It has tentacles

A pretty compelling argument, actually.

o shit dude u right
look at this lovecraftian monster

I think you could be on to something here.

Well, I mean... huh

But it was two lines

>HP's worst nightmare: a squid that hates white people
way ahead of you

An "is" is not an "ought". When words with precise and nuanced meanings get diluted down to superficial tripe by careless use, the language loses a measure of utility by losing a means of concisely capturing a comparatively large amount of semantic content.

Even if we grant (for the sake of argument) that this sort of linguistic entropy is inevitable and not something we can realistically stop, there's no reason we can't rage against and/or mourn the functional loss of perfectly good and useful words.

>Setting has ringworlds
>"Halo ripoff"

>it has antennae
>""kafkaesque""

...

But resident evil 7 wasn't supernatural it was the same mad science run amok the series in known for.

>tfw almost everyone has stopped using the word eldritch instead of Lovecraftian

How could this happen?

Normies

>silver age M&M game
>party taking down a mob boss
>GM calls him kafkaesque early into the campaign
>finally confront him
>he’s basically al capone mixed with the but from MIB
>mfw his human skin started ripping

this, I honestly don't know what the word even means anymore.

but that's just what steampunk IS

Holy shit we got a real live brainlet here!

Eh, steampunk implies it's steampowered things that didn't exist before the invention of the combustion engine like submarines and aircraft.

>DM describes a character being barefoot
>table groans about him running "generic Tolkien fantasy"

>DM describes a female character as barefoot
>Spends several minutes going into more detail about her feet than the rest of her body

What’s the difference between basic and normie?

Sure does bust your gaskets.

>kafkaesque
I thought kafkaesque meant being forced into a situation where you can't win. Is that not what it means?

It's basically an abstraction of life, something that everyone can relate to framed in such a way as to seen horrifying or absurd from the outside.

a "basic" person is just ignorant and comformist, a normie is arrogant about his basic tastes

>greentext
>still puts quotes around it even though that’s what greentexting is

How long until he starts lashing out at those uppity sponges?

Alright, a few years back I bought a collection of Kafka's works because I wanted to read them because I had heard good things about Kafka. I tried reading his poems and I don't fucking understand them. They're just words. I'm not trying to be edgy here or something, but they appear to be words with no rhyme or reason behind them. They don't express anything and leave me stupified, not wondering what the work means but if it even means anything at all.

Do I just not "get" it? Am I retarded? Or did I buy into the Kafka meme like a gullible schmuck? What even is poetry? I'm honestly wondering what poetry is at this point. There's this poem by a Dutch poet called Lucebert which I can cite by heart:

"Door

Open

Close"

WHAT EVEN IS POETRY ANYMORE? Can someone fucking explain this shit to me? Am I writing a poem right now? Is this a poem?

S E N D H E L P

Poetry is something people use to express themselves, the issue is that things which seem meaningless to some people can hit home with others. Making a vast majority seem like meaningless drivel.

Have you ever been out in public and you smell or hear something that you can't really place but it throws you through a loop and you end up in a certain mindset? Poetry is a bit like that but in word format. What smell or sound ends up sending you on a roller coaster for no apparent reason can mean nothing at all to other people.

People have gotten away with publishing the shopping list their wife left for them and have seen critical success through that method. Trying to define or measure what people can identify with is never ending war.

actually, it did happen. remember that cringe festival thread about how ASOIAF is actually cosmic horror? fucking painful

also,
I'm okay with this magical realm

Minimalism in general is a big dumb meme that has overstayed it's welcome

Got em

>spends all day chiseling hearts
>lovecraftian

Like how "Racist" can no longer apply to racial discrimination against Whites, right?

Hello Dr layman

Where did the racism meme come from anyway? I mean I wouldn't deny that he was racist because of the times etc., but I read almost every short story and I rarely ever encountered black people. In Herbert West there is this huge black zombie and probably some natives here and there. Ok there aren't any black main protagonists, wew huge deal. Where do people see that Lovecrafts stories are inheretely racist? Is it because of these letters where he discusses contemporary ideas?

>Green text
'Mu"ltip''le ""quot'"ation " " ""marks.'
'"'""'

Fuck off to /pol/

?

The only stories that spring to mind are the painting one and Innsmutth, the former being an all too obvious allegory for African Americans coming into society (which freaked the poor neruotic HP the HECK out) and the latter being about racemixing. Sorta. Its hard to call Lovecraft really racist cuz not only was he a product of his time, but he was such a tightly wound bundle of nerves and drugs that he could barely function. Pic related

Read his short-works or his books, that is what he is known for.

records.viu.ca/~johnstoi/kafka/hungerartist.htm

Pretty sure that was "ironic". There was something about taking away a lovecraft reward because of his racism and now calling everything lovecraft made racist is a meme

Red hook
Arthur Jermyn
Dunwitch horror
and a few others

I’m laughing but

You’re not exactly wrong

Dunwitch was about a weird cult family and a guy who was 90% lizard monster though. The others I get, but what was racist about the Spawn of Yog-Sothoth

Kafka is not well known for writing poetry. Read his short stories and novels instead.
Keep in mind though that an integral part of what makes Kafka Kafka is his usage of the German language. So if you don't speak German, you likely won't get as much from it as you could.

He was super racist, dood. Like, above and beyond what was normal accepted behavior.
Just read his letters.
Or "On The Creation of Niggers".

Also, who names a fictional cat Niggerman?

Who fucking dosen't that sounds awesome

Lovecraft was a xenophobe, more so than other people of his time. Compare his works with his good friend Robert E Howard in which it's less about if you're black, more about if you're eating the flesh of innocent women and children.

However.
HOWEVER
The one major thing that most people forget is that most of Lovecrafts racist stories come from the earlier years of his life when he was living in basically a ghetto in New York, before he married his jewish wife and chilled out.
He actually wrote in some of his letters later in life that he found some of his earlier works a bit silly with how racist they were.

Basically the man was afraid of everything, he was a neurotic sack of fear that found happiness in later life and chilled out.
Also it's easier to find a decent minority (Dr. Muñoz) in his stories than a decent rural whitey so his xenophobia wasn't just for people with different skin tones.

Know those LA types that've never stepped outside their white liberal bubble who would shit themselves to death if they were ever trapped in a room with Jamal and his family from detroit, or god forbid, Cletus and his clan from Alabama?
That's Lovecraft for the new age, they just hide it better.

>Also, who names a fictional cat Niggerman?

His actual cat was named Niggerman, too.

Considering its mostly about a degenerate rural family that has fallen to ruin, they're not totally wrong.

Reading translated poetry is a waste of time.

Which is rather funny considering the Victorian Era was 1837 to 1901. While not affordable the combustion engine, and various vehicles powered by them were well in existence.

Not that things like historical fact has ever played a part in how the tophat goggle brigade do things.

this, the wall between trash poetry and stuff that works for you and makes you feel is already paper thin, translated poetry should simply not be a thing. Though the guy said there is no rhyme, so I think he read it in german,(or he is just retarded like that and expected rhymes in a translation)

Poetry can really be any text that's designed to be a poem, or even some texts that aren't designed to be a poem.

Just remember, not all poetry is good poetry, and good taste is subjective.

"Eldritch" didn't disappear or change and Lovecraftian was always the looser defined of the two synonyms. Your premise regarding the language losing utility is entirely moot. Try harder.

>there's no reason we can't rage against and/or mourn the functional loss of perfectly good and useful words.

Sure there is-- Namely, given the existence of synonyms for literally every concept, that you're better served by celebrating language's increased utility.

Like, I get that you really want to define "usage you don't like" as "superficial tripe", but hey, that's on you, dawg. You're the one with the brain damage there.

But it's about an old, rich family that has fallen to ruin and debauchery. That's a classic Lovecraft set up.

I said majority, dingus.

See? You brought up another example of a word that changed meaning. "Eldritch" didn't mean what it means to you now (i.e. cosmic horrors), it just meant "creepy phantoms". But the meaning changed because the majority used it in a different fashion.

Eldritch has always meant "weird and sinister or ghostly" with strong connections to otherworldly supernatural shit due to its origins from the word for "elf." It ain't that your assertion is wrong, it's just that you're an asshole because his assertion also isn't wrong. Nice try though.

It's also called Poetic. As in Poe.

Except his "assertion" is wrong, and the only asshole here is you.

>He's buttmad because he's wrong.

Kek.

>It ain't that your assertion is wrong
>He's buttmad because he's wrong.

Pick one, you projecting faggot.

Why? I already made a pedant mad by being more correct than him. At this point it's more entertaining to me to continue fucking with you.

it happens, my dude

>But it's about an old, rich family that has fallen to ruin and debauchery.

It has a lovecraftian set up, not lovecraftian lore, it's like saying that every book with a hard ass dedective that likes whiskey and women was writen by chandler

Things with neither steam nor punks?

youtube.com/watch?v=TFCuE5rHbPA

Hi layman

If you wanna be less identifiable stop putting my dude in ALL OF YOUR POSTS

Lovecraftian can describe both a narrative angle,IE 'the trivial nature of man when compared to the horrible vastness of things unfathomable', and also a legitimate aesthetic direction. The art surrounding the cthulhu mythos is distinct and instantly recognisable, and therefore i feel that it is okay to refer to it as lovecraftian, or refer to derrivatives of it as such.

I'll leave you to it then, little buddy.

This is lovecraftian, as much as you might disagree:

youtube.com/watch?v=qPL_E-TEtL8

>is wrong but won't admit it
>pulls out the tired "he mad" card instead
>can't post without being hostile

Classic signs of a child. I'll leave you to your "I was only pretending to be retarded" trolling, little buddy.

Your taste in Doki's is objectively good though

Y'never proved I was wrong though, sweetie. Ball's still in your court. Gonna man up and actually try to argue about your weak shit definition of eldritch or just concede that you're a limpdick wanker?

Also, kek.

>He gets flustered when people are meanies on Veeky Forums.

I mean, it's exceedingly anachronistic (by 1914 the entire British fleet was already diesel-powered) and not at all based on reality, many many things were only possible because unlike the steam engine, which was cheap, the combustion engine was smaller and more efficient. Planes and zeppelins are very much from that era. In all honesty, steampunk stuff should look far more into Jules Verne then other steampunk authors
It's kinda like Joyce in the sense that while he is a good writer half the point of his work is how he plays with the language.

>sweetie
>man up
>weak shit
>limpdick wanker
>flustered

He's going all out with the projecting petulance. See you later, little buddy. Not gonna be reading any more of your drivel.

'k, you can fuck off and keep being wrong, darlin'. No skin off my back.

Just to add something extra to my point here , now that both eldritch and lovecraftian are practically synonyms (and both separate from their original meanings), there will likely be a new word used to describe actual "lovecraftian" content. Like Lovecraftesque, while things we used to call "eldritch" (the creepy ghost shit, like fairies before we made them unthreatening) are increasingly referred to as "fae".

The only real option we've got is to just adapt and roll with how the majority communicate. Just look at how jealousy and envy became the same word in the minds of the masses.

You're wrong about the common usage of pretty much every example word you listed, sweetie.

I fucking love those 5 flying figures. Weren't they in the first DS video too?

I find I have too much in common with Lovecraft. I'm racist, I'm unattractive, I don't want to work, I don't want to socialise, and I just want to write the stories I want to write (even though most of my manuscripts are never accepted and I make barely any money from them).

The dream is to write enough and create my own mythos that people will eventually come to love. The nightmare is that it will be as diluted and corrupted as Lovecraft's own by other authors (or capitalised to the point of embarrassment, like Tolkien's work).

Neat, could you tell us a bit about your mythos? How is it different from Lovecraft, what kind of themes are you including in your writings, and what have you written so far?

Because Aetherpunk doesn't have the aesthetics synonymous with Steampunk.

I've been working on a combined alternative history and alternative future, which conjoins in our present day Earth. There are Lovecraftian entities that exist but it's their "shadows" on our world that cause mayhem, creating anomalies that breach the laws of both established magic and physics. Where his works are mostly the impotence of a man against something otherworldly and greater than can be known, mine is that power corrupts and what good exists is always temporary. There are characters who can face off against supernatural forces, but a victory costs them as a person and only buys time.

I've so far written a 1600 page creature guide (of around 800 creatures), an abridge history and future timeline (involving many of the more outlandish conspiracies of our world), a few short stories that were just for the sake of writing something, a novel-length piece that starts as an introduction to one particular focus of the mythos (monster hunting), and the full plots for two series that will hopefully be eight books long each (one set in modern times, the other in a lost age before recorded history which was intentionally covered up by non-human entities).

My biggest problem has been that I don't enjoy pressure, so I'm always hesitant to release work unless it's under a pseudonym. The larger themes are harder to glimpse through a smaller lens, which each story effectively is, and early dismissal of those pieces could impact later ones too greatly. I also can't ever commit to a final idea, so I end up going back and redoing various aspects of it and never finalising it. That, however, was why I first started it anyway, as I enjoy world-building more than story-writing.

I guess that's why I browse Veeky Forums instead of Veeky Forums; we're all looking to make an engaging world here, not one to be dissected under the cold light of literary criticism (i.e. my work is to Lovecraft as a McDonalds burger is to kobe beef). I can only hope I finish enough of it to make sense.

This
I remember hearing one of his friends later in his life stumbled across some of his older works/letters and was shocked to learn Lovecraft had been so racist once.

Medusa's Coil is a short story where a woman's hair murders people and the big horrifying twist Lovecraft ended the story on was that she was, in fact, a secret negres.

After reading At the Mountains of Madness, I have no clue how people started describing lovecraftian creatures as eldritch when Lovecraft jams the word "cyclopean" in every other sentence.

Only the rocks and ruins are cyclopean.

They're also usually non-euclidean

So it was a black woman who needed her weave?
Sounds completely plausible.