Category Archives: AI

HPLinks #39 – join the Esoteric Order, Lovecraft’s Dark Enlightenment, sculpting Lovecraft, Dunwich revived, Mayfair magazine, and more…

25 Sunday May 2025

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HPLinks #39.

* S.T. Joshi’s blog has updated (19th May 2025). Among many other items, he is currently seeking a new acolyte to join his very own secret Esoteric Order. He also notes the ‘zine…

Nightlands no. 3 (Autumn 2024), containing my article ‘H.P. Lovecraft and Weird Art’ (an article I wrote years ago as liner notes for an album that never appeared)

* In German, a philosophy journal article whose fragmented title might best translate into English as ‘The Dark Enlightenment of H.P. Lovecraft’, from Weimarer Beitrrge No. 68 (2022, freely available online 2025)…

… he develops an atheistic-materialistic philosophy not only in his literature, but also in essays and especially his extensive correspondence, which can be understood as a “dark enlightenment”. What Adorno and Horkheimer do in their dialectics of the Enlightenment, based on de Sade and Nietzsche also applies, ‘mutatis mutandis’, for Lovecraft. His work unfolds an “intransigent criticism of practical reason” and its agent, the too “self-evident subject”. [Only by understanding the] basic positions of Lovecraft’s philosophy, as developed in essays and letters, does his poetics of form [become clear and] open us up to the full understanding of his literature. His works also provide directional concepts for the philosophy and philology of ‘the eerie’. […] Against this background [I engage in] a reading of his “The Color Out of Space” (1927)

* From Russia, “Preserving the Author’s Style in Translating The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath“ (April 2025). A short conference paper, freely available online. Partly in English.

* Deep Cuts considers the very late “Of Gold and Sawdust” (1975), by Lovecraft’s friend Samuel Loveman.

* “Making an Ultra-Realistic Portrait of H.P. Lovecraft” via 3D digital sculpting and texturing. A link from a few years back, but I don’t think I’ve linked to this ‘making of’ page before. Only to the results.

* New on Archive.org, a pack of three Historic Males SD 1.5 LoRAs including Lovecraft. These are free character add-ons for generating images with Stable Diffusion 1.5. Historical personage add-ons having been last week removed from CivitAI (the main Stable Diffusion download website) along with living celebrities. I guess CivitAI didn’t have either the manpower or the cultural savvy to know if a celeb was dead or alive, and thus they junked the lot.

Tip: you may want to put “Spock” in the negative prompt, if the LoRA wants to veer towards Star Trek’s Captain Spock. That seems to restore Lovecraft’s face. The above is an Img2Img style transform + the LoRA, starting from a Bondware Poser 13 render.

* Feuilleton has lengthy comments on the ‘history of Lovecraft in comics’ academic paper (linked to in my previous HPLinks). Reading this history has spurred him to finish his own unfinished adaptation of The Dunwich Horror… “This, then, is my major project for the next twelve months. The book as a whole will take at least this long to finish”.

* The Alan Moore World blog has “Lovecraft was an American William Blake”…

In writing about Lovecraft, as I’m doing at the moment, I want to understand where he was, to become him, as it were. We’re both pulp writers trying to express our vision of the truth. In this current book Yuggoth Cultures, I’m trying to divine that knowledge.” (Moore, 1993).

Sadly, it appears that his Yuggoth Cultures was left in a London taxi-cab and thus lost. Not sure how the book overlaps with Moore’s comic-book series Yuggoth Cultures and Other Growths, but I’ll take it on trust that Alan Moore World knows that the published comics and the lost book are different things.

* I missed noticing this event, but managed to snag the poster at a small size. A ‘Lovecraft festival’ on the videogame service Steam, which has now been-and-gone.

But from this I was able to track down the larger and more appealing artwork (same artist, no artist credited) that the poster was partly made from…

* Bounding Into Comics reviews the new Re-Animator movie 4K UHD set, and itemises the many additional extras newly packaged with the movie.

* The publisher Dark Horse is preparing to ship a ‘special hardcover’ edition of Richard Corben’s “Lovecraft and backwoods terror” graphic-novel Rat God. 184 pages with “remastered lettering”. Unfortunately it’s also being coloured, having originally been in greyscale. Due in the autumn of 2025…

Terrible things stalk the forests outside Arkham in this chilling original tale from comics master Richard Corben.

* Viking (an offshoot of Penguin Books, last I heard) is reported in the book trade as being set to publish Penguin Weird Fiction later in 2025… “an anthology of stories featuring H.P. Lovecraft, Edith Wharton and Arthur Conan Doyle, among others”. The advance notice makes it sounds like the stories feature these authors as characters, but I suspect it’s not that interesting. Just another cash-in reprint, I expect.

* New on Archive.org, a set of Mayfair magazine (for several decades a leading mass-market British equivalent to the U.S. Playboy), which search shows had in its February 1970 issue a reprint of Lovecraft’s “From Beyond”. George Underwood was the artist…

* Another new batch of short SF/fantasy readings at LibriVox. This time around there are four by Lovecraft’s one-time protege Henry Kuttner, all public domain. Also, I didn’t realise any stories by Marion Zimmer Bradley had slipped into the public domain. But at least one of her stories must have, since she’s in this collection.

* And finally, a reminder to those who may be visiting Providence this summer, that I have a free Lovecraft’s Providence Map online.

— End-quotes —

“”Polaris” is rather interesting in that I wrote it in 1918, BEFORE I had ever read a word of Lord Dunsany’s. Some find it hard to believe this, but I can give not only assurance but absolute proof that it is so.” — Lovecraft to Dwyer, March 1927.

“As to the charge of modernism against me because of my predilection for Poe & Dunsany, why, Sir, I refute it!” — Lovecraft to Kleiner December 1919 (he instead hails his predecessors in the 18th century gothic, discovered and read in his childhood attic).

“When I think of Dunsany, it is in terms of “The Gods of the Mountain”, “Bethmoora”, “Poltarnees, Beholder of Ocean”, “The City of Never”, “The Fall of Babbulkund”, “In the Land of Time”, and “Idle Days on the Yann”.” — Lovecraft to Fritz Leiber, November 1936.

“… a few weird [stage] dramas such as Dunsany’s ‘Gods of the Mountain’ & ‘Night at an Inn’ have demonstrated how a natural expert can weave horror, dread, & mounting tension with skilfully managed dialogue.” — Lovecraft to Natalie H. Wooley, March 1935.

“I infinitely prefer Dunsany to Cabell — he was a genuine magic & freshness which the weary sophisticate seems to lack” — Lovecraft to C.A. Smith, August 1926.

“Imaginative artists have been few, and always unappreciated. [William] Blake is woefully undervalued. Poe would never have been understood had not the French taken the pains to exalt and interpret him. Dunsany has met with nothing but coldness or lukewarm praise.” (Lovecraft, “In Defence of Dagon”, January 1921).

HPLinks #33 – Two Hearts, death and rebirth, mapping Lovecraft, Kitbash Kit, Cairn RPG as 1920s Lovecraft, and more…

09 Wednesday Apr 2025

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HPLinks #33.

* New from the HPLHS, Two Hearts That Beat As One is Sonia’s autobiography…

Businesswoman, milliner, writer, publisher, patroness — known to many as the woman who was married to famed ‘weird fiction’ writer H.P. Lovecraft — Sonia Haft Greene Lovecraft Davis was a woman of many names because she lived a rich and fascinating life. Scholar and editor Monica Wasserman, working with Helios House Press, is delighted to be publishing a beautiful case-bound hardcover edition of Sonia’s autobiography.

* Also new from the HPLHS, a set of HPLHS Vintage Prop Maps, including what appears to be a newly-made one showing the unexplored parts of the world at the start of the 1930s.

* Inklings-Jahrbuch 41: Defying Death: Immortality and Rebirth in the Fantastic, being the proceedings of a 2023 Symposium in Magdeburg, Germany. Now newly and freely available online. Includes, among others, “Death as a Character and Its Philosophical Depiction in Children’s Books” and “Immortality and Digital Rebirth in Science Fiction”.

* New in the open-access education journal Writing in Practice #9, the long article “Maps to Arkham: Lovecraft, Landscape and Visual Poetry”. Discusses creatively approaching Lovecraft via Situationist methods of walking in a city…

… his walking habits still embody a radical response to place and his negotiation of urban commercialism, coupled with a sense of alienation from the normal life of that environment, has fed into some of the fragmented visuals in ‘Maps to Arkham’. The sense of failure and the city are bound up in his fiction, much of which revolves around nightmarishly huge and hostile urban environments

* New on the Kitbash store, a Lovecraft Kit of 3D models of buildings, which you can then use royalty-free to assemble custom scenes for use with 3D digital artwork or games. A hefty price, but Kitbash are known for quality and they sometimes give away complete kits free — so it might be worth checking their store at Halloween 2025 for a freebie or two.

This Kit brings eerie New England streets to life, with shadowy apartments, a looming city hall, a forgotten library filled with forbidden tomes, and a museum hiding unspeakable artifacts. A solitary lighthouse stands against the dark, its beam barely piercing an endless mist. From dimly lit taverns to cursed houses, every corner whispers madness.

* Free on Itch.io from 2024, “a re-skinning of Cairn RPG, so that it takes place in a 1920s Lovecraft inspired world”. In a 71-page A5 PDF illustrated booklet for RPG gamers, which gives Cairn a comprehensive makeover. The adapted Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike source, Cairn RPG is new to me but appears to be a streamlined game with very compact rules and thus suitable for absolute beginners. It has a strong fan-base and is popular because free/easy/fun. The description for its ‘Seven Silver Spheres’ introductory fantasy-forest adventure gives a flavour of a typical setting. I see the free ‘Barrow Delver’ is the game’s solo play ‘oracle’ and the free Cairn: Pocket Edition is a two-page at-a-glance wall-chart for the rules. There appears to be no AI-powered version of all this, at present, so you’ll need pens, paper and various gaming dice.

* Thomas Phinney’s Cristoforo font, free in .OTF format and free for any re-use. Be warned, however, that I think that ‘Call of Cthulhu’ done in this typeface would probably infringe a key Chaosium trademark. The font is a revival of Hermann Ihlenburg’s Victorian era typeface Columbus.

* Amazon UK is now listing the English translation of Gou Tanabe’s 194-page manga-style graphic novel of Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space”. Due on 1st July 2025, from publisher Dark Horse.

* In Italy, the first issue of the new VersiPellis: rivista di miscellanea a tema fantastico e weird (February 2025) has, among others, the article “Lovecraft and Theosophy: an unconscious inspiration?”, and…

an editorial which makes it clear the desire to build a project that is not a simple container of stories or articles, but a meeting point between enthusiasts and scholars of the fantastic.

“23 pages of comics”. The editors are not averse to considering AI-assisted comics for publication, which may interest some.

* And finally, H.P. Lovecraft Ghibli edition, created with the new type of image generating AI. This works more like a Photoshop filter, in terms of being faithful to the input image, and need only a mimimal prompt for style rather than content. The image itself is not amazing, but works as a demo for the ‘style overlay’ technology behind it. This method of using existing images will change a lot of things in the creative world, once it’s open sourced and can easily be run locally on a PC. Currently, it’s only available as part of ChatGPT 4o.

— End-quotes —

“A drawing of myself by myself would have to be something like the accompanying enormity — which succeeds marvellously in looking like nobody I ever saw in or out of the mirror. I might get a job drawing portraits for Wonder Stories.” — Lovecraft to J. Vernon Shea, August 1931. Lovecraft includes a rough pen-sketch of his side profile.

“I have a curious and anomalous sense of kinship with the hawk-nosed, broad-templed Roman physiognomy. […] All other non-Nordic physiognomies repel me violently but the Roman features […] as displayed in the realistic portrait statuary of the republican age [of Ancient Rome], produce in me a profound feeling of stirred memories and quasi-identity. I have the curious subconscious feeling not only that people around me once looked like that, but that I once looked like that. Which is rather amusing in view of the fact that I am actually the utter reverse of Roman in appearance — tall, chalk-white, and of a characteristic and unmistakable Nordic English physiognomy.” — Lovecraft to C.A. Smith, December 1933.

“It is said that the Belgian stratospherist Prof. Piccard cuts his own hair — but when I look at the result in newspaper portraits I feel I am the greater artist!” — Lovecraft to Morton, January 1933. In later years Lovecraft cut his own hair with clippers, to save money.

Add-ons for Stable Diffusion, another round-up

19 Wednesday Mar 2025

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Here’s another small selection of Lovecraft-adjacent Stable Diffusion 1.5 add-ons, new since my last such update. These are free ‘style add-ons’ for free Stable Diffusion 1.5 AI models, which are used to generate images in free software such as Invoke AI. A gaming-quality graphics-card must be slotted into the PC, such as an NVIDIA 3060 12Gb.

* Carbonite Style is Star Wars-y (Han Solo trapped in carbonite) also has obvious uses for making Cthulhu-style bas-reliefs.

* Medieval Slums. With a rather slick ‘wallpaper’ style, but you could tone that down with the slider / prompt.

* Carnivorous Plant.

* Dreamlike Surrealist Painting.

* Rural Eldritch (currently in paid ‘early access’, thereafter to be released for free in ten days).

* Vintagecomic. Excellent, when used with the right model. Also gets the print/texturing right.

Release: NovelForge 3.x

08 Saturday Mar 2025

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For a few years now, the Photoshop plugin creator Mediachance has also offered the desktop CQuill Writer 1.x creative writing software, this being an affordable $60 standalone helper / story-organiser / style-prompter. After much development over the winter this has just been renamed NovelForge 3.x and 3.x can link to powerful LLM AIs (aka ‘chatbots’), which work directly in its editor window.

It uses the same user registration as CQuill, and I tested this… and yes… NovelForge picked up my old CQuill registration details. Just download the NovelForge trial installer, and it will automatically pick up your CQuill registration and also import the old project files. The user interface and workflow possibilities are much the same, with only a new AI assistant tab.

There’s a video on How to setup NovelForge with OpenRouter for free, to access remote LLM AIs. As you can see here, it can also work with local desktop AI hosting suites…

Use cases: paraphrasing; condensing; dialogue fixing (e.g. speech of the time period, regional accent and dialect, prevailing courtesy mannerisms etc); coherence and readability; cliche and modern slang avoidance; crafting more believable character responses e.g. emotional / logical / humorous; adding world-building details and names; quick research assistance; potentially also a ‘stylisation makeover’ (‘write it like Lovecraft’) and scene extension (‘suggest three events that might happen next, one of which should be plausible but unlikely’). And so on.

The interface is decidedly old-school, but dark mode can be enabled using the third-party Windowtop, and the font size is natively scalable.

In the past I’ve mentioned that I plan to use my registered CQuill to distill a ‘Lovecraft Style’ module (doing so is only possible in the paid version). This is still planned, and (as with the further novels I hope to write one day) I’ll find the time and energy eventually.

Four more LORAs, and a CivitAI block tool for UBlock

30 Thursday Jan 2025

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A few more recent LORAs, which are kind of ‘style-steering add-ons’ used with MODELS based on Stable Diffusion 1.5. All free. Local AI image generation will ideally require a PC with at least an NVIDIA 3060 12Gb graphics-card.

Not many, as Lovecraft-ish LORAs have been few and far between over Christmas and New Year, what with all the many distractions of those weeks. These are the only worthy ones I’ve spotted, since my last such posting back in 8th December.

18th century men LORA for Rococo clothing, makeup, wigs, from Lovecraft’s beloved 18th century. For use with a MODEL which ‘knows’ what Lovecraft looks like, such as Photon.

Neo Noir v1.0 LORA. Dark film noir with modern slightly CG vibe in the demos, but obviously also able to do more of a ‘1940s publicity shot’ look. Appears to know clothing.

FantasyMapCreator LORA. Doesn’t appear to have gained many users, but some may want to test it.

And a new updated 1.2 version of Realms of the Dead LORA, and some new pictures (prompts included) show what can be done with it in terms of generating images of Ancient Egyptian passageways…

Incidentally, for those doing their own browsing of CivitAI, the key repository of LORAs, here is how to blank unwanted items in the search results. In UBlock Origin’s Filters list, add your tailored variant of this and save the list…

civitai.com##a[href*=”keyword”]

As the page of search results loads, this blocks the image in each target panel — but not the panel itself. It blocks the image only when it finds keyword in the panel’s href (its Web link), so replace keyword with whatever you need. This block thus squishes unwanted ’empire builders’ who are out to build a series of LORAs — all with the same brand-name. Their endless production of new LORAs can feel a lot like spam. Now you can cosmetically filter them out of results, by name.

Time-travel with LORAs

08 Sunday Dec 2024

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A few more free add-ons, for use with the free Stable Diffusion AI image generator.

1900s Drama Movie. Note also the Lovecraft-friendly Colonial style porches and doors.

10s Retro Future Movie trained on visions of the future, as found in 1910s movies.

Silent Movie v1.0 LORA makes small frame-sequences which can then be compiled into wobbly movie clips.

40s Western Movie. More R.E. Howard than Lovecraft (“Sweet Ermengarde” and “Juan Romero” aside), but possibly of interest to those who need to emulate pulp western images, in combination with an art-style LORA.

Stygia v1.1 LORA for Conan backdrops. An update from version 1.0.

Halloween LORAs

28 Monday Oct 2024

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Another small roundup of some of the more Lovecraftastic recent ‘style plugins’ for Stable Diffusion 1.5 AI image-generation. Free, and for use free local desktop software such as InvokeAI 5.x. You will however need a decent gaming graphics-card in your PC, ideally at least an NVIDIA 3060 with 12Gb.

Mostly LORAs this time around, but also one IP-Adapter.

Straight from Ulthar Labs Inc., the new Cat Face Identity IP-Adapter. This is a special kind of plug-in that plugs your cat’s face into each image generation. It’s not just a paste-in, it ‘knows’ what cat faces look like and adapts the source-face to the context. So you could have your favourite domestic kittee go on a trip to Ulthar, etc.

A 20s Silent Movie LORA, trained on scans of good-quality 1920s publicity-stills rather than old scratched celluloid frames, by the look of it. User feedback is good.

Frankenstein Tech – World Morph LORA. A ‘world morph’ LORA that makes everything you prompt for look like it’s either an interior of Frankie’s lab or else came from it. Also good for images of His Monster.

Frankenstein Tech might be combined with also-new Gothic Interiors – v1.1 LORA.

The Cosmic ‘Radio’

15 Tuesday Oct 2024

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[The narrator is an intern in a Catskill Mountains insane asylum]. I placed… “upon his head and mine the two ends of my cosmic ‘radio’; hoping against hope for a first and last message from the dream-world in the brief time remaining. In the cell with us was one nurse…” — “Beyond The Wall of Sleep” (1919).

Stable Diffusion 1.5.

More dark and character LORAs

08 Tuesday Oct 2024

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A few more Lovecraft-adjacent LORAs, released or spotted recently. These are free ‘style-guidance’ plugins for AI image-generation models based on Stable Diffusion 1.5.

* Nightmares of the Machine Age LORA. Vehicle designs to inspire your Lovecraftmobile.

50s Noir Movie LORA.

* Tabletop RPG / Call of Cthulhu – Old style Photos LORA. Apparently requires trigger-word retro, not specified on the record-page.

The same maker also has Call of Cthulhu RPG document generators, 1, 2 and 3.

The Great Cthulhu – Character LORA. The same maker also has Deep Ones and The King in Yellow LORAs. Note the Clip Skip requirements.

Still waiting for a good ‘Lovecraft as character’ LORA.

Dark LORAs

22 Sunday Sep 2024

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Some more newly-released Lovecraft-adjacent add-ons, which I spotted on CivitAI. For download and local use as style-guides with AI image-generation models derived from Stable Diffusion 1.5. All free, as is the software needed to generate the images (ComfyUI, InvokeAI, etc).

* Declassified Documents LORA.

* Another Limbo Style LORA, based on the visual style of the seminal videogame called Limbo.

* Back-side Light LORA for a creepy or film-noir portrait in darkness.

At low levels, ‘Back-side Light’ could be combined with the new Dystopian City LORA.

Four more LORAs

31 Saturday Aug 2024

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I spotted a few more new Lovecraftian-adjacent style-guidance plugins (LORAs), free for the free Stable Diffusion 1.5.

Transparent Specimen LORA, giving an x-ray creature effect. Perhaps especially useful for those making old 1920s x-ray plates, as part of a RPG game?

World of Green Mist LORA, looking very suitable for Innsmouth pictures, though you may want the Sponge tool in Photoshop to tone down the end results. It could be used with the also-new Creature in Myst LORA.

Starry night, for generating an Earth landscape with a starry night sky and moon.

More LORAs

22 Thursday Aug 2024

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Another pick of the recent free plugins for local/offline use with the free Stable Diffusion 1.5 AI image generator.

* Style of Milton Caniff LORA, able to do 1930s men’s suits and hairstyles in an illustration style. Of obvious relevance for anyone crafting 1930s Lovecraft-era artwork.

* VintageBW LORA for a vintage b&w photography look, and it could be combined with the also-new DarkLight – RimLight lighting LORA for noir rim lighting.

* DonM – Fossils LORA for generating fossils or polished stylised bas-reliefs.

* Mythicc Lands LORA, an unusual landscape generator that combines the landscape with a ‘geometric portal’ composition. Especially suitable for aiding attempts to emulate 1980s style sci-fi paperback cover-art, I’d suggest.

And an oldie, someone made an EMBEDDING (use like a LORA) for SD 1.5 which gave them a consistent Erich Zann face/head for a storytelling project. Still waiting for the consistent-character LORA for Lovecraft himself.

In the meanwhile, Centerflex model + the wasmoebius embedding has a fair idea of what Lovecraft looked like, though you may need to use negatives (Auden, Lincoln, Keaton) and stretch the resulting image up by 70 pixels to get the ‘long face’…