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Tentaclii

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

Tentaclii

Category Archives: Odd scratchings

Amazon Historical Prices

27 Wednesday Sep 2023

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Odd scratchings

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A new UserScript plugs an Amazon Historical Prices graph into each Amazon listing page. Possibly of use to book dealers tracking price trends over time, or those seeking to buy a more expensive item (perhaps a few weeks ahead of the possible purchase point, as ‘the countdown to Christmas’ has reportedly started very early this year). One might even use it to spot trends (e.g. the item ‘tends to become cheaper for a short while, once every two weeks’) caused by an AI spotting page-visiting trends among other potential buyers. The script’s code looks clean to me.

Fables, read

24 Sunday Sep 2023

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I’m now paging toward the end of the Fables series, reading through the 22 x ‘trade’ collections (2002-2015). This is the DC series I blogged about recently because the maker has sent all his Fables IP into the public domain.

I’ve only read one DC book in the last 20 years, and without the news of the IP release I’d have been especially wary of a book featuring ‘re-imagined fairy-tale characters’. To me, ‘re-imagined’ is a dog-whistle for ‘made politically-correct’. But a sampling of Fables found it to have excellent brisk storytelling, no political tub-thumping, and the artwork becomes very pleasing after the first couple of trades because it often somewhat emulates Jack Kirby (minus the krackle). Everything is very polished on the page, and as you’d expect…

Fables does have a bit of a creaky start during the first one and a half books, as everything gets hoisted into place. It’s also very “talky” for a comic. You do wonder if being forced to remove 50 words from each and every completed Fables non-action page would have improved the reading experience. Vol. 13 (‘The Great Fables Crossover’) I found to be a no-consequences mid-series filler and it’s definitely skip-able. But otherwise, great… absorbing and imaginative comics entertainment with superb storytelling. How memorable it will be in toto I’m not yet sure. Will it be like those blockbuster TV series, which gripped at the time, yet can’t even be remembered six months later? I have yet to find out, since I still have the last three trade books to go. But I read that the series has a “very satisfying” ending.

Apart from one passing and somewhat jokey mention of “Yuggoth”, there are no Lovecraft influences that I can see. But of course, now it’s public domain, there’s no stopping a Lovecraft crossover.

Lovecraft Arts & Sciences 2023 Winter Fundraiser

23 Saturday Sep 2023

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The Lovecraft Arts & Sciences 2023 Winter Fundraiser has opened on GoFundMe.

Call: Dark Worlds Quarterly

20 Wednesday Sep 2023

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Dark Worlds Quarterly has An Open Invitation to Bloggers…

I am quite interested in writing guest posts for your blog. (And equally interested in having your posts appear here.) I want to write about Space Opera, Cthulhu Mythos, Sword & Sorcery and other topics (robots, comic books, strange Northerns, Pulp in general.) But primarily these three.

The other Lovecraft Film Festival

17 Sunday Sep 2023

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Films & trailers, Lovecraftian arts, Odd scratchings

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The other Lovecraft Film Festival, the 28th Annual H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival in Portland, has dates: 6th-8th October 2023…

three days of the best new independent short and feature films in the cosmic horror genre, classic screen gems, special Guest speakers, author readings, panel discussions, art, live events

S.T. Joshi’s blog has also noted that the 2023 Portland (Oregon, USA) version of the annual Festival will have a “Lovecraft and Cats” discussion panel.

There are also plans to take the Festival to Mobile, Alabama in November.

Fables comics IP goes public-domain

16 Saturday Sep 2023

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Odd scratchings

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Nice…

As of now, 15th September 2023, the comic book property called Fables, including all related Fables spin-offs and characters, is now in the public domain. What was once wholly owned by Bill Willingham is now owned by everyone, for all time.

It’s the result of strong dissatisfaction with the publisher DC comics…

The one thing in our contract the DC lawyers can’t contest, or reinterpret to their own benefit, is that I am the sole owner of the intellectual property. I can sell it or give it away to whomever I want. I chose to give it away to everyone.

His Substack has the full details about his giving away a best-selling, long-running and Eisner Award-winning property, which Comic Book Treasury summarises as…

The series is about people from fairy tales and folklore who really exist in magical realms, but they were forced out of their worlds by The Adversary… and now live in exile in ours!

A sample page…

The already existing comics volumes themselves (at least 22 collected trade editions) are presumably not public domain, due to the involvement of others in their making. I assume it’s the formerly Bill Willingham-owned IP (characters, costumes, names, powers, world, storylines, backstory, settings) which is now freely usable. There’s a handy 256-page Encyclopedia for the series.

AI declaration rules at Amazon

13 Wednesday Sep 2023

Posted by asdjfdlkf in AI, Odd scratchings

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Amazon’s has new ‘AI declaration’ rules, currently only being applied to ebooks…

We define AI-generated content as text, images, or translations created by an AI-based tool. If you used an AI-based tool to create the actual content (whether text, images, or translations), it is considered “AI-generated,” even if you applied substantial edits afterwards.

Book creators must declare any use such of generated AI, even if later heavily edited by a human.

Thus it seems important not to have book covers that include any AI created elements. Even if you use a stock AI-created backdrop for a book cover, and it’s only 20% of the final cover, Amazon requires the whole book be labelled “AI generated”.

If not labelled then there seems a real risk it will be pulled from the store. This will be especially relevant when AI watermarking is rolled out, as Amazon’s bots will then be able to auto-detect the AI. In the meanwhile there’s also a risk with content that might attract the attention of activists of either the right or the left, seeking a way to have it ‘cancelled’. They might pounce on an undeclared use of AI.

AI translation is also covered. Thus if a scholar uses an AI-powered translation service to translate just one required quote (from Latin, say), then presumably again the whole book has to be labelled “AI generated”. AI-made abstracts, tables-of-contents, cover blurbs (and eventually AI generated back-of-the-book indexes) could also fall foul of the new rules. Even if heavily edited by a human.

And you might say… how will they tell? Ah, well… AI output from the main corporate tools is set to be invisibly watermarked, with Google already rolling out its version of the watermarking last week. Nvidia just signed up to watermarking, raising the prospect of embedding at the graphics-card level. Steganography… look it up.

And where such labelling leads to is very uncertain. For instance, having your book labelled “AI generated” might soon mean it doesn’t appear in search, or is only to be found on the Amazon store with difficulty. You may even find it’s blocked by some third-party Web browser add-on, cooked up by an AI-hater.

An example is DeviantArt’s AI declaration, required of people posting pictures. This seemed benign at first… until it wasn’t. Some weeks later, users found they could block all those “AI” tagged images. Those who had been honest and trusting of the company suddenly found their work being automatically ‘disappeared’.

NecronomiCon Providence dates

12 Tuesday Sep 2023

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NecronomiCon Providence dates. 15th-18th August 2024 in Providence, and “2024 convention passes will begin to go on sale ~January 2024”.

Letters to Wilfred B. Talman – the fourth set of notes

10 Sunday Sep 2023

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Odd scratchings

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Letters to Wilfred B. Talman – the fourth set of notes:

My fourth set of notes on the book of Lovecraft’s Letters to Wilfred B. Talman and Helen V. and Genevieve Sully. These notes cover letters from July 1931 to May 1932. Lovecraft is still writing to Talman, at this point in the book.

Page 180. A mis-transcription or perhaps a sleepy ‘slip of the pen’. I’d suggest that “retroactivity” should, for sense, read “radioactivity”…

It would take radioactivity to do that [i.e. fully awaken him in time to catch the 9am coach departure] after the Rip van Winkle coma from which I’ve just emerged.

At that time, radioactivity could still be thought of as a personal tonic rather than a deadly poison.

Page 180. It’s July 1931 and he has apparently only just learned the trick of pressing his trousers by putting them under the mattress in a hotel. He learned it from a “comic picture”, which might mean a comic-strip, a cartoon or even an animated short at the cinema. I seemed to recall he said somewhere he learned it from Arthur Leeds or Everett McNeil, but apparently not.

Page 182. 10th September 1932. Steam pipes and radiators are being fitted at Barnes St., at last. There was apparently no such heat before, and I seem to recall that even afterwards the pipes did not extend to certain upper visitor rooms.

Page 183. Talman has sent Lovecraft a card with “proof symbols” on it, which will be “invaluable” for proof reading. It’s interesting that Lovecraft had not used these before October 1931, despite his extensive revising and proof reading work. But perhaps it was the card that was “invaluable”, rather than the already-known symbols.

Pages 186-87. In late October he writes of a visit to Norwich, “an ineffably fascinating old town on the steep terraces that rise over the river Thames”. The story “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” is written a few weeks later, and thus perhaps Norwich played a small part in building the atmosphere of Innsmouth? Norwich, USA, is 25 miles SW of Providence, at the end of a long navigable inlet from the sea.

Page 187. Lovecraft is obviously familiar with the painted cat postcards of Wain.

Fittingly, in Spain the translation of Lovecraft’s “Cats and Dogs” has a Wain cat on the cover.

Page 189. He hears a public lecture at Brown from Willem de Sitter, on the new discoveries about the size of the universe. Sitter speaks ably and with good English.

Page 191. Talman was contributing articles to Seabury Quinn’s magazine.

Page 191. His friend Cook’s library is now gone, “due to his financial collapse”. It seems that the collector who the gang called ‘The Colossus of the North’ had been forced to sell most of his collection as the Great Depression deepened.

Page 191. Lovecraft recommends the rare book Dealings With The Dead by Sargent, on funeral, burial and mortuary practices through history.

Page 192. “My breakfast each morning consists of doughnuts & cheese … 365 days a year” except when in ‘nut-free places. He states the ‘nuts were always shop-bought, never home-made.

Page 193. Talman had sent Lovecraft the Argosy issue with the headlining “Voodoo Express” story. Lovecraft read it and partly approved… “it does pack a punch at intervals. That train alone is worth anybody’s dime.” Lovecraft wants to see the book The Cat in the Mysteries of Religion and Magic.

Page 205. Lovecraft is attending the Marshall Woods public lecture series at Brown.

Page 205. Lovecraft had a direct ancestor, son of Mike Phillips I, who built… “Mowbra Castle (still standing) near Wickford”. This is not the Wickford in Ireland, so there is no connection to the story “The Moon Bog”. The place is described thus…

In Belleville, still on the Post Road, stands the Phillips house, known as “Mowbra Castle”. It was probably built about 1695-1700 by Michael Phillips, who came from Newport. Its plan somewhat resembles that of the Arnold house at Moshassuck, but the chimney is nearly square, and the fireplace in the side room is at an angle of ninety degrees with that in the main room.” (Early Rhode Island Houses).

Page 209. Rimel’s horror tale “The Curse Wheel” was set in the “Ramapaugh” region. The story appears to be lost.

Page 209. Lovecraft has been tipped off that a New York City magazine called Weird Whispers might be a market.

Page 210. Lovecraft has visited the “Germanic Museum” in Boston, and urges Talman to see the Romanesque interior. This was a large and well-funded teaching museum dedicated to illustrating the civilised arts, created from early medieval times onwards, by the nations of “Germany, Holland, Switzerland, Scandinavia, England (and later Australia)”. It opened in 1921, and was especially known for its fine replicas of some of the most treasured medieval carvings and sculpture.

Born digital

09 Saturday Sep 2023

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Spotted in the news, and of possible interest to historians researching the biographies and families of British creatives…

Until recently, if you wanted to buy records from the [UK’s official] General Register Office you had to pay £11 to order a [birth or death etc] certificate through the post, or £7 to download a PDF. But for the first time it’s selling [instantly available] digital images of records, and at an affordable price – just £2.50 per image.

Births to 1922, deaths to 1887.

Tentaclii for August 2023

08 Friday Sep 2023

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A bit late, here’s my quick round-up of Tentaclii activity for August and a bit more.

Late August and early September have at last ushered in a beautiful English summer. The mighty walls of Tentaclii Towers has so far basked in a rare full week of fine weather. Cool-enough early mornings leading to days that are hot but not-too-hot. Nor is everything frazzled to an ugly brown crisp, as happens in the British Isles at the end of some summers. Since paid work still eludes me, these fine mornings have thus been used for a litter-picking of the entire Towers estate and even The Sinister Fringes That Lie Beyond. This mammoth task is now complete, just as the weather now grows increasingly misty and possibly-thundery. Unusual fungi have started to appear, heralding the autumn…

Not much news in books this month, but S.T. Joshi announced the anthology The Weird Cat. Amazon UK has this shipping in mid October and thus in time for Halloween.

In my weekly ‘Picture Postals from Lovecraft’ posts on Tentaclii I looked at: Lower Manhattan from Brooklyn Heights, and came fairly close to a vintage picture illustrating the opening of “He”; I probed the vampiric under-crypts of St. John’s, Providence; I was pleased to find more pictures of Eddy’s bookshop on Weybosset, although not the shop-front or basement interior; and I found and colourised a fine and revealing view of the town end of his long and beloved Angell Street, which revealed another reason for Lovecraft to think fondly of the city’s First Baptist Church steeple.

A patron’s question spurred the long post “Lovecraft and Vermont”, in which I surveyed the likely places there that a Lovecraftian might want to visit today. With pictures.

With the Lovecraft Annual 2023 almost due to ship, I posted a long review of the Lovecraft Annual 2022. Joshi has accepted my 2024 submission for the Annual (calling it “brilliant”, which was pleasing) and I now just have to find the time to whittle all the references and bibliography into the required format. Also in journals news, it seems that the purchasable run of old Crypt of Cthulhu PDFs have gone offline, along with the more recent 2017-2022 run. This means modern scholars have lost access not only to most of Lovecraft Studies, but also to most of Crypt.

Over in Middle-earth I published Tolkien Gleanings issue 6, my free PDF news ‘zine for Tolkien scholars. I finally pushed my big scholarly Tolkien book Tree & Star out in Lulu paperback alongside the earlier ebook edition. I also made Little Delvings in the Marsh, a search tool for Tolkien scholars.

Various choice items turned up on Archive.org or in Creative Commons, and were duly noted here.

In Germany, Lovecrafter and Lovecraft Online called for new staff, and released their annual double-issue Lovecrafter 11 and 12. I produced a quick English summary of what’s in #11 and #12. The Germans also have a new translation of Lovecraft’s Fungi from Yuggoth.

In events, The R.E. Howard ‘Howard Days’ announced 2024 dates. The Providence wing of the Lovecraft Film Festival should be booking soon, if it’s not booking already.

In Lovecraftian arts, not much in August. But more recently I was pleased to find the free Wrath of the Elder Gods pinball table (digital, videogame emulation), and the forthcoming French graphic novel Le dernier jour de Howard Phillips Lovecraft. Both look like quality, each in their own way. Another post on new Lovecraft comics is coming soon.

I’ve also been doing more learning and tinkering with AI, as much as I can using free services (I don’t have the RTX 2080 8Gb graphics card I need to do it locally, nor the price of the resulting electric bill). The key problem in AI image generation is still getting repeatable / pose-able characters, for storytelling purposes. Specifically for hyper-critical graphic-novel readers. Though my long-standing interest in the Poser software (the proper desktop software, not the unrelated mobile app of the same name) makes me think that Poser + AI will be a possible solution. Poser can do real-time comic-book renders from 3D figures and handles Python 3 very easily, so an AI plugin for Poser seems quite feasible. The trick would be make the real-time comic-book renders quickly look “in the style of Gil Kane” or “in the style of Jack Kirby”.

In audio, for Lovecraft’s birthday I offered an enhanced audiobook reading of Lovecraft’s “Vermont, a first impression”, enhanced with music and SFX. Also for this year’s birthday, the French play Lovecraft, mon amour was kindly released in full on YouTube (though with no good English subtitles). In podcasts, ‘Lovecraft & Astronomy’ was the topic of Talking Weird #52. Two of the PulpFest 2023 Lovecraft-relevant presentations appeared online as audio and were also linked.

A very kind benefactor has funded me for £56 worth of ‘thermals’ for the winter (top and leggings), a winter which will again have to be heater-less due to the massive electric bills and inflation that we’re all suffering with. They are the “max” thermals, supposedly good down to minus 15 degrees. The UK is overdue an Arctic winter, and I’m now better prepared if that happens. A £10 per hour job that can pay electric bills would of course be nicer to have, but no-one even wants to interview me… so the thermals and a scarf will have to do for now. As always, donations and new patrons are welcome. PayPal or an Amazon voucher code are two of the easy ways to make one-off donations.

That’s it, onwards into September!

Mountain trail

05 Tuesday Sep 2023

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New on Archive.org, a crisp new scan of Astounding v016 n05 [1936-01]. This was the issue in which the Editor trailed “At The Mountains of Madness”, saying…

“It creates one of the finest word pictures I have ever read.”

Some readers did not agree in the letters-pages, in later issues. Several being seemingly simply unable to comprehend it. Although several times one gets the sense that they were also members of the ‘Genre Police’, whose hackles were raised on finding a story that was more ‘weird’ than the usual Astounding science-fiction.

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