site banner
naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   2616 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.

6
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

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.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats