How is it that Cthulhu, or for that matter any of the Old Ones,

>>50798353
It doesn't. Imagine you had just found someone who had seen a Deep One.
"What happened?"
"A fish person jumped out of the darkness and tried to kill me!"
Tell me that sounds mentally stable to you.

Ask your mum

>>50798353

In Cthulhu's case it's largely a psychic thing. Even dead and buried under the ocean, his dreams leak out and worm their way into the brains of the weak-minded, driving them over the edge -- this creates the various cults dedicated to him, as people try to make sense of the strange, inhuman thoughts that are pressing on the back of their minds.

>>50798353

First of all, Lovecraft himself rarely if ever had a "go mad from the sight of it" moment; he must preferred long, slow build ups of psychological pressure that lead to breaking points of supernatural terror. "Oh look, a tentacle, guess I'm crazy now" is a bit more Derlethian.

>Is it a psychic thing?
In the case of Cthulhu, yes. Big C is a hugely powerful psychic presence whose dreamings disturb the minds of men.
>Is it the terror of them?
Sometimes.
>A man just can't comprehend what he's looking at and goes nuts?
Also sometimes yes, but also often the opposite; the comprehension is the real threat. It is the realisation that these things are real, of their significance and our insignificance; that everything we thought we knew was false.

The precise mechanics of course don't jibe with modern understandings of, say, psychiatry and mental illness because hey guess what they weren't written during times when we had those understandings. Yes, looking at something probably isn't going to alter your brain chemistry or cause a lump in your brain to spontaneously develop and now you're a schizophrenic.

Also, it's an echoing of the Judeo-Christian idea that looking at God can blind or kill you; Lovecraft was known to subvert some Biblical stuff in his writing.

>>50798353
His dreams are more complex than all of earth's civilizations put together, and infinitely more alien. And yes, he is psychic. So the smallest bit of leakage is too much for the average brain.

But in the books, we literally don't know. We seriously have no idea what cthulhu actually is besides really old, powerful, and popular in japanese pornos.

>>50798426
>>50798353
(Con't.)

>What if a man had no fear of Cthulhu?
Then that man is already mad, and probably a cultist.

>Why is it bound exclusively to looking at them?
Well, because sight is one of the most important senses? Especially when describing things in writing? Though if you read Lovecraft he often uses texture and tactile language to convey a more primal sense of disgust; things are hairy or slimy, with many gruesome tickling tendrils.

>If looking at you drives you insane, then how are there descriptions of their appearance?

Often there isn't. Part of what made Lovecraft a good horror writer is he wrote just enough to give an impression without actually get into the specifics. To use your example, the primary description we have of Cthulhu actually comes from an idol of the Cthulhu cult - who have never seen Cthulhu, merely glimpsed him in dreams. When Big C rises in the story, there is only enough of a resemblance there for the narrator to intuit that he is the thing that the idol was meant to represent, but the language focuses more on his alien substance and his sheer, mountainous scale.

>>50798369
Huh. So it's a matter of unreliable narrator then? With it being incorrect that old ones make you bonkers?
But then why does it affect you negatively in TTRPGs? Are they non-canon?
>>50798426
Derlethian is a literally who for me, so I guess he wasn't the best author, huh?
Right, a psychic thing kinda makes sense, but is it a proximity deal?
I guess terror makes sense.
So then does that mean the best way to deal with seeing an old one, and realizing it exists, would be to sort of ignore it, the same way one ignores mortality, or the inevitable death of the universe?

>>50798353
People don't go mad from seeing Cthulhu, they're just really scared. Some die of fright.

But they don't go mad just from seeing him.

They go mad from the psychic phenomenon known as "the call of Cthulhu", and even then, they can get better when it stops.

Question:
HAVE YOU READ THE FUCKING SOURCE MATERIAL?

IF YOU DID YOU'D KNOW THAT LOVECRAFT'S PROTAGS VERY RARELY GO MAD FROM SEEING FUCKED-UP THINGS

THEY GO MAD AFTER READING FUCKED-UP BOOKS THAT MAKE THEM QUESTION THEIR WORLDVIEW, OR AFTER BEING UNDER THE PSYCHIC INFLUENCE OF A GOD.

>>50798496
Well, what if he was suicidal, and didn't really fear torture?
So I mean, not entirely healthy, but pain and death hold no fear for him.

Right, but I meant why would that be the trigger of his psychic abilities? Does that mean a blind man would be less likely to go nuts?

Huh. Sounds good, and I actually prefer that he did it that way, because it leaves more artistic freedom to others.

>>50798500
No it's a matter of shitty game mechanics that make CoC players assume that lovecraftian monsters are literally so ugly they make you crazy from seeing them.

When in fact most of them are just ugly.

There's the case of Nyarlathotep who boasts about his true forms being so horrible none may witness them and retain his sanity, but we don't know if it's true.

>>50798353
Imagine that you are a deaf ant. Now imagine there is some kind of creature so wierd that does not have an exoskeleton, with hard-to-percieve size.
Now, said creature communicate not by exchanging pheromons, but by making the air vibrate. It is uterly alien to you, and your brain can hardly process all this informations, and what it implie. Your queen ant is'nt the center of the world, you are but a small part of a larger being, the planet. Witch is part of an even larger being, the Universe.

That is what Cthulhu is for us.

>>50798513
Sadly, no.
I live in bumfucksville, and no libraries near me have any Lovecraft, or H.G. Wells either, which kinda shocked me.
Lovecraft's not too well-known, I suppose, but Wells? Motherfucker's one of the founding fathers of sci fi as a whole.

>>50798353
>>50798426
>>50798496

Lovecraft also wrote stories like "The Unnamable" in which he intentionally creates a monster that cannot be discerned by five conventional senses, only intuited through (contradictory) impressions and the markings it leaves behind.

In "The Statement of Randolph Carter" the narrator witnesses no monster, merely hears reports from his friend over the phone as the man delves deep into a crypt. The man suddenly begs Carter to flee the cemetery. When Carter begs his friend to come out, an inhuman voice asserts Warren is dead and hangs up the phone. Here the horror comes from Warren (a stony and implacable man) suddenly being gripped by terror and thus it is left for the reader to imagine what he might have encountered down there.

In "Imprisoned With the Pharoahs", the narrator glimpses a mere fragment, a paw, of something far larger and greater and more bizarre in aspect than he can rightly put into words, and in doing so he realises the that this was the same problem encountered by the ancients when they attempted to represent it in a sphinx; it was like a man, like a lion, like an eagle, and yet none of those things in truth. It was merely how they could process its parts and attempt to render them visually. But these visions he witnesses may be due to the psychological stresses of being kidnapped and imprisoned by his guide.

So, yeah, the whole "see a tentacle, go flibble" thing is a bit of a misrepresentation brought about by later representations of Lovecraft's ideas.

>>50798500
>is it a proximity deal
No.

It's purely a matter of psychic sensitivity.
Wilcox went mad despite being in America when Cthulhu awakened. But the Norwegians who directly met him were just scared shitless.

>>50798549
It means a blind man would be less likely to be scared.

Read the fucking story

>>50798567
https://maggiemcneill.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/the-complete-works-of-h-p-lovecraft.pdf
Get reading

>>50798567
If you want, you can get both Wells and Lovecraft off of Project Gutenberg online for free. I recommend you give it a look, it's a great public domain resource.

>>50798600
I'd reach through the screen and jerk you off if I could m8.

>>50798567

>No libraries near me have any Lovecraft
Motherfucker, public domain is your friend. Google is your friend. There is no shortage of free versions of the text, or audio productions thereof, out there.

>>50798353
My interpretation is that when a human witnesses Cthulhu their mind "breaks".

Often times when we see things our mind doesn't understand we brush it off as a mistake or try to rationalize it in our minds. We do this because throughout our life we have "parameters of reality" that create the foundation of our life. We know that if we drop an apple it will fall to the ground. We know that we can only see when there is light. We know if we are stabbed in the heart we will die, etc

The visage of Cthulhu is such an aberration that it invokes such a strong fragmentation of our parameters of reality that our mind can't help but try to disbelief. But his imposing and undeniable presence refuses to let your mind cope in it's normal ways. As with anything that is bent too much, it breaks.

>>50798626
Look up the BBC's audio recording of The Shadow Over Innsmouth. It's great.

>>50798353
It doesn't make sense to you because it doesn't make sense. In real life, when you see something you don't understand, you just gloss over it or perceive it in the limited way you are able. Ants don't die from looking at their surroundings and all that.

Someone made this point in /ysg/ a while ago. I have a headache, so I'll paraphrase.

It's not so much just "seeing an old one" that makes people insane. Most of HPL's protagonists are learned men: doctors, archaeologists, other men with a deep-seeded ideas of a consistent reality. The stories are almost always about a slow descent into madness, often through a combination of scientific curiosity and eventual obsession. By the time any of HPL's protags actually /see/ anything horrific, they're fearful and broken men, already. A common theme in the books is that knowledge is inherently dangerous.

The fisherman who stumbled upon Cthulhu had been attacked by vicious cultists before landing in a nightmare corpse city, all before actually seeing the old one. Really, seeing the monsters is just the icing on the cake that confirms, without a doubt, that everything they know is wrong.

>>50798650
Well your interpretation is an interpretation of the Sanity rules in the Call of Cthulhu RPG when applied to Cthulhu's rules in the Call of Cthulhu RPG.

It's not an interpretation of the short story The Call of Cthulhu cause there's nothing in it to substantiate your ideas.

>>50798500

>Derlethian is a literally who for me
August Derleth is basically the reason people know who Lovecraft is in the modern era; he took control of Lovecraft's writings after HPL died, set up a publishing house to keep HPL's work in print - the problem is that he was also basically writing HPL fanfiction and publishing it. He brought a lot of ideas to the Mythos that really went against some of the core philosophy, such as assigning classical elemental alignments to certain Great Old Ones, or introducing the idea of "good" mythos powers opposed to the evil ones...

>>50798353

It's because actually seeing his impossible shape is final, total, absolute PROOF that the humans are less than nothing and that everything you thought you knew was wrong.

>>50798699
Ah, so a guy who on the one hand helped, but also hindere, Lovecraft's work.

>>50798353
You done any diving? Go see a giant animal in the water, with nothing but low-visibility between you. It moving gracefully as you lose your sense of equilibrium and panic, having difficulty figuring out which way is up and which is down even though, trying to imagine that situation when calm it seems completely insane (how can you not know where up is when it's the direction your body is trying to float)?

Like that. But the size of a skyscraper. Oh and it's not a whale--it's literally a god. Your perspective on what being a human animal is will never compare to the perspective of a person who hasn't seen it, ever again.

>>50798710
Except existentialism believes that anyway. Besides, on their own, a human may be nothing, but humanity is a group, a whole, and honestly as one whole, I think we're equal to one or two old ones, especially with nuclear weapons.
Cthulhu may have been big, but a nuke still would've hurt.

>>50798720
yes, but a lot of the blame lies with the RPG, because it not only based itself heavily on Derleth's works, it also introduced the Sanity rules that propagated the misconception you detailed in the OP.

>>50798754
As said above, merely witnessing Cthulhu doesn't make you go mad, so the point is moot.

And actually a boat is enough to temporarily incapacitate him. But since he's immortal he can regenerate automatically from anything.

The first thing a newbie CoC player says when Cthulhu is described to him is "why don't people just nuke it?" because obviously, if Cthulhu is a monster then they've gotta kill it, right?
The answer is: if you nuke Cthulhu, he comes back two months later, but pissed off and radioactive.

>>50798684
Does that mean a quantum physicist, or someone who understands reality may not be what it seems, would handle an old one better?
Or, along the line of thought, would a baby raised around horrific things and old ones have no psychological effects upon being eposed to one?

>>50798809
Even so, we can take a god out for two months.
That's not the actions of a nothing, and while we can't kill him, two months is still alot. And, if during those two months, we could find an adequate way to trap him, then we'd be set.
Hell, if a boat can kill him, why not just rig up an artillery cannon to shoot him in the face everytime he wakes up? Or just put him in acid? Sure he's big, but just enough to keep melting a vital part would be enough, right?
Honestly, beating Cthulhu sounds like a matter of thinking outside the box.

>>50798829
People who are raised around mythos monsters just become fucked-up cultists. They don't suffer emotionally from it, but since their idea of normality is completely alien to us, they might as well be crazy.

And quantum physicists being confronted with an actually empirical manifestation of what they believe on a purely theoretical level would still be pretty upset. But yeah they'd probably handle it better,in fact in Dreams in the Witch-House there's a mathematician who figures out how to do magic by making maths and he's really weirded out and becomes a bit paranoid but he doesn't go bonkers.

>>50798829
I'd like to think they'd handle it worse.

You spend your whole life studying and researching the "If's, Maybe's, and the Theoreticals."

Then you find out all of the things you studied were real.

Oh God.

However, your second point is actually brought up in Pickman's Model, iirc, which is one of my favorite stories. Otis Jiry does a great reading of it.

>>50798829
In the second case, it depends on what you mean by psychological effects. Would they function? Sure. Would they grow up to do things that everyone else sees as abhorrent and unnatural because that's what the rubbery mold creatures down the street do? Oh yeah. It would be perfectly natural to them, of course.

>>50798829
>someone who understands reality may not be what it seems, would handle an old one better?
a strong possibility
> would a baby raised around horrific things and old ones have no psychological effects upon being eposed to one

a definite yes.

>>50798897
>of thinking outside the box
precisely
you're thinking outside of the limits of the LITERARY GENRE OF COSMIC HORRORS and into the limits of the INTERNET WANKERY GENRE OF POWERLEVEL ARGUMENTS.

Which basically makes the issue of "would witnessing this thing make me insane?" completely irrelevant.

>>50798829
Well, the stories were also written when people had a much smaller idea of the universe. The protagonists almost always require some sort of convincing, along with a little proof. An excerpt from the Necronomicon that stuck with them for years, a small fetish that had no definable origin, things like that. They follow these shreds of evidence, but by the time they ever actually see an Old One, they are already 100% convinced of their existence and power. A quantum physicist, specifically, might be a little more open to the original breaking point of "oh man there are actually fucking monsters walking around somewhere holy shit", but I dont' think they'd fare any better.

>would a baby raised around horrific things and old ones have no psychological effects upon being eposed to one?
He would almost certainly be a cultist. It was explicitly stated that (dead) Cthulhu has a low psychic wave (or something) that makes sensitive people have dream-visions of R'lyeh

>Hey guys, from the safety of my own home with electric lighting, I can safely say that reality-bending monsters are neither terrifying nor psychologically damaging!

People lose their minds from spending thirty minutes around other people in high stress situations. What makes you think spending thirty minutes around fish-men in high stress situations would be less likely to leave someone with psychological damage?

>>50798901
Right, but what if raised with both? A sort of bridge person, inbetween batshit crazy, and normal.

So there is logic to Loveraft's universe, it's just not understood by humanity? Then it is conceivably possible for a human to come to understand it, although the journey might change them, without going insane?
>>50798907
So in the end, the best policy is to have weak convictions, because then they weren't really there to block understanding anyway.
>>50798935
I meant more that because Cthulhu is batshit insane, you need a batshit insane idea.
You need to think outside the box.
Outside of your own convictions, and understandings, and come up with a solution that, well, ony an idiot on the internet would have.
>>50798955
Well, yeah, I suppose they still might struggle with the fear.

Insensitive baby? Bridge Baby? And why do people choose to worship their dream visions?

>>50798829
>The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

That's literally the beginning of "The Call of Cthulhu." In Mythos works, understanding is often more dangerous than ignorance. Quantum physicists and their ilk are generally the people who are closest to the shattering revelations implied to be inherent in the existence of Mythos entities, so they're often the first to go, in a sense.

On the other hand, in various stories it's the learned who are able to resist Lovecraftian forces the best. You really want some scholars on your side if you're trying to defeat (well, slightly postpone the inevitable victory of) some kind of Mythos-related threat. It just takes an awful toll on them, as they have to live with the horrible knowledge they've acquired.

>>50798897
See mate, you've got it wrong. What everyone forgets is that the boat didn't harm him, it's that it went through him because he wasn't finished materialising because the stars only aligned for not even half of a minute. Dead Cthulhu sleeps in R'lyeh until the stars are aligned. Once they are, and he fully wakes, nothing shall stop him from. Nothing could stop him. If you're driven insane by him sleeping, then what if he's alive and awake?

>>50798897

>If a boat can kill him
It can't, though. The ending of Call makes it clear that, at best, all the ramming charge did was delay him just long enough that the stars to stop "being right" and he slouches back to Rlyeh for a nap. He just puts his exploded head back together and goes home. If the stars come right for longer than the few moments they had in the 1920's, it's going to take a hell of a lot more to even do harm, never mind delay him.

>Just put him in acid
He's not made of matter we understand, so good luck figuring out what acid to use.

>Honestly, beating Cthulu sounds like a matter of thinking outside the box

More like thinking outside the genre is what you're doing. It's like saying "all it takes to beat Cthulhu is a good cutemeet where he bumps into a nerdy girl at the college library and they fall in love because this is a romcom right?" No, it's not. You're operating in the wrong schema.

>>50799028
Har-die-har-har
Yes, I am a civilian, with a civilians ability to handle crazy shit.
But what if some hard motherfucker, who also happens to have a quantum physics degree because fuck you, and- Wait, I got it.
Gordan Freeman.
How would Gordan Freeman handle a gotdamn Lovecraftian horror?
>>50799041
But what makes the awful knowledge worse than any other awful knowledge, such as oblivion, mortality, the universe's death, and the fact that the human soul may not exist?

>>50799034
What you meant doesn't matter, I'm explaining you that Cthulhu, as a literary device, is something you should not be able to actually win against, and whose presence should humble you beyond the capacity to come up with an effective counter-attack plan.
if you really win against Cthulhu you're writing a bad story or playing CoC wrong.

In fact the more I read your posts the more you come off as a guy who wants to "win CoC" by killing Cthulhu.

Which is to say a DnD munchkin who lost his way.

>>50798353
Like 90% of people don't just "go crazy" from seeing eldritch horrors, they develop very reasonable psychological conditions not properly treatable by 19th century alienists, and then get thrown into an asylum.
Guy sees horrible monsters, suffers massive stress and fear that impacts his daily routine, can't explain why without sounding like a madman, and all it takes is someone deciding he needs to be fixed, and then it's off to gay baby jail.

>>50798353
It doesn't. Mythos stuff doesn't care about you or influence you in any way.

What drives you insane, much later, is the understanding that the universe is filled with things such powerful and incomprehensible that everything humanity, and you, personally, will ever achieve, or become, doesn't matter at all. This causes people to be overcome with deep depression and ennui, and THAT eventually drives you insane.

At least, that was the case before Derleth came with his psychic shit.

>>50799095
>>50799105
Ah, so he's got, for lack of a better word, plot armor? And no, I don't want to win by "kiling cthulhu", just was looking for a song about him, which led me to his wikipedia out of curiosity, when I noticed that it said that seeing him drove you nuts, while also saying that there were descriptions of him.
>>50799123
So essentially PTSD then?
That actually makes a decent chunk of sense.
You go through fucked up shit, and come out fucked up.

>>50799103
Fuck off with your powerlevel bullshit.

The Mythos isn't a fucking fighting game roster for you to pit against other characters.

The Mythos is a set of literary elements for you to create cosmic horror stories.

If you use them outside of this context they lose their value. And here you're clearly trying to turn Cthulhu into a pro-wrestling jobber for your babyface to win against.

>>50799158
The descriptions of Ktulu come from the dreams of fevered minds, as none have seen him and lived, or were mentally stable enough to be of any use. (In-universe, that is.)

>>50799105
I agree with this. I do like the idea of being able to confront the Great Old Ones and win, but that's definitely not classic Lovecraft in the slightest at all and understand that the horror part comes from the inevitability and unbeatable part of these characters.

Beating the Cthulu through ingenuity, determination, the social links you got by hanging out with that dude who wants to fuck his teacher; these are Lovecraft Lite things that have a much more optimistic bent than your CoC proper. There are definitely tabletops you can find to grab some of that feel, though I can't come up with any off the top of my head aside from DnD and WoD.

>>50799034
>So there is logic to Loveraft's universe, it's just not understood by humanity?
Not really. Whatever logic exists is, at best, dreamed up by Azathoth. But since all the stories are from a human perspective, it tends to emphasize the "random, chaotic, horrible universe" angle.

Eat an eighth of mushrooms and you'll understand why the concept of a non-euclidean city is pretty fucking spooky.

>>50799158

>He's got plot armour.

Still thinking in the wrong terms.

It's not that he's too big.

You're too small.

>>50799158
Cthulhu is a big thing, right?

In Mythos, Cthulhu is a small fry compared to the Big Things.

The universe itself is one of them.

>>50799158
"plot armor" is meaningless outside of fight-centered stories where the plot should be resolved by fighting.

"plot armor" has no meaning against a character you aren't supposed to fight.

The Norwegian captain incapacitates Cthulhu in the story but it's immediately made clear that it doesn't fucking matter and resolved nothing.

So no, Cthulhu doesn't have plot armor because he's not a supervillain for superheroes to beat up.

>>50799177

Well, SOME victories are possible in "purist" Lovecraft, but human endeavour rapidly becomes meaningless at a certain scale. In the Dunwich Horror, the Whateley boys are horrors that can be brought down in semi-mundane fashion. But those are essentially weird mutants caused by close contact with a deity, who doesn't care if your shotgun is really cool.

>>50799219
Yeah and let's not forget that CTHULHU ISN'T EVEN THE BIGGEST THREAT IN HIS OWN STORY.
Cthulhu is just the front desk receptionist of the Old Ones and R'lyeh is full of them.
He's the tip of the iceberg, and THAT'S what really scares the author-narrator of the story.

>>50799172
look at
>>50799158
Gordan Freeman has dealt with horrors akin to Lovecraftian ones on a regular basis.
He was the best example I could think of for the best individual to "deal" with a lovecraftian horror. And I mean "deal" in the sense of not go batshit whenever he sees sushi from that encounter afterwards.
>>50799178
But in the end, Azathoth must have his own version of logic.
Granted, fucking insane by human standards, but logic nontheless.
>>50799188
>>50799208
Except they said his whole point as an entity in the plot, is that he's unbeatable, uncomprehendable, and mostly indifferent to humanity.
In the end, it's a fiction, beholden to fiction's rules.
Now, a real life lovecraftian horror, yeah, it's not got plot armor.
He's just a massive fucker.
Massive in more than size too.
Massive in power, and influence.
Massive in the amount of fuck's ungiven torwards humanity.
They are not Benevolent.
They are not Malevolent.
They, from our view, just are.

File: boards.4chan.org 1476343756123.jpg (201KB, 1024x768px) Image search: [Google]

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>>50799103
But what makes the awful knowledge worse than any other awful knowledge, such as oblivion, mortality, the universe's death, and the fact that the human soul may not exist?

Irrefutable proof that the human soul DOES exist, and it gets raped for eternity. Basically, the ending to every HPL story.

>>50799123
This.The entire town of Dunwich saw some real shit, but they are pretty content to just not talk about it and keep fucking each other.

OP, play some Bloodborne if you have a PS4. It's Victorian werewolf hunters meets lovecraftian cosmic horror. Also, Spotify has many HPL stories read aloud for free. You seem interested enough, take a look.

>>50799282
>And I mean "deal" in the sense of not go batshit whenever he sees sushi from that encounter afterwards.
Oh, then sure I guess he could, as a matter of fact a fair amount of Lovecraft' characters do that.
But they've lost all hope because they know beyond any doubt that the world is fucked.

See that's what I'm getting at with Cthulhu and the whole cosmic horror thing.

Lovecraft's stories aren't just meant to induce horror or fear, they're meant to induce despair. And Cthulhu works in that context, with the rest of the story he appears in.

>>50799282
Why do you give a shit about "real life"?

This is fiction. You're on a board dedicated primarily to fiction.

>>50799282
No mate. Cthulhu is just a priest.

Think of it like that. He's not important.

At least, to them.

>>50799282
>But in the end, Azathoth must have his own version of logic.
He shits physics and then eats them and does it over again. And he likes the sound of pipes so he's got two formless dudes play pipes while he eats his own poo because he's "the blind idiot god".
That's literally all he does.

How's that for "logic"?

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>>50798353
OP, I want you to imagine a colour that fell from outer space. A colour that consumes people, for lack of a better description.

THAT'S your average Lovecraftian entity; abstract, immaterial and intrinsically adverse to the very underpinnings of ''logic'' and ''reason'', which are but trivial concepts that we humans have conceptualized to enforce order upon an inherently apathetic universe.

By the sheer fact that our insignificant sensory organs are simply not adequately equipped to fully comprehend these entities without driving us mad in the process, the pictures you see of Cthulhu are bit vague pseudo-representations of what could-be -- the glimpses of fragmentary reality, amassed in such a way to give you a mind's eye into the void of infinity.

>>50799384
Now I just have this image of the others looking at Cthulhu's strange hate for humans and being like "Why are obsessed with bacteria, you feckin weirdo."
I'm laughing at an eldritch horror.
take that, cosmos
>>50799375
Because you guys started applying real life rules.
Fiction's have different rules, from reality.

>>50799282
>But in the end, Azathoth must have his own version of logic.
In the mythos, the entire universe and all of it's contents are the dream of some massive dead god (Azathoth). Literal time, space, life, death, EVERYTHING is just some abstract dream of something so alien in concept that we don't really have the capacity to describe it wholly.

Can you imagine what this being must conceive when it's awake? Sure, you could attach a mundane label on it like 'logic', but at that point anything described as logic would be entirely different than the narrow definition you'd be using.

The funny thing is that your assertions are basically the same thing that every protag goes through

>I mean, there's no way something like that could exist, right?
Wrong
>It's big, but...it's not THAT big
Nope
>C-can't we nuke it?
Nuh-uh
>W...what if-
Nah

>>50799447
Cthulhu doesn't have a hatred of humans. He doesn't care. We are as ants to Them.

Besides fiction only has different rules wen it is allowed to.

>>50799447
>take that, cosmos
wow you're such a badass measuring your intellect to fictional beings that don't exist and were made up by other people like you.

You sure are a lot smarter and braver than Lovecraft.

Oh boy.

>Because you guys started applying real life rules.
when?

>>50799158

Again, you're just assuming this interaction is taking place in a different sort of story than a Lovecraft story.

Like I said earlier, if you want to write a story using Cthulhu and use a different genre with a different mood and different tropes and expectations for what is feasible, then sure, write your story where Optimus Prime fights Cthulhu. But that's not cosmic horror.

Cosmic horror is, as a genre, about human insignificance, irrelevance and meaninglessness in the face of things so much larger than us. Disempowerment is key, and I understand that it's a difficult pill to swallow when you come at Lovecraft from sci fi or fantasy which is often about how cool it is to have power and be able to do cool things. But Lovecraft was writing cosmic horror. Saying "what if it's not though?" is like asking why the leads in a romantic comedy don't stab each other in the face and scream about how much they hate each other and go on gore-splattered murder sprees; because that's not what the genre is.

>>50799460
Azathoth isn't dead he's just stupid and blind.

>>50799158
Lovecraftian entities are more akin to forces of nature. Does the wind have ''plot armor'', how about ''temperature'', or ''radiation''?

Yog-Sothoth the Gate and Key is LITERALLY the space-time continuum. Not a representation, not an ''avatar'', no. He's literally the very concept of space and time and the dimensions.
Try him on for size.

>>50799447
Cthulhu doesn't give a shit about humans he's just waiting for the stars to be right so he can summon the Great Old Ones on earth, and from there all over space.

>>50799509
>then sure, write your story where Optimus Prime fights Cthulhu. But that's not cosmic horror.
I mean, Cthulhutech was literally built for this kind of shit.

I don't like CT because I feel like it's too against the grain from HPL's themes, but OP might like it.

>>50799548
Yeah.
Cthulhutech sounds like it was written by people like OP.

Cthulhu isn't even that big of a deal, cosmic-horror wise. He's simply the Old One's vanguard to reclaim Earth.

>>50799575
Yeah, but don't give him too hard of a time. I mean, if you're not already a fan of the works, it's only reasonable to ask these kids of questions. I mean most of them are addressed by the protagonists.

>>50799421
He likes eating physics, so he makes some and eats it.
Seems logical to me.
We like bacon, so we make it and eat it.
Same with the sound of pipes.
>>50799426
Nice description, and it makes sense.
u don did a good
>>50799460
Yeah, but he's still got a logic.
Logic just means a mind process, a way of perceiving things. Either he has one, or he's not sentient, even if it is so fucking weird calling it weird is like calling the center of a fusion explosion "A little warm"
And as for those assertions, I guess that would seem funny.
Still, they are gods.
Who could hope to kill a god, but a god.
>>50799477
We drove steamboat into him an delayed him.
If we're ants, we're fire ants, and he's probably miffed at us.
>>50799493
It was a sarcastic "take that cosmos" you sperg.
Figured lack of punctuation and capitalization would make that clearer.

When you claimed plot-armor was irrelevant when discussing a fictional character who is required to be immortal by the plot.
>>50799534
If the wind was a fictional entity with features tacked on to help fulfill the plot?
Sure.
>>50799545
And we made him wait for next time.
Imagine you were waiting in line for something, and an ant bites you.
You step to the side, pull the ant out with tweezers, but now you've lost your place and must wait another 5 minutes.
You curse the ant, while the other people look on in confuson as to why you'd be so mad over an ant.
This is how I think Cthulhu sees us.

>>50799608
"Color out of Space" is actually one of HPL's stories, and the "creature" did "devour" things. The quotation marks are paraphrases, because those two words are about two or three pages of description in the book, I want you to understand.

Fire ants is probably a good way of looking at it.

>>50799608
>If the wind was a fictional entity with features tacked on to help fulfill the plot? Sure
I didn't ask you a question though, so thanks for that lackluster reaction, cunt.

Putting your smug mockery aside, these things are - objectively - beyond your comprehension. You cannot envision what it would be like to be swallowed whole by the space-time continuum. (or the wind, for that matter).

Stop trying to deconstruct Lovecraft (which you haven't even read). It's not working, and all you're doing is arguing semantics like a pedantic faggot.

>>50799608
>When you claimed plot-armor was irrelevant when discussing a fictional character who is required to be immortal by the plot.
what the fuck does that have to do with "applying real-life rules"?

And it sounds to me like you have textbook Asperger's syndrome: an obsession with organizing everything into a coherent system.
Incompatibilities between things (such as cosmic horror and military strategy) upset you so you shoehorn things into each other.

Like Deviantart people who make Sonic OCs of everyone they know cause they can't handle Sonic being its own thing.

>>50799608
But we did not delay him, he merely went back to death-sleep as the stars went out of perfect alignment. Should they ever perfectly align, he will rise, and the earth shall sleep in his wake.

And nothing can stop it.

>>50799707
this

>>50799711
Because, things like "plot-armor" will always be relevant in a story.
Fiction is beholden to rules.
The story was supposed to be about the oppressive horror of indifferent, massive, dangerous unknown.
So it was required that the manifestation of that in the story be worth fearing.
His immortality is merely plot armor used to make him more imposing.
It's a story.
With a story's rules.
He has plot armor.
>>50799707
Except, they aren't
Sure, some things are, for the sake of the story, but in the end I know about him.
I know he's immortal, because him being immortal improves the story.
Call of Cthulhu would be a very different tale if he died from the steamboat.

Grip a billiard ball, feel your fingers wrap around it, and you will understand. Now imagine a creature that existed in only two of those three dimensions, in a universe that described a simple plane through our own. To that creature, the billiard ball would appear to be a simple circle, growing and shrinking as it passes through the plane of the creature's universe. Imagine how our hand would look - strange fleshy circles filled with pulsing fluids, shards of os, glistening meat. The creature could never understand what it was really seeing, as it could no more conceive of a hand than it could imagine a creature like us, moving freely in three dimensions and gripping billiard balls on a whim.

>>50799813
This is what I mean with incomprehensible -- and your insistence to the contrary by saying ''no nu'' won't prove otherwise.

To imply that something can ''die'' assumes that it ''lives'' in the first place. Tell me, can a colour die? Is it alive to begin with?

>>50798353
>it's a "fundamental misunderstanding because I've never read the source material" episode

>>50799813
>I know about something
>I comprehend it
You *know* what a triangle is, and you *know* what angles are -- but can you 'comprehend' the notion of an extra-dimensional triangle with twelve angles? If so, then please draw one for me with a timestamp :^)

>>50799813
I think you're both arguing something that is, at this point, semantics. But I did want to say this,
>Fiction is beholden to rules.
The mythos is very purposely NOT beholden to any rules. If you wish, any rules that are within the scope of human reasoning.

Considering the fact that human reasoning is all that you or I could ever hope to achieve, you're supposed to take these sort of things with a grain of salt. Sit back and enjoy the horror at face value, because attempting to deconstruct it is redundant and futile.

It's more along the lines of an insane man who claims and truly believes he was abducted by aliens and you can see the fear in his eyes when he speaks of them. Optical illusions don't drive anyone insane because the brain can process them and eventually through time rationalize them as being tricks or flukes; possibly even replicating them. And with the insane alien abductee you can convince yourself he's lying for a variety of human reasons, or suffering from a mental disorder. But through his eyes he saw something that defied everything he previously knew and changed him forever in one singular experience and reduced him to a terrified mess. Not a single day would ever pass where he didn't think about it and that thinking and reasoning would push him to question the nature of reality and existence itself until to an outsider: he is absolutely a lunatic. And that's just from little grey men that shouldn't exist on our planet with some technology that also shouldn't exist in our timeline, imagine that scaled to the nth degree in the case of something like Cthulhu.

There's no skepticism after an experience like that, you will never be able to brush it off as a trick of the mind or blame it on something in the corner of your eye or weather balloons ever again.

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>>50798353
>How is it that Cthugha, or for that matter any of the Hot Ones, drives my mad by just looking at her? Is it a puberty thing? Is it the desire of her? Or is it just because a man can't ever be inside what he's looking at, and wants to bust a nut?

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>>50799912
Here you go.
>>50799914
Eh, in the words of Mark Twain
"Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't."
Fiction has the fault of being made by humans, with human logic.
Reality has no such limitations, and therefore an eldritch horror in fiction is inherently different from a real one.

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>>50799998
Sorry, but that's wrong. Geometry is objectively measured. Do you even know anything about mathematics? Kek

Speaking of Cthulhu, what's the best version of the RPG?

>>50799912
All triangles occupy the same infinite space across all realities rendering a 12 angled one an impossibility within the supreme reality. Should one enter ours it would be reduced to three.

>>50800040
The point was that showing an extra-dimensional object on only 2 is like trying to see a sphere in only 1 or less dimensions.
I cn know it, and I can even sort of feel a comprehension, though in the same sense I comprehend that the screen I'm looking at is a bunch of radiation bombarding holes in my face.
I comprehend it, but not really.

>>50799998
>doesn't get that his drawing is still 2D and that the exercise was physically impossible.
Guess you feel pretty stupid now for obliging him

>>50800071
And, not to mention, a twelve angled version of an object that is defined as having 3 angles (and 3 sides) is like saying "Show me tiger but it's a fish instead."

>>50800095
Exactly, and yet you still don't understand how the conceptualization of something that we inherently understand to be impossible, is not the very definition of incomprehensible?

Just how dense are you?

>>50798691
Okay Mr. Autism

>>50800110
But that's like saying "Hah, you don't understand how a circle can also be a square?
That's because a circle can't be a square, because then it wouldn't be a circle anymore haha gotcha good didn't I?"
A "definition" is a product of the human mind, and is beholden to the human minds rules.
Trying to compare an eldritch horror and an incorrect definition is just inaccurate.
So act smug all you want, but your point is invalid.

>>50800149
But dude that's what WE'RE trying to tell YOU

Any rationalization of Old God voodoo you try to make is inherently flawed, because you, as a human, literally cannot comprehend anything beyond a vague impression of what if MIGHT be like.

>>50800149
No, the error is on your part. I explicitly specified an *extra-dimensional* triangle with twelve sides, and asked you to draw it if you were as confident in your ability to comprehend everything as you pretend to be.
You drew me a shitty birth-canal and then sperged out with ''but it becomes 3D by bringing it into our reality!'' (forgoing the fact that it becomes 2D, since you fucking DREW it)

But ultimately, I didn't even specify that. You needed me to draw one in an extra-dimensional fashion. But you can't, right? You don't have the sensory ability to perceive or interact with dimensions beyond the first three, and you sure as fuck can't draw it.

Doesn't mean it fundamentally doesn't exist, it just means that *you're unable to*, since you're a pedantic faggot who can't admit being in way over his head.

So my point stands, and I can act as smug as I like :^)

>>50799998
Anon, I do believe you legitimately have some form of autism. I sincerely mean it when I say seek help.

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>>50800197
>I asked you to draw me one in an extra-dimensional fashion*
>inb4 pic related

>>50800196
>>50800197
I never refuted that, you goofs.
I'm saying that the gods of the story ARE beholden to rules, by fault of being written by a human.
>>50800199
How is given an obtuse answer to an obtuse question = autism

>>50798353
Because you can understand an optical illusin is merely an illusion

>>50800149
The universe you see is different from the universe that is. A fish in a pond looks at its surroundings and goes "this is the world". By its definition, it is correct because for all intents and purposes everything outside of its pond does not effect it. It never encounters it. It never sees the effect it has on its pond. So it thinks that's the world. But the world is bigger than just that pond; there are deserts and oceans and mountains and many other things the fish can't even conceive. And when something from outside enters that pond, the fish does not know what to do because it's an outside-context problem.
We are the fish, and the asshole hillbilly going fishing with dynamite is the Mythos. Not a god, no, but one of the minor beasties. The "gods" are planets, solar systems in comparison.
How are you gonna explain quantum physics to a fish? It completely lacks the ability to understand. We define reality, but that definition is based on our very limited and flawed observations that are minuscule enough to be irrelevant. That's the horror in cosmic horror -- humans can't see the universe for what it is because we're way, way too low down the food chain.

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>>50800280
>obtuse question
I don't think you know what that word means, but nevertheless, how was it an obtuse question? We're dealing with things that are supposed to be *beyond comprehension*, after all.

If you are physically and mentally incapable of representing something, doesn't mean that the thing you're incapable of representing doesn't exist. MENSA never did reply to your letter, did they?

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This is a Calabi-Yau shape. It has 10 spacial dimensions.

More specifically, this is a 2D image of our 3D concept of a 10D shape. Really appreciate how incomplete our ability to actually conceive this idea is. We can comprehend that it exists, in fact much of our current universe theory banks on it, but our actual capacity to perceive it is so fundamentally flawed that it's almost laughable to try.

This is basically the core of Lovecraft themes.

>>50799608
>Either he has one, or he's not sentient

Azathoth is not. He's empty. They don't call him the blind, idiot god for nothing. The lights aren't on, and nobody's home.

I fucking hate tripfags jesus christ read the goddamn books

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>>50800400
Amen, brother.
qt. non-euclidean Lovecraftian horror for you

>>50800370
Hell, "time" being the 4th dimension has been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt for a century and most people still have trouble with the idea

>>50800351
Your pulling this argument in a stupid direction
READ. THE. WORDS. IN. FRONT. OF. YOUR. FACE.
Comprehending a lovecraftian horror is possible.
Why?
Because it was created by a human, with a human's logic, and a human's rules.
It was made as a story, and stories have rules, at least good ones do.
Yes, there are things that are incomprehensible.
Yes, a real life eldritch horror would be incomprehensible.
But an entity in a human story will follow human logic.
>>50800400
Didn't want anyone pretending to be me, or something equally stupid.

>>50800052
the d20 Call of Cthulhu is objectively one of the worst roleplaying books ever put to paper, however, it has one of the best paragraphs introducing a game master to horror roleplaying.

The new Delta Green is pretty neat, Trails of Cthulhu is kinda nice for investigative games, but I reckon just go for the old fashioned BRP Call of Cthulhu

>>50799282

You believe that Gordon Freeman has not gone insane, that he handles the horrible things he has seen without remark. You never question why he never speaks, why you never see him relax or rest. You have never seen him sleep nor eat. You think that he is fine, that he is content with his lot in life. He is not.

Gordon Freeman has no control over his own life any longer. He decides nothing, not when to begin nor when to end. You believe him unaffected by his relationship with the G-Man, a being who cares nothing for the "rules" time or space, a being who could very well be to Freeman what Cthulu is to you.

You believe you can fight against these eldritch gods because you do not understand. You think Freeman is unaffected. You are wrong.

And still you wonder why there is no Half-Life 3.

>>50800437
See, that's where you're wrong. Human beings can comprehend individual parts of a whole -- we can conceptualize, but never truly immerse yourself in comprehension; that is, inherently knowing and understanding.

You *know* the number 12, you understand that it is relative to other numbers and -- as a concept -- is found between ''11'' and ''13''.
But can you comprehend the number 12 communicating with you? Again, you can understand that it means to communicate, but can you comprehend what it would be to communicate with a number -- an abstract concept that only exists in relation to other things?

No, you can't.
Now cut the shit and fuck off with your retarded autism already, it's getting old.

>>50800437
So what you're saying is because a person wrote a book, the characters in a person's book must be human or humanlike, because a person wrote it, logically, they must think like people. But only if it's fiction!

So, therefore, if the person wrote a book that had a dog in it, the dog will think like people because a person wrote it.

If a person wrote a book with aliens in it, the aliens will think like people because a person wrote it.

If a person wrote a book with alien gods in it, the alien gods will think like people because a person wrote it.

Anon, I really do think you have some form of autism, you sound very much like my cousin.

>>50799034

To put things into an understandable preservative, try to run Crysis on a PC-98 or any old early 90s computer: chances are, it won't be able to store the first 25% of the game before it ran out of space, and even if it were, it would have no idea how to accommodate for all of its various technical requirements, leaving you with what from its perspective is incomprehensible garbage that will lead to an error at best and a crash at worst.

Part of Lovecraft's horror is the realization that like a machine, the human mind has hard limitations that it can never hope to overcome, like an old computer. That trying to process certain things will break it because it simply does not have the proper parameters to render those specific variables, and trying to will invariably tax it to a point of breaking.

>>50800531
>Can it handle Crysis?

>>50800437
If you can't understand >>50800510
then you should go ahead and fellate a gun for wasting everyone's time by forcing them to come up with asinine analogies so your autism can understand.

>>50800519
Oh for fuck's sake.
A human won't write a rock as a human.
He'll write it as he sees a rock.
A human won't write an eldritch horror as a human.
He'll write it as he perceives an eldritch horror.
Then, understanding the eldritch horror just means understanding the man who created it.
Difficult, but possible.
>>50800510
You're point is invalid to me now, because you can't comprehend mine.
read >>50800437 again.
>>50800531
Fair nuff.

>>50800437
Dude, you really need to actually read some of this shit.

HPL goes out of his way to avoid directly-describing most entities, because it's been pretty firmly established that most of the physical elements of anything that even smells like and elder-thing are subject to immediate and drastic change by the literal incarnation of chaos. Most of his descriptions talk about how utterly impossible it is to actually describe the focus of the horror. Instead, he flourishes scenes, atmosphere, senses of smell or inhuman sounds.

>>50800519
That's actually not wrong, though. Every depiction of a dog in stories that does more then just have it there personifies it, and every sci-fi story with aliens does the same thing. stories are human-made, and therefor operate with human rules. and human rules include the idea of "what a thinking mind is." You're never going to have a story with a thing that thinks, where that thing thinks in a way that's not human, because the author and reader only understand thinking as human.

>>50800617

I can't tell if it's confirmation bias or just a lack of reading that convinces you of this.

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>>50798353
I feel like we have this thread at least once a year.

pic not related but hey, who doesnt love giant monsters?

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>>50800583
>I won't concede the point that communication with the number 12 is incomprehensible to me because I'm too autistic to admit that I don't understand what was said.
Wew, monkeys and typewriters I guess. Well played kid, nearly got me fooled there.

>>50800656
He has a point though.
How often have you seen a writer write any mind as anything but human or human-like?

>>50800667
Because I agree with you that I can't comprehend that.
You just refuse to move away from that point, and realize that I'm making an entirely different point.
That I can comprehend communicating with a fictional representation of 12, because a human made it, according to there human rules, and so it will follow there conception of what a communicable 12 would be like.
My point this entire time has been that reality and fiction are different, and that reality is incomprehensible, while a good fiction will always be comprehensible.

>>50799989
Miyu Matsuki

RIP

>>50798353
Look at the fucking picture you posted and imagine being one of the guys on that boat.

>>50800676
Never, because they don't. That's why being told how someone thinks and feels is a staple of the protagonist, not of every single entity in an entire story.

>>50800718
Well, I 'd be scared, but if all that happened was that I saw that, and then it went away, I wouldn't go nuts.
Think about it and feel worried a lot, potentially getting PTSD?
Sure.
Descend into pure insanity?
No.

>>50800718

If that picture were canon, then they would have stabbed him in the nuts with that boat, and I can tell you I wouldn't be able to go back to sleep after that.

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>>50800732
>He doesn't know what 3rd person writing is
>He doesn't know that you can see the thoughts and feelings of multiple character from multiple species from multiple stories
>he doesn't know that they all think like a human, or similar to one
kek

>>50800710
Your point is moot, though. It's a simple deconstruction and doesn't prove anything.

''Because everything is the inadvertent or deliberate product of the human mind, it means that it is therefore limited by the confines of the human mind''

While technically true, it's fucking moot, since I can argue that the only reason you think that is because the very notion of logic (which is not something universal as you claim it to be) wasn't conceptualized by the ancient Greeks.

It's semantics, it's pedantry, and it's pseudo-intellectual. All that you're ultimately really saying is ''these things can be comprehended because they can be conceptualized''. It isn't insightful -- and as I alongside many others have mentioned numerously -- it also isn't correct.

>>50798829
I suspect most programmers and sysadmins would say something like "I FUCKING KNEW IT" and then run like hell. There are a lot of half joking references to computers being Lovecraftian or straight up magic, and that's actually the basis of the whole Laundry Files series, as well as the Cthulhutech tabletop game.

>>50798353
Cthulu is different things, to different victims.
To the politician he is The Alien, and the lie to all the politicians ambitions. The Great Game of Europe, the struggle to colonize the world, you might as well be the head dog-catcher in Piccadilly as Emperor of the solar system we're such a miserable backwater.
To the Churchman Cthulu is the Foreign God, putting to lie the Churchman's whole faith. The tale of Christ is a lie, and the only real diety on the whole of Earth is an amphibious demon worshipped by filthy darkies in the colonies.
To the mystic Cthulu is the Banal Understanding. Magic was never a question of enlightenment or spirits. It was technology. Soulless physics that man was considered too stupid to grasp, dressed up in a fancy dress to keep the details right. He doesn't understand a single thing, and he never will.
To the Scientist, Cthulu is just full of fuck. Scientific revolutions add new exceptions or rules. Einstein doesn't actually contradict Newton at the macro level, just adds some footnotes to the end of his claim. And I'm the context of almost 400 years of continual sediment of knowledge Cthulu makes no sense. How he got here makes no sense, Lemuria makes no sense, his abilities make no sense. And the deeper answer turns out to be "Science isn't real, you're just cute when you think you know something."
Cthulu is a variable symbol. In any given story what he ultimately stands for is "the assumptions at the core of what you think life is about are too retarded to even call wrong." What those assumptions are varies from protagonist to protagonist.

>>50800757
>he doesn't know that they all think like a human, or similar to one
Two can play at this game.
How do you know how humans think?

Objectively, you can only draw from primary sources -- being yourself, however, you are an individual and therefore not plural. For all that you know the rest of humanity is intrinsically linked through a hive mind and we just appear as individually-motivated agents of our own free will, but truly this is all a dream and you are the only inherently conscious being in the world.
You can't disprove that, so how can you say with certainty how other people think -- if they even do at all?

See how easy it is to be an autistic kid who just runs in circles, thinking it impresses anyone on this Mongolian stop-motion emporium.

>>50798829
Physicists and philosophers are probably the two most likely to not be phased that heavily. PTSD from the fear maybe, but I don't think it would shatter their minds.

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>>50800810

I am coming to accept this as the thread unfolds.

>>50800817
What "game"? Listen:
old ones are FICTIONAL.
All fiction is written by humans.
Ergo, Old ones are a creation of humans.
A human has to understand something to create it.
Ergo, Humans can/do understand old ones.
It doesn't matter that a real one wouldn't be created by a human, because there isn't a real one.
And before you go off on me about "muh cosmic horror themes", lovecraft has been dead for most a century, and I could care less about the literary conventions of a dead genre.

>>50799034
I think the problem with "just attack him as fast as he regenerates." Is that cthulu's unconscious dreams hurt people world wide. His experience of being attacked to the point of melting would probably kill half the earth with sympathy pain.

>>50800983
>A human has to understand something to create it.

Bullshit.

>>50800983
>A human has to understand something to create it.
A man creates a fire by rubbing two sticks together. This man does not necessarily have to understand fire to know how to create it.

>>50800983
>>50800983
Dude, we're not having trouble understanding what you're trying to say. We /know/ what you're trying to say.

Your reasoning isn't incorrect per se, but it's redundant to the point of being completely moot.

>>50800983
>A human has to understand something to create it
This is a blatant lie.

>Dead genre
Behold, a man who does not understand the falsehood he has created.

>>50801050
He understands heat and the desire to stay warm, and he understands that fire is the product of the necessity. It's intricacies amount to nothing. He understands the fundamental and his knowledge of fire will forever be linked to his human need for warmth. It will never be an abstraction to him.

>>50801105
Easy there son, just put down the goalposts and admit you were wrong. Shit gets invented on accident all the fucking time, because people think they're doing one thing and it turns out they were wrong.

Like you, for example. You think you're making reasonable points, when in reality, you're effectively shitposting.

>>50800983
>dead genre
Literally never been more popular

>>50801089
No, no, see his local library doesn't have works of Lovecraft so it's obviously a dead genre.

>>50801150
>his local library doesn't have works of Lovecraft
They almost certainly do, is the worst part.

I mentioned it earlier, but there's dozens of HPL audiobooks and read stories on spotify for free, too.

>>50801135
All creation was created to be understood! I won't be silenced.

>>50801197
>All creation was created to be understood!
Then the least you can do is read the source material

>>50800437
>Didn't want anyone pretending to be me

why is it so easy for you to comprehend someone wanting to be a retarded faggot, but have such difficulty understanding there might be other such behaviors or minds equally incomprehensible?

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>>50798353
Sometimes staring at things youre not supposed to has an effect on your mind.

>>50798500
>But then why does it affect you negatively in TTRPGs? Are they non-canon?

I mean the source, and the tangential secondary sources have been dead for how long now? Since before our hobby even existed?

I fucking wonder.

>>50800793
humble anon take this (you) as a symbol of my respect and gratitude

>>50799866
Not that anon, but yeah, actually, you can 'kill' a color. You'd have to genocide everything with functioning vision and a brain capable of understanding it, but, yes, as color is a social concept ascribed to radiations from light, it can be 'killed'. I'm not trying to be smarmy, but I just finished a Noblesse game where my character strangled a concept of Stagnation.

Temperature, however, as a measurement of radiation itself, absolutely unkillable. Well, unless radiation was annihilated, but that's besides the point.

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>>50799912
Not the guy you're arguing with, but I couldn't help but try to imagine it. Here's my best shot: I simplified it to 3D passing through 2D, and bent the space around a pyramid so that four triangle instances appeared (3 angles x 4 = 12 angles). The exact position of the resulting shapes depends on how space is folded, my choice was arbitrary, but it resulted in an expanding size of triangles hung in space in alternating up-down patterns.

Which makes a 4D in 3D space even more interesting. It really depends how space is bent around it; all the resulting pyramids could be in the same space and thus unseen except for the outermost layer, or it could be translucent to get something like images of a hypercube. Or something weirder.

>>50801426
I like your attitude, have a (You)

>>50798426
>Judeo-Christian
Quick correction here; that doesn't exist.

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>>50801197
Here's an issue, anon. You'r trying to make yogsothery into Space Opera.

On a purely personal level, I agree with your assessment. To be fair, I don't even like Cosmic Horror that much, I just steal concepts for games and novels.

But a lack of in universe understandability at events/creatures is the necessary 'suspension of disbelief' required by yogsothery. If you want a squiddy as a force the protagonists fight, that's one thing: understanding it, however, is simply not a staple of Cosmic Horror.

Okay OP, I'm going to make this simple for you:

You aren't allowed to have opinions about the anything mythos related until you've read The Call of Cthulhu.

>>50798754
Yeah but at the time when Lovecraft was writing these themes and concepts were rarely explored. Most people believed in God and that humanity was made in his image, and were the greatest beings under divinity that the universe could produce. To be revealed as worthless was a true horror to readers of his era

Imagine if you actually saw a Lovecraftian creature, and were made aware that the nihilists were right all along - that life has no meaning or purpose, that we are nothing but biological flesh machines winding away into nonexistence. Not just accepting it intellectually, but knowing, as a fact, that it is true.

Might drive you a bit nutters, no?

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>>50798754
>I refuse to suspend by disbelief and reject the basic premise of this fictional work
>Look at how smart I am, I haven't even read it!

>>50801582
I agree with everything you said, and also your image macro.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KoExgr3yzvg

I didn't love this show, but it definitely had its moments. I love the simplicity of the whole thing, especially since this dude had been built up for a while, iirc

I forgot how big of faggots tripfags can be

>>50801514
Fine. "The concept from Abrahamic tradition..."
Happy now?

>>50801636
You're confusing legitimate Nihilism with a cynical type of physical Determinism.

Nihilists are actually right, though.

>>50798564
I like the idea of driving an ant mad.

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>>50801592
>You aren't allowed to have opinions

>>50801592
>>50801941
it's more like 'you probably shouldn't comment on a genre you've never read'

also I would append the first comment to include:
>Rats in the Walls
>Colour out of Space
>The Statement of Randolph Carter
>Dreams in the Witch-house

>>50799034
>So there is logic to Loveraft's universe, it's just not understood by humanity? Then it is conceivably possible for a human to come to understand it, although the journey might change them, without going insane?
To understand it IS to be insane, from a human perspective. Our brains just aren't wired to comprehend it.

>>50801996
>Our brains just aren't wired to comprehend it.
according to a work of fiction, yes.

>>50801941
Not when discussing source material you've never read, no.

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>>50801989
No love for the Mountains of Madness?

>>50799857
Completely underrated

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>>50799857
>>50802101

>>50802055
You seem to be unable to comprehend the difference between intern logic and external logic as it applies to a narrative.

>>50802070
I was never a fan of MoM. It was interesting from a lore perspective but the story was just a vehicle for that lore and it showed

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>>50802129
The best part of At The Mountains of Madness is that it sets up the excellent CoC campaign Beyond the Mountains of Madness.

Source: Am fa/tg/uy who ran BtMoM for my group

>>50802055
According to the definite source on a FICTIONAL universe, yes. Unless you're claiming that Cthulhu is real, just fuck off.

>>50798353
>How is it that Cthulhu, or for that matter any of the Old Ones, drives a man mad by just looking at him? Is it a psychic thing? Is it the terror of him? Or is it just because a man can't comprehend what he's looking at, and goes nuts?

We have had two centuries of nihilism in public discourse, an understanding that we are not special and the universe doesn't give a fuck about us.

HP Lovecraft's protagonists have barely even heard of the idea yet.

Cthulhu isn't mind-breaking through some special power, he's mind-breaking because his existence means the foundations on which your mind is built (God decrees justice, Good is a real thing, mankind has a purpose) is swept away in one fell swoop. Your entire life, you have been living a lie and now you see the truth.

>>50802332
name an HPL protagonist who goes mad in that fashion

>>50802353
William Dyer.

>>50802332

Cthulhu is a bad example because he actually DOES have "some special power" but other than that, your point about nihilism might be right.

>be a good christian english gentleman
>something really bad happens
>something you cannot explain walks in front of you
>you pray to god to save you
>and you pray
>and you pray
>nothing happens
>it is stll there
>you realise there is no god, but only the things you cannot explain

>>50798589
>In "The Statement of Randolph Carter" the narrator witnesses no monster, merely hears reports from his friend over the phone as the man delves deep into a crypt. The man suddenly begs Carter to flee the cemetery. When Carter begs his friend to come out, an inhuman voice asserts Warren is dead and hangs up the phone. Here the horror comes from Warren (a stony and implacable man) suddenly being gripped by terror and thus it is left for the reader to imagine what he might have encountered down there.
Wait, I thought Lovecraft lived before mobile phones.

>>50802427
It is a cable phone. With a really long cable.

>>50798600
Cool, thanks. Is there a specific order they should be read in?

>>50802506
Green

>>50799140
>What drives you insane, much later, is the understanding that the universe is filled with things such powerful and incomprehensible that everything humanity, and you, personally, will ever achieve, or become, doesn't matter at all. This causes people to be overcome with deep depression and ennui, and THAT eventually drives you insane.
You mean like the realization that the sun might explode at any moment, a meteorite might strike at any moment and yellowstone could erupt at any moment and we'd be fucked because a singular human has no ability whatsoever to motivate the powers that be into getting off their asses and actually building redundant colonies in space?

Because knowing that you could amount to something but will not because of faggotry is kind of more disturbing than the realization that you gotta lie back and think of England when the earth randomly decides to lose its magnetic field.

>>50802506
nope, Lovecraft wasn't even really writing a cohesive world. The usual beginners' list is:
>Shadow over Innsmouth
>Color out of Space
>Call of Cthulhu
>The Curious Case of Charles Dexter Ward
>Rats in the Walls
>Herbert West, Reanimator
>Dreams at the witch house

>>50802513
The sun isn't actively thinking about killing you, you dumb retard.

>>50800531
>Part of Lovecraft's horror is the realization that like a machine, the human mind has hard limitations that it can never hope to overcome, like an old computer. That trying to process certain things will break it because it simply does not have the proper parameters to render those specific variables, and trying to will invariably tax it to a point of breaking.
Well, yeah.
That's why we use mathematics and physical models like "sphere is surrounded by flying spheres" instead of trying to comprehend physics as a whole.

Humanity's knowledge of physics is already beyond a human's understanding of the same thing.

>>50802567
Neither is Cthulhu, or Azathoth, or Yog-Sothoth.

You dumb retard.

>>50802593
Azathoth will think about destroying humanity -exactly the microsecond he wakes up.

And a moment later, he does it, destroying the universe because why not?

>>50802635
That's functionally identical to a massive sun eruption.

So, on a tg level, what does every one think of Delta Green? Anyone know if it's good?

>>50802640
No, a sun eruption doesn't destroy the entire universe you retard.

>>50802683

> /ysg/ - Yog-sothothery general >>50759993

>>50802593
Nyarlatotep actively fucks with and kills people. In some stories, he is the entity that gave humans the nuclear bomb.

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>>50802716
Here's the issue, though. Everyone there is there because, if the game had a dick, they'd be sucking it.

That is what a general IS.

I'm asking if it's good, and that from people who know about Lovecraft but aren't, theoretically, as biased.

>>50802718
>Nyarlathotep is not one of the elder gods he names

>>50802708
It destroys the extent of the universe that we are living in.

Also, how is "a dreaming monster thing" different from a computer simulation? The latter is a valid theory that is being explored. People are actively looking for the limits of the simulation.

>>50802740
Fair enough.

Delta Green the setting, I like. I particularly like the post-9/11 setting reboot because it writes out stupid bullshit like the Greys and casts the players as the g-men. The tension surrounding a DG op isn't "will I draw the attention of MAJESTIC-12 and end up in a black helicopter" but "do I risk exposing the Mythos to the public, and can I justify my actions before a Congressional hearing if they should come to light?"

Delta Green the new system, I also like because it fixes 90% of the bullshit that pisses me off about BRP and other percentile games.

>>50802793
Rad. I shall endeavour to acquire it.

>>50798589
Sounds similar to Segan's talk about encountering a forth-dimensonal being. The process could drive you mad trying to comprehend what you just saw.

>>50802822
You may find this of interest.

http://www.delta-green.com/2016/02/download-delta-green-need-to-know/

>>50802741
So?

They are plenty of forces in Lovecraft's stories that actively hunt and stalk mankind.

The imprisoned entity that the shrink of Ward accidentally frees, and then goes on a global killing spree murdering wizards and necromancers.

Azathoth is a blind retard. Nothing he dreams has any kind of consistency and literally can't have any. Things only behave as they do in a smallish portion of space, and beyond that things get wacky.

The Old Ones who came to earth aren't made of matter or energy. They're made of some other state of existence. "That's not possible" you say "reality is made of only matter and energy". Well, in the Mythos you're wrong. So very wrong. There's other stuff, and sometimes that other stuff comes down and rapes your ability to understand it just by existing.

Ultimately though, Cthulhu won't make you go crazy just by seeing him. He just makes you very upset, which usually makes you go crazy. Only his psychic presence makes you go crazy.

>>50802761
Azathoth doesn't just blow up our part of space, he stops dreaming it. You aren't just killed, you cease to exist. Reality ceases to exist.

Ultimately, no it's not really that different than the simulation thing though. Except it runs on magic and the rules don't matter.

>>50800143
You don't get to act smug when you're called out on your ignorance

>>50802903
>That's not possible" you say "reality is made of only matter and energy".
What?
No.
Reality is made up of energy. Matter is just another state of energy.

>Things only behave as they do in a smallish portion of space, and beyond that things get wacky.
Fun fact: That's what physicists believe.

>>50802943
If physicists actually believed that, the entire field of Astrophysics wouldn't exist.

>>50802959
>Visible Matter
>Known Universe
>Totality of the Universe

Three entirely different things. Guess which one Astrophysics focuses on, on account of being able to observe it.

>>50802959
you're definition of small is too small.

>>50802977
Are you actually saying "the laws of physics only operate in the parts of the universe that we can observe, and in the parts of the universe we can't observe they obey completely different laws"?

>>50802988
Technically, it's "they probably obey different laws", but yes.

>>50802995
Please explain how you can make claims one way or the other, about how unobservable parts of the universe operate.

>>50802995
I'm dubious of actual scientists believing this. What possible reason could their be for physics to suddenly start misbehaving? The observable universe is a decent sample size in all likelihood, and most information points to a finite universe.

>>50798754
>>50798829
>>50798897
You're a fucking idiot. "Oh look at me I know literally nothing but I know how to beat the unbeatable!! I so clever"

>>50798353
He doesn't.

None of them do.

What causes the men who see these things to institutionalize themselves or be institutionalized in HP Lovecraft works is one of two things:
>They sound crazy.
Watch "From Beyond" for the perfect example of this in action. You have a man, who says he has literally seen things, actual living creatures, floating in the air all around all all the time. He KNOWS they exist, he's SEEN them. They move through and around us, but we can't see them unless a special machine that he and his now dead frond - whom is missing his head - is used to make them visible. Oh, and one of these invisible things bit off his friends head.

Except he's telling the exact truth. It's impossible, of course, none of that could have happened, but there you have it. He's got to be crazy because there is no proof, no reasonable explanation, only his utterly insane rant. This is also a theme present in the harration of "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" (remade in movie format as "The Ressurected"), The Hound, and Cool Air.

>Realization of the pointlessness of life and mankind's achievements.
Nothing you can ever do will matter. The human race is insignificant and utterly outclassed by the truth that the Great Old Ones were, are and will be, eternal and omnipotent.Your life is as significant as the lives of mice and rats - short, brutal, and pointless. And sometimes something massive, something you can barely comprehend will silently swoop down and pick you up in claws that are massive and deadly. Once in a very great while, someone escapes those claws. They survive, through pure chance or being terribly clever. You are a mouse, and those silent claws are out there. So you retire from life, and live in a small room, taken care of, insulated from the outside world. Because you have given up. The world can go on without you. You're done. This theme: Call of Cthulhu, The Shadow out of Time, and At The Mountains of Madness.

>>50803009
>>50803016
I don't know where those claims came from.
It's just the general attitude that I've heard from multiple physicists over the years.
For them, the idea of different laws of physics in some other part of the universe is a "well, duh" thing.

>>50803025
>This theme: Call of Cthulhu, The Shadow out of Time, and At The Mountains of Madness.
As well as life in Africa.

>>50803025
Mountains of Madness doesn't have anyone go crazy besides Danforth and he probably goes crazy because he sees some kind of evil God peeking over the far mountains. Which has less to do with any kind of rational or well thought out reason, but just the dread of knowing he literal apocalypse is just waiting for someone to find it.

>>50803027
I love all of these names you're trowing out. Honestly I can't believe you. I know a great deal of physicists who refuse to believe that physics are even a thing, and I'll take their word over it over yours.

>>50803027
It's less "different laws" and more "These are parts of the universe that we are incapable of observing directly and from the indirect observations we've managed to make, they conflict with our current models for understanding of how the fundamental forces affect matter and/or spacetime."

>>50800040
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7K5KjOdLD8

This is why you can never understand the geometry of the Great Old Ones. You can't create an object in four dimensions - we can only see the shadow of a fourth dimensional object.

>>50803047
But we get the same thing with shit that happens in our corner reasonably often don't we? So it's less different universal rules and instead more universal rules we're just not clear on yet.

>>50803054
To the casual observer, those are functionally the same thing: "Our Fundamental Understanding of the Nature of Reality is Incomplete, and possibly Entirely Incorrect"

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>>50803054
>But we get the same thing with shit that happens in our corner reasonably often don't we?

>>50803027

Physicist and Mathemahicians are not what someone would call sane. The greatest of them were all more or less bonkers. They are modern day cultist. Look at Sheldon Copper, his obsessive compulsivness is how he praise the glory of Lord Azatoth trying to bring order in His chaos.
Hell, Matemathicians are among the Science guys the one with the highest quantinty of believer in the Bearded Guy Up in the Sky.

>>50803086
I think it's quite charming how physicists can talk about mundane shit with other physicists, get a weird idea and then take out pen and paper and start calculating the scenario.

It's like if engineers randomly assembled slingshots out of household implements whenever they are idle.

>>50803081
We already understand how that works though. Quantum Physicists just decided to back the wrong asshole's theory for the past few decades.

>>50803086
Docus on math are fun. Weird people that live in paper caves talking about the beauty in numbers and how God put those numbers... "there", whereever those numbers are.

Weird people.

>>50803106
That's because engineers don't actually understand the nitty gritty of the why in how things work. They mostly have tables and pre-existing formula's to do that for them.

>>50803113
>We already understand how that works though
If we did there wouldn't be controversy and there'd already be upscaled prototypes that create non-suspect thrust.

>>50803081

What is that thing?

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>>50803009
It's called 'dark energy' and 'dark matter'. We are certain there should be both more matter in our observable universe as well as more energy, due to the universe's growth rate that we have recorded as well as certain gravitational anomalies. We can't directly observe these phenomena, but we CAN observe the effect they have upon other things.

>>50803016
It's not that physics starts misbehaving, it's that there are phenomenons we're still studying.

For example, silver, as far as we interact with it, is just a lump of metal. But make that shit nano-sized and it behaves like asbestos. The size of an object and thusly the scale fundamentally effects the properties of an observed object.

>>50803113
Uh, it is not yet proven it works you retard.

It is only priven that the setup for the experiment is legit, and other research groups can now copy that experiment and try it for themselves so we can get lots of data.

>>50803113
Actually there are a few competing hypotheses.

>>50803054
Problem: humans can never actually be certain of all laws of the universe because we are not equipped to perceive entire sections of the universe we know for a fact must exist.

There must be a fourth dimension. We can perceive it' effects and its shadows in our reality. We cannot actually perceive the fourth dimension itself. It is a physical impossibility. But it is there.

And even more irritating, is that there are most likely 5 to 6 other dimensions of physical reality we cannot see alogn with that one.

>>50803136
Dark Energy and Dark Matter are currently unobserved (possibly) but they both exist within out observable universe.

>>50803134
If you enclose a microwave in a box in microgravity and turn it on, thrust is generated.

We don't know why or how, but it is proven that it does happen.

>>50803121
And they are still less weird than artists.
I remember how, back in school, every single author and other artist that we talked about had some kind of really fuckey quirk. Like phimosis.

>>50803134
The memedrive.
It's literally a magnetron from a household microwave, attached to a copper cone.

If we are lucky, it will allow us to build truly propellant-less spacecraft that can accelerate for a long-ass time and make it to the next star in less than 100 years.
If we are really lucky, it will give us flying cars, hoverboards and orbital perpetuum mobiles.
If we are unlucky, it will not work at all.
If we are really unlucky, said perpetuum mobiles might drain energy from another dimension and start a war with extradimensional beings.

>>50798353
In actual Lovecraft, beholding old ones rarely drives you mad. Cthulhu has psychic dreams which madden sensitive (usually artists), and his city cannot be processed visually by the human brain, but looking at him is harmless.

When people go bonkers in HPL'S real work, it is usually due to impending doom or a horrible revelation about THEMSELVES.

>>50803147

Is a plot from Nyarlatothep ... Ia Ia ... Fthang!!!!

>>50803145
Allegedly. It could also be that our understanding of how gravity works in large scales is fundamentally flawed.

>>50803136
Isn't Dark Matter probably just neutrinos and some other stupidedly small Uninteractive particles at this point?

>>50798426
>Also, it's an echoing of the Judeo-Christian idea that looking at God can blind or kill you; Lovecraft was known to subvert some Biblical stuff in his writing.

See The Dunwich Horror, which explicitly apes the crucifixion of Christ.

>>50803145
Oh, that was what I meant. The point is, though, was that a directly unobservable state does not correlate with nonexistence. Rather, a directly unobservable state merely means it is not able to be directly observed, which sounds redundant, but, really, isn't.

>>50803151

I hope that we are really unlucky. I want to see the world burn.

>>50803179
Wait, when does it do that? When Wilbur's brother gets killed on the hill and cries out for his father?

>>50803178
We don't really know. There are lots of theories, but little to no concrete data to validate or invalidate any of them.

>>50803180
That's fair, but we've gotten off track. When I say that a creature from a different part of the universe in Lovecraft's work obeys different laws or is made of different stuff, I mean really different. Not just we don't understand, but it's not even part of the stuff we don't understand in our corner. We'd have to start over from physics square one to understand how it works.

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>>50803178
Dude, I study philosophy, not astrophysics. I know what I know because I like to learn as a hobby; if there was anything groundbreaking like that, I missed it.

Pic related to how I feel in deep science discussions.

>>50803154
Or just this

>>50802394
The christian God isn't real. That pagan negroe voodoo god actaully is. And he is right in front of you, chewing on the county sherriff.

>>50803187

Killed is a big word. The part of 'normal' matter of his body were 'destroyed' but the most 'alien' stuff was just sent back to daddy. He could be still be 'alive' in a way or another just banned from this side of reality for a while.

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>>50803202
So, basically, kinda like theoretical 'strange matter'?

Because that shit is appropriately named.

>>50803209
If Armitage is to be believed, he can never be reformed again. Which is an interesting idea. Maybe his stuff could be put back together in a sufficient different shape and it would be okay, or maybe his consciousness could be switched to some other matter and that could come back.

I'm also fond of the idea that his normal earth matter stayed behind. So there ended up just being a grotesque pile of some partial guts and a face sitting at the top of the hill.

>>50803224
Stranger than that even. Different to the smallest possible scale of matter.

>>50798353
>If all it took to drive a human insane was not understanding what we're looking at, then wouldn't strange optical illusions drive us insane?

No, there's a bit of a difference there in that when you look at an optical illusion your brain is being tricked into two or more different interpretations of what you're seeing and alternates between them. Eventually it occurs to you that it's an optical illusion and you ignore it.

What this illustrates, though a lot of people ignore it, is that what you're seeing isn't actually reality. Objectively the universe doesn't resemble the model our brain builds of our surroundings and Lovecraftian horror is about having your perception of reality, both philosophical and sensory, shown up for the inadequate and flawed model it is. It'd be like seeing something moving effortlessly through solid matter, like a tower collapsing and falling straight through the ground, then suddenly realising that there's not really any such thing as a solid, it's all deep down just energy and matter clustering and that deep down matter is just different forms of energy and that nothing around you really exists the way you see it. Heck you get this effect even in perfectly euclidian geometry that doesn't break our mental model just by looking at the distance between stars, human beings stink at evaluating huge distances, they're basically beyond our comprehension.

Philosophically it makes a lie of manifest destiny and other philosophical conceits like that because it shows that the universe is beyond your comprehension, either indifferent or inimical to your presence and tat nothing you can do will affect the wider uiverse, which can snuff you out in a moment.

1/2

>>50803163
No, but it's actually a good indication that the Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum Theory is just plain wrong, and that we should have been backing the Causal Interpretation for the past 90+ years.

>>50803244
Add to this that Lovecrafts stories are set in the twenties and that Lovecraft was terrified of insanity for personal reasons, a lot of what he describes is basically PTSD, stress induced psychosis and severe shock because his authorial conception of madness is based on contemporary understandings of mental health.

2/2

>>50803225

And yet Armitage could have lied to the people of Dunwich and to himself. or that 'Never' just mean 'a long long long time'. This is the fun, noone who praticte Mythos magic know EXACTLY what is doing, is a matter of faith and hope before else.

>>50803244
>What this illustrates, though a lot of people ignore it, is that what you're seeing isn't actually reality. Objectively the universe doesn't resemble the model our brain builds of our surroundings and Lovecraftian horror is about having your perception of reality, both philosophical and sensory, shown up for the inadequate and flawed model it is. It'd be like seeing something moving effortlessly through solid matter, like a tower collapsing and falling straight through the ground, then suddenly realising that there's not really any such thing as a solid, it's all deep down just energy and matter clustering and that deep down matter is just different forms of energy and that nothing around you really exists the way you see it. Heck you get this effect even in perfectly euclidian geometry that doesn't break our mental model just by looking at the distance between stars, human beings stink at evaluating huge distances, they're basically beyond our comprehension.
This reminds me of a video I once saw, of someone playing DayZ.
The game glitched out and, whenever the player moved the camera to look at the radio tower in the distance, there's be stray polygons flying around and fucking up the view. The more it filled the screen, the bigger the effect was, but not when it was looked at from the corner of the screen.

At that moment I felt like videogames might be the best way to simulate Lovecraftian horror.

>>50803253
What about dreams in the witch house, where it's done with maths?

>>50803244

Can people become mad after a bad LSD 'trip'? If so, is not like meeting Cthulhu is much more different.

>>50803245
Can you explain the difference?

>>50803263

Math is magic. You spent most of your life working with things that doesn't exist save from some imperfect rapresentation in out reality. No wonders Maths belive in God, they belive in square root of -1 too.

>>50803262
>At that moment I felt like videogames might be the best way to simulate Lovecraftian horror.
I agree, the beauty of games is that they're basically simple simulated environments that don't have to be survivable by a real person and therefore don't have to follow our idea of physics. If you want to show someone what non-euclidian geometry looks like a game is the best place to do it

>>50803266
Yeah, Lovecraft even mentions that you can see Shoggoths if you chew on a specific herb.

There's no special property to mythos stuff that makes you crazy. It's just awful and distressing for any number of reasons so you get terrible PTSD.

>>50803266
Yes. Usually they become schizophrenic.

>>50803279
>There's no special property to mythos stuff that makes you crazy. It's just awful and distressing for any number of reasons so you get terrible PTSD.
Just like the existence of the 1%.

>>50803266
'becoming mad' isn't really a thing but given what Lovecraft describes yes, I would imagine you could probably fuck yourself up enough on a bad trip to class as 1920s insane.

>>50803287

1% of what?

>>50802506
>>50802537
>Dagon http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/d.aspx
>Shadow over Innsmouth http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/soi.aspx
>Colour out of Space http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/cs.aspx
>At the mountains of madness http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/mm.aspx
>Charles Dexter Ward http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/cdw.aspx
>Rats in the Walls http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/rw.aspx
>Herbert West, Reanimator http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/hwr.aspx
>The Dunwich Horror http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/dh.aspx
>The Call of Cthulhu http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/cc.aspx
>Dreams in the Witch House http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/dwh.aspx

best for not having shit spoiled to you immediately, and getting that gnawing vibe.

>>50803292

Then case solved. From the 1920 prospective meeting Cthulhu was a bad LSD trip. Modern peoples has seen so much shit that they will not be 1920 'mad'. In modern day you meet Cthulhu and become a tmblr. Fair enough.

>>50803295
People so rich that they could personally finance a moon colony, who could buy three hundred nice houses per day for the rest of their lifetime without earning additional money.
And they don't do anything useful with that amount of cash. Instead they live lives so opulent that you cannot even imagine.

You sometimes think of a banker as rich, but those people laugh at the bankers. They live on an entirely different scale of reality.

>>50803308
I would read at the mountains last. If only because it kinda does some demystifying.

>>50803311
Naw, you'd probably still go pretty mad. Ask anyone who's been to war. Seeing something on screen and seeing it in objective reality are two very different expierence.

>>50803267
According to the Copenhagen interpretation, physical systems generally do not have definite properties prior to being measured, and quantum mechanics can only predict the probabilities that measurements will produce certain results. The act of measurement affects the system, causing the set of probabilities to reduce to only one of the possible values immediately after the measurement. This feature is known as wave function collapse.

By contrast, the Causal Interpretation postulates the existence of a wavefunction on the space of all possible configurations, and in addition postulates an actual configuration that exists even when unobserved. The evolution over time of the configuration (that is, the positions of all particles or the configuration of all fields) is defined by the wave function by a guiding equation.

The point with the Causal Interpretation is that it would mean the universe is truly deterministic, avoiding troublesome notions such as wave–particle duality, instantaneous wave function collapse and the paradox of Schrödinger's cat.

>>50803323

You got the pills and you keep your life as a tax payer.

>>50803329

So if I know the Equation I can know everything. Even if the Cat is Dead inside the box?

>>50803348
I'm not saying war and a Lovecraftian horror are comparable. I'm saying the fact that seeing depictions doesn't give the full feeling of either. I can't imagine living the rest of my life knowing there were actually tangible monsters in the world. Not just in an acute short term way, but in a chronic long term anxiety.

>>50803375

Today you got a pill and everything is A-OK. I'm pretty sure the guy in white coat will found some that fix even cthulhu. We don't believe in anything anymore, just give us the proper chemical stimulus and we will keep going.

>>50803382
I think you need to go talk to some people with actual mental illness and have them tell you how much they wish that was the case.

>>50803370
Yes. It also means that the EM drive is functionally Spooky.

Alot of good points in this thread so far but i also want to add that these books were written during a time when society was very much different from ours. Atheists, nihilism and materialism are uncommon ideas to live your life by compared to today.

The shock of lovecraft would be people with a rigid understanding of the world coming to terms that its all bullshit and our place in the universe matters not at all. This is a stark contrast with the enlightened learned science or spiritual religion of that era.

If anything, our modern society would look horrendously decadent and lovecraftian to anyone from his time.

>>50803151
>If we are really lucky, it will give us flying cars, hoverboards and orbital perpetuum mobiles.
The EMdrive creates little trust based on the experiments, plus the reason why we don't have flying cars have to do with the fact that no one trusts the avarege with one, rather then some technological weakness.

>>50802513
>You mean like the realization that the sun might explode at any moment, a meteorite might strike at any moment and yellowstone could erupt at any moment and we'd be fucked because a singular human has no ability whatsoever to motivate the powers that be into getting off their asses and actually building redundant colonies in space?

>Because knowing that you could amount to something but will not because of faggotry is kind of more disturbing than the realization that you gotta lie back and think of England when the earth randomly decides to lose its magnetic field.


>The things that nihilism has given me two centuries worth of tools to process are far less scary than these new things that are fucking me over today

Yeah no shit Sherlock.

>>50798754
Cthulhu isn't made of matter. A nuke would do nothing.

>>50803393

Is scary ... I don't like living in a Deterministic universe. Chaos is ... comforting.

>>50803392

I've dreamed R'lyeh under the wave before I was old enough to know what Sci-fi, Lovercraft and everything else was. There still part of my life I fear to look back at because I cannot truly differentiate them from my dreams and nightmares. But is fine. You eat the drugs that make you happy and stop looking back. Humanity was made to self delude itself or we all have killed ourself by now.

>>50803409
*the average Joe with one

>>50803404

In fact we are all cultists now.

>>50803404
This is a good point. When 19th century was drawing close, it looked like we were getting close to understanding the fundamental principles that drive the universe. Then comes Einstein with theories of relativity, Hubble with existence of galaxies beyond ours, and Planck with quantum mechanics. It turned out that the universe was a lot weirder than anyone had believed possible. Lovecraftian horror is an extension of that Zeitgeist.

>>50803409
We don't understand the thing yet.
For all we know, it can be upscaled with better design. Or cold fusion.

>>50803517

>Upscale pseudoscience with other pseudoscience.

Cold fusion will never be possible.

>>50803187
1.) Born among shepherds
2.) Immaculate conception (ostensibly - it's implied that the father may have been Yog-Sothoth's surrogate.)
3.) Godling's duty is to bring about the Kingdom of God (end the world and bring Yog-Sothoth fully into it).
4.) Murdered on on a hill while he cries out in anguish for his divine father to save him.
5.) May be resurrected


These sorts of things would make the horror that much more repulsive to a period reader.

>>50803517
>We don't understand the thing yet.
We don't even if it actually works to begin with. We simple know that the methodology used by the guys at NASA was correct, and it will need further experimentation.

>>50803547

I don't think anything 'immacualted' happened there. But some japan guy would have liked that.

>>50803576
In the context of the story, it is claimed that the pregnancy wad immaculate. Lovecraft, a cynic who is deliberately subverting the myth, implies it wasn't.

>>50803613

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

So I just finished "The Tomb", and I gotta say, seems more like something Edgar Allan Poe would write. Less about insignificance, and cosmic horror, and felt more like a story meant to be confusing, and disturbing, similar to many of Poe's.

>>50802126
>characters LAYERED onto each other
>flatland
Choose one.

>>50803266
Only if they already are latent mentally ill.

Psychedelics can't make you crazy. They can [trigger] the crazy that has already been inside you.

>>50804180
Early Lovecraft is heavily influenced by Poe, yes

>>50803404
>>50803455
To be honest, you can still make Lovecraftian horror work.

You just have to replace madness with hopelessness and terrible uncertainty. Like an upscaled climate change.

Instead of worrying about tropical storms killing thousands of people and causing trillions of dollars in damages from the Caribbean all the way to NY, you now have to worry about the yearly "transmigration" when some kind of force passes through the Earth causing massive death, destruction and infecting sane people with absurd homocidal behavior.
You'd have madness forecasts, predicting the total number of people going insane this year, and how many people will die this year. People would go around selling anti-transmigration bunkers, where they'd hope to survive in.

It's a question that I'm personally wondering, because I want to make a Lovecraftian setting set billions of years in the future. Mankind has survived for this long, has achieved the impossible in science and engineering, and they still cannot defend themselves against the things that lurk at the threshold.

>>50803418
Well, he's partially made of matter, that's why the boat worked. The overwhelming majority of him isn't, though.

>>50804870
I dunno, I always imagined it like the 4D shadow idea. They just sailed the boat through Cthulhu's shadow.

>>50801633
Under-appreciated post.

The horror and madness stems from a bunch of places, including some legit supernatural sources, but in many cases it comes from something more mundane: a total destruction of the person's worldview, that everything they know is wrong and that they are totally insignificant in an impossibly large, empty, and uncaring universe. This hits them like a ton of bricks.

It's harder for modern readers to find that quite as scary because we sort of live with that already as nihilism/existentialism is more common and even people that don't have those outlooks at least know and have considered them, so shitty writers aping HPL rely instead on "lolspooooooky noneuclidean tentacles u r insane now."

>>50801633
>>50804793
>>50804905
Bloodborne put a smart twist on it.

Skipping the problem of anachronistic fears, Bloodborne just focused on making the player feel inadequate to survive the environment, forcing the player to give up their humanity in order to survive.

In a way, it's still about going insane, except how the insanity isn't mentally, it's biologically. The further the player gets in the game, the less human they become.

>>50803139
Perceive != understand
I cannot perceive R^n but I can understand it, I can understand it just as easily as R^3 or R^2

>>50801514
This.

>>50798353
>Is it a psychic thing? Is it the terror of him? Or is it just because a man can't comprehend what he's looking at, and goes nuts?
All of the above, think of it as severe mental trauma and terror like what can trigger ptsd and catatonic states along with an epileptic seizure as your brain is fed sights and sounds and feelings and thoughts that are truly alien and claw their way inside the deepest recesses of your mind.

Additionally, knowing the true nature of reality in the lovecraft mythos basically makes you insane compared to normal people.

It occurs to me, quantuam hippies are what happens when weak-minded people try to comprehend the world of quantum physics, and fail so hard that they break with reality, start believing impossible things, and become cultists.

>>50806678
Now I think about it, yes, quantum hippies are an excellent example of what someone who has seen Lovecraftian reality would appear to normal people.

>>50806472
To add to the alien nature:
Even the sounds are foreign, as some works put it the name Cthulhu itself is a close approximation of the psychic wail that is heard in dreams, not what it actually sounds like. It's a mesh of sub-audible vibrations from both ends of the spectrum.

>>50807041
Or consider the color out of space as another example.

>>50804215
Choose both. The book and the short film have a two dimension character go in the third Dimension. Maybe the poster was trying illustrate that.