ZEITGEIST

Sung by the husky accented Italian croonster Camillo Miller and animated by the inestimable Rob Beschizza, a fond last remembrance of our communal nine month romance with ToM over its twitching corpse. Thanks, you prince of men.

Farewell, Table of Malcontents [YouTube]

This post chronicles the diaspora of ToM writers:

John & Eliza:

Ectomo.com [Ectoplasmosis, ToM's Successor]

John Brownlee

johnbrownlee.net [Personal Blog] (Give it a couple of days, any future blogs I'll be writing for will be mentioned here)

AMC SciFi Scanner [Blogging For Cash]

Eliza Gauger:

Gibberings [Personal Blog]

Annalee Newitz

Techsploitation.com [Personal Blog]

Lisa Katayama

Tokyo Mango [Personal Blog]

If you liked us, please feel free to follow.

When I started working on ToM nine months ago, I wasn't quite sure it would all work out. Conceptually, the blog I had pitched to Wired was like Dragon Naturally Speaking hooked up to the misfiring synapses of a profanely rambling schizophrenic pervert. And, you know, a few thousand posts later, ToM's been cancelled, so maybe it didn't work out.

Still, we've all had some fun. At the very least, without ToM, Wired would not be ranked as high in Google for searches about cephalophilia, vagina dentatas, and Lord Cthulhu as it is. That is a sizable accomplishment. Hopefully, another massive publishing empire will come along someday and rake in the vast profits that can be had from the coffers of the Internet's most bizarro fetishists. Who'll be laughing then?

But in all seriousness: though ToM is no more, it stands in the unique position of having a loyal, intelligent community that is the envy of the other Wired Blogs. That's you guys. And, without trying to seem maudlin, the comments, feedback, support and even criticism of ToM's readers has been the aspect of running ToM that I have treasured most.

Why? Because when I took over ToM, I wanted to prove that blogs didn't have to be fetishistically devoted to a single subject matter (like games, or gadgets, or music) to be successful. That the most important aspect of a successful blog wasn't obsessively updating about "the news" but strong voice and personality. And that a blog dedicated to a broad spectrum of fringe art and culture could attract a sizable audience, because not everyone's interests are obsessively exclusive to a single note played over and over and over again.

You guys proved that for me, and everyone at Wired knows it. Thanks for that. I wish we all could have stuck around ToM longer, but it wasn't in the cards.

But it's not goodbye: we've got a new hangout! I hope I'll see you there!

This won't come as a surprise to some of you: dark murmurs of ToM's imminent death have been filling the comments section for some time. However, consider this the official announcement: June 30th will be the last day Table of Malcontents will be updated.

That means all of you will have to go elsewhere for your steampunk octopi, your Cthulhu Cthursdays, your random Soviet Russia animations, your surrealist photography, your vagina dentatas, your noise-du-jours, your random assortment of curiosities and your bizarre and occasionally profane off-topic Brownlee ramblings.

The good news is that if you're a fan of ToM or ToM's writers, you'll have some place to go. Annalee and Lisa are still going to be posting at Wired over at the Underwire blog. As for Eliza and myself, we won't be blogging at Wired anymore, but we're very likely to have at least one new blog for you to visit come June 30th.

I'll save the mushy stuff about how much I love you guys for the last day. In the meantime, what this means is that if you're an artist or blogger who wants to get something up on ToM, you have two weeks one week (oops! we're dead!) to email me. Not an artist but just want to call something noteworthy to the attention of our readers, while they are still amassed in a writhing neo-cult of R'lyeh? .

Update: I'm going to keep this on the front page, just so visitors don't miss it in the crush of posts. Also, because kind words make me gush.

• If only Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev wrote death metal.

• Creepy Japanese cutout dressing books courtesy of my favorite naked go-go blogger, dadanoias.

• "I can paralyze a 200-lb attacker with just one finger... driven with bullet-like velocity directly through his taint!" Vintage comic book martial arts ads

• For when you want to drink ether in an emergency ward, surrounded by the screams and spurting gore of your fellow patrons: the Clinic, a hospital-themed club in Singapore.

• What the first movie-goers saw: "Legend has it that when the Lumière brothers' film Coming of Train, La Ciotat was screened in 1896, its image of a train approaching a station made viewers flee their seats for fear of being crushed. In fact, reactions were less dramatic but perhaps more profound. One audience member wrote, "[T]he train rushes in so quickly that, in common with most of the people in the front rows of the stalls, I shift uneasily in my seat and think of railway accidents." The same year, a Lumière film of carriages coming toward the camera made Maxim Gorky squirm: The carriages "move straight at you," he wrote, "into the darkness in which you sit.""

• • You get the feeling that the Phelps Family History home page pay tribute to their ancestor Mary Phelps Jacob, inventor of the modern brassiere, only for the excuse to do the unlikely on an ancestry web page: include lots of pictures of voluptuous women lounging around in their bras and panties.

Adolf Hitler's summer holiday footage, mashed-up Wonder Years style.

Amongst the zoological garden of the Internet's many inscrutable fetish curiosities is the area of body inflation. The idea is simple: imagine a voluptuous naked woman. Rent eight oxygen tanks. Shove a hose into each orifice, then wrench the valves open so hard that the knob breaks off in your hand.

This is the body inflation fetishist's Venus de Milo: a globular temptress with planetoid sized breasts, a waist size the circumference of the sun, attached to tiny feet, hands and head. For the body inflation fetishist, Violet's fate in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is pornography.

Consider The Bizarre Adventures of Berrygirl comic, which takes the plight of Beaudegarde and extrapolates it into the odd sexual adventure of a rapidly inflating blue college girl who smacked on the wrong brand of gum during her college lecture. You probably won't thank me.

The Body Inflation Page ["Official" Site, whatever that means]

Paleo-Future — pretty much the definitive blog on retrofuturism — has just posted another fantastic fine: a real estate pamphlet from December, 1953 showing a couple of recently married cosmonauts floating in the ether, while a balding, weasely looking real-estate agent tries to hand-wave around the fact that the astroturf has space moles and the oxygen dome leaks in winter. I especially love the look of the wife: floating around in the horrible empty void of outerspace, surrounded by whizzing micro-meteorites, but she still managed to cram a perfectly gleaming coiffurage into her air-tight space helmet and don a set of pearls.

The Future of Real Estate [Paleo-Future]

The cavalcade of artists, actors, visionaries and celebrities who appeared on Groucho Marx's You Bet Your Life and vied for a couple hundred dollars delivered from the bill of a wooden mallard seems practically infinite sometimes. For example, this 1954 interview between Groucho and Ward Kimball, jazz trambonist and one of the definitive animators of 50's Walt Disney Studios. Ward's no Tor, but it's close!

Cthulhu Cthursday is dead, ToM is coughing up its last phlegmy lungfuls of life, but this H.P. Lovecraft Camio-Coffin necklace still deserves to be admired. Ideally through a monocle laying between the powdered cleavage of a corset-wearing tuberculosis nymph, her pallid breasts underwired with the pulsing tendrils of orich veins. A bit pricey for costume jewelry at $42, but it's an original.

HP Lovecraft Coffin Portrait Necklace [Etsy] (via Warren Ellis)

It's less a round-up of projects that Von Slatt has created than an analysis of Von Slatt's inspirations and philosophies. I tried to structure the piece around one excellent point Von Slatt made to me about the shared allure of both steampunk and DIY:

The Victorian era was really the last era in which a high school graduate was given the complete set of scientific concepts to fully understand the technology of the age," von Slatt says. "Because of this, part of what I wanted to do was to co-opt the term 'steampunk' and imbue it with this DIY component. DIY wasn't part of the definition of steampunk … but I wanted it to be."

Unfortunately, my editor left out my line about the sweat-chilling horror of laying paralyzed in a dark room on a moonless midnight as thousands of clockwork trilobites crawl all over your naked body. One day, Wired, in some subdued article about BIOS chip production, I'll manage to slip that line by you!

Meet Mr. Steampunk [Wired]

The tranquil life of Cold War West Germany, where insane teenagers in leotards prance about as anthropomorphic cats while lecherous drunkards lean against the pub wall and grope themselves. "17 year old Bianca Passarge of Hamburg dresses up as a cat, complete with furry tail and dances on wine bottles, June 1958. Her performance was based on a dream and she practiced for eight hours every day in order to perfect her dance." Via Vintage Photo.

• "In 1907, the fastest vehicle on the planet was powered by steam. Now, steam vehicles have a reputation (whether true or not) for being slow, inefficient and generally rubbish - but that may not be the way it has to be. The British Steam Car Challenge team are making a new steam powered car, with four boilers and a very high tech chassis indeed - their aim being to break the 200mph (321kph) barrier that has stymied other attempts in the past. A technological achievement that would help to establish that steam is a technology with ‘legs’ yet!|

• The next stage of evolution: tetrochromat females.

• Speaking of the man who created gynecological instruments for operating on mutant vaginas and brought it to the big screen, David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises has a trailer up.

• The Lambiek Comiclopedia, an illustrated compendium of over 9,000 comic artists, listed under last name (or pseudonym).

• No one in the world has had better album covers than that crazy ebony lioness, Miss Grace Jones.

• New London in the Future, from 1909.

It's probably fitting that the last ever ToM Cthulhu Cthursday post will be this. Cthulhu, cats and the whole Internet... with one slavishly meme-loyal Photoshop, your worth has been annulled. I loathe you, Giannia.

I'm a Mac guy: a smarmy black turtleneck wearing doofus hipster who responds to every stray technical complaint with a smug look and the advice to "Get a Mac."

But if I were to switch back to a PC, it wouldn't be for Vista, nor to save myself a few bucks on a more powerful machine. It would be to avail myself of this incredible Cthulhoid case mod, shaped and textured like a fat unabridged edition of the Necronomicon Ex Mortis. The full specs for gadget loving geeks:

* Fully textured outer case
* Necronomicon Glyph window, with 114 cuts...
* ...Lit by two 12" CCFL tubes
* Elder Sign & Cthulhu Runes etched window, lit by…
* …8 superbright green & 8 superbright yellow LEDs attached to…
* …Hard Drive activity flasher circuit.
* Power button in monster mouth
* Reset button in right eye
* Light switch in left eye
* Sculpted tentacles set on left side around window.
* Textured fan cowling inside
* Front bezel eyes lit with 2 superbright LEDs
* Front lower part lit with two 4" CCFL tubes
* Fully textured CD & floppy bezels
* Decorated semi-clear pull-down front cover
* Two extra Stealth Fans
* Glow-in-the-dark rounded IDE cables
* Split sleeve & mesh wire covers
* NEW! Lighted Keyboard Mod

If only there were a way to take this baby and slap the insides of a MacPro into it, I'd be in heaven. But I guess, as a monster, it's a Windows beast at heart.

The Case That Must Not Be Named [Stonehill.org]

I have never wanted a vagina less than when I saw David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers. In a haze of drug abuse, the delusional gynecologist Beverly Mantle (played by Jeremy Irons) becomes obsessed with operating on mutant women with abnormal genitalia. The chrome instruments he comes up to deal with this entirely theoretical problem are curved and hooked and cork-screw shaped. They are horrible things, designed for ripping and tearing as they plunge.

Ladies, don't think I don't understand the horror of Mantle's contraptions. Granted, I don't have a vagina, but I have a rectum, so I have some basis of comparison. I can extrapolate that the experience of having a vagina is very much like the experience of having a rectum, but lined on the inside with the mucousy nerve endings of my penis. As such, the concept of shoving anything up there, let alone something shaped like an extraterrestrial surgical device, gives me the cold sweats.

Anyway, the movie above is one of the extras on the Criterion Collection DVD of Dead Ringers: an entire special feature devoted to diagrams and photographs of the gynecological devices of mutant women. Ladies, you may want to pass on this one.

The Guardian Online has posted a gorgeous article on Shoko Tendo, best-selling author of Yakuza Moon: Memoirs of a Gangster's Daughter, which chronicles her life of delinquency, drug addiction, crime, rape and ultimate redemption:

It is only when Shoko Tendo removes her tracksuit top that you appreciate why, even on a hot day, she prefers to remain covered up in public. Outwardly she is much like any thirty-something you would be likely to encounter on a Tokyo street. Her hair is of the dark-brown hue favoured by many Japanese women her age, her greeting is accompanied by a well-executed bow, and her voice seems to be pitched a little on the high side, a common affectation in the company of strangers.

But her protective layer comes off to reveal stick-thin arms covered, from the wrists up, with a tattoo that winds its way to her chest and across her back, culminating, on her left shoulder, in the face of a Muromachi-era courtesan with breast exposed and a knife clenched between her teeth.

Blood ties: Yakuza daughter lifts lid on hidden hell of gangsters' families [Guardian]

Artist Hope Larson bought herself a beautiful cherry red sketch book and, puncturing each page and threading a ribbon through it, handed it out amongst the deviant artists at the latest MoCCA. The idea was to make it into a kiss book, in which an artist is invited to draw one character kissing another, drawn by a different artist on the facing page. The ribbon threaded between them becomes the frenching tongues.

Of course, as soon as her kiss book passed out of her control, the slippery slope, one thing led to another, someone started their drawing with an anus and Hope's kiss book was awesomely ruined.

MoCCA Kiss Book [Hope Larson] (via Warren Ellis, who has great musical taste)

Speaking of Lolita, Christopher Plummer as Nabokov himself, lecturing a college classroom on Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis: "There must be in you some cell, some gene, some germ that will vibrate in answer to sensations which you can neither define nor dismiss. Beauty plus pity is the closest we can get to a definition of art. Where there is beauty there is pity, for the simply reason that beauty must always die."

Via Grow-A-Brain.

WikiHow has posted the intriguingly titled article "How To Be A Gothic Lolita." The perverted heart begins pounding with masturbation-like regularity: surely, such an article will deal with teachning 14 year old girls to listen to Type O Negative and seduce synaesthetic Russian professors. But what the f...

Throw away any pre/misconceptions you may have! Gothic Lolita is not necessarily related to what you think of as "Goth". It is not a reference to Vladimir Nabokov's famous novel Lolita and followers of the style do not consider it to be a sexual style. Instead, adherents present themselves as young victorian girls and consider it necessary to look "cute," "beautiful," or "elegant" rather than "sexy."

So step one in being a Gothic Lolita is to be neither Gothic OR a Lolita? What is wrong with Japan? Good god. Eliza — sleeping soundly in her tiny coffin, stuffed with teddy bears and prophylactics — probably coughing up thick, mucousy lungfuls of blood right about now. She can feel cosmic aesthetic wrong.

How To Be A Gothic Lolita [WikiHow]

New York artist Debra Hampton creates gorgeous art out of supermodel cutouts, watercolors and inks, resulting in women who look less human than exotic extraterrestrial women, tattooed in three-dimensional holograms. And hey, has any sci-fi author ever thought up holographic tattoos before? If not, I've got dibs.

Debra Hampton [Artist's Site] (via Neatorama)

Neil Gaiman gives an excellent little monologue about H.P. Lovecraft and the Cthulhu mythos. He rightly mentions a fact a lot of Lovecraft fans gloss over: that H.P. was a downright amateurish writer a lot of the times. What most people are fans of is not Lovecraft, but Lovecraft's ideas, his vision of humanity being weak and helpless and surrounded by malevolent cosmic evil. Yes, there are gods. We are not alone in the universe. But our gods hate us. And, as Gaiman puts it, we're totally screwed.

PS: Is it just me, or does Neil Gaiman speak exactly like Gaius Baltar?

Is there anything more loathsome, more indicative of the rife idiot stupidity of the Internet than the LOLCats meme? The endless repetition of the exact same joke (photograph of surprised cat + implausible misspelling) done over and over and over again. Have you ever opened Photoshop, inserted a picture of your cat and then superimposed a sentence beginning with "O HAI" in a bold white Impact font? Congratulations. You are a lowest common denominator idiot and, quite frankly, you're lucky Stalin ruined that whole gulag idea for everyone.

On the other hand, LOL Cthulhu? Now there's a meme we can all get behind. How long, though, before someone soils even this fine thing by 'cleverly' mating this hilarious, tentacled genre with its retarded feline cousin, unleashing the bastard spawn LOLCathulhus upon the world? God damn you, whoever you are.

LOLThulhu [Isometric Forums]