Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Haunted houses ramp of the fear with performance art

Haunted houses are staples of this glorious season, but perhaps they've become too comfortable.  Too corny, not really scary; too historical, too... easy.

Hence this article about an amped up version in Minneapolis.  The author, T.D. Mischke, describes a new project, simply called "Death."  There's no fixed address for the event, so Mischke looks for a rave-style announcement of ad hoc time and place.  One appears, then:

After receiving an anonymous tip alerting me to the time and location, I arrived at the appointed intersection in Nordeast Minneapolis only to find a vacant lot. I wasn't out of my car 30 seconds when three large men with masks came up behind me, threw a hood over my head, and wrestled me into the trunk of a sedan. Speakers in the back seat were blaring heavy metal music, and in the trunk, alongside me, was what appeared to be a dead sheep or goat, freshly killed...

Read on.  It gets better, or worse.  

Is the article fiction, or describing a real thing?

(via MetaFilter; image from Kakashi)

Russian bears treat graveyards as 'giant refrigerators'

"In Karelia one bear learned how to do it [open a coffin]. He then taught the others," she added, suggesting: "They are pretty quick learners."

Today's real life Gothic horror story is caused by climate change, and we can't beat the headline:

Russian bears treat graveyards as 'giant refrigerators'

Yes, ursine horror is the order of the day:

Russian bears have grown so desperate after a scorching summer they have started digging up and eating corpses in municipal cemetries, alarmed officials said today. Bears' traditional food – mushrooms, berries and the odd frog – has disappeared, they added.

It can be turned into a short-short terror tale, as the Guardian demonstrates:

From a distance it resembled a rather large man in a fur coat, leaning tenderly over the grave of a loved one. But when the two women in the Russian village of Vezhnya Tchova came closer they realised there was a bear in the cemetery eating a body.

...The shocked women cried in panic, frightening the bear back into the woods, before they discovered a ghoulish scene with the clothes of the bear's already-dead victim chucked over adjacent tombstones, the Russian newspaper Moskovsky Komsomelets reported.

Well done!  Note the "tenderly", which heightens the emotional whiplash come come.  And the deflatingly casual "chucked".

(via Ed Webb's distributed brainpan; photo treatment of modern Russia's greatest meme from The Latvian)

Pop up sex offenders in your neighborhood

Checking out a neighborhood for sex offenders?  Why, "There's an app for that".  

Users can adjust the range of their search from a tenth of a mile to several. A map mode identifies registered offenders as pins on a map, while an augmented reality view allows users to look through the camera lens of their smartphones to pull up addresses in any given direction.

Users can click on each of the pins or red dots to draw forth detailed information about the offenders, including their names, addresses, photos (if available) and the offenses they were convicted for.

Just in time for Halloween, if we remember that holiday fear.

 

(thanks to mid-Pennsylvania's own Todd Bryant and Ed Webb)

This story creeps around the reader

A fine use of augmented reality for unsettling stories, AR Jekyll and Hyde:

(via Bruce Sterling)

Mechanical Brides of the Uncanny

Mechanical Brides of the Uncanny: everything is good in that sentence.

(via Ed Webb's brainWeb)

Charge of the anthropophagi: Halloween Recession 2010

At least one observer sees the ongoing Great Recession in Gothic terms:

[T]he nation [is] whistling past the graveyard of mortgage documentation fraud while skeletons dance around everything connected with the money system. Halloween came early this year.

Kunster hits all kinds of Gothic registers, starting with Poe:

The USA is getting to look like one big Masque of the Red Death

Then on to monsters:

...I suppose it's convenient that our pop culture has been saturated with vampires, zombies, and werewolves for a decade, coincident with the self-cannibalizing of our economy.

Mood:

Something in the zeitgeist told us to get with the program of a twilight existence.

And vampires, speaking of twilight:

We're well-schooled now in the ways of the undead, operating under cover of darkness, going for the neck at every opportunity, even eating our young - if you consider the debt orgy, both private and public, as a way to party like it's 1999 by consuming your children's' future. 

Then Kunstler pulls it all together for a climax:

The night of the Blood Beast comes Sunday, just in time for the All Souls Day open of the equity markets. That's the day when the costumes come off and we stop pretending. That's the day that the skeletons dance on the real estate destined to be our graves.

Attack of the devil near Paris

A Gothic short story flared up in France this week, sparked by race and national differences in the dark.

First part:

"Thirteen people were in an apartment on the second floor when, at around 3am, one of the occupants heard his child crying," said Odile Faivre, the deputy prosecutor in Versailles.
"The man in question, of African origin, who was completely naked, got up to feed his child, at which point the other occupants took him for the devil..."He was seriously wounded in the hand after being stabbed with a knife before he was thrown out of the apartment, via the door."

Part two:

The 30-year-old man then tried to force his way back into the room.
"That's when the other occupants tried to escape by jumping out of the window, panicked by a fear of the devil," said Ms Faivre.

Injuries and police investigation followed.

(thanks to one lobe of Ed Webb's distributed brain)

Fearing Halloween in 2010: two specters stalk our streets

Halloween is scary, says ABC.  Scary because it threatens your children, that is.  ABC touches on some classic lore, like poison candy, but focuses first on kids getting hit by cars. 

That kids get hit by cars all year long isn't mentioned.

Next, ABC reports on the weird specter of teens trick-or-treating.  Why is this scary?

[Mayor Mark Eckert of Belleville, Ill., near St. Louis] said he heard from too many single mothers and senior citizens complaining they were frightened by "6-foot-tall kids" showing up at their homes in search of candy

[Lou Thurston, spokesman for the Newport News Police Department in Virginia] said. "The point is making the place safe."

That's about as specific as it gets.  No mention of, say, gang affiliation, sexuality, terrorism, or home invasions.  One expert quoted actually sees Halloween as reducing crime.  Instead the article just leaves us with this weird image of women and/or older folks scared of tall (presumably male) teenagers wanting candy. Plus a sense that it's a new fear, somehow:

[John Womeldorf, a real estate agent in James City County, Va., states],"It is a different world than I grew up in so I guess we do have to have certain things like that in place to be enforced if needed..."

Perhaps a hint can be found in this bit of the law:

The ordinance also prohibits those over 12 years old from wearing masks in public any other day of the year.

Anonymous, beware!

Chupacabra explained, unfortunately

The chupacabra - explained!  And the poor goatsucker, eww:

Biologist Barry OConnor says that most chupacabra sightings are probably linked to coyotes with mange, a disease caused by mites burrowing under the skin of coyotes. 

Classic Gothic expliqué:

Mange leaves coyotes with extreme hair loss similar to that described by people who claim to have seen chupacabra. Analysis of alleged chupacabra carcasses by scientists has usually turned up evidence of mange, which is caused by the same species of mite (Sarcoptes scabiei) that triggers the itchy rash known as scabies in people. 

Most depressing explanation of weirdness since swamp gas.

(via Slashdot; image from Mike Kline)

A small communication problem

A French woman turned out to be alive, after being declared very dead.  Fortunately she wasn't buried or incinerated at the time:

A doctor managed to resuscitate her and put her on a ventilator but then, having consulted other doctors, called Paillard's sons to break the news that their mother was "very certainly clinically dead."
But her sons would not turn off the respirator and she was then transferred to the university hospital of the southwestern French city where a scan revealed that she was in fact not brain dead, Noel said.
"It's a kind of miracle," he said of Paillard, who woke up after 14 hours.

Here's a useful spin tip for anyone in communications:

He said that the doctor who resuscitated her had committed a communication error not a medical one as "he saved her life."

(thanks to my wife; photo from boliston)