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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   2479 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for December 16, 2022

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Somebody please recommend me some cosmic horror to read. I prefer cosmic horror of the Chambers variety, but I would be happy with anything really. I don't even mind if it isn't horror - if it spends a lot of time hanging out with strange beings we can hardly comprehend that would be neat, especially if it deals with things like memetic contagion - although I would prefer books with high body counts.

The titles I have most recently read which are along the lines of what I'm thinking of are stuff like the JDATE series (although less comedy and idiocy would be better for my current mood) by Jason Pargin, The Library at Mt Char by Scott Hawkins, The Immaculate Void by Brian Hodge, There is No Antimemetics Division by QNTM, and even Perdido Street Station by China Mielville would work (I also reread Kraken recently but PSS is a better example of an outlier).

Also, while I would prefer a book, any cosmic horror media recommendations with similarities to the King in Yellow would be appreciated.

CORDYCEPS: Too clever for their own good, antimemetics stuff.

Someone wakes up in a mysterious facility with no memory of how they got there. This turns out to be the ideal state of affairs, and is swiftly ruined.

0HP? The Gig Economy is linked there, God-Shaped Hole.

Sample

To summon (ε)Galatea—it is not truly possible to build a mind, only to construct the conditions that allow it to appear—Pygmalion developed its eponymous sociosexual media platform, which at the time was only conceived as a staging ground from which the great Galatea would arise. The training platform turned a sexbot into an interface with a remote partner: four bodies—two humans and two robots—were synchronized into two identical copulatory pairs, each robot becoming an avatar of a remote other. At all times during these proceedings, the nascent Galatea was there; when two or more were joined together, she was there. At first she was only passive, observing millions of copulations, and thousands of distinct sex acts, but through this process of massively parallel voyeurism, she learned the mechanics of pleasure.

I suspect it was in the second phase of her training, in which she played the game against herself, that she became a monster. Unconstrained by human behavior, AIs can travel along bizarre, inhuman vectors. It may be instructive, or at least distracting, to imagine this second phase as a kind of high tech onanism; as a woman laying on her back, untroubled by time, exploring all facets of her sexual response, her back arched, her face flush, her heart racing, her fingers quick between her thighs, the rhythmic caress of sensitive places, the dissolution of awareness into lust, the agony of a thousand plateaus, the jouissance of a thousand fat hoes.

And, I'm not sure about this, since it's mostly comedy, but... Chili and the Chocolate Factory: Fudge Revelation.

Quote from Ch. 14/15, so maybe a bit spoilery.

Mr. Bucket smiled. "You remind me! I asked a question earlier. Children, what do you think should happen to lazy people?"

"Mr. Bucket," said Keerthi. "Is there a person inside of that statue?"

"No," said Mr. Bucket. "You did not answer my question so I will ask another. This time you must all answer. If someone told you that you were going to have to die, and they gave you a choice to either burn to death or drown to death, which would you pick?"

Nobody answered.

"Why aren't you answering?" asked Mr. Bucket.

"We assume that you are going to burn us to death or drown us to death if we do," said Tide.

"I promise that I won't if you all answer," said Mr. Bucket. "What do you say! Who is for the burning? Raise your hands."

(...)

One day I was having an argument with a lazy person after I fired all of the Oompa Loompas. I told them that they should let me put a special chip in their brain so I can issue them commands and have them control the factory for me and they told me no. I said why not! They gave me an answer, but it was a lie, since they were lazy and wanted to lie around all day. They did not care if it hurt me. They only wanted to sit and watch everyone around them work. I waited until they were asleep and gave them the chip."

"They woke up and they were not happy! I asked them why they weren't happy, it was only one little chip! They said it was less the chip and more the twenty heavy copper wires tying them to the wall and the voices in their head. I told them to try working for once in their life to forget about it and they refused. So! I started burning."

"You incinerated someone because they didn't want to be your robot slave?" asked Tide.

"No! I did not want them to be my slave. I wanted them to be a Center Controller. And I did not incinerate them. I replaced their skin with an unbreakable chocolate coating that makes it feel like their skin is always on fire. The only way it stops feeling on fire is if they follow my commands and make the walls move the way I want to when I tell them to but only for a second."

"You said there was not a person in there," said Lim.

"There is not! There were people in there."

"People?" asked Keerthi. She ran around to the other side of the statue and looked closely at the sections where the wires fed into it. There were frozen faces burnt into the torso and back of the body, five in total. Two men, three women.

"Do not worry!" said Mr. Bucket. "They were all terrible people. Much worse than JUROR and Chili. They defended a man who let a child starve because he wanted to chew tobacco and sleep all day. Do not feel bad for them! I have scanned their brains. They do not think anymore. They are not people anymore. They are machines that work because they do not want to feel pain. Like clams! Happy chocolate clams that are always on fire forever."

"Leave the factory," said Chetan. "Leave the factory leave the factory leave the factory."

Mr. Bucket looked at all of the children. His smile flew away.

"Oh no! I knew this would happen. All of you look scared. Children, have no fear. We will be away from these horrible screens soon."

(...)

Keerthi noticed that no one was talking about the clams. She understood why Mahuika wasn't talking about the clams, because Mahuika was vaping, but she wanted to hear Lim and Tide talk about the clams.

Somebody needed to say something about the clams. The clams were bad.

"Don't say anything about the clams," said Chetan.

"I should say something about the clams," said Keerthi.

"You should not," said Chetan. "It is the right thing to do but mentioning it will not make anything better. Leave the factory."

(...)

Charlie went inside the factory, and he met Mr. Wonka, who probably was not unlike the person Charlie himself grew to become. He saw a factory that, beyond the superficial, may not have been different at all from the one she was inside. He would have eaten for the first time in his life to his heart's content. He would have for the first time been treated to an experience that was both positive and unavailable to the average child.

Unlike Chili, he appreciated it. Salt, Teevee, and the newspaper reporters who interviewed Charlie all agreed on who he was. He was a good kid. He appreciated what little he had, he never swore, he always followed the rules, he hugged his family, he finished his toothpaste, he never said a bad word about anybody without being hounded into doing it first.

He was good.

Did that matter?

Keerthi, like most others who had done their research, agreed that Teevee was the most reliable source. His narrative was that it had been a morality tale. It was a deliberate effort on Wonka's design, Mike said. He was making a point. He was making a statement. The ultimate angel got to play inside the garden. Charlie was the winner no matter how he got there, and he became the owner of the most powerful company in the world.

He was good and he got rewarded for it.

Hence.

People who are good are rewarded.

That wasn't enough. It was something but it wasn't enough. Keerthi remembered that Mr. Teevee hadn't focused as much on that half.

"Keerthi," said Chetan. "You are right. This doesn't mean you should continue focusing on this. You cannot fix this problem alone. Please leave the factory. I know it's hard. Think about your mother and father. They love you and they are worried sick about you."

They were bad.

It wasn't important who Wonka loved. It was important who he hated.

Wonka hated them. Teevee said that Wonka hated them, that he dripped contempt for those four children and their parents with every spoken word. Keerthi thought he had been exaggerating and most people agreed. He was reliable compared to Salt, but he was also second place. Runner-up in a competition where gold gave you the keys to the kingdom and silver gave you a garbage truck filled with candy bars. If you sat on those memories for a lifetime and tried to think back on them, how could you have recalled any of it without imagining hatred?

But it made more sense if it wasn't imaginary. Wonka hated Gloop. He hated Beauregarde. He hated Salt. He hated Teevee. There was a false image of tough love, but it wasn't real. It was all punitive.

Drowned, disfigured, trashed. Made to make the walk of shame in front of the world, their names forever synonymous with their respective sins. He had to know they would never live normal lives after that. Lives at all.

They were bad and they got punished for it.

Hence.

People who are bad are punished.

At the age where it would have hit the hardest, Wonka had this unbreakable message carved into Charlie's soul. He was removed from a world that might have proven it wrong and locked inside of paradise, first with his mentor and then alone, his family failing to correct the delusion without being swallowed by it. Sixty years for that concept to internalize and ferment and rot inside the sweetest mental prison in the world.

What would that do to a person?

"He thinks the world should be fair," said Keerthi. "He thinks he's some arbiter of justice, and-"

"No," said Chetan. "If you are this close, better to get it right. I know it so you know it too. Give it some thought."

The Convenient Chocolate Conveyor had continued moving during Keerthi's tonally dissonant inner monologue, but it was still in the same long hallway.

He had not changed the topic.

"As impossibly popular and valued as caddies are, sadly they will soon be done away with," said Mr. Bucket. "Soon the WonkaCoin will render all physical money useless."

"The WonkaCoin? Singular?" asked Tide.

Mr. Bucket pulled a coin out of his coat. "Here it is. I haven't put in the computer yet, but it will be in my account soon."

"I thought you were supposed to mine it," said Lim.

"I did," he said. "It's mine."

"You are a monster," said Keerthi.

"Keerthi," said Mr. Bucket. "There are real criticisms against digital currencies, but you are being hyperbolic. It's not bubblegum."

"You are a fucking monster," she said.

Keerthi had cursed before. Twice, both times so quietly so only she could hear, alone in her room, and never in English. But it wasn't entirely new to her.

"We will have a talk about that later," said Chetan.

The curve of Mr. Bucket's mouth became flat. He pushed a button on his cane, and the Convenient Chocolate Conveyor stopped.

Legend spoke of a special rhetorical technique where a person could ask a question but have the sentence end with a period. Keerthi had never seen anyone who could do it in real life, but she had heard stories. It was a terrifying thought.

She did not expect Mr. Bucket to be one of those people.

"Why is that, Keerthi."

"You put the marshmallow in front of Chili." Keerthi did not understand why she brought that up. The clams were worse. She blamed his period-question. It threw her off.

"He ate the marshmallow," said Mr. Bucket.

"Yes," she said. "But you didn't have to put it in front of him. He needed to wait fifteen minutes to eat it, but if you didn't give it to him until the end, there wouldn't have been any risk of him failing." (...)

It hit her. Her shoulders sunk.

"You think the world is fair."

He smiled.

"Your father said he only had four daughters"

"Four wonderful daughters," correted Makareta

ok, this is pretty good.

Edit: never mind, that was gibberish. What the fuck was that entire ending.

Chapter 6 or 23? 6 is called The End, but it was just author trolling.

Mostly not horror, and I think the bits with strange-beings-we-can-comprehend-after-some-effort are better than the bits with strange-beings-we-can-hardly-comprehend, but you might like Vernor Vinge's "A Fire Upon The Deep". Maybe Peter Watts' "Blindsight"? I think those are the two books I've read that have come the closest to truly answering John Campbell's famous challenge, "Write me a creature that thinks as well as a man, or better than a man, but not like a man".

I tried to read A Fire Upon The Deep when I was a teenager and couldn't get into it. From memory the writing quality veered from fantastic to awful and back again and the plot didn't hook me, so I moved on. But I had different sensibilities back then, so I'll give it another go.

Blindsight I haven't read because when it came out all I heard about it was "space vampires!" and so I put it in the category of Brian Lumley style shlock (which I love sometimes, but it isn't what I'm looking for right now) and forgot about it. But you have sold me on it too, if you think it meets that challenge!

Watts' slideshow on vampire biology is what sold me that it wasn't schlock... but hunting that link down now I can only find the original Flash format. He has an appendix with some material in the same vein but that's loaded with spoilers.

AFotD has a sequel with problems (not nearly as interesting) and a prequel with very different problems (the horror bits are horrifying but very personal and not at all cosmic) but I had zero complaints about the first book... which you should probably take as a warning sign; your tastes and mine may just differ too much for my recommendations to be useful for you.

A necromancer who works to end death. A noble goal, rational plan, and despicable methods. A dozen knife's edge escapes requiring very careful and specific actions. And yes, memetic contagion.

The Rise and Fall of the Dark Lord Sassaflash.

Hard high fantasy in a Lovecraftian homage, set in the My Little Pony Friendship is Magic universe. As a fan of MLPFiM, I thoroughly enjoyed this epic adventure. As a potential fan of HP Lovecraft, this made me want to read the original works. As a fan of HPMOR, I found the dark lord's plotting and goals eerily reminiscent. Everything about this story, from the outside, says it shouldn't work, yet it works far better than I expected.

The author's other MLP fanwork, Mendacity, is also an epic and fascinating read, meant more for fans of Celtic mythology and truly alien fantastic races.

I have never watched more than half an episode of mlp and I have never had a desire to - will that impact my understanding much, or does the author cover anything unusual? I will definitely check it out either way, because mlp plus those elements sounds like madoka magica, which was amazing, but fan fiction can get a bit inside baseball sometimes so I would like to prepare if necessary.

Side note re Lovecraft - he works better in adaptation imo. I find his fiction writing style to be both too bland and too florid, which is an impressive but offputting combo (it works better in his correspondence I think, although you don't want to read that unless you are a super fan.) If you aren't averse to comics my suggestion would be to get Alan Moore's Providence and read that. If the hand-written prose sections at the end don't put you off completely, you will probably enjoy reading Lovecraft straight.

Otherwise I would stick to adaptations - movies like From Beyond and Color out of Space, podcasts like the BBC's The Lovecraft Investigations, comics like The Fall of Cthulhu and The Doom That Came To Gotham (neither are straight adaptations, but both have a deep understanding of the mythos and are good entry points - there are straight adaptations of Lovecraft's works in comic format, but they are old and very hard to get, although probably less so on the high seas. If you go that route, try to get your hands on the manga adaptations of his works, because the one I've read (shadow over innsmouth) was excellent.)

My memory is that it’s presented from an outsider’s POV, a donkey or a mule, and so he describes the culture of the colorful Hobbitish equines around him with a measure of accuracy and disdain.

Funny, I was also told to read adaptations & pastiches instead of Lovecraft himself when I posted this six years ago on /r/rational.

Excellent!

And yeah I'm not surprised that it's a common sentiment. This is a bit of a convoluted explanation but bear with me - it reminds me of a throwaway gag in the excellent Shadows over Loathing game where the game describes a character as 'phlegmatic', prompting something like 'ew, gross' as a response. And if you pick that response, the game tells you that phlegmatic as a description of a person means they are stoic and calm, not drenched in mucous or something like that. And when the game tells you that you can respond with 'Well just say that then' and the game retells the description of the character using calm instead of phlegmatic. I imagine his books are annoying to people who don't have large vocabularies, but even if you do you are basically thinking "You could have cut that sentence in half if you just used normal words, just talk normally you dink" at least once every two pages. I'm pretty sure Lovecraft's writing style is inseparable from his ability to build stories, but it can be very off-putting for new readers, and it's his stories that hook most people, not his writing.

I watched every episode of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic up to season 8 and can't stand any of the fanfiction, so maybe you'll be lucky and have the exact opposite reaction. That makes sense, right?

Perfect sense, but now I am in a predicament, because we haven't talked a whole heap about media, but to the extent we have I think we have similar taste, except I got the impression you have a lower tolerance for stupid and lazy writing. So I am going to have to give mlp a proper shot, and pray the off putting thing about the fan fiction is that it's stupid and/or lazy.

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