#zero hp lovecraft

[weaselandfriends]

From The Making Of: Cleveland Quixotic.

Nowadays this factoid might be of more interest to people. Just another example of my uncanny ability to stay a step ahead of the real world (a la Chicago)

In related JD Vance news, @recordcrash has proposed the (shitpost?) theory that JD Vance and Zero HP Lovecraft are the same person. Both writers... both right wing... 0hp deleted all their social media accounts only a few weeks before JD's nomination... Who can truly say?

[cannotbestormed-scharfuehrer]

[grandhotelabyss]

The reigning queen of American letters and MSNBC-brained lib extraordinaire humanistically reproves one of the most notable of American letters’ ultra-right-wing upstarts, a hyper-racist celebrant of his reactionary namesake and the anti-humanist reducto-materialism for which he tentacularly stood. “Quite a meeting of the minds here,” someone quipped in the quote Tweets. 

There’s less ideological distance between them than appears from their Twitter feeds, hers almost comically aligned with official ideology, his just as strenuous a performance of almost psychotic distance from it or any other liberal norm. But as I’ve observed already, she encrypts in her fiction a worldview at odds with her political rhetoric, at least based on the handful of works I’ve read out of her massive oeuvre, and at least as one possible or plausible view of life. And she admires the first Lovecraft, the real Lovecraft, having written a long introduction to one of the reprint collections. As for who is the superior author between JCO and 0HP, there’s no question. He’s a one-note Nancy and a shallow pasticheur, whereas she at her best—for example, in We Were the Mulvaneys—can channel the very wind and rain. 

Who’s right in the quarrel above? They may both be right; there may be no contradiction between their two prophecies. Some will be replaced by the machine—they were, she says elsewhere in the feed, machines already (not a terribly liberal sentiment, by the way)—and some will thrive in a more restricted artisanal market. But her reference to “home cooking” is the real clue in the labyrinth.

I’m seeing too much despair over the AI question from writers and artists. It’s too late to complain about this; the time to complain was when Hegel subjected art to a theory of historical progress which guaranteed everybody’s eventual obsolescence. (I use “Hegel” as a convenient shorthand for a broad shift toward historicism in western aesthetics; one could use other names, from Vico to Darwin, and one could read Hegel in other ways.) The robots have come to finish that job, not to start anything new. I suggest another way to look at the question. “I side with humanity” may fail as rhetoric—too sentimental, too science fictional. So I put the assertion more selfishly: I side with myself. 

We will be enjoined to surrender to the robots for both left-wing and right-wing reasons: as a xenophilic openness to the technological Other, as a democratic extension of art-making to everyone, and as a bow to the market’s demand for maximal efficiency and low labor costs in all things. All sound Hegelian dissolutions of art into the social matrix in its ethical, political, and economic guises. So why go on making art? Well, why did we start in the first place? Why do I cook when I could just order take-out? 

I leave you with this hint, from an essay I first shared to this very website about a decade ago. It’s not obviously related to the matter in hand, but its main claim—that the artist’s own satisfaction and self-transfiguration in the artistic process is an intrinsic good needing no worldly defense—settles the whole question:

Bernhard agrees with critics like Bourdieu in denouncing art’s covert parasitism on the networks of social status. But he disagrees about what to do. Bourdieu wants to jettison the ideal of the aesthetic as disinterested attention to form. This might annihilate some forms of snobbery. But it is hard to imagine that settling accounts with Kant will do much to change the social world’s basic nature as a hierarchy founded on fear and pain.  Bernhard, with a deep understanding of how art has been infected by the social relations described by postmodern critics, reacts more rationally. Don’t get rid of art; get rid of social relations.

The satisfaction of the highest art for Bernhard thus defines a human space both replete with value and outside society. In this it does not look so different from the Kantian ideal of aesthetic experience. But there is a crucial difference. For Bernhard, accepting the truth of the postmodern critique means accepting that every relation between an artwork and an audience becomes enmeshed in status relations. Bernhard faces the consequences squarely. The “real satisfaction” of art can never be achieved by the audience of a work, but only and solely by its creator.

—Michael W. Clune, “Bernhard’s Way”

[clockspur]

There’s flurries on Halloween here🥶

I drew this while waiting for Trick-or-Treat Time. ‘Dunno if any Trick-or-Treaters will show up, but at least me and my doggy are safe and warm(though I AM gonna have to give him a Treat later; poor boy is being kept away so that he doesn’t tackle children with love and kisses🐶).

Soooo anyways

Happy Halloween 👻

stay safe and warm🎃

[bitterkarella]

Midnight Pals: Physical Fitness

[at the beach] Sonia Greene: oh howard this was such a lovely idea! Greene: a romantic seaside picnic and just the two of us! Greene: and we've got your favorite food right here - untoasted white bread! Greene: isn't this nice? HP Lovecraft: [sweats, stares at ocean] right sure

HP Lovecraft: Hey! Quit kicking sand in our faces! Sonia Greene: that man is the worst nuisance on the beach! Aleister Crowley: [grabbing Lovecraft] listen here, I'd smash your face, only you're so skinny you might dry up and blow away!

Crowley: [to greene, as he manhandles lovecraft] look babe, why don't you drop that zero and get with the hero Crowley: i'll show you how a real man kicks sand in people's faces! Crowley: THE GREAT BEAST!!! DO AS THOU WILLT!!!!

Lovecraft: The big bully! I'll get even some day! Greene: oh don't let it bother you, little boy Greene: i'll fix you up a nice big meal, put some meat on those bones Lovecraft: and that'll help me build muscle? Greene: [sweats] um muscle? um sure yeah muscle

Poe: howard, you need to stop letting aleister pick on you Lovecraft: but he's twice my size! he's all buff cuz of all the mountain climbing! Poe: you could start working out? Lovecraft: you mean physical labor? Lovecraft: sport?! Lovecraft: [sweats] like a common cornishman?!?

Poe: you should try it Poe: a good regimen of rowing and swimming helped me build mass Barker: oh come on edgar Poe: no really! Poe: [removes shirt, revealing he is super swole] Barker: Barker: oh right Barker: right i forgot about that

Mary Shelley: listen up nerd you don't need exercise Shelley: what you need is one of these [flips switchblade] Poe: oh come on mary, what if he gets attacked when he doesn't have knife on him? Shelley: dunno, that's never come up

Shelley: next time aleister gives you shit, you give him one of these [pantomimes shivving] Poe: mary, violence never solved anything Shelley: it does if you're good at it Poe: Barker: ah ha ha she's got you there edgar

Lovecraft: Darn it! I'm sick and tired of being a scarecrow! William Hope Hodgson says he can give me a real body. all right! i'll gamble a stamp and get his free book Lovecraft: i'll just not eat this week to afford the stamp

William Hope Hodgson: are you "fed up" with seeing the huskies walk off with the best of everything? Hodgson: sick and tired of being soft, frail, skinny or flabby? Hodgson: i know because i myself was once a puny 97 pound "runt" Hodgson: today, I am two separate gorillas

Hodgson: give me 5 weeks and my body building plan will turn YOU into the bronzed adonis you were meant to be Hodgson: through a dynamic combination of cardiovascular training, lifting big kegs, and standing in the desert while getting your balls tanned by an ultraviolet machine

Lovecraft: wow, how's you get so buff?? Hodgson: from constant brawling during my navy days Lovecraft: w-wait Lovecraft: you're a sailor?? Hodgson: yeah you should know from my popular lecture series about how much the navy fuckin sucks ass Lovecraft: [sweats]

Hodgson: ugh, i tell you Hodgson: it's just impossible to pay the bills with pseudoscience fitness programs catering to mens' insecurities Hodgson: i'm gonna pivot to weird fiction instead Hodgson: that's where the big money is

Hodgson: what if a bunch of pig men attacked a big house Smith: [on phone] hey clark ashton? it's me! your cousin! marvin smith! Smith: you know that new horror genre you're been looking for? Smith: well, listen to this! [aims phone at hodgson]

[darkopsiian]

thumbnail and concept art for MOTH's Terminated Experiments

The Angler was based on an Angler Fish and the Cryptosuchus from Below Zero. The Brush Jelly was based on a Man'o'War and the Gomazoa from MTG. The Circuit Worm sounded gross so I used it. The Lumenymph is a Rats In The Walls (HP Lovecraft) reference. The Engineer was originally named the Saboteur, but it felt too on the nose. The Yewcots name is a combination of Yew Berry and Apricot.

[morlock-holmes]

The Last Psychiatrist's book came out, which led me to two reviews, both of which call him out for saying stuff that is obviously crazy but both of which also contain incredibly bizarre statements just tossed out there with seemingly no self-consciousness about whether they are just as odd as anything TLP has written:

I'm just going to ignore those parts of Scott Alexander's review that are like that to focus on a pet peeve:

(The Bible describes very clearly what angels look like. Everyone agrees the Bible is the authority on angels, maybe the only primary source for them at all. All Western culture for 1500 years has been based around the Bible. There are hundreds of millions of people who take the Bible completely literally and read it every day. The Bible says - Revelations 22:18 - that if anyone changes the Bible in any way even by a single word they will be punished with eternal torture. And yet nobody’s mental image of an angel, nor any popular artistic depiction of an angel, has anything in common with the Biblical description. This is the highest-grade antimeme I feel comfortable using as an example; if you don’t see the fnords they can’t eat you.)

I mean that's... that's just definitely not the case.

Alexander links to this review by Zero HP Lovecraft (Whom I am unfamiliar with) who says,

I want to explain some things to you now that you probably feel deep in your bones but probably haven’t found the time to articulate. Whenever someone talks about “capitalism” like it’s a hostile alien living among us, they are either wittingly or unwittingly agitating for communism. They may not even realize it. Everyone feels some measure of discontent in their life and the lazy, fashionable scapegoat for this in current year america is “capitalism.” If you blame capitalism for your problems, no one will take it personally, and many of the other monkeys around you will make agreeable noises. But there is exactly one group of people who blames all their problems on capitalism, and that is communists. If you blame your problems on capitalism, you are a communist. If you talk about “late capitalism” or “late stage capitalism” you are (possibly unwittingly) claiming that the return of Christ glorious worker’s uprising is nigh, repent repent, every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Georgius Christ is Floyd. There are two ways you can try to get out of this: the first is “yes, and” and the other is “no, but”. If you’re part of the first group, you’re irredeemable. Communism, much like being a woman, is a congenital condition, and it can’t be cured, though sometimes you can treat the symptoms. If you aren’t a communist, but you scapegoat or criticize capitalism, then you are at the least participating in communism, but it may not be your essential nature. The slur for these people is “neoliberal” — a word that means someone who likes communism in theory but is just slightly too pragmatic to ever get past second base with her. You’re the ones I’m trying to help. We can tell TLP is in this second group because although he talks about capitalism, he saves his worst vitriol for “the media,” which is a right wing dog whistle, just like talking about capitalism is left-wing dog whistle. When a man is sending you mixed signals, it means he himself is confused.

This is more batshit than anything that he quotes from TLP.

I'm trying to figure out if this means:

"Capitalism" is a word that refers to every possible human economic system other than communism, such that by definition the only possible alternative is communism;

"Capitalism" and particularly "Communism" are not specific historical economic systems, but in fact names for the exactly two economic systems that can exist;

Current technological or political realities ensure that it is literally impossible to create any economic systems other than capitalism or communism at this particular moment, such that opposition to one is de facto support of the other

The first two would be bizarre, and even the last is, uh, contentious but reading further this guy wasn't pulling a schtick, he's just a depressing John Bircher who knows that if he pretends that he's giving you some secret post-normie secret insight we'll just forget everything about American history. Guys, did you know that blacks are inferior to whites, and more criminal, that only super insightful insight porn writers have ever come up with such an out-of-left field crazy idea that no american normie could ever actually believe?

Honestly, fuck this depressing fascist. His ilk are going to be running the country soon, complaining about how hamstrung they are as they march people into camps. It's amazing how good he is at selling the most normie American bullshit as, like, forbidden knowledge that only the most enlightened masters have cued into.

Honestly his opinions seem to be:

Men have been feminized, and that's bad;

White racial pride has been atenuated, and that's bad;

Trans people are mutilating themselves, and need to be stopped;

Blacks are more criminal than whites, and need to be controlled

But sold as, like, this forbidden knowledge that only somebody as smart as him could come up with. It's amazing how these people will see a finger-wagging leftist and then decide that said leftist must be running American politics.

I am poorer for having read this dumb bitch.

[datenightfright]

Dunno if u still do hp lovecraft but can I have like, a random thoughts or imagine about yan hastur? Like anythg that first pops up in ur mind is fine as well. TIA!

I love this. Good soup.

-Yandere Hastur gives you zero choices in life, but makes you think they do. Sure you can chose what you want to wear for the day, but it better be the outfit they picked out for you. You can chose to eat pizza, or you can eat the five course meal he made you. You can chose to behave, or you can chose to be punished.

-Always has a limb on you at all times. They MUST be touching you, no matter the circumstances. You can't even get rid of them in your sleep.

-The "gotta break them, then make them" yandere type. Of course you're all they want in life, of COURSE they want nothing but you, as you are. But you COULD be better? You could be perfect.

-Loves it when you dress in their color. Yellow looks good on everyone, but it looks best on you.

-A jealous outer god, they will keep you from others. Cthulhu might show you off once and a while, but you're all Hastur's, you always will be.

[irate-pirate-bi-27]

Get to know me tag game!

Thank you @rooksnooks for the tag!!

Rules: answer + tag 9 people you want to get to know better and/or catch up with

Favourite Colour: At the moment it's red, but I constantly switch back and forth between red and blue. Sometimes I also dabble in purple.

Last Song: Aengus, The Prize-Winning Hog - The Toxhards :)

Currently Reading: The Undying by Mudrooroo (I'm also halfway through a reread of The Name Of The Wind, and I'm on a hiatus from a collection of short stories by HP Lovecraft). I haven't been reading much fanfic recently tho

Currently Watching: The End Of The Fucking World (with my sibling) and Just Roll With It (as well as my ever-growing Watch Later list on Youtube)

Currently Craving: The motivation to read or do anything productive

Coffee or Tea: Tea forever. If tea has one fan I am her. If tea has zero fans I am gone from this world.

Any hobby you would like to try? How can I pick just one? My first thought is learning sign language (or any new language really) but there's also painting, cycling, hiking, learning an instrument, etc etc

Any discipline you'll follow during the Olympics? I might keep up with the swimming, since it's the one Australia always does really well in. I'm looking at the categories right now and just found out that break dancing is also a category now?? so I'm definitely gonna watch that. If I get time I might check out the gymnastics or archery or martial arts categories too

Any AU/Alternate Universe you've been plotting for? I haven't written any fanfic in a while now, but my latest project has basically been bible fanfic. In a sentence, I would describe it as an angsty Jesus x Judas sci-fi/fantasy AU with an unhappy ending (for now)

I will tag: @birdo-is-here, @starsinplainsight, @neon-zoologist, @hex-is-vexxed, @iiep-wop, @shaunarcanine , @ohmygod-zu-you-suck, @bepisbee, @aussiegingerguy, and anyone else who wants to join in!

[cryptidsncurios]

@cursedfortune sent: belated/early munday question: horror stories you're ride or die for? it can be from any media.

Eyyy, guess what, it’s munday now, so thanks for the question friend! To start, my blanket statement concerning my faves is that I absolutely love any story that explores the unknowable, the unexplainable, and the extraordinarily eldritch. Cosmic and monstrous horror is MY. JAM. I’m into the gore, the body horror, the things that are just TOO. BIG. for our brains to comprehend so they just.. yknow… explode. Bonus points that I am a notorious terato and appealing monster designs are just……. hhhh

So in terms of specifics: it’s sad that Lovecraft was such an asshole, bc honestly some of his stories serve as the cornerstone for a lot of my inspo, primarily his works like Call of Cthulhu, At the Mountains of Madness, Beyond the Wall of Sleep, Dagon, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, and etceteraaa. Thankfully, his ideas have since been better adapted for people who AREN’T raging bigots like himself, which is why I HAVE to give a big shoutout to Lovecraft Country, of which I’ve only read the book but I hear the show is awesome too.

And nooooow let me kinda do this by categories with some of the highlights off the top of my head:

Movies:

The Thing (or anything John Carpenter tbh)

Hellraiser (plus the book Hellbound Heart, and just Clive Barker in general)

The Ritual

The Void (the ultimate love letter to practical effects horror, would recommend 10/10)

Color Out of Space (also the short story, plus I gotta credit Nic Cage, his performance was actually fantastique)

Shows:

EVERY. SEASON. OF. CHANNEL. ZERO. No lie, it's AMAZING. (And it's not like American Horror Story that's like.... icky to me, ngl. Some parts of that are cool, but then others are.... yuck. iykyk

Uuuuh tbh haven't watched too many shows, but I do have every intention to watch The Last of Us (as well as play it)

Books:

Tomie (and like, ALL of Junji It's stuff... so can we get some love for Junji Ito heeere!!)

Frankenstein

Camp Damascus

And I'm working on reading Shadows Over Baker Street now, which is like, if Sherlock Holmes was in the world of HP Lovecraft and so far it's WICKED SICK and Neil Gaiman writes the opening short story A Study in Emerald and I love that man, he is a fantastic human being)

Also since I'm on the subject of Gaiman, Coraline gets a mention

The Turn of the Screw (read in college and the first paragraph is a doozy but the ending HIT ME)

Video Games:

Silent Hill (any time it's foggy I'm like "i..it look..looks liiike....... o_o u know what... O-O )

The Evil Within (both games---they have their problems, but the haunting atmosphere is A+++ (well, in-between all the... horrific dying... pffff))

And like……. whatever it is that’s going on in Kojima’s silly little mind

Also I would like to give a shout out to the comedy/horror genre, like the Evil Dead series (Bruce Campbell, pls slide into my DMs), Dude Bro Party Massacre III (I'm not sure this counts as horror??? but OH lord my brain is still trying to wrap around this insane mess and I need people to watch it), and Tucker and Dale vs Evil.

So yeah, is a messy list tbh and there’s a ton more, but these ARE my ride or die picks and I'm sorry that this got so long but I have FEELINGS for horror aaaaaah

[n4682]

fun fact about me

some of the things i have not yet read but want to read at some point:

dracula

any hp lovecraft work

fahrenheit 451

some of the things i have read:

the geneva conventions and the addendums

the communist manifesto

anyways completely unrelated did you know that i have zero taste in media whatsoever

[brazenautomaton]

I'm rereading "The Gig Economy" by Zero HP Lovecraft, and at some point he uses the words "brazen automaton." Is it a reference to your blog? Google tells me that "brazen head" or "brass head" is a thing, but "automaton" seems much less common. coincidence?

if it is, I wasn't told about it

there's a boss in Slay the Spire called the bronze automaton but that's the closest I got

and I made up the phrase as a descriptor for my icon, Huitzil from Darkstalkers, I had never seen it anywhere else

e: on superficial review consisting of ctrl-f, he appears to believe "brazen" means "bronze" and not "brass"

which

uh

may have been a misconception I also held at a relevant time

[a-god-in-ruins-rises]

this zero hp lovecraft guy is supposed to be one of the intellectual leaders of the alt-right (or whatever they’re calling themselves these days) yet he’s always saying dumb shit like this.

he should know that what usually made the difference between a good king and a bad king was his bureaucracy and his administrative ability and his ability to delegate. the most successful states in history were those that were most bureaucratic; sumer, egypt, china, greece, roman empire, byzantine empire, england, france, spain, america, the incan empire, the many italian city-states, prussia, the medieval catholic church, etc. and this isn’t even taking into consideration the many “good bureaucracies” of highly successful corporations and other private enterprises.

“nooo, but i don’t like bureaucracy, bureaucracy is for small-souled bug-”

*sound of bones crunching as well-equipped, well-organized military marches over him*

[grandhotelabyss]

thoughts on Zero HP Lovecraft?

I read one of his celebrated long stories, "The Gig Economy" I think, a three-way pastiche of Borges, DFW, and his namesake HPL, all in service to a "sentient internet" type idea out of an almost 25-year-old J-horror. There was nothing to it, in my opinion: a very limited vision. Haters can be real and important artists, but I don't think he's our Lovecraft, still less our Pound or our Yeats.

[copperbadge]

Hey, Sam, could you straw poll your followers on what sort of Halloween book they'd like? I'm from wider horror vistas, so I'm not clear on what more middle-of-the-weird audiences like. For instance, I'm still not clear on 'spoopy' though I could probably manage 'kooky'

Is Spoopy like a whole thing now? I thought it was just a word from that meme image. I've never really associated kooky with Halloween either, but like...

So, I keep struggling with this for multiple reasons. One, I really would love to do a poll about this but I have zero idea of what to ask. I'd say you should do the poll and I'll link it, but I know why you're asking and it's not just the readership, it's also that generally I'm very good at asking the right questions to get really interesting data in response. So it's not that I don't want to, or don't see why I should, I'm just flailing a bit.

Mainly because, Two, I'm actually highly unfamiliar with even the basics of horror -- I never saw a single horror flick until I was grown and even then I wasn't that compelled by them, so I haven't seen most of the classics, and outside of Stephen King and HP Lovecraft (the bulk of both I genuinely consider dark fantasy rather than horror) I don't find most horror novels very interesting either. I don't object to violence or gore but I don't find them interesting, and very little on the page scares me. There are a handful of stories from the Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark books that I found terrifying as a child, but a full half of that at least was those fucking creepy illustrations.

When I was a kid, this might tell you something about me, I was the one who told the scary stories at sleepovers and campouts and such, because I found telling them much, much more interesting than hearing them. But I was repeating either stories I'd heard from older kids or paraphrases from the Scary Stories books.

Three, I would dearly like to write a Halloween-aesthetic novel in specific, but I don't think of Halloween and horror as being associated necessarily. To me Halloween always carries a flavor of camp with it, at least in terms of narrative. Most halloween movies, outside of like the actual Halloween franchise, are silly films made for kids, most of which were in fact made after I was an adult. Hocus Pocus and Disney's Halloween Treat were the two mainstays of my childhood and one of those isn't even a movie, it's a clip show.

Which I think you're getting at anyway, actually, but I'm just like...I'm trying to vocalize why I feel very scattered, mentally, about the idea. Even when it comes to creativity I'm usually highly systematic, but trying to capture Halloween in a narrative is very elusive to me -- so I have no fixed starting point that I can build the poll off of.

I need to think about it some more, so this probably won't happen until after Halloween, or at least much closer to, which is kind of a shame. But -- there's perhaps something to basic research, asking about what movies people think of as "halloween" movies, what they think of as defining Horror classics, that kind of thing. I'm open to suggestions if people want to drop comments or reblogs about what they'd like to know (please don't send asks, as I don't repost asks sent in response to other asks; or if you do I'll gather that data but please don't expect a reply).

[diaryofasugarfiend]

Fiend Watched Encanto

-Mirabel's gift is being able to tolerate bullshit

-donkey unicorns

-I don't know enough about Colombian history to know if I'm supposed to know the event Grandpa died in

-and by that I mean I know zero things about Colombian history

-there are several HP Lovecraft jokes you could make about Bruno

-talking about which, this is not how you treat someone with the gift of prophecy, it's not his fault you got smacked by Apollo's dodgeball

-my biggest criticism is that there's a kid that talks to animals and not a silky anteater in sight

-cacti and sundews

-at least Grandma can admit that she done fucked up

-these characters and the ones from Coraline should hang out sometime

-favorite song: What Else Can I Do?