One of my Facebook friends shared this...

Pretty much sums things up,  yes? It was on a shared status by Pete Caballero.  Not sure if he's the originator or not,  but whoever did this captured how I felt today about the world. Thanks to Carl Hylin for sharing.

I came across these photos of me as Great Cthulhu a few days ago

If only I'd been able to rig wings. Big, green bat wings. :) Happy (almost) Halloween! I'm not sure at all what I'm going to dress up as this year. I'm just glad we have a work environment where that's okay, even expected. I think my favourite costume anyone did ever was the information services people came as keys from a keyboard, and a late and sorely-missed colleague, who was very likable and full of joie de vivre, came as the 'any' key. :)

So wrong

Thank you, Bill, for sharing this on Facebook. May you have My Little Cthulhu Pony nightmares.

With My Little Cthulhu Pony, Friendship is Madness

Now YKWIA will like these...

I went as Great Cthulhu for Halloween at work a few years ago. Granted, I don't think my co-workers quite got it. The second picture with my arms out was particularly hard to do--the costume was originally a 'giant' and had a peephole at 'chest' height for the costume, but the head was done in crepe paper on a long dowel rod, which I generally held with my hands. I think I balanced it between my chest and chin for the picture. :) Okay, time to get back to work!

I brought this up during the Cthulhu game today

I have a copy and I do think it was rather clever. It's a filk song to the tune of ABBA's 'Fernando' called 'Do You Hear the Pipes, Cthulhu?' You can see the lyrics and download the .mp3 file of the song to listen for yourself. Here's a video tribute with the song as well:

:)

10 beloved cartoon characters reimagined as Cthulhu - Snoopy, Garfield & more

These are great. I especially like Garfieldthulu.

In celebration of finishing the notes

and still having time to relax. :)

Okay, I'm geeking out

Twitter + Neil Gaiman + 1000 contributions = a BBC Audiobook!

From Twitter an Audio Story with Neil Gaiman

How Does it Work?
Read the opening line of the story tweeted by Neil (or catch up with it in progress by visiting #bbcawdio) and then follow us at http://www.twitter.com/BBCAA to post the next sentence of the story (tweets must be 140 characters or less) like this:
@BBCAA Your Tweet Here #bbcawdio
(Please use both the @BBCAA and the #bbcawdio tags to be sure we see your contribution!)

By the way, if you go to Neil Gaiman's website, he has a Cthulhu hand puppet on his head in the photo. :) The fun starts at noon (EDT) on Tuesday, October 13th. :)

Every Cthulhu hunter should watch for the yellow sign

as opposed to the Yellow Sign from 'The King in Yellow'. No, we're talking a normal street sign, showing a stick figure running from tentacles with 'Cthulhu' emblazoned on the bottom.

Check it out at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/gothcandy/143837543/

I have also found two things to get next payday from Chaosium, the makers of Call of Cthulhu, the roleplaying game I play. One is a Starkweather-Moore Antarctic Expedition T-Shirt (although the patch is rather nifty, too). The other is an Orne Library/Miskatonic University book bag.

:)

Two videos YKWIA found to harm me

that are absolutely hilarious. Well, if you've got my sense of humour, anyway. :)

A well-done and well-known TV series opening...which sails right into the Mythos.


Gilda Sue Rosenstern reviews Robin Spriggs's Wondrous Strange: Tales of the Uncanny


Enjoy.

Gives a whole new meaning to 'checkmate'

Someone has made a Cthulhu chess set. Check it out. The person still has the moulds, so can make more.

The kings (Cthulhu) have precious stones for eyes; the white piece has spherical lab-created rubies, the black piece has salt water pearls.
The queen is Nyarlathotep (has a single large tentacle for a face).
The bishops are Father Dagon/ Mother Hydra (take your pick).
The knights are Hounds of Tindalos (the knights move in angles, and in the mythos the hounds are supposed move through angles).
The rooks are shoggoths
The pawns are Deep Ones.

:)

Cthulhu made it at #26

right under Sauron on the list of 50 greatest villains of literature. Voldemort was #5, and Cruella de Vil is just two steps behind Satan. Check it out.

A really spooky French Cthulhoid video

called 'Ryleh' (as in R'lyeh)

Sounds like a fun read for your favourite child in your life

Where the Deep Ones Are, coming soon from Atlas Games. Hail to my game master for pointing me to this one. Here's the blurb:

After refusing to eat his fish like a good boy, young Bobby is sent to his bedroom without any supper at all. But Bobby escapes when the Manuxet River runs right through his room carrying an old boat that takes him to Innsmouth. When the Deep Ones come for him he flees, but when he eventually joins their wild rumpus under the ocean, they crown him the most Deep One of all.

Scenario:

You are a highly trained Ninja who secretly protects humanity from horrific extradimensional beings. You managed to deal with the Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath, kill the cultists who were invoking the Dark Mother herself, and then send the foul eldritch horror back to whatever place she comes from. In the process you 1) decapitated two Russian immigrants whose chanting nearly killed you, 2) reanimated them and then set the house on fire, creating zombie flambé, 3) took out two Hollywood directors, a gifted animator made of bugs, and a scary femme fatale (and by the way, their cabin got burnt to a crisp, too.} You desperately need to find a girl you think is trapped inside a motion picture reel, meaning you need to shakedown the studio head for a safety deposit key to retrieve the film.

Now, what are you going to do about that police detective that keeps calling you? He just knows about the two burning zombies and that one of the people you called a cultist has disappeared (granted, on a different coast than he was supposed to be on). How do you explain it in a fashion that lets you (and your accessories-after-the-fact) off scot-free?

Any suggestions, because Sunday's game is going to get rather ugly, I think, with the consequences on this one, and we still have an innocent to save.

(Errata: I made two oopses in this post. One, we didn't take out the gifted animator--the cultists took out one of their own. Two, he wasn't made of bugs--he was flesh and blood (a lot of blood), but had bugs around him all the time. At some point the 'made of bugs' possibility came to mind and it stuck with me despite evidence to the contrary. My game master pointed out the error, and I stand corrected. We still need to come up with a solution to our problem of vigilante justice, though. Thanks.)

PS We think we have the solution. You take all of the questionable assets your paranormal investigations company has--blood diamonds, gun-running, drugs, plutonium, everything but the llama milking farm--courtesy of the insane yet weirdly competent secretary, and transfer it to said dead cultist (who happens to be Russian) and then tell the police that he has links to the Russian Mafia and they probably killed him and the others because their little cult was threatening to expose the Mob's activities. Whew! It's not fool-proof, but it's enough to hopefully keep Margaret's character from dying in the gas chamber (I think California still has a gas chamber) and my character (who is almost five months' preganant) from delivering her baby in jail due to accessory after the fact without trying to explain Mythos beings to civilians.

Aaaagggghhhh!

It's bad enough that the door panel on the inside of my driver side front door of my car has come off and is only hanging by the window controls, so that I have to reach in and adjust it any time I get into the car. Tonight I couldn't get the door to shut because the hinge was frozen. I had that trouble a couple of times last year. Usually I can run the car for a little while and it thaws. No such luck. So I buckled myself in, held the door closed by the top, and drove home (with the dome light on, of course). At one point I had a cop behind me and I was afraid I'd be pulled over for the dome light. I got home safely, and after a few tries, the door finally shut enough that the dome light went out, although I think it's still not quite shut. I hope it doesn't do this tomorrow.

On the good side, one of my co-workers has said he'd put the panel on if I buy the clips. He fixed my tail ligth the other night. It's funny, he's 25 years old and his hobbies are fixing cars, especially Chevettes (which haven't been made since 1987) and playing with an old Commodore 64 computer. He so missed his decade. Since I came of age during that decade, and I even had a Chevette (I had an Atari 800XL computer rather than a Commodore), we have several topics we can talk about, although I start glazing after about 10 minutes of car speak.

On the down side, we played the game today and my character who betrayed a creature who was an ally, half human and half daemonspawn, has now had a second family member killed (her father). The creatures plan to wipe out her entire family in retaliation, but they're doing it in sneaky ways that make it look like accidents or natural causes. Meanwhile on the ship to Antarctica a saboteur has destroyed about a quarter of the food and poisoned the sled dogs with strychnine. So, it's been a particularly disheartening game today.

Speaking of Antarctica--here's a beautiful video of time-lapse photography spanning a year in Antarctica.



Well, I guess that's all--I have to go to bed so that I can get some actual sleep (this is earlier than most of the week has been).

Now this is a Cthulhoid video

Plants with eyes! Undulating plants! No doubt they're animated by the gelid mass derived from Shub-Niggurath!

Alien Plants

The veggie bacon

works even better in the microwave. I may not be able to cook on an electric stove but I do pretty well with a microwave--it comes from years of not having a stove or oven due to a landlord's incompetence and penchant for bringing me gas stoves that leaked or caught on fire. So glad I don't live there any more, especially as it was worse than I realised. When I read HP Lovecraft's Rats in the Walls I thought I heard skittering of squirrels on the roof. Little did I know there really were rats in the walls until I got the place condemned.

WARNING: SPOILER for Beyond the Mountains of Madness follows:

***************

Anyway, speaking of Lovecraft, the game is proceeding nicely. The Antarctic expedition's ship captain has been murdered. We're not even out of port yet and we're working our butts off. Meanwhile, I got to introduce a new character briefly--she pretty much got off a plane, took a train ride to Arkham, and then was picked up at the train station and taken back to Boston and was put on another plane, because there's a mission. Plus my character who's supposed to be gestating and is under a death sentence by half-daemons has to go to a funeral at her family's in Canada and I expect the whole clan to be decimated by the creatures.

Yes, and we call this fun and keep coming back for more. :)

A diversion from sad things

Our gamemaster played this for us today. I give you, 'Shoggoth on the Roof'.



Tentacles!

I'm home earlier than normal

I didn't have to pick my friend up from work tonight because he's off. I did have to go to Kroger to pick up some things, including Cerys' food, something that I forgot earlier.

I never did get to start Harry Potter. I intend to get through the first chapter tonight. Then tomorrow I'm going to bring it along because the woman I normally eat lunch with is on maternity leave (she was induced Friday; I don't know yet what she had, and they never found out ahead of time--I hope and presume all went well). The others have been eating outside, and I've been trying to stay out of the sun because I burn easily anyway and the Lasix increases that risk. So instead I'll have a trusty book with me. Then I have an appointment that afternoon, so it's always good to have something to read while waiting.

Anything I haven't mentioned from this week already? Oh, the other night I went by the ATM and it said 'do you need more time?'. I said no and it spit out someone's debit card and receipt. I couldn't really slip it under the front doors of the bank, so I held onto it until the next morning, locking it in my glove compartment. It felt strange to have someone else's card. I took it in the next day to a teller. I hope the guy got it back alright.

Today we played the game (it was excellent). Dee wasn't there, she had family obligations, but we soldiered on. Brenda killed two Byakhee in a total magical darkness, which was quite impressive. Of course, then the cultists started shooting, and that's difficult to handle when your main weapons are swords.

By the way Byakhee is also a free program for generating standard Call of Cthulhu character sheets. Check it out. It allows you to automatically roll a character and fills out your sheet, generate random character names, roll complex dice combinations, import images for the investigator, calculate income, roll checks off, and allows you to export to a web page. It is, unfortunately, not so useful for us because we have such specialised stats, but fun nonetheless, and did I mention free? They also have on the website sheets for NPCs (Non-Player Characters), newspaper handout templates, calendar sheets, a resistance roller, a back sheet for the standard sheet, one for Delta Green, and additional rule packs (skills, occupations, weapons, spellbooks, etc.) for Walker in the Wastes, 1930's Antarctic Explorer (from Beyond The Mountains of Madness), Delta Green, 1920s Investigator Companion, and Dreamlands. There's even a thought for today. The one I just got was 'Famous last words: "I think it's intelligent. Let's see if I can communicate with it."' That would be Dee's character Autumn, I'm sure. :)

Well, that's all for now. I want to get that chapter in!