First, get as accurate an estimate as possible as to how much blood is in your body. I'm not sure how to go about this, but I imagine you could get pretty close to the actual figure. Then purchase a jar which will hold this amount of liquid. Get a number of the tubes they use for blood donation (say 6) running into the jar. At the other end of the tubes are the needles which you insert into strategic parts of your body. Each of the tubes will need a pump attached to get all the blood out, especially after your heart has stopped pumping. Finally, simply activate the pumps & bleed to death. Ideally you would rig it so that after all your blood has been pumped into the jar, the tubes disconnect themselves and (perhaps) self destruct along with the pumps (a bit tricky to engineer I imagine)leaving no trace. Your unsuspecting loved ones will then stumble upon your dry shrivelled corpse, and, some distance away, a jar containing all your blood. That ought to get them thinking, no?

#disclaimer# I'm not encouraging anyone to commit suicide here. There surely are other answers to any problem you may have. This is for those who have their mind made up, but would like to go with a bit of style.
-- stupop, Aug 24 2001

(??) Marc Quinn: Self http://www.artnet.c...den-guest10-1-2.asp
[jutta, Aug 24 2001]

Collective Suicide http://www.wired.co...ve/8.04/joy_pr.html
Happy reading! [Pallex, Aug 24 2001, last modified Oct 17 2004]

Jerry Hunt http://www.jerryhunt.org
Jerry spent months planning his suicide, as outlined in the detailed videotape he left behind. [td, May 01 2002, last modified Oct 17 2004]

"Best suicide plan ever" http://bash.org/?488793
courtesy of bash.org [calum, Jun 22 2005]

Well, I suppose the idea *is* posted under Health:Stupidity.
-- Guy Fox, Aug 24 2001


[... where it didn't quite belong; so I made a new Health: Suicide category, even though this really is more of a Culture: Suicide thing.]

Three references, with increasing proximity to the topic:

1. In a booklet I read once, another stylish suicide method advocated was to swallow a very small bomb with a timer, go into an expensive restaurant, and just before the set time announce on the top of your voice that you're so full you're gonna explode. Suicide bombings and a Monty Python movie have made this both an old hat and (if possible) in even worse taste than before.

2. Neal Stephenson's "Diamond Age" has a nanobot weapon called "cookie cutters". He describes it at some length; it basically purees the person that swallowed it from the inside. The first time I read this I skipped over it in impatience for the story to move along; the second time, the image stuck with me, like a paper cut. Anyway. Swallow some of those guys, sit on a funnel, and wait.

3. The "Sensation" exhibition of modern art works from the Saatchi collection - the one that Giuliani and PeterSealy don't see the point of - showed a self-portrait bust by Marc Quinn made of his own frozen blood. (The 8 pints of blood in it were taken over half a year; the artist didn't kill himself over the artwork.)

To me, there's something intrinsically life-affirming in even the darkest, most destructive art; if all suicides required long and devoted artful preparation rather than a catastrophic loss of balance, maybe there would be fewer.
-- jutta, Aug 24 2001, last modified Aug 30 2001


Everybody loves mystery suicides, right? A less picturesque but perhaps just as puzzling way to go might be in a locked room with a revolver rigged to a spring or bungee that would snap the gun upward and into a space above a ceiling tile set to fall back into place upon its passage.
-- The Military, Aug 24 2001


Grab an icicle, go into your den, lock the doors and windows...
-- phoenix, Aug 24 2001


jutta - beautiful post, especially your last paragraph. Also like the "sit on a funnel" image.

My original reaction to this idea was negative, but i'm coming around. (In general, I think suicide can be a wonderful thing, and more people should consider it. But manipulative suicides and "cry for help" attempts soil this otherwise honorable act). What bothers me about it is the possibility that a suicide can throw suspicion on innocent parties. Military's idea, for example, would make the suicide appear as a murder. Besides possibly imprisoning an innocent person, it falls under the more general category of "i'll show you" suicides, in which the act is supposed to have manipulative effect, and not just result in a death. That is the kind of repulsive behavior that gives suicide a bad rap.

Another "artful" suicide: Set up an embalming fluid kind of system that removes blood and replaces it - not with embalming fluid - but with an epoxy. As you slowly expire, you feel the burning of the epoxy. The epoxy penetrates your entire circulatory system, then cures, setting your dead body in plastic permanence.

Also, using the "cookie cutters" jutta mentions, swallow the critters, then jump from an airplane. Your body is pureed while falling, creating a beautiful blood rain (and a pile of bone, perhaps).
-- quarterbaker, Aug 24 2001


One could also inject an air bubble into blood stream at a nonvisible point and dispose of syringe immediately just before becoming immediately disposed themselves.
-- thumbwax, Aug 24 2001


Off-topic (?) but the `cookie cutters` idea provoked me into submitting a link to an article by Bill `i invented Java` Joy, where pretty much the same thing happens, only to the whole planet.
-- Pallex, Aug 24 2001


Wasn't a similar thing also done in a Greg Bear novel? 'Forge of God' or something like that.
-- -alx, Aug 24 2001


Hmmm. Envision a preparation for death that lasts an entire lifetime. The only thing more tragic would be a preparation for life that lasted an entire lifetime. Eek. I'm with AfroAssault, one might as well explode when the end comes.

"Never to have lived is best, ancient writers say;
Never to have drawn the breath of life, never to have looked into the eye of day;
The second best's a gay goodnight and quickly turn away."

--Yeats
-- Dog Ed, Aug 25 2001


Mephista: Or some really big scissors.
-- StarChaser, Aug 25 2001


In GURPS UltraTech (an RPG supplement mainly about high-tech(and messy) ways to kill) another nanobot weapon is mentioned. It's very appropriately called "Splatter" and consists of dozens of nanobombs which are injected. Once they have spread through the bloodstream (or by remote command), they all explode, making a slightly messier pile of intestines than the "cookie cutters"
-- Saruman, Jul 26 2002


//It is a good day to die.//

Unabubba, are you Australian?
-- gizmo_man, Jul 26 2002


Hide your sheep gizmo-man
-- Helium, Jul 26 2002


i like the idea about the bomb in the restaurant but not the cookie cutters thats kinnda sick feeling your insides eaten alive maybe some pain killers first
-- furyfighter, May 12 2005


[Thumbwax] 8/24/01 You have to be injected with a lot more air than people think to die.

The exact amount necessary to kill an adult is not known, but it would have to be more than all the air contained in the entire length of IV tubing.

Average IV tubing contains approx. 5ml of air, this amount would not hurt you. My main source for this was the US Army ATIA, Fort Eustis Virginia.
-- 37PiecesOf Flair, May 12 2005


In Turok (it's another video game) there is this gun, that shoots these things that go into your flesh, and spin blades rapidly, creating a very gorey, and painful death. Dunno why I posted it, but uh... yeah.
-- EvilPickels, May 12 2005


Sometimes I wish I had a brother. Well I still do, but he's been in formaldehyde in a jar on top of the telly since last april, and he's no fun to play with.

'Hide and go seek' is such a bore with him, 'cause he's always in the same place, and I always have to come out of my hiding spot after an hour or so to find him still curled up inside his jar.

My sister Glenda took him to 'show and tell' at school one day, and was sent straight home with a letter for my mother. Mum decided then and there that we were not to go to school any more, and that we could learn as much from television as the rest of the children.
-- benfrost, May 12 2005


This is one of those odd ideas that made me stick aorund here.
-- finrod, May 12 2005


Eat yourself.
-- goatfaceKilla, May 13 2005


[EP] called a "cereberal bore". It hunts for brain waves and performs seek and destroy, a la spinning blades and drills and such... Good game.
-- daseva, May 13 2005


There's this really sick story called 'Baby's Blood', I don't know who by, but it's about this man who gives this new kind of drink to a barman, and he says that it's really good, but never drink it on its own. Later on in the tale, it tells of these women who come out of a daycare, saying that the very nice man inside is really good with children, they just sleep for hours afterwards...

And in the same book, there's this story called 'Ladyfingers', which is about this surgeon who is running drugs, when his boat is sunk, so slowly, but surely, he cuts off his fingers one by one as he's so hungry...

Yeah, gory, not the sort of thing I should be reading, but still...

What about hiring a hitman to kill you, then telling him that he'll be in this certain room at a certain time, then hiring loads of people who look vaguely similar or very similar to you to come in with the same clothes on as you?
-- froglet, May 13 2005


What about Prussian roulette - where you aim the gun perfectly at someone, but don`t know whether it will fire forwards or backwards?
-- goatfaceKilla, May 13 2005


Clone yourself at birth, then stand on a big block of ice, tie a rope to it and hang it out the window with an other block of ice hanging off that, then hire someone who looks just like you to bump into your clone, injecting him with some sleeping tablets. While he's asleep, take plaster-casts of his feet and hire a surgeon to swap your finger prints, and while he's at it, to also transplant your face with that of a hard up street-urchin.

Now roll up one of those amaretti wrappers (the ones that float in the air if you set light to them) and balance a remote control, with an aspirin tablet glued to the on button, suspended over a beaker of water.

Next, invite a group of murder-mystery writers, all of whom have a strong, but distinct motive to kill you around with the promise of leaving them all millions if they can find out who murdered you (by following a number of pre-recorded statements made by yourself) and have them each killed off in an increasingly elaborate set of booby traps designed to finish off your enemies in a series of gruesomely appropriate ways.

Finally, explode.
-- zen_tom, May 13 2005


If I remember correctly (which I may not), the stories about baby's blood and the eating-himself surgeon were by roald Dahl. - very good read.
-- Custardguts, Oct 12 2006


I would've thought that the solution to the box, [Frank], would be to make the box either a.) trasparent or b.) airtight. Either way then you would surely find out.
-- froglet, Oct 12 2006



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