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my fav lovecraftian horror are the blind penguins, right behind lovecraft's own cat
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Oct 26, 2018 02:50
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A big flaming stink posted:I don't know why the whole thing got named the Cthulhu mythos, Cthulhu itself is decidedly not that big of a deal within the universe. Yog-sothoth, Shub-nigurrath, and Azathoth are the real heavy hitters, right? Lovecraft was loving terrified of just about everything outside of his house including -All non whites -All non protestants -Wild animals including penguins, rats and other things that are not at all scary -Foreign languages -Foreign plants He was an incredibly sheltered, racist bitch and most of his writing is genuinely terrible (unless you don't mind racial slurs appearing on literally every page)
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Oct 26, 2018 05:10
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Bogart posted:Nyarlothep is the only god-rear end god that's loving around with people. Azazoth is basically braindead, but if you piss him off enough, he'll destroy everything iin the universe n a blind response to the stimuli. That's based on my very vague memory. all of our reality is azathoth's dream. if he ever is disturbed enough to wake up, existence will simply stop all at once. in the meantime, him stirring in his sleep sends ripples through our 'reality' that manifest in the mind-bending ways that are credited to him. azathoth being both blind and a literal medical idiot is effectively to explain why his dream has gone on for billions of years. he has no real inputs and what little he does get has a tendency to not register. beyond that, all of the ancient ones were generally portrayed as being roughly of the same doom class (that is to say, total and utter) except nyarlothep and bokrug. nyarlothep is more of a malicious trickster god and while he'll happily cause untold death and suffering, he's unlikely to finish off humanity just because he loves loving around with us too much. bokrug really just had beef with one city of ancients that was loving him around for literal millennia, after that place got hosed he just sort of left and never bothered anyone again. the precise nature of the doom varies (hastur will mindbreak all of humanity and take the small fraction of those that survive that process as his slaves, whereas cthulhu will just flat out kill everyone, presuming no boat) but it's a constant that getting the undivided attention of an ancient one results in the utter destruction of mankind. Improbable Lobster posted:Lovecraft was loving terrified of just about everything outside of his house including
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Oct 26, 2018 05:55
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Coolguye, if you really find Lovecraft's prose tiring, I needs must expand your vocabulary. I'm putting you on 40 ccs of Dorothy Sayers, stat.
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Oct 26, 2018 06:19
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Discendo Vox posted:Coolguye, if you really find Lovecraft's prose tiring, I needs must expand your vocabulary. I'm putting you on 40 ccs of Dorothy Sayers, stat. put it in my rear end
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Oct 26, 2018 07:21
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Improbable Lobster posted:Lovecraft was loving terrified of just about everything outside of his house including And have you ever seen a photo of the guy? He even looks like a total sperglord who dwells in the basement.
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Oct 26, 2018 07:42
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"Her marriage to Lovecraft was never legally ended because Lovecraft, although he assured her the divorce had been filed, failed to sign the final decree" I can see why his attempts to write actual dialogue, involving people and talking, are pretty hilarious.
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Oct 26, 2018 07:56
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Both Lovecraft and Robert Howard were guys who, in this day and age would be hikkikomori 4channers with a collection of fedoras.
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Oct 26, 2018 08:17
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I picked up Metal Gear Survive for a tenner. Any tips a newcomer might have overlooked?
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Oct 26, 2018 10:07
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Drunken Baker posted:I picked up Metal Gear Survive for a tenner. Any tips a newcomer might have overlooked? Filling up your hunger and thirst meters freezes the bars for a few minutes and is more efficient than simply keeping them at a bare minimum. Yes, the spear is useful, no it will not serve you in all situations. Experiment. Silencers are much more durable and therefore much more useful when you get pistols, the Burkov and 9mm is by far the most material efficient gun you can have. Stealth is your friend, keeps you from getting murdered, and has material rewards - backstabbing wanderers = 1.5x as much energy. If you're having trouble navigating in the dust, build a set of binoculars or find the road - the scope lets you use the compass again and the roads put you back on the map. You have access to fresh water at the beginning, but the oasis will dry up once you start making proper expeditions and leave the tutorial. Be prepared! Save bottles in advance. Finally, you can always see the lights of facilities and bases in the darkness. And it gets real drat dark in there, beware of night!
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Oct 26, 2018 10:19
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Drunken Baker posted:I picked up Metal Gear Survive for a tenner. Any tips a newcomer might have overlooked?
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Oct 26, 2018 10:37
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Quicksilver6 posted:Filling up your hunger and thirst meters freezes the bars for a few minutes and is more efficient than simply keeping them at a bare minimum. Cheers! I know it gets shat/poo poo/shitted on a lot, but I'm really looking forward to getting lost in it. Literally and figuratively. Cardiovorax posted:Where? I'd be interested in picking it up myself at that price. Amazon.
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Oct 26, 2018 10:52
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Aw, shame. I was hoping there was a sale somewhere. I don't think I'll be buying a console just to play it on, but thanks anyway.
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Oct 26, 2018 10:59
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Kokoro Wish posted:Both Lovecraft and Robert Howard were guys who, in this day and age would be hikkikomori 4channers with a collection of fedoras. Lovecraft, yes. Howard would be that person who is just on the edge of woke but keeps rushing to defend his truly awful friends like Lovecraft from a mob of critics on Twitter.
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Oct 26, 2018 11:12
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SelenicMartian posted:"Her marriage to Lovecraft was never legally ended because Lovecraft, although he assured her the divorce had been filed, failed to sign the final decree" Ross Geller based on Lovecraft
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Oct 26, 2018 11:40
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Improbable Lobster posted:Cthulhu gets knocked out by a boat motor, I literally cannot think of a less scary monster. Cthulhu is really a manatee.
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Oct 26, 2018 12:21
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Coolguye posted:All of this is correct except for the last bit. The vast majority of his writing doesn't have any racial slurs (Those are his essays, and will give you humongous amounts of contact embarrassment if you read them). That one ridiculous story where he wrote his insanely racistly named cat into it was the exception, not the rule. People get super antsy to blurt out YEAH BUT DID YOU KNOW LOVECRAFT WAS REALLY RACIST every time anything about him comes up and it's gotten super tiresome. Like yeah, everyone knows his cat and that the guy was basically agoraphobic, but H.P. Lovecraft The Person is so far removed from his writings/~mythos~ by this point that it almost barely matters anymore unless you're reading his miserable personal writings. Everyone's aware that he was a super awkward anglophile, it doesn't mean every bit of his writing was the worst thing ever, even moreso now that it's all passed through so many pop culture filters that something like the fishmen, who were at one time weird racism about 'swarthy mediterraneans' or whatever, are really just used as straight up freaky fishpeople now.
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Oct 26, 2018 15:40
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It's been loving years since I read that, but I thought he got speared by the bow. Either way, for an elder god(or whatever caste he is) it's a punk way to go out.
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Oct 26, 2018 15:41
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Yardbomb posted:H.P. Lovecraft The Person is so far removed from his writings/~mythos~ by this point that it almost barely matters anymore unless you're reading his miserable personal writings. I mean, this doesn't excuse it, but people seem very intent on turning him into some kind of cartoonish caricature of himself.
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Oct 26, 2018 15:45
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No Lovecraft was really really racist, even by the standards of early twentieth century America.
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Oct 26, 2018 15:52
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I feel his fear of penguins is immensely more interesting to discuss, especially once you look at how he describes the elder things.
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Oct 26, 2018 15:55
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exquisite tea posted:No Lovecraft was really really racist, even by the standards of early twentieth century America.
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Oct 26, 2018 15:58
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Yeah he was. I'd have to find it again, but even for his time people were trying to figure out why he was so racist. His friends at the time felt the need to pen defenses of his extreme racism. And although he married a Jewish woman, Sonia Greene had to keep reminding him that she was Jewish because he kept going into anti-semitic rants. It's not just racial slurs either, a lot of his works have an undertone of fear of "race mixing" and poo poo. It's basically the basis of Shadow over Innsmouth. The Cthulhu mythos has moved well on past him, and given that it was itself influenced and derived from the works of others (ie Hastur) or written in collaboration with other people that's fitting, but the dude was extraordinarily racist as were many of his stories. His racism doesn't merit a defense. Chev posted:I feel his fear of penguins is immensely more interesting to discuss, especially once you look at how he describes the elder things. Who can trust anyone that wears a suit everywhere?
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Oct 26, 2018 15:58
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TGLT posted:Who can trust anyone that wears a suit everywhere?
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Oct 26, 2018 16:04
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Cardiovorax posted:Knowing what I do about early twentieth century America, I have difficulty believing that, but then, I don't know the guy that well. He was racist enough that his friends like Robert E Howard went "gee, maybe this race stuff isn't quite as big a deal as I thought" because of how obsessively racist he was.
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Oct 26, 2018 16:20
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 1. Little Nightmares 2. OK/NORMAL 3. Unforgiving - A Northern Hymn 4. Rise of Insanity 5. Paratopic 6. Rusty Lake Paradise 7. Cube Escape: Paradox 8. INFERNIUM 9. Dead Secret 10. All Haze Eve 11. Welcome to Hanwell 12. Gray Dawn 13. The Last Cargo 14. Observer 15. Dark Deception 16. Cultist Simulator 17. House of Evil 18. Nevermind 19. CONCLUSE 20. Sagebrush 21. The Painscreek Killings 22. A Room Beyond 23. The Evil Within 24. Yomawari: Midnight Shadows 25. Dead Secret Circle 26. Disturbed: Beyond Aramor    It always seems a little strange to take pleasure in a game that delights in killing you. Most of the time, dying in games is intensely frustrating but some titles make it part of the fun, like Spelunky does so effectively. Disturbed is from that ancient class of point-and-click adventures, the ones that gleefully murder you out of spite. But unlike those teeth-gritting tales of yore, this one is designed with death in mind. It’s an excellent compliment to the grim tone and fatalist themes, so if you’re okay meeting your demise at regular intervals, sometimes to advance the plot even, this one promises to be quite the ride. Mild-mannered Gabriel has been banished from the land of Aramor to the tiny isle of Greyrock for reasons he cannot recall. Life there is harsh but simple, toiling away at growing the simplest of crops and drowning one’s sorrows in drink. All that changes when the armored ones come for him, hulking constructs that snatch Gabriel away and deposit him on a mysterious, forested island. Something is amiss in these dark lands, and it’s possible Gabriel is the only one who can stop it. It’s also possible his past is going to catch up to him in some very ugly ways, ways that could put him on the wrong side of an entire kingdom. Disturbed: Beyond Aramor builds on the morose mythos started in Disturbed, but playing that one isn’t essential to understanding the story here (it is free, though). Aramor and the surrounding lands are steeped in a pitch-black shade of fantasy, where ghosts can extinguish lives with a touch and even the smallest beasts can turn your insides into outsides. Your travels will take you to ruined villages, abandoned camps, overgrown graveyards, and far worse places in search of the clues needed to address at least some of the awful things going on in the world. A big part of the grim atmosphere is how easy it is to die, a feature carried over from the previous Disturbed. As a point-and-click game you’ll shuffle from scene to scene, checking points of interest and absorbing items to be automatically used when needed. But sometimes you’ll click on a tuft of grass only to have a poisonous snake lunge out and kill you. Or you’ll sit down to fish and a sea serpent will devour you. Or you’ll lay down in bed and awaken to a sword through your sternum. Even the simplest interactions can lead to an untimely demise, but this time you don’t have to lean so hard on the save system to get around it. Death is a mysterious part of Gabriel’s life, taking him to a barren place with more clues and options to explore with each expiry. Perishing resets the game back to the start, but the wealth of options you have there, coupled with the handy skip function, means each death provides new opportunities that won’t take long to explore. That’s really what’s so great about this sequel, that it expands the basic gameplay of the first in new and creative ways. There’s even a completely alternate start you get if you die enough times! Your inventory is expanded to include currency to spend and different weapons to use in battles, which are pretty interesting text-based affairs. The world is significantly larger than before, offering all sorts of new and exciting places to die. Even the writing itself has been punched up, complete with some seriously emotional descriptions of imprisonment and executions that you might want to be ready for. I did mention this game is grim, didn’t I? Disturbed was a fine attempt at a different, darker sort of adventure, and Beyond Aramor refines that attempt into a full-featured experience. The graphics evoke that distant, hollow feel with their monochrome wastelands, and the sound effects are just there enough to make the world feel real. If I had to complain about something it would be how the different scenes are connected, as the game doesn’t really tell you which way you entered from, but I’ve gotten quite used to that after the first hour or two. I don’t yet know what it’s going to take to save the land from the armored ones, but so far it seems to take a lot of my blood and a lot of innocent sacrifices. If you’ve got the stomach for that, you’ll find a solid, sprawling adventure here to mope your way through.
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Oct 26, 2018 16:38
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yeah, publishers had to tell lovecraft to take it down a few notches outside of his work or he'd start becoming too hot to publish. you had to be one serious weirdo to get reprimanded for racism at the turn of the 20th century. it was A Thing. yardbomb, however, is also correct that it's kind of fashionable now to throw his writing under the bus too, which is a mistake imo. enjoying his writing's pretty consistent ability to evoke the feeling of a disturbing fever dream does not make you a bad person, nor does it even mean you have bad taste.
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Oct 26, 2018 16:44
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I mean, no one's arguing the guy was a particularly good person, but considering that he was born only twenty-five years after the USA finally got rid of slavery and grew up in a world where grandpa could still tell you about how, back in the day, he used to own ol' Mr. Hawthorne down the street and that's how it ought to have stayed, I really just don't buy that he was that much worse than the bad end of average.
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Oct 26, 2018 17:30
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I wish I saved this article I read a few years ago that was basically "how racist was America 100 years ago??" that was written in response to some sci-fi book where an aircraft carrier went back in time to WW2 or something, but basically Lovecraft was more extreme than the average person and I have no compunctions about trashing his name. I try to avoid Lovecraftian as a descriptor because he may have inspired a slew of writers but their body of work stands out far beyond his today.
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Oct 26, 2018 17:46
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Cardiovorax posted:I mean, no one's arguing the guy was a particularly good person, but considering that he was born only twenty-five years after the USA finally got rid of slavery and grew up in a world where grandpa could still tell you about how, back in the day, he used to own ol' Mr. Hawthorne down the street and that's how it ought to have stayed, I really just don't buy that he was that much worse than the bad end of average. Yeah I guess if you just ignore everything he said and did, and also everything that his contemporaries said about him, and also every reference people have posted in this thread, you could totally continue thinking that.
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Oct 26, 2018 17:52
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Second half of this blog post talks about how people of his time reacted to his racism with some sources. "Of their time" is always kinda bullshit but it's especially bullshit because he was not the norm even for his time. Dude was lovely. Jackson Pollock was a poo poo but his art was good, lovely people can make stuff that resonates.
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Oct 26, 2018 17:52
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Just put a "yes we know he's racist shut up" at the end of all lovecraft posts for a while, thanks. Anyway, I think the best lovecraft inspired thing/film was "the banshee chapter" which doesn't ever really show you the monster in full view up until the end. Even then, it only does so for a fleeting second. Very much leaves it up to your imagination. "yes we know he's racist shut up"
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Oct 26, 2018 17:54
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exquisite tea posted:Yeah I guess if you just ignore everything he said and did, and also everything that his contemporaries said about him, and also every reference people have posted in this thread, you could totally continue thinking that.
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Oct 26, 2018 17:54
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People are discussing contemporaneous letters and correspondences. Not past recollections, at that time communications that amount to "yo dude what the gently caress" or "hey no woah he's not really that racist he uh... look it's okay because uh..."dogstile posted:Just put a "yes we know he's racist shut up" at the end of all lovecraft posts for a while, thanks. Take it up with Cardiovorax.
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Oct 26, 2018 17:57
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Cardiovorax posted:No, what I mean is that he was lovely and really, really racist, but also that people like to whitewash their own history on that issue and to ignore that everyone else was, while not nearly as bad, still not really that much better, either. Even Tolkien, who famously told Nazi sympathizer to gently caress off in his correspondences, has that thing where all his bad guys are "swarthy." There's no real metric for racism, Lovecraft was very racist in a kind of "all these races terrify me, what even are they" way but not so much an "I'd like to own and lynch my fellow man" kind of way, which was the trend at that time and also now and maybe why he didn't fit in with regular racists.
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Oct 26, 2018 18:03
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Yardbomb posted:People get super antsy to blurt out YEAH BUT DID YOU KNOW LOVECRAFT WAS REALLY RACIST every time anything about him comes up and it's gotten super tiresome. Yeah it's extremely tedious and reliably ruins threads. It's like when a kid in elementary school would get ahold of some minor piece of trivia and find every excuse to inject it into unrelated conversations. Did you guys know that PEANUTS, are neither PEAS, nor NUTs? Makes u think..
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Oct 26, 2018 18:08
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Yeah, I can see that. All I'm saying is, people into the genre really like to point out Lovecraft as "one of the bad ones" a lot these days, which he was, but they also like to conveniently forget that while he was extreme in his views, a lot of those ideas were still very much the vogue of the day. Especially pulp fiction and sword&sorcery basically run on it, in a lot of ways, and often still do, if more subtly so. It's not a genre with a very proud history. Anyway, sorry for the derail. Cardiovorax fucked around with this message at 18:16 on Oct 26, 2018 |
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Oct 26, 2018 18:11
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It'd be nice if the whole genre could move past Lovecraft as a name for the subgenre. Like, Bloodborne has some good monster designs, but they inevitably get compared to Lovecraft, not to Hidetaka Miyazaki, the game's director. I've seen the horror in The Evil Within 2 compared to John Carpenter, and while I don't know if it's an accurate comparison, it's at least a comparison to someone from less than 50 years ago. We don't compare modern rock music to Chuck Berry or Elvis. I think it's probably because everything in the genre is either niche or just bad. AM1200 was awesome but too niche to be popular, Possession is popular among horror fans but not among general audiences. Bloodborne was PS-only and didn't catch on like Dark Souls did. We don't have a Freddy Kreuger of cosmic horror to replace Cthulhu, or an HR Giger household name to retitle the genre after. Rick and Morty (I know, very high IQ, etc) was a good example of this kind of thing when they just started calling their body horror monsters "Cronenbergs". I think people feel the need to use the Call of Cthulhu license because it's a well-known brand name, but at the same time, like Night10194 is saying Night10194 posted:The Mythos is funny because it's so saturated at this point that it can't actually surprise any of the people consuming Mythos related media. When you know it's always coming up fishmen or whatever it's hard to be scared. I don't know a lot of hardcore cosmic horror fans who still actually want this brand specifically.
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Oct 26, 2018 18:36
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It's kind of hard to avoid the label because basically all other authors who contributed to it in its early days were self-admittedly very much inspired by Lovecraft and/or in regular correspondence with him, like Clark Ashton Smith or August Derleth. Honestly, though, I thought Bloodborne got called Lovecraftian because of its concepts and themes, not because of its art. It's all about aquatic-slash-stellar god monsters with plenty of inspiration drawn from molluscs and invertebrates, offering madness and power in equal measure. It's really as Lovecraftian as its gets, if you'll excuse the phrasing. It's as hard to escape that as it is to escape comparisons to Tolkien when writing about dwarves, elves and orcs.
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Oct 26, 2018 18:41
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Cardiovorax posted:It's kind of hard to avoid the label because basically all other authors who contributed to it in its early days were self-admittedly very much inspired by Lovecraft and/or in regular correspondence with him, like Clark Ashton Smith or August Derleth. Honestly, though, I thought Bloodborne got called Lovecraftian because of its concepts and themes, not because of its art. It's all about aquatic-slash-stellar god monsters with plenty of inspiration drawn from molluscs and invertebrates, offering madness and power in equal measure. It's really as Lovecraftian as its gets, if you'll excuse the phrasing. It's as hard to escape that as it is to escape comparisons to Tolkien when writing about dwarves, elves and orcs. Bloodborne probably got called that for good reasons but my point is that they don't have a more modern point of comparison, and it'd be good if the genre had one, if only to move past HPL himself. Yeah, because elves, dwarves, and orcs are all Tolkien creatures and they're all pretty tired also. I think a lot of people today would think of them as a Dungeons and Dragons property, even though that's incorrect. I think if fantasy innovated a new popular race or monster or whatever, it probably wouldn't get compared to Tolkien, whereas new creatures of a certain type do get compared to HPL.
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Oct 26, 2018 18:49
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