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A comic book creator has vanished, and the circumstances are pretty Gothic.
To begin with, a stray body part:
detectives opened up a van registered to Perry after a guest smelled something foul. What they found inside, they say, was a severed arm.
Then signs of grim intent:
Police also found Perry's home ransacked and further human remains in a dumpster near Perry's home.
Our thoughts go out to Stephen Perry, his family, his loved ones, and fans.
(thanks to Lee Graham)
A newly discovered galaxy is apparently horrific: "Obese, gluttonous, and cannibalistic". "[H]ugely bigger, swollen and ginormous," in fact.
undigested galactic nuclei flying around, quadrillions of tons of gas and dust sloshing hither and yon, and all that million degree X-ray emitting gas sitting out there…
Bad Astronomy is having a blast with this.
our galaxy... ran out of smaller galaxies to eat, whereas 146-IG is basically still standing in the kitchen with the refrigerator door open.
(via Slashdot)
A ninth suicide has occurred at one Chinese electronics factory, according to the BBC. That's 9 out of 11 attempts.
A total of 11 Foxconn employees have tried to kill themselves this year - two have survived.
A sad, dark story, this also connects with several fearsome digital media currents.
Fearsome media: connecting death and new tech is a staple of cyberfear. Suicide has always been a feature of this, going back to John Varley's splendid story "Press Enter []".Fearsome media: Slashdot wonders
whether the shiny finish of the latest gadgets available from mega corporations are tarnished by such information...
If it's Apple that's in the spotlight, probably not.
Fearsome media: cyberpunk and left tech crit have long connected technology, human suffering, and multinational corporations.
(thanks to Peter Naegele and others for the link; photo from barekim)
NB: this post is not intended to make light of the workers' suffering, nor does it compare FoxComm to WWII-era factories.
A fine series of uncanny valley robotics projects can be viewed in this John Nolan demo reel.
Animated mouths, disturbing head-mask-things, mechanical body part extensions, talking blobs, automaton-like animals, humanoids, puppets, unwholesomely eager bots, a cheery quasi-reborn robobaby - it's all the stuff of nightmares good.
(via MetaFilter)
As I headed east across Tennessee this week, a giant hole opened up in the highway and tried to eat cars and trucks. A sinkhole, to be precise, gaped across I-24.
25 feet deep, at least 40 feet wide. Would have destroyed any car which plunged into it.
Repairs still going on as of this posting. It doubled in size overnight. 13 miles of the highway closed.
Tennessee tried to kill Infocult, but we survived.
One scary but happy story involves a DOT worker who saved lives.
Britain's Royal Navy stated that it does not keep track of sea monster sightings. Best Freedom of Information query ever:
A marine biologist inquired whether the Ministry of Defence held records about ''abnormally large or dangerous sea monsters hundreds of metres under the sea'' that had not been revealed to the public.
In reply an official wrote: ''The RN (Royal Navy), and MoD in general, does not maintain any form of central repository of information purely devoted to sea monsters..."
Time for digital repositories to swing into action!
The Telegraph also muses:
The MoD's stance on sea monsters contrasts with the policy on UFOs it maintained for more than 50 years.
Facebook is now accused of fomenting binge drinking, leading to death. French folks have been using Facebook to arrange apéro géants.
It was to have been a weekend of excess. In recent weeks, a number of cities in France have played unwilling host to oversized, outdoor "cocktail parties" organized via Facebook. In March, 4,000 people toasted each other in Rennes. In April, it was Brest's turn, where 7,000 revellers gathered for a massive drink up. Last week, 10,000 partygoers came together in Montpellier for a bit of imbibing.
Naturally, someone dies.
Last Thursday night in Nantes, a massive gathering of 10,000 drinkers ended with the death of a 21-year-old party-goer who fell from a bridge. As a result, officials in municipalities targeted by Facebook fetes posted calls for responsibility on the Internet, boosted security and urged that the events be cancelled.
Let's see if this meme crosses the Atlantic, or at least the English channel.
(via Ed Webb via Diigo)
Gregor Samsa awoke after uneasy dreams, to find augmented reality covered with insects. This is about a new therapy (article behind paywall) for people suffering from fear of cockroaches.
Participants in the study sit at a desk with a computer wearing a virtual reality headset. The headset has a camera attached, such that the person wearing it will see a video representation of the desk that they’re looking at. But with cockroaches.
That’s right. You sit at a desk, wear a virtual reality headset, and then see the desk that you’re sitting at covered in cockroaches.
Your nightmares may commence... now.
The therapeutic possibilities are clear, but never mind that. Think of the horrors! For one, this has got to be an AR prank waiting to happen.
For another, this sort of thing will surely crop of in fiction involving AR. One character sees insects crawling through their handsets, but nobody else does. A bug appears, then shrieks, because it's holding a handset, through which it can see a gigantic human being. Etc.
And, as with so many things, the way has been blazed by a classic X-Files episode.
Here's a great Gothic line from the paper's abstract:
testing the correspondence between the inclusion of feared stimuli and the induction of anxiety.
Hey, that would make a fine blog subtitle.
(via Slashdot)
Economic crisis Gothic: while the Las Vegas area already has a surplus in empty houses, a new movement wants to built more houses in the same area.
There are 9,517 spanking new houses sitting empty. An additional 5,600 homes were repossessed by lenders in the first three months of this year and could soon be for sale.
Yet builders here are putting up 1,100 homes, and they are frantically buying lots for even more...
Some of the boom-era homes...are in developments that feel like ghost towns.
One fascinating aspect of this odd story is its emphasis on accelerated time. Apparently the very new building boom is based on a market assessment seeing homebuyers as preferring very new houses to older ones. "Older," meaning a few years old. "They want new", argues "a marketing executive with another Southwest builder."
[M]any Americans will always believe the latest model of something is their only option, an attitude builders are doing their utmost to reinforce....
So if this movement succeeds, and people occupy shiny new buildings, will the bubble-crash houses remain untenanted, undermaintained, aging into Gothic architecture? If the American economy does recover, will these Gothic homes persist as memories of a Gothic economic crisis?
Here's one cheery sign:
In Phoenix, a billboard for Fulton Homes summed up the builders’ marketing approach. “Does your foreclosure have tenants?” it asks, next to a picture of a mammoth cockroach.
(photo from Bert K)
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