Is it the beginning of a geek take on horror? It was a fun film, and felt very original when it came out, but it was also a bit of a gimmick. I'm not sure it's ready to become an entire genre without becoming very quickly stereotyped.
With perhaps humor being the exception, it seemed like his description of this new genre almost summed up the themes from Frankenstein. I think horror has always been a "geek" thing. (If that word with its modern meaning can even be retroactively applied)
"[...] in order to survive, we need to supplicate ourselves to horrible entities whose motivations we are literally not capable of understanding."
Feels familiar. I am trying to protect my privacy to the best of my knowledge but I feel that I'm losing it to several entities whose identities and ends are rather... cloudy...
I may be naive but I don't think there ends are that cloudy Their inability to understand that while they may have noble ends but that they won't be in control forever, they aren't capable of protecting this knowledge from nefarious entities even if they did everything they could and they they don't comprehend all the the side effects of their quest for knowledge including opening up holes that can let other nefarious entities gain access too.
I don't think it's stupidity that cause them to not understand but more cognitive dissonance led by their absolute belief that what they are doing is for the good of all.
> I don't think it's stupidity that cause them to not understand but more cognitive dissonance led by their absolute belief that what they are doing is for the good of all.
Or just greed.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." -- Upton Sinclair
> the Lovecraftian universe fits extremely well with the universe as understood by geeks. It's a fundementally science-driven place, where all magic is indeed just sufficiently advanced technology.
Call of the Cthulu starts with a shared dream, so where's the technology? Several other stories involve dreaming too. Lovecraft is more about programming (programming people and peoples programming) than science. Most Lovecraft characters are introverts much like the geeks, and selfie takers of our auspicious era (meh).
At the point when Lovecraft was writing, dreaming was intimately connected with a new, exciting science - psychology and psychotherapy.
And the technology's all around - it's explicitly stated both in Lovecraft and subsequent folk who build on the Mythos that the Great Old Ones, the Mi-Go, the Great Race, and others aren't supernatural entities, but aliens with mathematics and magic we don't understand.
No; his real writing style is even more florid than that. Lovecraft's writing is marked by complex sentence structure and a heavy use of archaic terms. Compare the opening of "Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath" for an example:
There was one website that got posted here a while ago [1] where everyone that's looking at it is hosting it- if everyone stopped looking at it, the page would die. A neat concept.
A good deal of Lovecraft's works involve something that is definitely technological. Several of his crazy "alien" races (sometimes Earth-based) have their extreme powers due to technological progress, such as the Elder Things (genetic engineering), the Great Race (time-traveling & mind-swapping), and the Yi-Go (brains-in-jars and inter-stellar travel). Many of his human antagonists are also developing forbidding science/technology, although usually with some alchemy thrown in. Even crazy creatures obey physical laws that happen to not be known; more than one creature disintegrates on death because its body is an exotic type of matter, and at least one creature is invisible for the same reason.
A lot of the horror of Lovecraft's works stem from a fear of science-gone-too-far. I read an interesting essay that said that his regression-to-past-generations works were actually founded in the contemporary revulsion many people felt they were first introduced to this newfangled "evolution" business (augmented by Lovecraft's notorious racism).
You'll also notice that a lot of the science in Lovecraft's stories isn't, uh, good. Like, it's really bad. Creatures that flap their wings and fly out of the atmosphere, and to a different dimension. Stars that are far away have different laws of physics. That sort of thing.
Imagine someone who is a mild conspiracy nut (of the email-forwarding variety), and not scientifically literate but reading pop-science articles about new breakthroughs in the 20s and 30s. The majority of Lovecraft's writings are a fair description of this hypothetical person's fears about scientific progress.
Lovecraft's cosmic horror is still fairly rules-based, i.e. it's magic of the Clarke's-Third-Law variety. The dreaming in Call of Cthulhu is a natural force that obeys laws. Humans don't know what those laws are, but something does and can manipulate that force. Cthulhu itself doesn't obey our laws of physics, but there are laws of physics that he obeys (possibly from another dimension), and he is also subject to the alignment of the stars. It's all described as rationally explainable, but not within the bounds of what human intelligence can graps.
The actual Dreamlands stuff with Randolph Carter is different, though. It's not even horror, really. It's Lovecraft making an explicitly Fantasy setting, in emulation of Lord Dunsany. It's got a much more whimsical and adventurous vibe, and the various fantastical elements (horrific or otherwise) generally aren't as rationally-explainable.
This exemplifies my love hate relationship with HN. I love that I now have something new to read that is extremely interesting, but I hate that you've just destroyed my productivity for a time span of not minutes, but hours, or even days depending on how deep I go into this rabbit hole.
It's been a week and you may be in danger of becoming productive again, so I thought I'd link you to the LJ that the author kept before starting SlateStarCodex: http://squid314.livejournal.com
A tangent: I strongly encourage anyone who is a fan of Cthulhu, Lovecraft, this quote, and video games to try Bloodborne for PS4. It's the best blend of these four elements I've ever experienced, and it still sticks with me months after I finished it.
For what it's worth, I bought a PS4 solely for Bloodborne and I think it was absolutely worth it, plus we have Dark Souls 3 coming down the pipe next year too...
You're free to disagree, but Demon's Souls and Dark Souls do not touch on the Lovecraftian horror elements nearly as strongly as Bloodborne does, which is the whole reason I mentioned it here. Bloodborne is the only game in the series which is actually relevant to this thread.
As for the class/character system, Bloodborne is actually not a Souls game and is deliberately different. I don't really want to get into a big discussion of the game mechanics here, but it took what worked best from Demon's Souls and invested everything in it. Nobody really played with heavy armor in Demon's Souls anyway except perhaps for a self-imposed handicap. Bloodborne is basically a streamlined Demon's Souls with the cruft that didn't work well thrown out and a more explicitly Lovecraftian story and world.
DS2 has a lot more variety but also has a large number of basic mechanical issues, such as imprecise hitboxes.
Dark Souls 1 probably hits the sweet spot between variety and solid fundamentals. Hopefully Dark Souls 3 marks a return to this style.
On a related note - I've thought for a while that Charlie's Laundry series would make an excellent TV series - if for no other reason than it allows me to speculate on who could play Angleton.
You needn't be; "In the Loop" is a British political satire starring Capaldi in, I think, one of his better roles, and besides which is a cousin of "Veep", easily the most on-point US political satire of the last fifty years.
That paper has been one of my favorites since I first read it. That said, assuming a bounded level of complexity in the bug/hack, there are ways to jump from an infected toolchain to an uninfected toolchain, it just requires quite a bit of effort. If you can't assume a bonded level of complexity, well, it then becomes a debate on theology.
Apocalyptic narrative is as old as writing. Human understanding also grows with technology - the British Empire only banned slavery around 200 years ago.
Dystopian stuff has the same problem for me as horror. All I see is Joe Flaherty as Count Floyd saying "Oooh, scary!"
The only horror movie I ever liked was "Alien". Because it was credible.
One of the common elements of the Lovecraftian Mythos is that the gods of it do not care about humans and cannot be appeased or swayed or what not. Perhaps this isthe primary takeaway we should focus on when comparing these vastly influential technologies and the people behind them to Cthuloid horrors.
Interesting. I currently fiddle around with a little game [0] to brush up my Javascript. It is exactly about this theme: Seeking knowledge to save mankind and Cthulhu. Alpha-quality warning! https://qznc.github.io/IncCth/
[0] assuming you consider Cookie Clicker et al "games".
I'm reminded of A Study In Emerald, a Sherlock Holmes style detective story in a Lovecraftian setting (with a licensed board game which I hear is quite good).
63 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 196 ms ] threadIs it the beginning of a geek take on horror? It was a fun film, and felt very original when it came out, but it was also a bit of a gimmick. I'm not sure it's ready to become an entire genre without becoming very quickly stereotyped.
Particularly since I think the "geek" moniker could definitely be applied to the Shelleys. Byron, less so.
Feels familiar. I am trying to protect my privacy to the best of my knowledge but I feel that I'm losing it to several entities whose identities and ends are rather... cloudy...
I feel a follow-up piece coming on entitled
"Ia, ia, Google fthagn..."
Pessimist!
Cool Airbnb
The Tweet of Cthulhu
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Mozilla
I don't think it's stupidity that cause them to not understand but more cognitive dissonance led by their absolute belief that what they are doing is for the good of all.
Or just greed.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." -- Upton Sinclair
Call of the Cthulu starts with a shared dream, so where's the technology? Several other stories involve dreaming too. Lovecraft is more about programming (programming people and peoples programming) than science. Most Lovecraft characters are introverts much like the geeks, and selfie takers of our auspicious era (meh).
And the technology's all around - it's explicitly stated both in Lovecraft and subsequent folk who build on the Mythos that the Great Old Ones, the Mi-Go, the Great Race, and others aren't supernatural entities, but aliens with mathematics and magic we don't understand.
Parody sites like http://thedoomthatcametopuppet.tumblr.com/ actually give a pretty good sense of his signature style.
Edit: Now I know puppet is horrible after all.
Example: Field of research were allowed to deadlock, but I still intend to accept the situation might be available for a unification algorithm.
http://www.yankeeclassic.com/miskatonic/library/stacks/liter...
[1]http://ephemeralp2p.durazo.us/2bbbf21959178ef2f935e90fc60e5b...
A lot of the horror of Lovecraft's works stem from a fear of science-gone-too-far. I read an interesting essay that said that his regression-to-past-generations works were actually founded in the contemporary revulsion many people felt they were first introduced to this newfangled "evolution" business (augmented by Lovecraft's notorious racism).
You'll also notice that a lot of the science in Lovecraft's stories isn't, uh, good. Like, it's really bad. Creatures that flap their wings and fly out of the atmosphere, and to a different dimension. Stars that are far away have different laws of physics. That sort of thing.
Imagine someone who is a mild conspiracy nut (of the email-forwarding variety), and not scientifically literate but reading pop-science articles about new breakthroughs in the 20s and 30s. The majority of Lovecraft's writings are a fair description of this hypothetical person's fears about scientific progress.
Lovecraft's cosmic horror is still fairly rules-based, i.e. it's magic of the Clarke's-Third-Law variety. The dreaming in Call of Cthulhu is a natural force that obeys laws. Humans don't know what those laws are, but something does and can manipulate that force. Cthulhu itself doesn't obey our laws of physics, but there are laws of physics that he obeys (possibly from another dimension), and he is also subject to the alignment of the stars. It's all described as rationally explainable, but not within the bounds of what human intelligence can graps.
The actual Dreamlands stuff with Randolph Carter is different, though. It's not even horror, really. It's Lovecraft making an explicitly Fantasy setting, in emulation of Lord Dunsany. It's got a much more whimsical and adventurous vibe, and the various fantastical elements (horrific or otherwise) generally aren't as rationally-explainable.
You're welcome.
But I'm trying to hold off on buying a PS4 until there's more than one game I want to play on it.
I feel like it's not possible to express yourself as fully as you can with the class/character system in DS2 in bloodborne.
It's certainly not terrible and it's a nice holdover until DS3... but it lacks. (I do really like the parry and revenge systems though)
As for the class/character system, Bloodborne is actually not a Souls game and is deliberately different. I don't really want to get into a big discussion of the game mechanics here, but it took what worked best from Demon's Souls and invested everything in it. Nobody really played with heavy armor in Demon's Souls anyway except perhaps for a self-imposed handicap. Bloodborne is basically a streamlined Demon's Souls with the cruft that didn't work well thrown out and a more explicitly Lovecraftian story and world.
DS2 has a lot more variety but also has a large number of basic mechanical issues, such as imprecise hitboxes.
Dark Souls 1 probably hits the sweet spot between variety and solid fundamentals. Hopefully Dark Souls 3 marks a return to this style.
https://www.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712.fall02/papers/p761-thomp...
The C2 article on it is basically a bunch of mere mortals trying (and failing) to come to grips with it:
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TheKenThompsonHack
Dystopian stuff has the same problem for me as horror. All I see is Joe Flaherty as Count Floyd saying "Oooh, scary!"
The only horror movie I ever liked was "Alien". Because it was credible.
So meh.
[0] assuming you consider Cookie Clicker et al "games".