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Sokushinbutsu, or How To Mummify Yourself in 4 Easy Steps

Filed Under Body Modification, Education | 2007-07-05, 17:22

1. Change your diet
For 1000 days (almost 3 years), only eat nuts and seeds that are naturally found. This, in combination with hard physical training will reduce your body fat to nearly nil, eliminating an easily decomposable part of your body.

2. Switch to Bark
Ok, now that you are sick of eating nuts and seeds for almost 3 years, it’s time to switch it up. For the next 1000 days, eat only the bark and roots from pine trees. This will reduce the amount of fluid you have in your body, leaving you even more dessicated.

3. Start drinking poisonous tea
Towards the end of your 1000 day stint eating delicious bark and roots, start drinking tea made from the sap of the urushi tree. Usually this sap is used to make laquer, but it will help you vomit, sweat, and urinate more often. This will help get rid of that terrible moisture in your body. Oh, and it will help to kill any maggots or other insects that might try to eat your mummified body later.

4. Lock yourself in a tomb
Finally, you’ll want to enclose yourself in a tiny tomb, just big enough to sit lotus style in. You’ll hang out in here for the next 1000 days, but chances are you’ll die long before you hit the 1000 day mark. How will you breath? A small tube will be run into the tomb. How will everyone know when you’re dead? A bell will be placed inside. Ring this bell every day until you die, then stop ringing it. When we don’t hear the bell anymore, we’ll pull out the air tube and seal up the tomb.

When the last 1000 days are up, we’ll crack open the tomb to see if you were successful. If we find a mummy, hurray! You’ll be considered a Buddha and will join an elite group of only a couple dozen monks who have succeeded over the years! If you’re all rotted, we’ll commend you for your effort, and tell you better luck next time. Want some tips? Try drinking the water from the sacred spring on Yudono mountain in Yamagata. I hear it helps because it has arsenic in it to help kill off any bacteria or micro-organisms. Oh, and watch out for the government, this whole practice was outlawed by the government back in the late 19th century.

Buddhist Mummies of Japan(image #1 source and a listing of visits to the different mummies along with a few pictures)
Buddhist Mummies of Japan (image #2 source)
Article in JSTOR that I wish I had access to Thanks to Bethany for hooking me up with a copy!
The Very Special Dead – more pictures

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Eyeball Tattoo Updates

Filed Under Body Modification | 2007-07-05, 15:33

Shannon has another update on the status of the eyeball tattoos I posted about earlier. The other two guys weren’t experiencing any pain, but he had a bit and went to see an ophthalmologist. They ran a bunch of tests, and he was told that everything is looking alright, and the pain was most likely due to irritation of the muscles. He has pictures of his eye and Josh’s eye, which are looking alright, although a bit irritated.

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Ten Piercings Gone Bad

Filed Under Body Modification, Video | 2007-07-04, 12:20

Like many of my body modification posts, this may not be for those that are squeamish and following any links in this post may lead you to NSFW material. This content is not for everyone. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Sometimes piercings just go bad. They don’t heal, they reject, they get infected, they get pulled out, and more. Sometimes this is due to poor piercing, other times due to poor aftercare of the piercings, and sometimes your body just doesn’t want something in it. Here are the top ten “Piercings Gone Bad” that we found on one of our favorite body mod blogs, ModBlog. We’re not posting the pictures here because they’re pretty graphic, so follow the links if you think your stomach is strong enough to see them in their full color glory.

Why You Should Never Get Pierced with a Gun
What’s wrong with getting your ear pierced with a gun? People do it all the time right? Guns are terrible piercing tools and nobody in their right mind should ever use one. This girl had her friend pierce her cartilage with a gun and soon developed a terrible infection that doctors say likely came from someone else’s tissue on the gun. Her ear ended up liquefying and necrotic tissue had to be scraped out. When it was finally healed, cosmetic surgery was required to return it to a “normal” state.
Photos: Gun Piercing

Invisible Industrial
An industrial causes some distinctive keloids after it was ripped out. If only there was a LOLBodyMods…
Photos: I can guess what that used to be…

Fear of Rejection
If your piercing looks like this, take it out. Your body is rejecting it and you need to respect that. An eyebrow piercing and a navel piercing that are held in only by the tiniest amount of skin.
Photos: What is that held in by? Hair?

Accidental Implant
Please make sure the jewelry you put in is big enough for the piercing, unless you want to end up with a really bad “transdermal”. This eyebrow piercing was too short and one of beads was pulled into the skin.
Photos: Measure Twice, Pierce Once

Ripped Septum Piercing
Septum piercings do get ripped out. I’m sure it hurts. The general consensus is that this septum piercing was probably too low anyways, but needless to say this poor guy is missing a chunk of his nose now. And he could stand to blow it once in a awhile.
Photos: Ouch… the uninostril dude…

Chain link piercing
This 15 year old kid wins the Stupid Award. In what must have been an attempt to look cooler in his emo/scenester MySpace photos, he thought he could use chain links to pierce his lip and septum. Technically it wasn’t much of a piercing but more of a crushing of skin when he used pliers to crimp the chain links into his lips and nose. Needless to say, it didn’t heal very well and he had to get them removed by a professional.
Photos: Chain Link Piercings Gone Bad (Well, Duh!)

Massive Keloid
You thought the industrial keloid was big? Take a look at this sucker. Before and after pictures of an enormous keloid on some poor girl’s ear. She definitely should have gotten this looked at much earlier. Want to see even worse keloids from a scarification gone bad? Check these bad keloids
Photos: Giant Keloid Removal

Madonna Volcano
Want to see a gross and disgusting Madonna piercing? This one was a result of an employer that had a “no piercings” rule at work so the person had to remove the piercing every time they went in, which of course can lead to irritation, infection, and all sorts of fun. Ick.
Photos: Ouch.

Ear Stretching Gone Bad
If you’re eating, don’t click on this one. This is an example of what can happen if you try to stretch your eyes too quickly. This girl didn’t stop when her lobes started thinning out and eventually it tore away from her head and was left dangling. The good news was that a cosmetic surgeon was able to sew the lobe back to her head for $2000.
Photos: Ear Stretching Disaster

Ear Explosion
Even I can’t look at this one for more than a second or two at a time. Another example of what happens if you try to force your ears to gauge up too quickly. Look at all the crusty. Wow.
Photos: DIY Ear Explosion

The moral of the story? Go to a professional piercing who knows what they’re doing. Feel comfortable grilling them on their procedures. Any good piercing will be happy to brag about how well they run their shop. If your piercing is starting to look abnormal, have someone take a look at it. Nobody thinks an swollen, infected, oozing piercing looks good.

Oh, and if this is your piercer, find a new one asap.

video via modblog

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More Color Legends

Filed Under Education | 2007-07-03, 12:27

We posted about other color legends previously, but here are some more:
Why is Envy a Green Monster?
Why is Ferrari Red Iconic of Sports Cars?
Why Are Mental Institutions Light Green?
Why Are Highlighters Bright Yellow?
Why Does a Guy Get Blue Balls?
Why is Purple A Royal Color?
Why is The Red Cross, Red?
Why Does the Tour de France Leader Wear a Yellow Jersey?
Why Do US Immigrants Apply for a Green Card?
Why Does a Bride Need Something Blue on her Wedding Day?
Why Do Masters Golf Tournament Winners Get a Green Jacket?
Why Do We Wear a Yellow Ribbon to Support the Troops?
Why Are Some Americans True Blue?

Check out all the answers at COLOURlovers

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Explosives Camp

Filed Under Education, Fire | 2007-07-03, 10:39

via MAKE

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Mind Erasing Drug

Filed Under Body Modification | 2007-07-02, 19:53

Perhaps Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind isn’t too far off. Researchers have discovered that it may be possible to selectively erase specific memories using specific drugs administered at the correct times. Two recent studies give some evidence to this effect.

One experiment was conducted with rats at New York University. Two musical tones were associated with a mild electrical shock. The rats would then hear the tone and would brace for a shock. The researchers then gave half the rats a drug, called U0126 and known to cause limited amnesia, when playing one of the musical tones. Afterwards the rats would only brace for the shock with one of the tones, instead of both.

Another study at McGill University, in Montreal, and Harvard University was performed with actual human subjects:

The researchers used propranolol, a drug normally used to treat hypertension in heart disease patients but also known to cause memory problems. They treated 19 accident or rape victims for 10 days with the drug or with dummy pills, while they asked to describe their memories of a traumatic event that happened 10 years earlier.

A week later, they found that the patients given the drug suffered fewer signs of stress such as raised heart rate when recalling their trauma.

Full article

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Eyeball Tattoo

Filed Under Body Modification | 2007-07-02, 19:26

Like many of my body modification posts, this may not be for those that are squeamish and following any links in this post may lead you to NSFW material

What’s the last place on your body you would expect to get tattooed? Most people would answer the eyes. Not tattooed eyelids, but tattooing your eyeballs. Well not only is eyeball tattooing possible, it’s also been done more often than you would think. BMEZine’s wiki page states that it was commonplace before contact lenses as it could be used to cover up defects in damaged eyes. Usually this is performed on sightless eyes as there is a chance for infection and loss of sight. However recently an attempt was made on tattooing the sclera (the white part of your eye) of three guys with perfectly healthy eyes.

Howie (LunaCobra.net) performed the procedures on the three brave “mice”: Pauly Unstoppable, Josh, and Shannon Larratt. The goal was to color the sclera a nice blue color. Kind of like the Fremen’s eyes in Dune if you ask me. One attempt was done with a hand-poked technique, while the other two utilized a syringe to inject the ink. All in all there was some difficulty getting the ink at the right level and getting it to stay, but it definitely looks like a start towards modification of yet another body part. So far one update has been posted and it looks like the ink is spreading around, distributing more color. I can’t wait to see how these guys heal and how the final result looks.

Oh, and as if it didn’t need to be said, but don’t try this at home. This experiment was well researched, the risks understood, and willingly accepted.

Original blog post with pictures
Update after 24 hours
image via zentastic

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Animusic’s Pipe Dream

Filed Under Art, Video | 2007-07-02, 17:15

Ok, I might be dating myself some here, but this was a nice blast from the past:

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