Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

More Mexican real-life Gothic

Meanwhile, the Mexican drug war continues, offering up real-life Gothic horror.

The dismembered bodies of 17 men were found Sunday on a farm in a part of central Mexico disputed by violent drug cartels, officials said. The bodies were dumped near a highway in the town of Tizapan el Alto by the border between Jalisco and Michoacan, said Jalisco state prosecutor Tomas Coronado Olmos.

[T[he bodies were naked, mutilated and stacked with chains around their necks. They had been killed elsewhere and dumped on the property.

This stuff has been going on for a while, and energetically.

In May, authorities found 18 human heads and remains packed into two abandoned cars along the highway connecting Chapala and Guadalajara, Jalisco.

...More than 47,500 people have been killed in Mexican drug violence since December 2006, when President Felipe Calderon launched a military offensive against the cartels, according to the latest official figures. Some civil groups and activists say the figure is higher.

Infocult's been on the Mexican Gothic beat for a while.  We've already recommended reading 2666.

The gnawing, labyrinthine hunger out of time

What horrors lurk within Pacman? "It's like Kafka wrote a Lovecraft story", broods Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.  

It begins: "Pacman is the story of a man who wakes up one day to find he is nothing but a mouth."  Do read the whole thing.

Infocult does indeed want him to speak to Centipede.

(via Grant Potter on Twitter)

Looking back through Amnesia

The designers of Amnesia look back on its two-year career.  Good thoughts on piracy, planning, and audience.

"Dad's Secret Door" purports to describe the discovery of a hidden underground passageway.  Apparently it connects the family house with a nearby church (like Castle of Otranto).

It begins with a trick door:

...which leads to tunnels and passageways...

Things get darker, as you might expect:

Then darker still - what the:

Even better, a recent development:

[the tunnel] has been blocked off by a new wall my dad had put in half way, so we own half now lol. we have found another passage way but you lift up a slate in the floor and the room is huge but flooded

A dark, underground, flooded chamber.  What could be there, eh Infocult readers?

(via Reddit)

Improvements to the giant stomping robot

The Legged Squad Support System (LS3), a/k/a Big Dog, just got better at creeping us out walking around.

it demonstrated new gaits and improved perception of the world around it. But perhaps most importantly, this Big Dog is 10 times quieter than the earlier deafening prototypes, which bounced around unnaturally while emanating a deafening (and position-telegraphing) mechanic roar.

Watch for yourself.  See the thing stand up, burst out of bushes, advance in a pair, and stalk a human:

 

Infocult: charting the end of the human race, one robotic step at a time.

The zombie war on terror

Wired's Danger Room calls the war on terror "The Zombie War".

In a rational world, as the emergency receded, so too would the institutional mechanisms of response. In the world we actually live in, the war on terrorism is more like a zombie, lurching forward thoughtlessly on instinct and stimulus-response.

Ackerman breaks it down: the huge federal budget costs that live on.  Plus "[t]he 9/11 security state is very much alive. Or, if you prefer, undead."  And the human casualties.  He makes the metaphor work, sadly.

(thanks to Todd Bryant)

Die-o-ramas

One California crime reporter invented a new American Gothic art form: the Die-O-Rama.  These are tiny art projects depicting acts of mayhem in everyday life.

They feature corpses, shallow graves and improbable characters, like the gunman in a pope costume, the decapitated man sitting next to his severed head and a guy dispatching his victim with a lawn mower.

For example, a mowing incident:

Or a little axe murder:

I love the origin story:

Abigail Goldman was wandering the Internet when she came across the model train website that changed her life. She noticed all the miniature figures were engaged in wholesome activities — waving to strangers, helping neighbors.

Then she had a dark thought: Maybe those characters could be made to do violent, unspeakable things. They could populate tiny, twisted dioramas of her own design, snow-globe-sized worlds of murder and mayhem.

And the intrusion into daily life:

Goldman is an Infocult natural:

"I said, 'Oh, look at all the little people! Wouldn't it be fun to have them hacking each other in half?'" said Goldman, 30, a former Las Vegas Sun crime reporter...

Much of the madness involves gardening tools. "You can do so many things with a pair of hedge trimmers," said Goldman, whose blond librarian-like braids belie a worldview that's Goth teenager. "Lawn and garden tools are ghastly and horrifying and fraught with danger. They're all horrible and they're in your house, waiting to decapitate someone."

Even better, she knows about clowns:

Previous Infocult posts on deadly dioramas: Christmastime, the demon barber of Peep Street.

(thanks to Thomas Burkdall)

Past horror via uncanny photographs

Here's another example of that uncanny image practice, where photos of past events are blended with images of the same locations today.  Here the topic is the San Francisco earthquake:

I find the presence of animals especially unsettling:

(thanks to Thomas Burkdall)

Bloodthirst poem

Fine blood/parasite imagery from Omar Khayyam, as translated by Juan Cole:

I am busier than you are, 
cleric of the faith!
And, despite my drunkenness, 
I’m soberer than you.
I drink the blood of the vine,
while you drink that of people.
Be fair, which one of us 
is more bloodthirsty?

 

Kickstarting the Zombie lawbook

Zombie law: not just a concept, but maybe a book.

This USB reward for donations is pretty nice:

(thanks to Annette)