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Just call it lil' shubby, 🐐
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Dec 7, 2018 22:13
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Lovecraft had his brain broken by racism and that’s part of what makes his work compelling. He tried to make universes where the racist garbage he’d been told makes sense and he created cosmic horror. Just think about his “most merciful thing in the world” quote in terms of a man without the tools reconcile what he’s been told with what he can plainly see.
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Dec 7, 2018 22:27
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Oh man reading this thread, I had only read the Call of Cthulhu short story and so didn't know about all this, but now I'm assuming this Lovecraft quote:quote:There are black zones of shadow close to our daily paths, and now and then some evil soul breaks a passage through. When that happens, the man who knows must strike before reckoning the consequences. is probably referring to running into black people on his daily walks or something.
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Dec 7, 2018 22:32
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You can gently caress with the spelling and pronunciation of mythos stuff as much as you like. It's mostly supposed to be the closest approximation humans can make to the "real" sound, right? Like, Cthulhu pronounced "Kath oo loo" is supposed to be a bad representation of the bubbling sound of the big green guy's name. It wouldn't be hard for the Goat With A Thousand Young to be Shub N'groth. (NUHgroth). If you wanted to go there you could point out that it was mispronounced and badly transliterated in the past by the same sort of assholes who thought you could communicate with anyone by speaking english loudly and slowly and thus named mountains things like "Calm down, it's just a hill" in the local language. As for the "black" goat... yeah, same dudes, same reason. Put it in a bit about how bad it went for the poor assholes who've tried the spell with the '20s pronunciation. E: ...and there's a reasonable modern mythos story right there. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 22:41 on Dec 7, 2018 |
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Dec 7, 2018 22:37
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NutritiousSnack posted:Actually he's difficult to read, there is a difference between being a being a boring hack and someone who managed to survive being thrashed for a hundred years (for sometimes good reasons: tackling his racism for example) and literally forgotten. You confuse him using literary devices in stories for pulp magazines, known for breezy reading, and being inept or not scary. The dude is motherfucking terrifying, like don't discount the racism, but actually read his work as an exchange of ideas, and not rolling poorly on a SANITY roll. Ignoring your weird claims that Lovecraft was progressive somehow, really, are you actually claiming here that nobody who truly gets Lovecraft could dislike his works? That's genuinely pathetic. And also still not scary. Sorry, but the idea that we all live in an uncaring universe surrounded by antipathetic monsters that could and would snuff us out in a heartbeat without ever knowing we even exist isn't scary. That's day to day life. Like, you just described medical bills.
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Dec 7, 2018 22:57
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ProfessorCirno posted:Like, you just described medical bills. And this whole global warming thing too.
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Dec 7, 2018 23:01
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Kemper Boyd posted:And this whole global warming thing too. Quite frankly, the Lovecraftian monsters aren't terrifying because they don't even know what they're doing. Real world monsters absolutely know.
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Dec 7, 2018 23:05
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ProfessorCirno posted:Quite frankly, the Lovecraftian monsters aren't terrifying because they don't even know what they're doing. Real world monsters absolutely know. It's the egocentrism thing. Lovecraftian horrors being capable of wiping out humanity without even knowing is a personal insult to our (superior, western) civilizations, how dare they not appreciate this wondrous edifice.
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Dec 7, 2018 23:11
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I get why the "oh no world doomed uncaring universe" stuff doesn't resonate that well these days, but are you saying you can re read (eg) The Thing On The Doorstep and just get "body swap, who cares, and the zombie thing was lame anyway"? That story's creepy as gently caress and it's even creepier when you think about it in context of the author's misogyny and sexual hang-ups. E: I always thought those types of ones were scarier than the big monster ones anyway. Erich Zann, the one with the tomb and the guy's ankles, terrible old man, even pickmans model, kinda. E2: Thinking about it I would 100% reccommend The Terrible Old Man as a lesson in worldbuilding for TTRPGs. It's a super short piece but it sets a vivid theme and includes a shitload of interesting looking details without explaining them, and doesn't explain anything about exactly how things went down or why things are as they are. The closest thing we get to the latter is effectively rumours from kids. Just drop the bits about immigrants. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 23:43 on Dec 7, 2018 |
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Dec 7, 2018 23:14
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golden bubble posted:He was even afraid of cyclopean architecture. Cyclopean architecture sounds really scary, but it is actually the ancient Mycenaean/Incan/ect. art of fitting large, irregular stones together so tightly that the structure holds without mortar, like so I'm from this cyclopean country and Lovecraft is also considered classic nerd lit/influence here. My two takes as for why he's popular even among people he probably despised are 1. While surrounded by his very specific anxieties he tapped into some universal fears about the Unknown and The Other that can be recontextualized from South America to Japan 2. His literature has been heavily deconstructed, his racism, misogyny and xenophobia laid bare and scrutinized. There are almost no "Lovecratian" derivates that don't comment on or subvert the original themes. That's why we are getting Lovecraft Country
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Dec 7, 2018 23:26
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Pacho posted:There are almost no "Lovecratian" derivates that don't comment on or subvert the original themes. That's why we are getting Lovecraft Country I really have to disagree - works like Lovecraft Country are still the exception in pop-cultural production. There's a Lovecraft industry that produces Lovecraft-branded works, and a large swathe of that industry are pretty hostile to desconstructing Lovecraft's racism. Hell, it was only in 2015 that the World Fantasy Award stopped being a bust of Lovecraft's head, and there was a miniature culture war over it, especially from angry SFF fans and writers who thought calling out HPL's racism was unnecessary and an affront to the award's tradition.
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Dec 8, 2018 00:11
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Darwinism posted:It's the egocentrism thing. Lovecraftian horrors being capable of wiping out humanity without even knowing is a personal insult to our (superior, western) civilizations, how dare they not appreciate this wondrous edifice. I always found the comparatively low key stuff to be far more terrifying than the unknowable cosmic horrors - the Elder Things, the Yith, the fungi from yuggoth. They're all much easier to grasp, which makes they're complete indifference to us that much more chilling. It's the difference between not noticing us, and noticing but not caring. Also weren't the fungi debating whether it was worth the effort to wipe us out? That gives me chills, we're not even a proper annoyance.
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Dec 8, 2018 00:30
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Strom Cuzewon posted:I always found the comparatively low key stuff to be far more terrifying than the unknowable cosmic horrors - the Elder Things, the Yith, the fungi from yuggoth. They're all much easier to grasp, which makes they're complete indifference to us that much more chilling. It's the difference between not noticing us, and noticing but not caring. I wasn't the biggest fan of Winter Tide (another entry in the Lovecraft-response genre) but it does very well by the Yithians, who've always been my favourite Mythos element. e: also can't believe I never noticed the, uh, unpleasant nature of ol' Shubby's name - never said it out loud, I guess.
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Dec 8, 2018 02:35
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ProfessorCirno posted:Sorry, but the idea that we all live in an uncaring universe surrounded by antipathetic monsters that could and would snuff us out in a heartbeat without ever knowing we even exist isn't scary. It's ironically real scary to black folks for whom this makes a good allegory for the racist American police state, as shown in the novella The Ballad of Black Tom (a reworking of The Horror at Red Hook) , which got like a million awards in 2016/2017.
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Dec 8, 2018 02:53
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I'd like to throw out there that Kevin Crawford wrote Silent Legions precisely so that you could randomly roll your own cosmic horror mythos without relying on Lovecraft, at the minimum to avoid the issue where the players already know what a Hound of Tindalos is going in, but also to avoid Lovecraft's writing in general.
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Dec 8, 2018 03:33
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Silent Legions also lets you randomly generate their epitaths and names. This is good for making good and evocative titles for the gods and also names you'll never call them because the titles are better and actually pronouncible.
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Dec 8, 2018 04:17
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Alien Rope Burn posted:I'm not arguing which is more racist or more offensive, I'm not terribly interested in marking them on some kind of prejudice-ometer. I'm just saying Howard's work is more easily separated from racism- you can argue part of the themes of his work are part and parcel with colonialism and the might-makes-right sort of material, but they were more covert than overt. Sorry, but there's ample poo poo in Howard where his racism is 100% overt, and it's spread throughout his canon widely. You can't separate his work from his racism without coming to a highly deficient and incredibly narrow view of his work, just like if you judge Lovecraft based solely on, say, From Beyond.
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Dec 8, 2018 04:31
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Joe Slowboat posted:Hell, it was only in 2015 that the World Fantasy Award stopped being a bust of Lovecraft's head, and there was a miniature culture war over it, especially from angry SFF fans and writers who thought calling out HPL's racism was unnecessary and an affront to the award's tradition. It was pretty heated; there was sidewalk chalk graffiti all over town about SJWs and Sad Puppies. I saw two guys arguing in front of the coffee shop downtown. e: Knew I saved a pic. 
LongDarkNight fucked around with this message at 05:34 on Dec 8, 2018 |
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Dec 8, 2018 04:33
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It's interesting that S. T. Joshi, a Lovecraft scholar of note and a person of color himself, went so far to defend the bust, even though he is perfectly aware of Lovecraft's racism. I get that he's passionate about Lovecraft, and he's right that Lovecraft is important to the genre, but if people are upset about possibly being awarded the bust then just don't. It does not cost you anything to be considerate. Also, who wouldn't be upset being presented this abomination? 
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Dec 8, 2018 04:54
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I'm pretty sure nonwhite people are fairly aware that when it comes to racism with classic authors it's only matter of degree and how well they've been whitewashed, because otherwise you'd have to toss out over half an English lit course. Pulp is particularly bad about this. What happens when sheltered white dudes are the ones who get to write nearly everything (or at least get published) until pretty recently.
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Dec 8, 2018 05:58
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Its also an undeniable fact that Howard was big into the Aryan myth seeing as Conan was explicitly one, and the critique of "civilization" was really just that it allowed for black people to pretend to be as good as white men, which was why Howard was avowedly pro-lynching as a way for white people to sidestep the justice system to punish black men.
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Dec 8, 2018 07:11
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Biomute posted:It's interesting that S. T. Joshi, a Lovecraft scholar of note and a person of color himself, went so far to defend the bust, even though he is perfectly aware of Lovecraft's racism. I get that he's passionate about Lovecraft, and he's right that Lovecraft is important to the genre, but if people are upset about possibly being awarded the bust then just don't. It does not cost you anything to be considerate. Joshi makes a nice career out of selling books to people explaining his take on Lovecraft's influence on genre fiction and his place in history. I am not convinced that this is a coincidence; it's entirely possible that Joshi's objections are the panic reaction of someone who sees a threat to either his cash cow (if you want to be very cynical) or his claim to academic relevance (if you want to be less cynical).
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Dec 8, 2018 07:21
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Warthur posted:Howard wrote plenty stories where, say, a central and overtly stated theme was that Conan considered a black tribe owning a white woman as a slave to be the thing which crossed the moral event horizon from him, or black people using evil scary black people magic, or Conan slaughtering heaps and heaps of people who are basically native Americans only they get the label "Picts" for the sake of putting a figleaf on that, or Bran Mak Morn's people have become wizened and dark-skinned as a result of their descent into savagery, or where direct parallels are drawn between black people and apes, or where two-fisted boxer Sailor Steve Costigan beats up an ethnic stereotype, or where unrelated detective Steve Costigan murders a bunch of foreigners in the name of vigilante justice, or... I actually decided to dig into some old Conan stories fairly recently just to say I had. My expectations were coloured by the Wikipedia article titled The Character of Robert E. Howard which contained the line: quote:Howard became less racist as he grew older [...] Howard's viewpoint was also affected and softened by his correspondence with H. P. Lovecraft — whose own beliefs about race were a lot stronger — and his relationship with Novalyne Price — who was more liberal and challenged him on his racial beliefs. Which has the pretty blatant subtext of "Lovecraft was so racist he made Robert E. Howard, who was also racist, uncomfortable. I made it through a good chunk of Lovecraft's work when I was in college and, while I was definitely able to recognize the racism of his work, Lovecraft came across as such a weirdly hateful little Goblin I didn't find myself as bothered by it as I probably could have been. I expected a similar situation with Howard... So I ended up picking up The Conquering Sword of Conan collection and dove into the first few stories: he first story "The Servants of Bit-Yakin" was definitely wadding to Howard's vein of old-timey, HP Lovecraft racism what with Conan going to Not-Africa and competing with some other white people in scamming some Not-Africans out of their treasure, the next story "Beyond the Black River" was pretty much diving head-first into unpleasant racism territory with the introduction of The Picts. I can see what Howard was at least trying to do with this story (An exploration on the savage nature that lurks within all mankind and the inevitable clash between civilization and man's primal state), however why he felt this was best expressed by mashing every negative stereotype about African and American native populations together into the giant, ugly chimera that is The Picts I will never know*. Upon seeing that the titles of the next two stories are "The Black Stranger" and "Man-Eaters of Zamboula" I felt like I might have accidentally picked up a collection of all the Conan stories people prefer to pretend didn't exist any more. But on closer inspection I realized all of these were published in 1935-36, when Howard's views on race had supposedly "softened", which makes me wonder: If this was the stuff he was writing after becoming less racist, what the gently caress was he writing BEFORE? * - I'm lying, I know exactly why he did this: It's because it was the 1930 and Howard was a big ol' racist whose only exposure to the cultures he based The Picts on was reading other pulp mags.
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Dec 8, 2018 07:29
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Joshi likes to claim that Lovecraft also softened his views and became a socialist in his later years, though if you read the political essays Joshi bases this on it's clear that Lovecraft supports socialism largely because he thinks it will appease the masses and thereby preserve the social status quo.
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Dec 8, 2018 08:40
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Warthur posted:Joshi likes to claim that Lovecraft also softened his views and became a socialist in his later years, though if you read the political essays Joshi bases this on it's clear that Lovecraft supports socialism largely because he thinks it will appease the masses and thereby preserve the social status quo. That is a softer position compared to, say, "better dead than red". I don't think it makes him a socialist, but going by his depictions of the Yithians in A Shadow Out of Time, he seems to think that an ideal society has some elements of socialism to them. Also, on a more general point: I think it's a mistake to think that just because a horror author depicted something as terrifying in their books they were personally terrified of the same thing. A lot of the elements of religious terror in Lovecraft's works are mostly taking the piss, for instance. Also Cirno, the idea that cosmic horror is no longer terrifying is like... You're speaking on behalf of a lot of people. The most obvious counterexample I can think of are all the people who are unsettled reading about concepts like Deep Time, who are experiencing exactly the same anxieties Lovecraft's cosmic horror was supposed to invoke.
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Dec 8, 2018 11:02
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Honestly the japanese do lovecraft the best because they know he would believe them to be yellow apes and therefore treat the lore with the respect it deserves by fusing cthulhu with the daughter of that dude who made those wave paintings or making the shoggoth a horny slime maid
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Dec 8, 2018 15:56
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LatwPIAT posted:all the people who are unsettled reading about concepts like Deep Time Wait, what?
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Dec 8, 2018 16:16
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Plutonis posted:Honestly the japanese do lovecraft the best because they know he would believe them to be yellow apes and therefore treat the lore with the respect it deserves by fusing cthulhu with the daughter of that dude who made those wave paintings or making the shoggoth a horny slime maid Also Nyarthlotep the lead female in a harem anime. Also featured Cthuga and some others I can't remember.
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Dec 8, 2018 18:47
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LatwPIAT posted:Also Cirno, the idea that cosmic horror is no longer terrifying is like... You're speaking on behalf of a lot of people. The most obvious counterexample I can think of are all the people who are unsettled reading about concepts like Deep Time, who are experiencing exactly the same anxieties Lovecraft's cosmic horror was supposed to invoke. Who is unsettled by deep time except young earth creationists? I don't think there's a huge group of people experiencing existential horror from the very concept of the earth being more than 6,000 years old, driven to insanity by seeing a fossil or paleolithic artifacts in a museum. No one knows or cares about geological/stellar timescales anyways except for scientists & nerdy types who find it cool or awe-inspiring, and the creationists who also experience cosmic horror from people saying "Happy Holidays" or playing D&D.
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Dec 8, 2018 19:19
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Preem Palver posted:Who is unsettled by deep time except young earth creationists? I don't think there's a huge group of people experiencing existential horror from the very concept of the earth being more than 6,000 years old, driven to insanity by seeing a fossil or paleolithic artifacts in a museum. Think deeper and about the future rather than the past. For certain assumptions about an arbitrarily long lived expansionary multiverse, a completely material view of consciousness and continuity of consciousness, it's infinitely more likely that you're not on a planet at all but spread across billions of Boltzmann Brains, hallucinating part of a second of your live before dying in agony. Which is at least a bit unsettling, even beyond the 'nothing matters' that thinking about any deep future can cause.
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Dec 8, 2018 20:25
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Like all forms of the simulation hypothesis, Boltzmann Brains rely on the idea that an entity in the simulation (say, a delusional Boltzmind) would have any idea what the conditions outside the simulation could or should be like. The idea that we can therefore say 'the likelihood is that we're simulated' is self-defeating, because if we are in fact simulated, we cannot know what is outside the simulation nor even what kinds of rules it might abide by. Once you say 'the world is simulated' you have no way to choose between Boltzman Brains, the Gnostic Demiurge, or the Matrix. Therefore, we do not have any way to project the likelihood of our being in a simulation from what we think the laws of the universe are in our world, and any attempt to do so betrays itself from the start. It's ultimately a not-very-interesting ghost story, no different from 'you might be in a coma in a hospital dreaming all of this' except with a veneer of scientific or mathematical verisimilitude.
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Dec 8, 2018 20:57
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Thranguy posted:Think deeper and about the future rather than the past. For certain assumptions about an arbitrarily long lived expansionary multiverse, a completely material view of consciousness and continuity of consciousness, it's infinitely more likely that you're not on a planet at all but spread across billions of Boltzmann Brains, hallucinating part of a second of your live before dying in agony. Which is at least a bit unsettling, even beyond the 'nothing matters' that thinking about any deep future can cause. There's no need to bring Boltzmann brains into this, even. There's no reason to assume the past or present exist, and if consciousness is an entirely materially derived phenomenon arising from a particular confluence of neurochemistry there's no reason to assume "you" survive beyond the next instant (philosophy is terrifying).
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Dec 8, 2018 21:06
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Thranguy posted:Think deeper and about the future rather than the past. For certain assumptions about an arbitrarily long lived expansionary multiverse, a completely material view of consciousness and continuity of consciousness, it's infinitely more likely that you're not on a planet at all but spread across billions of Boltzmann Brains, hallucinating part of a second of your live before dying in agony. Which is at least a bit unsettling, even beyond the 'nothing matters' that thinking about any deep future can cause. It's about as unsettling as roko's basilisk or brain in a jar hypotheses, which is not at all. We're already the self-aware amalgamations of dead stars and space farts in an uncaring, incomprehensible cosmos. The thought that "woah, what if we were actually a slightly different arrangement of atoms but had no way to know it" does not feel me with existential dread. The possibility of a cosmic event wiping us out without us ever knowing it's coming or (much more likely) us just loving up our world and civilization through institutional inertia because 3 million years ago our ancestors figured out how to poke things with sticks and we just kept on going until WMDs and anthropogenic climate change became possibilities is far more terrifying.
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Dec 8, 2018 21:08
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Deep time being spooky is like when you lie on the ground looking at the sky and your perspective shifts and the sky is really really big and you're tiny and possibly going to fall off and the planet is spinning through space. What I mean is it can be a fun kind of spooky for a few minutes, and you say whoa a few times when you picture just how loving big everything is, and that brief dizzying moment of awe and fear can be a legitimate thing, but if it goes on too long: get help. Or drink to forget.
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Dec 8, 2018 21:11
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"Scary" stories aren't only entertaining if they literally terrify you. There are different emotional ways to engage with that genre of material, and I don't think it's particularly helpful to take a deep dive into exactly whether or how modern readers are actually experiencing fear. "Lovecraft isn't really that scary" is more of a throwaway line than a useful critique.
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Dec 8, 2018 21:24
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spectralent posted:There's no need to bring Boltzmann brains into this, even. There's no reason to assume the past or present exist, and if consciousness is an entirely materially derived phenomenon arising from a particular confluence of neurochemistry there's no reason to assume "you" survive beyond the next instant (philosophy is terrifying). this just proves that some people think way too hard about stuff
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Dec 8, 2018 22:00
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Meanwhile, in a trad games crossover with video games: https://twitter.com/AmazonChique/status/1071499191996674049 The rear end in a top hat fired from running GoG's twitter presence for transphobic bullshit has been hired on by Hambly, the gamergator who faked being assaulted at GenCon to own the libs.
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Dec 8, 2018 23:00
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YouTube keeps recommending me videos from TheQuartering no matter how many times I click the "I'm not interested in this" button and I really wish they'd stop.
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Dec 8, 2018 23:10
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Liquid Communism posted:Meanwhile, in a trad games crossover with video games: The only surprise here was that he was fired from GOG at all since the "assume their gender" tweet and the follow-up calling the existence of trans people a "debate" were both posted by CDPR proper and not this guy, so he's an exact fit for their corporate culture. Kai Tave posted:YouTube keeps recommending me videos from TheQuartering no matter how many times I click the "I'm not interested in this" button and I really wish they'd stop. I use this to get rid of all the far-right garbage Youtube recommends as soon as you watch any video about anything.
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Dec 8, 2018 23:16
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Kai Tave posted:YouTube keeps recommending me videos from TheQuartering no matter how many times I click the "I'm not interested in this" button and I really wish they'd stop. Hatewatching allows a person to build their own hell, largely via google algorithms.
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Dec 8, 2018 23:20
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