New life goal: be the sort of person who could plausibly have “death mushroom trainer” on my resume, and doesn’t live in the world of Pokémon. Forgive us for never bringing Jae Rhim Lee to your attention before. Her Infinity Mushroom project and its accompanying TED Talk have been around for a while, but this is the first we’ve seen them. Lee is pictured above, wearing her Mushroom Death Suit.

And now you have to read the rest of the aritcle, don’t you?

If you grew up a geek, it’s likely you were familiar with at least one person, if not many, whose ideal family was less Leave it to Beaver and much more The Addams Family. Perhaps you were one of those kids yourself. Perhaps you never quite outgrew those tendencies (and why should you)? Kaitlin from Ask A Mortician has a very special message just for you, those kids, and all the aspiring forensic anthropologists, morgue doctors, and morticians out there.

We’re putting this exquisitely composed, edited, acted, and staged death scene up here not only because it’s riotously funny, but because it’s from a film called Kareteci Kiz (that’s Turkish for ‘Karate Girl’) that follows the life of a woman (who presumably knows karate) who becomes a cop to seek revenge on the mobsters who killed her father and husband.

No, we don’t feel like it’s tangentially related to the purview of this site at all.

(via The FW.)

Who doesn’t need a little death in their life? If you’re not already following Caitlin Doughty and The Order of the Good Death, consider this your chance to catch up. A licensed mortician with a wry sense of humor and no fear of cameras (not to mention an endearing love of her cat), Caitlin has an interest in death and the death industry that’s as academic as it is professional. Determined to use her powers of morbidity for common good, she began the web series Ask A Mortician to do just what it says on the tin; answer burning (sometimes literally) questions about bodies, decomposition, funeral rites, exploding caskets, and yes, even zombies. Recently, she’s eschewed the longer, multi-question videos for single-question ones, meaning that AaM is more frequent. To our minds, that’s nothing but a good thing.

Go forth and be fascinated, by subscribing on to her YouTube, and checking out her trove of posts at Order of the Good Death’s main site.

Allow us to warn you ahead of time: if you have a problem with extremely realistic wax figures, you’re advised against watching this video. If you’re not, and you’re merely intrigued by them, then we strongly encourage you to watch Sigrid Sarda discuss how she’s devoted herself to creating hyper-realistic wax mannequins. Partly inspired by the death masks of centuries past, Sarda discusses her penchant for wax as a “living substance,” and how people are sometimes turned off by wax figures because they have to “confront themselves.” It’s macabre, it’s ooky, it’s spooky … it’s pretty awesome. (If you have a soft spot for the very, very weird.)

(The Midnight Archive via io9)

Mortician Caitlin Doughty is providing us a huge service: answering our questions about what happens to our dead bodies when we are no longer around to find out for ourselves. She’s been running a web series on You Tube, Ask a Mortician, for a while now and we’d like to present her fifth episode to you. In this video, she covers pressing questions like “What happens to corpses in space?” and “Will burning the body a dearly departed obese person cause a grease fire?” But if you are just in the mood to find out more about her line of work, we urge you to visit her web site, Order of the Good Death.

(via Jezebel)

Um, great news! For those of us who are extremely aware and accepting of the fact that we will all, one day, die, Facebook is now offering an app that lets its more forward-thinking users write a bunch of posts, messages, etc. to be published after they have died. Obviously, there are truly sentimental and heartwrenching reasons to do this, and then there are, of course, the people who want their friends to suffer through an extremely macabre prank. BOO!

Is there some kind of support group out there for actors whose careers turn into a series of bloody deaths? If so, wherever it is, it should really make some time for Steve Buscemi and Sean Bean.

(via The Daily What.)

This video by Sharon Shattuck and Flora Lichtman of Sweet Fern Productions, which was done for Radiolabin collaboration with Lynn Levy, depicts what happens when a whale dies in the ocean. But it isn’t gross. It’s actually, strangely enough, kind of beautiful and touching because it’s done with colorful puppets accompanied by string music. In a world we don’t generally get to see, a whale’s remains will sink to the bottom of the ocean floor upon the end of its life. For the next 50 to 75 years, that whale will support a whole new ecosystem. It pretty much donates a second life — a whale’s life span is also 50 to 75 years — to creating more life.

(via Boing Boing)

MORTYS from Bad Kidow Company on Vimeo.

This is the story of a single mother who is very, very busy with her work, and a son just wants to help her simplify her routine. With, you know, mechanized soul reaping.

Bad Kidow Company’s Death doesn’t TALK LIKE THIS, and she never says “Peachy keen,” but there’s just something about her that appeals to us…

(via Geeks are Sexy.)