December 23, 2004
The Future: SimSimba
CNN is reporting that a woman in Texas has paid $50,000 for a clone of Nicky, her dead cat. The clone, Little Nicky, was delivered yesterday. The deal was made as part of the "Nine Lives Extravaganza" sale offered by Genetic Savings and Clone, a company whose very name screams out ethical integrity. They specialize in "gene banking" and cloning of pets. Read the story here.
On occasion of this event, I have the following observations.
Food for thought. But, I muse, how can I cash in?
How's this for new company concept: Mobfront Genetic Publishing. Our slogan, with a nod to Kubrick, will be "All the Best Pets."
We'll start with Simba. Everybody loves Simba.
So I'd like to use Simba as the prototype - or "manuscript" - for a first edition run of SimSimba - Everybody's Fauxvorite Feline(TM). This is genetics, so fur color and stuff is pretty much up to the owner, or as we like to call them, our "registered independent product caregivers." You can name your SimSimba whatever you want, but all legal documents and pet registrations must list the full name as "MGP presents SimSimba: [pet name here], [version ID here]" Chips implanted in the ear will make it a breeze to track and run metrics on your pet's behavior. Weekly trend analysis reports will help registered caregivers anticipate and prepare for the future. This will all be covered in the EULA.
I think the idea has legs! If not, we can engineer them. If successful, we will carefully vet additional manuscripts for quality, endurability, and other elements that make for successful publishing. Evenutally we will have a catalog of, yep, "all the best pets," that you can choose from and customize.
If you think this is all merely more of Jason's snarky armchair hyperbole, check out Genetic Savings and Clones' website. The index page is, by itself, enough to retint my image of a kitten in a stocking for the rest of my life. Five years ago, it would have been the "teaser" website for a sci-fi flick, like the Lacuna Inc. website or the brilliant, incredibly dense and detailed system of interrelated sites developed for Spielberg's AI in 2001. It's still the most brilliant Internet guerilla marketing campaign/game yet devised. The fictional AI pages and domain names are no longer in service and aren't linked from the "official" AI website. Thankfully, they are archived by www.cloudmakers.org, a site created by the netizens that originally solved the puzzle.
On occasion of this event, I have the following observations.
- Naming the first cloned pet after the son of Satan in an Adam Sandler movie is a shit-poor idea. The right-wingers will wreak havoc with any grist they get, and that will pay reaaaaaally well on holy freak-out websites. I'd be cool with "Darling Nicky." "Nicky 2.0" is lame, but "Nicky 2/9" (sounded "Nicky Two-of-Nine") would make my inner geek happy, cuz, you know, nine lives 'n all.
- Stephen King's Pet Sematary is now a shudderingly prescient moral cautionary tale.
- Simba will never die!
Food for thought. But, I muse, how can I cash in?
How's this for new company concept: Mobfront Genetic Publishing. Our slogan, with a nod to Kubrick, will be "All the Best Pets."
We'll start with Simba. Everybody loves Simba.
So I'd like to use Simba as the prototype - or "manuscript" - for a first edition run of SimSimba - Everybody's Fauxvorite Feline(TM). This is genetics, so fur color and stuff is pretty much up to the owner, or as we like to call them, our "registered independent product caregivers." You can name your SimSimba whatever you want, but all legal documents and pet registrations must list the full name as "MGP presents SimSimba: [pet name here], [version ID here]" Chips implanted in the ear will make it a breeze to track and run metrics on your pet's behavior. Weekly trend analysis reports will help registered caregivers anticipate and prepare for the future. This will all be covered in the EULA.
I think the idea has legs! If not, we can engineer them. If successful, we will carefully vet additional manuscripts for quality, endurability, and other elements that make for successful publishing. Evenutally we will have a catalog of, yep, "all the best pets," that you can choose from and customize.
If you think this is all merely more of Jason's snarky armchair hyperbole, check out Genetic Savings and Clones' website. The index page is, by itself, enough to retint my image of a kitten in a stocking for the rest of my life. Five years ago, it would have been the "teaser" website for a sci-fi flick, like the Lacuna Inc. website or the brilliant, incredibly dense and detailed system of interrelated sites developed for Spielberg's AI in 2001. It's still the most brilliant Internet guerilla marketing campaign/game yet devised. The fictional AI pages and domain names are no longer in service and aren't linked from the "official" AI website. Thankfully, they are archived by www.cloudmakers.org, a site created by the netizens that originally solved the puzzle.
