Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Fun around Philadelphia

I just had a very weird travel experience.  I was trying to get to Philadelphia's airport from my hotel, where I'd stayed around conducted the emerging technologies workshop.  The van service, called Tropiano, ran late.  Then later still.  When I called to check and complain, the Tropiano dispatcher hollered at me for bothering them.

The van arrived, after I spent close to an hour cooling my heels outside a hotel.

I'm constantly reminded of just how dependent the high-tech world is on these industrial connections, car and highway, which fill the gaps between our internet connections.

I blog this here as a warning or caution.  I wonder if any Trop rep will reply, or any other person comment?

Good Gothic podcast: "Sacred Skin"

The latest horror podcast from Pseudopod, "Sacred Skin", is very good.  A nicely done short story, taking place in the end of a British aristocratic family, turning on a productive connection between class and the occult.  Very well read, too.

I've been enjoying Pseudopod since it launched, and wish them the best.

Fear the ubicomp spime: Bruce Sterling's keynote

A glimpse of fear about ubiquitous computing comes from Bruce Sterling's 2006 Ubicomp conference keynote:

Now, you could run this system without the recycling aspects... You just run it and pour goods out the far end.  But if you did that, it's so much more efficient than today's industrial methods that it would kill you more quickly.
The abuse potentials for spimes are, frankly, colossal.  Ubicomp is dangerous.  Spimes are dangerous.  On the other hand, the world as we know it is not sustainable.

Filed as one anxiety (out of many) forthcoming about the internet of things.

The shadowy stranger in your brain

Gothic science update: a team has found how to trigger a certain creepy feeling.  The sense of a person nearby, perhaps just behind you, can be sparked by sending electrical current into a certain part of the brain.

Though the woman had no history of psychological problems, she repeatedly perceived a "shadow person" hovering behind her when doctors electrically stimulated an area of her brain called the left temporoparietal junction.

The article itself is quietly disturbing, including the subject's reports of the shadowman interfering with the tests.

If this pans out, when will we see military and policing applications?  Or will installation art be first to market?

Still more browser games: Pokku's Friend

Pokku's Friend is yet another browser-based point-and-click adventure game, from the same team that published Wheat Straw Girl.  Like that game, Pokku's Friend has striking images and sound; different is greater gameplay complexity (relatively).  It's also lighter in tone, being more whimsical and playful.

(we owe it all to the Wyvern)

More browser game fun: Wheat Straw Girl

Wheat Straw Girl is another browser-based game of exploration.  This one has smaller puzzle dynamics than most, and seems more concerned about the aesthetic effect.  The latter is driven by strong background music, and a fascinating visual style.  An ominous air comes off of Wheat Straw Girl in waves, and is deepened by at least one jarring narrative ending.  It's more like The Phone, in other words.

(another one via the discerning eagle eye of the Blue Wyvern)

More browser game fun: Haluz

Haluz is a new browser-based game, in the mold of Samorost 1 and 2.  There's a narrative, constructed in picaresque episodes.  The tone is calm and whimsical, like the Polyphonic Spree game or Treasurebox.

(via Blue Wyvern, and more coming from that delightful source)

Cell phone worries in the UK

Spiked is hosting a series of articles about mobile phones fears.  Start with this one.
So far the tone has been measured and not panicky.

(thanks, Jesse)

Fun picnic looms

This is a meeting I really wish I could attend.  I'm too busy, and it's too far away (Europa).  But it does look like fun: creativity, social media, some ARGery.

I will content myself with following its blog.

Picking up the quipu belatedly

A quick note on the quipu: apparently its informational nature wasn't known by westerners until very, very recently.  From a good review of 1491:

despite many clues in post-conquest sources (often written by Spanish colonial leaders or clergy), scholars only realized in the late 1990s that the bunches of intricately knotted strings produced by the Inka actually represent a writing system yielding three-dimensional written texts. The first systematic analysis of the grammar of the khipu code did not appear until 2003. As the Western Michigan University historian Catherine Julien explains, the chance now exists that we “may be able to hear the Inkas for the first time in their own voice.”