Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

The .edu supervillain

Found on Google+, Infocult's creator as supervillain:

(thanks to jason k)

Horror of student loan debt

"The Red" is a horror short about... student loan debt.  

The heroine is haunted by all kinds of horror tropes in a few short minutes: wounds, mysterious bleeding, uncanny voices, crawling bugs, disturbing people, creepy phone calls, and oozing monsters.  Not to mention less Gothic and more microeconomic fears, like job stress, declined credit cards, dwindling finances, and stalking creditors.

 Eventually the heroine cracks under the strain and goes mad.

"You can't outrun it.  All you can do is face it.  And fight it."

Drone horror expands

How scary are drones? Pretty creepy, according to Germany's defense minister.

"We prefer to pull the plug [on drones]. That applies to the future as well, when costs get out of control. Better an end with horror than a horror without end..."

Drone fear could well grow into something mainsteam and durable.

(via Reason; image via Wikipedia)

Art in disease

A new book finds beautiful visuals in the midst of horrible medical imagery.

The imagery is horrible because it usually stems from disease or trauma: Lou Gherig's Disease, ectopic pregnancy, testicular cancer.  There's something classically decadent about the project. 

(thanks to Todd Bryant)

Progress on the digital afterlife

We're doing better with our posthumous digital affairs, according to a Long Now post.

For example, there have recently been a series of Digital Death Day unconferences.  There's even a beautifully named Death Switch.

With a death switch, the computer prompts you for your password once a week to make sure you are still alive. When you don’t enter your password for some period of time, the computer deduces you are dead, and your passwords are automatically e-mailed to the second-in-command. Individuals began to use death switches to reveal Swiss bank account numbers to their heirs, to get the last word in an argument, and to confess secrets that were unspeakable during a lifetime.

(thanks to Chris Worden)

Cthulhu meets MOOCs

The rise of MOOCs explained. They came from R'lyeh!

(thanks to Steven Burnett)

TMZ tries cyberfear

Celebrity gossip site TMZ discovered the scary side of cyberspace a few weeks ago, running a frantic story about hackers blackmailing the United States into war.  

As the headline shrieked, 

HACKER GROUP THREATENS

TO BOMB WHITE HOUSE

(caps and font size in original)

The story starts from the classic trope of the scary hacker: clever, secretive, powerful.  Hence their ability to attack the Obama administration.

TMZ then takes things in an odd direction by linking this political threat to celebrities.  

We're told the group -- which claims responsibility for swatting Rihanna, Diddy, Ryan Seacrest, Justin Timberlake, Paris Hilton, Chris Brown, Tom Cruise and others -- contacted authorities through 911 and threatened to detonate 8 devices around the White House perimeter if President Obama does not declare war within 24 hours.

Yes, it's about "swatting", not geopolitics.  And lets gossip-drenched readers connect their celeb-stalking tales to the White House.  Interesting twist on cyberfear.

Naturally there's no retraction or sourcing of the claim.

(via Jesse "Wouldn't Be Caught Dead Reading It" Walker)

Self-assembling printed robot inches your way

"A Printed Inchworm Robot" is mildly uncanny on the face of it.  The little thing inches along, like a metal worm.  It's interesting, too, because most of it has been 3d printed.

But where it leaps into the uncanny valley is the way it folds itself together:

Yes, it's slow and tiny.  But Infocult readers recognize the signs of uncanny robotics looming in the future.

How to use a touch of Gothic

The New Yorker quietly adds just a smidgen of Gothic to a technology essay:

The primary interface element of Now is what Google calls “cards,” which are modelled after real cards. They present a clean, trim canvas for information—one recalls the discussion of tasteful business-card design in the film “American Psycho.” 

"One recalls?"  Depends on the "one" in question, but Infocult always remembers.  "That's bone."

Here's the scene, as a refresher:

(via Bruce Sterling)

A drowned town rises into the light

A flood wiped out and submerged an Argentine town in the 1980s. Yet this year it surfaced, ruins emerging into the air.  Call it a kind of ghost town:

People come to see the rusted hulks of automobiles and furniture, crumbled homes and broken appliances...

...They climb staircases that lead nowhere, and wander through a graveyard where the water toppled headstones and exposed tombs to the elements.

(thanks to Jesse Walker)

Russia, home of the Gothic

Russia is such a Gothic nexus that it breeds vampire moths.

Their discovery must have been quite the surprise:

When the Russian moths were experimentally offered human hands this summer, the insects drilled their hook-and-barb-lined tongues under the skin and sucked blood.

Lest you think there's a global epidemic of the critters, here's evidence for an especially Russian breed of bloodsucking moth-things:

Entomologist Jennifer Zaspel at the University of Florida in Gainesville said the discovery suggests the moth population could be on an "evolutionary trajectory" away from other C. thalictri populations...

"Based on geography, based on behavior, and based on a phenotypic variation we saw in the wing pattern, we can speculate that this represents something different, something new," Zaspel said.

Russia: redefining real-life Gothic, monster by monster.

(thanks to Stevem Burnett)

Cannibalism in Syria

Today's story of cannibalism comes from the Syrian civil war, where a rebel apparently gnawed on a dead soldier's heart.

According to one account,

In the clip, Sakkar cuts into the chest of the dead soldier before ripping out his heart and liver and declaring: “I swear to God we will eat your hearts and your livers, you soldiers of Bashar the dog”. To off-screen cheers and chants of “Allahu akbar [God is Great]”, the man then bites into the heart.

Here's a copy of the video:

Uzumaki invades real life

A woman's esophagus mutated into a spiral horror, delighting fans of Uzumaki everywhere:

The woman had lost 11 pounds in the past several months, and told doctors she had cramplike spasms shortly after eating.

Her doctors performed an endoscopy and found that, when she swallowed, her esophagus had the same helical shape as a playground twisty slide.

Nice analogy!  It looks like so:

Infocult normally doesn't examine HuffPo, but makes an exception in this case. Stopped analog clocks are, after all, right twice a day.

(via Naked Capitalism)

More scary short videos from Popcorn horror

We shared the fine short video "Click" a few days ago.  Now it's time to examine the other Gothic tidbits from the contest which "Click" won, Popcorn Horror.

Warning: all of these have scenes of extreme violence, pain, and death.  Very NSFW.

"Mortified" is a fun short-short, barely 2 minutes long and offering a fine grin:

"Twinkle Toes" is the most complex and ambitious story of the lot, a violent piece about revenge.  It plays games with your expectations.  For instance, don't be sure as to who owns that severed foot:

"Don't Move" is a very gory and always tense bit based around a shocking in media res setting.

 

"Blood Roulette" has an interesting twist to the Russian shooting game.

Inhabiting an abandoned skyscraper

A Venezuelan skyscraper failed to fill its spaces with business, and fell empty.  Gradually poor people moved in, squatting in what sounds like a disturbing ruin:

‘rooms with a view’ lacked walls, working electricity, running water, windows, balcony railings and certainly no elevator, yet the new residents settled in as high as the 30th floor. Chilling stories of small children playing too close to the edge and deadly winds gusting through living quarters were a constant reminder of the risks they were taking.

Yet those squatters self-organized into a healthy community, turning the Gothic vertical slum into what some call a near utopia.

Torre David Trailer from Urban-Think Tank on Vimeo.

(thanks to Randy McCall)