Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

The five scariest films: the New Yorker broods

The five scariest movies: a decent list from the New Yorker.   I'm glad the author (and the brain trust behind the article) doesn't focus on one period.  Bonus points for picking Night of the Hunter. 

Some classic suspects, hard to argue with: Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Silence of the Lambs.

And two inspired choices.  The Body Snatcher seems to stand in for a generation of classic horror.  And Mulholland Drive - if the idea was to pick Lynch, I'd have gone for the first third of Lost Highway, for scenes like this one:

The article also has a nice point about the demographics of horror. It certainly chimes in with my experience of teaching Gothic lit.

The idea of the article makes for a good game.  Which five - only 5 - would you pick?

World of eQaedaCraft

Plotting terror attacks in World of Warcraft: it was inevitable that someone would float the idea.  It combines the ever-popular eQaeda meme (virtual jihadis) with the as-yet underdeveloped fear of massively multiplayer online games.  I'm just catching up to this one, but it's a goodie:

[T]wo World of Warcraft players discuss a raid on the "White Keep" inside the "Stonetalon Mountains." The major objective is to set off a "Dragon Fire spell" inside, and make off with "110 Gold and 234 Silver" in treasure. "No one will dance there for a hundred years after this spell is cast," one player, "war_monger," crows.

Except, in this case, the White Keep is at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. "Dragon Fire" is an unconventional weapon. And "110 Gold and 234 Silver" tells the plotters how to align the game's map with one of Washington, D.C.

(thanks to Todd Bryant and everyone else)

The universe has a drain, and galaxies flow darkly to it

"Dark flows": a rich term, describing vast mysterious movements of cosmic matter.

Patches of matter in the universe seem to be moving at very high speeds and in a uniform direction that can't be explained by any of the known gravitational forces in the observable universe. 

Why the ominous name?

Kashlinsky calls this collective motion a "dark flow" in the vein of more familiar cosmological mysteries: dark energy and dark matter. "The distribution of matter in the observed universe cannot account for this motion," he says.

And where are these titanic streams of galactic clusters heading?  Right about here:

What to make of this?  We can enjoy reflections like this one:

The scientists deduced that whatever is driving the movements of the clusters must lie beyond the known universe.

Or we could cue up the wildest, most universe-smashing dreams of space opera (Steven Baxter alert!).  Or summon up nightmarish horrors from, well, beyond space, if not time. 

(via MetaFilter)

Connectivism, the dark side

The dark side of connectivism:

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents...
[S]ome day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age..."

Lovecraft - The Call of Cthulhu

Nicely done, professor Webb.

In a sense, this is a reflection of what lies beneath much of the antidemocratic resistance to the Web.

50 fine villains, all in a row

A decent list, this 50 Greatest Villains.  A very nice sampling from the full Gothic tradition, and also the Jacobean Revenge tragedies.  Good to see The Judge there (if you haven't read Blood Meridian, do so at once).

I do agree with the MetaFilterians, that it's a very bad move to leave out Richard III.  Shakespeare's, that is.

#2 is a surprise.  Poor rabbits (no, not Woundwart).

Polar bears, cannibalism, and global warming: together at last

More Gothic Arctic horror:

"The Arctic sea ice melt is a disaster for the polar bears," according to Kassie Siegel, staff attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity. "They are dependent on the Arctic sea ice for all of their essential behaviors, and as the ice melts and global warming transforms the Arctic, polar bears are starving, drowning, even resorting to cannibalism because they don't have access to their usual food sources."

Scientists have noticed increasing reports of starving Arctic polar bears attacking and feeding on one another in recent years. In one documented 2004 incident in northern Alaska, a male bear broke into a female's den and killed her.

America's economy peers into the abyss, and dark metaphors gaze right back

As the economic crisis seizes the American imagination, we turn to horrific and grotesque language to grapple with it. 

There's the toilet metaphor, showing the economy as, well, a pile of crap:

The heavy use of the plumbing metaphor almost makes one picture Paulson with his pants riding down a couple inches, leaning over a financial toilet bowl. It is clogged with unwanted securities backed by mortgages, supposedly because the sellers cannot find any buyers.

That's a pretty limited version, though.  Although scatological, it's not at Rabelasian levels, suggesting some optimism remains.  The blogger is holding back instead of cutting loose, being rhetorically continent, clenching the... you get the idea.

John Robb offers a less sphincter-minded metaphor, but one drawing on a political vision familiar to Gothic readers.  It's the bad state - not a tyranny, but a doddering scam presiding over dangerous villains:

The hollow state has the trappings of a modern nation-state ("leaders", membership in international organizations, regulations, laws, and a bureaucracy) but it lacks any of the legitimacy, services, and control of its historical counter-part. It is merely a shell that has some influence over the spoils of the economy. The real power rests in the hands of corporations and criminal/guerrilla groups that vie with each other for control of sectors of wealth production. For the individual living within this state, life goes on, but it is debased in a myriad of ways.[emphases added]

Notice the language of simulation and emptiness suggested by the language of hollow shells.  it reminds me of this haunting, possibly accidental phrase from an economist's blog posting:

Taxpayers lose any chance of being made whole

Next, Jonathan Lethem finds echoes of our crisis in Gothic Gotham city, in an editorial titled "Art of Darkness" (thanks to Barbara Fister for the tip):

so many real things lie in ruins: a corporate paradigm displaying no shred of responsibility, but eager for rescue by taxpayers; a military leadership’s implicit promise to its recruits and their families; a public discourse commodified into channels that feed any given preacher’s resentments to a self-selecting chorus. In these déjà vu battles, the combatants forever escape one another’s final judgment, whirl off into the void, leaving us standing awed in the rubble, uncertain of what we’ve seen, only sure we’re primed for the sequel.

If everything is broken, perhaps it is because for the moment we like it better that way. Unlike some others, I have no theory who Batman is — but the Joker is us. [emphasis added]

We've already had other Gothic language: the economy as Frankenstein, and the Nigerian scam/Web 2.0 mix.

The sheer complexity of these problems might help explain why this rhetorical move is so compelling.  But it's also the fact that this crisis is, to pick up the first metaphor, some scary shit.

MicroGothic tales from The Shadow of the Wind

I love one beautifully digressive habit in The Shadow of the Wind (2001).  Carlos Ruiz Zafón enjoys tossing off short glimpses of fantastic tales, micro-micro-Gothic-narratives worthy of fuller exploration.  They get tied up and shut down right away, never returned to.

Here are a few samples:

"People love to gossip, don't they?  But not me.  All I know is that once Julian told the kids in the building that he had a sister only he could see.  He said she came out of mirrors as if she were made of thing air and that she lived with Satan himself in a palace at the bottom of a lake.  My Isabelita had nightmares for a whole month." (119)

Fun kids!  But we don't see that sister ever again.

I... was about to turn down the avenue when I looked up and saw Tibidabo Mountain awakening behind the clouds of gauze.  Suddenly I felt like taking the funicular up the hill to visit the old amusement park crowning its top and wander among its merry-go-rounds and the eerie automaton halls, but I had promised to be back in the bookshop on time. (147)

Naturally we never return to that steampunkish hilltop.

The dreams began with that mysterious fever, which some blamed on the sting of a huge red scorpion that appeared in the house one day and was never seen again, and others on the evil designs of a mad nun who crept into houses at night to poison children and who, years later, was to be garroted reciting the Lord's Prayer backward with her eyes popping out of their sockets, while a red cloud spread over the town and discharged a storm of dead cockroaches. (260)

Neither nun nor scorpion reappear.  But what a sentence!

This habit reminds me of Kilgore Trout's one-paragraph novel-stories.  Among other things.  Is there a term for it?

America becomes a Nigerian email scam

The economy jumps the shark, and already the internet satire kicks in. 

First,

Dear American:

I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude.

I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion dollars US. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you.

I am working with Mr. Phil Gram, lobbyist for UBS, who will be my replacement as Ministry of the Treasury in January. As a Senator, you may know him as the leader of the American banking deregulation movement in the 1990s. This transactin is 100% safe.

This is a matter of great urgency. We need a blank check. We need the funds as quickly as possible. We cannot directly transfer these funds in the names of our close friends because we are constantly under surveillance. My family lawyer advised me that I should look for a reliable and trustworthy person who will act as a next of kin so the funds can be transferred.

Please reply with all of your bank account, IRA and college fund account numbers and those of your children and grandchildren to wallstreetbailout@treasury.gov so that we may transfer your commission for this transaction. After I receive that information, I will respond with detailed information about safeguards that will be used to protect the funds.

Yours Faithfully Minister of Treasury Paulson

(copy found here)

Then there's the bailout, Web 2.0 style: BuyMyShitpile.com.

LOLcats aren't far behind:

Time to get working for Halloween

This guide to making Halloween jars is splendid.  The concepts is elegant, and the costs are next to nothing.

I also admire the storytelling emphasis, especially on the mysteries and questions good labeling elicit.

Let's make a bunch!

(thanks to Tom Haymes)