No.6752
He was an anglophile which is just stupid, but he was a nice writer so he cares
also nigga cat
No.6753
When, long ago, the gods created Earth
In Jove's fair image Man was shaped at birth.
The beasts for lesser parts were next designed;
Yet were they too remote from humankind.
To fill the gap, and join the rest to Man,
Th'Olympian host conceiv'd a clever plan.
A beast they wrought, in semi-human figure,
Filled it with vice, and called the thing a
No.6754
He was scared of fish
No.6755
Entertaining racist.
No.6756
all the cthulu thing isn't scary anymore, my guess is that a big part of a fear came from the elimination of humanity in general but these days we allready have WOMD that can erease earth so people have allready gotten used to the fact that we're completely doomed anyways, infact most of lovecraftian shit gives a comforting and nostalgic atmosphere these days.
also
>>>/hobby/ No.6757
Americans aren’t human and Lovecraft was aware of the conspiracy but feared for his life and just tried to tell the truth about the ugly fish goblinos in world like Shadow over Insmouth
No.6758
Damn bro you got the whole squad laughin
No.6759
really great author who pioneered a genre. his personal views are more funny than anything, he naming his cat uighurman, being such an anglophile that he was terrified of having Welsh ancestry, and marrying a Jewess is comical.
No.6760
BUH BUH WAH IF IT WERE LIKE SOME BIG SUPA CRAZI POWER THAT DON'T LIKE ME
damn thad wud suk ;(
No.6761
His racism is so wacky and archaic that it’s funny. He holds prejudices that likely wouldn’t even occur to the average Klansman or skinhead. Pretty sure there’s a line in Call of Cthulu that mentions how only the degenerate races worship him, such as the mulattos or the Portuguese.
No.6762
Didn't he become a lefty in his later life ?
No.6763
>>6761He was also deathly afraid of the Welsh.
No.6764
>>6761>>6763If he didnt hate the dutch, then he wasnt certified racist™
No.6765
>>6762not really but I mean he married a jew, and become more accepting.
No.6766
>>6762I think after WWII happened he rescinded his views on racism, but it was probably out of sympathy rather than because his personal views on biology actually changed.
No.6767
>>6765His wife left him because he went on antisemitic rants.
No.6768
>>6766Lovecraft died in 1937.
No.6769
He realised the threat eternal 🏴🏴🏴sheep shaggers🏴🏴🏴 posed before anyone else.
No.6770
I liked the movie "In the Mouth of Madness" but that was more of a satire of Lovecraft based on a novel by Stephen King so… lmao
No.6771
>>6750I find it ironic that /pol/fags worship him when he was completely fascinated by oriental culture. He makes a lot of explicit references to islamic texts, the nameless city is from an Arabic myth and is mentioned in the quran. His conception of deities is also very eerily similar to the sufic conception of god. They believe he is a being beyond human conception and the more you learn about God's nature the more likely you are to go insane. Also his favorite book as a child was a 1001 nights.
No.6772
>>6750A cool /pol/tard. Interesting to note that he mellowed out tremendously later in life, I think he would just be a normal editor for Weird Tales if he had lived longer.
No.6773
>>6770watch colour out of space, its directly based on lovecraft and kinda has a nice little b-movie charm
No.6774
>>6771>I find it ironic that /pol/fags worship him when he was completely fascinated by oriental culture.It's not ironic, /pol/negros all are filthy weebs and believe 99% the same bullshit Islamic fundies do
No.6775
>>6771>/pol/fags worship him Since when? Before or after some SJW-hero did a nice job and break it by saying that Lovecraft is ugh, problematic? I really wonder how this people think. Is it that everything is new for them? Or is it that they can't make political judgements? As in poker play, so to speak.
>>6774>It's not ironic, /pol/negros all are filthy weebs and believe 99% the same bullshit Islamic fundies doThat would be an anachronism. Because the latest wahabist/salafist bullshit is really new. Say what you want about orientalism, true or imagined. But at least it isn't about someone razing tombs because it's "shirk" to keep historical memorysakes.
No.6776
he looks like zuckerberg and AOC had a baby
No.6777
>>6771hitler himself liked muslims
No.6778
>>6764Who doesn't hate the perfidious d*tch though? Their whole country is below sea level. You know what's also below sea level? The Deep Ones. Dagon. Sunken R'lyeh.
And far too tall, as if for generations they've been interbreeding with a race of gangly alien conquerors from way out beyond the stars.
Awful people. Awful country. A pervasive aura of wrongness hangs over the country like a pall.
>>6768>Lovecraft died in 1937.Yes, and Herbert West interviewed him in 1948.
No.6779
When you think about it, we actually did discover lovecraftian/eldritch shit in the far reaches of space in a sense
In regards to black holes for instance, we use Infinity for our calculations because the math is unable to calculate it - as the escape velocity comes ever closer to light speed for instance, the mass exponentially grows. we have to do a border comparison, which returns infinity as gravity for an escape velocity of c at the event horizon.
A black hole is also a sphere. the horizon of the sphere is the cutoff point of our universe and the spacetime inside the sphere. the singularity is simply the center. if we follow our conventional physics, then at the exact cutoff point of the event horizon, spacetime's curvature is infinite to make the escape velocity c.
that means that inside the horizon, things get..eldritch. spacetime is bent to such a degree that the dimensions of time and the dimensions of space switch spots. there is no way out because every direction leads toward the singularity. in essence, space has become time and the singularity is all around you. the only way to get out would be to go back in time.
this is what people mean when they say that inside a black hole, physics and mathematics doesn't work. it just doesn't. think about some logical consequences of the things we currently know about black holes and general physics.
'black hole' is an apt name for this phenomenon. a spot in the fabric of reality that tears it apart in ways we cannot reconcile. a barrier that can only be crossed one way, and once beyond, nothing works the way it should.
black holes are quite possibly the most lovecraftian thing in this universe.
That’s not to get into stars, powered by insane incomprehensible energy, with heat so intense as to fuse atoms together, they have natural life cycles too depending on the type of star, and on the cosmic scale stars are almost like cells or atoms, in fact, ain’t it interesting how solar systems and the components of atoms resemble each other?
No.6780
>I-Is that… an Italian person… in my beautiful New England?!? AHHHHH uighurMAN HELP ME I'M GOING INSAAAAAAAAAANE
No.6781
>>6779Too bad Lovecraft was apparently not aware of the work of Einstein or Schwarzschild. They had already theorized the existence of black holes by his day.
No.6782
>>6771/pol/ definitely does not worship him? not sure why you think that. /tv/ and /lit/ mock him endearingly but I think that's the extent 4chan knows or cares about Lovecraft
No.6784
>>6781>Too bad Lovecraft was apparently not aware of the work of Einstein or Schwarzschild.Nope. In one story, there's some refrerence to some semitic man saying that time is relative. Lovecraft also used Alfred Wegener's continental drift theory as a vehicle.
No.6785
>>6750insane reactionary and racist who was also a talented writer.
/thread
No.6787
>>6750good stories and basically a caricature of New England. 10/10.
No.6789
>>6763source? Copypastaing that would be coemdy gold
No.6790
great writer, worth reading, essential if you're ever interested in accelerationism
No.6791
While a lot of people talk about his racism, I think it's important to contextualize it. Once you understand Lovecraft's background, you get a bit of insight into why he had some really morally abhorrent views.
>Born and raised in a dilapidated New England Mansion
>Father went incurably insane when he was a young boy, Lovecraft had to watch him physically disintegrate in an asylum
>Lived with his grandfather, received no formal education but had free access to all of his grandfather's books; getting classic literature, a few sciences, etc
>Develops no social relationships outside of his immediate family in this time
>Mother suddenly goes insane and gets sent to the same psychiatric ward
>Eventually released, takes Lovecraft back home and lives the life of a hermit
>Constantly tells Lovecraft that he's disgusting, he's ugly, that he couldn't EVER go outside because of how horrible he looks.
>During this time it's said that Lovecraft only ever left the house for necessities, and even then only wearing a large coat and hat and not making eye contact with anyone.
>Gets his big break writing horror
>His letter to the editor describes his own stories as trash, but hopefully one of them would be worth printing.
>Never really achieves fame, but gets a small circle of writers he'd correspond with frequently.
>For the first time in his entire adult life, Lovecraft actually has friends.
>Gets married, his wife believes that she can help him by rescuing him from the shadow of his family-life in New England, they move to New York City.
>Lovecraft, social mess that he is, immediately hates the city.
>Goes from seeing no one outside of his immediate family to massive crowds of people, impoverished migrants, etc
>Perpetually unemployed, has no actual skillset to find a job.
>Wife eventually divorces him, he immediately returns to New England
>Keeps up the correspondence with his friends, meets a few of them in person.
>Dies completely broke.
Honestly, Lovecraft's life is a a testament to what loneliness could do to a person.
No.6792
>>6791>Lived with his grandfather, received no formal education but had free access to all of his grandfather's books; getting classic literature, a few sciences, etcReminds me of Dunwich Horror.
But if we're going to believe Houllebecq's long essay, Lovecraft was at first infatuated with New York. He didn't like to grow up. Had to stop playing with his toys at 17. He also thought that he was born in the wrong century. He would rather have lived in the 1700s or the 2000s, IIRC.
No.6793
The man was incredibly fearful of everything all the time. One of his books IIRC was based on his fear of his neighbor's brand new air conditioner and it gave him nightmares until he went over there and spent a few hours and realized it wasn't going to suck his soul out or something.
No.6794
>>6753A what? I think you forgot to post the whole thing
No.6795
>>6791>be lumpen>be reactionarylike clockwork
No.6796
>>6793yeah here it is
>The story is set up as the narrator's explanation for why a "draught of cool air" is the most detestable thing to him.
>The tale opens up in the spring of 1923 with the narrator looking for housing in New York City, finally settling in a converted brownstone on West Fourteenth Street. Eventually, a chemical leak from the floor above reveals that the inhabitant directly overhead is a strange, old, reclusive doctor. One day the narrator suffers a heart attack, and remembering that a doctor lives directly above, heads there, culminating in his first meeting with Dr. Muñoz.
>The doctor shows supreme medical skill and saves the narrator with a concoction of drugs, resulting in the fascinated narrator returning regularly to sit and learn from the doctor, his new friend. As their talks continue, it becomes increasingly evident that the doctor has an obsession with defying death through all available means.
>The doctor's room is kept cold at approximately 56 degrees Fahrenheit (13 degrees Celsius) using an ammonia-based refrigeration system, the pumps driven by a gasoline engine. As time goes on, the doctor's health declines and his behaviour becomes increasingly eccentric. The cooling system is continuously upgraded, to the point where some areas are at sub-freezing temperatures–until one night when the pump breaks down.
>Without explanation, the panic-striken doctor frantically implores his friend to help him keep his body cool. Unable to repair the machine until morning and without a replacement piston, they resort to having the doctor stay in a tub full of ice. The narrator spends his time replenishing the ice, but soon is forced to employ someone else to do it. When he finally manages to locate competent mechanics and the replacement part however, it is too late.
>He arrives at the apartment only to see the rapidly-decomposed remains of the doctor, and a rushed, "hideously smeared" letter. The narrator reads it, and to his horror, finally understands the doctor's peculiarities: Dr. Muñoz was undead, and has been for the past 18 years. Refusing to give in, he has kept his body going past the point of death using various methods, including perpetual coldness. No.6797
>>6795I wouldn't exactly say he was lumpen, class-wise. More like an impoverished aristocrat.
No.6806
>>6761Dude literally hated everything not an Angloid New Englander. To the point that he called Hitler’s political platform “too moderate” in his early years.
No.6808
>>6789He only wrote The Shadow Over Innsmouth because he found out that his grandpa was welsh. The ending where the protagonist found out that he’s also a deep one is from that.
No.6809
>>6764The only race who racists aren't allowed to hate is People of Blackface (aka the Dutch).
No.9135
>>6755>racisthow?
>>6756Cthulhu isn't scary anymore because people don't actually read his literature and thus fail to understand that it isn't some generic kaiju, but a LITERAL (eldritch) god who is incomprehensible in true form and humanity is absolutely nothing in front of it.
No.9136
To repost
The subject of Hitler came up several times in Lovecraft's letters, and this particular quote I think helps to put a good deal of his views on the man - and the Nazis in general - in perspective. It is more damning with faint praise than Hitler receives in some of Lovecraft's other letters, casting the Nazi dictator as the lesser of two evils, and focusing specifically on the contrast between Nazism and Bolshevism - basically, the Communist revolution in Russia, with its inherent overthrowing of the old order and iconoclasm. While we today know that Hitler was worse than Lovecraft knew, these are the views of a man from his own time, working with what limited information came through the press - and even at that, Lovecraft was suspicious of the press, leading to a kind of epistemic closure. It was really only through correspondents like Shea that Lovecraft got any kind of challenge to some of the preconceptions he held, which forced him to defend and reconsider them.
"
As for Germany today—to call it a “madhouse” is to exaggerated in the grossest fashion. The details of Nazism are deplorable, but they do not even begin to compare in harmfulness with the extravagances of communism. You seem to forget that most of the German people are quietly going about their business as usual, with a much better morale than they had last year. If the Nazi destruction of certain books is silly—& there is no reason to deny that it is—then there is no word to express the abysmal idiocy & turpitude of the bolshevik war on normal culture & expression. Germany has not even begun to parallel Russia in the destruction of those basic values which Western Europeans live by. When I say I like Hitler I do not imply that his is a & blindly against the disintegrative forces which more educated & sophisticated people accept without adequate evidence as inevitable. His neurotic fanaticism, scientific addle-patedness, & crude gaucheries & extravagances are admitted & deplored—& of course it is quite possible that he actually may do more harm than good. Once can scarcely prophesy the future. But the fact remains that he is the sole remaining rallying-point for German morale, & that virtually all of the best & most cultivated Germans accept him temporarily for what he is—a lesser evil at a special & exacting crisis of history. Objections to Hitler—that is, the violent & hysterical objections which one sees outside Germany—seem to be based largely on a soft idealism or “humanitarianism” which is out of places in an emergency. This sentimentalism may be a pleasing ornament in normal times, but it must be kept out of the way when the survival of a great nation hangs in the balance. The preservation of Germany as a coherent cultural & political fabric is of infinitely greater importance than the comfort of those who have been incommoded by Nazism—& of course the number of suffers is negligible as compared with that of bolshevism’s victims. If what you say were true—that others could save Germany better than Hitler—then I’d be in favour of giving them a chance. But unfortunately the others had their chance & didn’t prove themselves equal to it. […] Your hatred of Nazism—especially in the light of your extenuation of bolshevism’s vastly greater savageries—appears to me to be a matter of idealistic emotion unsupported by historic perspective or by a sense of the practical compromises necessary in tight places. Emotion runs away with you. For example—you get excited about four Americans who were mobbed because they didn’t salute the Nazi flag. Well, as a matter of fact, did you ever hear of a nation that didn’t mob foreigners who refused to salute its flag in times of political & military emergency? […] Still—don’t get my wrong. I’m not saying that Schön[e] Adolf is anything more than a lesser evil. A crude, blind force—a stop-gap. The one point is that he’s the only force behind which the traditional German spirit seems to be able to get. When the Germans can get another leader, & emerge from the present period of arbitrary fanaticism, his usefulness will be over."
- H. P. Lovecraft to J. Vernon Shea, 8 Nov 1933, 000-0655, Letters to J. Vernon Shea 202-203
>>6808>>6763>>6761>The WelshAye, Albion Gwiber of (New) England has always clashed with Y Ddraig Goch
No.9141
>>9135I think it’s more that Cthulhu is no longer scary because we’ve had world ending weapons, have known the universe is incomprehensibly vast, have known how old the universe is, known the entire history of Earth and our evolution without any god needed, for nearly a century now.
Once you’ve lived fearing the very real end of the world due to human warfare for decades Cthulhu conceptually seems way less scary.
No.9258
A very interesting Evangelion x Cthulhu Mythos Crossover fic that I enjoyed but also left me somewhat unsettled. Frankly the sheer horror of the eldritch beings and how they affect people is what makes it a bit offputting after finishing. It's the kind of horror that crawls under your skin like a tentacle.
https://www.fanfiction.net/s/3872447/1/Fear Of course the 'best' Eva-Cthulhu fic is of course Children of an Elder God
http://www.thekeep.org/~rpm/eva/coaeg.htmlhttps://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Fanfic/ChildrenOfAnElderGodOn a seperate note there is an anime based on HP Lovecraft's ideas:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyaruko:_Crawling_with_LoveSpeaking of Digimon got really eldritch with some of its media.
https://bogleech.com/digimon/d150mother.htmlhttps://old.reddit.com/r/whowouldwin/comments/1yby6j/evangelion_unit_01neon_genesis_evangelion_vs/ Also it's amusing that some biblical depictions of angels are closer to Evangelion than anything we see in common media.
No.9259
>>9141His power is supposed to be casually equivalent to an all out nuclear strike and the noneuclidian horror is an affect that supposedly affects anyone.
Cthulhu is only less scary because it's fiction with a realistic edge to it.
No.9283
Color Out of Space is the only story of his that genuinely spooked me
No.9285
>>9141In the original works Cthulhu isn’t that great though. It’s just a lowly priest settling on a planet most other Old Ones considered an irrelevant backwater world.
The thing works through madness of the world and can go intangible, no weapon can really affect it.
No.9288
>>9285I mean Gamma Ray Bursts can destroy our planet whenever and we have no proof time can’t just randomly stop, so….
No.9289
Various people have said that Lovecraft expressed a thorough-going materialism either throughout or in his later works. I'm pretty this "materialism" is of the naturalist sort.
Recently, his work eventually inspired the philosophy of "speculative realism"- imagining the world as autonomous from human comprehension- which the influence is obvious. I would say that it's a trend that has appeared as the social sciences have increasingly begun to realise the slow pace of its predictive power. And, more specifically, in relation to some British universities' embrace of continental philosophy and radical, para-academic aesthetics.
Williams S. Burroughs underwent a similar treatment because of Nick Land in the 80-90s; and, what do you know; Lovecraft was a big inspiration for him as well.
No.9355
Good entertainer, nothing more than that.
No.9356
>>9289>Recently, his work eventually inspired the philosophy of "speculative realism"- imagining the world as autonomous from human comprehension- which the influence is obvious.But that idea is not rare at all, you can find it through the history of philosophy. IMO Baudrillard's "objective irony" (objects play with us, not we with them) is a far more interesting spin on the idea than speculative realism. As for fiction you could as well cite Philip Dick as an influence for example.
No.9358
dont much about lovecraft but i found a 8bit rpg for like 3 dollars on steam called cthulu saves the world and it was amusing for a bit
No.9362
>>9358Lovecraft and video games is a pretty good mix in theory, but not many do it well because once you figure out how the game's systems work it loses all of that crushing horror. Take Amnesia for example - it quickly becomes a simple stealth game with resource management.
A proper Lovecraft game would constantly tweak its systems just to fuck with your sense of what's going to happen. And/or would have the systems so complex and opaque that the player can never figure out how things really interact with each other. Then horror would be something more than just cheap decoration.
No.9363
>>9362i agree 100% but i was talking about a 3 dollar 8 bit rpg that was goofy so i didnt have super high expectations
No.11884
What do you guys think of h bomber guys video on him?
https://youtu.be/l8u8wZ0WvxI No.11888
>>11884>HPlovercraft in te 21 century is really about me. Video turns into personal sex idpol after a few minutes. I thought I would get interesting stuff about the HPloveccratf fantasy world, but it turns out it is about boring personal stuff. I think the video might be trying to tell me homophobes are fish people. I probably did not understand that the way it was meant. It is definitely trying to spoil the fun about HPs cool monsters. If you think it is about something else , you did not grow up, you grew sour.
No.11895
>>11888>I think the video might be trying to tell me homophobes are fish people. <I probably did not understand that the way it was meant.
Audibly keked
No.11904
>>6750I hear he had a redemption arc at the end of his life, but I am not sure.
No.11917
nigger cat lmaoo
No.11918
According to porkypedia:
>After leaving New York, he moved to an apartment at 10 Barnes Street near Brown University with his surviving aunt; a few years later, they moved to a slightly less expensive place at 65 Prospect Street. As a result of the Great Depression, he shifted towards socialism, decrying both his prior beliefs and the rising tide of fascism.[78] He supported Franklin D. Roosevelt, but he thought that the New Deal was not sufficiently leftist.[79]
No.11934
>>11904He shifted significantly to the left in the last 6 years of his life, disowning his reactionary past and basically becoming a socialist. I recommend reading his personal letters, it's fascinating watching how his views change, and how disillusioned and disgusted he becomes with the views of his younger self.
No.11942
>>11904He shat on The New Deal for trying to save the doomed system of capitalism and advocate for revolutionary actions. He was only a reactionary due to his dysfunctional upbringing of a NEET in hyper conservative New England.
Similar to how Che used to be white supremacist until he actually lived alongside actual working class people and realized the “racial divide” of LatAm is completely made up by the ruling oligarchs to mimic to colonial period.
No.11989
>>6785the insane produce the best art, its why reactionary nineteenth century Russians made some of the best literature
No.19023
And interesting opinion of his writing
https://archive.is/KcbKP No.19024
whose fucking hobby is H.P lovecraft
No.19025
I like his cat.
No.19026
>>19024People who like weird eldritch stuff? SCP used to be really into him before they devolved into gay RP.
No.19038
wholesome person
No.19039
>>6755mo u new york is poopoo lands
No.21156
His works contain explicit references to ancient islamic texts, some say cosmic horror is a pessimistic inversion of sufist cosmology. Some of his stories, like the nameless city, is a direct reference to a story contained within the quran. Here are some direct quotes:
>At one time I formed a juvenile collection of Oriental pottery and objets d’art, announcing myself as a devout Mohammedan and assuming the pseudonym of “Abdul Alhazred” – which you will recognise as the author of that mythical Necronomicon which I drag into various of my tales […]. (letter to Edwin Baird, February 3, 1924) >The absurdity of the myth I was called upon to accept and the sombre greyness of the whole faith compared with the Eastern magnificence of Mahometanism, made me de-finitely agnostic […].10You can read more here:
>https://www.researchgate.net/publication/272537419_The_Darker_Islam_within_the_American_Gothic_Sufi_Motifs_in_the_Stories_of_HP_Lovecraft https://github.com/punchmonster/Lovecraft-Letters/blob/master/19370207-Catherine-L-Moore.md I remembered from that the biography of Lovecraft included that in his homeschooling, he was able to read the thousand and one nights, developing an love for eastern culture, even adopting an arabic name (this of course is when he is a child).
No.21554
If you read to the end, it's a bit like in a story, I think it's At The Mountains of Madness,. Where they discover a horror in a familiar but totally incongruous form given the setting
a creature in the form of a New York subway train.
http://opr.news/7c334f66211124en_gb?link=1&client=opera
>Recently, his work eventually inspired the philosophy of "speculative realism"- imagining the world as autonomous from human comprehension- which the influence is obvious.>But that idea is not rare at all, you can find it through the history of philosophy. IMO Baudrillard's "objective irony" (objects play with us, not we with them) is a far more interesting spin on the idea than speculative realism. As for fiction you could as well cite Philip Dick as an influence for example.Yea, and Islamic philosophy. The example from Islamic philosophy that Graham Harman gives a lot is the question of what it's like for fire to burn cotton.
No.21593
>>21123>blocked by Sony PicturesAnyone have it downloaded? My file got corrupted.
No.21601
>>6750the cat thing outs him has a racist I think
No.21606
>>21601he used to be a racist until he matured
No.21674
>>21156I think Lovecraft had a huge love for both middle eastern and East Asian culture. In many stories he has referenced both cultures as well as making a story envisioning a rise of East Asia specifically China even during his racist period. Later on he was noted in many of his private letters to praise China as being a very traditionalist and cultured country.
>>21606More correctly he got laid with a Jewish lady which forced him to socialize and drop the schizophrenia.
No.23102
>>23101A lot of his stories were made to be funny intentionally. Like the reanimator series, some even argue that his essay on cats vs dogs was also made in jess. It’s also a big part in his literary frustration that led to some of his work getting shelved and only saw the light of day after his death. For instance the shadow over innsmouth was an angry shitpost he made when he realized his grandpa was welsh.
No.23104
>>23102>literally a 1930s DnD Dungeon-master/troll but as a writer lmao
No.23108
I read a small collection of some of his shorter work recently and they were generally entertaining but there was one where the protagonist wanted to escape some evil spirit that torture the dead by… killing himself??
No.23112
He was a poltard writing fan fiction.
No.23130
>>9289It isn't at all and he only really expressed in letters toward the end of his life not really in his works
>I cannot accept your point about natural reluctance "to destroy the system which sustains us", because no rational reformer wants to destroy any system which sustains any honest worker. As I see it, your mistake lies in assuming that it is the dying plutocratic set-up which sustains you—a very basic & crucial mistake, when one comes to think of it. Actually nothing could be further from the truth. So far as your own individual case is concerned—if I judge correctly, you are an expert in certain forms of finance & accountancy & administration, whereby your services are important in any enterprise involving the receipt, disbursement, exchange, or comparison of commodities, or the maintenance of complex industrial or administrative operations. Now do you suppose that such services are any less necessary, or that they would be less reasonably rewarded, in a government-controlled or government-owned enterprise than in a private profit-grabbing scheme? What difference would it make to you whether your just return for high-grade mental work came from the American government or from a courteous private financier? The only losers in a move towards rationalisation would be the dividend-drawers who now get something for nothing, & the few top executives whose present salaries are disproportionately padded beyond all relationship to the extent of their actual services. Would such a rationalisation form an "overthrowing of the system which provides you livelihood"? I can't see that it would. I can't see that socialism would hurt anybody who is willing to work & who expects a just return from the work he performs—including guarantees of proper security in old age & in times of necessary unemployment or disability. Then, of course, it must be remembered that the moderate road avoids even the principal minor ills of readjustment. Communism would mean some rather disconcerting bumps—but there is nothing of destruction or violent dislocation in the orderly progressivism whose various stages are represented by the New Deal, the La Follettes, & Norman Thomas.
>But the real joke of course is, that all this isn't a matter of choice anyhow! Capitalism is dying from internal as well as external causes, & its own leaders & beneficiaries are less & less able to kid themselves. I'm no economist, but from recent reading I've been able to form a rough picture of the dilemma—the need to restrict consumers' goods & to pile up a needless plethora of producing equipment in order to maintain the irrational surplus called profit—which has caused orthodox economists like Hayek & Robbins to admit that only starvation wages & artificial scarcity could stabilize the profit system in future & avert increasing cyclical depressions of utterly destructive scope. Laissez-faire capitalism is dead—make no mistake about that. The only avenue of survival for plutocracy is a military & emotional fascism whereby millions of persons will be withdrawn from the industrial arena & placed on a dole or in concentration-camps with high-sounding patriotic names. That or socialism—take your choice. In the long run it won't be the New Deal but the mere facts of existence which will be recognised as the real & inevitable slayer of Hooverism. Nobody is going to "destroy the system"—for it has been destroying itself ever since it evolved out of the old agrarian-handicraft economy a century & a half ago.
>All this from an antiquated mummy who was on the other side until 1931! Well—I can better understand the inert blindness & defiant ignorance of the reactionaries from having been one of them. I know how smugly ignorant I was—wrapped up in the arts, the natural (not social) sciences, the externals of history & antiquarianism, the abstract academic phases of philosophy, & so on—all the one-sided standard lore to which, according to the traditions of the dying order, a liberal education was limited. God! the things that were left out—the inside facts of history, the rational interpretation of periodic social crises, the foundations of economics & sociology, the actual state of the world today … & above all, the habit of applying disinterested reason to problems hitherto approached only with traditional genuflections. Flag-waving, & callous shoulder-shrugs! All this comes up with the humiliating force through an incident of a few days ago—when young Conover, having established contact with Henneberger, the ex-owner of WT, obtained from the latter a long epistle which I wrote Edwin Baird on Feby. 3, 1924, in response to a request for biographical & personal data. Little Willis asked permission to publish the text in his combined SFC-Fantasy, & I began looking the thing over to see what it was like—for I had not the least recollection of ever having penned it. Well …. I managed to get through, after about 10 closely typed pages of egotistical reminiscences & showings-off & expressions of opinion about mankind & the universe. I did not faint—but I looked around for a 1924 photograph of myself to burn, spit on, or stick pins in! Holy Hades—was I that much of a dub at 33 … only 13 years ago? There was no getting out of it—I really had thrown all that haughty, complacent, snonbish, self-centered, intolerant bull, & at a mature age when anybody but a perfect damned fool would have known better! That earlier illness had kept me in seclusion, limited my knowledge of the world, & given me something of the fatuous effusiveness of a belated adolescent when I finally was able to get out more around 1920, is hardly much of an excuse. Well—there was nothing to be done ….. except to rush a note back to Conover & tell him I'd dismember him & run the fragments through a sausage-grinder if he ever thought of printing such a thing! The only consolation lay in the reflection that I had matured a bit since '24. It's hard to have done all one's growing up since 33—but that's a damn sight better than not growing up at all. Here's hoping that Henneberger (quite a get-rich-quick Wallingford in his way) won't try to blacken me with the letter!I think its quite clear from the phraseology that he was a Marxist or at least a SocDem that had a strong familiarity with Marx by the end of his life and was essentially arguing for the Soviet model to be applied in the US, he was also switched on enough to anticipate neoliberalism, its though leaders and offer a proto-critique.
No.24228
>>23112>imagine pigeonholing everything into your internet-centered world-view Touch grass
No.24229
>>23102>the shadow over innsmouth was an angry shitpost he made when he realized his grandpa was welsh.On the subject there's a really strange fanfic of NGE/innsmouth that keeps close to the 2 works' styles.
https://www.fanfiction.net/s/7089598/1/Rebuild-of-Fear No.24233
>>23101Funny pulp stories are the best. Most of the concepts introduced were already incredibly ridiculous on their own. He should’ve embraced it fully.
>>23130He also got into a shouting match with both of his aunts over his support for FDR. It’s really a huge shame that he died at the cusp of radicalization.
No.24812
>>24235Thanks Shay, cool screenshot
No.26145
>>6750He was a great writer, but also a massive racist and all-around elitist. Which actually makes his writing better.
If you accept "The Death of the Author" and the idea that the protagonist of a story isn't necessarily supposed to be a moral exemplar or even a good person, you get a lot of books where the protagonists are racist, upper-class dickheads who think they're better than everyone and know everything, only to get their comeuppance when they come up against dark and ancient forces they cannot possibly comprehend and have to face the truth of their own insignificance. That's probably not how Lovecraft intended it, but once again "Death of the Author".
No.26149
>>26148> dead a month laterDid the CIA get him?
No.26162
>>6761Hahahaha I forgot it already, Yeah there is that phrase
Such are prejudices.
I didn't know but hell, a spanish haloween special from ¿liberal socdem? ¿just socdem? mexican youtubers
No.26175
>>26145>but also a massive racist and all-around elitist.He was only like that under the care of his abusive aunts. When the money from his grandpa's estate dried up the same time the Great Depression hit he became more and more leftist over time with all the social elitist attitudes being channeled into a very Stalinist high culture appreciation. Him subsequently getting a large circle of supportive and loyal friends helped him get over the whole racism. Especially his wife who's an older jewish lady that took him to New York and fixed his mommy issues.
This then later led to him basically got kicked out of his aunts' house after an argument where he was pro FDR. By the end of his life he was pretty ashamed of his edgy right wing phase and only occasionally talk badly about blacks just to appease his inner cirlce of fans.
Long story short his racism is way overblown. Most of his work about the fear of the unknown is more closely tied with capitalist alienation than anything else.
Fun fact he even had a weeb period in which Lovecraft began to admired all things Chinese and Japanese as 'high culture".
No.26648
>>6750What were the main literary inspirations of Lovecraft? Being a dumbass I have the idea his type of stories and themes came out of thin air but that must be wrong.
No.26661
>>26648He was pretty open about what inspired him. His biggest childhood idols were the gothic horror of Edgar Allan Poe, the long form prose and the fictional pantheon building of lord Dunsany, the unknowable horror from Robert W Chambers.
This was combined with Lovecraft’s xenophobia and his interests in cosmology and Arabic tales from 1001 nights to form the Cthulhu mythos. Interesting enough there were a lot of parallels between Lovecraft and his British counterpart in William Hope Hodson another sci-fi horror author that also use antiquated prose for eldritch horror fiction that Lovecraft even commented on it. Unfortunately Hodson was killed by an artillery shell during WW1 before his talents were recognized.
No.35889
It's kind of funny that one of the cosmic horrors of one of his earlier stories is just Eskimos.
No.35896
>>35889>one of the cosmic horrors of one of his earlier stories is just Eskimos.Hold up, what? Where?!
No.35897
Huge fucking reactionary bigot that deserves all the hate he gets, but he is a fun read.
No.35900
i have a collection of all of his stuff
he's pretty good for a pulp writer, very literary in the tradition earlier writers like poe while also playing around with fantasy
definitely had a lot of nonsense racial and reactionary views and a sort of provincial, backwards worldview, but it can kind of be ignored and in a way it even compliments the artistic gloominess of his stories
No.35914
>>35896The story is called "Polaris."
>They say there is no land of Lomar, save in my nocturnal imaginings; that in those realms where the Pole Star shines high and red Aldebaran crawls low around the horizon, there has been naught save ice and snow for thousands of years, and never a man save squat yellow creatures, blighted by the cold, whom they call "Esquimaux." No.35915
>>35914Fucking kek
>>35900This and checked.
No.36233
https://gaslightchronicles.com/storiesThis is my web novel, it's very lovecraftian.
and explicitly leftist.
No.36240
>>6750He has a ridiculous head shape
No.36246
>>35889>>35897In another story, the horrifying twist was that the POV character's mother turned out to be… BLACK!!!!
No.36249
>>36233Prose here is actually incredible, and there's a table top in the works? Bookmarked. Good luck comrade
No.38211
I've read a bunch of his works now, and a lot of his stuff seems to be very of his time. For every story about cosmic horror from beyond the pale, there has to be like two that are about shit like the Mole Men or an evil wizard. Not that I don't like them, but its more the way he writes than what he's writing about.
Like if he was writing today and your average shitty creepypasta was something like
>One day my friend gave me a bootleg of Sonic the Hedgehog that he bought on the deepweb and told me to try playing it when no one was around. So I tried playing the game late at night, but the music weird and glitched out and the colors were completely inverted and wrong and then Sonic game on the screen, but his eyes were black and he was crying ultra-realistic blood. So I screamed and turned off the TV, but then I heard and sound behind me and spun around and it was evil Sonic!
Then Lovecraft would write something like
<I am something of the avid antiquarian and it is for this reason that I found myself at a back alley second-hand shop in search of old and obscure artifacts when I happened upon what I first thought to just be a frivolous curiosity from my own halcyon days of youth. It was what appeared to be a bootleg copy of Sonic the Hedgehog for the Sega Genesis, a childhood favorite of mine. Still, the thing still held some antiquarian interest. Instead of the rounded square of cheap plastic cheap plastic typical of pirated bootlegs of the era, it had a strangely undulating form, and it was comprised of a material completely foreign to me. Even as I held the odd cartridge in my hand, it gave the impression of a sort of permanence and age, as if the thing were not only impossibly older than even the console it had been made for, but was ancient beyond even the dawn of mankind.
<I shook this impression from me and brought the old cartridge home with me, where it promptly found its way into my old Sega Genesis with hopes of re-living some of my early days of innocence and perhaps the chance to find a glitch or anomaly typical to the bootlegs of the time. What my screen showed, however, was something altogether unfamiliar. At first, the screen filled with strange hieroglyphs of no civilization I have ever come across. Then the screen opened into scenes of indescribable, foetid landscapes, vistas of great, cyclopean structures erected in impossible geometries, and terrible abysses where blasphemous things writhed in the Stygian black. The screen then settled on what at first seemed to be the comforting figure of Sonic the Hedghog, but with deepening horror I realized that the thing was twisted and tortured, its squalid form rendered in bizarre proportions, and it seemed to be exsanguinating and excreting foetid fluids from every imaginable pore. It was upon observing the wretched thing in all its grotesque detail that it finally occurred to me that the images before me could not possibly have been rendered by some decades old children's toy, and it is with this that I am somewhat embarrassed to admit that my nerves got the better of me and I fainted. When I was aroused once more, I found that my television was off and the antediluvian cartridge was quite gone. I briefly humored myself that the whole ordeal was just a fitful dream. That's when the mad piping started.
<I don't know how I survived, much less escaped. What followed is now a blur and I can barely stand to recall the few things that my memory still allows me. I know the thing still hunts me. It is never far away. There is a constant baying as if from some wretched animal, always just out of perception, and a presence waiting just behind the wall of sleep. I suspect the thing that hunts me does not intend to kill me, but to carry me off to its blasphemous realm beyond the vast abysses of time and space. I do not intent to allow it to do so. To whoever finds this, know that when you read it I will be dead. I have purchased a machine pistol, and with it I intend to destroy myself. I write this to warn you to destroy, or at least stay away from the items even now being imported into this country from the farthest reaches of the dark orient. My God, did that madman Christian Chandler not claim, in his descent into strange theosophical madness and unspeakable depravity, to have been visited in visions and dreams by such creatures and taken in spirit to their land beyond the stars? Have we not had an epidemic of young men of seeming intelligence and good breeding who, after having purchased various eastern curiosities, locked themselves away in their rooms for weeks, months, even years at a time and when worried friends and family broke in, found their quarters had been filled with bizarre artworks and idols of discordant figures wrought in disturbing proportions, and the young men gibbering about dream worlds and even claiming to have taken dream wives? The thing that I encountered is something beyond description. It is a thing that should not exist. I can feel my rational mind slip even as I attempt to recall it. Yet, indescribable as the thing was in its totality, it had formed its writhing, visceral madness into a figure I was all to familiar with. An image from my childhood. Sonic the Hedgehog.
No.38212
>>38211Now I wanna read Lovecraft masterpieces but written like a shitty copypasta.
No.38213
>>38211Evil wizards are scary.
No.38214
>>38211I wonder if Lovecraft would write stories based on the autism of Chris-chan… your Sega example just made me think of the legendary lolcow.
No.38219
fantastic author with unfortunate views.
No.39017
>>23130came here to post this. I'd always known that later in his life Lovecraft became more lefty, but I didn't really think until yesterday to read his letters where he expressed these views. I'd been lead to believe before that he was more of like a New Deal "socialist" and had no idea that in his letters he was probably reading Marxist works. makes me sad to think that he didn't live longer and that he's remembered for essentially having an alt-right incel phase early in life. it would have been so interesting to see what direction his writing might have taken after he'd become politically conscious.
No.40026
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/whyishoudini/erik-houdinis-gaslight-chronicles-grimdark-gothic-horror>>36233>>36249What up, it's been 6 months and I'm trying to get volume I published.
Lovecraft is a heavy inspo ofc, and Frank Baum, with a very Marxist undercurrent to the whole thing. (eldritch city is capitalism manifest)
No.40033
Just recently read The Dunwich Horror and The Whisperer in Darkness. Damn that shit is entertaining, made me feel like a child in the 1930s reading them in some pulp sci fi magazine. Also the first work of fiction I've read in years, everything else has been history, theory, or legal cases. Felt great to just shut my brain off and go along for the ride, and Whisperer in Darkness' use of correspondence by mail is a great plot device that endows the reader with a feeling of helplessness combined with a weird sense of distance and security which is later revealed to be false. It doesn't matter if you're across the country, the space crabs will find you. It reminds me a lot of the scene in Aliens when they're watching the live feed of the marines enter the compound. Love this mad racist lad.
No.40055
>>6750He was a racist but he was so incredibly based. Wish he wasn't a racist, he would have been the writer of all time.
I especially like his misotheistic philosophy. Really makes you feel like humanity is just a toy in the forces of the Universe. We have earthquakes, tornados, tsunami, volcanos, a possible nuclear war, meteor rains, fucking black holes, FUCKING SUPERMASSIVE BLACK HOLES. And here we are, just a bunch of helpless insects that can do nothing against them. These natural disasters and hazards might as well be considered gods. Unpleasable, jerkass gods who don't even care about our prayers.
No.40056
>>39017Hm, yeah, his views changed later in life. Though people tend to dismiss this, saying that he didn't really change.
No.40057
>>40026The Cold God feels no mercy to our souls. 😢
No.40083
>>40026tl;dr if you've read under the pyramids there's a subtle arg element to this narrative with lost media that no one has figured out yet
No.40232
>>9258>Also it's amusing that some biblical depictions of angels are closer to Evangelion than anything we see in common mediaChristianity, I forgive you.
Now kill all the Christian revisionists plz.
No.40243
>>40232Technically all the memes about "biblically accurate angels" as eldritch beings refer to the angels depicted in the Book of Enoch, which never made it into the Bible.
No.40244
>>6750I've been reading his shit and he writes either dreamy, fantastical stories, or horror stories. And IMO he's way better at the former. A lot of his horror stories boil down to "AND THE MONSTER WAS A MAAAAAAAAANNNN" at the end, very schlocky. But his non horror stories are very vivid.
No.40245
>>40243they appear in Ezekiel
No.40255
>>40243Angels look like very beautiful people, so if by "closer to Evangelion" they meant Rei then that's correct, but those "biblically accurate angels" are not actually angels but other heavenly beings.
No.40256
>>40255>Angels look like very beautiful peopleFUCKING ANTHROPOCENTRISM REEEE!!
The imagination of so many people is so… weak.
No.40257
>>40256It's how they are described in the Bible…
No.40259
>>40257Okay, the Bible sucks then, worst fiction book ever. I'd rather believe the Old Ones exist than this.
Why do people believe in all this? The likelihood of angels resembling us, based on how much incomprehensible and traumatizing shit there is in our universe, is extremely low. And yet people would rather believe in this than in some terrifying and ugly monster-gods, I do not understand. Are people that naive that they'd buy into it?
No.40261
>>40259 (me)
And don't tell me it's "the look I am comfortable with," people with bird wings are weird. Why don't they look like some cute critters or whatever like in Madoka Magika? Why do they have to look exactly like humans? And especially, why should it be their default form? It doesn't make sense, it just looks like whoever came up with the idea of angels couldn't think of anything better.
No.40264
>>40259The "reasoning" is that humans were made in God's own image, since they are the height of creation… It's probably cope for animals being atheists or some shit like that.
No.40272
>>40264>The "reasoning" is that humans were made in God's own image, since they are the height of creation…Talk about pride being a sin.
People speculate about the aliens being real and yet humans are somehow God's greatest creation. This did not age well.
No.40458
>>40456They would? How does he know how horses think?
No.40469
>ooohaaahhh you know what would be so so scary omg
>air conditioning
>OOOOHHHAAAAHFGSAHH THE HORROR
No.40562
>>40026His sleep was not a respite but a relentless deluge of night terrors. He found himself trapped beneath a cerulean surface, his lungs crying out for air as he strained against the crushing weight of the water. He fought against the suffocating current, only to find himself unable to escape, his screams dissolving into desperate bubbles that rose towards the sunlit surface, a distant reminder of a world he was being dragged away from.
Shaken awake by the terror of drowning, he sat up, gasping for breath, the very real sensation of water evaporating from his lungs. Sweat-soaked sheets clung to his trembling form, the scent of fear permeating the otherwise fragrant room. His eyes darted across the room, the familiar shadows playing tricks on his haunted mind.
His torment was ceaseless, sleep giving no quarter. These nightmare visions were punctuated with the chilling symphony of gunfire and the crescendo of strangled screams.
As he thrashed in his opulent bed, ensconced within the high-rise apartment of New Gaslight, his unconscious mind waged war against spectral foes. He embodied ruthlessness, his heart morphed into a cold, calculating sentinel, indifferent to the innocents swept away in the tide of his battle or the devastation that followed in his wake. His survival was the solitary beacon guiding his actions.
He rolled onto his side, a bead of sweat slipping from his brow, staining the plush pillow beneath him. Another jolt of fear sent him tumbling into the valley of dreams once more.
The dreamscape shifted, the city's menacing skyline replaced by the expansive openness of prairies. Stalks of wheat swayed ominously, brushing against the fabric of his subconscious, whispering secrets he had locked away. As abruptly as it had begun, his peaceful prairie morphed into another horrifying tableau. The tranquility of the field soon transformed into a snare, the open sky closing in, the ground beneath him swallowing him whole.
Now, he was encased within a claustrophobic wooden box, the damp earth seeping in through the cracks. The taste of the grave filled his mouth, the oppressive weight of his premature burial pressing down on him. His heart pounded a frantic rhythm against his ribcage, the muffled thump echoing within his earthen prison.
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