly thingies, giving the overall impression that a senior prom sank slowly beneath the waves, the cover band solemnly playing "Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)" with corsages and rented bow ties floating around their knees. So that's pretty cool.
Natural Burial
This is pretty straightforward. Your unembalmed body gets interred in a biodegradable casket or shroud in a pesticide-free area planted with native flora. A few centuries ago this was just called "burial," but now we need a special word for it. The modern innovation I most appreciate is that many natural cemeteries provide GPS coordinates in lieu of a gravestone, allowing you to pay your respects via Google Earth. Personally, I'm willing to go one step further and be buried in a cemetery that lets the coyotes and vultures have at me. What could be more eco-friendly than a scavenger buffet?
Ecopod
Even if you want to be buried in a traditional cemetery with stone angels, immaculate lawns and drunken goth teenagers, you can reduce your carbon death mask by being buried in a coffin made of post-consumer recycled material. (Particularly apt, given that you're a post-consumer.) There are a lot of options here but my favorite is the Ecopod, a recycled newspaper coffin that looks like something Steve Jobs would crawl into, only to emerge later as a huge luna moth.
Promession
If you can put off dying for another year or two, you might be able to get in on the next big thing in Gaia-approved post-breathing services, a patented process called "promession." Remember the one interesting day in junior high science class when the teacher brought in a canister of liquid nitrogen and proceeded to shatter a rose like safety glass? With promession, you are that rose. Rather than burning your body to ashes, this process freeze-dries you into person dust. Once powdered, you can decompose as you've never decomposed before, providing life-giving nutrients to a shrub or, if you're feeling impish, some poison ivy.
Resomation
Like promession, Resomation is a new, science-infused process designed to emulate cremation without having to fire up the grill. According to the site, Resomation is basically decomposition on fast-forward, accomplished with chemicals rather than larvae and bacteria. I'm not sure the larvae and bacteria would consider it an improvement, but at least it doesn't release harmful, Earth-choking emissions. Another listed benefit: "You can use it immediately first thing in the morning." Now your surviving loved ones don't have to miss yoga class!
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Born helpless, nude and unable to provide for himself, Lore Sjöberg eventually overcame these handicaps to become a revenant, a reveler and a reverend.
: Wired.com tracked down some great comic book-inspired tattoos at this year's ComicCon in San Diego, but we suspected our readers could show us some mad ink. We were right. Check out our favorite comics-inspired tattoos submitted by you.
Quite a few of the entries were definitely geeky, but not necessarily comic related, so we decided to give them some net space at our Wired.com Readers' Best Geek Tattoos gallery. Enjoy!
Left:
Comic Collection
Submitted by Anonymous
Photographer's comment:
"This takes up a lot less space than the boxes of comics I used to lug around.?
: Jean Grey as Phoenix
Submitted by Mindy C
Photographer's comment:
"Got this beauty six months ago -- it took two four-hour sessions. I still need to go in and have more shading added when I get the funding together. I plan on getting Rogue on my left arm, and Fray eventually. This was my third tattoo. :)?
: Super (Mario) Duper Tattoo
Submitted by Liz
Photographer's comment:
"I went in to see Kevin Starai @ Deluxe Tattoo in Chicago almost two years ago with pictures and my own crappy drawings of what I wanted. 'The bad dudes from Mario brothers.' When I came back a month later to see his drawings, I almost pooped my pants. Even now when I wake up and see it every day, I almost poop my pants. I love it. "
: Vissago's Metroid
Submitted by Vissago
Photographer's comment:
"I've wanted this tattoo for years and years. This was four sessions, each an hour in length."
: Marvel Zombies
Submitted by Greg Clarke
Photographer's comment:
"Marvel Zombies Secret Wars cover, with some characters switched out."
: The Corinthian (from Neil Gaiman's The Sandman)
Submitted by Brian Dillard
Photographer's comment:
"This is 'The Corinthian', the serial killer nightmare from Neil Gaiman's The Sandman. It's part of an entire Sandman sleeve mostly inked by Kevin Lytle of Eternal Tattoo in Livonia, Michigan. It was Kevin's idea to surround him in a crown of leaves in which human eyeballs -- his feast of choice -- substitute for berries or flowers."
: Death and Life of Superman
Submitted by Rob Stevens
Photographer's comment:
"Done after my divorce and for my 32nd birthday, symbolizes my love of the Superman character, as well as the transition from my old life to my new one. The kryptonian script above the tattoo is a word chosen to remind me that being alone doesn't necessarily mean being lonely: Solitude."
: Godzilla & Co.
Submitted by Kyle Y
Photographer's comment:
"The king of the monsters commanded nothing less than a full sleeve dedicated to himself and those giant rubber behemoths, and I obeyed. It took me seven years to complete it."
: Boba Fett
Submitted by tk7602
Photographer's comment:
"The skull from Boba Fett's shoulder armor in Return of the Jedi."
: Major Motoko Kusanagi
Submitted by Melissa
Photographer's comment:
"I love anime, and what better way to show that then get a giant tattoo of my all-time anime goddess??
: Akira Tattoo
Submitted by Joe Peacock
Photographer's comment:
"My Akira sleeve, based on the comic (not the movie). I started designing this when I was 16 years old. It's changed a bit over the years, and once I found an artist who could do what I wanted, we got to work. This is the final result, depicting the moments after Akira awakens and nukes Neo-Tokyo."
Flickr Homepage Update Exposes 'Hidden' Social Features
Yahoo's photo sharing website rolls out some changes to its default user
interface. The changes to Flickr, which lets logged-in users see
more photos on their homepage and gives greater visibility to the
activities of their friends, are intended to increase social interaction on
the site.
The Web's Photographic Memory: A History of IMG and EMBED
Back in the old days, the nascent web didn't have any support for images.
But the key supporters of the new standards stuck to their guns, and the IMG
and EMBED tags came to be. Webmonkey takes a look back into the dark ages
and considers the birth of multimedia on the internet.
