Monthly Archives: June 2024

A useful new scholarly tool

12 Wednesday Jun 2024

Posted by in Fonts, Scholarly works

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Grabbing editable text from screenshots is useful for scholars, especially those who often use Google Books or perhaps academic article services that don’t allow copy-paste from their free samples (e.g. Project Muse). I used to use the free Microsoft OneNote (handles tiny footnotes well, but is bad on comic-book lettering). But more recently I found the £9 ABBYY Screenshot Reader, which uses the well-tried and trusted Abbyy OCR. Tentaclii readers may already have this, actually, as I think it comes free with most copies of Abbyy Finereader scanning + OCR software. Or it used to. Often, this was given away free when you purchased a flatbed scanner. The software does just as well, and in some cases better, than OneNote.

But now there’s another contender for offline OCR on a desktop PC, the popular and wholly free IrfanView, which is used by millions. If that appeals then get IrfanView v4.67 and also its plugin pack installer. After install of both you’ll see that IrfanView has a new OCR option, though it’ll need to be enabled in the plug-ins menu and then require the free open source Tesseract OCR as its local OCR engine. Lots of language support in Tesseract (if was formerly Google’s tool), and there’s even a special version trained on mediaeval / blackletter texts. Just the thing for OCR-ing and translating ye olde arcane tomes, perhaps. Though note that OCR of German blackletter has now been overtaken in quality by (paid) online AI.

Lovecraft and Felis

11 Tuesday Jun 2024

Posted by in Kittee Tuesday, Lovecraftian arts, Podcasts etc.

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A new, human reading on YouTube, of two short Christmas poems by Lovecraft.

Christmas Greetings to Felis (Frank Belknap Long’s cat)

Little Tiger, burning bright
With a subtle Blakeish light,
Tell what visions have their home
In those eyes of flame and chrome!
Children vex thee — thoughtless, gay —
Holding when thou wouldst away:
What dark lore is that which thou,
Spitting, mixest with thy meow?

   (“Blakeish” = William Blake, the ‘Tiger, Tiger’ poet).

Egyptian Christmas

Haughty Sphinx, whose amber eyes
Hold the secrets of the skies,
As thou ripplest in thy grace,
Round the chairs and chimney-place,
Scorn on thy patrician face:
Rise not harsh, nor use thy claws
On the hand that gives applause —
Good-will only doth abide
In these lines at Christmastide!

And here is the tiger-striped Felis, being held by Lovecraft…

The Thing: Remastered

10 Monday Jun 2024

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts

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John Carpenter’s well-known movie The Thing (1982), had a single-player horror-shooter videogame sequel in 2002. Antarctica. Expeditions. Horrid Alien Life. Paranoia. All very familiar to Lovecraft readers. The game was popular and sold over a million copies.

Now it’s “soon” to be The Thing: Remastered (not to be confused with the remastered movie), offering an overhaul of that glorious olde Millennium-Vision look, and what sounds like some UI and other enhancements. Undated as yet, but it now has a page and trailer on GoG.

I found a detailed “Making of” interview with the makers, about the original 2002 game…

‘Thing’ creatures often have random eyeballs in strange places; that almost plant-like opening-up of structures and there being tentacles inside it; the spindly-leg stuff that pops out of things and parts of the body being able to tear away from other parts of the body and spawn more creatures […] ‘Thing’ creatures rarely look demonic [in the clichéd way].

Hold the Fort

09 Sunday Jun 2024

Posted by in New books, Scholarly works

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Hot on the heels of my recent long blog post on “Lovecraft and Charles Fort” comes a new book. My post could only recommend the book The Fortean Influence on Science Fiction (2020). But the latest Reason magazine (ever alert to the forces of unreason) reviews Think to New Worlds: The Cultural History of Charles Fort and his Followers (University of Chicago Press) and thus alerted me to another one. The new book is set for release on the 3rd of July 2024.

The book’s 394-pages survey not only the influence on imaginative writers, paranormal research and crypto-zoology (‘Bigfoot’ etc), but also what the Reason review calls “the libertarian-leaning strains of Fort’s following, from the San Francisco Renaissance to the Discordians”. These are left unexplained by the reviewer and may be unknown outside of a West Coast crowd of a certain age. So I should perhaps explain that the former references the 1950s/60s Beat generation writers (Ginsberg, Burroughs et al), and the latter a prank religion perhaps best known to science-fiction readers via mentions its primary text Principia Discordia in the infamous Illuminatus! Trilogy of the mid 1970s.

On searching the Google Books version of Think to New Worlds (already online), “Lovecraft” gets 17 hits. So his posthumous intertwingling with Fort is not ignored.

1925 NYC map

07 Friday Jun 2024

Posted by in Maps, Picture postals

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This week on ‘Picture Postals’, another map and also a departure from the Providence theme. New York City’s subway and ‘elevated’ railway system in 1925, drawn by E.R. Trott and given away to customers by a large hotel. In Red Hook Lovecraft was living in the bottom-right corner of the map. See “CLINTON” written in capitals at an angle, and then find “Atlantic” and intersect the two… and you’re about there.

2988 pixels on the longest side, and thus readable if downloaded at full size. A very useful map if reading Lovecraft’s 1925 Diary and letters from New York, since it also has many of the street names, parks, ferry lines, museums, libraries, and even the dock numbers. All for 1925.

And to bring the map somewhat to life, here we glimpse a typical subway entrance with news-stand, at Columbus Circle in October 1925. On one of the southern corners of Central Park…

Note the news vendor’s baseball bat, ready to hand. Hoodlums got what was coming to them, in those days!

A Doc doc

06 Thursday Jun 2024

Posted by in Odd scratchings

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I’m pleased to hear of a substantial new documentary film, on Doc Savage fandom and collecting. Nearly finished and set to preview at PulpFest 2024 in early August 2024…

Ron Hill is finishing work on ‘We Are Doc Savage: A Documentary on Fandom’. This feature-length documentary, two years in production, explores the history of Doc Savage fandom by interviewing dozens of the collectors, creators, and characters keeping the legacy of The Man of Bronze alive.

Trailers are available at the director Ron Hill’s website, as well as updates on progress. It sounds like a labour-of-love documentary and is stated as currently running 55 minutes. Though I guess there may now be scope for a crowd-funder to buy some rights, and thus make an extended version at some point? One which shows some images and clips that would require payment to use? But that’s just my guess.

Anyway, I’ve always had a soft-spot for Doc Savage. Having, as a lad, graduated from the Marvel/Curtis oversized b&w comics magazines (whole stories, effectively graphic novels and with decent artists), to some of the reprint books picked up at second-hand market stalls. That’s about where I left him in the 1980s, though I do recall the movie version (campy tone and cheesy music, but it had its moments).

What’s new with Doc? A lot of so-so modern comics, it seems. But, judging by a quick skip through Amazon, Will Murray’s very well-reviewed Doc Savage: Skull Island (The Wild Adventures of Doc Savage Book #6) (2013) novel would be the best starting-point re: the more recent Doc offerings. The ‘Wild’ series of novels ran 2011-2018, and there are 21 books. The ones I looked at have audiobooks, albeit expensive ones on CD. No Audible. Amazon finally have a chance to tempt me to an Audible subscription and yet… the ‘Wild’ Doc audiobooks are not on Audible.

Surprisingly, I see nothing on YouTube for “doc savage” “wild adventures”. I’d have expected trailers?

“The Temple” on stage

04 Tuesday Jun 2024

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts

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A new “anniversary production” of the one-man theatre show of Lovecraft’s The Temple, at the Buxton Fringe festival in July 2024. Buxton is a spa town on the far western edge of the Peak District National Park, England, with a large upmarket cultural festival centering on its Opera House. The local newspaper has more details of the show.

Meanwhile, online… a generative video AI for the introduction of “The Shadow Out of Time”. Not an adaptation, just a filmic AI experiment to accompany narration. But an impressive showcase.

The Moon Terror

02 Sunday Jun 2024

Posted by in Podcasts etc.

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The Moon Terror by Albert G. Birch, new on Librivox as a three-hour audiobook.

It was issued as an offshoot of Weird Tales, drawing on their first four years of stories. As S.T. Joshi has it…

The Popular Fiction Publishing Company did publish one book in 1927 — The Moon Terror, with stories by A. G. Birch, Anthony M. Rud, Vincent Starrett, and [editor] Wright himself, all from early issues of Weird Tales — but it was such a commercial disaster that no more books of the sort were issued.

The new recording is just the Birch story, which was the lead item in the ill-fated volume.

Cohors Cthulhu

01 Saturday Jun 2024

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts

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A table-top RPG that ‘Lovecraft the Roman’ might have enjoyed, Cohors Cthulhu: Tabletop Roleplaying Game. “A 2d20 RPG adventure of mighty Roman warriors and their barbarian rivals fighting the forces of the Mythos”. Funded with a cool £221,000 and shipped in late 2023, and now with a new follow-on expansion-set Kickstarter.

Although be warned that it seems to be as much about pagan forests as Roman army life…

Far from the Eternal City, deep in the forests of a hostile frontier, unravel the mystery of a village overcome by nightmares its people are forced to re-enact on the waking world. Without the support of a Roman column, cast into a strange land, will you survive with your sanity intact?

Far from nicely tiled Roman hot-baths and libraries, I’d suspect. Though that is also what Lovecraft himself hazily envisaged, and I’m fairly sure he would have tried his hand — had he lived — at an ‘Ancient Romans on the African frontier’ tale. Though in this game it appears that the pagan northern forests are the setting.