19 Friday Apr 2013
Posted in Unnamable
A store-wide sale is on at Necronomicon Press. 15% off (although I’m informed that it’s actually 25% off when you get to the checkout — but don’t blame me if it isn’t). Various Lovecraft zines and journals inc. later issues of Lovecraft Studies, Crypt of Cthulhu, and Studies in Weird Fiction.
18 Saturday Aug 2012
In Lovecraft had had a Lovecraftmobile….
02 Thursday Aug 2012
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Unnamable
How to occupy the kidlings in the dog-days of August? Why, “Build an Elder God”, of course! 🙂 Releasing from Signal Fire Studios on 15th August for $20…
“Building An Elder God is a casual card game of Lovecraftian construction for 2-5 players ages 10 and up. The rules are easy to learn and a typical game takes from 15-30 minutes, depending on the number of players. Build a Cthulhu-esque tentacled monstrosity to completion before the other players, using damage cards to blast your opponents’ creatures to slow down their progress so that you can win!”
02 Monday Jul 2012
Posted in Astronomy, Historical context, Unnamable
Over on the Urania blog, a new scholarly/scientific essay in Italian by Albino Carbognani, on Lovecraft’s first publication in a national journal. This was the letter to Scientific American, advising on a method of detecting the presence of possible planets beyond Neptune…
From the conclusion of Carbognani’s essay (my approximate translation), in which he suggests naming any beyond-Pluto planet ‘Yuggoth’…
“In 1999 two groups of researchers claimed to have proof of the presence of an unknown planet at the edges of the solar system, due to the alignment of [the paths of] long-period comets [but today, to prove such a theory] there is [still] the need to have a [wider] sample of long-period comets that is free from selection effects. Full details of this kind may be provided by the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite, to be launched in the spring of 2013. Gaia should allow the discovery of about 1,000 long-period comets during its five year mission. Will an analysis of the distribution of [their] cometary aphelia [paths] give us details about the existence of a true ‘Yuggoth’ planet? It would be very symbolic to call any [new outer] planet by that name, the name summoned from the fervid imagination of Lovecraft to designate the hypothetical trans-Neptunian planetary body that he anticipated astronomers should find the edge of the Solar System.”
Incidentally that very same edition of Scientific American carried an ad for the Remington, the same typewriter Lovecraft had used to type his letter…
14 Monday May 2012
A new genus and species has been named after Lovecraft. “Nanocthulhu lovecrafti” is an unusual bisexual wasp, and is described in the Proceedings of the Entomological Society of Washington.
More photos here.
07 Monday May 2012
Posted in Unnamable
Miskatonic Books is having a Hippocampus Press summer sale…
“over 70 titles at 40% to 70% off cover price”
I spotted An Epicure in the Terrible / Lovecraft Encyclopaedia / the Collected Essays series at 55% off. Lovecraft’s Library is 40% off.
18 Saturday Feb 2012
Posted in Unnamable
After two years of silence (possibly while on a giant-airship expedition to the Antarctic), Steampunk Magazine has finally returned to civilisation with a new issue…
14 Tuesday Feb 2012
Posted in Unnamable
An interesting illustrated new fannish article on Looping Wor(l)ds, “Midnight Tides and Lovecraftian Gods”. While ploughing through Steven Erikson’s ten-book fantasy series The Malazan Book Of The Fallen, the author of the article muses on the nature of the shoreline and sea, and the persistent human imagination regarding supposed god-like entities lurking in the deeps…
20 Friday Jan 2012
Posted in Unnamable
Missing the dust-jacket to your Arkham Press rarity? Facsimile Dust Jackets claims to be able to supply you with the requisite wrapper for H.P. Lovecraft titles…
Or you could just frame them?
19 Thursday Jan 2012
Posted in Unnamable
Roundtable: Intersectionality and Lovecraft, from a 12th Jan Locus Online roundtable. “Intersectionality” is a feminist theory term that suggests one’s different social and cultural identities — being a woman, being lesbian, being black, being disabled, being a daughter — interact in society to form more intractable tangles of discrimination. It has since been ported more generally into a variety of leftist academic approaches such as sociology and cultural studies, where it knocks around with subtler theories of hybridity, ‘fluid identity’ versions of queer, and various ideas on how online identities are lived out.
14 Saturday Jan 2012
Posted in Unnamable
IFC profiles Portland: The Science Fiction Capital of America?
17 Saturday Dec 2011
Posted in Unnamable
You know you’re having a Lovecraftian Christmas when…
* You read At The Mountains of Madness to get “that snowy Christmas feeling”.
* You fasten your Christmas present parcels with tape printed to look like a tentacle.
* Roasting chestnuts by the fire reminds you of the cultists’ scene in “The Call of Cthulhu”.
* At parties you begin to gibber wildly that Santa is an anagram of Satan.
* Christmas carollers are met at your door by a wreath of mistletoe, ivy and holly twisted into a hideous pre-Christian mask.
* Scrooge seems like a rationalist atheist hero to you…
* Your oddly-shaped Christmas tree is delivered by an in-bred backwoods man, who warns you not to listen to the voices that may come from it.
* You think the Three Wise Men were named Alhazred, Atal, and Kuranes.
* “The Festival” seems like a description of an ideal Christmas with the family.
* You get the North Pole mixed up with the Plateau of Leng.