Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Intensive Care

Here's a fun discovery from 2011: "Intensive Care", a podcast audio drama Gothic.  

It's beautifully produced.  Many voices, lots of good sound effects, and a nice score combine to establish a rich environment: a hospital, wherein an unreliable narrative is trapped.

The plot - ah, I'll leave you to it.  A fine bit of psychological and medical horror.

Fun with removed body parts

What do you do with one of your body parts, once removed?  Consider them a family heirloom, naturally.  Let us take a rare look into the world of sports, visiting a baseball player after surgery:

"My daughter asked me to bring something back from the hospital and she said 'your rib.' So I brought my rib back. Fortunately the doctor gave it to me and allowed me to take it home...

"(The rib) is actually in one of my cabinets in my bathroom," Carpenter said. "I'm still trying to figure out what we're going to do with it. It's probably smelling really good. It's in a jar with some of that solution. It was pretty gross, actually.

Said awesome daughter is 7 years old.  Awesome!

What to do with a rib?

"I'm sure we'll do something with it ... Make a necklace or bracelets or something. We haven't figured that out yet."

Does this qualify as sports Gothic?

(thanks to Steven Burnett)

Zombees

More zombies: this time it's zombie bees.  They are attacked and suborned by a cruel fly:

The fly's life cycle is gruesomely reminiscent of the movie "Alien" — though they don't pose a risk to people. Adult females, smaller than a fruit fly, land on the backs of foraging honeybees and use their needle-sharp ovipositors to inject eggs into the bee's abdomen. The eggs hatch into maggots. "They basically eat the insides out of the bee," Hafernik said.

  

 

Zombie economy in the fall

The undead economy meme continues:

After a surprisingly good performance in the third quarter, the thinking is the stock market is ready to pull back, especially after a few choppy sessions and a new batch of data that should continue to show a slow-moving, ‘zombie like’ economy.

The article uses a Halloween pumpkin as a visual.  Maybe we'll see a little more of this over the next month.

Troll as gamer

There's a great passage in this account of meeting a troll face-to-face.  

The victim confronts his tormentor, who breaks down and explains his actions:

I put my hand on his shoulder and asked him "Why?"

The Troll sat there for a moment and said "I don't know. I don't know. I'm sorry. It was like a game thing."

A game thing.

So, that's what it was...

This is a good example of the classic game criticism, that games teach bad behavior.  

(thanks to Jesse Walker; troll photo by Losttrekker)

Hostage-taking with Facebook friends

A Pennsylvanian man took hostages during a standoff with police.  He also took time to update his Facebook page.

Thaxton, who had a prior criminal record, updated his Facebook profile multiple times throughout the morning, telling his Facebook friends "i cant take it no more i'm done bro" and "how this ends is up to yall bro."

This was too much time, for the police.  They were not pleased.  For one, multitasking:

"People were sending Facebook messages. We could see that he was paying more attention to Facebook than to the negotiating team, which was hampering our abilities to resolve the situation," Diane Richard, a spokeswoman for Pittsburgh Police Department...

For another, the hostage-taker received popular support for his actions:

Richard said not every [Facebook] message asked Thaxton to give up, that some encouraged him to keep going.

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(thanks to Todd Bryant and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Digital Futures Unconference participants; photo of an exercise by USAG-Humphreys)

The internet, corroder of souls

Maybe the internet is "turning us into sociopaths". So says one worried soul, concerned about online rudeness.

It’s as if we’ve all forgotten that there’s a real person on the other end, reading and being hurt by our vitriol. That’s as close to the definition of sociopath as one needs to get for an armchair diagnosis, though of course many other typical sociopathic traits are also being encouraged by social media.

"we've all forgotten": fascinating to see the author turn from demonizing trolls to picking on, well, all of us.

Evidence for this is thin, mostly anecdotal: "Just take a look at how people are talking to each other as well. Frankly, it’s terrifying".  Or the support is vague: "the depressing and seemingly exponential rise in libellous, abusive and unpleasant behaviour between human beings unencumbered by worries about consequences."  Exponential, really?

As is usual with cyberfearmongering, the mongerer in question quickly recommends government-imposed discipline:

perhaps what’s needed now is a bolder form of censure after all, because the internet is not a universal human right. If people cannot be trusted to treat one another with respect, dignity and consideration, perhaps they deserve to have their online freedoms curtailed. For sure, the best we could ever hope for is a smattering of unpopular show trials. 

Let's see if mainstream media and politicians pick up this tech-friendly-sourced complaint, a la Jarod Lanier's.

(thanks to Steven Kaye)

More anti-zombie training

The zombie prep meme shambles on, as a group of federal workers are about to receive anti-living-dead training.

Next month, [HALO Corp] will incorporate — no kidding — zombies into a disaster-crisis scenario at the company’s annual Counter-Terrorism Summit in San Diego, a five-day event providing hands-on training, realistic demonstrations, lectures and classes geared to more than 1,000 military personnel, law enforcement officials, medical experts, and state and federal government workers.

I wonder how widespread zombie curricula are, as the fall semester starts.

(thanks to Amanda Lee)

A chef does body disposal

Domestic Gothic met the restaurant world when a chef killed his wife, then used professional skills to dispose of her body.

"I just slowly cooked it and I ended up cooking her for four days," Viens could be heard saying on the recording...

[H]e stuffed his wife's body in a 208-litre drum of boiling water and kept it submerged with weights. He said he mixed what remained after four days with other waste, dumping some of it in a grease pit at his restaurant in Lomita, and putting the rest in the trash.

But there's always something left, isn't there?

[T]he only significant thing left was his wife's skull, which he stashed in his mother's attic at her home in Torrance.

Interesting Oedipal touch there.

And listen to the quiet, scary explanation which ends this AP Gothic:

[S]heriff's Sgt. Richard Garcia asked Viens what happened on Oct. 18, 2009, the night his wife disappeared.

"For some reason I just got violent," he said.

(photo by Joelk75)

In the woods near the village

A gloriously abandoned house near the town of Ostashevo:

In theMacabre And the Beautifully Grotesque Facebook group. Which says:  

Mansion at the abandoned Ostashevo village, Chuhlomskoy Kostroma region in Russia built by Ivan Ropet, late 19th century

(thank you, Ioanna)