Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

LOLCthulhu

LOLCthulhu: inevitable, since everything goes better with an elder god.

Submachine: Future Loop Foundation game

Another nice casual game comes in Submachine: Future Loop Foundation.  The grandiose name applies to a quiet point-and-click adventure, where you try to escape from a series of rooms.  It's well done, and not too difficult.  The mood is melancholy and nostalgic.

It's by Mateusz Skutnik, the same creator who did the related, creepy, and more ambitious Daymare Town.  Part of his Submachines sequence.

(via Shut.in, a site devoted to escape-the-room games)

Bank robbery with bomb hostage, a new case

Real life as pulp fiction: the crime scheme of having a bomb strapped to a maybe-innocent, maybe-complicit victim is now a genre.  Another man appeared during a daylight heist, sporting an explosive device, and claiming innocence.  This time it's Florida (of course), rather than Pennsylania:

On Tuesday evening, the man was in the drive-through lane of the bank where he works. The device was strapped to him with duct tape, and he seemed convinced that it was a real bomb, [police Captain] Rode said.

It wasn't clear how the robbery occurred. Authorities said the employee passed a 'significant amount' of money to two men and a woman he claimed had abducted him at gunpoint from his Dania Beach home and brought him to the Wachovia bank branch in downtown Hollywood.

The employee said the alleged kidnappers wore masks, the two men had guns and he could only provide a generic description to investigators, Rode said.

Two relevant posts: the latest on Brian Wells, the collar bomb fellow; puppet mastery, crime, and new technologies.

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Fine Fantomas riff

This eerie little film mixes scenes from a 1913 Fantomas film (F. and the Guillotine's Shadow) and a modern soundtrack (Amon Tobin).

(thanks to Jesse Walker)

Military hackers take down power plant in exercise: CNN

CNN reports that American programmers managed to remotely shut down a power plant.  The "Aurora" exercise was proof of concept, and realizes a favorite information warfare scenario.

How much of this is FUD or a play for local advantage?  Hard to say.  There's a lot of stage management in the report.

RSS as Glu, or the open web versus the CMS

RSS as Glu makes a clear, elegant, and economical distinction between teaching and learning in course management systems, and doing to on the open Web (2.0).  In fact, it's less about RSS in particular as Web 2.0 in general (cited are blogs, wikis, and RSS aggregators). 

It's by Alexander Hayes.

(via George Siemens)

Experiments in reanimation: glimpses from the shadow nineteenth century

Experiments in reanimation: the bioetheric laboratory.  The title alone should whet one's interest.  This is a series of set piece fantasies, Frankensteinian riffs, with 19th-century designs attached to Moreauvian organics.  Whiffs of natural philosophy gone wrong after midnight:

the monkey arm moves!

(via BoingBoing)

A history of modern mashups

"Remix Culture: The Early Years" samples a series of mashups and related art from the past few years.  A useful blitz history - and with a copyright argument at the end.

(via Brian Lamb via his del.icio.us)

Comments about to hit milestone

Comments here at Infocult are about to hit a milestone.  As of today's today the number of comments stood at 1996.  2000 is only a few captchas away!

The pain gun unleashed

A pain gun was demonstrated for journalists by the Raytheon company.  It's called Silent Guardian, and projects a beam of hurting:

It is a bit like touching a red-hot wire, but there is no heat, only the sensation of heat. There is no burn mark or blister.
...anyone in the beam's path will feel, over their entire body, the agonising sensation I've just felt on my fingertip...
"I have been in front of the full-sized system and, believe me, you just run. You don't have time to think about it - you just run," says George Svitak, a Raytheon executive.

How many sf versions of this have we seen?

• From Dune, opening chapter, the agony box with which the Bene Gesserit test Paul.
• From Harry Potter, the cruciatus curse (thank you, my wife)
• Star Trek: the Klingon agonizer!

The abuses are clear: torture in an enclosed space, crowd control.  One could also imagine crowd control as the full range is used, then extended.  Half a mile can cover a lot of people.

The uses for fiction should appear shortly.  One can imagine the Silent Guardian used in horror and suspense stories.  And certainly pornography.

(via BoingBoing)