Like an eternal tattoo, if you plan on getting yourself turned into a record when you die you had best be careful about what track you want to be remembered by — will it be a one-hit wonder or a timeless classic?

Morbid or amazing depending on your point of view, Ask Studio is an offering of British company Andvinyl that involves pressing your cremains into a series of musical discs.

Each record has 24 minutes of audio (12 per side) and a single person’s cremated remains can be turned into up to 30 such discs. You can even pick which body parts become which disc, apparently (though how they separate those out in the cremation process is probably up to you).

Music is not the only option, either — the user supplies the sound, so it can be a song or simply a message to a family member, spouse, friend or other loved one. Labels feature the name, birth and death dates of the deceased. Album artwork can also be customized.

You can even have them shipped to vinyl stores for resale if you’re into that sort of thing (and if the participating shop is game to sell human remains). It’s not cheap (a few thousand dollars) but neither is burial! Pets welcome as well (Pet Cemetery soundtrack, perhaps?).

The post Spin Me Right Round: Company Presses Cremated Ashes into Playable Vinyl Records first appeared on Gajitz.

TAYBLES tap into our nostalgia for cassette tapes, a love of handcrafted wood furniture and a functional desire to have mood lighting close at hand.

The Los Angeles company creates wooden tables, each shaped like a tape and sealed with clear epoxy. LED lights tucked into the pair of central holes add light and color to the room.

The ‘tape’ part of the cassette turns out to conceal a secret, too: storage space for books, gadgets or, well, tapes, situated in the center of the empty table.

The biggest difference between models (besides the great variety of woods and their associated hues) is, of course, the label, which can be customized to feature your favorite tunes, a hand-written list of songs or whatever you desire.

Minimalist metal supports provide a likewise-vintage and non-distracting structural system to keep your tape table floating on air.

The post Mixtape Coffee Tables Remix Retro Nostalgia & Vintage Furniture first appeared on Gajitz.

Bringing the 1972 Pong classic Atari game back to life in a beautiful new form, the Table Pong Project will suddenly look a lot more like beer pong (or air hockey or table tennis perhaps). The real key (fast forward a few minutes to see it) is the reflective trickery that makes the entire thing look physical and three-dimensional, from the paddles to the bouncing box/ball.

The creators behind the project had little technical skill when they set out and learned what they needed to from YouTube channels, Google searches and by asking questions on web forums. Against that background, the results are nothing short of amazing, from the game physics to the graphic renderings on the smooth surface of the table.

Each player controls their paddle with knobs, much like arcade controls, and the angle of impact changes the path of the ball. Single-player mode works as well as two-player in their initial prototype. Whether or not they will deploy their retro wonder commercially remains to be seen. The video above details the construction process and shows the game in action

The post Table Pong: DIY Console Brings Atari Classic to Life in 3D first appeared on Gajitz.

Cosmological myths, legends and superstitions of of our ancient ancestors were often tied to astronomical phenomena, and now researchers have found a truly stunning tool they used to make observations of these celestial happenings.

In the absence of modern magnifying glasses and reflective mirrors, the structure discovered in Portugal employed a lower-tech approach: a narrow passage filtered out extraneous light, helping people see stars at times when they would be hard to spot in the open sky.

Part of a prehistoric tomb complex called the Seven-Stone Antas, the astronomical observation device is thought to have been used to view Aldebaran, a red giant in the constellation of Taurus. This star becomes visible in the early morning s of spring, just before sunrise, but would be hard to see outside of a narrow window without a device to block out unwanted night. In turn, its passage was presumably used to mark a change of seasons from spring to summer.

More from the scientists behind the discovery and their next steps: “The team’s idea is to investigate how a simple aperture, for example an opening or doorway, affects the observation of slightly fainter stars. They focus this study on passage graves, which are a type of megalithic tomb composed of a chamber of large interlocking stones and a long narrow entrance. These spaces are thought to have been sacred, and the sites may have been used for rites of passage, where the initiate would spend the night inside the tomb, with no natural light apart from that shining down the narrow entrance lined with the remains of the tribe’s ancestors.”

The post 6,000-Year-Old Prehistoric Telescope Unearthed in Portugal first appeared on Gajitz.

Fanzines were the key pre-digital mode for sharing knowledge and love about sci-fi across space and time, and now the University of Iowa Libraries is beginning to make thousands of them digital.

Their plan is to start with the James L. “Rusty” Hevelin Collection, which contains thousands of volumes, spans decades and features elaborately hand-illustrated titles and hand-drawn artwork.

The library acquired the collection after the author and artist passed. His work covers sci-fi culture dating back to 1941 and the first ever science fiction convention. These zines not only helped fans, but they also assisted aspiring authors.

From Hyperallergic: “Fanzines like the Futurian War Digest from the 1940s made in Leeds, England, and The Phantagraph published in the 1930s and 40s in New York were DIY materials imagined for a growing sci-fi community and often distributed by hand.”

“They also provided an accessible platform for writers including Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, and Arthur C. Clark who would go from fanzines to the icons of the genre.” In many cases, the earliest work of these greats rests only in zines, not in books, and would be lost if only their novels and published short story collections remained.

The post Library Project to Digitize Over 10,000 Science Fiction Zines first appeared on Gajitz.