Snagged on eBay and ‘AI up-scaled’ (I found one that’s good for typography) and cleaned a bit. Possibly of interest for Lovecraftian RPG game-masters looking for late Victorian props…

1074 pixels up-scaled to 2400 pixels.

Mediachance has revealed a Cyber Monday discount. This one-man developer mostly makes worthy arty Photoshop plugins and filters, and now offers a further 25% off everything via a coupon-code.

But this offer is of interest to Tentaclii readers because of his CQuill Writer. This is his labour-of-love innovative AI-ish creative writing assistant, which I liked when I tried the free version. It helps you emulate the style of a famous writer by ‘digesting’ their corpus. The ‘one-time purchase’ paid version will let you ingest Lovecraft’s tales, and thus make the master a prompting ‘style assistant’ as you write. This is not as annoying as it sounds, and it works really well. The software can also serve as a far more user-friendly Scrivener equivalent for planning and organising a large work of fiction.

With the discount you should be looking at somewhere around $35, maybe $42 with a local sales tax added. If that’s worth paying will depend on how much you want to emulate Lovecraft, Tolkien, etc. If you don’t, or can do that without prompting, then just use the free version.

I also noticed 50% off (via a front-page coupon-code) at the RetroSupply Co. including the 1950s trash-comic TOOM Horror Comic Font, which may interest makers of faux retro items for RPGs.

A peep at the British anthology By Daylight Only (1929). A new sale listing shows the original dust-jacket, which gives the colour. The paid repro ‘Facsimile Dust-jackets’ version has it as red, but here I’ve digitally recoloured to green…

Presumably a contributor copy would have arrived, circa December 1929, for Lovecraft. A tale by the master had appeared in the third volume, almost certainly issued in time for Halloween, and he received his copy in mid December. So we might imagine the same timing for this fifth book in the series. By Daylight Only featured his “Pickman’s Model”.

Perhaps it was first shipped in bulk to the Weird Tales office for further distribution to the American authors at their latest addresses. Since the British publishers dealt with Weird Tales London agent Charles Lovell, who picked the best published WT stories and passed them in good form to Selwyn & Blount for further selection and arrangement. I imagine he also passed back the contributor copies when ready. Ah, yes… I find that supposition is confirmed. In 1929 Lovecraft also wrote to Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright to thank him… “for the anthology which you forwarded”.

A few Black Friday sale items I’ve noticed, of possible interest to Tentaclii readers. All rather modest savings so far. No ‘80% off’ door-busters, as yet.

Blambot has 30% off of their comic-book lettering fonts, by using coupon-code CYBERWEEK at the checkout. Expires 4th December 2022. Some horror fonts and vintage 1950s EC comics type fonts. They also have vintage ad fonts, suitable for recreating old ads and poster for RPGs.

25% off a one-time perpetual licence for the QuarkXpress DTP desktop software. Don’t judge it by the bad reputation it had back in 2002. It’s now worth considering if you need a full DTP desktop software, and (unlike Adobe’s InDesign) it doesn’t require an expensive plugin to export to HTML5.

A modest 25% off Gigapixel AI, the best desktop image up-scaler. Apparently still available as a standalone, for now. They had announced that it would only be available in a bundle with their other AI software.

Modest discounts on DxO ViewPoint 4. If you visit places and make or have a lot of pictures of buildings or rooms, this ‘partly automatic’ desktop software straightens the curved/wonky verticals and horizontals. Used to be very cheap, a couple of years ago. Now more expensive.

No discounts yet on PDF Index Generator, DocFetcher Pro, JitBit Macro Recorder, Scrivener 3, Booksorber. CQuill Writer is 30% off all year round, so doesn’t really count.

As with all software, try before you buy, to check your OS can run it and if you like the user interface. Some software, such as Serif’s Affinity Publisher DTP software, have squinty deal-breaker UIs. Others won’t run on old OSs. AI software may require a certain grade of graphics card.

Surprisingly true. All-but useless for news / opportunities gathering, but fun to scroll really fast through for 30 minutes a day on a desktop PC, with images blocked. That assumes, of course, you know how to ‘follow’ someone while also blocking their daily tidal-wave of re-tweets. And that your feed has settled down, discarding the stupid mini-feeds ‘suggested topic’ (Soccer, Wrestling, Boxing and other manly grunt-fests). Why are suggestion-bots so dumb? All of them, all the time. Fix that, Elon and you’ll be a rich man. Oh, wait…

In the news last weekend, Manitoba man inherits author Robert Bloch’s belongings…

It will take some time before Robert Unik finishes sifting through everything he inherited from his late mother last month, but so far the treasure trove the Manitoba man just received includes books, photos and documents that once belonged to the famous fiction writer Robert Bloch.

Possibly useful for my future reference, once I get around to finishing my stop-start Doctor Who re-watch, is the 1990 MacFarland book A history and critical analysis of Blake’s 7, the 1978-1981 British television space adventure. Newly found on Archive.org, to borrow. It appears to have just about everything you might want to know about the much-loved Blake’s 7 TV series, including episode synopses.

I also spotted the more fannish guide-book Maximum power! : the complete unauthorised guide to all 64 episodes of Blake’s 7 (2nd edition). Which has details of some of the more obscure spin-off items…

Warning of wobbly cardboard stage-sets and rubber-suit monsters: 1970s British sci-fi TV series are not for everyone, and are something of an acquired taste.

British readers of a certain age may be interested in a new digital reprint of Spellbound, which in the mid 1970s was a popular spooky supernatural-mystery weekly comic for girls. Spellbound Volume One is available now. This collects the vintage serial “I Don’t Want to be a Witch”, and pairs it with selected vintage one-off strips. There are also four modern one-off takes on the Spellbound formula, bundled in a 116-page volume. But note that back then a page of a British weekly could contain the equivalent in panels of three pages in a modern padded-out comic.

Also from the 1970s, Philippe Druillet’s Vuzz collected as a new oversized hardback, albeit of 72 pages.

SF Crowsnest is now recruiting unpaid reviewers. In the past couple of years this fine free-to-read grassroots title has offered quite a number of reviews of books related to Lovecraft’s life, letters and work.

It was a mild and damp October here in England, which has raised a bumper crop of strange fungi around Tentaclii Towers. The blog was not quite so fruitful, with a bit less activity than normal. Still, here’s my summary for the month.

In postcard pictures related to Lovecraft and his places, this month I looked at St. Paul’s Chapel in New York City (where Lovecraft married Sonia); I found evocative pictures of Newport at Night; and also a few of St. Augustine sea-front including a one-off 1950s low-tide picture. Otherwise there were only small historical nuggets this month. A flick through Robert Bloch’s Once around the Bloch: an unauthorized autobiography revealed the unexpected fact that Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright had a very good sense of humour (at least, when met personally). Who knew? My post on bicycle racing in Providence discovered that the 11-13 year old “veritable bicycle centaur” Lovecraft would surely have known of the opening of a large new cycledrome, backed by the manager of the Providence Opera House. In the third instalment of my notes on Letters with Donald and Howard Wandrei I learned (among many other things) that Lovecraft did eventually see the famous surreal-horror movie Dr. Caligari, and one reel of The Golem. But too late to influence his writing. Another website took a look at the composer Scriabin and Lovecraft, and I responded by doing some digging on possible connections. I found a 1922 connection via Galpin, and various broad parallels between Lovecraft and Scriabin, but there seems to have been no influence of Scriabin’s music on Lovecraft or on “Erich Zann”.

In journals and magazines, the German Lovecraftians released a German-language double-issue Lovecrafter #9 and #10. The thriving scholarly Shima journal released a special issue on sea-monsters in English.

In books, I noted the new Theology and H.P. Lovecraft, and later also linked to a podcast with the author of one of the chapters. I also looked through all the forthcoming McFarland books and picked out those likely to appeal to Tentaclii readers. A costly academic collection The Medial Afterlives of H.P. Lovecraft: Comic, Film, Podcast, TV, Games appears to be due by early 2023.

In useful scholarly tools I discovered the Contemporary Biography Builder tool; noted a useful PDF Index Generator video on making back-of-the-book indexes from custom lists; and I spotted that the Stellarium 1.0 final/stable software has finally appeared.

Overseas, the Portuguese have a new non-fiction book on Lovecraft and the Esoteric Traditions: Influences of Cosmic Horror on Occultism. The Spanish have a new police-procedural historical Cthulhu Cult novel, El Asesinato de Robert Barlow.

In events, this month I spotted several Lovecraft + Halloween talks in New England on Lovecraft. And the French have just held their big Campus Miskatonic 2022 event.

Two ‘Lovecraft as character’ graphic novels were noted this month, both with French connections. The Monstrous Dreams of Mr. Providence has now appeared in English and at a nice price on the Kindle, and there’s a new Lovecraft in Quebec gallery exhibition in Canada and an accompanying French-language ‘BD’ graphic novel based on Lovecraft’s visits to Quebec.

In podcasts, the latest Voluminous podcast revealed not only a wholly new Lovecraft letter, but also that the S.T. Joshi Endowed Research Fellowship was once again accepting applications (the deadline has just gone). It further revealed that scanning of the newly arrived Long letters had not started at the John Hay Library, at least as of NecronomiCon 2022. The new LibriVox Ghost and Horror Collection brought new public-domain readings of “The Outsider” by Lovecraft, and “The Loved Dead” by Eddy and Lovecraft. Dark Adventure Theater announced their big December release, R.E. Howard’s Lovecraftian homage story “The Black Stone”. Nice choice, which will please both REH and HPL readers. I was also pleased to find Tolkien’s The Hobbit, unabridged and full-cast and free. A fine listen.

In movies and TV, the Portland (Oregon) edition of the Lovecraft Film Festival even took place in early October. On TV the Netflix “Pickman’s Model” TV one-off was called by The Hollwood Reporter merely “overlong and over-obvious”. This may not worry those who know the story well already, and are keen to see as much period-costume Lovecraft as possible. Though I don’t know what other problems it may have, from a Lovecraftian perspective.

Sadly several of my carefully-made products have ‘fallen flat’ in terms of much-needed Gumroad sales, and they continue to do so. Meanwhile other key income streams have recently fallen away, due to piracy and also people cutting their online spending. Things are getting a bit difficult for me, frankly. If anyone has any regular reliable monthly work I could do, which ideally pays $600+ per month, I’d greatly appreciate hearing about it please. I’m perhaps best suited to being a specialist editor and researcher/writer, and I have strong skills in Web wrangling and picture processing. Many thanks, and thanks also to my patrons on Patreon.