Life Seems Bleak

Forbes reported on Sunday that in the very near future there may be unmarked white government vans that drive around cities taking pictures with technology that sees through walls and cars and peoples’ clothes.

Despite this technology being completely illegal, it’s “now the largest selling cargo and vehicle inspection system ever,” said Joe Reiss, a vice president of marketing at American Science & Engineering, the company that manufactures the Robocop-esque devices.

I guess they have primarily been used for surveillance purposes in American operations in the Middle Eastern Wars. But lately law enforcement agencies are apparently starting to buy and deploy them. Here’s a creepy sci-fi advertisement for the things in which the vans drive around somewhere indiscriminately violating the shit out of everyone’s privacy:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGCd0KPJcMs&fs=1&hl=en_US%5D

Do you ever get friend requested on Facebook, accept the request, go to your new ‘friend’s’ profile pictures, look at a few, then go over to your own profile and look at your Wall, and then pictures of yourself, the whole time imagining how your new friend will see them and fantasizing about specific ideas—that you’ve formulated over time—they’ll form about you?

Here are two questions I got asked on Formspring the other day, both seem especially bleak:

In a bleak continuation of the ongoing face transplant craze that’s taken the world by storm, Connie Culp is the first woman to receive a new face via cadaver in the United States.

After getting shot in the face by her husband and subsequently undergoing thirty surgeries, she can smell, talk and smile with a new face now. Here is her face before the shooting and the surgery:

This is her new face:

The Emmys are happening as I write this. Has anyone ever ‘hated on’ the Emmys by calling them “embarrassing and bleak”?