posts tagged with: lovecraft
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Via jwz
This weekend happicow and I drove down to NJ and met up with some friend to attend this year’s Wicked Winter Renaissance ( / pirate / ninja / Lovecraft ) Faire. This faire was vastly different from the last one that I attended, in that there was no snow, and more walls (meaning, more concurrent performances, but less of a sense of unity).
There seemed to be less renaissance than I remember from last time, and more like-minded people hanging out and being naughty together (friends were made, but I didn’t catch their names; also, someone tried to stick a vibrator up my nose), enjoying some great performances (like Voltaire, and the White Elephant Burlesque Society), and buying some nifty swag (like that underbust I’ve been craving forever [at a great price, too!]). What garb there was, if any, seemed decidedly more Victorian than renaissance, but that suited me fine. :)
Like last time, our main goal in attending was to see Voltaire, though this year I decided I really didn’t need to annoy him with any photo-taking (though I did annoy him with conversation, delivering messages of love from Syracuse).
Unfortunately, we only attended the faire on Friday. Though the quality of what was available was wonderful, there really didn’t end up being that much of it, and we saw most of what there was to see (save performers) in a few hours. Since we were unfamiliar with the majority of the performers, it was hard to decide whether it was worth it to drive down for another day, not knowing where in the schedule we should have been aiming to attend. Instead, we hung around in northern NJ, visiting Asian markets and documenting strange discoveries.
Due to the legal kerfuffle surrounding this year’s faire (wherein the hotel refused to honor the contract until they were taken to court about it, and then tried to weasel their way out of it by charging credit cards and canceling reservations) this may be the last faire. That’s sad, as it really is (AFAIK) a unique and wonderful event. To help out with the legal fees, you should buy one of these nifty-keen escape from Holiday Innsmouth Cthulhu shirts.
Previously, The Great Pumpkin cometh. Now, via ectomo, witness an even more maddeningly wonderful eldritch tale of childhood wholesome holiday specials gone horrific: The Great Old Pumpkin.
This quest led me into mouldering libraries, cramped basement antiquaries, far-flung correspondences, and, on one occasion, frightening and persistent telephone conversations with a lunatic in Boston. The last raised alarms in my family. I promised them I would turn away from my studies, all the while resolving to continue them in secret. I committed everything I knew to memory, burned all my papers, and embroidered my most unfathomable and precious secrets in near-invisible thread on my security blanket, which as you can see, I carry still.
My continued investigations led me to certain grim texts detailing eldritch and macabre sincerities—chants, autosacrifice, sinister configurations of pumpkins—which would bait the Great Old Pumpkin to my patch. On the Hallowmas Eve of two years ago, my investigations bore fruit, so to speak. I believe that I saw him—orange, flaming, and magnificent, hovering above me for an instant and then vanishing skyward into the constellations.
I can’t believe this has been around for years, and I’m just discovering it now.
You will almost certainly enjoy this more if you are cool enough to have previously read some Lovecraft, specifically, the Call of Cthulhu. Since it’s available for free online, why don’t you do that now?
I suppose that it’s equally important to have seen this at some point in the last decade. I suppose.
The past few nights, I’ve had some really disgusting dreams.
Two nights ago, I decided to try a recipe I found in the intertubes: Red Lobster Cheddar Bay Biscuits. They were really easy to make, and though they didn’t look as tasty as the picture, they were delicious (so much so that my friends made me make them again the next night). I probably ate more than I should, considering they are slathered in butter and filled with cheese, but I simply couldn’t let something so tasty go to waste when there were leftovers…
That night, I had a dream that there were sticks of butter lying around, and to keep them from going to waste, I ate them, plain, as one would eat a twinkie. The texture and taste were very vivid, and the whole thing was just about as disgusting as it sounds, but, dammit, that butter would have been wasted (waist be damned!).
I think the lesson there was to let things be wasted, or to prevent waste by making less of the thing in the first place. Or to let leftovers lie in ziploc bags in the fridge.
Yesterday, I took a personal day off work and spent a good chunk of the day out on the lake in happicow‘s sailboat. By the end of the day, I felt pretty disgusting as a result of getting too much sun, having too much sunblock slop on my person, and being surrounded by too much lake air and bugs for too long a time.
Last night, I had a dream that I had gone swimming in the lake, and when I later disrobed back at home, I found about a half dozen bloodsucking Lovecraftian terrors, all dead, and some still attached to me, beneath my bathing suit. They were about the size of the palm of one hand, and were shaped similarly to squids, excepting that each tentacle ended in a sucking leech-like mouth. Some of their corpses simply fell away, but some were still attached, and as I pulled each tentacle free, there was a terrible pop, and I was unsure whether that was just the tentacle coming free, or the tip breaking off.
I think the lesson there is that the outdoors is full of disgusting things, and that I should stay as far away as possible.
I think the moral of this story is that I shouldn’t try new things, because my subconscious apparently has a lot of trouble dealing with that. Or, alternately, I should try new things, because weird dreams are fun in a completely disturbing eldritch horror sort of way.
This is the third time I’ve tried to post today. Firefox keeps crashing and losing my posts. H8.
Here’s the brief summary of what I’ve been trying to say, because by now I’ve lost patience with this thing:
- H.P Lovecraft Historical Society‘s A Shoggoth on the Roof: good
- pod!s crashing while gtkpod is writing to them, thus causing brain craving process who won’t let you unmount the /ipod device, necessitating a reboot: bad
- The Haunt still not having zombie wings: bad
- The Haunt having otherwise good food, a cool bartender, and cheap beer on Wednesdays: good
- Beth knitting at the bar all night: 1337
- Dj Draven at The Haunt: good
- Other stuff next Wednesday at The Haunt, meaning that there is more likely to be zombie wings, but less likely to be cheap beer: ???