Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

It was as if an occult hand posted to the blog

"It was as if an occult hand" is a splendidly Gothic phrase, and also a journalistic in-joke.  For decades some reporters have made a game of sneaking those words into non-Gothically-inclined stories.

Wikipedia has some examples:

"Wonders if Cyprus events might have been 'organized by some occult hand' as part of W Eur global strategy."

"Even worse, with some E-mail systems, if the writer doesn't fill in the subject line, the occult hand of artificial intelligence will enter No Subject."

"It was as if an occult hand had somehow palmed the film."

"It was as if an occult hand had passed over Nick Mancuso's face, momentarily transforming him into Tennessee Williams."

"...one might say it was as if an occult hand had hurled a raspberry at Hollywood."

"He said it is as if an occult hand had arbitrarily determined which..."

"...Saturday, it was as if an occult hand had passed over the Academy Awards..."

Apparently the secret group has stopped tracking uses.  But, tantalizingly:

In 2006, Greenberg announced that the Order had chosen a new secret phrase at an annual editorial writers' convention and resumed a stealth operation.

(thanks to jason kielbasa; photo by The Italian Voice)

One more Gothic Christmas item

XKCD imagines how else the holiday could go wrong:

The very bad Spirit of Christmas

Here's some Christmas horror, of the brief and disturbing sort: "The Spirit of Christmas."  Not safe for children:

(via Nicole Cushing)

Christmas with the devil

Here's a musical celebration of Christmas, Infocult-style: Christmas with the Devil, by Spinal Tap.

(thanks for the reminder, Peter Naegele)

Dogbot gets better, scarier

The creepy Big Dog robot, herald of the robot apocalypse, has been upgraded.  Now it can follow people.  Oh yes:

(via Popular Science)

Christmas horror: one list

Wired's Bloodlines crew select their favorite Christmas-themed horror movies.

Newtown game-blaming continues

Fallout from the Newtown killings continues to include criticism of computer gaming.

The US Senate's Commerce Committee is trying to ask the National Academy of Sciences to investigate possible links between violent media and violent actions.  

[T]he bill also seeks to find out whether "video games' interactive nature and the extraordinarily personal and vivid way violence might be portrayed in such video games" makes the medium "unique."

Ben Stein imagines such connections:

At a certain point, just “killing” on the console blurs into doing it in real life. “Killing” is just what the kid does all his life. How much of a stretch is it for him to shoot into a movie theater or a political gathering or a kindergarten in “real life” if his life is so pitiful that he does not know what’s real and what is not?

Let's see if this grows into something larger, such as more legislation or the gaming industry deciding to do more self-policing.

(cartoon via Clay Bennett)

A new spider trick to plague your dreams

The spiders’ webs were crafted around face-height, near the trail, and about the width of a stretched-out hand.

One spider has a very creative ability.  It makes giant, fake spiders and places them in webs.  Then it shakes the web, to make the simulacrum more realistic.

Here's what it looks like.  Fake spider = huge; scheming prankster = tiny, on top.

Here's the discovery story:

 

From a distance, they saw what resembled a smallish, dead spider in a web. It looked kind of flaky, like the fungus-covered corpse of an arthropod.

But then the flaky spider started moving.

A closer looked revealed the illusion. Above the 1-inch-long decoy sat a much smaller spider. Striped, and less than a quarter-inch long, the spider was shaking the web. It was unlike anything Torres had ever seen. “It blew my mind,” he said.

 

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Anime historical horror

A group of anime artists got together to ask a question nobody should ponder: what would 20th-century dictators look like if imagined as anime heroines?  

The responses are eye-mangling, like this Pol Pot:

It's as if they read Hetalia and decided it wasn't disturbing enough.  Think chibi fascism.

An obscure Gothic is illuminated

Friend of Infocult Jesse Walker reports on reading a very rare Gothic novel.  It's Julia and the Illuminated Baron (Sally Sayward Wood, 1800), an early American tale about the Illuminati.

Let Jesse summarize:

Coming in the wake of the Illuminati panic of 1798, in which Federalists fretted that the secret society was aiming "to subvert and overturn our holy religion and our free and excellent government," Wood weds those anxieties to a Gothic melodrama set in pre-revolutionary France, featuring an Illuminatus who holds a young woman captive and plots against her virtue. Wood's Illuminati are a depraved band of nature-worshippers, seizing personal pleasures as they prepare for the Jacobin apocalypse. At one point Wood has a woman describe the order's initiation ceremony: "disrobed of all coverings except a vest of silver gauze, I am to be exposed to the homage of all the society present upon a marble pedestal placed behind which sacrifices are to be offered." The character adds, "This sect increases daily. They will in a few years overturn Europe and lay France in ruins."

Wood was the first woman American Gothic writer.

You can find a dim version of the book on Scribd, or snag a new edition in print.

(image via Maine Memory)