03 Wednesday Jan 2024
Posted in Scholarly works
New in open access, a journal article on Tennessee Williams as a Weird Tales writer and reader contemporaneous with Lovecraft, “What weird meant to Williams”.
“In August 1928, Weird Tales magazine published “The vengeance of Nitocris”, a short story written by 16 year-old Thomas Lanier Williams. What Tennessee Williams wrote later in his life resembles the plots, the structure, and stylings of stories (including the names of characters) that appeared in Weird Tales in and around 1927 and 1928″.
03 Wednesday Jan 2024
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
A pleasingly retro Dave Carson original from 1980, up for sale on eBay (not from me)…
This led me to discover his 2022 artbook Called by Cthulhu: The Eldritch Art of Dave Carson, with an introduction by Neil Gaiman.
And further, that a Special Collector’s Edition — in larger 10″ format and three volumes — appeared in the spring of 2023. This appears to be still available.
02 Tuesday Jan 2024
Posted in Odd scratchings
New to me, ‘Adventures in Time and Space: 60 years of Doctor Who art’. This is a large free exhibition running until 27th January 2024, at the Weston Museum in the probably rather wind-swept seaside resort-town of Weston-super-Mare, England. Might be combined with the more sedate ‘The Wonderful World of the Ladybird book artists’, which opens in Bath (20 miles east of Weston-super-Mare) on 19th January 2024.
02 Tuesday Jan 2024
Posted in AI, Kittee Tuesday
A few more AI LORAs from over Christmas, free plug-ins suitable for making science-fiction and fantasy images with AI image generators. These are more newly discovered than new.
New, the Terran Trade Authority space art style LORA. TTA was a British book series that republished the best sci-fi paperback cover-art of the 1960s and 70s, weaving around them a coherent future timeline of spacefaring, space-wrecks and explorers.
Might be used with the newly discovered kaodiiLandscapeMix – night – v1.0, a rare full model dedicated to dusk and night paintings. As such, possibly of use for the more subtle types of horror painting, and dimly-illuminated space art planetscapes.
Newly discovered, an Ice Age LORA, for making various types of scene look icy and snowy. Possibly of interest to those devising pictures of ‘Conan in the cold wastes’ or ‘Lovecraftian cities at the pole’, etc, but also ‘ice planets’.
Newly discovered, lurking at HuggingFace. RetroFutur, an Embedding rather than a LORA (they work in a similar way). Note this is for SD 2.1 786 rather than the usual 1.5. Gives sort of a Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow look…
And, since this is Kitty Tuesday, note the same maker has a KittyPic embedding, for photoreal cats in SD 2.1 786. Do not combine with RetroFutur to create visions of the Greater Ulthar Cat Empire of 2499… do not… oh, too late.
See also my new mega-list “I battled through 20,000 anime girls… so you don’t have to” (December 2023).
02 Tuesday Jan 2024
Posted in Kittee Tuesday, Scholarly works
S.T. Joshi’s blog brings news of an article on ‘Lovecraft and Cats’ in Offcourse #95 (December 2023). Freely available online.
01 Monday Jan 2024
Posted in Odd scratchings
Footnote fans may be interested in a new release of the free open-source DTP software Scribus 1.6. Now has “foot and end notes (experimental feature)” along with a new dark mode, a “new PDF-based output preview”, and even (it’s claimed) import of Microsoft Publisher .PUB and Quark files. Still works on Windows 7 too.
The download is here. I’m downloading now, and I’ll believe the .PUB import when I see it. But the footnotes and other changes make it a must-install.
Update: I knew it was too good to be true. The 64-bit installs, launches and then… completely and utterly freezes. Rebooting the PC made no difference. I then tried the 32-bit, but the same problem there. Scribus also then managed to make my old Microsoft Publisher un-launchable, due to the new C++ runtime installers Scribus needed to install.
01 Monday Jan 2024
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Archive.org has the usual Public Domain Day 2024 Remix Contest…
“Make a 2–3 minute movie using at least one work published in 1928 that will become Public Domain on 1st January 2024.”
With one of 2024’s possible themes being “Weird Tales of 1928″ and another being somewhat detective-ish, “Sleuthing the Public Domain”.
A quick look at my Public domain in 2024 post suggests a film-maker could choose from Wandrei’s “Sonnets of the Midnight Hours” series in Weird Tales. In books, small parts of Wild Animal Interviews and wild opinions of us and the prescient The Day After To-morrow: What is going to happen to the world? might make amusing cartoons.
Talking of cartoons, Mickey Mouse’s first appearance finally enters the public domain, so a makeover for the malodorous mouse is not impossible. Imagine…
‘It is 1928. Mickey the Rat is piloting the sinister river steamer Whippoorwill to Providence, with a malign black cat as the skipper. They sail up through the mists to Providence to relieve Mr. Lovecraft of some Lovecraftian creatures which have escaped his imagination and entered reality. A sign indicates the creatures are to be imprisoned on the Isles of Shoals. Mickey also smuggles aboard H.P. Lovecraft himself, who as usual is seeking a cheap ticket to his beloved Newport. But the master’s presence excites the massed weird creatures to a chaotic cacophony of sinister cosmic music, as each one strives to emit its unique sounds. As they set sail again Mickey the Rat then conducts them all in a wild and somewhat co-ordinated sonic worship of their creator. The short ends with Lovecraft ignominiously put off on a lonely lighthouse rock near Providence, while Mickey the Rat is stuck on kitchen duty boiling tentacles… the fun has been foiled by the skipper.’
Whippoorwill was indeed the name of Mickey’s steamboat, captained by a cat. The above makeover closely follows the plot.
01 Monday Jan 2024
Posted in Odd scratchings
Wild Yorkshire notes that 2024 is the Baring-Gould Centenary year…
In 2024, the Baring-Gould Centenary year, we’re celebrating – in artwork and animation – his work inspired by the time he spent as a young curate in Horbury: the hymn ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’, his folklore study ‘The Book of Were-Wolves’ and his semi-autobiographical novel, set in a thinly disguised version of Horbury, ‘Through Flood and Flame’. Cue thwarted love, dramatic disasters and the villainous Richard Grover, man-monkey and firebrand preacher.