Category Archives: Kittee Tuesday

Lovecraft and Felis

11 Tuesday Jun 2024

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A new, human reading on YouTube, of two short Christmas poems by Lovecraft.

Christmas Greetings to Felis (Frank Belknap Long’s cat)

Little Tiger, burning bright
With a subtle Blakeish light,
Tell what visions have their home
In those eyes of flame and chrome!
Children vex thee — thoughtless, gay —
Holding when thou wouldst away:
What dark lore is that which thou,
Spitting, mixest with thy meow?

   (“Blakeish” = William Blake, the ‘Tiger, Tiger’ poet).

Egyptian Christmas

Haughty Sphinx, whose amber eyes
Hold the secrets of the skies,
As thou ripplest in thy grace,
Round the chairs and chimney-place,
Scorn on thy patrician face:
Rise not harsh, nor use thy claws
On the hand that gives applause —
Good-will only doth abide
In these lines at Christmastide!

And here is the tiger-striped Felis, being held by Lovecraft…

Dreamy cats

28 Tuesday May 2024

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Spanish readers have a new 256-page volume of translated letters, Diario de suenos: cartas de H.P. Lovecraft, Vol. II., with this “Vol II” focussing on Lovecraft’s dreams and cat letters…

all the dreams in the author’s surviving correspondence are collected [and these have] until now been unpublished in Spanish”. And as a bonus, “the final section ‘The Fabulous Adventures of the Kappa Alpha Tau Fraternity’, dedicated to Lovecraft’s letters about his feline friends.

Tales of Wonder No. 8, and a wonder-tale of cats

14 Tuesday May 2024

Posted by in Kittee Tuesday, Odd scratchings

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New on Archive.org for the first time, a good scan of Tales of Wonder No. 8, for Autumn 1939.

The SF Encyclopedia states the magazine gave Arthur C. Clarke his first professional published articles, and as we see above it also gave British readers the strong taste of the other Clark, Clark Ashton Smith. Tales of Wonder also had…

“The Smile of the Sphinx” (Autumn 1938, No. 4) – where cats are discovered to be aliens observing humans – was one of the most popular stories the magazine published.

A pity Lovecraft could not have lived to chuckle at that one. The title may even have been a nod to Lovecraft… “the smile of the Sphinx vaguely displeased us, and made us wonder about the legends of subterranean passages beneath” (“Under the Pyramids”).

The 12,000-word cat tale was such a success that the fanzine Tomorrow No. 7 (August 1938) published a “making of…” article by the author.

The story itself can be found reprinted in Worlds Beyond 1 (December 1950), available as an open PDF download at Archive.org. A poor scan, but readable. An amusing story, with a British setting that reminds me of Wells’s War of the Worlds, plus we get a thinly disguised Arthur C. Clarke as a story character.

Sadly, it can’t be made into an audiobook and AI will botch it due to the poor OCR underlying the poor Archive.org scan. The author only died relatively recently, in 1989, and thus it is still in copyright. Presumably the rights are what has prevented it from being included in various ‘SF with cats’ anthologies over the years, since I can find no trace of it in such.

Banging Lovecraft

09 Tuesday Apr 2024

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New on YouTube, “In Lovecraft’s Dreamlands” by The Terrible Old Man and his Band of Cats.

Song lyrics…

In the shadows of ancient time
Where dreams and nightmares intertwine
The cosmic dance in the heart of night
The stars bear witness to the unfathom’ble night

The celestial lands, in eerie blend
Where horror and wonder never seem to end
Nyarlathoptep lurking in the abyss
A haunting presence you cannot dismiss.

Moonlight over Ry’lh, where darkness reigns supreme
In Lovecraft’s dreamlands we are free to dream
Embrace the eld and let your spirit roam
In the depths of madness forevermore…

In the depths of madness forevermore…

Moonlight over Ry’lh, where darkness reigns supreme
In Lovecraft’s dreamlands we are free to dream
Embrace the eld and let your spirit roam,
In the depths of madness forevermore…

Others are way ahead of me. Check out Plan 9 From Outer Space – the AI Album.

Tanabe’s “Call” dated

06 Tuesday Feb 2024

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There’s a date for Gou Tanabe’s chunky graphic novel adaptation of Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu” in English. Set for the end of July 2024, in a Dark Horse paperback of 288 pages.

Also of possible interest, Monster Cats at the end of May, an anthology of “comic strips about fantastic felines”. Not to be confused with a Mutant Cats graphic novel due at the end of April. In which a ‘green’ energy project gets botched, which unleashes mutant cats from another dimension. Sounds kitty-tastic!

Medieval cats and braces

23 Tuesday Jan 2024

Posted by in AI, Kittee Tuesday, Lovecraft as character, Lovecraftian arts

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For ‘Kitty Tuesday’, a new Medieval cats LORA for your PC’s local AI image-generator. Cats as seen on medieval manuscripts. That was when they had rocket-cats. Really…

Also a new Retro Men’s Suspenders Outfit LORA, which could be useful for those making an ‘H.P. Lovecraft as character’ comic or 1920s-50s Call of Cthulhu RPG artwork with AI image generation. In British English, suspenders = braces.

So far as I’m aware, he used a firm belt rather than braces, but the LORA is certainly depicting a key aspect of his era.

Droomwereld kitties

16 Tuesday Jan 2024

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An early 1970s Lovecraft book cover I’d not seen before, complete with kitties from Ulthar. De Droomwereld Van Kadath (1972) from Holland. Translates as ‘The Dreamworld of Kadath’, the book being a translation of The Dreamquest of Unknown Kadath.

Looking at the fungi also on the cover, I’m wondering if they also popped in a translation of the “Fungi from Yuggoth”?

LORAs in spaaace…

02 Tuesday Jan 2024

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A few more AI LORAs from over Christmas, free plug-ins suitable for making science-fiction and fantasy images with AI image generators. These are more newly discovered than new.

New, the Terran Trade Authority space art style LORA. TTA was a British book series that republished the best sci-fi paperback cover-art of the 1960s and 70s, weaving around them a coherent future timeline of spacefaring, space-wrecks and explorers.

Might be used with the newly discovered kaodiiLandscapeMix – night – v1.0, a rare full model dedicated to dusk and night paintings. As such, possibly of use for the more subtle types of horror painting, and dimly-illuminated space art planetscapes.

Newly discovered, an Ice Age LORA, for making various types of scene look icy and snowy. Possibly of interest to those devising pictures of ‘Conan in the cold wastes’ or ‘Lovecraftian cities at the pole’, etc, but also ‘ice planets’.

Newly discovered, lurking at HuggingFace. RetroFutur, an Embedding rather than a LORA (they work in a similar way). Note this is for SD 2.1 786 rather than the usual 1.5. Gives sort of a Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow look…

And, since this is Kitty Tuesday, note the same maker has a KittyPic embedding, for photoreal cats in SD 2.1 786. Do not combine with RetroFutur to create visions of the Greater Ulthar Cat Empire of 2499… do not… oh, too late.

See also my new mega-list “I battled through 20,000 anime girls… so you don’t have to” (December 2023).

Necronomicon Pages AI generator

07 Tuesday Nov 2023

Posted by in Kittee Tuesday, Lovecraftian arts

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Necronomicon Pages – v1.0. This is only a LORA, something perhaps best thought of as a small plug-in for a large generative AI base model. The pages were made using this LORA with the EIDOMODE Stable Diffusion 1.5 Checkpoint model.

Here the indecipherable-ness of AI text is turned to advantage.

Also spotted, a new LORA for Hannes Bok – Golden Age Pulp Style – v1.0, for use with the SD 1.5 base model. May work well with Metropolis 1927 style.

And since this is also Kittee Tuesday, yes… there’s also a LORA for High Quality Cats – v1.0 and the more meme-friendly CuteCat – v1.0. Even a cosmic Space Cat generator. Though the LORA for the 200+ feline cat expressions they can make has yet to arrive. Still, these are perhaps useful for making “H.P. Lovecat” images.

AIs know Lovecraft

24 Tuesday Oct 2023

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I love that nearly all indie generative AI models know what Lovecraft looked like (‘indie’ because those of Adobe etc are quite obviously censored). And, increasingly, can also generate cats. Cats being a tricky creature, due to their natural camouflage and near-infinite contorting combinations of outline-shape.

Here’s an example from a new AI which makes retro pixel-style images…

HPL returns from the mailbox with his daily haul of letters, ‘zines, books and kittens.

From Kadath, from Joshi

17 Tuesday Oct 2023

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Comic Art For Sale has an original b&w variant splash-page by Juan Samu, from the recent Unknown Kadath series. John Carter, Ulthar cat, Dreamlands ship, tentacles, and side-hints of “Colour Out of Space” and “At the Mountains of Madness”. The ‘Little Nemo’ like figure appears in the comic.

Also relevant to a ‘Kittee Tuesday’ post, S.T. Joshi’s latest blog post has The Weird Cat anthology as publishing tomorrow…

The Weird Cat [is] still not officially published by Wordcrafts Press [but] its publication date is October 18.

He also notes, at the most recent Lovecraft Film Festival…

‘H.P. Loves Cats’, directed by Gary Lobstein — a five-minute film devoted to HPL’s worship of his favourite species.