New to me, the book Weird Chicago (2008), now on Archive.org.

My text searches, and a skim of the table-of-contents, suggest that the book somehow completely overlooked the fact that Chicago once housed Weird Tales magazine. But it does note in passing that 1930s/40s Weird Tales cover-artist Margaret Bundage’s husband worked as a bartender at the Dil Pickle bar.

A new database of…

all the instances recorded in the scientific literature in the past century, of frogs and toads attempting to mate with things that they shouldn’t

Nicholas Diak has a new post that holds up the classic era of European ‘sword-and-sandals’ films to be an unappreciated genre. Mostly these were Italian-made in the 1950s and 1960s, historically themed and relatively authentic and traditional, akin to westerns in the USA. But made before the Italian turn to the ‘spaghetti-westerns’. Diak is an enthusiast who celebrates…

“a new breed of “Criterion-esque physical releases” from “Justin Decloux’s Gold Ninja Video label, an independent boutique label that strives to give the Criterion treatment to forgotten, obscure, and public domain films”

Criterion being buff shorthand for ‘lots of extras, featurettes and commentary’. The latest release being…

a supplemental-laden edition of Marino Girolami’s Fury of Achilles (1962)” … “a good introduction to the genre” though only available now in a 16mm print … “With over 300 titles in the sword-and-sandals canon, Decloux states that finding an entry point into the genre can be problematic. [His first featurette on the disc] proffers eight titles and explains what makes each of them a stand-out film.” His next featurette on the disc… “‘Weird Swords and Sandals: A Video Essay’ has Decloux disclosing a few noteworthy peplum [Italian] films that has weird or fantastique elements, such as giant monsters and magic.

Sounds like one for the collection of some Tentaclii readers, who will probably also want to get onto the Gold Ninja mailing-list.

Elsewhere, John Coulthart surveys Ray Harryhausen’s swords and sorceries, noting the dim prospect for anything similar today…

Epic fantasy is no longer as untouchable as it used to be following the screen success of the Tolkien and George R.R. Martin franchises, but sword and sorcery remains mildly disreputable…

How to bulk download a disparate set of PDFs from the Internet Archive? The following workflow may be useful for those downloading sets of publications.

If what you want is already in a neat and discreet ‘Collection’ then you’re in luck. There is already a Collection Downloader. Possibly there are others.

If the set is not in a Collection and you don’t want to make one, or is otherwise jumbled and problematic, this roundabout solution will work.

1. Install the Web browser add-on Copy Open Tab URLs. This can copy the URLs of all open tabs to a list with ‘one URL per line’.

2. Visit Archive.org and find all your uncollected issues of a journal or ‘zine run and its successors. Quickly right-click/open each one into a new Web browser tab. I am assuming there are perhaps 40-70 scattered issues, not hundreds or thousands. And that your PC memory and Web browser can handle that many open tabs without crashing.

3. Using your new Web browser addon ‘Copy Open Tab URLs’, instantly capture all the open tabs into a one-URL-per-line list.

4. Paste the resulting list into my URL converter .XLS spreadsheet. This takes advantage of the fixed format that Archive.org URLs and PDFs links have. For instance…

https://archive.org/ details/fluffy_kitty_tales

The PDF at this page this will almost always be…

https://archive.org/ download/fluffy_kitty_tales/fluffy_kitty_tales.pdf

As you can see in the above spreadsheet, the hidden formulas in the spreadsheet automatically fix the URLs. Copy the final ‘fixed’ list of links from the spreadsheet. Save the list to a plain .TXT file.

I could have done this with a regex, but people are more familiar with the .XLS spreadsheets in Microsoft Office.

5. Now use a simple bit of freeware that will just download a list of files. The well-established free Chrome/Firefox browser addon DownThemAll! will do the job, with a bit of initial wrangling. First set it to go directly to its Manager when opened.

Then in the Manager right-click somewhere, and “Import from file”. Select your list of PDF links.

Ok, you should be done. Start the downloads running, keep your browser open, and go off and do something else. Because it’s going to take a long time.

When finished check the list for any ‘404’ PDFs. They may be a few where the URL failed, and they will need to be manually downloaded from the page.

Ideally, the .torrent file linked in each tab would be extracted instead, loaded up to your torrent software, and then just the .PDF file in each torrent set running and nothing else. But how one would do that in a bulk/automated manner, I don’t know. And it’s possible that the cross-file slaloming of a .torrent means most of the other files also get downloaded anyway, in effect. So maybe straight .PDF links is the best way.

Alan Moore is popping out of retirement, having landed a six-figure Bloomsbury contract for a quintet of books to be titled Long London. Said to be set in an alternative-history London “encompassing murder, magic and madness” over a long time-period, and with the first book due in 2024. One wonders if he’ll have Lovecraft visit London in the late 1920s.

Kindle Fire owners with ‘stuck downloads syndrome’ may be pleased to learn that the major new OS update for the Fire 10″ (2019) has cured the problem for me.

When you send PDFs to the Fire via ‘Send to Kindle’, after the items download they appear on the Fire’s ‘Carousel’, aka the Home Screen. The items are placed at the head of your app icons. This is very convenient, but sometimes the new arrivals get ‘stuck’ and you can’t do anything with them. Such as simply delete the icon.

For this reason you may have had this feature turned off. Here’s how to turn it back on again:

1. At top of the screen, swipe to access Settings via the white cogwheel.

2. Select Apps and Games.

3. Select Amazon Application Settings.

4. “Home Screens”.

5. “Show New Items on the Home Screen” — turned ON.

The ‘stuck’ items that were cluttering your Home Screen can now be deleted.

Twitter has blithely allowed The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society account to be stolen…

About a month ago the HPLHS Twitter account was hacked and stolen by some miscreant. Repeated efforts to get help from Twitter Support were met with complete silence. Within hours of our discovery of the issue, we were approached by an unknown person offering to “help us get our account back”: all we had to do was send this person a DM. We declined to do so, because we feel fairly certain that this person is the thief and was simply trying to shake us down. Since Twitter itself never helped, we have decided to simply start over. Although the hacker stole all our followers and our entire timeline of messages, we still have our original handle, @HPLHS. Thanks to the brave stalwarts who have followed us anew. Apologies to anyone who might have found themselves spammed by the thief. May hordes of Nightgaunts descend upon him/her/them.

The new one is thus at “@HPLHS”, should you have a Twitter account. I don’t.

It appears that Fivver no longer permit offers to convert a complex scholarly book from Word .DOC to Kindle ebook. In this case, a perfectly legitimate technical offer was banned, and indeed robo-libelled as well in their rejection. The offer was a perfectly legitimate and considered one. To take someone’s finished academic book to the Kindle ebook format, round-trip footnotes and all, to the linked Kindle format for sale by the author on Amazon. I was wondering why no-one had ever responded to the offer. Now I know.

Robert B. Stroud’s C.S. Lewis Mere Inkling blog asks…

Where do all the satellites go when their utility ends? No, they don’t all just burn up on reentry into the Earth’s atmosphere as their orbits decay. Many are too large for that, and they must be escorted to a remote and desolate Spacecraft Cemetery. … And what better place than the dark depths of the ocean? Among the craft that have been scuttled at the spot are unmanned satellites . . . and, possibly most remarkably, the entire decommissioned Russian space station, Mir.

The isolated location of this unique graveyard is near the “oceanic pole of inaccessibility,” which marks the location on earth which lies the farthest from any land. The cemetery, which is already the final resting place for more than 260 spacecraft from Russia, Europe, Japan and the United States, lies on the deep seabed approximately 1,500 miles between Pitcairn Island, Easter Island, and Antarctica.

This remote locate is truly mysterious [but, so the author is informed] this “oceanic pole of inaccessibility” is virtually identical with the location of R’lyeh […] wherein Cthulhu awaits his terrible awakening.

Now there’s a cue for a Lovecraftian story, if ever I heard one. Lovecraft effectively ‘reached’ the zone some 50 years before the formal calculation of where it lay. So far as I recall, from my reading of S.T. Joshi’s book-length survey of Lovecraftian fiction, I don’t remember hearing of it being used before. Even by Stross, who apparently removed R’lyeh to the Baltic of all places.