Arctic Light

... you too could live in a house furnished entirely in white fur and driftwood!

rachelmanija and I found this site of showcase homes and now we can't stop mocking it.

For example, appreciate this house which looks like relatively normal minimalist design at first glance but reveals new depths of bonkers the more you scroll down. The giant skulls! The ladder to nowhere! The bag covered with eyes! The incomprehensible taps in the bathroom! (Evenings are punctuated by screams as guests and residents try to figure out how to take a bath without scalding themselves.)

And let's not overlook the little girl's room in which the only decoration is a four-foot-high portrait of a parakeet that looks like it's planning to eat you as soon as the lights go out.

Elsewhere in Bonkers Designville, what do you want in a house with three kids? Three white sofas!

I also appreciate the hallway bench that looks like it came straight out of an airport waiting area. "My client loved it the moment she saw it and understood what I was trying to evoke," says the associated quote from the designer. Yes, and what you're evoking is "I just missed my connecting flight to Belgium."

Also, storing your plants in the fireplace is apparently a thing. (The fireplace is also a useful space in which to store your driftwood!)

And the children's rooms continue to be nightmare fuel, as evidenced by this house in which some poor little girl gets to do homework while staring directly into the eyes of Judgmental Barbie from a foot and a half away. Also, what could be better as a design element in a small child's bedroom than a tippy and breakable vase full of sticks? (At least this child has actual toys, unlike the one with the hungry parakeet.)

I've seen some really WTF book covers (1970s sci-fi is especially prone to it), and quite a few that seemed to have only the most passing relationship to the book's contents, but I am pretty sure this VERY NOT WORK-SAFE cover of The Princess Bride is the most bizarre, hilarious mismatch of book contents to book cover that I have ever seen.

If I need brain-bleach, so do you!

Not worksafe! Quite porny, in fact! Did I mention this is an actual cover? Of the actual book? Someone was clearly dropping a lot of acid at Ballantine Books in the 1970s. Either that, or my edition of The Princess Bride somehow left out the tentacle rape, skulls, snakes and inappropriate religious imagery. Also I never really imagined Buttercup looking that much like Cher.

So in addition to splitting its streaming and DVD packages, Netflix is renaming the DVD service "Qwikster".

I can't even say that name with a straight face. And what makes this seem like even more of a stupid marketing decision ... who are the people who are going to be having to deal with the name change? Probably people who don't do a lot on the Internet, so ... people like my parents and my grandmother. I don't want to put my grandmother down here, because she actually deals with change pretty well for someone who's 80, but THINK, NETFLIX, THINK.

Also, the two websites (Netflix and Qwikster) will be separate, so if you want to know what your viewing options are for a given movie, you have to search in both places. Nrgh.

I can see why Netflix wants to boost its streaming side, but as a customer I'm mostly just frustrated. I would love to do streaming-only (I really prefer that to the DVDs), but of the movies and TV shows in our queue, probably less than a third of them are available streaming. It just makes more sense to take the DVD option; why sign up for streaming if I'm not going to be able to watch most of what I want to watch?

ETA: Although bironic offered this link which kinda ... makes sense out of it. Sort of. It's fascinating reading, anyway.

ETA2: Another useful link (with a different but also quite sensible explanation) supplied by torachan.

Phone company cuts off FBI when it fails to pay its phone bills.

This is so sad. And hilarious. My tax dollars at work, eh?