Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Gothic horror: the fearsome priest

Today's dose of real-life Gothic horror comes from a Catholic priest in Texas.  The story is like a fever dream from the British anti-Catholic imagination.

According to the police, Rev. John M. Fiala molested a local minor.  But it gets worse.  

A Catholic priest stands accused of a) sexually assaulting a teen, including raping the boy at gun point b) threatening to kill him if he told anyone c) threatening to kill himself and the boy so they could go to Heaven together d) actually trying to get him killed -- the priest allegedly offered 5,000 to an undercover agent to murder the boy (guess he didn't feel like going to Heaven yet).

British Gothic lit often featured characters or settings from the European South, sometimes drawing on fears and/or hatred of that region's dominant Catholicism.  The Inquisition, hypocritical monks, tortured nuns, and so on became popular staples.

Saddest tweet of the month

Nice example of Twitter microstorytelling, sad robot:

(thanks to Jesse Walker)

Uncanny valley extends a shiny claw into the magazine world

Magazines have always had a purchase on our nightmares, usually by their contents. But we should also note some recent creepiness through disturbing Photoshopping. Or, as Cracked puts it,

Photoshop is Filling Magazines With Dead-Eyed Humanoids

There's a weird slickness, like a manga-drawn droid's face here:

Look into her eyes.  Looooooooook......

(thanks to my splendid wife)

Rise of the Facebook dead

How many Facebook users will die this year?  One million, says Mashable.

 

The number will surely grow.

 

One Gothic thought:

Anecdotal evidence suggests, however, that most accounts are not “memorialized” — they patiently await the next status update that will never come like faithful Hachikō.

(thanks to Peter Naegele, via Facebook, of course)

Banning Facebook just doesn't help

Every so often fearsome media arguments backfire:

A pastor who said Facebook was a 'portal to infidelity'  has admitted to having  threesome sex with his wife and a  male church assistant.

This tweet says it marvelously:

Rev. Miller was concerned, you see:

The Rev. Cedric Miller's secret past was exposed after he ordered church leaders to delete their Facebook accounts or resign.
He blamed the social networking website for causing married couples to have illicit affairs and igniting 'old passions'.

 

(thanks to Ed Webb)

Barcodes for embryos

Several researchers have successfully implanted "silicon barcodes" into mice fetuses.  

The objective was to develop a system which minimises risks when identifying female gametes and embryos during in vitro fertilisation and embryo transfer procedures, to reduce the phases of the clinical process requiring control and supervision by two embryologists.

That's fodder for all kinds of fears, starting with privacy (It's "a first step towards designing a direct labelling system of oocytes and embryos", says the press release) and moving on to classic birth/baby horror.  Not to mention the hacking possibilities, if they upgrade to RFID...

(via Network World)

Hidden library chamber revealed

An Indian library's hidden chamber was discovered this week, in a glorious moment of Gothic bibliophilia.

A mysterious room has been discovered in the 250-year-old building a room that no one knew about and no one can enter because it seems to have no opening of kind, not even trapdoors.  

A secret room in the National Library - what an idea for stories!

And so many classic Gothic moments appear in this short account:

 ASI conservation engineers stumbled upon a blind enclosure' on the ground floor, about 1000 square feet in size. 
A lot of effort has been made to locate an opening so that experts can find out exactly what it was built for or what it contains. But there is not a single crack to show. 
"We've searched every inch of the first floor area that forms the ceiling of this enclosure for a possible trap door. But found nothing. Restoration of the building will remain incomplete if we are not able to assess what lies inside this enclosure," said deputy superintending archaeologist of ASI, Tapan Bhattacharya. "We've come across an arch on one side of the enclosure that had been walled up. Naturally speculations are rife," said another archaeologist.  

(via ResourceShelf)

Behold Amabo!

Backmasking is back, as some YouTube authors claim to have revealed president Obama's true statements.

It's classically insane stuff, with "Yes we can" becoming a polite "Thank you Satan".  There's a Lovecraftian surrealism with lines like "Sub-Earth - the mark that's now sooner".  Don't miss the revelation of the Greek/Egyptian/posthumanist axis in "Hear my composite self for the Pharoah Zeus."

I still think it was The Exorcist (1973) which kicked off the great wave of backmasking madness, with that terrific "IAMNOONE" scene.

(thanks to gimlet-eyed Jesse Walker)

Cthulhu infects the dreams of little children

Lovecraftian horrors, drawn by schoolchildren.  No, not because the kids awoke from fevered nightmares, but because the stories were related to the children in "abbreviate" forms.

(thanks to Saramin and everyone else)

More digital afterlives

A new book explores your digital death - or rather, what happens to your digital materials after death.  I haven't read it yet, but the books seems to have a good, broad coverage of issues.

This field keeps on growing.  Mashable now lists seven (7) after-life digital services.

(via Steve Burnett, the great and terrible, and Todd Bryant, the Mixxer)