19 Thursday Mar 2020
Posted in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts
A new one-hour Plot Points podcast asks…
How did H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Colour Out of Space’ influence gaming? Academic Scott Bruner, Chaosium stalwart Jim Lowder, and host Ben Riggs (Encounter Theory) gather to discuss!
18 Wednesday Mar 2020
Posted in Odd scratchings
An interesting real ‘hook’ for a plot-point in a game or story… Ancient secret of lightning strikes at stone circles revealed in Scotland…
Geophysics [of a stone circle, by the University of Saint Andrews] revealed that … there was a massive, star-shaped magnetic anomaly in the centre – either the result of a single, large lighting strike or many smaller strikes on the same spot.
18 Wednesday Mar 2020
Posted in Historical context, Odd scratchings
The local Brattleboro newspaper has a new appreciation of Arthur Goodenough. The newspaper doesn’t appear to block visitors from outside the USA.
Their new local history article focuses on Goodenough’s speaking out against the state-enforced sterilisation of 250 “idiots, imbeciles, feebleminded or insane” in Vermont, to prevent them from having children. That was in 1931, and the Great Depression was beginning to grip. To many at that time, it must have seemed quite a sensible move.
But Goodenough rightly worried about what would now be called ‘mission creep’. Worried that, once such a thing was permitted, the public would come to accept it and doctors would treat it as routine. Then the apparently limited policies would slowly grow into a self-serving bureaucracy that could start to encompass anyone deemed ‘aberrant’…
He stated that it is unknown if physical or mental infirmaries might visit the lawmakers later in life; or find their way into the lives of friends, children or grandchildren. With passage of the law any of them could find themselves visited by the sterilization knife as well.
17 Tuesday Mar 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
John Coulthart has posted a full scan of his cover-art for His Own Most Fantastic Creation, in the post “Double weird”.
16 Monday Mar 2020
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
Back Issue! #121 (due in two months, 10th June 2020) is in Previews, and will be a special issue on Conan and similar in the comics. Includes among other items…
* the 50th anniversary of Roy Thomas’s Conan #1,
* the Bronze Age barbarian boom,
* top 50 Marvel Conan stories,
* Marvel’s not-quite Conans (from Kull to Skull),
* Joining Roy Thomas are Kurt Busiek, Ernie Colon, Chuck Dixon, Mike Grell, Ron Randall, Dann Thomas, Timothy Truman, Marv Wolfman, and many more.
15 Sunday Mar 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Podcasts etc.
That strange scurrying noise? It’s a horde of Lovecraftians burrowing into a HPLHS dropdown-menu, to get at the free .MP3 of the Dark Adventure Radio Theatre: The Rats in the Walls radio drama…
On moving into 66 College St. Lovecraft had discovered a… “narrow and hideously nighted space in the attic under the eaves — reached from the attic proper by low doors, and having no windows whatever. … I am wholly alone in the house now, with my aunt at the hospital and the downstairs neighbour on the high seas bound for Germany — but what was that creaking above me last night? Part of that black space [in the attic] is directly over my desk. Perhaps it was only the rats…” — H.P. Lovecraft, to CAS, June 1933.
15 Sunday Mar 2020
Posted in Odd scratchings
Just taken in a consignment of copies your new book or magazine, printed in somewhere like China or Italy? Or had curious Lovecraftian packages in the mail? Then you’ll be needing Less Wrong’s new “Comprehensive COVID-19 Disinfection Protocol for Packages and Envelopes”.
Or, rather more simply, you could just leave them in a hallway or spare room for 15 days, after which time any virus traces should theoretically be kaput — even at chilly temperatures. But it seems a freezing garage is probably not the best place to store the consignment, as such virii can go into cold storage and persist for longer. So if that’s all you have, add a low level of electric trickle-heat.
Also, some may be considering sending glossy cards/postcards to elderly and ill folk in isolation until perhaps the end of May 2020. There are such programmes starting up but they seem like a very bad idea, given the type of surfaces and the hand-contact and envelope-licking involved. Something virtual like Skype or a phone message would be better.
15 Sunday Mar 2020
Posted in Historical context, Podcasts etc.
A new American Writers podcast looks at Lovecraft’s “A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson”, and his love of the 18th century wits and satirists.
From the time-travel movie Berkeley Square (1933), one of Lovecraft’s favourite movies and set in the 18th century.
One of the best free public readings is “A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson” by H. P. Lovecraft by HorrorBabble.
14 Saturday Mar 2020
Posted in Odd scratchings
MPorcius surveys Lovecraft’s Eddy collaborations…
“The Loved Dead” is a masterpiece of horror: economical, perfectly paced, internally consistent and novel
And now in the public-domain, for those looking for an as-yet untouched Lovecraft source for an adaptation.
13 Friday Mar 2020
Posted in New books, Podcasts etc., Scholarly works
S.T. Joshi’s blog has updated. Among other items mentioned, a 15-volume Greek edition of Lovecraft is underway, with the third volume having been issued in 2019; there is a possibility that the Lovecraft biography I Am Providence could begin a Czech translation; and a set of ‘Providence Pals’ interviews (i.e. pioneer Lovecraft scholars, researchers and editors) is forthcoming in podcast format.
13 Friday Mar 2020
Posted in Odd scratchings
New on Archive.org, Unreleased Film Scripts, all unreleased and effectively unmade as movies. There’s Bug Jack Barron by Norman Spinrad; del Toro’s At the Mountains of Madness; a Conan first draft (2008, presumably an early try for the 2011 movie); and a 2005 script for Ender’s Game (presumably an early try for the 2013 movie).
12 Thursday Mar 2020
Posted in Historical context, Scholarly works
Friday the 13th approaches. Here in the UK, the 13th is a key virus infection-point. According to the UK’s Chief Medical officer the start of the peak in symptoms should then begin here on 19th-23rd March, rising thereafter and possibly continuing high for three or four weeks. (Update: he’s now saying “the peak” might last 10-14 weeks).
Thus, tomorrow we face a very scary Friday the 13th. There’s also a full moon in the night sky, possibly giving hysterical toilet-roll chewers an added dose of lunacy.
What better reading then, for this moment, than my account of H.P. Lovecraft and the deadly influenza epidemic? Accordingly here is a free chapter from my book Lovecraft in Historical Context #3, “A Real Horror: on the 1918 flu epidemic in Providence”. The chapter has been slightly revised, and there’s a new picture of one of the armed guards on the gates of Brown University.
Download: real_horror_1918_flu_in_providence.pdf