I do know some archaeologists who are fans of Indiana Jones, though - but not the second or fourth films (the second because it's racist tripe, the fourth because it's a travesty of the original trilogy).
]]>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Frobenius
Come to think about it, who's to know which dirty words Tarzan is using on the Africans, having been taught they are numerals...
]]>The Christian heaven is paradise, it is wish-fulfillment and if you truly believe you are going there, why wait? I had an unproven theory that the original version of Christianity had no suicide prohibition and thus there was a rash of it from new converts. The dogma was amended to correct for the self-termination bug and all references were scrubbed from the historic record due to the embarrassment factor.
Just because we all live in an era created and shaped by the inventions of the rationalists does not mean the majority of the inhabitants must be rational. Just marvel that satellite broadcasts are used to beam the sermons of of creationist televangelists around the world.
]]>(Steven Barnes is the writer who worked with Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. They both write SF, but John seems to write weirder stuff. Such as Nfinity. Which got very odd.)
]]>That reminds me of an old ?myth? about the Lone Ranger (pre-Johnny Depp version). He had a native companion known as Tonto who addressed him as "kimosabe". The theory was that kimosabe was a native word for "horse's ass".
P.S. the Spanish word for dumbass is "tonto".
]]>Does that mean I don't know that I am a member of the Conservative Party, and I falsely identified David Cameron to Google as a spammer?
]]>Personally I'd opt for an alternative explanation: what terrified HPL was what terrifies us all, entropy. The superb short story "Nyarlathotep" essentially focuses that terror down to a laser beam pinpoint. And it's a valid fear. Entropy will eventually rot your body, if you're unlucky it will erode your brain with Alzheimer's, and along the way entropy will also trash all the people and places you've come to know and love.
So I'd suggest that the whole Cthulhu mythos is just a mask for HPL's real fear: the second law of thermodynamics.
]]>Consider the revelations in Tatja Grimm's World. Consider the Blight.
Oh, and Stoddard's comment @ 71, about an 'optimistic Lovecraft', made me think.
Which statement is scarier?
"Lovecraft was an optimist", "Kafka was an optimist", "Nietzsche was an optimist", or "Oppenheimer was an optimist"?
]]>Simple-it's the same place where and the same reason why there's not going to be a third book in the whole "Halting State" universe.
By the time a writer has figured out what part of the transcendental horror that the new technology has generated, somebody has patented it, licensed it, produced a million copies, retired to a villa in the South of France or in the Sierras, and somebody is pirating copies of it in a factory run by the Chinese Army outside of Shanghai.
Six months from now, it'll be a joke on Have I Got News For You.
]]>Charles, you might be familiar with the Eclipse Phase RP Game... that's the closer singularitarian Lovecraft you can find today.
]]>Possible hereditary mental instability - his father was institutionalized when Lovecraft was three and spent the rest of his life in an asylum. His mother died at the end of a lifetime of hysteria and depression -- probably bipolar.
Almost his entire childhood was spent in isolation due to an overbearing mother's concern for various real and imaginary illnesses.
He had a lifelong sleep disorder, night terrors.
All of that pales in comparison to the Astrophysical Journal?
BTW, singularity authors, Lovecraftian or otherwise, are not something that interests me because they are misguided. Belief in an approaching singularity depends on the recurrent human mistake that growth which is approximately exponential in its early stages will continue to be exponential until the end of time, despite the fact that this has never panned out. It never pans out because belief in exponential growth ignores the existence of resource constraints.
There are always resource constraints.
]]>