Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Cold War Gothic: submarine subsurface secrets

This week's Cold War Gothic: photos of an underground Soviet submarine base.  It's in Balaklava, and now open for tours, burrowing under a mountain, through tunnels and hidden spaces:

(via MeFi)

MySpace versus murder, for a change

MySpace played a heroic role this week, quite different from its customary villainy.  After being tipped off, police officers scanned high school student MySpaces to find hints of an impending school shooting.

Revisiting the repression issue

I don't think the blogosphere is breeding cannibals. But...

The Wall Street Journal has an editorial about the scary Web, in reaction to the recent cannibalism and social software debacle. It's a handy summary of blogging fears, along with the now-obligatory MySpace terror.  Pop music and cable tv show up for flavor and historical continuity.

Henninger reminds me of Christina Rosen, running a conservative social agenda under the banner of seemingly apolitical technology crit.

Delwiche to Terra Nova

Game scholar and fine teacher Aaron Delwiche just joined the Terra Nova gaming blog team.  Congrats, Aaron!

Thank you, Walla Walla airport

I am enjoying free, decently fast WiFi at the Walla Walla airport.  Kudos to the people who organized that!
The airport provices this through Pocket iNet.  Thanks, guys.

Decent, free WiFi is still a hard thing to come by in American airports.  It's 2006, isn't it?

Podcast interview for Gnosh

A podcast interview with myself and Mike Richwalsky is now up on the Educause site.  Matt Pasiewicz asks us about Gnosh, the splendid social search tool for which Mike's been the project lead.

This took place at the April CNI meeting in Arlington.

History of pre-digital, pre-internet computing

Howard spotted this nifty history of largely pre-digital computing projects.  It's helpful to see the arc of time from quipu through ENIAC.

Another new Web book: http://www.controlandfreedom.net

Control and Freedom is a new book about digital surveillance, privacy, and related matters.  While you can buy the MIT Press hardcover, the book's website is well worth the trip.  There's a great deal of content, but also some fun extras, like one chapter's concept map, an Avital Ronnell-worthy mouseover hypertext, and the most (intentionally) entertaining EULA in years.

(via Grand Text Auto)

Why email isn't dead yet

Central Desktop Blog offers a series of powerful arguments explaining email's persistent use as social software.  Why isn't email dead?  Usability, near-ubiquity, personalization.

I disagree with a couple of points.
  First, the "email is available everywhere" line, which breaks upon the reality of American access - i.e,, the uneven distribution of broadband, rare deployments of WiFi, the difficulty of checking email on a cell, and so on.
  Second, email is not in your face.  It's trapped safely in browsers or fat desktop apps, doesn't intriduce in your experience unless you deliberately set it, and is so laden with extra functions and screen real estate as to blend into the browser or desktop.

Interesting, too, to read in combination with the recent Pew study finding women more comfortable with email than men.

(via Brian Lamb)

Blogger as cannibal

Blogging and cannibalism: an alleged murderer blogged about cannibalism, before telling police he intended to dismember and eat the victim.  Kevin Underwood apparently didn't get to make his meal, but the girl was killed and her body kept in a container.

Blogging: a Blogger account, the appropriately titled Strange Things are Afoot at the Circle K.  It now has more than 500 comments attached to the last post, expressing horror, disgust, rage, disdain, and schadenfreude.

He also maintained a Myspace account, Subspecies23.  The main page is down ("This profile is undergoing routine maintenance" - routine? this sort of thing happens frequently?), but this entry now holds a string of comments replying to the arrest news.  It's a fascinating mix of religious commentary and homophobia.  No, he is not accused of killing someone of the same gender.

His Yahoo profile doesn't have much, beyond the picture we're using in this post.  But it does have this perhaps-accidentally revealing line:

Hobbies:     Reading, writing, surfing the internet, martial arts, listening to lots of music, watching movies, Anime, Manga, anything to do with Japan, and ummm, other stuff..

There's a gaming angle, of course.  The CNN story notes that the fellow liked to play Kingdom of Loathing.  I really hope this detail doesn't find its way into gaming-is-evil discourse, but it might.  The MySpace account should appear in the growing anti-MySpace meme.

The CNN account is a small gem of true crime writing.  Note the prominent description of Underwood was "boring" (well, he showed them, eh?).  And the extensive description offered by a police officer:

"Regarding a potential motive," Purcell Police Chief David Tompkins said Saturday, "this appears to have been part of a plan to kidnap a person, rape them, torture them, kill them, cut off their head, drain the body of blood, rape the corpse, eat the corpse then dispose of the organs and bones."

Is that a motive, per se?

We've noted an earlier instance of cannibaliam and social software, way back in 2003.

(thanks, Sean Collins)