After totally blanking on a new vote incentive for the last two weeks, there’s a new one up today. It’s a quick study for a painting I’d like to do from The Outsider. All that free time I have, y’know.
On a whim, I decided to see how many different images of Cthulhu I could find in 30 minutes.
I guess I mixed my stupid pills in with my vitamins this morning. Thirty minutes? I was overwhelmed in five, my mind turned to jelly just as if facing the old booger himself. (I note that my spellcheck accepts ‘booger’ and ‘Cthulhu’, but not ‘spellcheck’.)
And despite the great variety and talent on display, I am comforted that my own version of Koot-loo is….different. You may not like it, but I think you’ll agree.
Anyway, here are the results. All the art is property of the original artists,but there’s no way I am going to track down every single name. If anyone objects, let me know and I will take your picture down, promise.
You folks know by now that I am a cat lover. Paul of Cthulhu, over at Yog-Sothoth.dcom, just lost his Cathulhu, and has written a moving obituary. My condolences.
This weekend I picked up the new B.P.R.D. trade paperback, #13, 1947. I can never keep up with the monthly issues, and the TPBs are so much easier to read. B.P.R.D. is one of my favorite comics, at least when John Arcudi and Guy Davis are at the helm. 1947 didn’t appeal to me much on a story level, but the guest artists, twin brothers Gabriel Bá and Fábio Moon, made up for the disappointment. Bá is one of my favorite artists and works on one of my top five favorite comics, The Umbrella Academy, so it is fun to see him adjust his style somewhere between UA and the Hellboy universe.
I saw Inception this weekend. Liked it but can’t say I followed it fully. Need to see it again, but I was impressed with the way the story was constructed, and the way the film resolved the story without necessarily providing solutions to all the mysteries. Wish the writers of Lost had as much respect for their audience as Chris Nolan.
Breaking Bad is a top-notch show, horror of a different kind. Aside from watching a basically good man descend into evil, rationalizing all the way, and aside from the horrors of the drug trade itself, the show doesn’t flinch from the horror of drug addiction in and of itself. In episode 6 or 7 of the second season, Jesse, one of the main characters, tracks down a couple of meth heads who stole the goods from one of his dealers. The meth heads and the house they live in and the abused child are as creepy and scary as anything in fiction. The pacing is different, but I could have used the characters and setting in LIM without any other changes. Like other shows that may seem at first conceptually offensive – Dexter and even The Simpsons–Breaking Bad is actually a pretty moral and ethical show. The film-makers have just learned that you can’t explore the finer twists and turns of moral concepts in a show about Mr. Goody Two-Shoes and family. It’s a terrific show and I recommend it highly. The third season will be out on DVD in September.
And last, let me make note of Pulpfest, being held this July 30-August 1 in Columbus, Ohio. How I wish I could go, but it’s not in the cards for me this year. Again. But this is where you go to gather with like minded fans of pulp fiction, where you go to buy the original magazines and books of reprinted stories, and where you go to have a heck of a good time.
Grumpy Old Medievalist has sent in a link that is too cool to risk being lost to those of you who may not read the comments. In fact, the whole site looks pretty interesting, but be sure to check out the Mexican tourist attraction, the Island of the Dolls.
First off, here’s an interesting if shallow article from the Daily Galaxy about an alternative to the theory of dark energy in the cosmos: time is slowing down! Definitely of interest to the Lovecraftian mind.
And more good news: I”ve gotten ahead again! I really cranked on two more pages, and with the one that was originally scheduled for next week but is now going up three weeks from today, I am back to three weeks ahead. If I can repeat that stunt over the next week I may be back to a comfortable margin…but I am going to re-examine those first pages this weekend to be sure I didn’t cut any corners in my haste.
This last Wednesday’s post, Technological Addiction, received a whole raft of comments, though I would have to place the culpa on mea for some sloppy writing rather than any great thoughts put forth. Maybe one of these days I’ll rewrite it and see if I can’t be more clear. Still, it was fun getting lots of responses and confirming the idea I have that LIM readers are thoughtful, literate, impassioned people.
I increased my collection of Ash Tree Press books to 48 this last week, which is cause enough to buy a new bookcase! I can finally take all my double shelved books down and display them properly. Hooray. There are roughly 130 titles in all, and the first couple of years worth are quite spendy, but all in good time. In the meantime, I have loads of interesting supernatural fiction awaiting my reading convenience.
And although this isn’t really horror, the trailer for the animated version of the comic The Goon is exciting to watch. Just think what an animated Lovecraft is Missing could look like. Dream on…
Have a good weekend.
I purposely left my laptop at home while I was on vacation; I don’t have an iPhone or iPad. For a solid week I didn’t have internet, email, or a digital file or any sort. And the best part about is, I didn’t miss any of it, not for a single minute. It was, in fact, a huge relief.
In spite of that, I’m no luddite. I love technology, I just don’t care to be bound by it. If I have to I can add in my head, I can draw with a pencil, I can type on an antique typerwriter. Are any of you old enough to remember when White-Out was cutting edge technology? Plus, I can get along without talking to someone every few minutes. When the grid goes down or we have an EMP strike, I know some people who are going to totally freak out.
But those folks are just amateurs compared to the people who have been turning up in the news this last year. The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and CBS have filed multiple reports about people – parents in particular- who sleep with their iPhones and Blackberries, just in case they need to check their email or get a stock quote in the middle of the night. Kids are responding in poll after poll that their parents spend time on their mobile devices even when ostensibly out for a day with the family, or at little league games, or school functions. Digital neglect is a growing concern.
The most extreme example of this, though, is the now infamous Korean couple who let their own real baby starve to death while addictively raising a healthier child online. They reportedly spent 10 hours a day with their virtual child, while only pausing to feed the real one once a day. Why not just eat your young? At least it has a precedent in the real world.
Though I can’t find the story source at the moment for the details, South Korea also has passed a law outlawing the playing of online video games by young people during certain hours, due to addiction problems that have been turning up. In the U.S., similar concerns have been expressed about games like World of Warcraft. One lady I’ve met has to spend most of her time with her significant other online as an avatar in that game because he spends 8-10 hours a day immersed in it.
I can’t be the only one who thinks that’s sad. And crazy. And sad. And crazy. And sad.
Before we leave iPhones, let us not forget apps! Of all the dozens and dozens I have seen, the only two that I see any real value in are an animation stop watch device that calculates frame counts from your finger taps and Bump, which transfers information from phone to phone with a, uh, bump. Honest, I can tell time, read a calendar, add and subtract (and multiply and divide), remember an appointment, look up Bible verses, find a restaurant, get the weather, check my email, read the latest about LiLo or Paris or the Gulf disaster, blow my nose, burp the baby, tie my shoes, and pick my nose without needing an app to do it for me.
Business today thrives on email, I’m told, and the internet, and therefore both must be checked regularly and frequently. Well, just because business DOES operate that way doesn’t mean it is a good way to operate. A friend of mine has boasted that he has 2000 unread emails in his inbox at work. What in the world is the value of that, for crying out loud? And the truth is, one third of those emails are him thanking them for thanking him for thanking them, etc., – in other words totally useless; another third are all the CC’s generated by the compulsive need to share even the most trivial information with everybody; so that leaves, what, around 650 possibly legitimate emails. If each one actually has valuable information in it (unlikely), and each one takes just one minute to read and digest and respond to, that is almost 11 hours out of the workweek. In what possible way could that be considered efficient? Is time no longer money, after all these years? Yet the email continues to pour in, and since people rarely write coherent subject lines, you get titles like RE:RE: RE:RE: RE: RE: reply. Email was originally a tool for business and used judiciously, a great one. Now, it is still of more value than a chat room, but not all that different from one.
Second Life is setting the stage for a story I wrote in high school, where people who could not deal with reality had taken refuge in virtual worlds; there were wards in private hospitals given over to the care of those who spent their ‘lives’ in VR helmets while their real bodies wasted away.
Silly idea? What about the couples who have split because one spouse became enamored with another ‘woman’ via her avatar on Second Life. One man spent 40 hours a week online with his new girl friend, in addition to his full time job. He couldn’t understand why his wife was leaving him, complaining that he never spent any time with her anymore. Worst of all, she happened to leave while he was on his virtual honeymoon with his new virtual wife, as they were enjoying wild virtual sex in a virtual hotel room. “But it’s just a game, honey!”
And what about the Second Life users who are suing Second Life over virtual real estate. From the Huiffington Post:
The users are claiming that Linden Labs and Founder Philip Rosedale persuaded them to invest money and pay a sort of “property tax” with the promise of actual ownership of virtual land. Now, the users say, the terms of service have been changed without their prior knowledge or consent. They say the new terms “state that these land and property owners did not own what they had created, bought and paid for, and that these consumers had no choice but to click on a new terms of service agreement or they could not have access to their property.” Moreover, the group alleges that Linden Labs froze user accounts and deleted or converted non-virtual currency and virtual property without giving any explanation or avenues for recourse.
Uh, you paid REAL dollars for VIRTUAL land? That should have been a tip-off right there, like cut-rate beachfront property in Florida. I know that we can twist our minds into thinking these things have value – Second Life’s parent company is worth almost $40 billion dollars. But if the people who populate the largest part of it ever find a new interest (like, maybe, getting a first life) then that is $40 billion dollars that is going to disappear faster than BP’s value after the Gulf Oil Spill, and BP at least still has hard assets it can sell. Once the bloom is off the rose, I don’t think there will be much after market for virtual land. I’ll spend my money on something of real value, like a cheap imitation Rolex watch, thank you.
Even more so than the addiction to using these devices addictively is the addiction to useless information, and lots of it. Useless information comes in two flavors: that which is irrelevant or lacking in meaning, and information so complex and thorough that it is impossible to wade through.
Picking a particular sick example of the latter, authorities in Austria recently arrested a man with 1,000,000 child porn photos on his computer. The porn is the sickest part, but step back a moment and ask yourself, why would anyone want a million photos of anything?!! You could tell the entire history of the world in some detail with that many pictures. To bring it back into the physical world, a wall 8 feet high and 15 feet long could hold 1440 3X4 photos. A million photos would take about 695 feet of wall, or a square room with walls 173 feet long, which is a room almost 30,000 square feet. Your average Wal-Mart is about 50,000 square feet.
It’s been some years back that a pair of eyeglasses with tiny cameras attached to the earpieces had been developed that could record every single second of your life, waking and sleeping. My gosh, is your day that interesting? Mine sure isn’t, and I think I have a pretty good time. I can see that there might be some value in being able to solve the ‘You said-No I didn’t” kinds of arguments — or would we actually find out that we truly do live in similar be separate universes where BOTH our memories are correct? It disturbs me to imagine cemataries of the future, where the tombstone will be a video screen running decades-long loops of a person’s entire life, from their point of view. What could make you miss someone more than reliving the time they spent waiting in a doctor’s office with nothing to read, or making a peanut butter and egg sandwich? I suppose with complex calculations you could plan to arrive at the exact moment every thirty odd years when the deceased witnessed a mugging or saw someone you kind of like naked, but if you’re off by even a few minutes, you’re back with the trivia.
Of course, the original technological addiction is television. You never hear of anyone being addicted to radio, although I’m sure there were a few. But when I hear that people on average watch 8 hours of TV every day, my jaw still drops. Where do they find the time? If I worked till five, and started watching TV the minute I got home, I wouldn’t be done until, say 2 a.m. Let’s not even get into what TV has to offer that is that interesting. If I watch five hours of TV a week, that’s a big week for me. Technically, I probably do watch a bit more TV per week now that I have discovered the glories of shows on DVD, but even that wouldn’t quite double my estimate. There is just so much more to do in life.
No one knows where all this is going. There will be good along with the bad. But I still expect to one day visit someone in one of those isolation wards someday. And no matter what, I am not going to enter their virtual world to do it.
I doubt that Lovecraft would have been a big Peanuts fan, but no other suitable expression comes to mind regarding the fact that I totally blanked on the new incentive for last week. And I mean blanked! I didn’t even have one ready! But I did get two pages inked and one mostly colored over the weekend, and think I’ll finish color on the second in a day or so, which will put me back ahead.
Still working my way through Dan Simmons’s Summer of Night. It’s similar thus far, at least in the general idea, to Stephen King’s It, but not as complex. But Simmons usually provides a good read, so I’m anticipating great things ahead.
Didn’t make it to see Inception this weekend (inking and coloring, you see) but I hear good things about it and am looking forward to it. Also borrowed the remake of The Crazies on dvd. Not expecting much, so I might be surprised.
I am either very committed, in the sense of being dedicated, or need to be committed, in the sense of having been driven beyond madness by unnameable terrors.
I’ve mentioned before that I try to stay weeks ahead of the posting dates so I am less likely to miss a due date. I started out this issue six weeks ahead. That has steadily eroded until I am, as of today, only two weeks ahead. But in roughing out the next five pages, I suddenly realized that the page that I scheduled and loaded for two weeks hence would really be much more effective if it came two pages later, that is, four weeks from today.
I wrestled with the idea for, oh, maybe thirty seconds…and then moved it in the schedule. Technically, I am still two weeks ahead, except that I am really only a week ahead. Hopefully, unless I lose more ground, I will regain that time when that page goes up, but in the meantime it’s stress city.
Now in January, about the time we should be starting issue 5, there is another spanner waiting to be thrown into the works: I’m starting work on an MFA. The only way I can see keeping up the comic is to find a colorist, which kills me because coloring is my favorite part of the process. Well, really the application of the color, the lighting and atmosphere. But I can draw and letter two or even three pages in the time it takes me to color one, which is 12-15 hours.
Worse still, I make no money on LIM and can’t really afford to pay anybody, so I’m not sure how I am going to pull this off. It’s going to be a lot of work, even if I amend the coloring process. If anyone out there is a colorist wanting experience, get in touch. Might as well start looking now, as January will be here before you know it.
Have a good weekend.
For the last week and a half I purposely put all things Lovecraftian out of my mind, just to recharge. But the Old Gentlemen apparently didn’t appreciate the notion, and forced me to acknowledge that the Old Ones have a foothold everywhere on Earth, even in tourist resorts.
The pictures below are all from Puerto Vallarta. Most of them are along the waterfront, and there were a few equally odd ones that I couldn’t get close enough to photograph (no evil power at work, they were in a construction zone.) The disturbing baby moon was in a pottery shop at the airport.
I have no idea as to the origins or purposes of these statues, what they might commemorate or what they might be warding off. The giant lizard -and it was giant, almost 40 feet in length, is a sand carving, as are the seated figures, which are part of a Last Supper display but were weird enough to warrant inclusion here. All of them are washed out to sea at night by the tide, so this is your only chance to see them in this incarnation.
My favorite is the strange head with the fluted mouth. It was against the sun and sky, so even from my vantage point I couldn’t tell you what it was. The most disturbing, while not eldritch in any way, is the naked boy with a cowboy hat riding a sea horse. Horror does indeed come in many forms.
