COMMONPLACE: Sinbad vs Cthulhu

As a child, I loved Ray Harryhausen movies. Absolutely adored them. From his early work in Mighty Joe Young to Jason and the Argonauts to the original Clash of the Titans, I watched them ravenously. If there was a Harryhausen marathon on AMC, you could forget getting me to do anything. My ass was planted in front of that television, watching impossible things come to life. I actually wanted to do visual effects for years. Build models, make monsters, create fantasy. But then computers ruined all of it and I moved on.

I realized over the weekend that some of Harryhausen’s bigger movies are streamable through Netflix, so I watched Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger a few nights ago.

It got me wondering…why the hell isn’t anyone doing anything with Sinbad? He’s an established cultural touchstone, and one with lots of wiggle room. People know he’s a pirate-y type, but they don’t know much more than that. Which is perfect, because it lets you get away with what ever the hell you want to.

Which is why I want to have him fight Lovecraftian horrors.

Think about it. Sinbad travels the sea, looking for adventure, what happens if he stumbles across, say, R’yleh and inadvertently wakes up a sleeping Eldritch God.

You could have him spanning the world trying to put the cosmic horrors back in the box.

And there’s a scene in my head. A fucking amazing scene.

Sinbad standing on the prow of his ship. Cthulhu or something similar rising from the waves towering dozens or maybe hundreds of feet over him. Sinbad’s crew is going mad, clawing at their eyes. Their captain, shockingly, is smirking. At which point Sinbad procedes to deliver one of those “FUCK YOU, EVIL THING! I’M SINBAD! I’VE DONE XYZ!” Where he enumerates all the fucked up things he’s seen and why the big scary insanity monster isn’t going to make him blink.

Anyway, that’s the idea at least. Tossed away into the COMMONPLACE.

While you’re here, watch the opening minutes of The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, one of my favorite Harryhausen flicks.

Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown

Guess what I just added to the top of my Netflix queue.

(Even though I think it’ll be pretty bad and mainly just talking heads gabbing about stuff I’ve heard a million times before.)

The Sleeper Awakens

Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise. Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men.

-HP Lovecraft, The Call of C’thulhu

Photo is taken from a series that the Boston Globe ran in their Big Picture blog about the underseas erruptions that are happening near Tonga. More here.

This seem like a bad idea to anybody else?

From the Independent:

British scientists are about to mount one of the boldest-ever missions, to search for life forms that have survived for possibly millions of years in a frozen “lost world” beneath an ancient ice sheet.

This week, a team of Antarctic scientists has been given the go-ahead to drill through a two-mile-thick sheet of ice that has sealed a sub-glacial lake from the rest of the biosphere for at least as long as Homo sapiens has walked the Earth.

They hope to find species that have survived below the ice sheet since it formed between 400,000 and two million years ago. Finding life in such an extreme environment would be one of the most important discoveries of the century, raising the prospect of searching for extra-terrestrial life on Europa, a moon of Jupiter where life is thought to exist beneath a frozen ocean. The scientists plan to use sophisticated ice-drilling technology developed in the UK to penetrate the ice cap and enter the liquid-water world of Lake Ellsworth in West Antarctica, one of about 150 sub-glacial lakes scientists have recently mapped with ice-penetrating radar.

…..

Although Antarctica’s sub-glacial lakes are buried beneath an immensely thick ice sheet, the lakes’ water remains unfrozen due to geothermal heat rising from deep underground and the immense pressure of the ice pushing down on the water; the water remains liquid at minus 1C or minus C.

Scientists believe any living organisms that have survived in the lakes despite the total darkness have done so by consuming organic detritus and other nutrients that accumulated in the lake’s sediment many millennia ago.

If these microbes do exist, they would almost certainly have evolved in near-total isolation from the rest of life on Earth, and for such a length of time that they might now be markedly different from similar life forms found at the surface.

“We hope to discover more about how life can exist in extreme environments and how Antarctica has changed in the past, which might help us to understand more about other places on Earth,” Professor Siegert said.

Sometimes there are articles about science that I read and the only way for my brain to make a shit-stain worth of sense out of them is to assume that the people who are behind the scientific research have never, in their life, read or watched any science fiction. If they had, then they would know how disasterously bad their line of research is going to go.

Take these sods for example. The best they can hope for is unleashing some heretofore unknown disease upon the unsuspecting population of the planet, or at worst, uh, you know, WAKING UP A FUCKING ELDER GOD WHO SLUMBERS SLEEPLESSLY BENEATH THE ICE AT THE BOTTOM OF THE WORLD.

The world would be a better place if all research scientists were forced to watch a shitty scifi movie for every 100 hours of research they did.

The Collect Call of Cathulhu

Remember the Real Ghostbusters? Back from when we were kids? Well, turns out that one J. Michael Straczynski (Babylon 5 creator) was the head writer and editor for the show, which explains why I have such fond memories of it.

One of the episodes deals with the Ghostbusters facing off against Lovecraft’s Cthulhu. The episode is full of name dropping references to characters from Lovecraft’s work and to his fellow writers of the time. Thanks to the wonders of the digital age (and next to no supervision of YouTube’s content), the whole episode has popped up for your viewing pleasure.

The Shadow Out of Time

I shivered at the mysteries the past may conceal, and trembled at the menaces the future may bring forth.
-Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee

from H.P. Lovecraft’s The Shadow Out of Time

One of my favorite short stories, and one of Lovecraft’s most epic works, The Shadow Out of Time tells the story of a Miskatonic State University economics professor named Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee. Peaslee finds himself apparently losing his mind as he has visions from the ancient past and far future. But, as the visions persist and begin to clarify, Peaslee finds that he is not infact losing his mind, but rather hismind is being transplanted by an ancient extra-terrestrial race that settled the Earth at some time in pre-history, the Great Race of Yith.

The Yithians have the ability to project the consciousness through time, swapping bodies with people through out history. Peaslee opens himself up to the experience, learning of the great hidden past and future of the Earth. But, Peaslee was learning the secrets of gods, ancient and beyond comprehension, and the secrets of gods are the most dangerous kind of secrets.

The story was originally published in the June 1936 issue of Astounding Tales, less than a year before Lovecraft’s death. Since Lovecraft had no estate or heirs to hold the copyright on his work, most of his material has fallen into public doman, meaning that you can read the whole story for free right now if you want to. Tomorrow, the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society will be releasing their radio play version of this story. Their other adaptations of Lovecraft’s work has been absolutely spectacular, and I have high hopes for their version of the Shadow Out of Time.

What in the unholy fuck…

www.mccain-cthulhu.com

…and they bought this why? www.voteforthemilf.com I can understand, owning that keeps people from setting up joke sites. Stuff like that is standard operating practice for large organizations who don’t care about another $9.95/year.

But…did the McCain camp really think they were going to be hurt by people comparing him to the deathless eldrich horror? Wait. Don’t answer that.

Family Cthulu

Ben is a disturbed human being.

The Bloop

The Bloop, a pretty inauspicious name for one of the great mysteries of the current age. The Bloop was a sound recorded by NOAA over a decade ago, back in the summer of 1997. It was an ultra low frequency underwater sound, along the lines of something a whale would make when singing. The problem was that the sound was loud enough to be heard at a range of over five thousand kilometers from its origin point, and according to the nature of the sound it originated from a biological source. If that’s true, then whatever made this would probably both the biggest and the loudest thing on the planet.

NOAA guesses that the sound originated somewhere off the southwestern tip of South America – roughly here. Which is interesting, because according to the HP Lovecraft story, the Call of Cthulhu, that’s roughly the same area that the ancient city of R’yleh was located. The sound was also used as part of the viral marketing campaign for Cloverfield. And I have a lingering hook in the back of my skull that tells me they also used the sound or a reference to it in the short-lived, but pretty awesome, TV series Surface.

Here is the Bloop in its original speed:

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Here is a video some one did using the Bloop as tentpole for something that will make your head bleed.

And like, always, Damn Interesting has a great bit on this subject. Wikipedia entry is here.

A Colder War

A Colder War by Charles Stross

My gift to you: a free novella. Something to pass your time today while at work. The story is a bit of Lovecraft mixed with Cold War-era spy stuff. It’s fun, in that campy way cyberpunk is still fun, just not so relevant anymore.

Lake Vostok

This is Lake Vostok. She’s buried under 3 kilometers of solid glacial ice and has a surface area of over 6 thousand square miles, making her the largest lake in Antarctica. The water in her is over a million years old and only kept liquid by a combination of geothermal heat from the bottom of the lake and pressure from the ice on top of it. She’s has the most oxygen rich environment on the planet, and what ever life exists down there will be unlike anything else on this planet, but probably very similar to any life we’d ever find on Europa. She has tides, too. Which gives the water just enough motion to keep things from separating out. Simply put, Lake Vostok is the largest sealed ecosystem in the world. She hasn’t been exposed to the outside world in at least a half million years.

The funny thing about this lake is that it fits in with bits of Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness. Lovecraft talks about a giant underground lake where the Old Ones built their last redoubt against their rebellious creations, the Shoggoth. The funny thing was that no one had any idea that there were lakes under all of that ice back then.

The wikipedia entry for Lake Vostok is here.

HPLHS Presents – The Whisperer in Darkness

They did a silent version of Call of Cthulhu that was pretty amazing, and so far the only Lovecraft adaptation to stick to form. If this holds to form, its going to be awesome.

Cthulhu for President

Printable large version here.

All of this via TheElderParty.com

I….wait, what?

How did I not know this existed?

Official description for the setting:

2085. Humanity faces extinction. Alien insects from the edge of our solar system, long hidden behind the façade of reality, descend to enslave us. Hordes of unspeakable horrors roll out from Central Asia, laying waste to anything in their path. The church of the fish-god scours the world for lost occult secrets to unleash terrible forces. Dead gods awaken and turn their dreadful eyes toward the Earth. And within hides a cancer, eating away at the very heart of the New Earth Government.

And a brief bit from the creators:

What is CthulhuTech?
CthulhuTech started out as a combination of two popular genres. The first was that of cosmic horror, made popular by H. P. Lovecraft and culminating in the modern day with elements of Mike Mignola’s Hellboy and John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness. The second was that of giant mecha Japanese animation, made popular by such series as Robotech, Neon Genesis Evangelion, and Rahxephon. But the setting has grown far beyond what it started out to be. CthulhuTech is now a truly unique hybrid of genres – cosmic horror, anime, post-apocalypse, traditional horror, and science fiction blended together seamlessly.

Official site here.