Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Now you can eat celebrity flesh

Bitelabs offers the best Gothic take on celebrity culture since Gwynneth Paltrow's skull was opened up for us all in Contagion.  The Bitelabs website offers delicious meats, grown from celebrities' tissue samples.  Call it glam cannibalism:

It all starts with your favorite celebrities, and a quick biopsy to obtain tissue samples. 
Isolating muscle stem cells, we grow celebrity meat in our proprietary bioreactors. 
In the tradition of Italian cured meats, we dry, age, and spice our product into fine charcuterie.

As the Bitelabs Twitter profile says, "We've never been so close to celebrities".  What's not to love?

There's a crowdsourcing element, as we're encouraged to get more celebrities involved.  For example,

The Franco salami must be smoky, sexy, and smooth. Franco's meat will pair with lean, strong venison. Sharp Tellicherry peppercorns and caramelized onions provide Franco's underlying flavors, complemented by a charming hint of lavender. The Franco salami’s taste will be arrogant, distinctive, and completely undeniable.

We could fire up a Kickstarter project for individual celebs, or small groups.  Ah, for Bratpackwurst.

And there's also a fine Green benefit to the Bitelabs offering:

Celebrity meat production requires less than 1% of the amount of land needed for traditional farming...

Bite Labs’ meats are not affected by the growth hormones administered to farm animals, nor are they in contact with pesticides or other chemicals associated with industrial farming....

Lab grown meats are the future.

Indeed.  What a vision, even if it's a viral marketing/stunt/hoax.  Note that the domain is .org, not .com.  

Note, too, the entertaining remix of foodie, localvore, startup, social media, marketing, and celebrity culture.  Behold the new glocalism!

Perhaps we're heading towards the younger Cronenberg's vision of consuming celebrities in other ways.  Or Iain Banks' glimpse of eating dictator flesh.

(via Slate)

Uncanny tattoos

Some folks have created nicely creepy tattoos by combining scary subjects with 3d styles.

For example:

Or:

(thanks to Jesse Walker)

Apparent Glass-bashing incident

A Google Glass user reports being attacked for her technology.

[T]wo women confronted her. Then, a man ripped the Google Glass off of her face.

This might be the prototype for Glass-bashing.

The victim's reaction via social media:

“OMG so you’ll never believe this but… I got verbally and physically assaulted and robbed last night in the city, had things thrown at me because of some *** Google Glass haters …” Slocum wrote on her Facebook page.

More from other people:

[W]itnesses said some people inside the bar got upset about the possibility of being recorded by the glasses. Brian Lester said he watched as a man insulted Slocum, then a man accompanying her retaliated with his fists.

“The crowd was jeering as any last call crowd would do with a fight outside of a bar,” Lester said. “She was running around very excited … and people were telling her, ‘you’re being an *** take those glasses off.”

Threatened by an angry mob - classic Gothic trope.

Note this defensive observation from a participant, about the bar: "it’s not really Google Glass country.”  Let's see if we start breaking down into pro- and anti-Glass factions.

Watch for more of this to come.

Ruins of abandoned Russian churches

The ruins of ancient, abandoned Russian churches are the focus of this gallery.

English Russia helpfully explains:

This article is about abandoned monumental churches of the Vologda region whose history is unfortunately unknown. So we post these pictures just for your visual enjoyment.

Live action escape the room invades North America

Live action escape-the-room experiences have hit Canada.

EXIT - The Ultimate Real Life Escape Gaming Experience from Exit Canada on Vimeo.

Let's see if EXIT doesn't intersect with Infocult in 2014.

(thanks, Annette)

Remixing your creepy dolls

What can we do with bits of old dolls? Freya Dobbins has an innovative approach involving remixing the pieces into new shapes.  She builds up heads, for example:

Or a head plus torso:

How fear sells

Some new research explores why fear is excellent for sales.

(thanks to the splendid Wife of Infocult)

Freeze-dry the dead

Promession is a new method for treating human cadavers.  It essentially freeze-dries us, then uses the leavings for compost.

Which is really excellent, all things considered.

But there are some fun Gothic elements:

• Details like "When the cadaver is completely frozen, it becomes very brittle. The body is then vibrated at a specific amplitude, which causes it to shatter into an organic powder."
• The inevitability of applying the process to someone still living. Start with "The corpse is frozen to minus 18 degrees Celsius, and then is submerged into liquid nitrogen", and enjoy the fear.

(thanks to Randy McCall)

A crustacean ready for your arms

Aw, nothing like a cuddly isopod toy:

Actually it looks like a giant isopod.  Infocult's readers are recommended the related and fine 2012 horror fim The Bay.

(thanks to Todd Bryant on Twitter)

Beholding suspended mummies

A photograph of Mexican drug war atrocities won a major award.  It's an eerie, haunting, disturbing image.

The photograph was taken in Saltillo, Coahuila in March, 2013. A narco manta was left with the bodies signed by “Z40”, leader of Los Zetas cartel.

Gothic horror in real life:

Some background here: