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Tentaclii

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

Tentaclii

Category Archives: Odd scratchings

AI snippet re-writing

26 Sunday Mar 2023

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Odd scratchings

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Why it’s no longer wise to longer trust DuckDuckGo / Bing snippets in search…

1. The Guardian newspaper says something silly about Tolkien (to be expected)…

2. But, on clicking through to the source, The Guardian‘s actual story says something different. It’s talking about Chaffey…

An AI at Bing has presumably re-written the snippet. I’d heard about AI search-result snippet re-writing, but this is the first time I’ve seen it in action.

New scans

21 Tuesday Mar 2023

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Odd scratchings, Scholarly works

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New on Archive.org, an open scan of the 1945 printing of Lovecraft’s Supernatural Horror in Literature.

And on fanac.org, a partial run of Reader and Collector, the fanzine of H. C. Koenig, Lovecraft’s industrious New York correspondent. A high-quality ‘zine, e.g. Vol. 3 No. 3 was a William Hope Hodgson special with essays.

CQuill Writer for vintage sci-fi

20 Monday Mar 2023

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CQuill Writer has an additional free dictionary for writing assistance…

Classical Sci-fi. Based on 1950’s Sci-Fi authors, devoid of modern terms.

Unzip and paste to… C:\Program Files\CQuill Writer\Dictionaries

OpenChatKit

20 Monday Mar 2023

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Odd scratchings, Scholarly works

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It was only a matter of time before text-generating AI became as open and free as graphics AI. The first such is here now and ‘live’, OpenChatKit…

“a ChatGPT-like dialogue language model that is fully open-sourced, with full access to code, model weights, and training data. The released OpenChatKit model can perform natural-language reasoning tasks, answer questions about documents with retrieval, and browse the Web much like BingChat. The model has 20 billion parameters and is trained on 43 million instructions. […] The release also comes with fine-tuning guides that allow users to easily fine-tune the model for their own applications. […] Apache-2.0 license.”

20 billion is not enough for complex tasks (it can’t write long working Python scripts, or pop out complete essays/stories), but it’s good enough to be useful so long as you know how to ask the question. For instance…

Show me an example of the use of taskkill in a Windows batch file

… gets a line of valid working code. Though you still need to know to wrap it in @echo off and exit, and then save as a .BAT file.

But this is just the starting release. The initial live/free public demo is here, if you want to see what arcane Lovecraftian blurblings it might produce if given the correct prompt. It’s fast and easy to use. Though obviously knows nothing about R’lyeh as a holiday destination. Pity.

I’m uncertain if it can be operated purely locally on an old desktop PC, being open source. If not then such things can only a matter of time and the right slot-in card. Some already claim to be able to run Facebook’s new run-away Llama on their PC.

Meanwhile, Grammarly will reportedly be plugging in AI auto-writing assistants sometime in April 2023. For a price, of course.

Tentaclii in February

04 Saturday Mar 2023

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The UK has seen the usual February wobbling between promising signs of early springtime and raw blasts of chilly weather. This seems to have influenced my ‘Picture Postals’ posts. My ‘Return to Copps Hill’ post revisited Lovecraft’s snowy visit to Boston’s Copp’s Hill Burying Ground. My Photoshopped ‘Vint-o-Vision’ picture had Lovecraft shivering at the controls of the Ladd Observatory telescope, Providence. More authentically I found two choice pictures of College Hill (under snow) and Angell Street (in the earliest spring). To thaw out shivering Tentaclii readers (I hear it’s still bitterly cold in much of the USA) there was then a visit to and inside the hothouses of the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens, leading into some choice quotes which establish ‘gardens’ as a key interest for Lovecraft in his imagination, dreams and reality. Sadly he never lived to fully explore the theme, although some in his circle took the idea and ran off with it in the direction of pulpy ‘sci-fi horror plants’.

Very little in new research or discoveries this month on Tentaclii, but I was pleased to find and recover a new ‘lost’ backwoods yarn by Lovecraft’s friend Everett McNeil. He certainly could spin a yarn, and I still wonder (despite having written his life) where he had the experience to write such tales. I suspect either during his walking to New York, or during his stint in the armed forces.

In books the action was overseas this month. Lovecraft’s letters appeared in Spanish for the first time. The French have the new volume Selection de lettres (1927-1929). The Germans published their handsome new book of the translated poetry, based around Lovecraft’s “Fungi from Yuggoth”, and this book earned the coveted Joshi ‘stamp of approval’ some weeks later.

There was however advance notice of some 2023 books in English, including: Lovecraft’s Letters to Hyman Bradofsky and Others, an untitled “book on Arkham House ephemera from the Classic Years”; a Miskatonic University Monograph: “The Discovery of Fragments of Kitab al-Azif at Harran”; an untitled book of letters from the Lovecraft Circle but not sent to Lovecraft; and the academic William Hope Hodgson and the Rise of the Weird: Possibilities of the Dark. Looking further ahead, NecronomiCon Providence announced the 2024 dates.

In scholarly work, I linked a couple of journals with interesting new items on sea-monsters seen in the light of contemporary academic theory. Which is the more scary, I wonder? Some Deleuze Seminars were dug up, containing his 1975-1976 thoughts on Lovecraft. The German annual Lovecrafter Nr. 3, a “50 years of Lovecraft in Germany” special-issue, became available in PDF and thus is now potentially machine-translatable.

Posts on artwork were wide-ranging this month, from August Derleth’s “cinderella’ stamp” to the latest Ian Miller artwork. Miller is still making masterpieces like this at age 70+, which is an encouragement to us all. There was also a link to a new article on the huge and sustained success of the Call of Cthulhu RPG in the Far East. Who knew?

In comics, Unknown Kadath had a trade paperback release date in May 2023. I linked to a new Dark Worlds Quarterly surveying vintage Lovecraft comics adaptations published in black & white.

In audio, lots of relevant items are still appearing on Librivox. Lovecraft’s friend Henry S. Whitehead is obviously getting some deserved and noticeably regular attention, here and there. We even had “The Fantasy Fan: The Complete Writings of Clark Ashton Smith” this month.

From the archives, some 1981 issues of Cultural Correspondence popped up on “Lovecraft, Surrealism”, with contributions from an elderly Frank Belknap Long. I also noted some choice Ray Bradbury items appearing, and then came the mammoth Collected Fiction of Henry Kuttner (an influence on Bradbury) and to celebrate I found and tweaked/colorised a picture of the young Kuttner. I also tracked down the three fannish/scholarly texts on Kuttner’s work.

As for me… still no joy on the job front. It appears there comes a certain birthday after which no-one wants to interview you for a monthly-paid job, regardless of how impressive your C.V. or wide-ranging your skill-set is. Three months of looking and applying, and not a single interview. Except one as a night-shift warehouse picker / pallet-stacker in Stoke-on-Trent, which was arranged via a special jobs fair… which meant they didn’t need to see my C.V. Despite having done 18 months of such manual work, many decades ago, I didn’t even get that job. The UK’s supposed talent shortage and ‘huge demand for over 50s’ appears to be a figment of the government’s imagination, so far as I can see. If such demand was really there, a 1990s first-class graduate like myself would by now have had a dozen or more interviews. What’s really needed seems to be guaranteed “double your dole money” jobs for over 50s who want to work. I’d be perfectly happy to pick the local litter (US: ‘trash’) for three days each week, for £700 a month. That’s all I need. And the city of Stoke-on-Trent certainly needs such an all-year army of litter-pickers, I can tell you.

Anyway, that’s it for the shortest month. Onward to March and warmth!

Astounding set

27 Monday Feb 2023

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Odd scratchings

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Currently on eBay, no bids. Low starting prices, and he ships from the UK. The condition looks less than astounding, but some may be interested.

Henry Kuttner

21 Tuesday Feb 2023

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Odd scratchings, Scholarly works

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New on archive.org, Collected Fiction of Henry Kuttner, ordered by date across 8,400 pages. Including his Lovecraftian tales and his poem “H.P.L.” for Lovecraft.

The young Kuttner at an early SF convention.

For a short overview of his best Mythos tales see Shawn Ramsey’s “Henry Kuttner’s Cthulhu Mythos Tales: An Overview”, Crypt of Cthulhu #51 (Hallowmas 1987). Also the anthology The Book Of Iod (1995) which collected ten Mythos tales by Kuttner and added an introduction by Robert M. Price, a collaboration, and one tale by Price himself. The book Discovering classic fantasy fiction: essays on the antecedents of fantastic literature (1996) has an essay of wider scope, “Henry Kuttner, Man of Many Voices”.

The Lovecraft letters to Kuttner were first published in the early 1990s, and these are now to be found at the back of the volume H.P. Lovecraft: Letters to C.L. Moore and Others.

Also on Archive.org is The Best Of Henry Kuttner (1975) from Doubleday with an introduction by Ray Bradbury (the influence was ‘Kuttner influencing Bradbury’, rather than the other way around), and The Best Of Henry Kuttner Vol. 1 (1977) from Mayflower in the UK, with a very different story list.

Many of his magazine covers can be seen in date order at Dark Worlds Quarterly’s survey which starts with Henry Kuttner Part 1 – 1936-1939.

Kuttner’s ‘repeating character’ series are: the Hogben tales of a family of weird mutant hillbillies; and the Galloway Gallegher series about a brilliant but penniless inventor who can only invent when drunk, and when sober finds himself at a loss to explain his new inventions. We see him here considering a fabulous (but also fabulously vain and preening) robot he’s created.

Fragments of Kitab al-Azif at Harran

20 Monday Feb 2023

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New at the HPLHS Store, Miskatonic University Monograph: “The Discovery of Fragments of Kitab al-Azif at Harran”. In the years before 1920…

Scholars from Cambridge and Miskatonic universities collaborated on a series of archeological digs in what is now southern Turkey. Excavations at the site of Harran made several unusual discoveries, chief amongst them is a fragmentary medieval document in Arabic. Professor Henry Armitage correlated the translated fragments with a passage in Miskatonic’s incredibly rare occult tome: the Necronomicon.

Said to be shipping at the start of March 2023.

Lovecraft was right, part 823

19 Sunday Feb 2023

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Physics-defying ‘dwarf planet’ Quaoar, discovered at the edge of our Solar System.

… the nameless vortices of never-dreamed-of strangeness, where form and symmetry, light and heat, even matter and energy themselves, may be unthinkably metamorphosed or totally wanting.

The Providence Herbalist

19 Sunday Feb 2023

Posted by asdjfdlkf in New books, Odd scratchings, Scholarly works

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A new eBay item, of reasonable crispness and thus of possible interest to makers of Lovecraftian RPG games set in Providence.

And talking of ephemera, advance news of a new book…

John D. Haefele and I actually have been slaving away on a book on Arkham House ephemera from the Classic Years — 1937-1972. We’ve got guys eyeballing some of the largest private collections (as I post, one stalwart has the legendary Phil Mays Collection under review), and we’re riding the whirlwind trying to juggle the info into order.

NecronomiCon Providence – 2024 dates announced

18 Saturday Feb 2023

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Odd scratchings

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Dates for your 2024 diary and advance holiday/hotel booking. NecronomiCon Providence is set for Thursday 15th August to Sunday 18th August 2024. Note that this is 2024, not 2023.

The Jackdaw – subscriptions needed

18 Saturday Feb 2023

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Odd scratchings

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The venerable and trenchant British arts magazine The Jackdaw requires subscriptions to continue. This paper-only magazine, akin to a Private Eye magazine for the British arts world…

has been withdrawn from sale from every museum shop in the UK because of its trenchant criticism (most of it from working artists) of the arts establishment. It urgently needs new subscribers to continue.

And over in Providence, the Lovecraft Arts & Sciences 2023 Winter Fundraiser appears to be ongoing.

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