NecronomiCon Providence is calling for scholarly papers for the academic strand on Lovecraft and his works…

“…including the influence of history, architecture, science (anthropology, biology, geology, etc), and popular culture (movies, theater, etc), on his works.”

But you have to be able to deliver it in person in Providence on 23rd-25th August 2013, and if selected will be allotted just twenty minutes. Perhaps fannish conferences such as this could also run a more flexible fannish format in parallel, for those unable to attend: “present the talk to video, and ramble on for as long as you want…” 😉

Added to the Open Lovecraft page:

* John D. Sanderson (2011), “The Shadow over Galicia: H.P. Lovecraft’s obsessions resurface in the film adaptation of Dagon (2001)”, Odisea No.12, pp.245-255.

Spoof Halloween submission to arXiv Physics…

Benjamin K. Tippett, “Possible Bubbles of Spacetime Curvature in the South Pacific”…

“In 1928, the late Francis Wayland Thurston published a scandalous manuscript in purport of warning the world of a global conspiracy of occultists. Among the documents he gathered to support his thesis was the personal account of a sailor by the name of Gustaf Johansen, describing an encounter with an extraordinary island. Johansen’s descriptions of his adventures upon the island are fantastic, and are often considered the most enigmatic (and therefore the highlight) of Thurston’s collection of documents. We contend that all of the credible phenomena which Johansen described may be explained as being the observable consequences of a localized bubble of spacetime curvature. Many of his most incomprehensible statements (involving the geometry of the architecture, and variability of the location of the horizon) can therefore be said to have a unified underlying cause. We propose a simplified example of such a geometry, and show using numerical computation that Johansen`s descriptions were, for the most part, not simply the ravings of a lunatic…”