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Hogge Wild posted:New England, England, and especially Wales. Dude you need to do a better job feeding your cats. That cute kitty in your avatar ain't lookin' so good.
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Sep 8, 2016 18:49
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DAD LOST MY IPOD posted:lovecraft always liked to include a final twist of the knife at the end of his stories, a coda that revealed the true extent of the horror. think "it was a photo from life!" gently caress, I could never remember the name of that one but it always stuck out as particularly nonsense
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Sep 8, 2016 18:51
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GRANNYS PEACH TEA posted:Dude you need to do a better job feeding your cats. That cute kitty in your avatar ain't lookin' so good. lol we´re spoopyfying our avs in byob if you buy a spoopy av now, you'll get the pumpkin pals tag, and your regular av back in november start here: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3765007 and say hi then go here: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3636960 and ask help with the av
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Sep 8, 2016 19:02
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Dreddout posted:What's a good place to meet sexy fishwomen? Gloucester, Massachusetts
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Sep 8, 2016 19:42
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Hogge Wild posted:lol its times like these im glad i have avatars, set to off
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Sep 8, 2016 19:48
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racial stuff aside, lovecraft really rarely ever wrote well. At The Mountains Of Madness is maybe the only story of his that doesn't read like he just published his notes for a story idea with a lovely frame story tacked on to make it comprehensible, and you don't need to read At The Mountains Of Madness, because The Thing is basically that movie with a body snatching alien instead of an incomprehensible beast inside an incomprehensible city but the themes of isolation and questioning sanity, dealing with the unknowable, the setting and all that, is in The Thing in some capacity and you don't have to deal with a turn of the century agoraphobe inserting his views on everything that scared him. I'm willing to bet the city in Mountains was just a stand in for a ghetto he had to view from afar once and the shoggoth was based of one particularly scary black guy. when you're aware of his prejudices it's hard to not see it in everything he wrote, which is why people bring it up. if you read it without knowing that (i was lucky enough to), it's mostly mediocre horror fiction. Poe this dude is not, he's wordy and his voice in my head is one of those really snazzy announcer guys from the early days of the talkies in front of a news real tlaking about how the boys in the pacific really stuck it to the japs or huns or w/e so be ready to read tons of racist wordy poo poo that tries hard to be spooky by basically failing to effectively describe anything. All those pictures of Cthulhu you see on the internet and stuff? It has no basis in anything lovecraft wrote or described. His actual description of cthulhu is so vague you could draw a stick figure with tentacles and it would fit
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Sep 8, 2016 20:01
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^^^The Thing has about as much to do with Mountains of Madness as Alien vs Predator. Also the bit about Cthulhu being described really vaguely isn't true at all. It's really weird to me how people, sometimes even the same people, both complain about Lovecrafts super verbose, adjective heavy, clumsy descriptive prose and and also complain about how he never describes anything and just says it was indescribablecorn in the bible posted:gently caress, I could never remember the name of that one but it always stuck out as particularly nonsense Medusa's Coil is great because ultimately it's all about a bunch of uptight white guys creaming their knickers over the repulsive and yet undeniable sexual allure of black woman hair. skasion fucked around with this message at 20:09 on Sep 8, 2016 |
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Sep 8, 2016 20:04
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the themes are so similar and you're better off watching the thing i really don't care if it's not a literal adaptation nobody should really be reading lovecraft.
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Sep 8, 2016 20:07
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hemophilia posted:the themes are so similar and you're better off watching the thing i really don't care if it's not a literal adaptation nobody should really be reading lovecraft. The city in the Mountains of Madness had non-euclidean geometry. The buildings in The Thing are all blocky as hell, full of straight lines and right angles. 
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Sep 8, 2016 20:09
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Jorge Luis Borges wrote a short story in tribute to Lovecraft and it was better than anything he ever wrote.
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Sep 8, 2016 20:15
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The themes aren't similar in the least tbh. At the Mountains of Madness is about how industrial society is doomed to turn its masters (the elder things/us) into the slaves of the machines they created to slave for them (the shoggoths for them, industrial society in itself for us). The Thing is about paranoia/trust, what it means to be a man and a human, how far one can go to survive.
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Sep 8, 2016 20:16
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i had to check the internet and yeah im not the only one drawing parallels so WHATEVS i'm not going to be tricked into re-reading a lovecraft story just to argue.
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Sep 8, 2016 20:18
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hemophilia posted:i had to check the internet and yeah im not the only one drawing parallels so WHATEVS i'm not going to be tricked into re-reading a lovecraft story just to argue. I'm going to murder you 
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Sep 8, 2016 20:25
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hemophilia posted:the themes are so similar and you're better off watching the thing i really don't care if it's not a literal adaptation nobody should really be reading lovecraft. You should read the novella that The Thing is based on - it is really very good. It would also help you to understand how badly you are screwing up your attempts at analogy here. "Who Goes There?" by John W. Campbell, Jr, 1938
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Sep 8, 2016 21:30
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jp hovercraft
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Sep 8, 2016 21:33
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no he isn't. he's the opposite of that. the shadow over innsmouth is kind of cool. the call of cthulhu, otoh, is almost unreadable.
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Sep 8, 2016 21:36
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i don't really disagree with any of what you're saying. probably nobody argues for lovecraft as a technically gifted writer. he was terrible at putting words together. nor was he much of an artist in any regard. to say he is no poe is to be guilty of a banality that even lovecraft never stooped to. if he's anything (he's a lot of things) he's not banal. but there's a reason that so many authors have been proud to call him an influence. something was going on with the dude, and it's neither in the words themselves, nor any of the technical craft aspects of the work. the case is not unlike philip k dick, another godawfully bad writer and fascinating creator. to access the value of lovecraft or dick is to be willing to enter deeply into their actual psychoses in action. lovecraft was a sick, sick person. so was poe for that matter, and again, it's not really saying much of anything to say that poe did it better across the board. but lovecraft's sickness is really seductive. poe was, in some ways, too healthy to really get at what happens in lovecraft. there are not a few poe stories that deal with the same issue as lovecraft repeated on loop, which is the degeneration of once-proud and powerful bloodlines into a disgusting parody of themselves, revealing the chaos, violence, and depravity behind our most carefully-maintained facades. this is lynch territory too. poe's stories are genuinely disturbing. lovecraft rarely reaches such an affective pitch, because he's not a good artist, and can't really create an effect; but again, he offers something different. he offers a confusedly self-aware victim of this degeneration, trying to describe how horrible it is from the inside. the "irony," all too appropriate in lovecraft, is that he accuses the Negro and the Chinaman of being the degradation of the white race... when the truth is that european whiteness is its own degradation, and the same families and societies that lock themselves away and try desperately to preserve what made them strong, inevitably become weak from this effort. lovecraft was a sickly scion of a diseased process of conservatism, appropriately obsessed with his own heritage and irrecoverable past, and doing what people always do in such circumstances -- blaming "outside forces" for their weakening, without understanding that it's precisely those who refuse all outside contact who become deranged. on the surface, in his intellect, it is clear that lovecraft was more or less oblivious to all this; and underneath, it is equally clear that he was terribly, terribly aware that he and people like him were the problem. why do you think hitler tried to murder all the jews? lol. nietzsche couldn't shut the gently caress up about how the austro-german petit bourgeoisie were decadent in the extreme: deteriorating, degraded, cancer-riddled, the worst and least cultured of all "modern" people, completely lacking in actual civilization, insane with violence, utterly ignorant, and determined to destroy everything and everyone in their quest to prove their own laughable "superiority." thomas mann wrote a novel about the same thing, buddenbrooks. it's about how his own middle-class merchant family fell, from self-righteous conservatism, into neuraesthenic dissolution. what's attractive about lovecraft, then, is that he opens up a space where this insanity is actually going on, all around the reader, because he was sick sick sick with it. it's like spending a day at the asylum. gruesome tourism. ya, ken kesey probably does a better job than any inmate of giving you the feeling of really being there... but there's something valuable about the experience of a real inmate, who doesn't know he is sick, or doesn't know the extent of his sickness, and who will never ever get better. (this is all to "negativize" these processes, but buddenbrooks ends with kind of paean to decadence, and nietzsche never stops harping about it being as valuable as it is dangerous. it's part of a common cultural cycle that can't be consistently moralized, applauded or condemned.) you might sum it up by saying that lovecraft and dick are "outsider authors," nincompoop amateurs without a hint of technique who nevertheless produced hideously curious and worthwhile objects.
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Sep 8, 2016 22:09
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that seems like a waste of fonts
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Sep 8, 2016 22:14
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This is a really good post and I think you've essentially described why I enjoy what I do in Lovecraft, but I couldn't encourage anyone to read him if they are hobby readers. If you're trying to appreciate him critically, okay, but if you're riding in on a Cthulhu meme wave, maybe read some Stephen King Cthulhu mythos, or any of the other homages from notable authors, or read a wiki page, I absolutely do not think he has very much material that is fun to read for anyone who is not interested in the process of writing or creating in general. When I say he's no poe, I'm really talking to a hobby reader type person, I don't want people mistaking lovecraft for something good. If you want good and creepy, a compendium of poe's published and unpublished work is very inexpensive and you will get far more out of it unless you're hardcore into literary criticism or aspiring to be a writer yourself. I would feel bad for anyone reading this thread finding themselves reading Lovecraft expecting to have a jolly time, because I fell for that and I only sort-of enjoyed At The Mountains Of Madness for reasons that are apparently incorrect, so i fear for anyone who reads less than I do venturing into his work
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Sep 8, 2016 22:17
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He had some cool concepts, a few decent stories, and some really interesting creature designs. One common criticism is how he "didn't describe his monsters and just called them unnamable!" That one is complete bullshit. It's based completely on one early story and applies more to his main inspirations and other people writing at the time. That's one thing that really stands out about him and why he survived while all of the "superior" Weird Fiction writers from his day are forgotten. He wasn't anywhere near as vague as the rest of them, and he might actually have something interesting to justify the build-up. He'd have these really bizarre and distinct space-monsters while other people were writing about evil willow trees, or just "hinting at the horror" so much there wasn't even a money shot at the end (probably because they had no idea what the monster/weirdness/horrror even was, or realized it would be boring). Any artwork based on a "Lovecraft Thing" is almost always instantly recognizable. He just wasn't a very good writer. And yes, gently caress, Call of Cthulhu is the weakest of his long stories, hands down. His legacy is complete garbage, though, because Lovecraft's fans are even worse than Lovecraft. It all started with August Derleth, the first Lovecraft Fan-Fiction writer, and that guy was a loving hack. The whole "Cthulhu mythos" thing is his fault, even more than Lovecraft's, and he added a bunch of garbage to try and build on the "lore". And now there's tentacle monsters in every fantasy thing.
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Sep 8, 2016 22:18
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I also have some fears, about the bookman. hosed up books and words, hell, I'd say to anyone that was reading the words (the ones from before): dont do it & check if your accicdently reading them right now, which is very possible
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Sep 8, 2016 22:19
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i like HP lovercraft better than the other front page writers, thats for sure
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Sep 8, 2016 22:20
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let's all watch Yes Minister instead
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Sep 8, 2016 22:20
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I accidently put some of the bad book words in my earlier post. Please to anyone that read them, try to unread them as soon as you can. I couldn't recommend them to you at all, frankly, and hopefully this post contains none of the words from before
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Sep 8, 2016 22:21
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Lovecraft was actually a good writer, and anyone who unironically recommends reading Stephen King as a better alternative is either trolling or functionally illiterate.
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Sep 8, 2016 22:22
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corn in the bible posted:let's all watch Yes Minister instead That's one of my favorite series!
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Sep 8, 2016 22:24
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CaptainSarcastic posted:Lovecraft was actually a good writer, and anyone who unironically recommends reading Stephen King as a better alternative is either trolling or functionally illiterate. dean koons
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Sep 8, 2016 22:24
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reallivedinosaur posted:dean koons I will loving cut you.
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Sep 8, 2016 22:25
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Hogge Wild posted:That's one of my favorite series! 
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Sep 8, 2016 22:25
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corn in the bible posted:did you know theres an exciting videogame yeah I've read about it lp it pls
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Sep 8, 2016 22:26
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reallivedinosaur posted:dean koons MEH
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Sep 8, 2016 22:28
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If you're readeing this stop immediately... it may already be too
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Sep 8, 2016 22:32
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Hogge Wild posted:yeah I've read about it 
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Sep 8, 2016 22:33
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Can we update the OP with reccomended Lovecraft stories? I used to love his work in late high school/college but I don't know what to read next.
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Sep 8, 2016 23:44
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try reading "the shudderer" or "spook witch of horror mountain'
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Sep 8, 2016 23:59
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"the three toed dog of hell" "mega-geist" and "the spooky gooky fortune cooky" are also canon
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Sep 9, 2016 00:02
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Siva68 posted:I stopped reading lovecraft after the umpteenth time something was so horrific it couldn't be described. How about as a writer you give some description, always felt lazy to me. It's because his stories are nightmares and dreams. If you've ever had a nightmare and there was some impossible dread or terror lurking somewhere, the moment you actually comprehend it, you give it boundaries and form and it's just a thing. He didn't want to describe a thing. He wanted it to stay that pure, incomprehensible, limitless terror. Essentially, he was describing a feeling, not an object or a creature. But, yeah, it still sounds lazy and he says it way too much.
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Sep 9, 2016 00:09
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Ork of Fiction posted:It's because his stories are nightmares and dreams. If you've ever had a nightmare and there was some impossible dread or terror lurking somewhere, the moment you actually comprehend it, you give it boundaries and form and it's just a thing. He didn't want to describe a thing. He wanted it to stay that pure, incomprehensible, limitless terror. Essentially, he was describing a feeling, not an object or a creature. This is only true of some of his stories. Nyarlathotep is a dream for example. Or Statement of Randolph Carter, though that one just winds up being goofy rather than scary. A lot of the time he just uses "indescribable" or "unnamable" or whatever to turn the story back towards the mind of the narrator, which is always what he is actually writing about, rather than spending more time and words on the devices he uses to interest you in the mind of the narrator, like a huge gaping tentacle monster the size of a barn. True Lovecraft fact: the first Lovecraft book I ever read was an anthology that came from the library. The painting on the cover was the same one on the cover of the Obituary album Cause of Death. It ended with Statement of Randolph Carter and at the end where the invisible all caps monster yells into the telephone YOU FOOL, WARREN IS DEAD! the last kid to read the story before me had written in blue pen "so is this book".
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Sep 9, 2016 00:17
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Fellbat posted:Thanks for this post actually, I was being a Jokey rear end in a top hat but somehow M.R. James had missed my notice when I reading stuff like H.P. and the Carnaki guy. Gonna get into this. Enjoy Lil Peeler posted:Can we update the OP with reccomended Lovecraft stories? I used to love his work in late high school/college but I don't know what to read next. Fellbat posted:Is there an H.P. Lovecraft story in in which H.P. Lovecraft is not character. Because in recalling them, they mostly seem to be about H.P. Lovecraft describing what they or another H.P. Lovecraft did. Join us here for Cosmic horror/Lovecraft/some general horror discussion: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3461819 To expand on the latter comment from Fellbat, I'd recommend Laird Barron. A majority of his protagonists are anti-Lovecraftian; hard drinking brawler thugs or doughty frontiersmen who work with their hands. All of his protagonists have an intelligence that belies their appearance. This actually makes the stories more frighting. Index of free Laird Barron stories online: http://www.freesfonline.de/authors/Laird_Barron.html From the freely available stories I recommend "Shiva, Open Your Eye", "The Forest", "Blackwood's Baby" and "Frontier Death Song" to start. Note the latter is an audiodrama and worth listening to. Definitely read Thomas Ligotti "Litany of Earth" by Ruthana Emrys is very good: http://www.tor.com/2014/05/14/the-litany-of-earth-ruthanna-emrys/ Victorian Age Cthulhu by Neil Gaiman "A Study In Emerald": http://www.neilgaiman.com/mediafiles/exclusive/shortstories/emerald.pdf I have been collecting the short stories by Michael Minnis, a forgotten excellent author. He produced 41 well written Lovecraftian tales in the late 90s early 2000s and published them in online free magazines. I had to find most of these in the Internet Archive. I'm just re hosting these stories. I do not benefit financially. He is a good author and needs to be brought back into the light. Make sure you read Shadow Over Innsmouth and The Dunwitch Horror (HPL both) first. "I Walk the World's Black Rim" is a beowulf retelling. "Knuckerhole" and "Bones of a Toad" are easy to jump into. https://www.mediafire.com/folder/t6792v35951vg/Mike_Minnis_Wayback_Machine_Archive Decent Bibliography of Mythos stories: http://www.epberglund.com/RGttCM/cmnet01a.htm
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Sep 9, 2016 00:32
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skasion posted:^^^The Thing has about as much to do with Mountains of Madness as Alien vs Predator. Also the bit about Cthulhu being described really vaguely isn't true at all. It's really weird to me how people, sometimes even the same people, both complain about Lovecrafts super verbose, adjective heavy, clumsy descriptive prose and and also complain about how he never describes anything and just says it was indescribable it's almost like people who are programmed not to be able to get past "X = racist" come up with other excuses to avoid X so they don't seem like small minded ideologues
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Sep 9, 2016 01:46
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