Any Sufficiently Advanced Technology Is Indistinguishable from Cthulhu

One of my favourite reads ever. Rambling and self-indulgent but holy crap is it spot-on.

This exemplifies my love hate relationship with HN. I love that I now have something new to read that is extremely interesting, but I hate that you've just destroyed my productivity for a time span of not minutes, but hours, or even days depending on how deep I go into this rabbit hole.

Indeed so.

I feel a follow-up piece coming on entitled

"Ia, ia, Google fthagn..."

I may be naive but I don't think there ends are that cloudy Their inability to understand that while they may have noble ends but that they won't be in control forever, they aren't capable of protecting this knowledge from nefarious entities even if they did everything they could and they they don't comprehend all the the side effects of their quest for knowledge including opening up holes that can let other nefarious entities gain access too.

I don't think it's stupidity that cause them to not understand but more cognitive dissonance led by their absolute belief that what they are doing is for the good of all.

With perhaps humor being the exception, it seemed like his description of this new genre almost summed up the themes from Frankenstein. I think horror has always been a "geek" thing. (If that word with its modern meaning can even be retroactively applied)

That paper has been one of my favorites since I first read it. That said, assuming a bounded level of complexity in the bug/hack, there are ways to jump from an infected toolchain to an uninfected toolchain, it just requires quite a bit of effort. If you can't assume a bonded level of complexity, well, it then becomes a debate on theology.

God dammit. OP here - I'm a huge fan of the Dark Souls games too...

But I'm trying to hold off on buying a PS4 until there's more than one game I want to play on it.

Seconded. Bloodborne is wonderful, with a genuinely hideous Cthuloid streak right through it.

I'm going to go ahead and disagree. If you are a huge demon/darksouls fan, bloodborne falls short.

I feel like it's not possible to express yourself as fully as you can with the class/character system in DS2 in bloodborne.

It's certainly not terrible and it's a nice holdover until DS3... but it lacks. (I do really like the parry and revenge systems though)

How does it compare (aside from graphics ;)) to Eternal Darkness (Gamecube)?

Huh, interesting point - I'd not considered the horrific element of Snowcrash in the same light.

I hereby posit that any choice other than Bill Nighy is a symptom of irreparable madness.

At the point when Lovecraft was writing, dreaming was intimately connected with a new, exciting science - psychology and psychotherapy.

And the technology's all around - it's explicitly stated both in Lovecraft and subsequent folk who build on the Mythos that the Great Old Ones, the Mi-Go, the Great Race, and others aren't supernatural entities, but aliens with mathematics and magic we don't understand.

Is a website nothing but a shared dream?

A good deal of Lovecraft's works involve something that is definitely technological. Several of his crazy "alien" races (sometimes Earth-based) have their extreme powers due to technological progress, such as the Elder Things (genetic engineering), the Great Race (time-traveling & mind-swapping), and the Yi-Go (brains-in-jars and inter-stellar travel). Many of his human antagonists are also developing forbidding science/technology, although usually with some alchemy thrown in. Even crazy creatures obey physical laws that happen to not be known; more than one creature disintegrates on death because its body is an exotic type of matter, and at least one creature is invisible for the same reason.

A lot of the horror of Lovecraft's works stem from a fear of science-gone-too-far. I read an interesting essay that said that his regression-to-past-generations works were actually founded in the contemporary revulsion many people felt they were first introduced to this newfangled "evolution" business (augmented by Lovecraft's notorious racism).

You'll also notice that a lot of the science in Lovecraft's stories isn't, uh, good. Like, it's really bad. Creatures that flap their wings and fly out of the atmosphere, and to a different dimension. Stars that are far away have different laws of physics. That sort of thing.

Imagine someone who is a mild conspiracy nut (of the email-forwarding variety), and not scientifically literate but reading pop-science articles about new breakthroughs in the 20s and 30s. The majority of Lovecraft's writings are a fair description of this hypothetical person's fears about scientific progress.

Lovecraft's cosmic horror is still fairly rules-based, i.e. it's magic of the Clarke's-Third-Law variety. The dreaming in Call of Cthulhu is a natural force that obeys laws. Humans don't know what those laws are, but something does and can manipulate that force. Cthulhu itself doesn't obey our laws of physics, but there are laws of physics that he obeys (possibly from another dimension), and he is also subject to the alignment of the stars. It's all described as rationally explainable, but not within the bounds of what human intelligence can graps.

The actual Dreamlands stuff with Randolph Carter is different, though. It's not even horror, really. It's Lovecraft making an explicitly Fantasy setting, in emulation of Lord Dunsany. It's got a much more whimsical and adventurous vibe, and the various fantastical elements (horrific or otherwise) generally aren't as rationally-explainable.

Yep horror is just sci-fi with an even more hackneyed magic system.