Author Archives: asdjfdlkf

Chicago Daily Tribune, April 1945

27 Monday Mar 2023

Posted by in Historical context

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Thanks to the Archive.org’s ingestion of old newspapers from microfilm, I’ve found a new early item on Lovecraft that was not included in the collection A Weird Writer in Our Midst: Early Criticism of H.P. Lovecraft. It’s from the Chicago Daily Tribune, 27th April 1945. As the Nazi camps opened and the news floods the newspaper’s initial pages, an anonymous ‘book notes’ columnist reaches for his edition of Lovecraft’s The Outsider and Others. The ‘black magic’ quote here attributed to Lovecraft was a fake, as many will recall.

AI snippet re-writing

26 Sunday Mar 2023

Posted by in Odd scratchings

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Why it’s no longer wise for scholars / bloggers to trust DuckDuckGo / Bing snippets in search…

1. The Guardian newspaper says something silly about Tolkien (to be expected)…

2. But, on clicking through to the source, The Guardian’s actual story says something different. It’s talking about Chaffey…

An AI at Bing has presumably re-written the snippet, possibly for extra click-throughs(?). I’d heard about AI search-result snippet re-writing, but this is the first time I’ve seen it in action.

More Handicraft Club

24 Friday Mar 2023

Posted by in Picture postals

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This week in my regular ‘picture postals from Lovecraft’ post, two newly-colourised additions to my Handicraft Club post from a few years ago.

Here we see the corner of Benefit and College Streets, Providence. Behind the magnolia trees are the headquarters of the Handicraft Club. A house in which Lovecraft’s aunt lived in 1927, and Lovecraft undoubtedly visited her there.

The side-buildings on the right were also part of the Club. Lovecraft was very familiar with this spot, and would later live further up the hill at No. 66.

Writer: the shaping of popular fiction

23 Thursday Mar 2023

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A handsomely designed collection of texts on early pulp writing, by L. Ron Hubbard. Collected in Writer: the shaping of popular fiction (2012). Now available to borrow on Archive.org. An earlier edition was already on there, but was not as nicely designed and the pictures were very dark and murky. Here they’re clear and crisp.

Previously on Tentaclii…

Lovecraft once had a long restaurant conversation with the flame-haired and young Hubbard, according to Frank Belknap Long. While impressed by the “extraordinary” lad, he evidently felt Hubbard was too professional and un-cosmic a writer to strike up a correspondence with.

So the interest here is more in Hubbard’s insights into the markets and fans of the period, rather than in any strong connection with Lovecraft.

Cthulhuton in Madrid

22 Wednesday Mar 2023

Posted by in Films & trailers, Lovecraftian arts

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In Madrid this weekend, Cthulhuton, the Spanish Lovecraft film festival. Billed as “the first” such. 25th March 2023 is the date.

with the presence of prestigious guests such as the American Sandy Petersen, creator of the well-known role-playing game The Call of Cthulhu and one of the greatest disseminators of Providence writer’s work worldwide.

Three choice vintage movies are to be shown, picked for their faithfulness. Petersen will lead the discussion after the main screening.

OpenChatKit

20 Monday Mar 2023

Posted by in AI, Odd scratchings, Scholarly works

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It was only a matter of time before text-generating AI became as open and free as graphics AI. The first such is here now and ‘live’, OpenChatKit…

“a ChatGPT-like dialogue language model that is fully open-sourced, with full access to code, model weights, and training data. The released OpenChatKit model can perform natural-language reasoning tasks, answer questions about documents with retrieval, and browse the Web much like BingChat. The model has 20 billion parameters and is trained on 43 million instructions. […] The release also comes with fine-tuning guides that allow users to easily fine-tune the model for their own applications. […] Apache-2.0 license.”

20 billion is not enough for complex tasks (it can’t write long working Python scripts, or pop out complete essays/stories), but it’s good enough to be useful so long as you know how to ask the question. For instance…

Show me an example of the use of taskkill in a Windows batch file

… gets a line of valid working code. Though you still need to know to wrap it in @echo off and exit, and then save as a .BAT file.

But this is just the starting release. The initial live/free public demo is here, if you want to see what arcane Lovecraftian blurblings it might produce if given the correct prompt. It’s fast and easy to use. Though obviously knows nothing about R’lyeh as a holiday destination. Pity.

I’m uncertain if it can be operated purely locally on a desktop PC, being open source. (Update: Yes it can, it now has a downloadable “7B” model). If not then such things can only a matter of time and the right slot-in card.

So far, this is the only genuinely free / public and ‘no sign-up’ text-generating AI I know of.

Meanwhile, Grammarly will reportedly be plugging in AI auto-writing assistants sometime in April 2023. For a price, of course.

1899 reviewed

19 Sunday Mar 2023

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts

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A new Liberty Room review of 1899, which it turns out was a short-lived and not much watched U.S. TV show in 2022.

The show only increases its adoption of Lovecraftian elements from there, featuring mad cults, rooms which defy all rules of geometry and space, and strange structures hidden in the remote arctic, all set in the same era in which many of Lovecraft’s own weird tales take place. Yet the show’s use of these elements is wholly its own, putting far more focus on the human mind and the mysteries that lie within each person than on those which lie in other dimensions.

I see it was a Netflix show, and that the (reportedly costly) first season ended on a monumental chiffhanger. Not that many viewers made it that far, though, with tracking showing only 50% of buyers made it through to watch the final episode. It will now never be completed, unless perhaps in audio / novel / graphic-novel form.

Stepping up…

17 Friday Mar 2023

Posted by in Picture postals

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I’ve had a Covid-like cold and no appetite for the last week, and a certain amount of brain and eye-fog. An AI doc (the only sort you can get in the UK, these days) had earlier chewed on my demographics and the weather/dates, to predict the strong likelihood of this happening. I very rarely get ill, otherwise. The AI was right, and not even wearing a mask for a while (as was suggest) prevented it. I suppose I should think myself lucky, though, because at least it wasn’t the ‘flu.

Anyway, for this reason my regular ‘Picture Postals’ post is necessarily short this week. Just the one picture, but a fine one. The steps of Lovecraft’s Public Library in Providence. Note the rather creepy-looking lamp-holders that once hung over the entrance.