A short month, and a chilly one. My new employment requires venturing out of the Tentaclii Towers grounds, and — lacking the requisite brazier-heated coach and fast horses — I have been re-acquainted with the delights of the English weather. Despite what hysterical cultists would have you believe, the English spring weather is definitely not “boiling” so far as I can tell. It’s set to be sub-zero with a heavy mist tomorrow, as I write.

In this month’s ‘Picture Postals’ posts I clambered up the mysterious Newport Tower in search of Vikings; I glimpsed the lower depths of Brooklyn Heights, which finally led me to a good artistic vision of what Lovecraft would have seen from atop those same heights; I gazed down Fulton Street in earlier times (which seemed to me to link with Lovecraft’s “The Street”); and peeped at the new excavations alongside the List building at Brown University (the site of Lovecraft’s house at 66 College Street). In another picture based post I wondered at the similarity of Lovecraft’s bibliophile ‘Great Race’, in “The Shadow Out Of Time”, to the Surrealist “Exquisite Corpse” of 1927.

For Valentine’s Day I examined Lovecraft’s one-time epistolary pseudonym ‘Valentine Boiling Fitz-Randolph Byrd’.

In scholarly work I found four new items. I also noted the use of Lovecraft for a new “Psychoanalysis of Wet Dreams”, which led me to dig up Lovecraft’s suitably soppy parody poem on the topic. I noticed that Fungi from Yuggoth: An Annotated Edition is back in print. In forthcoming books, S.T. Joshi announced a forthcoming volume of letters sent to R.H. Barlow, and also remarked on a new French screen documentary on Lovecraft.

In new books I noted: The Weird Tales Boys (2023) and Long Memories and Other Writings (2022) on Frank Belknap Long. Also the forthcoming artbooks Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book: Weirdly Illustrated by Michael Bukowski; and H.P. Lovecraft: Zoomorphic Manual. In old books I was pleased to learn of the existence of The Annotated Tales of Edgar Allan Poe (1981), now on Archive.org.

My occasional highlighting of free AI ‘LORA’ image-generation plugins continued, and I linked to an AI generated video adaptation (Lovecraft’s cosmic “The Poe-et’s Nightmare” from 1916).

Also in freeware, I was pleased to recommend AnyTxt Searcher for scholars. Also free, though requiring a hefty and expensive graphics card for your PC, Nvidia released “Chat with RTX”. Which appears to be an easy way to locally build an in-depth ‘H.P. Lovebot’ AI chatbot from his letters and essays. Now all we need is the humanoid robot HPL to put it in. Ready when you are, Mr. Musk!

Definitely not freeware, a complete set of Weird Tales was put up for sale on eBay at around $150,000. Which if you have a mere three bitcoins lying around, would actually be quite affordable. Sadly I only have a tiny fraction of one bitcoin, worth about $80 at the last count.

I updated my PDF of letters from E.H. Price to Lovecraft, which triggered a small but pleasing round of new downloads. Also for the Lovecraft Circle, I was pleased to find a good map for the Conan tales. I’m a little surprised there aren’t more such maps, and that I had to dig it up from 1975. In audio I noted R.E. Howard’s Weird Tales horror stories had arrived on Librivox.

I also posted on “Brian Stableford as editor and scholar”, and sorted out which of Asimov’s many ‘robot tales’ are said to be the best to start with. In Tolkien, I made more progress with issue #8 PDF ‘zine version of my Tolkien Gleanings, which should be out in a few weeks and weigh in at 100 pages.

And… the blog passed 5,000 posts.