Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

One year of Infocult

Infocult has been running for one year, now, having launched in August 2003. Thanks for following along!

Web pages to make you jump

More samples of Web page horror here and here. It's a staple, now, the Web page with the innocent-looking initial image, followed by the double whammy of scary image and loud music.

(thanks to Grace and Thomas)

Storytelling by blog

Another story by blog: "The LiveJournal of Zachary Marsh" does a Lovecraft story, complete with emoticons, IMming, and links to interesting Websites.

[ mood  | scared ]
[ music | The Music of Erich Zann ]

Clearly the epistolary form is viable, or the epistolary-diary one.

(thanks to Jesse)

Novel as blog: Roommate from Hell

Jill points out Roommate from Hell, a novel told as a blog, from Jim Munroe.

One could compare this with some preexisting novels repurposed as blogs, like this rereading of Joyce's Ulysses.  Or other long prose works, such as the Pepys diary blog or the Da Vinci notebooks reading.

Jill starts off the commentary:

It uses the project blog idea, which is rather like the basis of an epistolary novel: there has to be a reason why the narrator starts writing letters and a fictional audience to whom the letters are addressed. Here, the fictional audience merges with us, the real audience. An epistolary novel only ends when the letters end, and traditionally, they only end when the narrator or the fictional recipient dies, or of course, when the narrator marries the recipient, or one of the recipients.

It starts here.

Daypop bursts for today

This morning's Daypop wordburst net poetry continues to limn cyberculture's preoccupations. More surrealism:

cambodia, mildewy; goss; fay, wray; heimlich, hecht;
osce; counterfeiting; lodged; chalabis; bmw;
carpetbagger; kennebunkport; testifies; tsunami

I like the way the words circle around topics with unnamed keywords: Bush, Kerry, Iraq.

Office zombies versus the stapler: new Web game from Sweden

Speaking of the living dead, here's more Swedish Gothic madness, in a game where you play the only living office worker in a building full of bloodthirsty zombie ex-co-workers.

You know that feeling when you return from the restroom and all your co-workers' brains have exploded, and they have been tranformed into blood-thirsty zombies, infected by an intergalactic computer virus disguised as check-this-out mail attachment?

What else can you do but attack?

I'm thinking about recent stories of Swedish computer-media horror and the uncanny, fictional and non-.

(via BoingBoing)

Great horror film location: Chernobyl

Considering the options for horror movie settings, isn't Chernobyl a fine coup de theater?

The zombie-free Chernobyl scenes are for the opening, in which a rogue ex-CIA agent is seen stealing the world's last five canisters of Trioxyn gas, the lifeblood of the living dead.

"Chernobyl is very spooky and serves our purpose -- we are shooting in all these abandoned towns and villages, with rusting equipment lying around everywhere," Fradis says.

The sense of a post-apocalyptic world dawns as we follow the Chaika around the Chernobyl district.

Grass and shrubs sprout from holes in the sides of crumbling cottages. A graveyard for helicopters, fire trucks and other equipment used in the cleanup operation in 1986 stretches beside a road. In Pripyat, the deserted town that once housed the reactor's work force and their families, children's toys still litter the rubbish-strewn kindergarten, and fading Soviet slogans adorn the sides of gaunt concrete apartment blocks.

(thanks to Len)

WIPO supporting intellectual property for the developing world

In today's iteration of the global intellectual property struggles, we learn from the latest update from the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), we learn about the continuing drive to include developing world cultures within the intellectual property framework:

WIPO’s current work is aimed at developing a shared understanding of how best to develop and apply the principles of the intellectual property system to serve the interests articulated by holders of TK and custodians of TCEs," [director Idris] added.

As others have pointed out, modern, western intellectual property reflects but one form of cultural organization.

IMDB: a history

Nikki Finke's history of the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) takes us from its personal database origins through the Amazon buyout, up to the present day.

Also this week, the glorious ResourceShelf points us to a fine, focused, "deceptively simply" movie reviews database, the MRQE.

Information war: the al Qaeda virtual state

An article in last week's New Yorker describes the emergence of a global al Qaeda virtual community. I've blogged about this at Smartmobs, but wanted to add this final formulation here - global guerrillas, the next step?

As long as Al Qaeda is seen as being an irrational, unyielding death cult, the only response is to destroy it. But if Al Qaeda—amorphous as that entity has become—has evolved into something like a virtual Islamist state that is trying to find a permanent place for itself in the actual world, then the prospect of future negotiations is not out of the question, however unlikely or repellent that may sound to Americans.

(emphasis added)
The next stage of information warfare?
(thanks to Howard)