The world’s real economy may be flagging, but not necessarily the make-believe economy of online multiplayer games, according to reporting by The Wall Street Journal and the website Singularity Hub.
For example, entrepreneur Ailin Graef’s Anshe Chung Studios is worth “millions” of real U.S. dollars, earned mostly by managing rentals of make-believe real estate and brokering make-believe money transactions in the game Second Life.
Graef also commands top (real) dollar for her designs of make-believe fashions for players’ game characters (avatars).
Two other companies are suing each other in federal court in San Francisco over the copyright to their lucrative business models of creating make-believe animals (horses, rabbits) that sell very well to players who take them on as game pets for their characters or breed them to make other make-believe animals.
Man, this
would really
mess you up
A surgeon from Britain’s Oxford Radcliffe Hospital announced a cure for a 57-year-old man with a rare condition that made, in his mind, audible and ever-louder sounds whenever his eyeballs moved.
“Superior canal dehiscence syndrome” elevates the interior sounds of the body (such as heartbeat and the “friction” of muscles moving against muscles) to disturbing levels.
Wasn’t this a
horror movie
in the ‘70s?
Recent alarming headline: “Miami Invaded by Giant, House-Eating Snails” — up-to-10-inch-long snails that attach to, and slowly gnaw on, stucco walls.
(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa Fla. 33679 or go to www.newsoftheweird.com.)