Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Ghost airport and train station in Germany

Germany's Brandenburg Willy Brandt Airport (BER) currently stands as a monument to bad project management and epic construction delays.  Years behind schedule and billions of Euros over budget, the thing has never been used and still hasn't opened.  As a result, it might be a ghost airport.

This BBC article offers the monicker.

Dozens of gates are ready for aeroplanes to pull in. Information screens display simulated real-time flight information. Gleaming terminals stand waiting for passengers to walk through them. Berlin’s Brandenburg Willy Brandt Airport (BER) looks exactly like every other major modern airport in Europe, except for one big problem: more than seven years after it was originally supposed to open, it still stands empty. There are no passengers using it.

One photo:

The caption for that photo read: "Empty 'ghost' trains run into the airport’s station every weekday to keep it properly ventilated."

Which is appropriate, since those trains now serve a ghost train station.  Entertainingly, there's a German word for this: Geisterbahnhöfe. Wikipedia helpfully explains that "Ghost stations is the usual English translation..."  More:

This term was used to describe certain stations on Berlin's U-Bahn and S-Bahn metro networks that were closed during the period of Berlin's division during the Cold War. Since then, the term has come to be used to describe any disused station actively passed through by passenger trains, especially those on an underground railway line. Sometimes the term is also employed for unused underground stations not passed by trains.

Infocult: in your infrastructure, around the world.

 

The night the teeth were found in Georgia

Construction workers in Valdosta, Georgia were demolishing an old building when the made a Gothic discovery.

Within a wall were... teeth.  Hundreds of human teeth.

The tentative explanation offered by the Valdosta Daily Times is that a tenant one hundred years ago was a dentist. Why they'd stash a thousand teeth in a wall remains a mystery.

(thanks to Steven "The Extractor" Kaye)

"Alexa, please creep me out."

For the Halloween techno-dread season, enjoy this two minute short, "Whisper."

 

 

("Echo, please thank Elena Clark")

When your phone reaches out to touch someone

MobiLimb is a smartphone attachment.  It consists of an artificial finger that can move around and do things, including creeping out most of the human race. 

And yes, you can choose between a matte black tech-style finger or one with human flesh-like covering.

According to Engadget:

On the less creepy side, MobiLimb can be used to prop up a phone when you're watching a video, control phone settings and provide an additional way to grip your device. But on the extra creepy side, it can caress your arm as you hold your phone or be dressed to look like a human finger.

Best nickname?  David Phonenberg.

Infocult: describing your world with our own special touch.

(via Elena Clark and MetaFilter)

The death comet returns

Asteroid 2015 TB145 is due to fly past the Earth again in early November.  Due to its charming shape and features, we know 2015 TB145 by other names, like "Spooky," "death comet," "the Halloween comet," and "the Great Pumpkin."

 

Naturally Infocult has already addressed 2015 TB145 last year.

(thanks to Chris Lott)

A new exhibit of skulls

The New York Times offers an excellent survey of a new, skull-themed exhibit from France.  Throughout her adult life Mathilde de Rothschild collected skull art, and the results are now on display in the Fondation Bemberg Musée in Toulouse.

(thanks to Tim Lepczyk via Twitter)

An Instagram death meme

From the frantic quest for Instagram fame comes a new idea.  Users ask followers to add "RIP" in their comments.

An early one framed this as a solution to a bad relationship:

Another use is more prosaic:

Another comment, on the "sneakernews" Instagram page (which has 7.5 million followers), "riccardomancaa" said, "Can y'all comment RIP on my latest photo so people think I'm dead and so I cannot go to school."

There's a playful, game-like aspect to this:

Karen North, a clinical professor of communication at USC Annenberg [explains:] "Because that's not part of a game. The game is to get people to comment, and the other game is to get people to fall for the fake report of your death."

Any medium will eventually turn to stories of death.  Any medium can be used for fakery and hoaxes.  It follows that the two can coincide.

(thanks to Elena Clark)

Scary clown story from Britain

Two British boys reported a disturbing encounter with a clown.

The boys were cycling in Joyden's Wood, near Dartford, when they were met by the clown.

They told police that he shouted "run or die!" and held something 'which looked like a knife'.

Perhaps it's a one-off, but it could also be a sign of another clown panic, a la 2016.

(thanks to Jesse "honk honk" Walker)

When generational relations turn Gothic

The most Gothic form of intergenerational tensions has become a rising business sector.  Wired reports on the boom in parabiosis companies: firms using young people's blood to address old folks' health problems.

There are many gory and hilarious aspects to this business.  Think of this finding from one startup, the vampirically named Ambrosia:“We measured 113 biomarkers 30 days after the transfusion and we saw a durable, but not permanent, effect".  i.e., a one-time shot of young blood isn't enough.  Something continuous is in order.

Or consider this brain function aspect: "Wyss-Coray, who worked next door to the lab where Wager began her parabiosis studies, showed in his own mouse-enstein experiments that young blood could improve memory and learning in older rodents."  There's something... poetic? ironic? about an older generation that criticizes a younger for having no attention span, then using the latter's blood to improve their own mental functioning.

Sadly, no one has selected the name Báthory for their brand.  Infocult wishes to offer this idea for any marketer, free of charge.

The world is Gothic, when you look at it the right way.

A sinkhole gallery

The Atlantic Monthly offers an impressive gallery of the many ways Gaea wars on the human race.  These instances range greatly in scale, from holes small enough to nibble a car to those large enough to puncture a city.

This Bosnian sinkhole looks like the start of an invasion:

While this classic Guatemala sinkhole appears like something from science fiction:

And this is just the best line:

[O]n July 19, 2011... Inocenta del Rosal Hernandez, 65, awoke to a loud boom and found the earth under her bed had imploded...

(via MetaFilter)

The book of hidden poisons

Open Culture reports on a seventeenth century book that contains more than one might suspect.

It's a pharmacopeia with more than words.  On the outside, a lovely book:

On the inside?  What an auction dubbed a "hollow book used as secret poison cabinet":

 

Each drawer is labeled with the herb inside.  Also, from the auction page:

Incl. greenish bottle bearing the label "Statutum est hominibus semel mori" ("It is a fact that man must die one day").

Infocult has a library.

(thanks to Jesse Walker)

 

When transportation turns Gothic

A British sign:

Through punctuation or copy and paste, the world becomes Gothic.

Human-made sneaky hole eats a visitor

In 1992 artist Anish Kapoor created a work of art featuring a deep hole.  The hole was coated with black paint, giving it the impression of bottomlessness, or of sheer impossibility. All was art, until a person stepped into it.

The work, Descent into Limbo (1992), consists of a cube-shaped building, which can be entered by visitors, with a circular hole in the centre of its floor. The sides of the hole are coated in black pigment, giving the illusion of a depthless void.

No word from Earth, who is apparently countering with more sinkholes. 

(thanks to Ed Webb)

15 years of Infocult

On August 12th, 2003, Infocult was born. 

It didn't struggle to the earth's surface like an ancient monster bricked up by lost civilizations since time immemorial.  Infocult didn't manifest from unholy rites conducted in forbidden military installations.  Infocult didn't whisper uncannily  from that digital speaker you were convinced you'd turned off just before you went to sleep.

Instead, this blog began fifteen years ago with two posts.  In fact, we commenced with an abiding interest in blogging and what we then called "Web 2.0."  Revisiting these oldest entries summons up fragments of the 21st century's first years, before Facebook, the iPhone, and president Trump.

The site's design hasn't changed much.  It still looks like the pre-WordPress, pre-mobile web.

When I think of this blog's arc over the past decade and a half, I imagine it focused on three things, the site's unholy trinity:

1. The ways we fear technologies
2. Gothic texts
3. Real-life Gothic horror

Scrolling back over the teeming archives confirms this, but also adds much more.  There was an interest in the history of information.  Gaming and/as storytelling cropped up for a time, as did Web 2.0 storytelling.  Copyright was nearly an obsession for a few years.

Over time those faded out as the unholy trinity grew to rule the blog.  I think this happened for personal and professional reasons.  I started up a blog on the NITLE site and devoted time to that, and so the new blog soaked up some of my interest in education and technology topics.  (That blog disappeared during NITLE's last years, when the entire site was replaced with a handful of new pages; since then the domain has gone unowned.) Then I started my own blog, and that picked up still more of those interests and my time.

Infocult became my Gothic remnant, the skeleton remaining once the flesh has migrated... elsewhere.  And the skeleton has grown in its own way as the times have changed.  We pay attention to creepy clowns and sinkholes, along with the mysterious severed foot plague.  Infocult is halfway to Charles Fort.

It's not as popular as my professional blog.  Comments rarely occur.  I'm not sure of when someone last linked here.

Yet people keep suggesting stories.  Jesse Walker, Steven Kaye, Ed Webb, Todd Bryant, Randy McCall, Thomas Burkdall have generously emailed me creepy accounts.  So has my family.  It's a bit disturbing to think that Infocult began when my daughter was 7; she's now 22.  Brian Lamb exhorted a terrified Vancouver audience to read here. Jim Groom has loved this blog with his B-movie heart. And Andrew Connell has made Infocult's Draculablog possible.

It's as if Infocult occupies a quiet corner of the shambling web, persistently chronicling dread and horror, kept afloat by my obsessions and those of some friends.  And that's fine.

Thank you for fifteen terrifying years, friends.  Onward!

 

Real world Gothic: a surprise body discovery in LA

An attentive grocery store manager in Los Angeles noticed a bad smell coming from a column inside their store.  Looking into it yielded an Infocult story:

Around 2:30 p.m., the manager of the store on the 700 block of West Avenue K reported a strong smell from the column. He called a repairman thinking it was some type of sewer leak. 

A handyman and plumber began removing bricks and soon afterward, they noticed a shoe and leg inside the grocery store column. 

What backstory could have led to this grim event?

[The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department] believe[s] it may be the body of a suspect who escaped from a traffic stop on Monday night.  

The driver was pulled over for a fake license plate, crashed the car, escaped onto the Winco roof and then disappeared. 

"He may have gotten inside there and gotten down to try and hide from the deputies and then couldn't get out," Corina said. 

There is an access door on top of the roof and the suspect may have fallen or got stuck and was found five days later, according to the sheriff's department. 

Infocult: lurking within buildings, waiting to be discovered.