• About
  • Directory
  • Free stuff
  • Lovecraft for beginners
  • My Books
  • Open Lovecraft
  • Reviews
  • Travel Posters
  • SALTES

Tentaclii

~ News and scholarship on H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937)

Tentaclii

Category Archives: Kittee Tuesday

Lovecraft and Felis

11 Tuesday Jun 2024

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Kittee Tuesday, Lovecraftian arts, Podcasts etc.

≈ Leave a comment

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

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Kittee Tuesday, Lovecraftian arts, New books

≈ Leave a comment

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all the dreams in the author’s surviving correspondence are collected [and these have] until now been unpublished in Spanish”.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 asdjfdlkf in Kittee Tuesday, Odd scratchings

≈ Leave a comment

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

Posted by asdjfdlkf in AI, Kittee Tuesday, Lovecraftian arts

≈ Leave a comment

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

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Kittee Tuesday, Lovecraftian arts

≈ Leave a comment

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 asdjfdlkf in AI, Kittee Tuesday, Lovecraft as character, Lovecraftian arts

≈ Leave a comment

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

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Kittee Tuesday, Lovecraftian arts

≈ Leave a comment

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

Posted by asdjfdlkf in AI, Kittee Tuesday

≈ Leave a comment

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).

Lovecraft and Cats

02 Tuesday Jan 2024

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Kittee Tuesday, Scholarly works

≈ Leave a comment

S.T. Joshi’s blog brings news of an article on ‘Lovecraft and Cats’ in Offcourse #95 (December 2023). Freely available online.

Necronomicon Pages AI generator

07 Tuesday Nov 2023

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Kittee Tuesday, Lovecraftian arts

≈ 5 Comments

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

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Kittee Tuesday, Lovecraftian arts

≈ Leave a comment

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

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Kittee Tuesday, Lovecraftian arts, New books

≈ Leave a comment

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.

← Older posts

 

Please become my patron at www.patreon.com/davehaden to help this blog survive and thrive.

Or donate via PayPal — any amount is welcome! Donations total at Easter 2025, since 2015: $390.

Archives

  • June 2025
  • May 2025
  • April 2025
  • March 2025
  • February 2025
  • January 2025
  • December 2024
  • November 2024
  • October 2024
  • September 2024
  • August 2024
  • July 2024
  • June 2024
  • May 2024
  • April 2024
  • March 2024
  • February 2024
  • January 2024
  • December 2023
  • November 2023
  • October 2023
  • September 2023
  • August 2023
  • July 2023
  • June 2023
  • May 2023
  • April 2023
  • March 2023
  • February 2023
  • January 2023
  • December 2022
  • November 2022
  • October 2022
  • September 2022
  • August 2022
  • July 2022
  • June 2022
  • May 2022
  • April 2022
  • March 2022
  • February 2022
  • January 2022
  • December 2021
  • November 2021
  • October 2021
  • September 2021
  • August 2021
  • July 2021
  • June 2021
  • May 2021
  • April 2021
  • March 2021
  • February 2021
  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • August 2020
  • July 2020
  • June 2020
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • March 2020
  • February 2020
  • January 2020
  • December 2019
  • November 2019
  • October 2019
  • September 2019
  • August 2019
  • July 2019
  • June 2019
  • May 2019
  • April 2019
  • March 2019
  • February 2019
  • January 2019
  • December 2018
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • August 2018
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • August 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • March 2014
  • February 2014
  • January 2014
  • December 2013
  • November 2013
  • October 2013
  • September 2013
  • August 2013
  • July 2013
  • June 2013
  • May 2013
  • April 2013
  • March 2013
  • February 2013
  • January 2013
  • December 2012
  • November 2012
  • October 2012
  • September 2012
  • August 2012
  • July 2012
  • June 2012
  • May 2012
  • April 2012
  • March 2012
  • February 2012
  • January 2012
  • December 2011
  • November 2011
  • October 2011
  • September 2011
  • August 2011
  • July 2011
  • June 2011
  • May 2011
  • April 2011
  • March 2011
  • February 2011
  • January 2011
  • December 2010
  • November 2010
  • October 2010
  • September 2010
  • August 2010
  • July 2010

Categories

  • 3D (14)
  • AI (60)
  • Astronomy (70)
  • Censorship (14)
  • de Camp (7)
  • Doyle (7)
  • Films & trailers (100)
  • Fonts (9)
  • Guest posts (2)
  • Historical context (1,094)
  • Housekeeping (89)
  • HPLinks (40)
  • Kipling (11)
  • Kittee Tuesday (92)
  • Lovecraft as character (54)
  • Lovecraftian arts (1,594)
  • Lovecraftian places (19)
  • Maps (69)
  • NecronomiCon 2013 (40)
  • NecronomiCon 2015 (22)
  • New books (958)
  • New discoveries (165)
  • Night in Providence (17)
  • Odd scratchings (984)
  • Picture postals (276)
  • Podcasts etc. (424)
  • REH (177)
  • Scholarly works (1,441)
  • Summer School (31)
  • Unnamable (85)

Get this blog in your newsreader:
 
RSS Feed — Posts
RSS Feed — Comments

H.P. Lovecraft's Poster Collection - 17 retro travel posters for $18. Print ready, and available to buy — the proceeds help to support the work of Tentaclii.

Proudly powered by WordPress Theme: Chateau by Ignacio Ricci.