Jean-Paul Laurens, “A Funeral” from c. mid-1870s-early 1880s. Laurens had a macabre streak and was known as “the painter of the dead”, though his online representation today suggests colour paintings rather than shadowy etchings similar to this one. This is my 3,800-pixel rip of a picture now in the public domain under CC0, but which was also locked inside a ‘zoomify’ viewing system. So feel free to use it as a book cover or as the basis of a new paint-over using Photoshop or Krita etc.

Oh dear. In the latest Scientific American the lead editorial article seriously suggests that we ditch the un-spellable and un-pronounceable “anthropocene” blahword… and replace it with something even more un-pronounceable…

the Chthulucene … an age in which we teach ourselves to live in full and rich harmony

Not to be confused with the Cthulhucene, in which Plush Cthulhu will gather around the campfires with happy rainbow-tailed LOLcats, to intersection-ally knit muesli together and sing ‘Kumbaya my Lord…’ while cuddling their therapy-shoggoths.

Judging by the piece, the editors of Scientific American are being serious and obviously have no clue at all about Cthulhu, and why he might make their dippy “Chthulucene” proposal just a little bit untenable for a mass audience.

A ‘shlockmeister’, on writing wild fake news for the ‘slick’ men’s magazines in the 1950s. He also had a sideline in what he called an “ESP” column in a tabloid newspaper, meaning he wrote wild psychic ‘predictions’ of what would happen in the coming week. One week, Cthulhu rose…

Man finds out rock used as doorstop is actually a $100K meteorite…

“… he first came across the rock in 1988 when he was inspecting an Edmore farm he was planning to buy. The then-owner of the farm told him that the meteorite arrived on Earth in the 1930s — “and it made a heck of a noise when it hit.” The next morning, the farmer and his daughter dug up the still-warm rock from the crater, then used it to prop open a door. After buying the property from the farmer, the new owner decided to continue using the meteorite as a doorstop.”

Five lessons Shweta Taneja learned at Europe’s biggest sci-fi and fantasy convention, a fascinating write-up by an Indian science fiction author encountering the bare-bones DIY approach…

“Authors at Indian festivals are mollycoddled. At one of the first festivals I attended, the Chandigarh Literary Festival, the kind organisers sent an SUV with a teacher and two children and bouquets to the Chandigarh airport. From that moment, everything was managed by an army of literary festival organisers. Not so in Europe.”

I imagine he might have had a somewhat different experience with a more genteel upmarket literary festival, outside the urban areas, of the sort with nominally-paid interns and hospitality budgets. But even then, it would probably be a bit more stripped back than in India.

I wonder what Lovecraft would have been like at an urban mega-vention? I mean, he was used to the demure micro-meetups of amateur journalists and then various later convivial cafe meetings of ‘the circle’. But an enormous fan-o-rama of thousands? I’d suspect he would have been the uber-notorious one in the dark glasses and pompadour hair, being smuggled by a security detail through subterranean access tunnels, to pop up through a trap door beneath the main stage. The big keynote speech given, he’d press the button to auto-sign everyone’s ebook, and then be whisked off to the waiting helicopter. Either that, or he just wouldn’t have gone to such things.

A new paper, “Tentacular Artificial Intelligence, and the Architecture Thereof, Introduced”…

We briefly introduce herein a new form of distributed, multi-agent artificial intelligence, which we refer to as “tentacular.”

The cover of Fantastic Universe, August 1956. The inner cover has a short evocation of the cover painting, written by former Lovecraft protege and friend Frank Belknap Long.

The artist was Ed Moritz, who had been a Nedor comics artist in the 1940s on the pre-Marvel Doc Strange. My attempted digital restoration of the painting, not entirely successful on the planet surface. Also, I’m currently having to use a lesser old monitor with a low greyscale response, so it may be slightly ‘off’ here and there…

Wormwoodania today…

“‘The Lost Tragedy’ by Denis Mackail, is a gently humorous piece (which was very much his style) set in a London second-hand bookshop. The narrator says: “Mr Bunstable’s book-shop represents a type of establishment which has pretty well disappeared from our modern cities. [It is a ‘dusty, labyrinthine bookshop, with teetering piles of titles everywhere’] As all who have considered the subject must agree, the principal object of any book-seller is to obstruct, as far as possible, the sale of books…”

Yes, I’ve often thought something similar about librarians as well.

A free talk on “The Other and Lovecraft” in France, 15th October 2018, by the French translator of S.T. Joshi’s I Am Providence.

Campus de Villejean, Rennes – The Drum, 15th October 2018, 18:30 – 20:00.