Oddity Central |
- Successful Businessman Selling His Whole Life on eBay
- Children Work Together to Build 1.8 Million LEGO Map of Future Japan
- Japanese Chilly Chair Makes Horror Movies Even Scarier
| Successful Businessman Selling His Whole Life on eBay Posted: 13 Aug 2012 06:10 AM PDT
After working hard to build a business and achieve millionaire status, a Florida entrepreneur is selling it all on eBay. This includes his successful video game stores, two beachside condos, several expensive cars and three kayaks. All for the small price of $3.5 million. Some people work their whole life and don’t even get close to amassing a fortune as large as 29-year-old’s Shane Butcher. The Tampa Bay gamer owns a thriving video game business as well as several houses and cars and lives a life most of us only dream of, and yet he is ready to sell it all and start over. ”My name’s Shane, and I’m putting my American dream up for sale,” the young businessman says in his eBay ad. Butcher got the idea to pass on his success to somebody else after he heard about other people who made similar sales on eBay. He and his family are in search of a new challenge, and want to visit the world, so they decided to sell everything they’ve built so far. “If you build a castle, it’s awesome to sell it and then start building another one, hopefully bigger and better,” Shane said. For anyone willing to pay the asking price of $3.5 million, Butcher is giving away all his fully-stocked “R.U. Game?” video game stores, located in Gainesville, Tampa, and Brandon, two houses that come with everything the Butchers own, with only a few exceptions, three vehicles and three kayaks. Because Shane has been an avid gamer all his life, he’s also giving away his entire collection of rare games and gaming systems to the lucky buyer. Also, to make sure the new owner of his business learns the ropes, he will stay on as a personal mentor for six months. To sweeten the deal he will pay in full 1 entire year’s worth of lease on all stores along with an entire year’s worth of HOA fees on our properties so that the new owner can get situated with their new position without worrying about high costs and stack up huge profits. ”There are some things that aren’t included. My dog, for instance. My wife and child aren’t included either,” the businessman said, with a laugh.
“It’s something you don’t see every day. You don’t see people selling their life on eBay,” Shane said in an interview with the local media. “There’s plenty of other weird things you see on there like a grilled cheese with the Virgin Mary’s face on it, but this doesn’t happen very often.” ”There’s so many things I haven’t seen and you just can’t see everything when you’re tied down to a business,” he said. “I’ve never seen Mount Everest, Mount Rushmore, Yellowstone National Park–I want to go see things. I have a huge bucket list,” Butcher added. Ah, I wish I had a successful business to sell…Anyone wanna buy this site for $1 million? Source: My Fox Successful Businessman Selling His Whole Life on eBay was originally posted at OddityCentral.com  |
| Children Work Together to Build 1.8 Million LEGO Map of Future Japan Posted: 13 Aug 2012 02:14 AM PDT
To celebrate the 50th anniversary of LEGO blocks being introduced in Japan, the Danish company organized a cross-country workshop called “Build Up Japan” in which over 5,000 children created their visions of future Japanese buildings. The assembled pieces were all brought to Tokyo and assembled as a giant white map. As Johnny from Spoon&Tamago noticed, the Internet is full of all kinds of massive LEGO works. We ourselves featured an impressive LEGO map of Middle-Earth, a LEGO football stadium model and even a full-size LEGO Ford Explorer. But the “Build Up Japan” event was special in more ways than one and definitely worth covering. While most large-scale works of art are usually created by experienced LEGO masters who spend years working on their pieces, this giant map was created piece by piece by around 5,000 Japanese children from six different regions of the island country. And, instead of having the kids just reproduce some of their country’s iconic buildings, organizers encouraged them to set free their imaginations and create imaginary structures of a futuristic Japan. The future of the country was literally in their hands and they made sure it was a bright one. When the assembled LEGO structures were completed, they were sent to Tokyo to be a part of a massive 1.8 million LEGO map that left the audience speechless. Build Up Japan took place from March to April earlier this year, but it was an event that won’t soon be forgotten. Check out tons of photos on their Facebook page.
Children Work Together to Build 1.8 Million LEGO Map of Future Japan was originally posted at OddityCentral.com  |
| Japanese Chilly Chair Makes Horror Movies Even Scarier Posted: 13 Aug 2012 12:39 AM PDT
Are horror films not scary enough for you? Than you might want to try watching them from the Chilly Chair, an offbeat invention that literally raises the hair on your forearms and back to enhance emotion. You could say Shogo Fukushima’s invention is really hair-raising. The doctoral student who attends the University of Electro-Communications in Tokyo wanted to create a device that would induce body hair to stand up, thus potentially intensifying people’s reaction to movies and video games. He came-up with a thing called the Chilly Chair, with weird forearm-rests that use electricity to reproduce the sensation usually activated by feelings of fear and surprise. The square arches of the innovative chair are made up of three layers; from the inside to the outside it contains an insulating dielectric plate, an electrode and a rubber plate. Electricity goes through the electrode polarizing the dielectric plate and attracts the user’s arm hairs making them experience a sensation similar to when picking up clothes charged with static energy. After testing the Chilly Chair on six subjects, Fukushima found they showed stronger reactions to video and audio stimuli. The guys from Innovation Daily had the chance to experience Shogo Fukushima’s Chilly Chair firsthand at SIGGRAPH, a conference on interactive technologies. According to their report, the unique invention works like this: once the subject sits comfortably in the chair, Shogo’s colleagues activate the device and send 10 kilovolts of electricity through its arches. At the same time, the inventor himself activates a loud alarm and flashes a scary image on the projector screen in front of the chair (at SIGGRAPH he showed a wide-eyed man with a gaping mouth). Innovation Daily reporter Francie Diep says she and her colleagues had already caught a glimpse of the images before actually sitting in the Chilly Chair, but the hair-raising sensation alone was “a little unsettling”.
Although Fukushima has only tested his Chilly Chair on six subjects in controlled conditions before showcasing it at SIGGRAPH, he says the results are very promising. Three of the volunteers were blasted with the strong alarm while sitting in the chair, while the other three heard the loud noise without feeling the effects of the chair. His measurements showed Chilly Chair users had stronger reactions and they themselves rated their emotion as higher. Next, Shogo Fukushima said he would like to see how he can add sensors to the Chilly Chair that would measure people’s skin conductance to detect their emotions. This way, the chair would raise the users’ arm hairs to enhance the emotion they were already feeling. Such an invention could work with any form of entertainment, even a book, because it wouldn’t need to be linked to stimuli like a movie’s scary scenes. I hope he makes it work, because this sounds like a cool cinema experience, unlike 3D technology. via Neatorama Japanese Chilly Chair Makes Horror Movies Even Scarier was originally posted at OddityCentral.com  |
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