Et tu, Cthulhu

Blam!

Kids today. No respect. If I had my way they’d be out tilling the soil.

Joakim: Nice overview. I was going to post a short comment on your blog, but it totally snowballed on me, so I’m posting it here instead.

One of the recent horror scenes involving technology that I found frightening was in (otherwise uneven) The Grudge. A surveillance monitor is showing a blurred rendering of the ghost stumbling along a corridor, towards and below the camera, which, judging from the angle, is mounted high on a wall. Now, a surveillance monitor is one of the most reassuring, comforting devices you get. See without being seen, no physical proximity. However, reality breaks down shortly after the ghost leaves the frame, and you’re faced with a pair of eyes radiating madness, hovering on a black background. The ghost is in the machine, and it’s looking back at you.

Technology-enabled monsters are a frightening concept in general. They’ll know who you are and where you live, follow you on the subway, take the elevator up to your apartment and lie in wait under the bedsheets (under the bed proper is so last century).

I think technology in the “recording and verifying” role is more common in recent works, although it rarely, if ever, plays center stage. In Sixth Sense, there’s a shot of a thermostat showing room temperature falling suddenly, in addition to the more widely exploited audio amplification. Alien^3 has an x-ray image verifying that Ripley’s got a monster inside her (a fate she eventually embraces, interestingly).

The role of technology seems to increasingly be to reveal the hidden. The notion that something can exist even if you can’t see or hear it is scary, and devices that are more capable than our own sensory equipment are commonplace. Note that animals (typically dogs and cats) with acute hearing sometimes also serve that function. It proves that you can be face to face with the unknown and you don’t even know that it’s happening.

On a side note, I think it’s interesting to see how art reflects society’s rapidly changing relationship to technology. The Alien series is my favorite example. In the first movie (1979), technology is represented by the traitor android, who’s in league with the evil. The android contingent redeems itself in the second (1986), and features as something of a martyr in the third (1992). And in the fourth (1997), it’s goddamn Winona Ryder (I wanted to say “fucking Winona Ryder” here, but due to its ambiguity, I had to settle for a weaker expletive).

Right. I’ve written a little script for Cacti, and I’m going to use it to show Telmex just what I mean by “intermittent DSL downtime”.

The orange bars indicate service outage. Every time this happens, my IP changes as an additional bonus. This has been going on since I got the subscription months ago, and despite numerous complaints and their seemingly sincere attempts at fixing the problem, nothing has changed. Pity me.

Update: I made the trivial script available. It takes one input (host to ping) and returns two outputs (avg latency and loss %).

I find it amusing that just a couple of days after Federico passingly mentions the Norwegian invasion of the Mexican Free Software scene, Leo posts his t-shirt design for sister companies copyleft.com.mx / copyleft.no, and it says “Norwegian invasion” quite clearly:

The lion is part of Norway’s Coat of Arms. As you might suspect by now, Norwegians are imperialistic fucks the same as most everyone else, we just haven’t been very successful at it in recent history, having been repeatedly pwned by Sweden, Denmark and Germany.