• About
  • Directory
  • Free stuff
  • Lovecraft for beginners
  • My Books
  • Open Lovecraft
  • Reviews
  • Travel Posters
  • SALTES

Tentaclii

~ News and scholarship on H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937)

Tentaclii

Monthly Archives: February 2019

Friday ‘picture postals’ from Lovecraft: Prospect Terrace

22 Friday Feb 2019

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Picture postals

≈ Leave a comment

“the mystic sunset flaming beyond the antient Baptist steeple, the narrow colonial hill streets with their fanlights & double rows of steps, & the great outspread sea of roofs & domes & spires leading off to the purple western hills as glimpsed from old Prospect Terrace? Zeus! the charm & mystery of the violet early evening, when the lights of the ancient city below began to twinkle forth one by one! […] Why, Sir, modernity cannot exist for one who has really gazed upon the elder world!”

“the sunset, seen beyond the mystical spires and domes of the lower town from Prospect Terrace, always fill[s] me with a curious sensation of opening gates and about-to-be-revealed wonders”

“What I want [is] a seclusion amidst ancient scenes wherein I may cast off the actual modern world in a quiet round of reading, writing, & pilgrimages to quaint & historick places. I want to dream in an atmosphere of my childhood — to sit on Prospect Terrace with an old book or a pad & pencil in my hands.”

Going Patreon-only

21 Thursday Feb 2019

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Housekeeping

≈ 2 Comments

Thanks for reading Tentaclii. My Patreon patrons have now declined to $30 a month. After six months of intense daily blogging at Tentaclii I think it’s now safe to say that the Tentaclii revival has been a whole lot of work, but has not proven a success. This means that at the end of this month I’ll be taking the blog “Private”, making it entirely invisible to the public Web and available only to my Patrons on Patreon.

Oriental Tales

21 Thursday Feb 2019

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Odd scratchings, REH

≈ Leave a comment

Newly on Archive.org this week, very clean and crisp scans of Oriental Stories. In layout/design ‘a Weird Tales clone’ and also edited by one Farnsworth Wright…

Oriental Stories, October/November 1930 (No.1, Robert E. Howard).

Oriental Stories, Spring 1931 (No. 4, one of Robert E. Howard’s proto-Conan Crusader stories).

The Acolyte for Spring 1943

20 Wednesday Feb 2019

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Odd scratchings

≈ Leave a comment

Newly on Archive.org is a nice clean scan of The Acolyte for Spring 1943, featuring one H.P. Lovecraft on “Poetry and the Artistic Ideal”. This is also on the Hevelin Fanzines collection in tiling per-page form, but now it’s also on Archive.org in complete portable PDF.

The Lovecraft Geek podcast returns

20 Wednesday Feb 2019

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Lovecraftian arts, Odd scratchings, Podcasts etc., Scholarly works

≈ 2 Comments

I’m pleased to see there’s a new episode of The Lovecraft Geek podcast with Robert M. Price, The Lovecraft Geek Podcast, 19-001. 19 presumably stands for 2019, and the 001 is self-explanatory. My podcatcher software refuses to download locally (“cannot verify talkshoe.com”), but it streams fine.

Price says at the start that he needs more questions sent in. I had sent in a list of questions by email last October, but he doesn’t seem to have got them. More questions are needed, to: criticus@aol.com

He notes that Ulthar Press has a set of Price-edited books lined up. Already published is The Mighty Warriors (summer 2018), his edited collection of new stories likely to interest those who like 1970s sword & sorcery action — with the twist that here we have… “aging once great heroes” rather than rippling youths.

Also announced was the book Narcotic Pnakotic Fragments (I think I heard that correctly, presumably a play on ‘necrotic’), a collection of his essays on the Mythos cycle, from Ulthar Press.

Sounding rather further off in time, and also from Ulthar Press, were various anthology titles. Most interesting to Lovecraft scholars is probably Price’s mention of his The Exham Priory Cycle. Since it will include historic “precursor stories” to Lovecraft’s “The Rats in the Walls” as well as new stories influenced by the famous tale.

Chaosium is apparently getting back into everything from action figures to anthologies, and the latter seem likely to include Price’s long-languishing ‘Cycle’ anthology manuscripts. Including one with stories expanding on Lovecraft’s revision tales. Price didn’t say so, but I presume that Chaosium are flush with cash from the success of the big-budget videogame and its associated boost to the sales of the table-top game and related books.

Price’s next Crypt of Cthulhu magazine should ship in the next couple of weeks. Presumably that’ll be #112, but Necronomicon Press doesn’t have its table-of-contents up yet. Although a note elsewhere on the Web-o-sphere tells of one of the scholarly essays in it…

“First and Final Estimates: August Derleth Looks at Weird Tales Magazine” is to be included in Crypt of Cthulhu No. 112 (late 2018 or early 2019). This builds upon Haefele’s earlier discussion in August Derleth Redux: The Weird Tale 1930-1971 (H. Harksen Productions, 2009), emphasizing Derleth’s positive impact on the reputation of Weird Tales magazine.”

Wordsmiths

19 Tuesday Feb 2019

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Odd scratchings

≈ Leave a comment

I recently spotted a rare lauding of Lovecraft, from Gunjan Patni, on a board for those studying the forms of language. He appears to be in India, and is thus presumably blissfully unaware that ‘you’re not supposed to say that’…

“I dabble in creative writing here and there. Wordsmiths like Tolkien and Lovecraft are a pleasure to read for their sheer skill in sentence structure and plethora of words.”

‘Trends, Observations and Conclusions’ for Lovecraft RPGs in 2018

19 Tuesday Feb 2019

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Lovecraftian arts, New books

≈ Leave a comment

A while back I noted a 10,000-word survey of Lovecraft RPG publishing in 2018, which at that point was about to move on to a series of articles scrutinising individual titles.

Now there’s a final part, Cthulhu in 2018: A Retrospective, part 5. In the first section this looks at 2018 Kickstarter campaigns that have yet to ship, and then concludes with a general “Trends, Observations and Conclusions” section. The latter is a useful addition to the articles I linked to in my earlier post.

House of Penance

18 Monday Feb 2019

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Lovecraftian arts, New books

≈ Leave a comment

This looks rather good, if only for the Ian Bertram art. The collected six-issue run of “House of Penance”. Tells the…

true story of the Winchester haunted house and one woman’s mission to wash away the blood curse … With an added horror element right out of H.P. Lovecraft. Collects the six-issue miniseries.

176 pages as a modestly priced Kindle ebook.

DeviantArt delve…

18 Monday Feb 2019

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Lovecraftian arts

≈ Leave a comment

Recently on DeviantArt…

Lovecraft fan by Sykadia (the expected format for posting on your DeviantArt profile).

The Temple by Nele-Diel.

Sona-Nyl by GeoKorf (“The White Ship”).

H. P. Robocraft by Mutinate. The robot has an ink pen in his hand.

Mister Carter by GarrulousGibberish.

Enamel Lovecat Badges by Aliquotoculos (Kickstarter).

Weird Fiction Review #9

17 Sunday Feb 2019

Posted by asdjfdlkf in New books, Scholarly works

≈ Leave a comment

S. T. Joshi’s blog has updated. He’s warmed in, in Seattle. While here in the UK it’s bright sunshine, ten degrees and the very earliest breath of springtime wafts over the moist soil. Joshi’s blog brings news that Weird Fiction Review #9 is out with a Colin Nitta cover re-imagining the famous Fantastic Four debut cover…

Includes “an illustrated history of Gnome Press”, an essays on surrealist horror novels, and another on “H.R. Giger-inspired Alien toys”.

It’s a bit quack…

16 Saturday Feb 2019

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Odd scratchings

≈ 1 Comment

Why is my Tentaclii blog not indexed by the secondary search-engine DuckDuckGo? Apart from (oddly) two PDFs in the “Unknown Friends” series? It’s curious, because the content is there and Google Search is all over my blog. It even sometimes shows up on Google Scholar and Google Books.

Not that the absence from DuckDuckGo matters much, as all the evidence from my other blogs shows the only traffic source that matters in any real way is Google Search. But it is slightly annoying, especially when one sometimes hears people piously proclaiming that “I’m giving up Google”. They’ll do fine for basic “where is that big site’s main page” navigation searches. That’s what I use the Duck for, and the Duck’s Image Search is excellent. But for anything else, you’re using a third-rate service and badly crippling your online research capabilities.

Tentaclii‘s indexing problem here is not actually DuckDuckGo’s own indexing, but rather that their service is built mostly on Bing, with a bit of Yandex and a couple of others. Mostly they appear to rely on the world’s worst major search option… Microsoft Bing. Search for Tentaclii on Bing, and you can see how the results mimic almost exactly the search results for DuckDuckGo. So Bing is the culprit here.

Could I quickly submit my URL (web address)? No. Since September 2018 Bing no longer allows URL submissions to suggest new sites they should index. Nor does DuckDuckGo allow direct URL submissions. I did join Bing Webmaster programme to get a ‘site dashboard’, in order to submit URLs, which was total overkill and proved to be impossible anyway. After submitting your site you have to “verify” thus…

Which is totally impossible to do for a WordPress.com blog, because the author doesn’t have any control over such stuff. Thus basically Bing doesn’t allow WordPress.com blogs to submit their URL, in a way that their system can ever verify. Which means there’s no way to submit the URL for Tentaclii. Some might even see this as anti-competitive behaviour by Microsoft, blocking the services of other companies.

Like I said, it’s not that much bother… because Google Search is the only traffic source that matters. But it’s just annoying in a niggling way, especially when you hear people occasionally lauding Bing and DuckDuckGo as if they were as good or better than Google. I run JURN and have spent the last decade immersed in the academic side of search-indexing, and I can tell you they’re not.

An Account in Verse of the Marvellous Adventures of H. Lovecraft, Esq.

16 Saturday Feb 2019

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context, Odd scratchings

≈ Leave a comment

An Account in Verse of the Marvellous Adventures of H. Lovecraft, Esq. Whilst Travelling on the W. & B. Branch N.Y. N.H. & H. R.R. in Jany. 1901 in one of those most modern devices, To wit: An Electric Train.

← Older posts

 

Please become my patron at www.patreon.com/davehaden to help this blog survive and thrive.

Or donate via PayPal — any amount is welcome! Donations total at Summer 2022, since 2015: $340.

Archives

  • March 2023
  • February 2023
  • January 2023
  • December 2022
  • November 2022
  • October 2022
  • September 2022
  • August 2022
  • July 2022
  • June 2022
  • May 2022
  • April 2022
  • March 2022
  • February 2022
  • January 2022
  • December 2021
  • November 2021
  • October 2021
  • September 2021
  • August 2021
  • July 2021
  • June 2021
  • May 2021
  • April 2021
  • March 2021
  • February 2021
  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • August 2020
  • July 2020
  • June 2020
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • March 2020
  • February 2020
  • January 2020
  • December 2019
  • November 2019
  • October 2019
  • September 2019
  • August 2019
  • July 2019
  • June 2019
  • May 2019
  • April 2019
  • March 2019
  • February 2019
  • January 2019
  • December 2018
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • August 2018
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • August 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • March 2014
  • February 2014
  • January 2014
  • December 2013
  • November 2013
  • October 2013
  • September 2013
  • August 2013
  • July 2013
  • June 2013
  • May 2013
  • April 2013
  • March 2013
  • February 2013
  • January 2013
  • December 2012
  • November 2012
  • October 2012
  • September 2012
  • August 2012
  • July 2012
  • June 2012
  • May 2012
  • April 2012
  • March 2012
  • February 2012
  • January 2012
  • December 2011
  • November 2011
  • October 2011
  • September 2011
  • August 2011
  • July 2011
  • June 2011
  • May 2011
  • April 2011
  • March 2011
  • February 2011
  • January 2011
  • December 2010
  • November 2010
  • October 2010
  • September 2010
  • August 2010
  • July 2010

Categories

  • 3D (13)
  • Astronomy (57)
  • Censorship (13)
  • de Camp (6)
  • Doyle (7)
  • Films & trailers (89)
  • Fonts (8)
  • Guest posts (2)
  • Historical context (1,068)
  • Housekeeping (83)
  • Kipling (10)
  • Kittee Tuesday (74)
  • Lovecraft as character (38)
  • Lovecraftian arts (1,383)
  • Lovecraftian places (19)
  • Maps (58)
  • NecronomiCon 2013 (40)
  • NecronomiCon 2015 (22)
  • New books (864)
  • New discoveries (158)
  • Night in Providence (17)
  • Odd scratchings (851)
  • Picture postals (208)
  • Podcasts etc. (375)
  • REH (148)
  • Scholarly works (1,234)
  • Summer School (31)
  • Uncategorized (2)
  • Unnamable (85)

Get this blog in your newsreader:
 
RSS Feed — Posts
RSS Feed — Comments

H.P. Lovecraft's Poster Collection - 17 retro travel posters for $18. Print ready, and available to buy — the proceeds help to support the work of Tentaclii.

Proudly powered by WordPress Theme: Chateau by Ignacio Ricci.