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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   3360 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.

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.

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