Category Archives: Odd scratchings

Weird Tales, April/May 1931

11 Monday Mar 2019

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New on Archive.org today, a fine crisp scan of Weird Tales, April/May 1931. Lovecraft, Howard, Smith, and Farnsworth Wright at the helm. Wright announces that Lovecraft’s “The Whisperer in Darkness” will be printed very soon, along with new Solomon Kane stories from Howard.

For some reason the 10Mb PDF looks terrible, compared to the Archive.org viewer. You’ll probably want the .JP2 scans, batch convert with IrfanView to .JPG, and then save into a .CBR file. Talking of .CBR, everyone needs to upgrade their WinRAR to the latest version, as earlier versions have a huge security hole. Strike that: Archive.org now offers “Comic Book Zip” format (.CBZ) which is to be vastly preferred over the muddy PDF.

Elder Props freebies

05 Tuesday Mar 2019

Posted by in Fonts, Lovecraftian arts, New books, Odd scratchings

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New on Archive.org… Elder Props (1981), an 84 page compendium of printable pages, presumably for use as photocopies made as RPG game prompts and elements. The artist has a nice clean toony ink style, which I like a lot.

If you wanted these in colour, look at Krita’s 4.0’s new ability to auto-paint line-art.

I see that the same book can also be downloaded from the site of the artist for free, though there’s it’s confusing labelled Evil Dead, which makes one think of tiresome video-nasty zombies movies of the 1980s rather than the Neconomicon.

The artist is still working, and has a similar product for the awesome Gravity Falls series. Also free Fonts…

de Camp on the reception of his Lovecraft biography

03 Sunday Mar 2019

Posted by in de Camp, Historical context, Odd scratchings

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From the Science Fiction Review in 1975, de Camp on what he left out of the Lovecraft biography…

This will already have been encountered by those interested in Lovecraft’s young manhood and his attempts to enlighten the local Irish youth. But I wasn’t aware of the information given on the initial sales volume for the biography, and this may interest those looking at the early history of the Lovecraft revival in the 1970s.

February on Tentaclii

01 Friday Mar 2019

Posted by in Housekeeping, Odd scratchings

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All right, so… 1st March 2019. February is gone. Doesn’t time fly! The signs of early springtime are everywhere here in the UK, though the first leaves are not yet out and the nights are still shiver-ish.

Here at Tentaclii, February saw 10,000 words posted, even with the week’s holiday from daily posting at the end of the month. The most important post was one of the Friday ‘Picture Postals’, which became a lengthy and highly illustrated essay on an overlooked area of New York City during Lovecraft’s time there. Given that Sheepshead Bay and its environs was such an unusual and eerie terrain, it was rather surprising that other Lovecraftians had not already delved into the topic. The post now effectively serves as an additional chapter for my book on Lovecraft’s sojourn in New York in the 1920s, and will be added and footnoted if there’s ever a new edition. Those considering new fiction featuring Lovecraft in the 1920s might also take this unusual watery setting and run with it. The Dutch marshlands of New York at the turn of the century could also make an unusual ‘true-life setting’ for a non-scary children’s picture-book, though Gravity Falls-like elements might still be woven in.

I also found minor new supporting information about Lovecraft’s favourite coffee-house in New York. Numerous new books and comics collections were noted, including an important one on Lovecraft in Japan. Pictures that were new to me were were found, including three of the interior of the John Hay Library and a large new scan on the Brown archive of one Lovecraft’s boyhood publications. Five new scholarly items were found and added to the Open Lovecraft page. Various other useful things were spotted and linked, including the welcome return of The Lovecraft Geek podcast, and a series of in-depth insider posts on the state of the Lovecraftian RPG market in 2018. I also picture-researched and published a new game scenario “The Assemblage of Dr. Arnold Astrall”, and my Patreons have access to the pictorial .zip bundle for this with public-domain pictures.

As you can see, daily posting at Tentaclii has now started again, after a week’s break, and the blog is now Patreon-only.

My thanks to those who have decided to become or remain my patrons on Patreon. You have ongoing access to the Tentaclii blog, which now has nearly a decade’s worth of posts, consisting of around 2,500 back-posts. These contain millions if not tens of millions of words plus Web links, all searchable by keyword or phrase, thus providing you with a unique resource for your own Lovecraft studies and musings.

Please encourage others to access this unique resource — all it takes is $1 a month via Patreon.

The Lovecraft Geek podcast returns

20 Wednesday Feb 2019

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, Odd scratchings, Podcasts etc., Scholarly works

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I’m pleased to see there’s a new episode of The Lovecraft Geek podcast with Robert M. Price, The Lovecraft Geek Podcast, 19-001. 19 presumably stands for 2019, and the 001 is self-explanatory. My podcatcher software refuses to download locally (“cannot verify talkshoe.com”), but it streams fine.

Price says at the start that he needs more questions sent in. I had sent in a list of questions by email last October, but he doesn’t seem to have got them. More questions are needed, to: criticus@aol.com

He notes that Ulthar Press has a set of Price-edited books lined up. Already published is The Mighty Warriors (summer 2018), his edited collection of new stories likely to interest those who like 1970s sword & sorcery action — with the twist that here we have… “aging once great heroes” rather than rippling youths.

Also announced was the book Narcotic Pnakotic Fragments (I think I heard that correctly, presumably a play on ‘necrotic’), a collection of his essays on the Mythos cycle, from Ulthar Press.

Sounding rather further off in time, and also from Ulthar Press, were various anthology titles. Most interesting to Lovecraft scholars is probably Price’s mention of his The Exham Priory Cycle. Since it will include historic “precursor stories” to Lovecraft’s “The Rats in the Walls” as well as new stories influenced by the famous tale.

Chaosium is apparently getting back into everything from action figures to anthologies, and the latter seem likely to include Price’s long-languishing ‘Cycle’ anthology manuscripts. Including one with stories expanding on Lovecraft’s revision tales. Price didn’t say so, but I presume that Chaosium are flush with cash from the success of the big-budget videogame and its associated boost to the sales of the table-top game and related books.

Price’s next Crypt of Cthulhu magazine should ship in the next couple of weeks. Presumably that’ll be #112, but Necronomicon Press doesn’t have its table-of-contents up yet. Although a note elsewhere on the Web-o-sphere tells of one of the scholarly essays in it…

“First and Final Estimates: August Derleth Looks at Weird Tales Magazine” is to be included in Crypt of Cthulhu No. 112 (late 2018 or early 2019). This builds upon Haefele’s earlier discussion in August Derleth Redux: The Weird Tale 1930-1971 (H. Harksen Productions, 2009), emphasizing Derleth’s positive impact on the reputation of Weird Tales magazine.”

Wordsmiths

19 Tuesday Feb 2019

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I recently spotted a rare lauding of Lovecraft, from Gunjan Patni, on a board for those studying the forms of language. He appears to be in India, and is thus presumably blissfully unaware that ‘you’re not supposed to say that’…

“I dabble in creative writing here and there. Wordsmiths like Tolkien and Lovecraft are a pleasure to read for their sheer skill in sentence structure and plethora of words.”

It’s a bit quack…

16 Saturday Feb 2019

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Why is my Tentaclii blog not indexed by the secondary search-engine DuckDuckGo? Apart from (oddly) two PDFs in the “Unknown Friends” series? It’s curious, because the content is there and Google Search is all over my blog. It even sometimes shows up on Google Scholar and Google Books.

Not that the absence from DuckDuckGo matters much, as all the evidence from my other blogs shows the only traffic source that matters in any real way is Google Search. But it is slightly annoying, especially when one sometimes hears people piously proclaiming that “I’m giving up Google”. They’ll do fine for basic “where is that big site’s main page” navigation searches. That’s what I use the Duck for, and the Duck’s Image Search is excellent. But for anything else, you’re using a third-rate service and badly crippling your online research capabilities.

Tentaclii‘s indexing problem here is not actually DuckDuckGo’s own indexing, but rather that their service is built mostly on Bing, with a bit of Yandex and a couple of others. Mostly they appear to rely on the world’s worst major search option… Microsoft Bing. Search for Tentaclii on Bing, and you can see how the results mimic almost exactly the search results for DuckDuckGo. So Bing is the culprit here.

Could I quickly submit my URL (web address)? No. Since September 2018 Bing no longer allows URL submissions to suggest new sites they should index. Nor does DuckDuckGo allow direct URL submissions. I did join Bing Webmaster programme to get a ‘site dashboard’, in order to submit URLs, which was total overkill and proved to be impossible anyway. After submitting your site you have to “verify” thus…

Which is totally impossible to do for a WordPress.com blog, because the author doesn’t have any control over such stuff. Thus basically Bing doesn’t allow WordPress.com blogs to submit their URL, in a way that their system can ever verify. Which means there’s no way to submit the URL for Tentaclii. Some might even see this as anti-competitive behaviour by Microsoft, blocking the services of other companies.

Like I said, it’s not that much bother… because Google Search is the only traffic source that matters. But it’s just annoying in a niggling way, especially when you hear people occasionally lauding Bing and DuckDuckGo as if they were as good or better than Google. I run JURN and have spent the last decade immersed in the academic side of search-indexing, and I can tell you they’re not.