Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Don't reboot the router

One man had a problem rebooting his router.  Things got... interesting.

Keep reading.  It... evolves.

(via MetaFilter)

Creepy museum object competition

Today's Gothic COVID-19 story concerns a creepy object competition.  

What’s a museum social media manager to do with no exhibitions on the horizon? The Yorkshire Museum recently put out a call on Twitter asking for museum experts to submit pictures of the creepiest objects in their collections. And things got weird—fast. 

There's a nice plague mask:

And another mask, either for execution or for public humiliation:

And, naturally, one creepy doll:

Museum professionals around the world responded with a series of esoterica that would make the creative director for a B-level horror movie jealous: a petrified sheep’s heart punctuated by nails, a blood-soaked doll with a missing eye, a severed leg turned into a deformed creature in desperate need of an orthodontist.

(thanks to Thomas Burkdall!)

Creepy TikTok

It was inevitable as link rot that fearsome stories would appear about TikTok.  

So far there isn't a social panic (yet), but at least one chilling story has appeared.  A British tabloid shares this tale:

A TikTok dancer's video has gone viral after a figure was spotted lurking in the background, despite the dancer claiming he was home alone...

But terrified viewers were focusing on something other than his dance moves, as they spotted a dark figure hiding in the background.  

Here's a screenshot:

That doesn't really do it justice.  Watch the video carefully.

Was it an animal who snuck inside?  A human thief?  Did the dancer stage this?

Reuben, who has more than 54,000 followers on TikTok, later uploaded an update following his original post to thank everyone for their concern.

He said: 'I'm kinda stomach sick right now and I was in and out of sleep all last night.'

He added another post saying 'i need answers!' 

Telling those watching he was going to try and sleep, he promised he would return to answer questions in the comments later. 

Fearing the mobile: cartoon edition

"Phone Addiction Is Real -- And So Are Its Mental Health Risks" is a short cartoon that aims to horrify the viewer into not using mobile devices so much.

It draws on the classic mixture of gore and violence that so many classic and modern cartoons relished.  It's also like a series of Rube Goldberg machines, with distracted people doing stupid things that then kick off more stupid things, and so on:

 

 

Note the bent-head cyclops nature of humans. The devices have mutated us physically, not only mentally and ethically.

(via R/PhonesAreBad)