Baby Ones

CNN reports that researchers have discovered a bunch of sea creatures in the Ross Sea, including "jellyfish with 12-foot tentacles and 2-foot-wide starfish" as well as "eight new molluscs".

NOAA scientist Chris Jones doesn't seem to think discovering new species is all that special: "All the fish people go nuts about that -- but you have to take it with a grain of salt."

A representative of the fish people wasn't available for comment.

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Cthulhu of the Wastelands

Cryptic Comet's turn-based, boardgame-like deck-building game Armageddon Empires features some fantastically tentacular art for the Xenopod cards. Even if you're not so interested in these types of games (and believe me when I say this is as hard and unforgiving as these games get) it's worth checking out just to see how creator Vic Davis has envisaged an army based on the horrors of the Mythos.

Link.

He is risen, and He is itchy

That Meteor That Made People Sick

Ray Huling wrote a nice piece for The Escapist about the meteor that hit Peru and subsequently made people sick.

"The event would have piqued Lovecraft's interest, as it embodies the ideology behind his writing. Lovecraft wrote to convey his idea of cosmic indifference. The universe doesn't intend to sicken us with meteorites, but the meteorites come; the sickness happens."

Gamers and Robert E. Howard fans should also check out Huling's article on Conan, also for The Escapist.

By way of Lovecraft

I have no idea what Neil Marshall means when he says this about his new wild west horror movie:

"This is 'Unforgiven' by way of H.P. Lovecraft, with that grim, gritty setting and a horror element nobody has seen before."

A grizzled cowboy tracks down a tentacled rapist? There's a lot of that going 'round lately, so I wouldn't be surprised.

Still, I did like Dog Soldiers and Descent, so he seems to know what he's doing. And given how poorly the Mythos has translated to film, he may very well be right about Lovecraft being a 'horror element nobody has seen before'.

Reviewing critiqued

Greg Costikyan, writer, entrepreneur, and designer of numerous games including that crazy RPG, Paranoia, hates when game reviewers conflate reviewing and critiquing.

Because this doesn't directly relate to Lovecraft in any way, I'll contextualise his assertion: A review of Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos would ultimately tell you whether it was worth buying; a critique of Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos may say Lovecraft was racist, insane, or whatever the hell you want to draw attention to.

Costikyan goes further and says there aren't any game critics out there -- only reviewers -- and that's made PC Gamer's Tim Edwards a bit mad. Can a review also double as a critique? Can a critique also tell you whether something is worth buying? I don't think anyone really cares apart from game reviewers, and Costikyan's done a great job of getting them to think about it.

Noctis

Noctis is all shades of awesome. It mathemagically generates a universe of eight billion solar systems, of which you can fly around in your StarDrifter spacecraft. You can land on planets, check out the scenery, and if you're lucky you'll even find signs of life. You might even find some ruins in your travels -- ruins of the non-Euclidean type....

The interface is hideous, the graphics are minimal, there's no real point to the game, and yet I sank a whole Sunday into it. And I'm a pretty busy guy.

Link. Head to the last page to make sure you get the latest version.

Loverama

I'm not sure whether the tentacled alien in the new Futurama movie, The Beast with a Billion Backs, actually qualifies as Lovecraft-inspired. It sounds quite Futuramic, and David X. Cohen's comments that the alien has "romantic interests" in every "single living being in our universe" sounds a bit hentai -- like it'll strip away your clothes rather than your sanity. Still, there was a Yithian in the Futurama episode A Bicyclops Built For Two, so maybe Matt Groening has a touch of Lovecraft in him.

(Image has nothing to do with Futurama. I found it via a Google search for 'tentacle monster' -- it was one of the few images that didn't have appendages squidging their way into girls' bits)

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