Okay, so it’s maybe a little pathetic, but it’s not without precedent. The Greek playwright Ovid recounts a story where the sculptor Pygmalion falls in love with a statue. The desire for romance is strong in humanity, but we are sorely limited by time and space such that finding the right person to share that romance is like finding a needle in a haystack when the haystack can sue for assault when you go groping through it. Even then, the high divorce rate shows that the first time quite often isn’t the charm. No wonder the desire to create one’s lover whole cloth is there, in the back of our collective minds.

I harp on this theme because our technology is allowing us to simulate other beings, thinking beings, and while the characters in our games are primitive and scripted now, that may not be the case in the future. We are entering an age were it probably will be possible to build your ideal soulmate in a character designer.

The field of robotics is also seeing a renaissance, as engineering catches up to our imagination. Take your custom-built personality program, download it into the future’s bastard child of Asimo and a Realdoll, and what then? A custom-designed partner who looks, acts, and loves the way you want it to. Try finding that on the dating scene.

The Stepford Wives wasn’t a horror movie, it’s marketing copy from ten years in the future.

Our friend Sal9000 is just the first raindrop to signal the coming flood. Stay tuned as we cover the literal marriage of humans and technology, already in progress.

I will be straight up damned if Michelle Rheaume’s crocheted Mushroom Kingdom-onians aren’t the cutest Mario home-crafted toys I’ve ever seen. Patterns and completed custom figures are available via her Etsy account (the Tanooki Mario has since been sold), and you can see more sold-out items on her Flickr, which I’ll bet you she’d be happy to craft on request.

We have quite a few friends who happened to be into the knitted crafts fare—having the ability to find famous characters and character patterns is always a huge enjoyment. I recently forwarded some quilt patterns to a friend with space invaders on them. There is something deeply atavistic about the 8-bit to crocheted pixel translation.

Link, via BoingBoing Offworld.

While installing World of Warcraft on my Ubuntu Linux laptop (using the WINE compatibility software), I found myself confronted by this license agreement. Ain’t that a pickle? I wonder if I’m bound by the license terms now that I clicked “Agree”?

Link, via Boing Boing.