SALTES, a custom search-engine for Lovecraftian researchers. Not great at present, partly because Tentaclii is not yet properly re-indexed by Google (e.g. search: “waterfront”). But it covers the basic URLs and it’ll grow over time. You can also jump off the end of the search results, to run the same search on the main Google Search.

You’ve got a treat this weekend. At last, I’ve incontrovertibly found Lovecraft’s fave restaurant in Brooklyn, and even its owner. All will be revealed in posts scheduled for Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

Well, what a month. One of those months where you do a lot of work… and it feels like you’re mostly just back where you started.

Not much in terms of new journals this month, though I noted that Hippocampus has listed the ’emerging scholars’ journal Lovecraftian Proceedings #4 (February 2022) in paper. The ebook of this for #4 has yet to appear on Amazon. Elsewhere I spotted that The Journal of Dracula Studies returned (it had vanished into the mists earlier, with a swirl of its cape). Various new scholarly online items were found and added to my Open Lovecraft page. Joshi confirmed I’ll have items in both his Penumbra journal and the Lovecraft Annual, in due course.

In new books, the paperback edition of the Joshi-edited anthology His Own Most Fantastic Creation: Stories about H.P. Lovecraft appeared. Also Joshi’s 1920s Lovecraft-as-detective novel Honeymoon in Jail. Ken Faig Jr.’s new book of research essays Lovecraftian People and Places appeared on Amazon and seems to be shipping now.

Various reviews and musings were noted and linked here, as well as relevant news from the German and Hungarian Lovecraftians. I also briefly caught up with Robert E. Howard material and events, ahead of the fast-approaching Howard Days in Texas.

On the Letters, I posted my final notes on reading the Galpin book of Lovecraft letters and some addresses in this led me to do some detective work in Cleveland… and I was pleased to newly discover the location of the cafe that Lovecraft and the rest of the crowd frequented during that fateful Cleveland visit. I also posted my notes on reading Selected Letters I, preliminary to tackling a re-read of the rest of the Selected Letters over the summer. From this I discovered the exact location and fabric and destruction-date of the ‘observatory’ tower on Nentaconhant Hill, via Selected Letters and some detective work. So far as I know these data points are also a new discovery. I also un-puzzled some of the puzzling aspects of the ending of Lovecraft’s war-story “The Temple”.

In my ‘Picture Postals’ posts I looked yet again at the foot of College Street, and found not one but two good pictures. Which just goes to show that, even when you think a particular place has been exhausted of old pictures, there may yet be more to be found. One of the two new pictures was a magnificent one showing the looming Industrial Trust building under construction, and I newly colourised this. While writing a post for a Patreon patron on the Brooklyn Museum, I realised that there are now pictures of Lovecraft’s adjacent beloved ‘Hill and Pool’ Japanese garden. Not great pictures, from scans of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden Record journal (1912-1944), but they are from the correct period. This led me to Part One of a look at the gardens in the form of their adjacent exotic hothouses.

In other ‘Picture Postals’ post I managed to find a good picture from inside the Providence Opera House and of the actual stage on which the young Lovecraft once strutted and slung slabs of Shakespeare at the audience. Judging by other online collections of such pictures I am the first to alight on a picture of the actual stage. Ken Faig also kindly pointed me to a cine home-movie showing the Market Place fruit-market site on the waterfront in November/December 1934, and a Lovecraft-alike man shopping for a Christmas tree (as Lovecraft did, for his new home at No. 66). Incidentally, through dipping at random into another volume of the Letters I learned that Lovecraft’s previous home at Barnes seems to have lacked furnace-heating for much of the time he was there. He seems to have only had piped heating there in the last two years?

Looking ahead in time I itemised some Lovecraft anniversaries for 2023, including the 50th anniversary of Lovecraft’s breakthrough into a mass market readership in America and the UK in 1973. I also looked at authors entering the public domain in 2023, with an eye to the more unusual or re-workable items. I suppose we will never be able now to confirm the Arthur Leeds death-date (he would have been entering the public domain in 2023) and thus will have to rely on the slipping years to gradually make all his tales public domain in the USA.

Tentaclii has of course returned. The old website host was, I think, trying to get rid of the legacy web-hosting sites it inherited many many takeovers ago, of which I was one. I paid them, but their unreachable ‘support’ meant that there was no way to find out why jurn.org was no longer responsive. I gave up on them and on the money paid, and just decided to move the backups to a wholly new domain on a new paid host, and to forget about the old address. It seemed the only option. The old site still hasn’t come back, so I now feel justified in the move. So, as you can see, Tentaclii is now located at https://www.jurn.link/tentaclii/ and though there was some initial hassle with getting the ‘domain verification’ email that problem is now sorted. As such the blog should now stay online for years, and is also now a lot faster and more responsive. It’s on a large service that only does hosting and does it well, and is also unlikely to get bought-out by some uncaring conglomeration that also does 100 other things and doesn’t much care about its websites. As such the blog and URL should hopefully stay online for a good few years now (sound of frantic tapping-on-wood…).

The site move was sadly not without cost, in money as well as a week of my time and frustration, and I really welcome PayPal donations from a generous benefactor to help cover the cost. The other way that readers can help is simply to link the new address in their own blog posts, and to spread the word on social media to those who might have lost track of where Tentaclii is. Many thanks. As usual, becoming a Patreon patron is also very much encouraged and encouraging.

Elsewhere in April, I completed a large ‘Carl Sagan’ special for the free Digital Art Live monthly magazine, and even managed to do a chunk of work on my forthcoming Tolkien mega-book.

More link-fixing this evening.

For some reason, after the fresh WordPress as first installed, this was fine for getting the PDFs…

/tentaclii/index.php/pdfs/

Now it’s not and it’s just…

/tentaclii/pdfs/

Yet the /index.php/ is needed for the links to the HTML blog post pages. ‘Go figure’, as Americans say.

The other problem is that a direct link to a PDF respects capitalisation. A free WordPress blog forces the filename down to the_cats_of_ulthar_annotated_2019_fontsembedded.pdf in the link and on the server. But a paid hosting server will have it as the original filename of The_Cats_of_Ulthar_annotated_2019_fontsembedded.pdf (note the uppercase) and will thus refuse to serve the PDF. The filenames of all my .PDFs are now lower-cased to match the links.

Anyway, PDFs and freebies links have all been check by hand, again. They should now all be working.

Also, I’ve been able to restore the pictures on my little RPG adventure A pictorial RPG scenario: The Assemblage of Dr. Arnold Astrall.

The sidebar now looks nicer and neater.

I’ve spent a further hour with a regex plugin (search/replace) rooting out any remaining jurn .org links, and as far as I can see they are now fixed and gone.

The PayPal donations link has been restored to the blog’s sidebar.

Hurrah! After numerous support emails and a week of hassle, my new jurn.link domain has now been ICAAN verified within the vital 15-day verification period. It and Tentaclii should now stay online for the foreseeable future.

The Free Stuff and Reviews pages at Tentaclii have had links repaired and fixed and tested by hand. All working as far as I can see. I’ve also fixed the map link on the Free Stuff page. It seems the new server does not like scr links to raw .JPGs without an initial embed + html in a blog post. It’s fine with .PDFs though. It is possible to block hot-linking to images by file-type, in the dashboard, but .JPG is not blocked in that way. So I assume it’s a server thing. It shouldn’t affect other maps, as they’ve not linked in that way.

The blog is still a bit ‘rough around the edges’, but will be patched up further in the coming weeks. One worry at present is that the vital ‘domain confirmation’ email is not being sent. I’ve tried three times so far, and nothing comes through from the naming authority. But I’ll see if I can try to feed it another email address. But… please do pass the blog’s new Web address around, in anticipation of it sticking.

Hi all, my apologies for the absence of my Tentaclii blog for the last four days or so, and also the lack of the JURN search-engine. There’s had to be another website move, but hopefully a more permanent one this time.

Tentaclii is now at: https://www.jurn.link/tentaclii/

JURN is now at: https://www.jurn.link/

Thanks for your patience, and your continuing patronage. My Poser and DAZ 3D artistry MyClone blog will also be returning in due course.

Another dull British January is done with and over. Not much is happening generally, but I’ve managed to make a full recovery from Omicron and have managed to keep up the daily posting schedule here at Tentaclii.

My blog has a new ‘Astronomy’ tag for posts, and I went back and retrospectively tagged relevant posts. Hopefully this will be useful for those writing the forthcoming book on Lovecraft and astronomy and the emerging astro-science of his time.

I took deep dives into learning more about Lovecraft’s almanac collection, and his interest in the moon in the context of the science of the time (the ‘volcanic moon’ theory etc). While researching the latter I identified some additional roots for his cosmic imagination re: what types of life might be able to exist in space. I also noted that the non-fiction articles in Munsey’s Magazine have obviously not yet been fully explored by Lovecraftians as a source of influence during Lovecraft’s formative years.

In other discoveries, I was finally able to find the press-clipping that showed a photo of Lovecraft’s favorite Providence bookseller, ‘Uncle Eddy’. This clipping was ‘hiding in plain sight’ at the Brown repository. I also spotted more evidence that Lovecraft’s friend McNeil was a fine photographer. I even made a short foray into Lovecraft’s use of the ant as a metaphor for himself and for humanity in his letters. Also a glance at Joel Dorman Steele’s A Fourteen Weeks Course series, as Lovecraft owned and recommended them.

This month Lovecraft was proven right by modern science, again, re: the news about the number of ‘dark’ sunless planets in the galaxy.

I’m currently reading through the very rewarding book of Lovecraft’s letters to Rimel and others, and for that thanks again to my Patreon patrons for helping me to pick it up when it was spotted very cheap on Amazon as a ‘Warehouse bargain’. As for buying more books myself, cash is the problem there. I’ve managed to survive the winter without once turning on the heater and I also now only heat a tank of water when needed. Which means that the savings gained should help compensate for the hefty rises in electricity and mortgage costs. I’ve also cut down on food bills. Once finances have stabilised in the springtime… then I may be able to risk buying a few more bargain books. I had hoped that my new Tolkien in Cornwall ebook would sell, and bring in some money that way. But so far… only three copies sold.

In new Lovecraft books the big event of a quiet month was the new $20 paperback edition for David E. Schultz’s Fungi from Yuggoth by H.P. Lovecraft: An Annotated Edition. On his blog, S.T. Joshi also confirmed the Letters volumes that should see release in 2022, and he noted a forthcoming book on “Lovecraft’s cosmicism and how it was adapted or amended” by later science-fiction writers.

The French are welcoming the first volume of their sumptuous and painstaking new Lovecraft translation. I noted the first review of Vol. 1 in Diacritik and translated a bit of it. In another post I noted the release of the fine cover-art for this new multi-volume edition.

Several new additions were added to my Open Lovecraft page (which links scholarly work shared in public open-access). The Litteraria Copernicana academic journal has a new Lovecraft special-issued titled “Lovecraftiana”, under Creative Commons, which was not all about adaptation. The Gothic Studies journal Studies in Gothic Fiction also issued a Lovecraft special-issue, albeit very much focused on adaptation. In academic work somewhat relevant to Lovecraft, I noted the new book chapter “Cats and Creativity in Eighteenth-Century Britain”. I’d like to see that adapted as a short graphic novel. I was also pleased to see that the Encyclopaedia Britannica 1926 three-volume supplement had slipped into the public domain. This is now public and online, and thus useful as a reliably snapshot and summary of the state of things in the 1910s and early 20s as Lovecraft emerged from his hermitage.

Various newly-liberated old zines with Lovecraft-relevant material were spotted arriving on Archive.org, such as The Diversifier #21 (July 1977); Toadstool Wine (1975), and an article in the Book Collectors’ Society of Australia newsletter Bibliophile (1948).

‘Tis the time of year for convention announcements, and there were firm dates and details from the likes of Eldritch-con 2022: A Horror and Fantasy Game Writers’ Convention; the new Chaosium Con; the German Lovecraft convention; and NecronomiCon 2022. Pulpfest also has dates and a call for material for the annual convention journal The Pulpster. The organisers of the Howard Days in Cross Plains have already announced their dates, back in December.

For those interested in some TV sci-horror fun in a dull January/February, I also made a “Skip or Watch” guide to the Tom Baker years of the British TV series Doctor Who, and am currently working through them and updating the guide accordingly. I’ve worked through three seasons so far and have finished season 14.

A forthcoming issue of Digital Art Live magazine will be a Carl Sagan tribute issue, so if anyone has anything that can be used for that (i.e. unpublished or otherwise re-printable interview transcript, etc) please get in touch. Also any stills/concept-art from the animations made of his ideas about alien ecologies on other planets.

So that’s it for January. I hope to continue posting daily in February, but the news is very slow and hard to glean at present. As always, please consider supporting me on Patreon. Even $1 a month, or an increase of $1 in your current patronage, is an encouragement.