At the HPLHS Store and new to me, a line of Lovecraftian Netsuke…

Also said to be set for the store (seemingly coming soon, perhaps for the Birthday on the 20th?) a toothsome faux carved whale-tooth from Innsmouth…

Lovecraft on carving…

“That [new] theory of rock carvings 150,000 years old is certainly fascinating in the extreme – even though it presupposes the evolution of man to have begun at a period somewhat earlier than is normally assumed.”

“The prevalence and depth of the mediaeval horror-spirit in Europe, intensified by the dark despair which waves of pestilence brought, may be fairly gauged by the grotesque carvings slyly introduced into much of the finest later Gothic ecclesiastical work of the time”.

“I am truly of an opinion, that [eighteenth century] carvings are just as genuine poesy as anything ever writ in lines and rhymes.”

H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival returns to his home city of Providence, R.I., in physical form, at the…

Columbus Theatre on H.P. Lovecraft’s birthday weekend, 20th-22nd August 2021

My rectification, up-scaling and colorising of a vintage picture of the venue.

The interior today.

As a fan of Titan Quest I’ve always wanted to play its spiritual great-grandpa Diablo II at a similar level of visual fidelity and polish. Now I’ll finally get the chance. Diablo II Resurrected apparently lands, at least in a ‘final beta’, on 17th August 2021. This being a “full HD remaster of Diablo II”, a single-player PC game which first appeared in 2000. And of course it’s mentioned here because it’s not just another dingy old dungeon-slogger. In what is held up as one of the greatest of games, your isometric adventurer traverses a veritable list of Lovecraft’s loves… a hoary medieval castle; Ancient Egyptian desert tombs; a Baghdad-like Arabian Nights city, sinister tropical jungles; ancient crumbling mountain-top temples… and all apparently “almost completely unchanged from the original Diablo II” other than to HD them. It’s not otherwise said to be Lovecraftian, though later Diablo games did apparently start to introduce Lovecraftian elements. But I would imagine that there may, in time, be Lovecraftian conversion-mods for Diablo II Resurrected.

A new episode of the Voluminous podcast, A Symphony of Galpin. In which the letters are accompanied by…

Reber Clark [and] his amazing orchestration of Galpin’s “Lament for HPL”

Pulp Flakes pops the covers open on a pop-up book inspired by readers of Weird Tales magazine…

More details at maker Hannah Batsel’s page.

Talking of making and magazines and interactivity… some of my readers, those who are writers or in publishing, may be interested to know that the venerable DTP software QuarkXPress is well and truly back. I recently took a look at it and was pleased to find it very mature, with annual updates since 2015. It’s a one-time purchase of about £360 (disguised as an annual subscription, but you get to keep it after a year even if you cancel). In fact, it’s better than that… the latest QuarkXPress 2021 is now 50% off for August. Which means if you’re quick you can get top-class professional DTP and ebook software for £181.

Its key feature is now absolute reproduction of a DTP print layout in Web browser-friendly HTML5. Plus support within that for animated elements (slide-ins, slow zooms into pictures) and looping animated GIFs and now SVGs. HTML5 is something no key competitors have natively, with the cheap-but-capable Affinity Publisher and Microsoft Publisher having no HTML5 export at all, and Adobe InDesign (subscription) requiring a third-party plugin (subscription) to export HTML5 layouts. As such the QuarkXPress 2021 free-trial is one to look at if you want to make a device-responsive online magazine with print-like layout plus full interactivity, with full control over content and no subscription-shackle or reliance on a cloud-service that could go ‘pop’ or cancel you at any moment. Of course, you can also export the usual .PDF file too, along with new-fangled tablet and ebook reader formats and suchlike.

I have no connection with the makers, it’s just sheer co-incidence that I very recently took a deep-dive into the ‘state of DTP’. I wanted to discover what’s currently possible with embedding creative animation in the magazine format. I came away from the research very lukewarm about the open-source offerings (LibreOffice Draw, Sigil, Scribus). The paid QuarkXPress came out the obvious winner for perfectly exporting fixed layouts to Web browsers in HTML5 and for having a one-time purchase.

The Lone Animator has a ‘making of’ post for his recent stop-motion/live-action short based on Derleth’s “The Dweller In the Hills”.

A 1976 reprint of Munn’s The Werewolf of Ponkert, now free on Archive.org in public PDF. The tale (1925) went into the public domain last year. Other than the original Weird Tales appearance, one scan which is not ideal for reading, this is the only other version on Archive.org.

“Dagon” presented as a small VR game/visual-novel from Bit Golem. It’s set to release on Lovecraft’s birthday next month. If you add it to your Wishlist on Steam now, apparently you then get it free on the release-day.

ComicCraft has 50% sale across all their quality (if rather expensive) commercial-use comic-books fonts, until 31st July. There are a dozen or so horror-comics fonts there, as well as some pulpy retro styles and some suited to adventure-hero comics.

The Blambot store is your rather more affordable alternative, and their sale is usually 30% off from ‘Cyber Monday’. You can also hire Blambot to create a custom comic-book font.