The UK Metro is reporting on a wedding ceremony held for a 28-year old Korean man and his full-sized body pillow girlfriend. The pillow cover supposedly has an image of a character named Fate Testarossa from the anime series Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha.

The story is reminiscent of a New York Times Magazine piece I wrote last year; the Metro article also mentions a story we originally posted on Boing Boing in November about a guy who married a character in his Nintendo DS dating sim.

Cardboard Brian* and I met at a ski shop in Colorado. He was hanging out by the front door, smiling indiscriminately at passersby. I instantly fell for his charming, goofy, lopsided grin. The shop employee said he wasn't for sale, but he let me take him home anyway.

I was drawn to Cardboard Brian because he slightly resembles my real life boyfriend — they have the exact same hairstyle and cartoon-like facial features. But shortly after I brought him back to my hotel room, I began to feel like Cardboard Brian was taking on a life of his own. While Real Brian sat at his computer chatting away on AIM with his buddies, Cardboard Brian sat next to me on the couch and we watched The Wedding Planner together, both of us with smiles on our faces. I was genuinely enjoying his company.

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A woman walks into a restaurant. She's alone, but she requests a table for two. She sits down, pulls a giant piece of cardboard out of her oversized bag, and unrolls a three-foot cutout of a human being. It has what looks like a computer-generated cartoon man etched on one side. She places the cardboard man gently on the seat across from her, making sure his body folds neatly at the hip crease and that his legs dangle comfortably below him. Then she opens up her menu.

Joel Massey happened to be her waiter that night. "She was just a real normal-looking woman in her mid-40s," he says. Everything else was normal, too — it was just a typical Tuesday night at the popular San Francisco restaurant.

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