Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

John Crowley news

Nick Antosca has blogged his interview with awesome writer John Crowley.  Nice bits include the news of an impending fourth and concluding volume in the Aegypt sequence, reflections on teaching, and an appreciation of sf readers.  And Crowley has a LiveJournal.

We noted Crowley's classic short story about digital memory last year.

Telephonic psychedelia from Ma Bell

"The phone is ringing.  It should be answered!"

Jesse Walker came across Telezonia (1974), a manic, deranged, phantasmagoric AT&T instructional film.  It shows children how to workship use the mad god-thing telephone.

Of course parts are disturbing.  The gleeful seduction of children out of daily life reminds me of Big Bunny (Amy Winfrey, sheer genius).  "Hey, let's just jump down this Freudian eruption into our living room!"  The awesome might, magical powers, and sinister capabilities of The Phone Company are right out of the climax of The President's Analyst (1967) (speaking of sheer genius). And ah, the voice of control seeping out of the phone, the dizzying moment as the children find themselves turning towards the thing, looking around for the source of the compulsion, and being instructed in obedience by frantic, costumed, slippery djinns. 

This requires mashup. 

Edoc update

There's a good introduction and update on the Edoclaundry alternate reality game over at ARGN.  I hope I get the time and opportunity to play this one.

Comfort, cycles, and chainsaws: Chuck Palahniuk weighs in

Certain horror films comfort us by their cyclical structure, according to a recent article by Chuck Palahniuk
It's a strange argument.  On the face of it, the idea makes sense, given the comforting nature of many other formulaic or tightly-genre-based works.  Repetition rewards our attention, confirming an older pleasure, extending it mostly in time, with a minimum of variation.  Moreover, we win a sense of superiority, by seeing past the protagonist's perspective, all the way to their gory end  - this connects with the moral layer applied to much of horror

Yet Palahniuk overstates the cyclical nature of some of those stories.  For instance, The Wicker Man (1973) is about an exceptional sacrifice, not a regular one.  The story is about the cycle having been broken, then restored into a shape other than that we've just experienced.  The restoration occurs (or is supposed to) beyond our ken, since we're stuck with the embarrassed, outraged, and terminal perspective of the cop.

Steven Kaye offers a different argument against the comfort-in-cycles thesis, noting that some horror stories punish characters who haven't really made mistakes.  The teens in Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) may be annoying, for example, but don't commit any crime, merely stopping their van in the wrong town.  Palahniuk also links this comforting feeling to news stories about disasters, which surely implies a bizarrely judgemental reading of atrocity! 

Moreover, "the cycle speaks only to a certain kind of horror," Steven tells me, after a pleasant half-hour of wood-chopping, "slasher horror, drawing on Italian giallo."  There's other horror.  S. T. Joshi's study of the weird tale emphasizes unpredictability in such stories, rather than repetition.  It's the moment of opening into possibility, the vertigo of surrealism, that powers such Gothic tales. 

I'm reminded as well of a different plot arc.  Borrowing a bit from Chuck P's framing device of a terminally ill friend, some horror is about evil out of bounds, metasticizing evil, horror erupting out of bounds.  Some vampire stories are all about repetition (Anne Rice's, for example), but the most influential of all, Stoker's Dracula (1897),  concerns breaking that cycle.  The Count will escape his castle, and broaden his parasitical web into a self-reproducing, widening, viral pattern, potentially overwhelming (transforming) humanity at large.  Consider as well Dracula's contemporary, The War of The Worlds, which is about the fall of humanity, rather than, say, a regular raiding party.  (If you don't think this is horror, reread this chapter)

Open source intelligence: SITE in the New Yorker

This week the New Yorker has an interesting profile of an open source intelligence project.  The discussion of SITE is even-handed, and fascinating as a grass-roots, low-resource project.  Reminds me of that PopSci article on low-cost guerrilla operations in Iraq, not to mention that other New Yorker piece about bottom-up, on-demand teaching and learning in Iraq.

A new Grow game: Chronon

The genius behind the Grow games is at it again.  Chronon offers a new twist on these point-and-click, dream-like puzzle games, by building in a timeline.  You can scrub back and forth, solving spatial puzzles by moving pieces along a chronology.  Very unusual concept.

No, I haven't finished it yet.

(via MetaFilter)

Information warfare in Iraq: problems showing through

Picking his way through the crumbling houses of Ad Duluiyah, Feldmayer is tied to the American grid by only the thinnest of threads.

Popular Science reports on problems with information-centric warfare in Iraq.  Issues include out of date maps, limited access, overloaded channels, hardware failures.  Some workable successes are patrol-level visualization and browser-based fora (as the New Yorker noted more than a year ago).

Meanwhile, the guerrillas seem to be ahead in the network-centric game:

Using disposable cellphones, anonymous e-mail addresses at public Internet cafés, and “lessons learned” Web sites that rival Cavnet, disparate guerrilla groups coordinate attacks, share tactics, hire bomb makers, and draw in fresh recruits. It’s an ad hoc, constantly changing web of connections, so it’s hard for U.S. spooks to know where to listen in next. It also lets the insurgents keep a loose command structure, without much hierarchy—just like the network-centric theorists call for.

(via MetaFilter)

Distributed wireless sensor arrays: on the Ho Chi Minh Trail

A distributed sensor array, communicated results wirelessly to a database... starting in 1967.  The United States Air Force launched Operation Igloo White, which placed numerous sensors along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.  Each device, camoflagued, sent signals to aircraft, which ferried the results to an IBM 360.

(via MetaFilter)

Killer spam

Weird, weird spam of the day award:

Some people are alive only because it is illegal to kill them

Rest of the message had nothing to do with it.  Of course.

Murder suspect via blog in Florida

BoingBoing reports on a case in Florida, where university police pursue a grad student because of horror fiction he wrote on his blog.  Notice how the Columbine killings return as a symbol of internet violence.  Interesting how the accused writer thinks it's a Wikipedia connection, but that that has no traction with the police.

Once again, the murder-blog connection persists.