HPLinks #25.
* New on Archive.org, Crypt Of Cthulhu #14 (1983) and Crypt Of Cthulhu #57 (1988) as scanned PDFs. These were not previously online. Back issues of Crypt are no longer available to buy as PDFs, so this sort of occasional fan-scan release is all we have.
* Alfredo; A Tragedy, free online…
H.P. Lovecraft wrote one play, that never made it to the stage. Here we present it in [full-cast] audio drama form.
* In French on YouTube, but YouTube can auto-translate, Interview with Francois Baranger (November 2024).
* The Breathing Abyss, a new free Lovecraftian mod for the popular RPG videogame Skyrim (Special Edition)…
The Breathing Abyss is an ocean-based quest mod centred around finding out what a mysterious entity is, where it’s from, and how it can be stopped. The mod features incredibly high-quality voice acting, a unique story, and custom assets.
* The Daily Express (a questionable British tabloid newspaper, inclined to clickbait) has a short player review of the new £10 Steam game Dreams in the Witch House…
the mixture of point-and-click adventure, life sim and role-playing works extremely well. […] With multiple endings and outcomes, this sub-£10 adventure is great value for money
* John Coulthart writes…
I’m currently putting together a revised edition of my Lovecraft book, so that’s one thing which may emerge at some point in the new year [2025].
* New on Librivox, public-domain audiobook readings of Lovecraft’s “The Haunter in the Dark” and “The Thing on the Doorstep”. Both read by Ben Tucker.
* Talking of audiobooks, there’s now a CPU-based local audiobook creator that uses local AI-generated voices. The latest Audiblez is free, open-source, installs on pure Python 3.x (no CUDA or PyTorch dependences, which are roadblocks for Windows 7 users) and generates speech locally on the CPU. The new version, released this week, adds a useful Graphical User Interface. Thus Audiblez may interest those with older PCs, who are otherwise unable to run local text-to-speech AI systems.
* I see that another excellent genuine freeware has also updated. Anytxt Searcher can now also run on Mac and Linux, as well as Windows, and has various other enhancements. Useful for scholars, it quickly searches across the text inside your desktop PC’s documents, including .ePUB files. For proximity-search, turn on Anytxt’s Regex ability by selecting ‘Regular Match’ in the search-type drop-down, and use (for example)…
\b(?:eldritch\W+(?:\w+\W+){1,9}?tentacles|tentacles\W+(?:\w+\W+){1,9}?eldritch)\b
A bit of a mouthful, but it works. This example will find all instances of ‘eldritch’ if the word occurs within nine words of ‘tentacles’. Note there are two instances of 9 in the regex, as well as the search-words. Both numbers need to be changed, if you’re expanding the seek-range.
* The Spiral Tower has a new long and cogent essay on “Sword and Sorcery Fandom: When Enthusiasm Becomes a Commodity”, in the hands not of corporates but rather of individual ’empire builders’ who are following the monetisation playbook…
… growth brought with it a new phenomenon: ‘enthusiasm opportunists’. These individuals, exploiting the community’s passion, began leveraging their fandom for personal gain through Kickstarter campaigns and other monetized ventures […] Over time, this monetized culture eroded the DIY ethos that had made the fandom vibrant. […] I voiced my discomfort with this shift, arguing that the commercialization of fandom was compromising its authenticity. However, my critique was poorly received, particularly by those who tied their monetized ventures to progressive [i.e. leftist] activism. My reluctance to uncritically endorse these ventures was cast, inaccurately, as opposition to their broader causes …
* New in English in the open-access journal Revista Laboratorio, “The Fallen American Adam In Clark Ashton Smith’s “The Maze Of The Enchanter””.
* The Pulp Super-Fan has a very short review of The Freedom of Fantastic Things: Selected Criticism on Clark Ashton Smith (2006) and Clark Ashton Smith: A Comprehensive Bibliography (2020).
* And finally, Lovecraft Copywork is a new free online site. It suggests you train to write in the manner of Lovecraft. Copywork is an old-school method of teaching good writing style. Each and every day one carefully and slowly copies a small portion of a great writer’s text, using one’s best handwriting (though here re-typing is suggested). Over time, one learns to intuitively emulate how the author wrote. The technique might also, I’d suggest, be paired with repeated listening to the same text-portion as read by a good audiobook reader.
— End-quotes —
Lovecraft on handwriting…
“Lonely philosopher fond of cat. Hypnotises it — as it were — by repeatedly talking to it and looking at it. After his death the cat evinces signs of possessing his personality. N.B. He has trained cat, and leaves it to a friend, with instructions as to fitting a pen to its right fore paw by means of a harness. Later it writes with deceased’s own handwriting.” — Lovecraft’s story germ #88, as noted in his Commonplace Book of story ideas.
“… the process of handwriting is no effort at all unless one aims for great legibility & ornamentation. The reason moderns think handwriting is hard, is that they have never practiced it enough to get used to it. […] It is, of course, perfectly adequate for careless & hasty letter writing, where no delicate plot-nuances have to be managed, & where the most slipshod sentence-structure can get by without criticism. Nobody expects anything of a letter, or judges any man’s style by one. Even when I write one by hand I pay no attention to rhetorick, but just sail along at a mile-a-minute pace. That is why I write so long & so many letters — because I take no pains at all with the language.” — Lovecraft to F.B. Long, February 1931.