After digging around through the guts of this blog, we've decided to mothball it but make it available as a sort of internet-fossil of sorts, in case anyone might find something interesting or useful amidst all this badly aging verbiage and decayed ambitions. By all means, please do feel free to poke around a bit, if you're so inclined. We wish you all the best. We've moved on. Maybe you'd consider visiting us elsewhere online.
A Combination resource-dump, workshop, and virtual commonplace book all rolled into one.
Wednesday, April 13, 2022
Thursday, February 23, 2017
The Big Time, by Fritz Leiber
Gutenberg link: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/32256
Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Time
An interesting review: http://www.conceptualfiction.com/the_big_time.html
Lieber papers at U-Texas: http://www.lib.utexas.edu/taro/uhsc/00021/hsc-00021.html
Monday, February 10, 2014
Art Resources
Here are some links to various Art-related resources that I've found interesting or useful. I will update this list from time to time as I discover new and exciting resources for committing art. Feel free to suggest any links you think would be of interest or utility in the comments below.
Cool Tools
Handy Art References
Something to See
Artistic Inspirations
Publications
Last Updated: February 18, 2014
Cool Tools
- Adobe I like my copy of Photoshop. I'm still getting the hang of InDesign. I'm not in any hurry to upgrade.
- Al.chemy Cool online tool for making shapes and stuff.
- Art Pad Paint online.
- Art Rage We have an older version of this software somewhere around here. Our daughter loved it.
- Artweaver An affordably-excellent image manipulation and digital painting program.
- Bomomo Try it!
- Canva A super easy-to-use online design tool.
- Context-Free Art Interesting experimental online art tool.
- Creately Diagram-making.
- Drawisland Online drawing tool.
- Easel.ly Create online infographics.
- Fatpaint Online design, logo-maker and more.
- Flamepainter Online painting app.
- Flockdraw Draw online with others.
- Imageforge Freeware image manipulation.
- Infogr.am Free online info-graphics maker.
- Inkscape Free vector graphics program.
- Kleki.com Online painting-in-your-browser tool.
- Myoats Online pattern maker and more.
- Queeky Online Painting app.
- Piktochart Make your own info-graphics.
- Psykopaint Online painting.
- Scribbler Nice little scribble-pad.
- Silk Online graphics with ambient/Newage music.
- Sketch-n-Paint Another online painting app.
- Sketchpad Online doodling.
- Sketchswap Fun scribble-trading game.
- Sumo Online digital painting.
- Vectormagic Convert bitmaps to vectors.
- Viscosity Nice toy.
- Visual.ly Image marketplace.
- Wordle Make your own word-clouds.
Handy Art References
- Artcyclopedia Online encyclopedia of all things art.
- Artlex Online Art Dictionary.
- Art Directory Lots and lots of artist biographies.
- Art List Pro A Daily Dose of Contemporary Art.
- Art Story Everything you wanted to know about Movements, theory and more.
- Bibliodyssey An incredible resource-packed blog.
- Book Arts All sorts of book-related things, quite interesting.
- Design You Trust Oh those wacky designers...
- Karen's Whimsy Online repository of many, many public domain clip-art images. We reviewed them.
- Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History
- Lilek's All sorts of cool stuff. A massive collection of things to gawk at and mock.
- Metropolitan Museum of Art now this list has a little class.
- MOMA Yeah. If you have to...
- Neosurrealism Not sure what it is exactly, but some of the work is pretty interesting...
- Surrealist.com A pretty extensive collection of all things surreal.
- Surrealism UK A lively, ongoing group engaged in surreal pursuits.
- Surrealism.org More surreal stuff.
- Wikiquote for Andre Breton...because he's cool.
- Woodblock A great, informative site walking you through the process of woodblock printing.
- Fonts.com Google fonts.
- Fount Handy tool for discovering what that font is that you've just spotted on a site.
- My Fonts Buy a few fonts.
- What the Font Another way to find out what font is that?
Something to See
- Dark Classics Art Gallery Blog.
- Library of Congress digital archives.
- Go Surreal Interesting blog; surrealism as a path to self-discovery.
- One Surrealist A Day Nifty surreal blog.
- Pictorial Arts Nifty blog of images.
- RoqlaRue Cool Gallery.
- Upland Trout Cool blog.
Artistic Inspirations
Publications
Last Updated: February 18, 2014
Thinking About Horror
It seems that nearly everyone who even dabbles in horror will quote Mr. Lovecraft's first line from his essay on Supernatural Horror in Literature, you know the one that goes; "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear..." Yeah. Whatever.
Down the page a bit, the third paragraph to be exact, is something that we find much more interesting:
Down the page a bit, the third paragraph to be exact, is something that we find much more interesting:
"Man's first instincts and emotions formed his response to the environment in which he found himself. Definite feelings based on pleasure and pain grew up around the phenomena whose causes and effects he understood, whilst around those which he did not understand -- and the universe teemed with them in the early days -- were naturally woven such personifications, marvelous interpretations, and sensations of awe and fear as would be hit upon by a race having few and simple ideas and limited experience. The unknown, being likewise the unpredictable, became for our primitive forefathers a terrible and omnipotent source of boons and calamities visited upon mankind for cryptic and wholly extra-terrestrial reasons, and thus clearly belonging to spheres of existence whereof we know nothing and wherein we have no part. The phenomenon of dreaming likewise helped to build up the notion of an unreal or spiritual world; and in general, all the conditions of savage dawn -- life so strongly conduced toward a feeling of the supernatural, that we need not wonder at the thoroughness with which man's very hereditary essence has become saturated with religion and superstition. That saturation must, as a matter of plain scientific fact, be regarded as virtually permanent so far as the subconscious mind and inner instincts are concerned; for though the area of the unknown has been steadily contracting for thousands of years, an infinite reservoir of mystery still engulfs most of the outer cosmos, whilst a vast residuum of powerful inherited associations clings round all the objects and processes that were once mysterious; however well they may now be explained. And more than this, there is an actual physiological fixation of the old instincts in our nervous tissue, which would make them obscurely operative even were the conscious mind to be purged of all sources of wonder."
Instinct and Emotion formed the earliest responses to environmental stimuli. Our deepest reactions are rooted in the irrational and are saturated in fear born of ignorance. As we learn more, we see past and see through the things that once terrified us. Sure. But as we move forward, this same principle, this ingrained process still functions, still twists things into fearsome figures and half-formed impressions that disturb and evoke discomfort or worse. It's part and parcel of the baggage we carry within us all, a legacy of our ancestry that cuts across all times, cultures and social media.
The Unknown is not only scary, but it triggers the darker impulses we barely apprehend or understand, let alone have any real control over, that swirl around deep below our civilized facades and avatar-like masks of conformity. It unlocks the feral squealing genii lurking within the deepest recesses of anyone, everyone, all of us. The horror is not the monster, the abomination, the alien, not even the Unknown--it is our reaction to things outside our comprehension or comfortable frame of reference. Horror is a mirror. A cracked mirror that reveals things we'd rather not face, things we don't understand, things we can't just ignore so they'll go away. Intrusive things. Transgressions from outside. Alien presences looming over the threshold we're going to have to cross one way or another. In a sense it's like social media and how it has invaded all our lives, and yet it's just as easily something old, a Machen/Bierce-style survival from the deep past if you will.
The Unknown is not only scary, but it triggers the darker impulses we barely apprehend or understand, let alone have any real control over, that swirl around deep below our civilized facades and avatar-like masks of conformity. It unlocks the feral squealing genii lurking within the deepest recesses of anyone, everyone, all of us. The horror is not the monster, the abomination, the alien, not even the Unknown--it is our reaction to things outside our comprehension or comfortable frame of reference. Horror is a mirror. A cracked mirror that reveals things we'd rather not face, things we don't understand, things we can't just ignore so they'll go away. Intrusive things. Transgressions from outside. Alien presences looming over the threshold we're going to have to cross one way or another. In a sense it's like social media and how it has invaded all our lives, and yet it's just as easily something old, a Machen/Bierce-style survival from the deep past if you will.
Essays of Interest
Here are a few essays I found interesting. I'll add more links as I discover more good stuff.
- Andre Norton on Her Writing
- Fantasy Heartbreakers
- Heinlein's Rules for Writing
- Hollow Victories: Warlord's Burden by Trey Causey
- How to Create a Religion in your Spare Time for Fun and Profit by M.A.R. Barker
- How to Write a Novel in 3 Days by Michael Moorcock
- How to Write Suckitudinous Fiction by Holly Lisle
- Lester Dent's Master Fiction Plot
- On Thud and Blunder by Poul Anderson
- Plausibility in Fiction by Ursula K. LeGuin
- The Simple Art of Murder by Raymond Chandler
- Thank You D&D by Bill Ward
- Tom Swift: An Appreciation by Jeff Duntemann
- Whatever Happened to the Omnicompetent Man? by C.C. Finlay
Resource Links: V
Last Updated: February 9, 2014
Vault of Evil (Blog)
An encyclopedia phantasmagorica of British Horror.
Vault of Evil (Forums)
Forums devoted to the discussion of Brit Horror Pulps.
Voyages Extraordinaire
An amazingly well-done Verne-inspired blog. Highly recommended!
Sunday, February 9, 2014
Resource Links: Q
Last Updated: February 9, 2014
Quaint Archives
Jess Nevin's Quest for Unusual & Adventurous International Notations & Tales ...a phenomenal resource for anyone interested in the Victorian era and Victorian era-related portrayals of the non-West and non-Western peoples in fantastical fiction, including science fiction, fantasy, horror, mysteries, historical novels, dime novels, penny dreadfuls, and story papers. There might be some previews of the Encyclopedia of Pulp Heroes made available at this site as well. Very interesting stuff.
Resource Links: J
Last Updated: February 9, 2014
J Lab
Reinventing journalism.
The J. Paul Getty Museum
A great place for art.
The Journal of Neuroscience
JSTOR
An academic research site piled with journals, primary sources, books, and more...but it's not exactly free...
Thursday, August 2, 2012
Third Time is the Charm
Okay. So it seemed like a great idea at the time, but all those blog rolls arranged in-between the ABCs we used to have on the Left-Hand side-bar are now history. Yet another abandoned-blog-on-hiatus has hit us with bad web-juju so we've pulled the plug on the whole thing until we can sort out a better way to handle things going forward. We'll strip out the blog rolls at Hereticwerks as well shortly. We'll rebuild them...probably...but right now we're not sure how we're going to handle this situation. Maintaining this sort of thing isn't supposed to be such a pain in the rear-end, but it is getting to be one, and that is unacceptable.
Maybe we'll do a Links page and a smaller, highly curated blog-roll or two. That has got to be better than getting digitally-smacked by yet another zombified abando-blog.
Maybe we'll do a Links page and a smaller, highly curated blog-roll or two. That has got to be better than getting digitally-smacked by yet another zombified abando-blog.
Tuesday, July 3, 2012
That Is Not Dead Which Can Be Made Into a T-shirt...
So...I was digging through some of the old files of dead projects and such and re-discovered the mini-comic 'Little Wilbur in Lovecraft Land,' from 1988. The original cover-panel looked like this:
On a lark I revised the image slightly, swapped-out the 50cents with a good 'ol IA! and made it green. What do you think?
I kind of like it so I uploaded it to Zazzle and made it into a T-shirt, like this:
The 'Little Wilbur' Mini-Comic never did get completed, though several others did, including 'The Sorcerer,' and 'The Book,' and 'Tamarind (Pt.1)'. Maybe I'll use the newly revised image on this blog as a link to all things HPL/Mythosian that I'm working on or posting about. Yeah. A Cthulhudex, of sorts would be a good idea. I wonder what else is lurking around in those old folders and files?
On a lark I revised the image slightly, swapped-out the 50cents with a good 'ol IA! and made it green. What do you think?
The 'Little Wilbur' Mini-Comic never did get completed, though several others did, including 'The Sorcerer,' and 'The Book,' and 'Tamarind (Pt.1)'. Maybe I'll use the newly revised image on this blog as a link to all things HPL/Mythosian that I'm working on or posting about. Yeah. A Cthulhudex, of sorts would be a good idea. I wonder what else is lurking around in those old folders and files?
Monday, July 2, 2012
Hither Came Cthulhu...revisited
Hither Came Cthulhu... Posters by hereticwerks
Make custom prints online at zazzle.com
Ia! Ia! We're testing-out Zazzle for producing some posters...
Anthology Builder
We've contributed a few cover designs. The Artist Guidelines are HERE. Submitting properly formatted artwork is a snap. It's non-exclusive, so it's also a potential venue for artists to re-print some of their art, if they want to try things out a bit. So far we've had two people use our 'Shambleau' cover on their anthologies...
Once Anthology Builder manages to get out from under the reprinting of Public Domain stuff and builds up a decent stockpile of material that got lost in the shuffle, got tapped in OP purgatory, or just plain fell through the cracks it will definitely become a lot more interesting and useful. We wish them luck.
Danger 5
Wow. This is running on Australian TV?!?
Danger 5 looks awesome!
There's also a Danger Monthly (A New Pulp Magazine), and here's a few More Details via Wikipedia, and then there's the Official Website.
Now, it's time to watch Danger 5: The Diamond Girls...gotta love Youtube.
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