eBay – PayPal problems, and a solution

25 Tuesday Feb 2020

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eBay sellers of books etc may be encountering problems that appear to have been ongoing for several weeks now. Customers may be contacting you telling you they can’t pay, with far more silently abandoning their cart. Specifically, the problem is that eBay Checkout never passes the customer over to PayPal, as the log-on popup hangs forever at the ‘spinning disc’. If that’s the case, then tell them to add the following URLs to their ad-blocker whitelist…

That solved the problem for me. It appears that recent updates to Web browers adblockers, the popular UBlock Origin specifically, means that these URLs have to be whitelisted afresh. pay.ebay also looks new to me, and may be the real stumbling block. Your customer’s native Web browser ‘tracking protection’ / adblocker / pop-up blocking may need to be turned off, as well as secondary adblocking add-ons such as Fair AdBlocker. The generic ‘accept cookies’ pop-up may also need to be accepted, over at PayPal.

New PEAPS

24 Monday Feb 2020

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The Pulp Era Amateur Press Society (PEAPS) reportedly has member vacancies…

Since 1987, members of the Pulp Era Amateur Press Society have offered research and commentary on the pulp magazines, their contributors, and their legacy. PEAPS — founded by Lynn Hickman in 1987 and still running today — focuses on all aspects of the pulp magazine hobby and related topics. Current members and alumni include some of the most accomplished pulp magazine fans and professionals in the world, including Al Tonik, Glenn Lord, Howard DeVore, Jerry Page, George Evans, Rusty Hevelin, Mike Ashley, Doug Ellis, Will Murray, Anthony Tollin, Brian Earl Brown, and Curt Phillips.

Membership is limited to 28 and it involves quarterly printed-paper mailings, presumably to some far-flung places if the membership is global.

Line and Frame: A Survey of European Comic Art

23 Sunday Feb 2020

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News of a new spring exhibition in New York City, “Line and Frame: A Survey of European Comic Art”. It opens with a Thursday evening launch event on 27th February 2020 (6pm-8pm) at Danese/Corey (511 West 22nd Street) and then runs until 14th March 2020.

The show will feature the work of 40 comics artists “who specialize in science fiction and fantasy”, including Moebius, Bilal, Breccia, Druillet, Nicole Claveloux, Guido Crepax, Milo Manara, among others. I doubt there’s a chance of seeing Lovecraft related art, but names such as Moebius, Bilal, and Breccia certainly overlap with Lovecraft comics.

Well-timed, the show comes at a point when the continental European comics industry is making a very belated push to produce and market more English translations in the USA. The show is supported by the various national cultural agencies in France, Belgium, Spain, etc.

Sketch by Moebius, being used to promote the show.

In other quality comics news, a “new 250-page graphic-novel Monsters from British writer/ artist Barry Windsor-Smith” is apparently due sometime in 2020 from an as-yet-unknown publisher. The basic premise, originating in a rejected pitch to Marvel for a Hulk storyline, is that… “an abandoned Nazi project in genetic engineering had been covertly revived by the U.S. government”. Judging from the sparse publicity it now appears to have become a graphic-novel somewhat similar to Alan Moore’s Providence, in terms of its adult nature and ambition. Just my guess, but I wonder if there may be some back-story links into aspects of the Lovecraft mythos?

Venus in Westminster Street

21 Friday Feb 2020

Posted by in Astronomy, Historical context, Picture postals

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“The marvellous brilliancy of [the planet (that looks like a star)] Venus toward the close of the month will probably cause many persons ignorant of astronomy to mistake it for an artificial light; indeed, one evening about five years ago Westminster Street was lined with curious and excited watchers who pointed out the planet as the searchlight of an aëroplane.” — H.P. Lovecraft, “The September Sky” from his regular astronomy column.

Judging by the female fashions and the electric trams the picture might be the late 1900s, and thus about the time of the “about five years ago” Lovecraft refers to in his 1914 column. In the picture a sign for the Empire Theater can just about be discerned, in the distance on the right. Illiteracy is still a factor in everyday life — as evidenced by the visual shop signs such as a huge key for a locksmith and key-cutter, and an eye for an optician. Lovecraft’s College Hill is glimpsed, rising up as some smudges of green at the end of the street.

“I hope it will not make it utterly un-decipherable to you…”

20 Thursday Feb 2020

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, New books, Odd scratchings, Scholarly works

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Some of Lovecraft’s best poetry, now ably translated into Spanish. The leading Spanish newspaper El Pais has a review of the new volume.

Lovecraft is a prophet of human insignificance in the cosmos, yet Garcia Roman finally decides that one of the tonal keys to Lovecraft’s poetry is that… “The poems show an author of maturity. One who is less pessimistic … If Lovecraft opened any doors to hope, he did so in his verses.”

“The Festival” in Italian

19 Wednesday Feb 2020

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“Ad Alta Voce”: Howard Phillips Lovecraft, a recording from Rai Radio 3 in Italy. A 31 minutes recording from last June, of what appears to be “The Festival” professionally produced in mellifluous Italian and with music. It takes some wrangling of the page to start the recording, rather than the station’s live-stream. Kudos to the station for keeping it online so long and making it public to the world, rather than removing it after a month or only making it available to certain territories — as is so often the case with the BBC and others.