'Every once in a while, your barriers break down. You get back to this certain gasp, because there's no way to reverse time.'

'Ernest Becker, in The Denial of Death (1973), counsels wisely that one must "consent daily to die, to give oneself up to the risks and dangers of the world, allow oneself to be engulfed and used up. Otherwise one ends up as though dead in trying to avoid life and death." ...there really is no such thing as security in life. Except for that sense of security that originates within. Relinquishing our illusions of control, accepting our relative powerlessness over life and death, and accepting ourselves as we are – including our anxiety and life's utter unpredictability – can be extremely liberating. It can allow us to stop worrying so much, and get on with living. The mysterious future will unfold soon enough. Make necessary plans and decisions. But don't dwell on them or be overly attached to their desired outcomes. Focus instead on what's happening right now, this very moment, however anxiety-provoking, painful, tedious or infuriating rather than anxiously anticipating what may or may not happen next. The future is never guaranteed, one way or another. It may or may not ever arrive. Something bad could happen. But, then, so could something good. Rather than hopeless pessimism or grandiose expectation, consider adopting an attitude of "benign optimism" (or at least neutrality) toward the potential but never promised future.'

'...seeking the Philosopher's stone to transform base metals into gold ends up transforming you. ...you end up being transformed by attempting to transform the world. Unlike the conformal adaptations of the idealists, tragedian change involves real self-destruction ... before resurrection can happen. ...Idealists are reluctant to tear themselves down. They prefer to only build up. Which means growth must build on what already exists. Idealists trap themselves into these cul-de-sacs of incremental change... into a doctrine of continuously evolving perfection, which declares that you are perfect as you are, at every point on your path. This has the effect of making it impossible for you to backtrack from a given path or admit that something was a "deep" mistake capable of causing real regret, damage or death.'

'“They procrastinate because they have no external authority figure demanding that they write. Often I explain to the patient that there is an authority figure he’s answerable to, but it’s not human. It’s Time itself that’s passing inexorably. That’s why they call it Father Time. Every time you procrastinate or waste time, you’re defying this authority figure.” Procrastination is a “spurious form of immortality,” the ego’s way of claiming that it has all the time in the world; writing, by extension, is a kind of death. “The risk you take has a feedback effect on the unconscious. The unconscious will give you ideas and it wants you to act on them. The more courage you have when you act, the more ideas it will give you.” He gives procrastinators a tool he calls the Arbitrary Use of Time Moment, which asks them to sit in front of their computers for a fixed amount of time each day. “You say, ‘I’m surrendering myself to Father Chronos.'" That submission activates something inside...'

'I spoke to a couple of Entrustet users, who said they particularly wanted to protect photos stored online, along with hosting and domain-­registration information for personal and business sites. Entrustet also offers an “account incinerator,” to obliterate content its users would prefer not to have linger on after them, and one person I spoke to mentioned having tagged a personal Twitter account for deletion — “it’s just inside jokes, personal ranting and raving” — along with a Gmail account. “I don’t need people judging the personal e-mails that I sent to my friends,” he explained. If we try to control the way we are perceived in life, why not in death, too? It’s not wholly unusual to do this with physical artifacts: letters to be opened only after death, or even to be destroyed. If nothing else, those Entrustet users figure they are leaving behind some guidelines about which bits of their online lives matter, and which don’t.' -- Like tears in rain

'This is how this works. You write a few e-mails, and choose the recipients. These emails are encrypted with military-grade algorithms, so you can be sure that no-one except the intended recipient will ever read them. Your switch will email you every so often, asking you to show that you are fine by clicking a link. If something were to... happen... to you, your switch would then send the emails you wrote to the recipients you specified. Sort of an "electronic will", one could say.'

'All mourning is ambivalence. You're never too far from age 2, when your rage is magically powerful. ...the unconscious never forgets even the briefest of hates. Sometimes the guilt has a convenient narrative: caring for a cancer-ridden, demented parent who exhausted your physical and emotional resources, and then finally(!) dies. -- In most (all?) zombie movies, there is always a scene in which a main character confronts a loved one turned zombie. The rest of the previous zombie attacks are merely prelude to that one, specific, pivotal interaction. Quick, bolt the door, ambivalence is coming. Movies give the loved-one zombie a momentary flash of the old self – is it remembering, is it a trap, or are you seeing what you want to see? ...how the living negotiate that bit of mourning determines if they'll be able to put the dead to rest, or are going to have be tied to them forever.'

'Once you learn to recognize it, you realize that plenty of life experiences have the same subjective signature. What all these trigger-moment experiences have in common is that they represent thresholds beyond which you are no longer in control of the consequences of your actions. Something you are creating goes from being protected by you (and your delusions) to facing the forces of the wild world. You haven’t started living until you experience and survive your first powerful “stepping on stage” moment. The bitter, depressed middle-aged adult who tells the 18-year old that “real life isn’t like the movies” is actually wrong. He has merely never dared to step onto a significant stage himself, so he doesn’t know that such powerful crossing-the-threshold moments are possible. That every life can be the Hero’s journey. The allegory of the stage is the story of your life told around the moments when you faced death, and charged ahead anyway.'

'CHAPTER 2: An apocalypse of self-abdication: If you believe the Rapture is imminent, fixing the problems of this life might not be your greatest priority. You might even be eager to embrace wars and tolerate poverty and disease in others to bring about the conditions that could prod the Rapture in to being. In the same way, if you believe the Singularity is coming soon, you might cease to design technology to serve humans, and prepare instead for the grand events it will bring. But in either case, the rest of us would never know if you had been right. The Rapture and the Singularity share one thing in common: they can never be verified by the living.'

'...considering the green movement’s history of setting ever-shifting deadlines for the End of Days, this is beginning to sound like ‘the boy who cried doomsday’. The idea that humans are killing nature and have a short amount of time to change their ‘ecocidal’ behaviour has been around for far longer than the IPCC, the UN’s science body whose recommendations are being discussed in Copenhagen. But the amnesia that environmentalist campaigners and theorists display when it comes to past predictions of doom is striking. For instance, in 1990 Ecologist founder Edward Goldsmith co-authored the book 5,000 Days to Save the Planet, calling for an urgent decrease in CO2 emissions to avoid the Earth expiring by 2003. As it turned out, the Earth outlived Goldsmith, who passed away in August this year.' -- (There's a name for this 'Nostradoomus' phenomena where old-timers make dire predictions for the world as an unconscious externalization of their repressed fear of impending death.)

"LET THESE BE GUIDESTONES TO AN AGE OF REASON. MAINTAIN HUMANITY UNDER 500,000,000 IN PERPETUAL BALANCE WITH NATURE. GUIDE REPRODUCTION WISELY—IMPROVING FITNESS AND DIVERSITY. (UNITE HUMANITY WITH A LIVING NEW LANGUAGE [Science]). RULE PASSION—FAITH—TRADITION—AND ALL THINGS WITH TEMPERED REASON. PROTECT PEOPLE AND NATIONS WITH FAIR LAWS AND JUST COURTS. LET ALL NATIONS RULE INTERNALLY RESOLVING EXTERNAL DISPUTES IN A WORLD COURT. AVOID PETTY LAWS AND USELESS OFFICIALS. BALANCE PERSONAL RIGHTS WITH SOCIAL DUTIES. PRIZE TRUTH—BEAUTY—LOVE—SEEKING HARMONY WITH THE INFINITE. BE NOT A CANCER ON THE EARTH—LEAVE ROOM FOR NATURE." -- Still doesn't solve the problem of the psychopaths.

'It follows some cases of members receiving updates about dead friends. If a user is reported as deceased, Facebook will remove sensitive information such as status updates and contacts. When reporting a death, users must offer "proof" by submitting either an obituary or news article. Memorialised accounts will have new privacy settings so that only confirmed friends can see the profile or locate it in search. "We understand how difficult it can be for people to be reminded of those who are no longer with them, which is why it's important when someone passes away that their friends or family contact Facebook to request that a profile be memorialised."' -- Proof. Is fb becoming a global Births, Marriages and Deaths database?

'Brazilian reality TV host Wallace Souza was charged earlier this month with ordering his bodyguard to kill people to boost ratings for his crime-themed reality show Canal Livre. Several episodes of Canal Livre featured Souza, a former police officer and politician, discovering the bodies of murdered drug lords in the jungles outside his home city of Manaus. To prove the police's incompetence, Souza would air segments like these, saying that his TV crew was doing a better job finding dead bodies than the police. Brazil, has brought Souza up on drug trafficking charges too. It seems that he was also running a drug ring along with several other ex-police officers, and that the killings he ordered helped eliminate his competition in the world of drug selling, as well as on television.' -- Inevitable snuff is inevitable. (Video inside)

'Never forget a face. Personal urns are a new and exciting way to memorialize your loved one. Now we can create a custom urn in the image of your loved one or favorite celebrity or hero. Personal urns come with a bare scalp ready for a suitable wig, which we can provide. A plaque and nameplate are also available.'

'The geographic nomenclature of GeoCities gave those new to the Internet a familiar shorthand for how social interaction could unfold. Sure, the tools might be different, but the concept of neighbors and like-minded groups of people, would, GeoCities promised, operate the same online as in the real world. The demise of GeoCities is not just the disappearance of a gif-riddled online ghost town--it's the death of a pioneering online community. And it's a reminder that we should think critically about who owns online spaces, how they are managed, and what happens when they are razed ..once online identities are created, are they the property of the users or the corporations that host them? David Bollier calls corporate-controlled spaces like GeoCities and Facebook, "faux commons." For him, true online community spaces are defined by users having control over the terms of their interaction and owning the software or infrastructure. Corporate spaces come with "terms of service" agreements.'

'Legacy Locker is a safe, secure repository for your vital digital property that lets you grant access to online assets for friends and loved ones in the event of loss, death, or disability. -- Legacy Locker helps you pass your precious accounts safely and easily to your spouse, children, friends, or other family. You can assign any digital asset to any beneficiary you want, and know that your content will end up in the right hands. Plus, Legacy Letters let you send a special, easily editable message to anyone you know and care about.'

'... it will become more and more common to need to take care of someone’s online affairs when they pass. How do you close out their email accounts, their forum accounts, Facebook, MySpace, IM, etc etc? In short, what do you do will all this stuff? In some cases you can just abandon it - there’s certainly no shortage of that sort of behavior from the net users who are still alive - but I have a sense that it might be unwise to leave accounts floating around out there for years when the owner is gone, particularly if those accounts might contain personal information. The trouble is that there aren’t any customs or traditions for stuff like this yet. Below are some of my thoughts on handling someone’s online affairs.' -- How interesting. There needs to be a 'Upon my death I hereby bequeath my online content to the digital commons' thing as an extension to archive.org

'Numbers are making their way into the smallest crevices of our lives. Quantitative analysis by its very nature seems remorseless and inhuman. Numbers may be useful for epidemiologists and insurance companies, school systems, the military, and sociology professors, but what have they to do with the fabric of our personal lives? ... two years ago, my fellow Wired writer Kevin Kelly and I noticed that many of our acquaintances were beginning to do this terrible thing to themselves, finding clever ways to extract streams of numbers from ordinary human activities. A new culture of personal data was taking shape.' -- Bunch of old men trying to cheat death by uploading their dataselves to the internets. Call this the Kurzweil-Kelly syndrome. By their numbers you shall know them.

'Follows the story of the cells of Henriettta Lacks. She dies in 1951 of cancer, before she died cells were removed from her body and cultivated in a laboratory in the hope that they could help find a cure for cancer. The cells (known as the HeLa line) have been growing ever since, and the scientists found that they were growing in ways they could not control.'

'...salience matters. Salience isn’t about having heard of something at some point — it’s about how likely you are to think of it right now. ...it’s not that people buying Michael Jackson tunes in the past 24 hours had never heard his music before. And it’s not that they are somehow looking for a way to vicariously participate in the cultural event that his death immediately became. But because of this cultural event, Michael Jackson and his music are dramatically more salient today than they were a week ago.' -- And also because the bulk of his fans are older and only have his music on vinyl, tapes and CDs. It's the rush to fight his impending 'attentional death' and keep him a vital part of living/digital culture by re-buying him in digital formats. Also the collective guilt for letting him slide into obscurity in the first place. All that and the fact he's still the greatest. http://bit.ly/D3Kk6 ;^)

'Psychologists and former contestants discuss what some are calling the 'Truman Show Syndrome.' ... the reality of reality shows is not nearly so benign: at least 11 reality-show participants have taken their own lives -- and two more who have tried to -- in tragedies that appear to be linked to their experience on television shows. Certainly, many of these people had pre-existing problems, which may have been why they were looking for such instant TV fame in the first place. But mental-health workers have discovered that many contestants on shows like “Survivor” and “Big Brother” -- even those who win -- suffer severe and often long-lasting psychological trauma.' -- I see dead people—everywhere.

'The basic model would consist of a tiny GPS transceiver placed in a capsule and inserted under a person's skin, so that authorities could track him easily. Model B would have an extra function — a dose of cyanide to remotely kill the wearer without muss or fuss if authorities deemed he'd become a public threat. The inventor said the chip could be used to track terrorists, criminals, fugitives, illegal immigrants, political dissidents, domestic servants and foreigners overstaying their visas.' -- WTF?WTF?WTF?

H1N1 Swine flu in 2009 #Pink markers are suspect #Purple markers are confirmed #Deaths lack a dot in marker #Yellow markers are negative

"Avatar Endurance Performance"

'Carles notes, in a somewhat Socratic ruse, that he wrestles with the question of value, of which he pretends to know very little: "Sometimes it is hard for me to evaluate what I truly value, and how much I value it." What he's suggesting is that desire is experienced as a kind of demonic possession, inhabiting our consciousness and allowing us no point from which to assess it objectively. As a result we rely on the social mirror. We know our desires from the reflection we see of them in the desires of others. Hence the formation of lines, lines of desire between one another in physical queues, with the lines making a kind of net within which to catch fleeting moments of eternity. The moment of utter satiation in possession which can suspend death. However, this net is rent by the competitive impulse that capitalism introduces into society, in the social mobility that prompts invidious consumption...'

"Sometimes it is hard for me to evaluate what I truly value, and how much I value it. Do I value having new products in my possession? Do I value ’shit like Apple products’/'cell phones’/'the right to say that I was one of the first people to see an adventure action movie that is part of a trilogy’? I saw these bros sitting outside of an urban boutique waiting to purchase the Kanye West sneakers. I wonder ‘what is so important’ about a shoe? Is there some sort of ‘technology’ that will make their lives’ better, or do they just want the right to the experience/right to purchase the shoe for $1000, or the right to sell the shoe on eBay to the ‘highest bidder’? Wonder if I could ‘bond’ with the people who wait in line for new products, since we basically value the same stuff. Feels weird when ‘everything feels like a toy’, but there are still these adults who ‘really want to buy a kewl new toy that will make people think they are kewler.’

'Business Week ranked the airport last in customer satisfaction due to long delays, bureaucratic employees, and overall oppressive atmosphere.' -- Have you lied to us? Have you lied to us? Have you lied to us? Will you lie to us? Liar.

On solsastalgia: "the homesickness one feels not when one moves away, but when one’s home environment vanishes before one’s eyes." -- "...now that economic hard times are here, more online worlds are dying, and here’s the interesting thing: They’re realizing that they owe it to their long-time players to make it into a sort of event. Game designers are realizing that ending their world in a dramatically satisfying way is actually a very interesting logistical, ludogical, and emotional trick. In essence, we’re slowly seeing the emergence of eschatology as a design challenge."

'The people on the other end of the line often have no legal obligation to assume the debt of a spouse, sibling or parent. But they take responsibility for it anyway. New hires at DCM train for three weeks in what the company calls “empathic active listening” ... Not everyone has the temperament to make such calls. About half of DCM’s hires do not make it past the first 90 days. Adam Cohen, chief executive of Phillips & Cohen Associates of Westampton, N.J., said his team of 300 collectors “are all trained in the five stages of grief.” If a relative is more focused on denial or anger instead of, say, bargaining, the collector offers to transfer him to the human resources company Ceridian LifeWorks, where “master’s level grief counselors” are standing by. After a week, the relative is contacted again. DCM executives say some of the survivors not only gladly pay but write appreciative notes.'

'... no matter how attentive its owner, Tamagotchis either died or sprouted wings after a couple of weeks or so, often prompting gloom and guilt. Furbys evoked similar emotions. "I would rush over to the house with a new Furby, and every single time, the child showed no interest in the new one." Ms Audley recalled. "They gave lots of indications that they felt betrayed, taken in and fooled. It had revealed its nature as a machine and they felt embarrassed and angry. They were totally unwilling to invest that kind of emotional relationship in an object again." -- And what about creatures that seem to be alive but immortal? Professor Turkle said one woman told her hat Aibo was better than a real dog because it would not die suddenly and plunge its owner into grief. The comment startled Professor Turkle... "The possibilities of engaging emotionally with creatures that will not die, whose loss we will never need to face, presents potentially dramatic changes in our psychology."

"She's in Paris."

"An 81-year-old Australian man has shot himself dead with an elaborate suicide robot built using plans he downloaded from the Internet. The machine was attached to a .22 semi-automatic pistol loaded with four bullets. It was able to fire multiple shots into the man's head after he activated it."

'The challenge is to design an application that would would allow a child to receive comfort from being able to have simple, virtual conversations with a parent who is not available "in-person".' -- *gulps*

"Why let all of your ideas die with you? Current Copyright law prevents anyone from building upon your creativity for 70 years after your death. Live on in collaboration with others. Make an intellectual property donation. By donating your IP into the public domain you will "promote the progress of science and useful arts" (U.S. Constitution). Ensure that your creativity will live on after you are gone, make a donation today."

'Someone cleverer than me once described this condition as having an "Alfred Hitchcock mind". I prefer to think of it as being perpetually stuck in the opening moments of an episode of Casualty, where every stepladder, plug socket, and loose-lidded food processor is a grinning, lurking deathtrap.'

"Creating a copy of online behavior and programming an avatar to respond to stimuli in the way the user has been during their digital life.... A digital representation of life could continue unhindered in a virtual environment, after real-life has ended. Maybe Google with its seemingly endless storage capacity will one-day also host our virtual afterlife."

"By mixing toilet cleaner with pesticide, anyone can make a cloud of deadly hydrogen sulfide gas. If the concentration is too low, it won't work. [One website] includes a web app that can calculate the perfect amount of each ingredient." -- Don't.

"Something quite interesting happens in the first few minutes of Ninja Gaiden II: The dead people don't vanish."

"games [are] unique [in] that they allow us to experiment with insanely dangerous physics. Games are only arena of modern life in which otherwise responsible adults are permitted to smash expensive things all to hell, purely for the sheer joy of it."

"The instant you die [in Halo], the game shifts to a third-person camera perspective. This sudden switch in camera angle [...] is, in essence, a classic out-of-body experience, of exactly the sort people describe in near-death experiences."

"How an Evil Clown, a Haitian Trickster Spirit, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a Database Into a Society."

On the game, Passage: "There have been a number of people who have written stuff about this being the first videogame to make them cry."

"Pencils made from the carbon of human cremains. 240 pencils - a lifetime supply of pencils for those left behind. Only one pencil can be removed at a time, it is then sharpened back into the box ... transforming it into an urn."

"An arrogant insouciance might, for example, seem more fitting to an age of imperialism than this wilting, debilitating malady; and enlightenment, another well-known theme of the era, might have been better served by a mood of questing impatience."

Rather evocative of the French Revolution. 2008. Going to be a fun year!

Video: Guy ages 20 years. :(

Congratulations! This is the last page.Thank you for visiting the End of the Internet. There are no more links. You must now turn off your computer and go do something productive. Go read a book, for pete's sake.

"... researchers from Bangor University in Wales stumbled on what is believed to be the world's oldest living animal: a 405 year-old clam. Or it was living, until researchers had to kill it to determine the clam's age by studying rings on its shell." >:-(

"Dexter is not a celebration of violence. It does not encourage us to admire a serial killer. Only a knucklehead or an opportunist would suppose otherwise. Dexter offers an absorbing what-if study. What if, it asks, evil were domesticated for good."

"The more people who visit the website, the faster the victim dies." No there's a pitch!

"I have (I think) a strong intellectual grasp of the roots of suicide terrorism, playing the game gave me an "aha" moment that I'd never had before: an ability to feel, in whatever tiny fashion, the strategic logic and emotional calculus behind the act."

"Experience is what you get when you don't get what you want."

*Shudders*: "While the human capacity for cruelty is limitless, it's hard to top the medievals for their sheer inventiveness when it came to executing a criminal."

"A Chinese man dropped dead after a three-day internet gaming session, state media reported today."

For a minute there I thought they WERE joking!

Advertising supernova in the sky

"It will become increasing difficult for religion to persist in the face of radical life extension and eventual immortality. Everyone is their own Jesus in this new empowered age of agency."

"Roleplaying games challenge us directly by setting goals... There are three types of goals in computer games: Endogenous goals originate within the game; exogenous from outside it. Diegetic goals come in when you start to role-play."

Presentation: "Prediction: When your mother dies in 2050 your didgital mom will be 50% her. When your best friend dies in 2050, your digital friend will be 80% him."

Online funeral palour. Odd.

"current emergency practices actually kill people - they flood you with oxygen [it] radically accelerate[s] the speed at which your cells die... instead [they should] chill your body down and very slowly warm it up while gradually reintroducing oxygen."

“Hats make you look good and feel beautiful. You can wear them for lunch, a wedding or for breakfast. It is like taking drugs: it is more fun and less dangerous. You don’t have to look like an old bat. You can be a crow and look like a hen.”

Lucky *@£$er! "Part of the remains of the actor, who played Montgomery "Scotty" Scott, were sent about 70 miles above the earth on a private SpaceLoft XL rocket."

"Self-aware agents [may] not know that they are in a sim, in which case perhaps some argument could be made that it is all right that they do not know since in fact we cannot prove that we are not in a sim ourselves."

"Memoris is a virtual graveyard. A necropolis for Second Life. Operated by the Japanese firm Metabirds, Memoris is quite unique in Second Life — an entire region given over to remembrance."

"In this brave new world of the web, even suicide can be an interactive performance egged on by a crowd of eager spectators. Small wonder, then, that the marketers, venture capitalists and media behemoths are exploit[ing] this orgy of self-expression."

"Dozens of internet users who allegedly goaded a depressed father to hang himself could face criminal charges.Kevin Whitrick, 42, killed himself live on the internet after being incited by chatroom users who initially believed he was play-acting."

"The pictures are so clear that people watching can see the faces of everyone in the crowd, and hear everything clearly, so they can spot relatives they might not have seen in years"

“I’ve thought about this enough that I’ve set a stipulation in my will so that if I die the executor, who would either be my mother or my best friend, is responsible for notifying everyone on my contact list that I’ve passed away” says Chartier"

"If iTunes had existed in his time, what jazz aficionado wouldn’t want to know what songs were on John Coltrane’s playlist?... Similarly, if Flickr had been around, what artist wouldn’t be interested in seeing Picasso’s Flickr portfolio?"

"Digital Remains is concerned with the role data plays when we remember deceased people. It assumes a world in which our data is stored on the network creating digital archives of generations of people."

"MyDeathSpace.com is an archival site, containing news articles, online obituaries, and other publicly available information. We have given you the opportunity to pay your respects and tributes to the recently deceased MySpace.com members via our comment