Here’s a home decor idea you won’t find at your local Ikea: a hideous, grotesque and all-too-lifelike Half-Life Barnacle ceiling lamp.
The most disgusting creature to come out of the Half-Life franchise, by far, has to be the Barnacle. They cling to ceilings, quivering and unseen, dangling their unearthly tongues as they wait to snare the unwary and suck them up into their foul maws. They’re not much better dead, thanks to the belching, vomitorious shower of offal that results from killing them. They are grotesque abominations of nature.
They also make pretty cool home decor, at least in the eyes of German sculptor Daniel Ritthanondh, who woke up one morning wondering why nobody had ever made a Half-Life Barnacle ceiling lamp. And then, being the ambitious sort, he went ahead and did it himself.
What he came up with is repulsive in every way. Teeth, tongue, pseudo-eye-things, even the high-gloss sheen that gives it that extra touch of slimy ick are all perfectly recreated. It’s the creepiest, most awful piece of lighting decor I’ve ever seen. Naturally, I want one. Badly.
Alas, I won’t get one. “While there won’t really be a ‘place’ to buy them, there’ll definitely be a very (very) limited run of OOAK [one of a kind] Barnacle ceiling lamps,” Ritthanondh wrote on his blog. “At this point it hasn’t been decided yet how limited ‘limited’ [it] is, but we’re probably talking about five pieces (or actually four since one of them has already turned into a commission).”
How much these things will cost wasn’t mentioned but I suspect it’s not particularly relevant. My guess is that if you have to ask, well, maybe you should just pop over to Ikea after all.
