More Stuff That Makes Me Wonder

Every now and then when I’m tied up on a conference call or some silly crap, I’ll cull internet news to keep myself from stabbing my eye with a pen to stay awake.  I recently found this concept of “virtual cemeteries” on one such expedition.  Just in case you have some extra time, interest, morbid curiosity, or all the above, the links are: I-tomb and I-memorial.  They have slick splash pages and are apparently connected.

Off the top here, I have to ask if I’m the only person here mildly disturbed by this idea.  This is jacked up on so many levels I’m losing count. I haven’t figured out how the monthly fee continues being paid after you kick it, and I probably don’t want to know.  I assume, similar to our national debt, this is a turd you can lay on your kids’ lawn in your will.  “Thanks, dad, for liquidating your house to keep paying for a site I can visit to remind me that you are in fact dead and apparently still being a dickhead.”  My kids would love me for that. I could get one last good eye-roll and overly-dramatic “what-ever.”

You can also apparently leave Very Important Documents and other Important Messages for safekeeping until after you die, to be released to specified people after your very long dirt-nap begins.  Seriously?  So that would be almost like a will, except with no legal standing in court?  Oh, and just as secure as our credit card and account information has been in the hands of banks, right?  Yeah. I have to admit that I’m comforted by the notion of people being able to pass along terabytes of pirated games and porn to their kids and other relatives.  That’s what Al Gore invented the internet for, right?  Then again, if I amp up my blog production to two per day but only publish one for the next forty years or so, then I figure I’ve got forty posthumous years of BrainRanting after I die.  Hmm…

As if this isn’t enough, these sites can apparently send notes to loved ones (their term) as a reminder of the dearly rotting. On one hand, that’s just f-ing creepy. Nothing quite like getting emails from the dead to keep me wallowing in the grief and loss. On the other hand, I guess I could set up automated taunts and insults to some of the Internet Trolls I hate most.  That, my friends, would be awesome. “Hey, AB, I’m dead now, but you’re still wrong and still a retarded Troll, you irritating f***.”

I thought the drive through funeral home idea was bad for encouraging laziness (“Can I get fries with that?”), but this does truly tops it.  Now we can not only spend our grandkids into financial slavery we can also encourage them to be lazy blobs after we’re all dead too.  Somehow this imaginary phone IM texting conversation popped into my head:

• BROTHER: “OMG like dad died n ima sad” 😦
• SISTER: “Srsly?” 😦
• BROTHER: “Yea n theres a website n stuff” 🙂
• SISTER: “Cool LOL so we can just visit that cuz IDK what i’d b wearin to a funeral LOL an u can’t wear Hollister LOL“
• BROTHER: “LOL werd so do we unfriend him on fb now?”
• SISTER: “idk“

Give us a reply and shout out what you think about this stuff.  I’m spent.