Since Karmacake is about to relaunch, I find that many of my brilliant story ideas are being stockpiled and saved up. Which, I know is counterproductive to maintaining hits on the existing Karmacake, but that's not the point I'm trying to make. So I come across this post, where a media arts student has figured out how to get a houseplant to play a first-person shoot 'em up game.

Which is so flipping cool! The plant is interacting with a game in order to stimulate the monitor to produce light to feed it. Basic elementary school science taught us that plant go ape shit for light and water, because that helps them produce chlorophyll. Chlorophyll is a green pigmented product that feeds the plants, helping them grow big and tall.

The average person may be more familiar with chlorophyll as the flavour of gum you accidentally bought instead of mint, but didn't realize it until the gum was in your mouth and you were gagging infront of your date. At that point you may have wished for the soap flavoured Thrills, as you embraced one defining characteristic of being human - only plants and animals that chew cud would ever get off on chlorophyll gum.

Who ever invented it probably likes giving high end fanny packs to friends as gag gifts.

ANYWAY!

So there's this plant, who raves on first person shooter games. Obviously, there's a complex set of mathematical equations to make it run in real time, but it's happening.

Meanwhile, somewhere in China, there are legions of individuals called "Gold farmers" who are hired in sweatshop like conditions to play World of Warcraft (WOW) for 10-12hour shifts. Basically they kill important characters over and over to maximize gains to resell to addicted WOW players online for profit.

Human ingenuity never fails to impress me. Here we live in a world where we used to think that technology would replace jobs and create unemployment. However, the opposite holds true! Now there is a technology that is creating a whole lot of nontraditional jobs, like gold farming, blogging, squatting on domains, and so on.

So what is hilarious to me in all this, is that little chlorophyll loving plant who is playing video games. Technology is starting to exploit the natural qualities of this stationary metaphyte in order to create an impression of intelligence in order to operate a game, that previously only computers and humans could do.

*BIG BREATH!*

Just to sum it up, does this mean that now plants will inherit the Earth?

OMG, gold farmers are going to get OWNED when that plant starts playing WOW.

Owned.