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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   2608 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for October 28, 2022

Be advised; this thread is not for serious in depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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What books are people reading? I'm still working through Anne Rice's vampire novels. They're surprisingly good.

I grabbed a hardbound copy of the complete works of HP Lovecraft, due to my paranoia about them being memory holed. Been slowly working through that. Like, extremely slowly. I believe the stories are arranged in the order they were written in, which means I'm frontloading a lot of the stuff that's almost proto-Lovecraft. Before he quite found his niche, although you can see him zeroing in on it.

Edit: I forgot, I also finished The Witcher series. Well, at least the first 7 books, and not the 8th side story novel. It was ok I guess. A whole lot of teasing for a fairly lame "subvert expectations" non-payoff. I can understand why the videogames largely threw out that ending, and went on to be way more popular than the books. I should probably play them now.

I feel like of all the guys I would put as Genre Founders, Lovecraft was the weakest writer. If you took all his stuff that really met the formal "Lovecraftian" definition, it would be a much shorter book, a hundred or so pages. And even the classics like Call of Cthulhu, you'd slap your DM in a rp game if his climax of the old god's emergence was "He gets hit with a steamship accidentally and that stops him roflmao."

Like, comparing to contemporaries, Doyle's full Sherlock Holmes stories are 1200 pages, and they all pretty much meet the "Brilliant Detective Fiction" genre. Lord of the Rings is 1500 pages, it's the definition of the "High Fantasy" genre. Lovecraft's complete works amount to 1600 pages, but the vast majority of them either aren't or would barely be "Lovecraftian" if it weren't written by Lovecraft.

It's sort of interesting how brilliant the ideas that underly Cosmic Horror are, that so few written pieces create such a strong impression on so many readers.

I find Lovecraft to be the paragon of a lazy writer. His whole œuvre can be described in one word: >!undescribable!<

I cannot unsee it, and I find it ridiculous.

I'm still not entirely sure what Non-Euclidean geometries are supposed to look like tbh, other than a sign that creepy shit is about to go down.

I always took his references to non-euclidean geometry to be referencing 4th dimensional structures. But I think I was pre-primed for this interpretation after being exposed to Flatland in school, and a short story from Science Fiction Age.

Funnily enough, over the long years many of the stories I read in Science Fiction Age left a strong impression on me. Strong, but without detail. I read these pages when I was 13-15, and I'm nearly 40 now. I didn't even remember the name of the magazine. I eventually cobbled together what few concrete details I could, and a few of the story titles I was pretty sure I remembered correctly and some google-fuu later, found it.

At first I only discovered that my favorite author in it's pages, Adam-Troy Castro, eventually published his silly short stories about the incompetent criminal masterminds Vossoff and Nimmitz into a book. Which I promptly purchased on ebay. But then I eventually found PDFs of every issue on archive.org, because of course they have it.

So it's with certainty I can now tell you, that short story in the Cthulhu mythos, my first exposure to it actually, was Out of Space, Out of Time in Vol 6, Issue 6 in 1998. I think I'll actually read it now for old times sake.

Edit: I read it again, and it wasn't half bad. Not as good as I remember it, not as catastrophically awful as some things I liked as a kid. A solid yeoman's effort to build on the Cthulhu mythos.

Play some hyperrogue, and maybe read the blog posts about it.

You will have to make a decent start on understanding hyperbolic geometry if you want to rescue the princess (~10% of the way through the game). I haven't got much farther than that, myself.

I second this, also Hyperbolica. While Hyperbolica is a fairly simple and short adventure game and wouldn't be interesting without its gimmick, its gimmick is that it takes place in a 3d hyperbolic world (and one area in spherical geometry). Not some top down tessellation like Hyperrogue, but with an actual first person perspective walking around in hyperbolic space. While Hyperrogue is a much more interesting (and challenging) game as far as the gameplay is concerned and probably requires more technical understanding of the properties of hyperbolic geometry to solve its puzzles, I think Hyperbolica does a better job of actually getting someone to experience hyperbolic (and spherical) geometry, rather than just having an abstract understanding of its properties.

If it's the one I'm thinking of, I might have seen the dev videos for that a few years ago. Will check it out!

Look at a globe. Seriously. The surface of a sphere is one of the classic examples of non-Euclidean geometry, a geometry where Euclid's 5th postulate doesn't hold. The exact description of the 5th postulate is a bit arcane (look it up on Wikipedia if you care), but it turns out to be equivalent to saying that all triangles must have corner angles that sum to 180 degrees. On the globe, if you choose a triangle with these corners: the north pole, 0 degrees E on the equator, 90 degrees W on the equator, that triangle will have all its corner angles 90 degrees, for a total of 270 degrees.

In fairness, there was a little thought out into the choice. Additive magenta is a genuine non-spectral color that does not actually exist in nature and cannot normally be perceived in objects, but can easily be created in projection.

You can find magenta flowers, and it's not on the spectrum but you can get it as a mix of spectral colors. Still better than most alternatives, I'd agree.

I wonder if they could have pulled off using a chimerical color instead, only showing the "impossible" color in brief scenes always subsequent to a scene colored+lit to act as a corresponding fatigue template.

A premonition of printer inks must have come to Lovecraft in a dream...

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