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Beware of Fake Monkey Automatons
rkinch writes "The Mechanical Music Digest gives this warning about bogus monkey automatons that seem to be flooding the antiques market. These supposedly 19th-century hookah-smoking shrunken monkey heads are actually clever modern reproductions tricked up to look old. That "Marvo the Magic Monkey" specimen hanging on your wall may not really date back to 1879."
If you have something like that hanging on your wall, well....
You're sicker than we all thought.
If you want such a grotesque thing in your house, this may be nature's way of punishing you for it.
I have this image of Taco in a room with all these mechanical talking monkey heads. :)
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On the other hand, it's probably my fault.
I shouldn't have believed it when the guy told me that it wasn't uncommon for antique monkey automatons to take AAA batteries.
But, damn!
what the FUCK? This is probably the strangest thing i've seen on /. (this isn't memepool taco!!)
this is a joke right? this is stuff that matters???
Why is this on slashdot? Is it April 1? Is the monkey in that machine running slashdot now?
How does one become a slashdot editor? Serious question. Is it an employee of OSDN or VA? Is it a volunteer job? Is it freelanced out? Is it someone who contributed over 1000KLOC to slash?
Is this some prank to /. this guy's page?
It's a sad day in America when a man can't trust that his mumified monkey corpse impaled on a mechanical rig in the reproduction of an Arab smoking a controlled substance isn't the genuine article.
I am confused firtly, about how this is /. material, but I guess the real question is does anyone have video of the monkey smoking, cause that would really be a cool conversation piece, I mean what chick doesn't get turned on when she sees a monkey smoking?
...I've said that many times
Because only genuine shrunken monkey heads come with an Evil Curse (tm).
jeez, and all this time i've been fearing REAL monkey automatons...
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
I guess this is an on topic story if only for all the comments of "What are those monkeys smoking?" directed at /. crew.
News for garage salers. Stuff that doesn't FUCKING MATTER at all to a small subculture of freaky linux types
Do the monkeys run on Linux?
WTF?
Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
... next time I'm shopping for bizarre shrunken monkey head antiques!
Actually, fakes are very common in the antique world.
I think it's time to launch a new /. category -
Monkey Automatons!
Seriously, how is this "news for nerds" or "stuff that matters"??
Til the first virus/worm hits the fake automaton monkeys, THEN you'll be sorry!!!
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
1) Mechanical Music Digest: Ah, a publication about music. Does the monkey make music? Can we legally make copies of the monkey's songs? Is the monkey using DRM-enforcing mechanics? Additionally, this publication is about mechanics, and mechanics are cool (especially quantum mechanics, which the monkey probably uses.) ... fill in your own reason why Fake Monkey Automatons 0wn j00 here.
2) warning: bug in the Monkey can share your files with everyone on the net
3) automaton: Monkey Automaton vs. Grendel, dude. Bulldozer-like ramps beat pneumatic spikes 9 times out of 10.
4) Magic: Gandalf has magic. YOU SHALL NOT PASS!
5) hanging on your wall: like my 80-inch plasma TV, baby
6) 1879: 0x757 in hex, which is a palindrome. Both hex and palindromes rock.
7)
...I told you never trust a monkey!
The end.
This has to be the most bizarre /. story since JonKatz's Message from Kabul.
Where's the foot icon? This has to be one of those irrelevant funny-ha-ha posts...
You need a FREE iPod Nano
"Do not meddle in the affairs of Fake Monkey Automatons, for they are subtle and quick to anger."
Oh wait, that's wizards. Nevermind.
Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
All right, but in all seriousness this is a serious problem in our country. Stringent lobbying agaisnt tobacco companies has forced them to explore new markets.
The result is that an increasing number of monkeys have started smoking. It's very sad, even monkeys in captivity are being targetted. As if this wasn't enough, Phillip-Morris has started it's own line of theatres for monkeys...just to get them to start smoking.
Now I know you guys are giving the mods flack for putting this article on front page...but there is a growing smoking monkey problem in this country. So can we please have some constructive advice on how to save the monkeys before it's too late?
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
Table-ized A.I.
Just imagine a beowolf cluster of 19th-century hookah-smoking shrunken monkey heads!
;-)
I'm at the karma cap--time to troll.
I know it's ultraportable, but I definitely think that in this situation Monkey Linux would be a wiser choice.
I think the basic problem here is that the editors each have some kind of quota. But nobody's standing back and saying, "Is this editor really making an effort to select interesting, relevent stores, or is he just going through the motions?
I want a sign for the front fence: "Beware of Fake Monkey Automatons". The house up the street only has pit bulls.
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
Suggestion to timothy and any other editor: if it's nearly impossible for a thread to contain interesting, insightful, or informative posts, perhaps you should rethink publishing it to the front page. Beyond a few wisecracks and a lot of (deserved, IMO) bitching, what else is there really to say about these... these... monkeys?
Here are your mod choices for 99% of this stuffed monkey thread: funny, overrated, underrated, off-topic, troll.
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Are you trying to tell me that my funky monkey is from a flunkey punky junky?
Oh man! I want my blankey.
Table-ized A.I.
yeah man, nothing worse than virus-infected fake automata monkeys. It takes a shit on your hardwood floor and then says:
This is a excite game
This game is my first work.
You're the first player.
I wish you would like it.
The level of professionalism around here has seriously dropped.
A moment after entering the previous post, I realized I should have titled it "Editor Automatons". Oh well!
..The brookyln bridge is not for sale, the beans aren't magical, if anyone had a method to beccome rich over night they wouldn't have to sell it for $50.. And last, but not least, there are absolutely no hot naked sluts waiting for your email.
...in the White House, why bother with a fake one on the wall?
Well, he is shruken, and he is a monkey boy, but I think in is likely more of a cyborg rather than an automaton.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
...I thought it was about Steve Ballmer.
RMN
~~~
Half the articles here I've read before they're here....so much for a 'good' news...
You're bitching because you were already aware of the mechanical monkey hoax? Well, not all of us read the same boards, bucko -- for some of us, this is still extremely important news. You know, "Stuff that matters?"
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
...is not that someone is trying to scam buyers with unauthentic products. Fake Rolexes, junk laptops and a ton of other crap on eBay slips through the cracks. -1: Redundant. No, what I find truly disturbing is the fact that there are actually people interested in buying a product that contains a dead monkey's shrunken head. Eww.
I think I'm gonna lose my lunch.
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
Well if you want to pay me $20 to punch your monkey I will, but I assure you it will cause you a great deal of pain...
And a plural of "troll" is "slashdot", but "trolls" is still acceptable.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Slashdot was created way back in 1996/1997. By the time traffic grew to the point where serious money was required to run it, Hemos (Jett Bates) took over as the guy who sold ads to advertisers. Ad money was fairly easy to get back then, so this worked out well. Their little company, Blockstackers, created the AdFu, Slashcode, and many other projects.
/. flame treatment. Which was ironic, as the Andover.net buyout thing was put up a week or so later. As Jack said, "don't mess with us -- or we'll buy you out ;)"
Andover, a very respectably REAL LIFE publication with years of experience, noticed Slashdot and thought it'd add well to their Andover.net online version. So they entered into negotiations with Rob and Jeff. Around this time, Jack Byrar (one of the colunmsts of Andover, now working on Newsforge where I used to work) wrote some articles about Linux use that got the
One of the contract requirements was that the core (Jeff, Rob, Jon Pater) have complete veto control over everything. If Andover wanted Slashdot to change its layout, they had could say no and not be fired (or face any other negative reactions).
But then VA Research (recently renamed VA Linux Systems) decided to buy out Andover.net and create OSDN. VA had owned the odd site (I know they had Segfault as an employee thing, but I'm not sure if they bought Freshmeat or Andover did, it's been a while), but they needed something to wrap around their Sourceforge idea (recently stolen from Bowie J. Poag, as Bowie tells it).
Anyways, the integration of many, many diverse sites, each running their own homebrew perl or PHP code didn't end up working out as well as originally hoped. OSDN became a bigger and bigger bit of branding, but the sites themselves didn't support anything like single sign on (although cross-site searching works, AFAIK). Plus, when you think that VA's only big income sources were incredibly low margin hardware and Andover's online advertising, you see why they made some of the decisions they did in 2000 and 2001.
First, they bought Linux.com, created Newsforge.com, and tried to make their dead-tree break with Open magazine. It worked out well enough that Open magazine broke even in the first year, but they needed to restructure seriously in 2001. They divested themselves of Open, and they divested themselves of some sites (like Kuro5hin, which I'm also associated with).
Slashdot (and the rest of OSDN) started to get more invasive advertising around this time too, as a way of getting more revenue from advertisers.
VA Linux Systems are basically a value-added Linux software for business systems company, with OSDN tacked on. How it will work out, I don't know. If they hadn't restructured in 2001, they would've been out of money by now. We'll see what their next SEC filling says.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
I bet the antique market hikes up the prices of these wonders. I'd like a hookah smoking monkey automaton, but dont want to have to pay through the nose for an "antique". Anyone know where I could buy a mokey smoking hookah?
Oh shit! I forgot to click "Post Anonymously"...
The biggest nit to pick about that is that Slashdot was one of the last Andover purchaces in their buying frenzy of sites, mostly software listing sites and review sites. They had a healthy stable of Windows freeware sites, reviewing sites, and clipart and font sites, most of which (imo), were crap. Winfiles.com and later on, nonags.com were far better than their freeware sites, and their clipart site was useless.
But then, I didn't include stuff like that because that's not what my post was about - it was about how Chips and Dips turned into a site with a post about Fake Monkeys, and the people involved, not the (rather boring, imo) story of the corporate trading and shuffling. Taco's opinion on things is pretty much in alignment with mine - if foo Inc. goes under, where foo is the company owning/hosting Slashdot, things just move on. As long as foo Inc. can't place stories, who cares who the owner of the week of Slashdot is? Taco, Hemos and all might lose or gain on their paychecks, but it won't really affect the reader experience (unless bandwidth can't be paid for, but that's a pan-internet problems for all sites).
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
/. doesn't have to be all about file sharing and Linux distros. In my book the fine folks who collect these items are bona fide Geeks. It's educational to peek at the drama of their very different world.
San Francisco has a museum, the Musee Mechanique, with some automata like this, real ones, along with a nice collection of mechanical coin-op musical devices. They're being pushed out by a renovation of the Cliff House, and there's a petition to save them. Please sign. Thank you.
You've been reading Dave Barry's articles, haven't you...? ;-)
RMN
~~~
I prefer a full picture when finding out about something, not half of one. Especially online, where someone may be happening by, and might want more information about everything, I think the post helped a lot.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
read the history of automatons and youll be impressed. Plus, its a monkey smoking a hookah, how can you not want to see that?
Moderation Totals: Flamebait=2, Troll=1, Redundant=1, Insightful=6, Overrated=1, Underrated=1, Total=12. (not mine)
When you see the monkey, smack it! (TM)
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Moderation: +4. Modded 70% Funny and 30% Overrated. 100% Saturated.
Hey, as long as they can type...
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