Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Come visit the Mystery Flesh Pit National Park!

Wouldn't we all like to visit the Mystery Flesh Pit National Park?

An energetic person on Reddit's Worldbuilding board has created this delightfully horrific alternate park.  So far it's only a series of images, mock-official documents posted to that board and to a Tumblr blog.

I'm developing supplementary material (maps, guide pamphlets, etc.) for a fictional national park/national monument chiefly characterized by the existence of an enormous living organism which extends deep into earth. The origin of the pit is unknown, as well as it's ultimate size and complete characteristics. The company which discovered the pit, Anodyne Deep Earth Mining Inc., has been granted a contract from the [National Park Service] to operate a tourist experience there with close oversight from the U.S. Government. Though most authorities and experts have determined that the pit is reasonably safe, new and unusual phenomena in and around it continue to be recorded.

For example, this official brochure:

Don't miss the Abyssal Copepods and the Restraining Forceps!

Consider the fine equipment used by a park trail engineer:

 

There's also a wildlife safety brochure, a gallery of park signs over the decades, and a look at a park ranger's getup.

Following its accidental discovery, the Mystery Flesh Pit and the unique phenomena surrounding it were targets of a headfirst and furiously paced campaign of commercial exploitation. Once architects, engineers, geobiologists and clerical members of the development team had done their work to make the park safe and viable, marketing teams faced the daunting task of selling the public on the intriguing and miraculous phenomena of the Mystery Flesh Pit while downplaying the visceral cosmic horror of the pit itself.

Families were a particularly difficult sell, as children often displayed an overwhelming fear and aversion to descending into the throat of the pit. One strategy early in the park’s history was the creation of friendly cartoon mascot Caver Coop. A brief animated film starring Caver Coop was shown at the park’s visitor center, where the character would attempt to assuage worries about being “eaten alive” or “swallowed”, reassuring children (and often parents) that the pit was perfectly safe and reinforced.

When the attraction was absorbed into the National Park System in the early 1990s, signage and other graphic materials were updated to the NPS Graphic Identity. The architecture of the park’s surface facilities was also expanded and renovated during this time to better fit with the “Natural Resort” image of the Mystery Flesh Pit brand, drawing inspiration from the local Santa Fe style integrated with unique bone formations discovered within the pit itself.

(via MetaFilter)

The American western drone mystery continues

A Colorado site reports on growing rumors about mysterious drones flying overhead.

a drone nearly hit a medical helicopter Tuesday.

Helicopter pilot Kirk Peebles said he saw a drone pass within 100 feet from his Flight for Life helicopter during a routine medical call near Fort Morgan.

More:

Residents have also started reporting drones sighted farther south and west than in previous weeks. People have reported drone sightings in Castle Rock, Parker, Fort Collins, Boulder, and as far south as the Pueblo area.

"It was very unnerving and I live alone," said Amy Smith, who said she saw a drone out the window of her home in Olney Springs. "It's scary to see something like that and not know what it is."

Several online groups have grown out of curiosity, anxiety and suspicion of residents.

"[I am] not super concerned from a national security perspective, but low flying ones above roads are starting to distract drivers and could cause accidents," said Annamarie Calabrese, a member of the Facebook group DRONES over COLORADO and NEBRASKA.

Previously.

Gothic cross stitch

Infocult approves of this art:

(thanks to Jesse "Favorite Programming Language is PERL" Walker)

 

Dreading drones

We haven't seen enough creepy accounts of drones, so thankfully the New York Times reports that some Nebraskans and Coloradans are worried about mysterious flying bots.

Since before Christmas, sheriff’s departments in the region have been bombarded with reports of large drones with blinking lights and wingspans of up to 6 feet flying over rural towns and open fields. The drones have unnerved residents, prompted a federal investigation and made international news, even though they may be perfectly legal. And still, they remain unexplained.

They usually fly at night.

Meanwhile, stories are starting to take off:

Ms. George said she had heard wild speculation about who might be responsible for the flights — the government? a cartel? a gas company? — and feared they would never know the truth.

“All the sudden, it’s just going to stop and we’re not going to have answers,” Ms. George said. “And that’s very unsettling to a lot of people. It’s the fear of the unknown."

Perhaps there's a black helicopter echo to this.

(thanks to Jesse "Not the Operator" Walker)

Starting the decade with medical horror

As 2020 begins we at Infocult continue our study of real-life Gothic horror.

To start, a horrific story from Romania, where a medical blunder killed a patient.

The patient, who had pancreatic cancer, died on Sunday after suffering burns to 40% of her body when surgeons used an electric scalpel despite her being treated with an alcohol-based disinfectant.

Contact with the flammable disinfectant caused combustion and the patient “ignited like a torch”, Emanuel Ungureanu, a Romanian politician, said on his Facebook page, citing medical staff at Floreasca urgent care hospital in Bucharest.

The more one thinks of this, the worse it gets.

And it was the opposite of procedure:

“The surgeons should have been aware that it is prohibited to use an alcohol-based disinfectant during surgical procedures performed with an electric scalpel,” the deputy minister, Horatiu Moldovan, said.

It's the 2020s: new decade, more terror.

(thanks to Tom Elliot)

One real-life death ship

A boat washed up on Japan's coast with a grim cargo.  But let Daily Beast give us the Gothic entrée to the story:

Ghost Ship Carrying Human Heads Washes Up on Japanese Beach

NHK provides some details:

Japanese authorities have found 7 bodies in the remains of a wooden boat that washed ashore on the coast of Sado Island in the Sea of Japan.

A police officer on patrol found the bow of the boat close to shore in the Sobama District of Sado City on Friday.

Coast Guard officers suspect the bow was part of a North Korean boat.

The Coast Guard and police found seven partially skeletonized bodies inside the vessel during a search on Saturday morning.

DB adds that "two decapitated heads [were also found] on the ship..."

As one Twitter user observes, "The backwash of North Korea's terror state produces some incredibly metal headlines, you have to give them that".

(thanks to Jesse "Not a Fisherman" Walker)

The blood business revs up

Here's an article about the booming America business of selling blood.

Key Gothic details:

• Donors turned into zombies
• Poor people being exploited
• Outlaws ("The U.S. supplies fully 70 percent of the world’s plasma, mainly because most other countries have banned the practice on ethical and medical grounds")

(thanks to saramin)

Revenge of a sinkhole victim

Two years ago a California sinkhole swallowed up a car, nearly drowning its driver in water and sewage.

Stephanie Scott, a makeup artist, suffered brain injuries and post-traumatic stress disorder after she escaped from the sinkhole by pulling herself from her flipped SUV, according to her lawyers. She received help from fire rescue workers as the crater filled with raw sewage in February 2017.

Now the survivor received damages from the city of Los Angeles.

(thanks to Ed Webb)

Naturally Thanksgiving has a Gothic side

The scribes at Jezebel dug up some very unsettling Thanksgiving cards from a century ago.  Most involve children.  Several are clearly Infocult's favored stuffing.

For example, a pleasant child gets close to a living bird, with deadly weapon in reach:

Or this sinister image of angelic children, one luring a turkey to its doom, while another readies a - garrotte?

Meanwhile, a lad gets ready with a different killing tool:

(thanks to Thomas "Pardon ME!" Burkdall)

Today in dreading video games

An Ohio state attorney offered an interesting example of cyberfear this week.  Seeking to explain why fraternity brothers accidentally killed a pledge, Keller J. Blackburn gave this intriguing theory:

“The overall lesson that I think is so difficult for our youth when they live in this video game culture is that if something goes wrong, they can reset it, start it over, and everything’s O.K.,” Keller J. Blackburn, the Athens County prosecuting attorney, said in announcing the charges on Tuesday.

But in real life, he added, “their decisions have actual consequences.”

This has several dimensions.  First, there's the argument that players can not distinguish between reality and games (which only works for computer games, not tabletop ones, although analog role-playing games have long had this mystique).  Second, Blackburn associates games with "our youth," here meaning teenagers and men in their very early 20s, missing the social reality that people of all ages play computer games.

Third, there's the gap between the crime and games.  To explain, here's the Times account of the former:

About a month after enrolling at Ohio University, Collin Wiant pledged the Sigma Pi fraternity. But on Nov. 12, 2018, he collapsed at an unofficial party at the fraternity’s off-campus house. A coroner later determined he had died of asphyxiation after inhaling nitrous oxide from a canister, known as a whippet...

James Dylan Wanke, 25, the general manager of the store where the nitrous oxide was purchased, and Joshua Thomas Androsac, 20, a member of the Sigma Pi fraternity who the authorities said provided the drug to Mr. Wiant, were charged with first-degree involuntary manslaughter, which carries a maximum penalty of 11 years in prison.

This reader can't think of a computer game where the player learns how to sell or give nitrous to another character.  For that matter, it's hard to think of a game where you can do whippets.

But this is unfair to Mr. Blackburn, who doesn't seem to be charging the Sigma Pi men with acting out game instructions precisely.  Instead, his charge concerns the specific game mechanics of restarting and extra lives.  Since those date back to the 1970s, we should expect Blackburn to outline the multi-generational crime way that followed in the wake of dire social influences like Ms. Pacman.

Notably missing from the attorney's account is the non-digital, far more prosaic explanations familiar to anyone with even a nodding acquaintance with American fraternity culture.  Frats can do horrendously stupid things in their hazing processes.  Frats can also encourage young men to ingest dangerous substances in potentially fatal amounts.  Frats can mishandle the medical emergencies that result.  Again, this isn't news.  It's simply history and our lived reality - and hence less exciting to mention when one can, instead, babble about the menace of a video game culture.

Insurance claim, Gothic style

The process of getting an insurance claim can be tricky, and sometimes rewarding, but not often is it Gothic.

Today's real-life Gothic comes from South Africa, where a family sought to prove a fact in a case.

Outraged family members say they were forced to drag in the corpse of their uncle, Sifiso Justice Mhlongo, after an insurance company demanded proof he was dead. The grieving family members filmed the ghastly scene, and the footage has gone viral.

One clip of said footage can be seen here.

According to the company's Twitter account, "We can confirm that the claim was paid.."

(thanks to Steven "I'm not dead!" Kaye)

Russian Gothic: a murder in history

Today's real-life Gothic story comes from Russia, where a - well, let's just go with the Washington Post headline:

Russia’s greatest Napoleonic reenactor was found drunk in a river with the severed arms of his lover in his backpack

To explain a bit:

The 63-year-old Sokolov is an assistant professor of history and one of Russia’s most prominent scholarly reenactors of the Napoleonic wars. The arms in the backpack are thought to be those of one of his students, 24-year-old Anastasia Yeshchenko, whose dismembered and decapitated body was found in Sokolov’s apartment just a few houses down from where he was hauled out of the water, drenched and intoxicated, police said.

And it's even more (melo)dramatic:

His plan, local news organizations reported, was to make his way to the Peter and Paul Fortress on Sunday, dressed as Napoleon Bonaparte, to romantically take his own life in front of gaping and undoubtedly awestruck tourists. 

Fellow students said Yeshchenko lived with Sokolov for some time but had recently moved out. Photos online show them dancing, she in an Empire dress with white gloves past her elbows, he in a glittering uniform decked with gold braid and a red sash, pulled tight around his evident paunch. He called her Isabelle, after one of the Bonapartes, and insisted she call him Sire.

The Gothic dimensions are evident:

Sokolov’s lawyer told the Tass news agency that he has confessed to the murder, a crime of St. Petersburgian passion that has parallels to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel “Crime and Punishment” — the use of an ax — and to the 1916 assassination of the “mad monk” Grigori Rasputin, with its denouement in the city’s dark interior waterways.

There might be a little bit of Edgar Allan Poe in there, too: Sokolov told investigators that he shot Yeshchenko in a fit of rage on Thursday, then entertained guests on Friday while her body lay in a room behind a closed door.

(thanks to Steven "Survived the Berezina" Kaye)

Ruins of the Cold War

The Gothic often lives in the ruins of power.

The Cold War's vast armaments are fine spawning grounds for horror tales.  A new book collects photos of Cold War ruins. CNN has a nice gallery.

(thanks to Jesse Walker)

Blood transfusions from young people are back

In 2018 one Silicon Valley startup offered a starkly Gothic service: blood from young people, intended to improve older folks' ailing bodies.

The firm, Ambrosia, reduced operations amid general dread, suspicion, and an FDA smackdown... and now the founder has launched a new business that offers pretty much the same thing.  It is delightfully named "Ivy Plasma."

(thanks to Todd "Teetotaler" Bryant)

Here comes the texts of February

Major American mobile phone service providers suddenly sent people a bunch of text messages that were supposed to go out this past Valentine's Day.

The story has a quiet eerieness to it:

Overnight, a multitude of people received text messages that appear to have originally been sent on or around Valentine’s Day 2019. These people never received the text messages in the first place; the people who sent the messages had no idea that they had never been received, and they did nothing to attempt to resend them overnight.

Some examples are classic haunted media, crossing Gothic boundaries:

Dozens and dozens of people have posted about receiving messages overnight. Most expressed confusion or spoke to the awkwardness of the situation, having been told by friends that they sent a mysterious early-morning text message. A few spoke to much more distressing repercussions of this error: one person said they received a message from an ex-boyfriend who had died; another received messages from a best friend who is now dead.

The reason seems prosaic, if not very impressive technically:

A company named Syniverse, which provides networking services, later took blame for the messages being delayed. Syniverse said a single server was at fault: that server failed on February 14th, trapping messages waiting to be sent out; the server was only brought back online on November 7th. When that happened, all of the messages were finally delivered.

Syniverse initially published a note saying that 168,149 delayed messages were sent. A spokesperson later told The Verge that the company is “still assessing the scope and volume of messages impacted by this server disruption.”

(via MetaFilter)