http://www.gorelets.com/uncanny Michael Arnzen's Notebook on the Strange in Pop Culture and Everyday Life Tue, 18 Nov 2008 15:06:19 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Photoshop Disasters is a funny weblog that collects flawed design elements in advertisements and elsewhere (like the above image from a Sears Catalog). The accidental amputations, bizarre hands, and other forms of freakish anatomical blunders strike a viewer as uncanny when you spot them in what would otherwise be a "picture ... http://www.gorelets.com/uncanny/advertising/photoshop_disasters_and_fantasy/ *** A Public Service Announcement! *** FACULTY WANTED TO TEACH WRITING OF POPULAR FICTION Assistant Professor of English Location: Greensburg, PA Category: Faculty - Liberal Arts - English and Literature Posted: 11/10/2008 Application Due: Open Until Filled Type: Full Time Seton Hill University seeks published novelist of popular fiction (preferably mystery/suspense), to ... http://www.gorelets.com/uncanny/fiction/faculty-wanted-to-teach-writing-popular-fiction/ For Halloween, the readers of Oobject voted for their Top 12 Videos of Creepy Automata. A great theme, from cats in a milk churn to maniacally laughing dolls. One of my favorites is this clip of a Decaying 1880s Automaton Harpist by Vichy: I won't belabor how uncanny ... http://www.gorelets.com/uncanny/oddities/creepy-automata-videos/ Ludicine has posted a call for papers to an intermedial conference focused on horror video games (and films and books and such), entitled "Thinking After Dark." With a focus on such topics as "figures of interactivity specific to the survival horror subgenre" and a featured guest in Barry K. ... http://www.gorelets.com/uncanny/new-media/call-for-papers-thinking-after-dark-horror-video-games/ Dr. Rob McMinn (the UK teacher behind the We Study Media edublog) offers up a nice Powerpoint "slideshare" from his courses, which gives a succinct overview of Freud's work on the uncanny (das Unheimliche) in relation to horror texts and the media. The UncannyView SlideShare presentation or Upload your ... http://www.gorelets.com/uncanny/theory/slideshow-on-freuds-uncanny/ [caption id="attachment_201" align="aligncenter" width="400" caption="Tron"][/caption] Software designer Daniel Wellman writes about an uncanny experience where a game he was programming seemed to come to life with a will all its own in his essay, "Real Life Tron on Apple IIgs": One day, when Marco and I were playing against two computer opponents, ... http://www.gorelets.com/uncanny/new-media/tron-gaming-and-the-death-drive-crash/ There's a lot of talk lately about how uncanny Tina Fey's impression of VP hopeful Sarah Palin really is, and with the next season of her Emmy-award winning TV show,  30 Rock, getting ready to launch at the end of the month, I thought the timing was right to post ... http://www.gorelets.com/uncanny/theory/30-rock-popularizes-the-uncanny-valley/ Conference reports and reflections from the Uncanny Media conference in Utrecht, Netherlands (2008) are starting to pop up online. Since it relates to my work on The Popular Uncanny, I was very interested in attending this event, but was unable to, so I'm seeking as many discussions and reports ... http://www.gorelets.com/uncanny/theory/uncanny-media-2008-reflections/ My essay on the teaching of horror fiction -- "The Unlearning: Horror and Transformative Theory" -- just went live in the debut issue of the journal, Transformative Works and Cultures. Here's the opening passage: I. Introduction: Fear is Never Itself The horror genre has many reasonable lessons to teach us, even ... http://www.gorelets.com/uncanny/theory/the-unlearning-horror-and-transformative-theory/ "The unconscious is very serious today -- even a little bit sad -- because we repress serious things into it: sex, death, libido, desire. But if it were irony and off-handedness which were repressed, what form would the new unconscious take then? It would become ironic; we would have ... http://www.gorelets.com/uncanny/theory/irony-and-the-return-of-the-repressed/    I've just posted an annotated list of "Classic Dismembered Hand Stories" on my creative writing weblog, The Goreletter. (This "hands" list was originally scheduled to appear in The Book of Lists: Horror, but was cut for space -- but I do have another article in that book on "Top Horror ... http://www.gorelets.com/uncanny/fiction/the-uncanny-hands-of-horror-fiction/ If you watch the latest Doublemint gum TV commercial -- featuring Chris Brown dancing in the dark with the product's new "slim" package -- you might be wondering:  gee, that song and dance is nice but what happened to the infamously kitschy jingle and the wholesome set of twins?  The ad ... http://www.gorelets.com/uncanny/advertising/pop-song-as-product-placement-doublemint-forever/ The TV Tropes Wiki is a useful community-built resource of common plot elements on television shows, which illustrates the high degree of scholarship and close reading that fan culture is capable of producing. It reads like a folklorist's taxonomy. The majority of the site's "tropes" -- which they ... http://www.gorelets.com/uncanny/theory/weirdness-isolation-and-sunnydale-syndrome/ [caption id="attachment_83" align="aligncenter" width="461" caption="iPod Shuffle ad asks consumers to "Enjoy Uncertainty""][/caption] Although the iPod shuffle is now an mp3 player that is the size of a postage stamp, the advertising campaign for the device -- back in 2006 when it was the size of a stick of gum -- asked ... http://www.gorelets.com/uncanny/advertising/enjoy-uncertainty-randomization-and-the-uncanny-ipod/ I recently came across The Blog of the Damned -- a group weblog that has compiled some interesting instances of "forteana 2.0 and the uncanny internet." One entry in particular really jumped out at me: The Browser as Scrying Tool -- that is, the literalization of the metaphor ... http://www.gorelets.com/uncanny/new-media/the-web-browser-as-ouija-board/