This Columbian white gold, silver or platinum  ring encrusted with Andean Emeralds is the official ring of the 2010 FIFA World Cup. It’s a bargain, costing between $2500 and $250 000 a piecem featuring miniature bejeweled stadiums and soccer balls.  The platinum rings are selling for a quarter million, featuring 220 emeralds. Theres only seven of these being made. Theres thirty three white gold versions for $70 000 having only thirty six emeralds and a few South African Diamonds tossed in for good measure. The World Cup MVP gets a ring for free but only one of the mid-ranged white gold ones.  Sucks to be him.

[Reuters]

Darwinia has made it’s presence known on the Xbox Live Arcade in the form of Darwinia+. This game has won multiple awards and received lots of attention in the past in it’s PC incarnations. Introversion Software has now brought it to the console where it is surprisingly easier and more natural to navigate. They even threw in the multiplayer incarnation ‘Multiwinia’ to boot.

The game exists in it’s own little digital tron-esque universe. It’s an ecosystem populated with industry, civilization, wild life, and various stimuli. It’s a virtual ecosystem where evolution and artificial intelligence is studied. There even religion as a component. continue…

Check out Caleb Larsen’s work. He’s got this one project; an unassuming black acrylic cube (I love it already) which perpetually attempts to auction itself off on ebay. As Caleb writes:

Combining Robert Morris’ Box With the Sound of Its Own Making with Baudrillard’s writing on the art auction this sculpture exists in eternal transactional flux. It is a physical sculpture that is perptually attempting to auction itself on eBay.

Every ten minutes the black box pings a server on the internet via the ethernet connection to check if it is for sale on the eBay. If its auction has ended or it has sold, it automatically creates a new auction of itself.

If a person buys it on eBay, the current owner is required to send it to the new owner. The new owner must then plug it into ethernet, and the cycle repeats itself.

It’s an interesting piece. One wonders if any robots are bidding on it.

[Caleb Larsen]
[A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter]

Do you like to eat? Do you like to spend? Do you like to combine these hobbies? Well feast (pun intended) your eyes and potentially your wallet on the world’s “most expensive” leg of ham! Selfridges’ Oxford Street flagship shop is hocking it (again, pun intended) for a modest £1,800 for the full seven kilograms. What makes this ham so expensive? Well Pig farmer and “ham expert” Manuel Maldonado hand picked an elite group of fifty pigs to rear in Extremadura feeding them a steady diet of acorns and roots to give them a distinctive flavor. But wait. Theres more. After slaughter, the ham was salted and cured for three full years before being boxed in a hand-made wooden case wrapped in an apron made by a Spanish tailor. It even comes with it’s own DNA certificate. Seriously. The only question left is what to serve it with.

[BBC]

ABC News (of all places) has some content you should really check out for the sake of the beloved hipster in your life. Skinny jeans are apparently (and medically) bad for you. Ugly boots can be damaging to your feet. Even that over-sized purse can be harmful. Clearly its time to either suffer for your (lack of) fashion, or really re-think your life choices here. In short: Check yourself before you wreck yourself because being a hipster is bad for your healf.

[ABC News]