Well, that’s January done with. How fast it goes each year. But let’s recap what it held here at Tentaclii…

I posted a long and fairly comprehensive overview of Lovecraft related activity in 2023 in various fields.

In my regular ‘Picture Postals’ posts I took a look across the city of Providence in 1896; shivered in the New York weather of January 1925; poked into Lovecraft’s letter-box; and even gazed into Lovecraft’s Eyes (purely in the interest of scientific research). I also found what must be the exact location for “Martin’s Beach”, along with a picture postcard.

In scholarship the only big book news this month was the discovery that the substantial book L’Affaire Barlow: H.P. Lovecraft and the Battle for His Literary Legacy had slipped out just before Christmas 2023. Two journals also appeared, the new Dead Reckonings: A Review of Horror and the Weird in the Arts, and The Dark Man: Journal of Robert E. Howard and Pulp Studies (13.2). In individual scholarly articles, I dug up a number of new items in languages other than English.

In comics the publisher Dark Horse announced a ‘Deluxe Edition’ of Gou Tanabe’s adaptation of “At The Mountains Of Madness”. I found a peep inside the new graphic novel Le Dernier Jour d’Howard Philip Lovecraft.

Not much in audio but I was pleased to belatedly spot a multi-voice unabridged The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, available for free.

In events the passes and tickets for NecronomiCon Providence went on sale in mid January 2024. The London Lovecraft Festival (stage theatre) also started booking.

I noted and linked several artbooks, such as Called by Cthulhu: The Eldritch Art of Dave Carson; the forthcoming illustrated Annals of the Jinns (Barlow), some forthcoming Chaosium product (RPG sourcebooks, but they kind of count as artbooks), plus Francois Baranger’s Innsmouth (due 2025). I also noted several small end-of-career art exhibitions which might otherwise have been overlooked.

The craft and technology of AI image making continues to hurtle forward at full speed, and I brought readers some of the best and most interesting LORAs for AI powered image generation. Including a new Solomon Kane character LORA, for R.E. Howard’s Kane. I imagine your AI would also obligingly clothe Lovecraft in the same vintage Puritan togs, if prompted. I also perfected a ‘Moebius emulating’ Stable Diffusion 1.5 workflow, or as close as you can get to ‘perfected’ with the wayward SD. Elsewhere I continued to update my directory of worthy AI LORAs for artists and makers of comics.

My Tolkien Gleanings #8 is underway, a round-up and ‘zine for Tolkien scholars. Expect it in a few weeks.

I’m pleased to report that I’ll soon have a bit more money to buy Lovecraft and Tolkien books, since I have a part-time job at last. I clean and clean toilets early each morning, which is all I could get after a year of no professional interviews, but it’s regular and it pays. Many thanks to all those who have donated or helped via Patreon over the last 18 months. The new job does mean I’ll have less time and energy, and as a result certain time-sinks will have to go. But Tentaclii won’t be one of them. On the plus side, the job means I can restore the flow of ginger beer to the taps of Tentaclii Towers, at last. I’ve even discovered that the little ‘Caribbean food’ nook in my supermarket holds an “extra fiery” version of the regular ginger beer can. This rare type is not on the usual shelf and I didn’t know it even existed.

The German Lovecraftians have a “new newsletter format” for members under the title Lovecraft Lore… “In which we send daily emails about events in H.P. Lovecraft’s stories.”

That sounds interesting. I guess one could now have an AI extract any ‘date like strings’ from within the Lovecraft fiction corpus, covert them to a consistent date format and then sort them into a per-month year list. And alongside each, the story title and a snippet of the original context. The Python-based open source datefinder looks like it’s half way towards that.

The booklet The Chronology Out of Time (1986) made a first try at a simple megalist of dates in Lovecraft’s fiction. But it is now well out-of-print, and not on Archive.org. Perhaps time for a new AI-assisted expanded edition?