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theterribletenno · 3 years

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Azathoth, the Black Hole warframe

Okay well Newton the Gravity warframe is pretty much fucking optional now that we have a BLACK HOLE WARFRAME. Boy @the-tenno-tripped was pretty right when he said the vision for Azathoth was "Grendel but..." and although he didn't come out feeling very "Lovecraftian" he absolutely feels like a fun and strong warframe that combines some of the best traits of both Grendel and Vauban.

Health: 100 (300 at rank 30) Shields: 175 (525 at rank 30) Armor: 250 Energy: 100 (200 at rank 30) Sprint Speed: 1.05

Passive: Enemies killed by Azathoth's abilities give +10% ability strength for the next 15 seconds, stacks up to +200% ability strength. Enemies killed by Azathoth's weapons give +5% crit and status chance to that weapon for 10 seconds, stacks up to +50%.

Ability 1: Gravity Well, 25 energy. Creates a stationary orb of incredible gravity at Azathoth's crosshairs within 18 meters. Enemies in a radius of 8 meters of the Gravity Well will be ragdolled and pulled in, and begin receiving 75 magnetic damage per half-second with 15% status chance. Enemies with less than 10% of their max health remaining will be instantly killed. Gravity Well lasts for 12 seconds and up to 4 Gravity Wells can be deployed at once.

Ability 2: Singular Hunger, toggled ability 3 energy per second. Azathoth opens his gaping mouth wide and sucks in everything in front of him. Health, energy, and ammo pickups caught in his vacuum will be worth double their normal value upon pickup and enemies within 18 meters and 45 degrees of his crosshairs will be ragdolled and pulled towards him, recieving 100 magnetic damage per half-second with 25% status chance. Upon reaching Azathtoth's maw enemies within 2.5 meters are dealt 200 true damage per second and enemies with less than 15% of their max health remaining will be instantly killed.

Ability 3: Decaying Orbit, 75 energy. For the next 10 seconds any and all enemy projectiles fired at Azathoth or through a 6 meter radius spherical area of him will become trapped in orbit around his body instead. Captured projectiles will assume circular orbits around Azathoth at random radius values of between 1 and 3 meters. Enemies that touch these captured projectiles will be dealt 200% of the projectile's initial damage value with 100% status chance. While Decaying Orbit is active, the countdown timer for Azathoth's passive is paused. Non-projectile attacks such as beams and melee attacks are not affected by this ability. Projectiles still orbiting Azathoth when this ability expires will be converted into universal ammo pickups at an exchange rate of 10 projectiles per universal ammo pickup.

Ability 4: Event Horizon, 100 energy. Azathoth contorts his body, breaking himself open to reveal the living black hole at his center. For the next 8 seconds all enemies within 25 meters are ragdolled and pulled towards Azathoth, recieving 200 magnetic damage with 50% status chance per half-second. Within 5 meters enemies are also dealt 200 true damage per half-second and enemies with less than 15% of their max health remaining will be instantly killed. This ability also pulls Gravity Wells within 25 meters to Azathoth's location. Enemies killed by this ability extend its duration by 0.75 seconds. Pressing the button again while active will prematurely terminate Event Horizon. Upon termination, Azathoth deals 500 blast damage for each enemy killed by Event Horizon with 100% status chance to all enemies within 35 meters. While Event Horizon is active, the countdown timer for Azathoth's passive is paused.

Subsumed Ability: Gravity Well (radius is reduced to 5 meters, duration is reduced to 8 seconds.)

Signature Weapons Gulf: Made using energy shaping technology discovered by the Orokin this Tenno weapon almost defies categorization. A semi-auto rifle weapon with a charged trigger. Tap to fire a hitscan projectile that deals even values of impact, puncture, and electric damage. Hold to charge up a slow-moving projectile in the form of two small orbs with a horizontal gap between that increases to 5 meters shortly after firing connected by a long, thin wire of energy that deals equal values of slash and electric damage. This firing mode has infinite punch-through against bodies. Both firing modes have very high status chance at the cost of low crit and high damage at the cost of slow firing speed. Both firing modes inflict a guaranteed impact proc on hit. When wielded by Azathoth this weapon has +100% crit chance against enemies caught in his Gravity Well. Dreamer: This uncanny assemblage of metals harvested from the void of space between the planets is infused with starlight and wonders, made by an Archimedean of the empire not as a weapon, but commissioned by an Executor as a statue. It was only when Azathoth ripped this sculpture of star-metal from its plinth that the microscopic singularity at its core ignited and the true purpose of this eldritch art came to life. A hammer melee weapon that deals mostly blast and magnetic damage with only small values of impact, puncture, and slash damage. High crit at the cost of low status and a surprisingly high attack speed. While in Azathoth's hands this weapon applies a guaranteed blast proc with every hit.

Closing Notes: I took more personal liberties with this one compared to some of the other members of the Cthulhu Quartet. Part of it was that we already have an 'eat people' warframe or two, and part of it was that in Cthulhu mythos Azathoth is like.... BASICALLY THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE? or like he is dreaming the whole entire universe so like... what kinds of powers do you draw from that?? So I went all-in on black holes swallowing things with his abilities. Also, another warframe that deals magnetic damage?? Gosh, if only magnetic damage was not one of the three most embarrassingly bad damage types in the game.

#warframe #original charatcer #fan made #cthulhu quartet #collab

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voidtongued · 3 years

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The discord has been having a meltdown over Waverider and how much it sucks but I'm just sitting here watching a random Australian man make Napalm in his back yard and working on the designs for the Cthulhu Quartet frames

#warframe #ooc

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thebenevolentgodofshepherds · 5 years

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Yes, I Hate: A note on my frustrations with the yellow fandom...

Yes, I hate how August Derleth completely raped concept of the King in Yellow, because he was jealous that his love HPL was so perfectly enamored of the book by Chambers. Yes I hate how horror fans in general misunderstand the Cthulhu Mythos and thus misrepresent it in general because they wannabe scary little goths. Yea, I hate how one-sided and one-dimensional they present the very concept of multi-dimensional beings to be. Yes, I hate how they often represent death as the worst of all possible outcomes when Lovecraft himself so often went out of his way to let the reader know that it actually would have been the sweetest mercy. Yes, I hate how racist and blindly culturally patriotic both Lovecraft and Chambers were, even though those negatives kond of forced them to find the writing niches that allowed them to create anything positive. Yes, I hate how no one realizes that "character" The King in Yellow is basically a metaphor for the force of eternal, spiritual love, trapped in the vessel of a decadent physical reality, hence why the street quartet is so important. And Yes, I hate that so many people think it's all about madness and rot and sickness, because they refuse to see that the book by Robert W Chambers is like a yin and yang symbol of the depths of the western spiritual tradition. But, alas, what could I possibly do about my frustration? It's not really like anyone would believe me if I told them what I know. I guess I'll just go make art...

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square-enix-headcanons · 5 years

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Wayfinder Quartet’s Favorite Pen&Paper RPGs

Terra: He really likes the system of GURPS; since that doesn’t have its own setting, he’s rather flexible in that and actually enjoys playing a variety, though he’s a bit more drawn towards contemporary or Steampunk-esque settings. That said, he also has a soft spot for the lore of Demon: The Fallen.

Aqua: She loves the actual roleplay part far more than the dungeon crawling and monster bashing part, so the more the system is made for that, the better. Her favorite would be Mage: The Ascension, but she also enjoys The Dark Eye.

Ventus: He’s in it for the adventure, so he loves the ones that let him explore fantastic new worlds; his favorites would be Dungeons & Dragons or The Dark Eye, but he also kind of likes Cyberpunk.

Vanitas: He loves dark themes, the worse the better. He actually likes being Game Master, but the others are always a little scared if he’s DMing; his favorite is Call of Cthulhu, but a World of Darkness round playing as Sabbat vampires or Black Spiral Dancer Werewolves is sometimes nice, too.

#Kingdom Hearts #Kingdom Hearts Headcanon #Terra #Aqua #Ventus #Vanitas #Wayfinder Quartet #I absolutely love Demon but I'm like the only one from my roleplay group who does #We mostly play Werewolf tbh #Which is interesting considering we used to have like 20 different vampire rounds #CoC is cool too though and I love it #I never actually got to play Dark Eye but I love it anyway #We're kinda-sorta planning a Cyberpunk round but haven't gotten anywhere yet #... which reminds me I gotta finish my character for that

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judebuffum · 5 years

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BLOCKTOBER II DAY 8: HYDRA Former occupation: Serpentine Water Monster Current occupation: Barbershop Quartet The Hydra once slept peacefully, deep beneath a lake in Lerna, until Hera woke him up for the sole purpose of killing the great warrior Hercules. However, upon meeting the Hydra, Hercules remarked he had quite a lovely voice and had he ever considered a career in music? The rest is harmonic history. #hydra #lernaeanhydra #barbershopquartet #bsharps . If you’d like to participate in this year’s #Blocktober challenge, the rules are simple: every day for the month of October, post a piece of pixel art based on the prompt. If you can’t post every day, you can still participate! Just pick your favorites… but post them on the correct day! Make sure to use the #Blocktober2019 and #Blocktober hashtags and tag me @judebuffumpixels in your description (NOT THE PICTURE) to possibly get featured in my IG stories! And please repost and share this prompt list so all of our pixel pals can participate! . OCTOBER 2019 01 - Orc 02 - Cerberus 03 - Mermaid 04 - Kraken 05 - Anubis 06 - Lich 07 - Chimera 08 - Hydra 09 - Jinn 10 - Dragon 11 - Humbaba 12 - Sphinx 13 - Jorogumo 14 - Wraith 15 - Manticore 16 - Naga 17 - Oni 18 - Scylla 19 - Troll 20 - Chupacabra 21 - Cockatrice 22 - Beholder 23 - Golem 24 - Griffin 25 - Kappa 26 - Basilisk 27 - Garuda 28 - Foo Dog 29 - Baba Yaga 30 - Leprechaun 31 - Cthulhu . #Blocktober2019 #Blocktober #Blocktober2 #BlocktoberII #drawingchallenge #drawtober #8bitillustration #artprompts #drawlloween #Inktober #JudeBuffum #illustration #illustrator #PixelArt #PixelArtist #8bit #8bitArt #8bitArtist #SpriteArt #PIGinktober https://www.instagram.com/p/B3W0eapHChk/?igshid=8mg52gpt80vc

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how2to18 · 6 years

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DURING THE POSTWAR PERIOD, the genres of the fantastic — especially science fiction — have been deeply intertwined with the genres of popular music, especially rock ’n’ roll. Both appeal to youthful audiences, and both make the familiar strange, seeking escape in enchantment and metamorphosis. As Steppenwolf sang in 1968: “Fantasy will set you free […] to the stars away from here.” Two recent books — one a nonfiction survey of 1970s pop music, the other a horror novel about heavy metal — explore this heady intermingling of rock and the fantastic.

As Jason Heller details in his new book Strange Stars: David Bowie, Pop Music, and the Decade Sci-Fi Exploded, the magic carpet rides of the youth counterculture encompassed both the amorphous yearnings of acid rock and the hard-edged visions of science fiction. In Heller’s account, virtually all the major rock icons — from Jimi Hendrix to David Crosby, from Pete Townshend to Ian Curtis — were avid SF fans; not only was their music strongly influenced by Heinlein, Clarke, Ballard, and other authors, but it also amounted to a significant body of popular SF in its own right. As Heller shows, many rock stars were aspiring SF writers, while established authors in the field sometimes wrote lyrics for popular bands, and a few became rockers themselves. British fantasist Michael Moorcock, for example, fronted an outfit called The Deep Fix while also penning songs for — and performing with — the space-rock group Hawkwind (once memorably described, by Motörhead’s Lemmy Kilmister, as “Star Trek with long hair and drugs”).

Heller’s book focuses on the “explosion” of SF music during the 1970s, with chapters chronicling, year by year, the exhilarating debut of fresh music subcultures — prog rock, glam rock, Krautrock, disco — and their saturation with themes of space/time travel, alien visitation, and futuristic (d)evolution. He writes, “’70s pop culture forged a special interface with the future.” Many of its key songs and albums “didn’t just contain sci-fi lyrics,” but they were “reflection[s] of sci-fi” themselves, “full of futuristic tones and the innovative manipulation of studio gadgetry” — such as the vocoder, with its robotic simulacrum of the human voice. Heller’s discussion moves from the hallucinatory utopianism of the late 1960s to the “cool, plastic futurism” of the early 1980s with intelligence and panache.

The dominant figure in Heller’s study is, unsurprisingly, David Bowie, the delirious career of whose space-age antihero, Major Tom, bookended the decade — from “Space Oddity” in 1969 to “Ashes to Ashes” in 1980. Bowie’s 1972 album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars was a full-blown SF extravaganza, its freaky starman representing “some new hybrid of thespian rocker and sci-fi myth,” but it had a lot of company during the decade. Heller insightfully analyzes a wide range of SF “concept albums,” from Jefferson Starship’s Blows Against the Empire (1970), the first rock record to be nominated for a Hugo Award, to Parliament’s Mothership Connection (1975), which “reprogramm[ed] funk in order to launch it into tomorrow,” to Gary Numan and Tubeway Army’s Replicas (1979), an album “steeped in the technological estrangement and psychological dystopianism of Dick and Ballard.”

Heller’s coverage of these peaks of achievement is interspersed with amusing asides on more minor, “novelty” phenomena, such as “the robot dance craze of the late ’60s and early ’70s,” and compelling analyses of obscure artists, such as French synthesizer wizard Richard Pinhas, who released (with his band Heldon) abrasive critiques of industrial society — for example, Electronique Guerilla (1974) — while pursuing a dissertation on science fiction under the direction of Gilles Deleuze at the Sorbonne. He also writes astutely about the impact of major SF films on the development of 1970s pop music: Monardo’s Star Wars and Other Galactic Funk (1977), for example, turned the cantina scene from Star Wars into a synth-pop dance-floor hit. At the same time, Heller is shrewdly alert to the historical importance of grassroots venues such as London’s UFO Club, which incubated the early dimensional fantasies of Pink Floyd and the off-the-wall protopunk effusions of the Deviants (whose frontman, Mick Farren, had a long career as an SF novelist and, in 1978, released an album with my favorite title ever: Vampires Stole My Lunch Money). Finally, Heller reconstructs some fascinating, but sadly abortive, collaborations — Theodore Sturgeon working to adapt Crosby, Stills & Nash’s “Wooden Ships” as a screenplay, Paul McCartney hiring Star Trek’s Gene Roddenberry to craft a story about Wings. In some alternative universe, these weird projects came to fruition.

Heller’s erudition is astonishing, but it can also be overwhelming, drowning the reader in a welter of minutiae about one-hit wonders and the career peregrinations of minor talents. In his acknowledgments, Heller thanks his editor for helping him convert “an encyclopedia” into “a story,” but judging from the format of the finished product, this transformation was not fully complete: penetrating analyses frequently peter out into rote listings of albums and bands. There is a capping discography, but it is not comprehensive and is, strangely, organized by song title rather than by artist. The index is similarly unhelpful, containing only the proper names of individuals; one has to know, for instance, who Edgar Froese or Ralf Hütter are in order to locate the relevant passages on Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk, respectively.

That said, there is no gainsaying the magisterial authority displayed in assertions such as: “The first fully formed sci-fi funk song was ‘Escape from Planet Earth’ by a vocal quartet from Camden, New Jersey, called the Continental Four.” And who else has even heard of — much less listened to — oddments like 1977’s Machines, “the sole album by the mysterious electronic group known as Lem,” who “likely took their name from sci-fi author Stanislaw Lem of Solaris fame”? Anyone interested in either popular music or science fiction of the 1970s will find countless nuggets of sheer delight in Strange Stars, and avid fans, after perusing the volume, will probably go bankrupt hunting down rare vinyl on eBay.

While Heller’s main focus is the confluence of rock ’n’ roll and science fiction, he occasionally addresses the influence of popular fantasy on major music artists of the decade. Marc Bolan, of T. Rex fame, was, we learn, a huge fan of Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, while prog-rock stalwarts Yes and Emerson, Lake & Palmer managed “to combine science fiction and fantasy, fusing them into a metaphysical, post-hippie meditation on the nature of reality.” What’s missing from the book, however, is any serious discussion of the strain of occult and dark fantasy that ran through 1960s and ’70s rock, the shadows cast by Aleister Crowley and H. P. Lovecraft over Jimmy Page, John Lennon, Mick Jagger, and (yes) Bowie himself. After all, Jim Morrison’s muse was a Celtic high priestess named Patricia Kennealy who went on, following the death of her Lizard King, to a career as a popular fantasy author. Readers interested in this general topic should consult the idiosyncratic survey written by Gary Lachman, a member of Blondie, entitled Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius (2001).

Heller does comment, in passing, on an incipient musical form that would, during the 1980s, emerge as the dark-fantasy genre par excellence: heavy metal. Though metal was, as Heller states, “just beginning to awaken” in the 1970s, his book includes sharp analyses of major prototypes such as Black Sabbath’s Paranoid (1970), Blue Öyster Cult’s Tyranny and Mutation (1973), and the early efforts of Judas Priest and Iron Maiden. This was the technocratic lineage of heavy metal, the segment of the genre most closely aligned with science fiction, especially in its dystopian modes, and which would come to fruition, during the 1980s, in classic concept albums like Voivod’s Killing Technology (1987) and Queensrÿche’s Operation: Mindcrime (1988).

But the 1980s also saw the emergence of more fantasy-oriented strains, such as black, doom, and death metal, whose rise to dominance coincided with the sudden explosion in popularity of a fantastic genre that had, until that time, largely skulked in the shadow of SF and high fantasy: supernatural horror. Unsurprisingly, the decade saw a convergence of metal music and horror fiction that was akin to the 1970s fusion of rock and SF anatomized in Strange Stars. Here, as elsewhere, Black Sabbath was a pioneer, their self-titled 1970 debut offering a potent brew of pop paganism culled equally from low-budget Hammer films and the occult thrillers of Dennis Wheatley. By the mid-1980s, there were hundreds of bands — from Sweden’s Bathory to England’s Fields of the Nephilim to the pride of Tampa, Florida, Morbid Angel — who were offering similar fare. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos inspired songs by Metallica, Mercyful Fate, and countless other groups — including Necronomicon, a German thrash-metal outfit whose name references a fictional grimoire featured in several of the author’s stories.

By the same token, heavy metal music deeply influenced the burgeoning field of horror fiction. Several major 1980s texts treated this theme overtly: the doom-metal outfit in George R. R. Martin’s The Armageddon Rag (1983) is a twisted emanation of the worst impulses of the 1960s counterculture; the protagonist of Anne Rice’s The Vampire Lestat (1985) is a Gothic rocker whose performances articulate a pop mythology of glamorous undeath; and the mega-cult band in John Skipp and Craig Spector’s splatterpunk classic The Scream (1988) are literal hell-raisers, a Satanic incarnation of the most paranoid fantasies of Christian anti-rock zealots. The heady conjoining of hard rock with supernaturalism percolated down from these best sellers to the more ephemeral tomes that packed the drugstore racks during the decade, an outpouring of gory fodder affectionately surveyed in Grady Hendrix’s award-winning study Paperbacks from Hell: The Twisted History of ’70s and ’80s Horror Fiction (2017). Hendrix, himself a horror author of some note, has now published We Sold Our Souls (2018), the quintessential horror-metal novel for our times.

Hendrix has stated that, prior to embarking on this project, he was not “a natural metal fan”:

I was scared of serious metal when I was growing up. Slayer and Metallica intimidated me, and I was too unsophisticated to appreciate the fun of hair metal bands like Mötley Crüe and Twisted Sister, so I basically sucked. […] But I got really deep into metal while writing We Sold Our Souls and kind of fell in love.

The author’s immersion in — and fondness for — the genre is evident on every page of his new novel. Chapters are titled using the names of classic metal albums: “Countdown to Extinction” (Megadeth, 1992), “From Enslavement to Obliteration” (Napalm Death, 1988), “Twilight of the Gods” (Bathory, 1991), and so on. The effect is to summon a hallowed musical canon while at the same time evoking the story’s themes and imparting an emotional urgency to its events. These events also nostalgically echo 1980s rock-horror novels: like The Armageddon Rag, Hendrix’s plot chronicles the reunion of a cult outfit whose breakup decades before was enigmatically fraught; like The Scream, it features a demonic metal band that converts its worshipful fans into feral zombies; like The Vampire Lestat, it culminates in a phantasmagoric stadium concert that erupts into a brutal orgy of violence. Yet despite these pervasive allusions, the novel does not come across as mere pastiche: it has an energy and authenticity that make it feel quite original.

A large part of that originality lies in its protagonist. As the cock-rock genre par excellence, its blistering riffs and screeching solos steeped in adolescent testosterone, heavy metal has had very few notable female performers. But one of them, at least in Hendrix’s fictive history, was Kris Pulaski, lead guitarist of Dürt Würk, a legendary quintet from rural Pennsylvania that abruptly dissolved, under mysterious circumstances, in the late 1990s, just as they were poised for national fame. Kris was a scrappy bundle of nerves and talent, a kick-ass songwriter and a take-no-prisoners performer:

She had been punched in the mouth by a straight-edge vegan, had the toes of her Doc Martens kissed by too many boys to count, and been knocked unconscious after catching a boot beneath the chin from a stage diver who’d managed to do a flip into the crowd off the stage at Wally’s. She’d made the mezzanine bounce like a trampoline at Rumblestiltskins, the kids pogoing so hard flakes of paint rained down like hail.

But that was eons ago. As the story opens, she is staffing the night desk at a Best Western, burned out at 47, living in a broken-down house with her ailing mother and trying to ignore “the background hum of self-loathing that formed the backbeat of her life.” She hasn’t seen her bandmates in decades, since she drunkenly crashed their tour van and almost killed them all, and hasn’t picked up a guitar in almost as long, constrained by the terms of a draconian contract she signed with Dürt Würk’s former lead singer, Terry Hunt, who now controls the band’s backlist. While Kris has lapsed into brooding obscurity, Hunt has gone on to global success, headlining a “nu metal” outfit called Koffin (think Korn or Limp Bizkit) whose mainstream sound Kris despises: “It was all about branding, fan outreach, accessibility, spray-on attitude, moving crowds of white kids smoothly from the pit to your merch booth.” It was the exact opposite of genuine metal, which “tore the happy face off the world. It told the truth.”

To inject a hint of authenticity into Koffin’s rampant commodification, Hunt occasionally covers old Dürt Würk hits. But he avoids like the plague any songs from the band’s long-lost third album, Troglodyte, with their elaborate mythology of surveillance and domination:

[T]here is a hole in the center of the world, and inside that hole is Black Iron Mountain, an underground empire of caverns and lava seas, ruled over by the Blind King who sees everything with the help of his Hundred Handed Eye. At the root of the mountain is the Wheel. Troglodyte was chained to the Wheel along with millions of others, which they turned pointlessly in a circle, watched eternally by the Hundred Handed Eye.

Inspired by the arrival of a butterfly that proves the existence of a world beyond his bleak dungeon, Troglodyte ultimately revolts against Black Iron Mountain, overthrowing the Blind King and leading his fellow slaves into the light.

One might assume that Hunt avoids this album because the scenario it constructs can too readily be perceived as an allegory of liberation from the consumerist shackles of Koffin’s nu-metal pablum. That might be part of the reason, but Hunt’s main motivation is even more insidious: he fears Troglodyte because its eldritch tale is literally true — Koffin is a front for a shadowy supernatural agency that feeds on human souls, and Dürt Würk’s third album holds the key to unmasking and fighting it. This strange reality gradually dawns on Kris, and when Koffin announces plans for a massive series of concerts culminating in a “Hellstock” festival in the Nevada desert, she decides to combat its infernal designs with the only weapon she has: her music. Because “a song isn’t a commercial for an album. It isn’t a tool to build name awareness or reinforce your brand. A song is a bullet that can shatter your chains.”

This bizarre plot, like the concept albums by Mastodon or Iron Maiden it evokes, runs the risk of collapsing into grandiloquent absurdity if not carried off with true conviction. And this is Hendrix’s key achievement in the novel: he never condescends, never winks at the audience or tucks his tongue in cheek. Like the best heavy metal, We Sold Our Souls is scabrous and harrowing, its pop mythology fleshed out with vividly gruesome set pieces, as when Kris surprises the Blind King’s minions at their ghastly repast:

Its fingernails were black and it bent over Scottie, slobbering up the black foam that came boiling out of his mouth. Kris […] saw that the same thing was crouched over Bill, a starved mummy, maggot-white, its skin hanging in loose folds. A skin tag between its legs jutted from a gray pubic bush, bouncing obscenely like an engorged tick. […] Its gaze was old and cold and hungry and its chin dripped black foam like a beard. It sniffed the air and hissed, its bright yellow tongue vibrating, its gums a vivid red.

The irruption of these grisly horrors into an otherwise mundane milieu of strip malls and franchise restaurants and cookie-cutter apartments is handled brilliantly, on a par with the best of classic splatterpunk by the likes of Joe R. Lansdale or David J. Schow.

Hendrix also, like Stephen King, has a shrewd feel for true-to-life relationships, which adds a grounding of humanity to his cabalistic flights. Kris’s attempts to reconnect with her alienated bandmates — such as erstwhile drummer JD, a wannabe Viking berserker who has refashioned his mother’s basement into a “Metalhead Valhalla” — are poignantly handled, and the hesitant bond she develops with a young Koffin fan named Melanie has the convincing ring of post-feminist, intergenerational sisterhood. Throughout the novel, Hendrix tackles gender issues with an intrepid slyness, from Kris’s brawling tomboy efforts to fit into a male-dominated world to Melanie’s frustration with her lazy, lying, patronizing boyfriend, with whom she breaks up in hilarious fashion:

She screamed. She broke his housemate’s bong. She Frisbee-d the Shockwave [game] disc so hard it left a divot in the kitchen wall. She raged out of the house as his housemates came back from brunch.

“Dude,” they said to Greg as he jogged by them, “she is so on the rag.”

“Are we breaking up?” Greg asked, clueless, through her car window.

It took all her self-control not to back over him as she drove off.

Such scenes of believable banality compellingly anchor the novel’s febrile horrors, as do the passages of talk-radio blather interspersed between the chapters, which remind us that conspiratorial lunacy is always only a click of the AM dial away.

While obviously a bit of a throwback, We Sold Our Souls shows that the 1980s milieu of heavy metal and occult horror — of bootleg cassettes and battered paperbacks — continues to have resonance in our age of iPods and cell-phone apps. It also makes clear that the dreamy confluence of rock and the fantastic so ably anatomized in Heller’s Strange Stars is still going strong.

Rob Latham is a LARB senior editor. His most recent book is Science Fiction Criticism: An Anthology of Essential Writings, published by Bloomsbury Press in 2017.

The post Magic Carpet Rides: Rock Music and the Fantastic appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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tenebris-metallum · 3 years

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Behold, Azathoth, brought into flesh and blood by the Technocyte’s action.

Part three of my collab with @theterribletenno, and the abilities for Azathoth can be found here [link]

Azathoth, as usual, was harder to get into a Shape. He doesn’t like having one for What Ever Goddamn Reason.

Normally I only do two versions - the flats and a shaded version, but I felt the Need to play with chromatic aberration and if you Ask Me, the aberration’d version looks really damn good, if a bit eye-burn-y

Bonus, me working out how his Face works

like this.

#cthulhu mythos #cthulhu quartet #warframe #fan made #azathoth #lovecraft #digital art

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theterribletenno · 3 years

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Cthylla, the Cthulhu warframe

@the-tenno-tripped the first daughter of Cthulhu and the diva of the quartet is arisen. By your blood was she conceived, by my flesh was she born. Now our child lives, having never known a womb. Behold and love our misbegotten monster, and know that she will be followed by three brothers. Cthulhu p'thagn.

Health: 200 (600 at rank 30) Shields: 50 (150 at rank 30) Armor: 325 Energy: 100 (150 at rank 30) Sprint Speed: 1

Passive: Damage dealt to Cthylla's health contributes to a pool with a maximum capacity of (X+Y) times 10 where X is Cthylla's max health and Y is Cthylla's armor value. Upon having her HP reduced to zero all damage stored in this pool is evenly divided between and dealt to all enemies within 18 meters of Cthylla as void damage as she enters bleedout. If Cthylla dies this ability triggers again for the same amount of damage.

Ability 1: Deep One's Grasp, 25 energy. Eldritch tentacles reach from Cthylla's outstretched hand, whipping at enemies in front of her and leaving them paralyzed with venom. Deals 125 impact & 125 slash damage with 40% status chance plus 175 electric damage with 100% status chance to up to five enemies within 12 meters and 45 degrees of her crosshairs. Enemies that survive the attack will receive an additional 200 electric damage with 100% status chance after a six second delay.

Ability 2: Elder Thing's Wing, 50 energy. Cthylla outstretches several pairs of nightmarish fin-like webbed wings from her body, and gains the ability to fly for several seconds. In this form, Cthylla moves at 30 meters per second, gaining vertical and horizontal flight capabilities using the movement, crouch, and jump hotkeys, similar to archwing controls but without the afterburner. Lasts 6 seconds. Melee attacks are disabled while flying but ranged attacks and abilities can be used. While flying incoming damage is reduced by 60%.

Ability 3: Call of Idh-yaa, 75 energy. Cthylla sings a song of shrieks and bellows in a language only known to the Void, calling on strength from beyond the stars. For the next 6 seconds all damage dealt to Cthylla will be ignored and converted directly into her passive damage pool and she gains immunity to status while regenerating 3% of her max health per second. Holding this ability will discharge 50% of the damage currently stored in her passive's pool with the same behavior as if it had triggered naturally.

Ability 4: Whispers of the Mad God, 100 energy. Cthylla uses her mind to bridge the gap between the Void and the material world, releasing insanity and calamity in a stream of multicolored lights from her brain. For the next 8 seconds all enemies within 25 meters will be dealt 450 damage of a random type with 100% status chance every second. Damage from this ability has a 20% chance to cause enemies to panic for 3 seconds, not attacking and fleeing in random directions. Meanwhile, allies will have 50% bonus damage of a random element added to their currently equipped weapons with a 100% bonus to either crit or status chance. These bonuses on allies are re-randomized after 4 seconds.

Subsumed Ability: Deep One's Grasp.

Signature Weapons Ghatanothoa: Despite being categorized as a shotgun this weapon fires a unique projectile, a large and amorphous globule of slow-moving energy. An alien weapon beloved by Cthylla. This globule explodes upon contacting an enemy or a surface, dealing pure corrosive energy in a wide area with high status chance. As the ponderously large and slow globule travels it absorbs enemy projectiles, adding their damage to its detonation. Pressing the alt-fire button will detonate the globule in flight. When wielded by Cthylla this weapon's explosion applies a guaranteed corrosive proc in addition to its normal status chance. Nctosa & Nctolhu: A large plastid shell functions as an incredibly durable shield while a beastly fang is used as a crude sword. Armaments reminiscent of sea creatures from long-extinct eras. This relic of forgotten eons is Cthylla's most preferred melee weapon. Deals mostly slash and puncture damage with low impact. High status at the cost of low crit. While in Cthylla's hands damage blocked by this weapon is added to her passive pool.

Closing Notes: THE QUARTET BEGINS. Cthylla is the daughter of Cthulhu and is critical to his plans for if he ever died he could be reborn through her. So that's neat. When it comes to crafting powers for Cthylla they were kind of scattered and a little random but she basically functions as THE Lovecraftian warframe. Also, not going to illuminate all the individual Lovecraftian references in here, basically if it's a name you can't pronounce it's an alien monster god.

#warframe #original character #collab #fan made #cthulhu quartet

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voidtongued · 3 years

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Hold me to this but when @theterribletenno posts the Cthulhu Quartet im gonna do designs for them.

This is a public post mostly so yall can remind me when I inevitably forget

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aion-rsa · 4 years

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South Park Vaccination Special Review

https://ift.tt/3tb3wtA

This South Park Vaccination Special review contains spoilers.

The coronavirus pandemic has no official start date. Beginning in early 2020 (but really late 2019), the virus spread to different parts of the globe gradually. In the U.S., states dealt with its arrival on a case-by-case basis. The closest we’ll come to an anniversary, however, is likely March 11.

March 11 was the day that the NBA suspended its season and the day that Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson revealed that they had both tested positive. Perhaps it’s fitting then, that the South Park Vaccination Special (styled as the South Parq Vaccination Special, which we won’t be indulging here) falls one day short of arriving a full year after that fateful day.

Of course, the South Park Pandemic Special already aired amid the throes of the pandemic on September 30. But with some 100 million Americans already vaccinated and the end of this awful thing approaching, the Vaccination Special allows South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone to really take a step back and reflect on the very strange year that was. Their conclusion? That shit really sucked, man.

The South Park Vaccination Special is far superior to the Pandemic Special and is one of the better South Park episodes of the past few years. That’s due to the show’s reinvestment in its own central four characters: Stan, Kyle, Kenny, and Cartman. One got the distinct sense over the past five or so seasons that Parker and Stone (now in their early 50s and late 40s, respectively) had come to identify with Marsh family paterfamilias Randy more than their original South Park Elementary students.

Randy has always been a “great in small doses” secret weapon for South Park, but Parker and Stone have lately been determined to find as big a dose as possible of whatever special, pandemic or otherwise, Randy’s Tegridy Farms is selling. The Vaccination Special doesn’t feature Randy until the very end of its runtime, when he takes the opportunity to hock his wares and remind us that the episode is nearly over. Taking his place as the South Park leads are the four Kommunity Kids who were always designed to fill that role in the first place.

There aren’t many tangible ways to measure this, but it does feel that amid quarantine, nostalgia has reigned supreme. When the present is boring and the future is murky, the past is all we have. At least I think that’s the case because me and countless other older millennials with disposable income have driven the Pokémon cards of our past to near extinction.

Parker and Stone too seem to have spent the months since the Pandemic Special aired thinking about their past. The resulting Vaccination Special is the kind of self-indulgent spectacle that the show would make fun of under any other circumstances. But after all we’ve been through together, who could blame South Park for wanting to post some cringe of its own?

South Park Pandemic Special Brings the Show’s Highest Ratings in Seven Years

By Joseph Baxter

South Park Pandemic Special: What Does The Return of Death Mean?

By Daniel Kurland

The plot of Vaccination Special is convoluted and bizarre as any other latter-year South Park episode. Parker, Stone, and their team of writers clearly view the writing process as exploratory, and follow the whims of the story to wherever it wants to go. In this case, the story takes South Park from Walgreens as the hottest club in town, to Cartman humiliating their teacher, to Mr. Garrison returning, to the whole town getting swept up in a war between the Kommunity Kids and the QAnon-tutored Q’Ties. Of course, Garrison faces down Hollywood’s shadowy elite, and Mr. White turns into a penis but that’s the long and the short of it.

While some (or most, if you’re feeling uncharitable) of South Park’s recent plots feel exhaustively convoluted, this one does not. Amid all the insanity, the show never loses focus of the four boys at its center. Stan, Kyle, Cartman, and Kenny have all dealt with the ennui of being together for 25 years before, but something about their dissatisfaction this time feels more acute…and more adult.

The quartet spend the entire episode with one another and their strange dynamic takes center stage. Cartman is always the one to make something happen, in this case the plan to cheer everyone up with a cruel prank that horrifically backfires. Kyle is always the one to oppose Cartman’s plan. Then Stan is always the one who must field Kyle and Cartman’s complaints and requests to keep the other in check. Meanwhile, Kenny is the wide-eyed innocent stuck in the middle of it all.

This dynamic is exciting and fresh to see onscreen again after the show has spent so much time sidelining the core four. But you can also appreciate just how exhausting it is for the kids. The scene in which they accept their “divorce” and begin the process of divvying up time with Kenny is strangely affecting (either that, or we’ve all been inside far too long). Despite displaying a newfound interest in serialization, South Park’s breaking up of its main characters seems unlikely to stick in its 24th season. For now at least, it’s a tender examination of what one full year of sustained stress can do to our most important relationships.

While the dissolution of the Kommunity Kids’ union is novel ground for the show to tread, the rest of this special is positively bursting with callbacks and nostalgia. Of course, the most prominent bit of past reclamation comes in the form of Mr. Garrison.

“Oh yes, I’ve got a lot of baggage,” Garrison happily explains to the bus driver upon arriving back in South Park following his stint as the literal President of the United States.

Garrison breaks down his hero’s journey to PC Principal and to any audience member who may have forgotten. First he was a caustic elementary school teacher with a finger puppet fixation. Then he was gay. Then he was a woman. Then he was Donald Trump. Now he’s back and can’t we all just get back to normal? Hopefully as quick as possible?

It’s hard not to see Garrison’s journey to reclaim his past self as commentary. Even if it can’t fully articulate it, South Park wants to get back to something, whether that be its own golden era or merely a world without a virus rampaging through it. There is a truly astonishing amount of past characters who pop up in this Vaccination Special, even if for only a moment. Scenes frequently feature comic book style flash page art with dozens of characters from South Park’s past. I wasn’t able to pause it to get a full accounting but I do recall seeing Al Gore, Cthulhu, and Najix, the Talking Taco Who Poops Ice Cream. Hell, even mad scientist Alphonse Mephisto from season one gets a speaking role this time around.

Given the subject of this particular episode, and the catharsis of all our impending vaccinations, a lot of these callbacks and cameos really do feel earned, rather than just an ancient show playing the hits. It certainly helps that a lot of these callbacks are funny. One in particular that caught my eye is a notecard reading “Whale on moon?” on Mr. White’s Q conspiracy corkboard. Who could forget the fate of poor killer whale Willzyx? Seeing Parker and Stone in their Basketball attire as part of the Hollywood Elite on the corkboard is good for a chuckle too.

In fact, much of this episode is perfectly pleasantly funny, if infrequently laugh-out-loud. The presence of Garrison’s Mr. Slave replacement, Mr. Service, is hilarious. Naturally, the sight gag of White as an enormous, barely sentient dick is a winner as well. Much of the third-wall breaking is amusing, even if it culminates with shadowy Hollywood powers being connected to the Israelis.

Not everything works in Vaccination Special. South Park doesn’t know what to do with QAnon, but to be fair: who does? Some of the boys’ plans once they secure vaccines are unclear or don’t really follow.

But still, by the end of the episode’s extended running time, it’s actually quite cathartic to see the people of South Park riotously celebrating, unmasked. That’s certainly partially due to the context surrounding the episode (after all, Pandemic Special featured a similar ending that wasn’t nearly as pleasant), but it also speaks to the work that the episode puts in with its characters.

I mentioned earlier that this is one of the better South Parks of the past few years. It occurs to me now that I have no way of knowing that’s true, having forgotten many of the South Parks of the past few years. In any case, judging South Park against itself is a difficult proposition as each episode feels crushed under the weight of the show’s own massive catalogue.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

For now, at least, the Vaccination Special works on its own as a nostalgia-drenched bright spot at the tail end of a very long year.

The post South Park Vaccination Special Review appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/38oOiZV

#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

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words-writ-in-starlight · 7 years

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10 Female Characters

So I was tagged in this meme by @the-anchorless-moon and it’s basically what it says on the tin: 10 favorite female characters from 10 different fandoms.

Lucretia, The Adventure Zone

Rogue, X-Men

Rachel Berenson, Animorphs

Claire Temple, Defenders

Sara Lance, Legends of Tomorrow

Daine Sarrasri, Immortals Quartet

Nomi Marks, Sense8

Eve Baird, Librarians

Cassandra Pentaghast, Dragon Age: Inquisition

Jamethiel Priests-Bane, Kencyrath

And here are ten more tags for people. If you don’t want to do it, don’t feel obliged.

@skymurdock, @lathori, @aethersea, @littlestartopaz, @cthulhu-with-a-fez, @sroloc--elbisivni, @thanatoswrath, @princehal9000, @maelace, @im-lost-but-not-gone

#kencyrath #taz #xmen #animorphs #legends of tomorrow #dragon age #other pertinent tags #idk #i'm not tagging everything #these are not in any order of priority #nor is this a comprehensive list of my favorite fandoms and their corresponding favorite female characters #hey i might write more of that diana at camp halfblood au if anyone was interested #tag meme #idiot teenagers with a queue #taz balance

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topmixtrends · 6 years

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Hendrix has stated that, prior to embarking on this project, he was not “a natural metal fan”:

“Dude,” they said to Greg as he jogged by them, “she is so on the rag.”

“Are we breaking up?” Greg asked, clueless, through her car window.

It took all her self-control not to back over him as she drove off.

Rob Latham is a LARB senior editor. His most recent book is Science Fiction Criticism: An Anthology of Essential Writings, published by Bloomsbury Press in 2017.

The post Magic Carpet Rides: Rock Music and the Fantastic appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books http://bit.ly/2SMN28U

#Los Angeles Review of Books #topmixtrends

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