Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Underground world beneath the bike rack

A mysterious underground chamber can be found right beneath this Tokyo bike rack.  I love the Lovecraftian ambience around the first glimpse of the stairs going down.  And the sad little soccer ball, bouncing into the depths.

(via Pink Tentacle)

This is a clever idea: retelling DC comic book villains' stories in the style of Little Nemo.  And narrated by the villain Lex Luthor:

(thanks, Lee Graham)

High Tech Noon: Better than Firefly

"High Tech Noon" is a fun mix of High Noon (1952) with sf and gaming visual and audio effects.

Much better than Firefly.

(via MetaFilter)

Scenario building as scenario building

Jamais Cascio reveals futurism's secret: dungeon-mastering Dungeons and Dragons helps you build futures scenarios.  It makes all kinds of sense.  The scenario-runner is both situations aggregates and creates a stack of materials, manages the social interactions of participants, deals with eventualities.

Via IM Steven Kaye points out to me that running a game is no guarantor of being a fine futurist.  Quite true.  Think of the experience as a dojo for futurists, a field for learning, rather than an automatic sign of achievement.

If it's confessions time, I admit that running Call of Cthulhu campaigns is my gaming inspiration.  It has the underground nature of D+D, plus madness.  And books.

Stories of vertical transports

An article about the elevator world, "Up and Then Down", is surprisingly mysterious, haunting, funny, and even melancholy.  Samples:

"When you’re waiting for a ride, you don’t think that what lurks behind the outer doors is emptiness. Every so often, a door opens when it shouldn’t and someone steps into the void. This is worth keeping in mind." 

"Loading up an empty elevator car with discarded Christmas trees, pressing the button for the top floor, then throwing in a match, so that by the time the car reaches the top it is ablaze with heat so intense that the alloy (called “babbitt”) connecting the cables to the car melts, and the car, a fireball now, plunges into the pit: this practice, apparently popular in New York City housing projects, is inadvisable." 

And from the framing story, about a man trapped in an elevator for more than a day, this Gothic touch:

"At a certain point, he decided to open the doors. He pried them apart and held them open with his foot. He was presented with a cinder-block wall on which, perfectly centered, were scrawled three “13”s—one in chalk, one in red paint, one in black."

The author is Nick Paumgarten.

(via MetaFilter)

Russia after the end: the pleasure of ruins

This image project imagines Russian sites after a terrible calamity.  For example, after a deluge:

To be more accurate, some of the images depict cataclysms in process - i.e., explosions hitting buildings.

Needle-in-sausage-package update

Updating the food tampering story: the grocery store is investigating.  We received two phone calls.  The first was a bit disturbing, with a staff member asking us questions indicating he was clearly uninformed about the case.  Later in the day a second staffer called, demonstrating far more competence, and indicating that he thought this an isolated incident.  Investigations continue.

We also informed our lawyer, and The Consumerist.

I'm definitely far more nervous as I open every container from a store: orange juice, cheese, whatever.  And feel more confident in the food we've made (eggs, goat).

Web 2.0 feedback continues to be excellent.  We've gotten a stream of advice and support from kind folks via comments on the previous blog post, via responses to my Twitter feed, and by Flickr.  Crowdsourcing how to handle this has been very beneficial.  Among other things, these replies are reassuring emotionally and practically.  I don't know where this goes next, but it's already a useful example of social software helping offline life.

Here's a photo of the package, right after discovery.  Needle positioned over ironic label for greater visibility:

Here's the needle alongside a US coin, for scale:

More updates as they come.

Hacking your brain: TED MRI loop talk

"Bryan, why do you read science fiction?"  I still get this question.  Here's one answer: to keep up with the present.  Check out this video about an improved feedback loop, whereby patients can watch their brain activity in real time, and respond:

(thanks, little brother)

Beware the Tokyo Gore Police

Tokyo Gore Police is an impending horror movie which has some kind of plot.  But it's this trailer - oh yes, so NSFW - that's worth watching, for sheer gonzo Asian Gothic who-knows-what? madness:

(via Warren Ellis)

Irony is a zombie, otherwise we wouldn't have to keep killing the thing

From the BBC:

An Italian woman artist who was hitch-hiking to the Middle East dressed as a bride to promote world peace has been found murdered in Turkey.

The naked body of Giuseppina Pasqualino di Marineo, 33, known as Pippa Bacca, was found in bushes near the northern city of Gebze on Friday.

She had said she wanted to show that she could put her trust in the kindness of local people.