oobi is love

[devi]

It's like my experiment, but in the 60s and with cute googly eyes...

muffledsqueak pointed me at the Oobi site. Oobi was a little plastic egg-shape with cartoon eyes. You put a message inside it, addressed it and left it somewhere, and the idea was that it would get carried a little way by one passer-by, then another and another, till it arrived at its destination. That was the idea. In practice, people hated it. That's actually the word they use, hated. The few that were sent vanished without trace.

I'm annoyed with the site for being so cynical and snide about the whole thing. I think it's a beautiful idea. I'd go well out of my way to transport an Oobi if I found one.

Thinking about how things like bookcrossing have caught on, and how many people have signed up for my letter stunt, it almost seems people are more open to an idea like this than they were in the 60s. Is it the Internet? Would people be more willing to release Oobis or carry them some of the way if they could come online and track them, or report having found one?

Maybe the little critter's time has come.

Comments

[carbonunit.livejournal.com]

That Oobi thing offends me because of the eyes. It's too obviously trying to compell it's "host" to carry it to it's destination by using cuteness, which makes me feel like crushing it instead. I tend to react to any attempt to compell me to do something using subterfuge or camoflage or hooks into my mammalian responses in the same manner. Like scratching away a parasitic bug.

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

I presume you don't have a cat, then.

[carbonunit.livejournal.com]

We have 7.

Surely you're not implying that cats are parasites using cuteness to manipulate their human hosts responses? Why, that's absurd! I mean.. uh... cats are different.

The difference is, cats are natural, but Oobi is a commercial product. The intention of Oobi is not so much to get you to carry it, but to buy it in the first place.

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

I wanted to give you a link to a filksong about cats surviving and manipulating humans based entirely on their cuteness, but when I googled for the lyrics... oh god, I can barely say this. The only place I could find them was...

*shudder*

This deserves a post of its own, I think.