Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Meanwhile, Ohio keeps giving us everyday Gothic

Ohio continues to offer us real-life Gothic, or just barking madness.  From Toledo:

The woman told police that after she fell asleep Brisport handcuffed her wrists and ankles, gagged her, undressed her and put her in an adult diaper, then read Bible passages, said police Capt. Ray Carroll.

We probably shouldn't rule out an art prank.  Or someone trying to give Michiganders more reason to hate Ohio.

When animals attack on mp3

This is one of the most disturbing things I've read all week.  File under the old header of "pet horror", or just surrealism:

"Please hurry up, he's killing my girlfriend," Sandra Herold, 70, shouted during the beginning of the 911 call, the animal screaming in the background. "You gotta kill my chimp."

The dispatcher at first did not understand that the attacker was an animal. Herold kept repeating "Hurry up! Please God," before she answered that the attacker was her chimp.

"He ripped her face off," she said of her friend, Charla Nash, 55. "He's trying to charge me."

When the operator tried to question her, she said, "Listen to me. They gotta shoot him, please."

Herold... stabbed the chimp with a butcher knife before making the call...

Read on for more horror, if you choose.  The thing just goes on: facelessness, body parts eaten.

Add the media level, too - the news account is about 911 recordings.  The page has an audio file, which is horrible.

Sf's great schism

Here's a fascinating thought: is there a religious divide within American sf? It's not religious versus secular, as one might think:

The main SF line is ‘Protestant’ in its imaginings, with Catholic impulses providing important counterpoint. Roughly, Protestantism is all about the ‘disenchantment of the world’ and Catholicism is about magic and sacralization. So SF is Protestant and fantasy is Catholic, and the fact that SF is often hard to distinguish from fantasy just goes to show that Protestant and Catholic imaginative impulses can intertwine and do complicated stuff.

“If I am asked to condense into a single sentence, my thesis is that science fiction is determined precisely by the dialectic between ‘Protestant’ and ‘Catholic’ (or, if one prefers less sectarian terms, between ‘deism’ and ‘magical pantheism’) that emerges out of the seventeenth century” (p. xi-ii).

I wonder (among other things!) about non-western Christian sf, namely coming from the Eastern Orthodox tradition.

Dark comets aim towards our shadow biosphere

Two space fear stories from Slashdot, and both within a day of each other:

Earth Under Threat From Dark Comets (/.)
Does Earth harbour a 'shadow biosphere' of alien life? (/.)

What a spooky, shadowy universe that suggests. 

Facebook status Gothic

Using Facebook status to tell a scary story - a very very short short tale:

[I]n the absence of another contender, Julie is the best updater on Facebook. This is the one to beat: “Julie at her computer on facebook. She doesn’t see the man come up behind her with the rope. As he tightens it around her neck, he changes her status: is DEAD!”

Nice use of writing with a medium to write about the same medium.

I also like the reference to Lovecraft's "Randolph Carter."

(thanks to andrea baker)

Mysterious vault being built by Scientologists

Scientologists are building an archive vault in Wyoming.  This sounds unremarkable enough, on its face.  But, being Scientology-related, how can weirdness not be involved?

[P]lans remain vague. County land use planner John Barton said the county also has been told the vault might hold any number of things besides documents.

"We've had everything from underground housing of sheep or hay," Barton said. "We've had cemetery discussed. We've had mining discussed."

The contractor, International Ground Support Systems of Santa Fe, N.M., also has said it plans to build a 3,500-square-foot caretaker house and an airstrip, county officials say.

Imagine the visuals: galleries and tunnels, reaching ever downward into the Earth.  Secret passageways.  Hidden chambers.  And always the risk of delving too deeply.  L. Ron Hubbard Gothic, continued.

(via Instapundit)

War Gothic, the memory of fortifications

"The frightening beauty of bunkers" a new translation of Paul Virilio's meditation on these Gothic sites of power in time, with gorgeous photos.

These are astonishing, like frames from a lost horror film, or a 1970s dystopia.

thanks to Jesse Wall...ker)

Gothic spawning day at Infocult

On a birthday, I love Thomas Ligotti:

Even after a person
is gone from this world,
people often tend
to remember birthdays.
 
They say: today is
the birthday of someone
who would have been
so many years old.
 
So just in case you're
not around next year:
happy birthday.
 
"Happy Birthday" by Thomas Ligotti
(From DEATH POEMS)

(thank you, shadowy voices of staring marionettes)

Monks and monsters in space

Monks and monsters in space: the Gothic roots of one unfilmed Alien movie are so Piranesi.

(via MetaFilter)

Yet another case of Russian cannibalism

Russian police charged two men for eating a teenager.  There's a quiet poetry to this odd, brief account:

City prosecutor's spokesman Sergei Kapitonov said Wednesday police arrested two men — a butcher and a florist — on suspicion of murder.

Note the conjunction of professions.  Not poetic, maybe, but novelistic! and apt.

Or note this two-sentence compressed horror novel:

Prosecutors believe they drowned the girl in a bathtub, cut her body into pieces and ate some of her internal organs. They allegedly then bagged up her remains and disposed of them.

And the simplicity of reason:

Kapitonov said the suspects told investigators they ate the organs because they were hungry.

The article's title puts quotes around "hungry".  How cynical... or what a fine pointer towards another story.

(thanks to Jesse "How To Serve Man? With Hot Sauce" Walker)