Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Infocult, 14 years in

Fourteen years ago this month Infocult was born.

It was an oozy birth, combining unwholesome ichor and illicit code.  It transpired somewhere dark, under ancient tombs lined with flickering screens.  Stories were muttered when Infocult heaved itself into life, tales of fear and the forbidden.

It's instructive, or at least of historical interest, to gaze upon the blog's first entries in August 2003, back in the days of the second Bush presidency's first term.  So many links have perished under link rot's blight.  Doomed technologies appear, like Friendster.  

Dennis Kucinich runs for president.  People lead flashmobs before smartphones.  SCO was a big deal.  So was RSS.

The United States had just invaded Iraq:

Yet we can see stable 21st century themes already in play: gaming as storytelling, the problem of spam, copyright battles, information literacy, worries about the open .

Infocult's major theme - the ways we fear the digital world - is there, but quietly.  Our secondary them - Gothic horror in everyday life - is not.  Infocult is an alien newborn, still clawing its way out of the bloodied host, casting about for prey.

Which it would find.

Scientists attempt to resurrect 20-million-year-old fungus

A group of international scientists claims to have successfully regrown a fungus not seen on Earth for 20 million years.

In a statement apparently designed to gladden the hearts of horror fans and B-movie lovers everywhere, one offered this observation:

“What we have found may be ancient fungal species that were there even before humankind was born,” said Fumio Inagaki, deputy director of the JAMSTEC Research and Development Center for Ocean Drilling Science.

Even better,

The JAMSTEC researchers hypothesize that land-based fungal species were buried underground but survived beneath the seafloor mainly in the form of spores.

How such fungi could survive remains a mystery. There is no ambient oxygen beneath the seabed, and temperatures there are high, at about 50 to 60 degrees.

"This is how it all ends", might be how readers respond.  "Did the fungus take over scientists' brains?" could ask another.  "You want fungi from Yuggoth? Because this is how you get fungi from Yuggoth," notes one commentator.

(via MetaFilter)

More creepy radio

The BBC has a fun piece on a mysterious Russian shortwave stations, "The Buzzer".  A bit like a numbers station, it provides eerie content:

Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for the last three-and-a-half decades, it’s been broadcasting a dull, monotonous tone. Every few seconds it’s joined by a second sound, like some ghostly ship sounding its foghorn. Then the drone continues.

Once or twice a week, a man or woman will read out some words in Russian, such as “dinghy” or “farming specialist”. And that’s it. Anyone, anywhere in the world can listen in, simply by tuning a radio to the frequency 4625 kHz.

There are several theories out there.  One is that it's part of Система «Периметр» ("Dead Hand"), which is terrifying.  

Another is that it's aimed at conventional war:

It only becomes a numbers station in moments of crisis, such as if Russia were invaded. Then it would function as a way to instruct their worldwide spy network and military forces on standby in remote areas. After all, this is a country around 70 times the size of the UK.

It seems they’re already been practicing. “In 2013 they issued a special message, ‘COMMAND 135 ISSUED’ that was said to be test message for full combat readiness,” says Māris Goldmanis, a radio enthusiast who listens to the station from his home in the Baltic states.

Perhaps we should, every so often, state "COMMAND 135 ISSUED" just to see what happens.

Clown hotel for sale

Should Infocult need a well-themed HQ, we could relocate to Nevada.  There a clown-saturated motel for sale.  Yes, "[t]he motel is covered in clowns, from the lobby to the rooms."

And a bonus level:

If the clowns aren't enough to keep you up at night, the motel is also popular with ghost hunters. Next door is Tonopah's first town cemetery, established soon after the town was settled by silver-miners in the early 1900s. The town boomed for a short while, but when mining fell off in the 1920s, the town started to empty.

One more awesome photo:

Any takers?

(thanks to Jesse "Floppy Feet" Walker)

More Ohio Gothic

Sometimes it's best to start a post with a direct quote from a linked news story:

A man stored his girlfriend’s body in a freezer with the help of another woman, who assumed the dead girlfriend’s life by moving into her home, using her credit cards and caring for her dog, authorities said.

Ohio Gothic, ladies and gentlemen.

And here's how you get caught:

Novoa asked a friend to keep a padlocked freezer, police said, but the man became suspicious because it had been locked for a week.

The friend managed to open the freezer, found the remains and called police, investigators said...

The two were arrested and charged with corpse abuse...

Ohio Gothic is its own special thing.

(thanks to Barbara Sawhill)

Jellyfish rising from the deep

Perhaps Gaea has more weapons in her arsenal.  The New Scientists reports on the growing menace of... jellyfish.

For a long time, it didn’t matter that we knew so little about these animals. They were just a mucous mess that washed up on beaches, or a painful nuisance for swimmers. But then huge invading swarms – jellyfish blooms – started making the news. In their millions, jellyfish are capable of spectacular acts of sabotage. Yet nobody knows where these blooms come from or how to get rid of them.

There are precedents for the rising jellyfish menace:

When the power went out on the island of Luzon in the Philippines in 1999, locals thought a long-feared military coup was under way. They were wrong. Sucked into water intakes, jellyfish had taken out vital services from power stations to data centres and water treatment plants. In 2006, a jellyfish bloom temporarily disabled the Ronald Reagan, one of the US navy’s flagship nuclear-powered supercarriers.

Mother Earth: her struggle against humanity continues.

(link thanks to Ed Webb; jelly photo by Michael Coghlan)

The clowns are back, at least in Maine

From Maine, perhaps the most Infocult thing all week:

A man accused of drunkenly strolling down a road in Maine wearing a black-hooded sweatshirt and a clown mask and brandishing a machete taped to his amputated arm has been arrested.

Like so:

Is the Great Clown Panic of 2016 back?  Only as an echo: 

Police say Berry was first spotted in Hollis but then fled into the woods. He was taken into custody after re-emerging in Waterboro. Police say Berry was intoxicated but cooperative. He told officers that he was copying previous clown sightings as a prank.

Clown panic reenactments, anyone?

(thanks to Ed "Honk Honk" Webb)

Death in stock photos

On Twitter, a user finds three stock photo images that tell a creepy story:

(thanks to Jesse Walker)

Ohio Gothic: the Earth versus civilization

The Earth continued her war on humanity by opening a front in Ohio.  When their houses and business began sinking into the soil, a group was evacuated for their safety.

The threat came from underneath:

A spokesman for the Ohio Department of Natural Resources tells WEWS-TV the cause hasn’t been determined, but he believes the damage is due to an abandoned mine shaft that collapsed nearly 85 feet (25.91 meters) below the ground.

Wadsworth Director of Public Service Robert Patrick says a coal mine subsidence study was done before construction began at the condominium development.

(thanks to Steven "Not a mole man" Kaye)

Sinkhole devours Florida houses

Earth continued her subterranean war on the human race this week by opening another sinkhole in Florida.

The results can be disturbing:

The sinkhole, estimated to be 250 by 225 feet and 50 feet deep, is full of water and not draining because of debris, Guthrie said. It's also looks like it's full of household chemicals and septic tank parts.

"We're treating this in essence as a haz-mat incident," he said.

The CNN account feels cinematic at times:

Authorities were called Friday morning about a depression the size of a small pool that a boat on the property was falling into.

 

Pasco County Sheriff's Deputy Jay Murphy said he arrived at 7:48 a.m. ET to find the sinkhole had formed and reached the corner of one house.

 

Nobody was home, he said, but fire and rescue personnel were able to get two dogs out before one corner of the house fell into the sinkhole.

 

By this point, the sinkhole was moving quickly, with "large chunks of the ground actually caving in," he said. 

 

Murphy said he went to the second house and helped an elderly woman and two other females get out. Other deputies started yelling for them to move quickly because the ground was collapsing underneath the corner of the house, he said.

 

The residents of the first house drove up in time to see the rest of their house destroyed, Murphy said, speaking to reporters in front of the sinkholes.

"As soon as they got here, what you see now is what they witnessed as the house caved into the hole," the deputy said. "They were unable to get any belongings. Everything they owned was in there."

There's also this ominous statement:

"The hole itself now appears to be dormant," Kevin Guthrie, Pasco County's assistant administrator for public safety, said at a news conference.

The war continues.

 

(thanks to Steven "Limestone Terror" Kaye)

Death by game puppet master: the case of Blue Whale

A computer game featuring puppet masters who convince players to wound and ultimately kill themselves sounds like something from fiction.  But Blue Whale is, apparently, grounded in reality.

Snopes reports on a recent example, where a San Antonio teenager apparently was talked into hanging himself by someone or some people running an instance of the online game.

From this story, Snopes outlines the game's structure:

Parents allege that teens reach out to game administrators called curators through various social media platforms. Those curators lead the players through 50 days of challenges including watching scary movie clips, cutting symbols into their arms and legs and taking pictures of themselves in dangerous positions such as on the edge of a roof or on train tracks.

The participants are allegedly required to take pictures of their challenges being completed and share them before being directed to end their lives on the 50th day. A search of related hashtags on Instagram shows users posting pictures of scars and cuts or memes that depict suicide, and a similar Twitter search shows users reaching out for curators to lead them through the game.

Wikipedia offers some additional background, including some disturbing features, such as this story:

In February, 15-year-old Yulia Konstantinova and 16-year-old Veronika Volkova threw themselves off the top of a 14-story building in Irkutsk, Siberia after completing 50 tasks sent to them.^[135][136] Before they killed themselves together, Yulia and Veronika left messages on their pages on social networks.^[136] Yulia published the photo of a large blue whale and then wrote "End".^[137] Veronika had previously posted things like "Do you feel that you become useless?" and "I am just a ghost".

There's also this origin story:

Philipp Budeikin, a former psychology student who was expelled from his university, claimed that he invented the game... On 11 May 2017, Russian media reported that Philipp Budeikin "plead guilty to inciting teenagers to suicide," having described his victims as "biological waste" and claiming he was "cleansing society."^[11][12] He was held at Kresty Prison in St Petersburg with charges of "inciting at least 16 teenage girls to kill themselves."^[11]

Some Blue Whale instances feature a nearly ritualized set of 50 tasks.  There is, of course, an app for that.

One blogger claims to have tricked readers into following his invitation to play Blue Whale.

Breitbart helpfully deems the game to be Satanic.

The Blue Whale game/meme/movement/legend cycle draws together several classic haunted media themes: young people, social media, computer gaming, mobile devices.  In 2017 it takes on an additional aspect, potentially, given its putative Russian origin - i.e., will it become even more sinister in a time of Russophobia?

The hanging coffins of China

An article summarizes the rare Chinese practice of stashing coffins far up cliffsides.

The coffins rest in a variety of formations, sometimes barely visible from the ground below. They're lined up in the crevices in the cliff face, balanced on wooden cantilevered stakes, placed in rectangular spaces hewn in the rock face or stacked high up in caves like those Wong saw on his latest coffin-chasing expedition to Guizhou.

A skull pokes out of a coffin made out of roughly hewn planks of wood, its smooth white surface catching the reflection of the winter light flooding into the dark cave.

It's one of about 30 caskets anchored on a limestone rock about 30 meters (almost 100 feet) up the side of a cave in Guizhou province in southwestern China. It could date back hundreds of years. The coffins, inside and out, are littered with fragments of clothes, bones and ceramics.

Imprisoned as a doppelganger

Prison is always Gothic in various forms, but another level of horror appeared in Kansas this month.  Authorities released an inmate when it became clear that he had been incarcerated instead of the real perpetrator, his mirror image.

More:

In booking photos, the two men looked nearly identical, with the same facial hair and cornrows. They are both close to 6-feet-tall and weigh around 200 pounds. The two men are also roughly the same age: [Rick] Jones was born in 1976, while Kansas corrections records show Ricky Lee Amos was born in 1977.

It took more than a decade for this to surface, which is still another form of horror:

In 2015, other inmates at Lansing Correctional Facility began telling Jones there was another inmate who looked like his twin. On top of being doppelgangers, the other man had the similar-sounding name of Rick.

(thanks to Jesse "the real one, honest" Walker)

Florida brain-eating parasite is on the rise

Florida generates its own particular form of Gothic horror.  Today's case in point: a brain-eating microbial parasite is growing in numbers across several counties in that state.

What does Angiostrongylus cantonensis do to us?

Fatality rates for the disease are low, but the parasite can cause a form of meningitis, and severe infections can lead to a coma or death. In adults, signs of infection include headaches, stiff neck, fever, vomiting, nausea, and paralysis of the face and limbs. Infected children exhibit nausea, vomiting and fever. According to the US Centers for Disease Control, there is no treatment for an A. cantonensis infection

How does it work?  A multi-species chain:

This malicious worm is dependent on two species for its lifecycle. Snails ingest the parasite by eating infected rat feces. In turn, rats eat the infected snails, and the cycle of despair continues. Humans contract the disease by consuming infected snails—either accidentally or deliberately—or by eating infected frogs or crustaceans, which can also contract the parasite.

Perhaps this is a quiet new front in Gaea's war against humanity.

Dawn of the skull cult

Recent excavations and research into Göbekli Tepe reveal what one team describes as an ancient skull cult.

Gresky and her colleagues found three skulls scored with deep cuts made by sharpened stones. The carvings bisect the center of the face, continuing up the forehead and all the way around to the back of the skull. One skull, painted with red ochre, also had a hole drilled in the top. A likely explanation is that the skull cultists were tying the skulls with cords, then threading another cord through holes in the skull, in order to suspend them from the stones.

More:

carvings of headless people and severed heads are common themes on pillars at Göbekli Tepe. Some images show animals holding human heads, while others show headless men (we know they are men because they have erections, a common representation during this period in human history). It's likely these decorated skulls were part of a worldview elaborated in these stone carvings.

Infocult: with humanity since the dawn of time.

(thanks to Steven "Acéphale" Kaye)