Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Online post-mortem resources

Social media's consideration of after-death issues has been maturing over the past few years.  Adam Brooks offers a neat guide to post-mortem resources from major social networking sites.

Fearsome Pinterest

Pinterest has already been the object of skepticism for its copyright policies. Now it's potentially a fearsome thing, as pro-anorexia users have been sharing "pins" there.

Pinterest central banned such stuff.  It's an open question if this will have any real effect.

Pro-ana folks have used the Web previously.  Consider it another twist on the link between body horror and digital technologies.

Vampires for the century after Stoker

What's the greatest 20th-century vampire novel?  The World Horror Convention is deciding that question this week.

On their ballot:

• Charles L. Grant, The Soft Whisper of the Dead
• Stephen King, Salem's Lot 
• Richard Matheson, I Am Legend 
• Kim Newman, Anno Dracula  
• Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire 
• Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Hotel Transylvania 

Good list.  I would have deleted Rice and added Suzie McKee Charnas' superior Vampire Tapestry (1980).

(thanks to Steven Kaye)

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Graves for sidekicks

One disturbingly Gothic classic superhero comic cover:

My Little Pony, my Saw

Today's Gothic mashup, or a Brony gone bad:

If the image makes no sense to you, it's the My Little Pony universe crossed with the world of Saw.

(thanks to Steven Kaye)

Suicide over Facebook

Another Facebook-related death: a Taiwanese woman killed herself, apparently using Facebook to share details of her demise.

Lin Mei-heng, 31, posted messages on the social networking site saying she wanted to take her life while at home in a suburb of Taipei on March 17, the Apple Daily newspaper said.

She also posted photos of charcoal burning in her stove -- before shutting the windows of her flat, so it filled with noxious fumes and she suffocated, according to the report.

Another sign of Facebook's gradual integration into everyday life. No blame attached to it, though - has FB escaped the haunted media realm?

(thanks to Ed Webb's Diigosphere)

Liquifying the dead comes to New England

That corpse liquification method we noted last year has arrived in Maine.

Since the arrival of the alkaline hydrolysis machine on Tuesday, the Maine Coast Crematory in Searsport has already processed several bodies, according to the company's owner, Mark Riposta, and he has a waiting list to process more.

Will this become a creepy or comforting thing?  For the latter, I wonder about the combination of green-ness and innovation.

(thanks, Tammy! photo from jenny downing)

Deleting the voice of the dead

It was bound to happen. We've been creating digital afterlives for years, so naturally someone figured out how to screw it up. T-Mobile deleted a grieving family's last voicemail from their deceased child.

"When I had bad days I would listen to her," the dad tells KOMO 4 News in Seattle. "She said 'Daddy I love you and I miss you.' And I don't have that no more."

T-Mobile has apologized to the family...

(thanks to Peter Naegele)

When the Earth mutters under your feet

Mysterious subterranean noises and shaking beset a Wisconsin town.  They seem to be booming sounds, coming from beneath Clintonville's basements:

What is shambling awake in the darkness?

Note that this is CNN, a reliable source for Gothic stories.

(thanks to Ed "Mole Man" Webb)

The very hungry, very disturbing caterpillar

Children's book or Gothic masterpiece? The case for The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

It's "a phantasmagoric bodyshock horror story that focuses on the tenets of extreme gluttony and one creature’s psycho-compulsive desire to consume the world around him."

Taking cues from Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft, The Very Hungry Caterpillar’s conception of horror isn’t a hyperbolic focus on blood and viscera, nor is it concerned with gothic notions of ghosts or death: rather, the anathema is an internalised grotesque; it is the body itself that is to be feared, treacherous from the inside and predisposed to intense bloating, mutation and the eventual emergence of the literal monster from within. 

Read on:

Most shocking, however, is the book’s horrific dénouement in which (spoilers ahead…) the Caterpillar descends into a life of abject reclusion, shutting himself away for an undisclosed period of time before an act of eclosion which sees an entirely different creature emerge from the now empty shell of our hero’s grossly disproportionate and outsized body. 

Once you're done with that, repent with Goodnight Dune.

(thanks to Laurel via Facebook)