After 8 years of Dubya, Americans were so out of control they accidentally elected a black man. Four years later? Four years of relentless obstruction and lunatic rage at his presidency? I kinda think re-electing a black man is the greater achievement.
US election retold in cleverly animated webcomic form
Iconic album covers reimagined with superheroes
Cutting, important argument about why Occupy Wall Street failed – because it was too mired in academia, for a start. Don’t agree with everything here but there are definitely some home truths for supporters of the Occupy movement. (via Amund)
Craaaazy amazing: a mental abacus “sport” that goes SO FAST. Wow! (via Maire)
& a potential breakthrough in mathematics – turns out there’s something more to know about a + b = c. The guy who’s advanced this proof sounds like a very interesting cat. (via Ivan)
Who said it: Hitler or Lovecraft?
The Necronomicon – it’s like the Bible, but different! (via Craig Oxbrow)
In praise of the hashtag. The hashtag as new literary device? This writeup is actually off on several things, but it gets a lot right. The # is the symbol character of the ’10s just like the @ was the symbol character of the ’00s.
Christopher Walkenthrough: computer game walkthroughs in the voice of Christopher Walken (via Dave Chapman)
How can there not be a movie of this? An amazing slave escape story. Edge-of-the-seat true life adventures!
That Kate Nash performed the Buffy musical episode. (Kate Nash gets a lot of flack, but Scroobius Pip rates her, so.) (That Buffy musical episode is a great episode of TV, but I still think it really doesn’t work outside of that context.)
Big Sugar has been weirding the evidence of the dangers of sugar for years. Like Big Tobacco, only successful. Fascinating.
The National Office of Importance
And finally… The Snuggery (via Pearce)
IMO, this earlier Bible/Necronomicon parody is even better (especially if you’re familiar with the Jack Chick tracts it “borrows” from):
http://jackchick.wordpress.com/2009/07/08/chick-parody-who-will-be-eaten-first/
The basic problems with the Buffy musical episode are that the songs are rubbish and that it was the “emotional turning point” of the worst season of the show.
Oh, and that the big “why a character has been behaving badly” revelation at the end of the episode (in a series which so often provided neat analogies between supernatural shenanigans and real-life problems) was something that nobody could possibly relate to.
Cain’t get that Hitler/Lovecraft link to load. Oh well. They were both white supremacists, so I guess the main differences will be over who they thought was the whitest…
Hitler Lovecraft works for me – just checked it again. I’m in Firefox, maybe a browser thing?
For anyone playing along at home the link is:
http://beesgo.biz/horp.html
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And regarding Occupy, same day I post something about how Occupy failed, they do something cool:
http://wilwheaton.tumblr.com/post/35309150177/the-peoples-bailout
I think it’s my laptop, or something. Working today, anyway. 11 out of 14. I was wrong about “who you think’s the whitest” being the tell. There *are* tells, but I won’t spoil it for everyone else 😉
Not least given they weren’t enough for me to get 14-14…
Lovecraft was never strictly a white supremecist; his prejudice was primarily cultural, and he was just as racist towards non-English Europeans as he was towards non-whites.
(One Lovecraft story, “The Hound,” hilariously tries to find horror in the sound of someone speaking Dutch.)
As racist as Lovecraft was in his younger years, he did change his mind considerably as he got older, claiming that his prejudices were largely the result of living a sheltered and solitary life.
By the time he reaches The Case of Charles Dexter Ward in 1927 he’s actually able to portray black characters affectionately (Asa and Hannah, who are actually based on a black couple Lovecraft knew personally), and 1931’s At the Mountains of Madness is practically a plea for racial tolerance with its anto-slavery and “monsters are people too!” message.
One of the factors in Lovecraft’s changing mind was doubtless his marriage to Sonia Greene, who was Jewish. Another was the influence of his close friend Robert E. Howard, a much younger man who also shed his intially-racist views as he grew older.
I don’t want to defend Lovecraft too much, as some of his most famous stories are hideously racist, but the fact remains that his beliefs changed as he became less ignorant.
*nods and nods*
Yeah, I was hinting at the fact he was more Anglo-supremacist than white-supremacist when I said the thing about “who they thought was whitest” (just as Hitler favoured Germans). “White”, though, isn’t entirely wrong as a term, as he frequently couched the issue in terms of skin-tone (swarthiness, for example, is an object of horror) or physiognomy (noting an Irishman’s “un-hibernian” hooked nose).
As for the opinions changing over time, yeah, I’m sure that happened; I noticed that the quiz quoted from his anti-abolitionist poem “De Triumpho Naturae”, without mentioning that it’s generally counted as juvenilia. Although it’s still worth noting works like it, since they don’t support the idea that his views on race were primarily “cultural”.
Also, change is relative: I certainly registered the depiction of Asa and Hannah in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, but this story predates The Dunwich Horror and The Shadow Over Innsmouth, both of which treat misegenation as a source of horror.
And I’m not so sure I’d have taken At the Mountains of Madness as anti-slavery either. If anything, it struck me as consistent with his paternalistic arguments against abolition in De Triumpho Naturae.
Why are there no comments about the math?
The Shadow Over Innsmouth is, I think, a sign of Lovecraft’s relative progression.
Consider: in the much earlier Arthur Jermyn, when a character discovers that he has mixed blood he pours petrol over himself and lights a match.
In The Shadow Over Innsmouth, when a character discovers that he has mixed blood, he hatches a plan to rescue his cousin from being unjustly locked in a psychiatric institution so that they can swim off to their homeland for good times. His previous horror at the Innsmouth look has completely disappeared: “Oh you mean I’m one of them? … Lovely people once you get to know them, these Innsmouth folk!”
As for At the Mountains of Madness, I viewed it as telling a story about a society built on slavery that was destroyed when the slaves inevitably revolted. It could almost be the story of Haiti. The shoggoths are a case of “There but for the grace of god…” in that they were considered to be the successful slave race, while humans were considered to be the failures.
As for The Dunwich Horror, I see that as being more about incest than miscegenation. It seems to me that the biological father of Wilbur & his brother was actually their grandfather, though acting as an emmisary of Yog Sothoth.
These are just my own doubtless biased personal opinions, obviously.