There is a thriving market of Ebola tshirts, bumper stickers and plushies. With the success of various Cthulhu plushies and Dalmutations, it comes as little surprise that a line of microbe plushies (including a Lyme disease plushie, a chlamydia plushie and a bone cell oestocyte plushie) now includes an Ebola plushie.
In a slightly less tasteful matter, the steward of "disease domains" such as h1n1.com, birdflu.com, chikungunya.com, potassiumiodide.com, fukushima.com and terror.com bought the rights to ebola.com for US$13,000 in 2008 and is now selling them for US$150,000.
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As reported here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and elsewhere, the previously discussed rights to the ebola.com domain were offered for US$150,000.
Well, Russian owned Weed Growth Fund bought it for US$200,000. However, US$50,000 is in cash and US$150,000 is is the form of 19,192 shares in Cannabis Sativa, Inc..
The plan is to use ebola.com to publish inside information and coverups related to Ebola treatment. However, it may be a conspiracy theorist paradise given the stated belief that marijuana may aid Ebola treatment.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 18 2014, @09:09AM
can't figure out what's more disturbing; that people make and market these things, or that there are people who actually buy them
(Score: 3, Interesting) by keplr on Saturday October 18 2014, @09:14AM
I hesitate to look on this practice too harshly, as I've always been a fan of both irony and black humor.
And (might I be forgiven for saying, in the same vein?) it had to happen, the Japanese have produced--and we have imported--an anthropomorphized anime-girl mascot for Ebola [8chan.co], complete with a satirical death-cult gleefully looking forward to pandemic spread of the disease.
For the uninitiated, there's actually a fairly old practice in Japanese anime/manga culture of producing such characters as representations of products and objects. All the major operating systems have one [wikipedia.org], for example. The Internet Explorer character [theregister.co.uk] is officially made on behalf of Microsoft's Singapore division. The character will have various features and iconography indicating what she (it's almost always a figure of a young woman) represents. In the case of Ebola, the character is dressed in a nurse's uniform, carries a bloody human skull, and her braids of hair terminate in enlarged depictions of the Ebola virus itself.
I don't respond to ACs.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 18 2014, @01:44PM
It's worth noting that the Japanese anime community, and consequently their western derivative has fetishized the concept of the psycho girlfriend/boyfriend in the form of the so-called Yandere [wikipedia.org]. I'm not going to go into the fine details, but the term refers to a character with genuine romantic interest and (typically) passive-aggressive violent attitude towards perceived threats to said romance, sometimes taken to extremes that would make your typical Hollywood ax murderer feel inadequate. The character of Ebola-chan plays into many of the stereotypes of this particular concept, which might better explain the reasoning behind designing a character after a deadly disease. YMMV on the merits of this particular characterization.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 18 2014, @02:24PM
No, ebola-chan just wants to share her viral love with you!
(Score: 2) by VLM on Saturday October 18 2014, @02:09PM
soylent news needs a -tan. Made of people, I assume. God only knows what the "beta site" -tan would look like.
About a week ago there was a hilarious 4chan thread of hand drawn comics of the board-tans asking each other out for prom or the winter ball gala or whatever, the comics of /pol/ asking out /x/ and /biz/ were hilarious. /pol/'s -tan looks like a female neocon lingerie which is hilarious stacked on top of hilarious.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 18 2014, @02:21PM
GOOD LUCK, EBOLA-CHAN! [imgur.com]
(Score: 2) by cafebabe on Saturday October 18 2014, @03:27PM
Worryingly, ebolachan.com and ebola-chan.com were both registered in Sep 2014. I'm now curious to see a graph of Ebola domain registrations over time.
1702845791×2
(Score: 2) by pnkwarhall on Saturday October 18 2014, @07:32PM
Why is this worrying instead of logical opportunism? That's when the media frenzy in the US went into over-time.
On the other hand, ebola-chan.com was (privately) registered on Sep 25th (the day Thomas Duncan checked into the hospital for the preliminary Ebola symptoms.) That's a bit of a coincidence.
Lift Yr Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven
(Score: 2) by pnkwarhall on Saturday October 18 2014, @07:37PM
(It's an interesting coincidence because that's the day he initially checked-in with symptoms and was sent home -- as opposed to the date when he re-checked-in and the hospital recognized he had Ebola, along with the corresponding media announcements.)
Lift Yr Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven