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"Short Mystery" is a one-page Web comic with a horror theme. It does a couple of nice things with the Web page medium - click and enjoy, making sure your speakers are turned on. Perhaps best experienced in the dark and while alone.
Don't worry if you don't read Korean - you'll jump on very quickly.
I like the harsh, space sounds.
(via MetaFilter)
The 2012 American presidential campaign is under way, and already we have fine horror movie/mad science talk.
"If Perry was President, one of the things I'd not worry about is a carbon tax," said Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform. "I'd worry about big spiders eating New Jersey first."
Norquist is no stranger to scary images, but this definitely ramps up the fear from his classic drowned kitten meme.
Careful students of American Gothic will note that Norquist fingered Jersey for the arachnic assault. Naturally.
(images from Wikipedia, clip works, and classic 1958)
Aliens built the ultimate alternate reality game, according to a splendid team of probably insane inspired Russian scientists. It's like von Däniken crossed with an ARG with a dash of one Kurt Vonnegut novel:
extraterrestrial communications in pictograms that extraterrestrial intelligence has placed in crop circles and in stone monuments around the world. The group has created a dictionary of over 250 extraterrestrial pictograms for interpreting crop circles and stone monuments...
That reference sounds very cool.
Also Infocultish is this apocalyptic information concept:
For thousand of years [extraterrestrial civilizations]have created the System of information transmission for earth dwellers.
Also intriguing is this tragic Easter Island idea:
(thanks to Jesse Walker, whose name we found scratched in a Peruvian wall)
the oaks were poisoned, and so was the atmosphere.
Cyberspace intensifies tensions between sports fans: so runs a complaint about one football rivalry.
"I've never seen it worse," said Paul Finebaum, a longtime Birmingham talk show host and newspaper columnist. "And I think it's because so many more fans are being heard or can be heard through so many different mediums. As a result, it's more contentious."
Twitter, message boards and, yes, talk radio keep things stirred up.
The article doesn't run with this theme, as you can tell from the talk radio note. T-shirts are next on the list of trouble-stirring agents, and then the author turns to... the actions of individuals.
Infocult does not follow sports, so perhaps you readers can offer insight. Is the fearsome internet meme alive in the professional athletics sphere?
(thanks to Ted Major)
In mid flashmob panic, CNN suddenly catches its breath. Maybe - just maybe - the internet is not to blame. And maybe censorship isn't the answer to crime.
"It's very difficult to enforce something that's unconstitutional," Jackson said in an interview with CNN. "To make a criminal activity of just having a conversation, whether some acts of criminal activity are associated with it or not, it goes beyond reason."
The mayor of a major American city just remembered that the First Amendment is still there.
His council forgot, for a while, perhaps inspired by Britain's prime minister. Then councilors had a memory attack:
Cleveland City Council unanimously passed legislation that would criminalize the use of Facebook, Twitter and other social media for assembling unruly crowds or encouraging people to commit a crime.
But [Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson], after consulting with advisers, defied the council and vetoed the ordinance -- his first use of that power as mayor...
Jackson suggested that the "emergency measure," as it was described in official records, was perhaps fueled more by emotion than by reason. And on Wednesday, the council members reversed course and voted 14-2 to side with the mayor.
Not only did CNN report this in a non-sarcastic way, but they also ran an anti-censorshop column by Douglass Rushkoff.
Other media sources might be taking a similar, realistic, Constitutional direction. The Christian Science Monitor carried such a report a few days ago. Philly.com reported that police dismissed social media causes for some local flashmobs. Perhaps the social media<->flashmob meme is being throttled back, or will stop entirely.
Hopefully journalists will check with Howard Rheingold for his thoughts, since he's been working on the topic for a long, thoughtful time.
(link via Annette, Todd Bryant, and other Infocult confidential informants; photo from compujeramey)
American politics just entered the uncanny valley, because the president is getting creepy, claims a New York Times columnist. Obama has become a "robotic Sustainer-in-Chief with an eerie inhumanity".
[H]ere Obama is, down in the valley, struggling to connect with the American people and failing, increasingly coming across as dispassionate to some and outright revolting to others.
For Charles Blow, it's not just Obama. Blow claims a general theory:
there must be an uncanny valley of politics, a point at which particular politicians rouse our discomfort because there’s something about them that people connect with, but there’s something else about them — intangible, unbelievable and not relatable — that produces a sense of unease.
Blow fails to admit any precedence for this concept. The long history of simulated/fake politicians goes back a ways. Perhaps we can see the reason for this in the sf examples in the column: a handful, all movies, all fairly recent. And they're not well applied - the AI one for Bachmann suggests he never saw the movie. Either blow doesn't know sf, or doesn't want to admit to it in the New York Times.
Death by elevator received a new twist in New York City, as two men nearly drowned in a flooded car.
Here's the industrial/environmental short-short story:
[Tyler and Amaker] rode the elevator down the basement because the doors were shut, but didn't know that the basement was already flooded. As Tyler described it, the water started rushing in.
With water that was filling up past their waists, the men held up a cell phone through a ceiling hatch in order to dial 911. Firefighters eventually rescued the uninjured men by turning off the power and lowering a ladder through the hatch.
Officials say that when firefighters arrived, the water was up to the men's necks.
Naturally, the two nearly doomed men were "both from New Jersey".
"We thought we were dead," said Tyler, "I literally thought I was going to die."
Infocult has pried open the haunted elevator doors for some time.
(via Cranky Prof); photo from De Lift (1983))
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