The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction (1917) as an audiobook

30 Thursday Mar 2023

Posted by in Podcasts etc., Scholarly works

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New on Librivox as a free public-domain audiobook, Dorothy Scarborough’s pioneering book The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction (1917). S.T. Joshi called it…

a thematically exhaustive but critically undistinguished work that nevertheless is a landmark for its mere existence. […] Lovecraft would not read [the book] until 1932; but when he did so, he rightly criticised it as being overly schematic in its thematic analyses and hampered by an amusing squeamishness in the face of the explicit horrors of Stoker, Machen, and others.

Still, it may be of interest to Lovecraftians who would have liked the convenience of an audiobook version. Or those looking for a succinct contemporary “thematic analysis” of the available pre-WWI material, unhindered by the psychological theory / leftist politics of later eras.

Cornell University Library has a nice scan of the paper book, free on Archive.org.

War-nymphs of Venus

29 Wednesday Mar 2023

Posted by in AI, Odd scratchings

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The AI image-generator Dream by Wombo is getting better by the day. The following picture was generated by Wombo and was only my third-try with the simple prompt…

War-Nymphs of Venus, females, science-fiction illustration, painted by Frank Frazetta

… using the free VFX v.2 style module. Looks at those hands, Wombo is getting hands more or less right now. A year ago they’d have been a horrible mangled mess.

Thanks to Links of Steel for the idea about plugging in “War-Nymphs of Venus” as an AI-gen prompt. The title is from a story in Planet Stories (Spring 1941).

Chicago Daily Tribune, April 1945

27 Monday Mar 2023

Posted by in Historical context

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Thanks to the Archive.org’s ingestion of old newspapers from microfilm, I’ve found a new early item on Lovecraft that was not included in the collection A Weird Writer in Our Midst: Early Criticism of H.P. Lovecraft. It’s from the Chicago Daily Tribune, 27th April 1945. As the Nazi camps opened and the news floods the newspaper’s initial pages, an anonymous ‘book notes’ columnist reaches for his edition of Lovecraft’s The Outsider and Others. The ‘black magic’ quote here attributed to Lovecraft was a fake, as many will recall.

AI snippet re-writing

26 Sunday Mar 2023

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Why it’s no longer wise for scholars / bloggers to trust DuckDuckGo / Bing snippets in search…

1. The Guardian newspaper says something silly about Tolkien (to be expected)…

2. But, on clicking through to the source, The Guardian’s actual story says something different. It’s talking about Chaffey…

An AI at Bing has presumably re-written the snippet, possibly for extra click-throughs(?). I’d heard about AI search-result snippet re-writing, but this is the first time I’ve seen it in action.

More Handicraft Club

24 Friday Mar 2023

Posted by in Picture postals

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This week in my regular ‘picture postals from Lovecraft’ post, two newly-colourised additions to my Handicraft Club post from a few years ago.

Here we see the corner of Benefit and College Streets, Providence. Behind the magnolia trees are the headquarters of the Handicraft Club. A house in which Lovecraft’s aunt lived in 1927, and Lovecraft undoubtedly visited her there.

The side-buildings on the right were also part of the Club. Lovecraft was very familiar with this spot, and would later live further up the hill at No. 66.

Writer: the shaping of popular fiction

23 Thursday Mar 2023

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A handsomely designed collection of texts on early pulp writing, by L. Ron Hubbard. Collected in Writer: the shaping of popular fiction (2012). Now available to borrow on Archive.org. An earlier edition was already on there, but was not as nicely designed and the pictures were very dark and murky. Here they’re clear and crisp.

Previously on Tentaclii…

Lovecraft once had a long restaurant conversation with the flame-haired and young Hubbard, according to Frank Belknap Long. While impressed by the “extraordinary” lad, he evidently felt Hubbard was too professional and un-cosmic a writer to strike up a correspondence with.

So the interest here is more in Hubbard’s insights into the markets and fans of the period, rather than in any strong connection with Lovecraft.

Cthulhuton in Madrid

22 Wednesday Mar 2023

Posted by in Films & trailers, Lovecraftian arts

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In Madrid this weekend, Cthulhuton, the Spanish Lovecraft film festival. Billed as “the first” such. 25th March 2023 is the date.

with the presence of prestigious guests such as the American Sandy Petersen, creator of the well-known role-playing game The Call of Cthulhu and one of the greatest disseminators of Providence writer’s work worldwide.

Three choice vintage movies are to be shown, picked for their faithfulness. Petersen will lead the discussion after the main screening.

OpenChatKit

20 Monday Mar 2023

Posted by in AI, Odd scratchings, Scholarly works

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It was only a matter of time before text-generating AI became as open and free as graphics AI. The first such is here now and ‘live’, OpenChatKit…

“a ChatGPT-like dialogue language model that is fully open-sourced, with full access to code, model weights, and training data. The released OpenChatKit model can perform natural-language reasoning tasks, answer questions about documents with retrieval, and browse the Web much like BingChat. The model has 20 billion parameters and is trained on 43 million instructions. […] The release also comes with fine-tuning guides that allow users to easily fine-tune the model for their own applications. […] Apache-2.0 license.”

20 billion is not enough for complex tasks (it can’t write long working Python scripts, or pop out complete essays/stories), but it’s good enough to be useful so long as you know how to ask the question. For instance…

Show me an example of the use of taskkill in a Windows batch file

… gets a line of valid working code. Though you still need to know to wrap it in @echo off and exit, and then save as a .BAT file.

But this is just the starting release. The initial live/free public demo is here, if you want to see what arcane Lovecraftian blurblings it might produce if given the correct prompt. It’s fast and easy to use. Though obviously knows nothing about R’lyeh as a holiday destination. Pity.

I’m uncertain if it can be operated purely locally on a desktop PC, being open source. (Update: Yes it can, it now has a downloadable “7B” model). If not then such things can only a matter of time and the right slot-in card.

So far, this is the only genuinely free / public and ‘no sign-up’ text-generating AI I know of.

Meanwhile, Grammarly will reportedly be plugging in AI auto-writing assistants sometime in April 2023. For a price, of course.