Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

2008: the year in Infocult

It's the end of December, so time to consider the year's highlights.  Favorite Infocult topics from 2008 cover a variety of horrible grounds:

• Gothic in everyday life.  We've seen it in innocent cornfields and human flesh powering cars.  Cannibalism is always a favorite.  New developments: horror language in the presidential election, and concerning the economic crisis.
  
• Web 2.0 storytelling.  A new blog category appeared on the topic, Alan Levine and I published an article, set up a wiki, a del.icio.us tag, and examples kept flowing in.
• Uncanny valley Gothic, especially reborn dolls.  This theme picked up in January, and kept toddling along, getting links, attention, criticism, and shivers of fear.
  
• Crowdsourcing.  Although I haven't published on this yet, I've ruthlessly exploited the world for my own benefit.  You, Web, have been generous.
  
• Severed feet and the rise of the Canadian Gothic.  The feet just kept drifting onto the Pacific shore, while other bizarre things afflicted the brooding northern giant.
• Cold War Gothic has emerged as a new subtheme, surfacing from the gothic in everyday life topic.  This can include atompunk and spaceflight eerieness.
• Mourning deaths.  Arthur C. Clarke died, and so did my wife's father.
• Fearing the internet continues.  From academic technology to the scary sex-box, Infocult's founding meme keeps growing.
  

Anything we missed? Any recommendations for 2009?

(skull-gazing photo by Arnaud Leene)

Scaling down to worlds within worlds

This set of six images drawn from the nano-scale world are weird and gorgeous:

(via Kurzweil)

Quintet: Polar film music from the 1970s

Some fine arctic music comes from Quintet, the much-maligned Robert Altman 1973 film.

The soundtrack of Quintet provides a rich tapestry of aural images that greatly enhance the awful bleakness of a world in its final throes of death, exploiting a broad range of the sound spectrum.

The highs are punctuated by the intermittent tinkling of glass, evocative of the crystallized snow and ice that cover this frozen world. We hear this especially in the main casino as we hover around the wholly incongruous glass chandelier that hangs above the set. Indeed, the chandelier could easily be mistaken for icicles when we see it for the first time, before it comes into focus. We also hear high squeaks and creaks as Essex searches the city directory, the cracked ice-like glass panes that swivel on rusted metal piping again evoke ice and cold.

And yes, there are Gothic touches, beyond the stress of watching the film itself:

In the midrange, footsteps during the deathly quiet chase scenes are often accompanied by the muffled crunch of packed snow underfoot, so evocative of a frozen winter setting bathed in a quilting silence. Somehow, the role of the Quintet dice onto the wood or fabric playing board seems to enhance this effect: the role of dice--which may mean life or death for the players--has never sounded so bleak and helpless as in the world of Quintet.

We finally come to the lower frequencies: the aching, rolling groans of the glacial ice are constant reminders that this is a world in its final stages.

Mention should also be made of the wild dogs feeding on the abandoned dead, the awful sounds of human flesh being shredded, and tooth-on-bone, along with the low growl of the savage beasts, can only be described as horrific.

(via MetaFilter)

Human tissue for cars, or the perils of taking off too much fat

This story about an American doctor using patients' fat to create car fuel has been making the rounds.  The concept alone merits Gothic attention, the idea of using human flesh to power machines, a metaphor rendered concrete.

Alan Bittner, who founded a high-profile clinic on Rodeo Drive, the Bond Street of Los Angeles, claims to be able to power both his Ford Explorer and his girlfriend's Lincoln Navigator on biofuel converted from excess flesh from human tums, bums and thighs.

One might imagine what those vehicles' exhaust smells like.

But there's a darker level hinted at in The Independent's story:

Lawyers representing several former patients are currently attempting to track him down. One of them, Andrew Besser, claims Dr Bittner's unlicensed girlfriend removed too much fat from his three clients, leaving them horribly disfigured. Dozens of other patients have complained to the State Medical Board, he added.

Revenge of the presents

This bit of Christmas cheer, "Presents Opening Children" (Rob Sheridan, 2007), comes from La Wurzel:

Winter Gothic, Infocult gloom for 2008

What horrors await us in this season of the long dark, and cheerful holiday?

We return to our earlier theme to recap, refine, and update Gothic delights in what is becoming an annual ritual.  Infocult readers and contributors offer the results of their shadowy investigations.  (And some were added via comments to this post; thank you, commentators)

• Conrad Aiken, "Silent Snow, Secret Snow" (1933).  There's an excellent Night Gallery version (two YouTube parts: 1, 2).
• Ambrose Bierce, "Charles Ashmore's Trail" (1893) (one copy)
• Algernon Blackwood, "The Wendigo" (1910).
• John W. Campbell, "Who Goes There?" (1938).  Filmed twice, as The Thing from Another World (1951), then by John Carpenter as The Thing (1982).  Wikipedia's entry also claims Horror Express (1973) as a version.
• [Chaosium], The Ithaqua Cycle (2006).  Steve B recommends "The Wind Has Teeth," by Greg Vance and Scott Urban (originally in When the Black Lotus Blooms, 1990).
• Død snø ("Dead Snow", 2009). Nazi zombies in Norway. Official site. Cute line from trailer: "Ein! Zwei! Die!"
• August Derleth, "The Drifting Snow"
• The Goblin Man of Norway (1999).  Mockumentary for an Xbox game, Too Human (2008; development hell is Gothic enough). Semi-ARG.  On YouTube:
  
• Charles Grant, "Caesar, Now Be Still" (1978).
• Clemence Housman, "The Were-Wolf" (1896) (Gutenberg text, with illustrations)
• Stephen King, The Shining (1977).  The great 1980 film.
• Kuolleiden Talvi ("Winter of the Dead", 2007).  Zombies attack Finland in this student film. Part 1 on YouTube.
• The Last Winter (Larry Fessenden, 2006).
• Lights Out, "Northern Lights." (mp3) "[A]nother great audio drama from Wyllis Cooper", says HP.

  A sound, a humming, a crackling somewhere inside your head. And there are times when you'd swear it's a voice talking to you -- talking in some kind of strange language you can almost understand, filling your whole being with a kind of desperate, inescapable terror.

• H. P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness (1936).  Picks up on Poe (see below).
• H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society, A Very Scary Solstice.  Prepare to carol! Behold the video version:
  
  (thanks to wifey for the timely gift)
• "Maybe Later We Can Make A Snowman." A very fine, twisted blog post about winter holiday horrors (blogged way back in '05).
• Edgar Allan Poe, The Case of Arthur Gordon Pym (1837) (one text).  Poe's only novel, climaxing in a doomed Antarctic expedition.  See also Lovecraft and Verne items on this list, for sequelae.
• Phil Pullman, Northern Lights (1995) (The Golden Compass, US title).  This superb children's novel is focused on the Arctic, including expeditions, a lab doing medical experiments on children (!), a great ice battle, and a mind-blowing final scene.  The book is filled with frights and dread, uncannily aiming at a legion of kids' fears.
• Thomas Pynchon, the Iceland Spar section of Against the Day (2006), 138-155 (see wiki here and here), an Arctic expedition and its horrible aftermath.
• Ravenous (1999), fun historical horror, well suited to the Christmas meal.
  
• Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818): the polar expedition framing story and the monster confronting Victor on the glacier.
• Dan Simmons, The Terror (2007).  A doomed polar expedition, with a Poe story reenactment.
• Jules Verne, Le Sphinx des Glaces ("Ice Sphinx", better known as "An Antarctic Mystery", 1897).  A sequel to Poe's Pym (see item on this list).  Gutenberg edition of one English translation.
• The Wendigo in folklore.
• The Wicker Man (1973). The great solstice movie of all time. There is no remake.
• X-files, "Ice" (1993).  Arctic fun with Mulder and Scully.

This list needs more stories.  And more women.

(many thanks to Steven B, HP, Steven Kaye, Wolf, and more chilly pals)

Silent night, deadly night

Horror movie reality: Santa Claus opens fire.

The gunman arrived at the party in Covina late Wednesday and immediately opened fire with a handgun, Buchanan said. Witnesses told police that the man took off the Santa suit and left the scene of the burning house in street clothes.

Internet addiction studies are deeply flawed: new study

This study looks at "internet addiction" studies, and finds them to be seriously weak:

previous studies have utilized inconsistent criteria to define Internet addicts, applied recruiting methods that may cause serious sampling bias, and examined data using primarily exploratory rather than confirmatory data analysis techniques to investigate the degree of association rather than causal relationships among variables...

Internet addiction has commonly been viewed as an extremely broad topic with few common definitions and little guidance..

(via Cathy Davidson)

Ripping up one airport's hideous food: attack of the mucoid cobbler

An awesome bad review of some heinous airport food comes from the New York Times:

O’Hare — the nation’s second busiest airport, with 76 million passengers in 2007 — was easily the worst airport I visited, particularly disappointing since Chicago is one of America’s great restaurant cities. Instead of Air Alinea or Tobolobampo to Go, however, diners will find: Chicago-style hot dogs so poorly assembled as to cast doubt on the city’s architectural heritage; collard greens so bland and peach cobbler so mucoid they’d start riots on the South Side; and greasy, flavor-free cheeseburgers whose only claim to fame is that they inspired a “Saturday Night Live” sketch...

I watched my fellow diners with envy: a woman who pulled a packet of Alka-Seltzer from her purse; a bald, beefy man in handcuffs who was no doubt looking forward to decades of prison food...

[A] Greek diner praised on AirlinePilotsForum.com, was miserable. The meat on the gyro platter (“awesome!” wrote ghilis101) seemed to have come from a “Jungle”-era slaughterhouse...

“Advice? Don’t eat!” joked the hefty fellow...

I can vouch for this assessment of O'Hare's "food."

On the other hand, I extracted the good reviews for our Restaurants in Airports wiki.

(via Cathy Yang via Twitter)

Fearing the human flesh search engine

Best technology headline of the week:

Man wins case vs "human flesh search engine"

The story is actually disturbing and fascinating, but not for what that headline suggests. 

The "engine" refers to distributed vigilanteism, where multiple participants collaborate in bringing what they see as justice to a bad situation.  Here a man's infidelity to his wife remained unpunished, according to the "engine."  So those moved by this story launched a distributed investigation, collaborative detective style, and acted on information found:

Wang was reportedly forced to resign, and had trouble finding another job, after strangers tracked him down and contacted the companies where he and his lover worked, the paper said.

Expletives were painted on his parents' door, and his photos, addresses, and phone numbers were made public online.

Watch for this potential fallout:

the online mob's harassment of more mundane characters involved in domestic disputes has left academics bemoaning China's weak privacy laws.

(thanks to Cronenbergian Steve Kaye)