03 Wednesday May 2023
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Via eBay, some real non-AI illustration. Here de-curved and colour-cast corrected (to the extent that’s possible without damaging the picture’s night-time mood). Not also up-scaled. Artwork by Rodell D. Sanford Jr., for what appears to be the first edition of Chaosium’s Lurking Fears RPG adventure anthology (inc. a Florida adventure, which it’s possible the cover depicts).
And another, from 1982, a painting but looking like it’s from the same artist…
03 Wednesday May 2023
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
I had another play with AI image generation, this time tempted by the new “Ink v2” style-module at the mostly-free Dream by Wombo…
A bit closer to Lovecraft this time, rather than Nick Cage or 1920 silent movie-star Buster Keaton. Although a bit stiff and too much of a ‘the butler bid it’ feel, perhaps. That’s the problem with AI, the faces and heads often have a touch of the showroom dummy about them. But feel free to use this for your Lovecraftian projects, fanzines, blog posts debating AI, etc.
24 Monday Apr 2023
Posted in Lovecraft as character, Lovecraftian arts
Three performances of the stage play “Lovecraft, mon amour”, in the French city of Lyon. 28th – 29th April 2023.
A fantastic theatrical and musical biopic, which immerses us musically in America from the 1920s to 1947. The play begins in 1947, Sonia has just learned of the death of Lovecraft, ten years after his death. This news upsets her and provokes a torrent of memories. But she begins to have the strange impression that Howard is actually there with her. As they move from confidence to confidence, these two characters reconstruct the course of their thwarted, extraordinary, overwhelming love… Will Sonia recognise Howard? Is love stronger than death?
23 Sunday Apr 2023
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works
Deep Cuts has dug up the horror poem “The Mould Shade Speaks” (1919) by early Lovecraft collaborator Winifred Virginia Jackson.
… very little of Jackson’s poetry has been reprinted, and much of it is uncollected or largely inaccessible for those without access to newspaper archives and obscure and expensive amateur journals, although a selection of poems have been republished in the appendix to Letters to Rheinhart Kleiner and Others.
22 Saturday Apr 2023
Posted in Films & trailers, Lovecraftian arts
Saturday-morning cartoons? Tentaclii has ’em! Newly uploaded to Archive.org, but made some years ago, a H.P. Lovecraft Motion Comic: The Rats In The Walls (2017). Excellent, even if we don’t get to see comic-book frames. 30 minutes, good narration. Also, it has Spanish subtitles here. Well worth watching.
The same maker also made H.P. Lovecraft Motion Comic: The Call Of Cthulhu (2015), which is on YouTube only.
Motion comics? They were partially animated comic-book-like animations made on the desktop PC with Adobe After Effects (not ideal) or (if you do a bit more research on software) with dedicated motion-comics software such as MotionArtist. Sadly they died off, despite portable HTML5 output, partly due to the additional labour needed to make them and partly due to the intensely conventional stance of the bulk of comic-book buyers. Maybe they’ll be revived, now that AI will be able to do some of the heavy lifting re: artwork, and now that comics buyers (different than readers) are a little less averse to ‘digital’.
MotionArtist 1.3, on which development stopped 2017. But it still works and can still be had if you look hard enough. It’s also well-documented and has abundant video tutorials.
16 Sunday Apr 2023
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Nightmare on Film Street reveals a new big-screen Lovecraft adaptation by director Joe Lynch…
“The thing that I loved about this particular script, which was originally based on the Lovecraft short story ‘The Thing on The Doorstep’, was the lineage involved … Brian Yuzna is one of our producers, who produced Re-Animator, and From Beyond, and directed Society. Dennis Paoli who wrote those movies, wrote this script.”
Sounds promising, and I see he has a half dozen big-screen movies to his credit. The title of the new movie is A Suitable Flesh, and it seems it hasn’t yet screened at a film festival. With Barbara Crampton.
Update: It will premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in June 2023.
Elsewhere, RPGFan reviews the much-touted Lovecraftian videogame Dredge…
While not a hardcore gaming experience, Dredge certainly sates the thirst for Lovecraftian vibes. … Authentically Lovecraftian.
Just one of an ongoing tidal wave of Lovecraftian games, including the newly remade mystery Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened.
14 Friday Apr 2023
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
A silver toad made by the Gorham Manufacturing Company, Providence, Rhode Island. In 1890, the year of Lovecraft’s birth. You’ll recall that Lovecraft’s father was, quite possibly, connected with the silverware firm in its heyday as a buyer or salesman.
Via the Smithsonian Open Access portal.
12 Wednesday Apr 2023
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Newly released on Bandcamp, Music from the H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast – Volume Three (2023)…
Music used in episodes of The H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast (hppodcraft.com), including material from the feature audio production The Colossus. Recorded in Santa Monica, CA.
Volumes One (2009) and Two (2011) are also available.
12 Wednesday Apr 2023
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Norwegian black metal has a major exhibition at the National Library of Norway…
Once feared and frowned upon, Norwegian black metal has finally come in from the cold. Norwegian black metal bands are enjoying considerable success with good record sales, sold-out tours and mainstream awards. The exhibition tells the story of this journey in the form of media coverage of 30 years of Norwegian black metal.
Runs until the 16th September 2023, at the National Museum in the capital Oslo. Free entry.
10 Monday Apr 2023
Posted in AI, Lovecraftian arts
A more painterly output from Dream by Wombo, compared to the previous post. The hair probably needs to be fixed. It’s too dark, ‘shoe-polish’ black. But imagine it’s 1922 and Lovecraft is “waiting for Loveman” at a rooftop cafe in Cleveland…
“Waiting for Loveman”
10 Monday Apr 2023
Posted in AI, Astronomy, Lovecraftian arts
What might have been… a well-fed and hairpiece-augmented Lovecraft imagined at age 65, at the end of a career as the venerable and respected astronomer who discovered the planet Pluto.
In this alt. history picture one might imagine that it’s 1956 and his retirement portrait is to adorn the newly-built hallways of NASA. As a writer, in his youth he published a few classic Dunsanian fantasy tales, but then fell silent in fiction. Yet he has just published a slim volume expounding a curious new ‘cosmic’ philosophy, a work said to be exciting some keen interest among European intellectuals.
The picture is more ‘Nick Cage plays Lovecraft’ than Lovecraft, perhaps, but that’s one of the tendencies that Wombo veers towards. The other is Buster Keaton. An AI isn’t making visual distinctions, it just knows a certain set of facial images are associated with the keywords 1920s (Keaton) and with Lovecraft (Cage). There are three ways I know of to control that. One is luck and a good text prompt. The other is a knockout word presented as $Buster$ and the other is to upload a ‘seed’ image of the real Lovecraft.
Thanks to the Dream by Wombo AI and Photoshop. I know I said I’d keep AI generated images off Tentaclii, but it’s getting so good now…
01 Saturday Apr 2023
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
A new free 3D model Lovecraftopus, under Creative Commons Attribution. I downloaded it and did a very quick test-render of the 114Mb .STL file…
Not as fab or as detailed as I was hoping for, but it may have some possibilities for gamers. As a ‘3D printed’ RPG or board-game piece, if nicely painted up. An .STL file is meant for 3D printing.