The little skip-jump to Red's avatar at the beginning is an inside joke to the longtime OSP audience: Red has a degree in mathematics and her friends like to occasionally joke with her, because she has a successful RUclips channel that doesn't really have anything to do with math.
Lovecraft wasn't afraid of people who were able to imagine things. He simply put artists and "sensitive" people as more likely to be able to sense the horrible things his mother saw. Which, if you know nothing about hallucinations or schizophrenia (as we can presume Lovecraft had no idea what was up with his mother), is actually a fairly logical leap to make. Also, the "for ritual purposes" thing is legitimate. There was a handicrafts lady who went to a museum and they had some objects as "for ritual purposes." She recognized the items as drop spindles, because she USES drop spindles, and she showed them how it worked. In the same vein, apparently the ancient dodecahedrons were for knitting? Handicrafts people worked that one out too. So, yeah. "For ritual purposes" honestly just means "basic tool that we don't know what it did yet."
Yeah, a lot of "for ritual purposes" is "we don't know". Some of the others are "we don't want to call the thing that is obviously an ancient dildo a dildo".
But it's not a catch-all term. There are plenty of objects that archaeologists know what the purpose is for, and they're simply that, objects used for rituals and ceremonies.
I mean sure, but there are also a lot of things that used for ritual purposes. If in 1000 years, someone digs up a giant pair of Golden scissors are they supposed to assume that they were Giants wandering around? Or that we occasionally ceremonially cut things?
To be fair, the idea of a author that is good at writing horror because he's scared of everything is not exactly uncommon, if you look up any interview with *Junji Ito* it becomes very clear that he's similar to Lovecraft (minus the prejudice) in the sense that they are scared cats capable of channeling "the bitch in their hearts" to put "the bitch in our hearts".
Except that where lovecraft came off as extremely paranoid and, for lack of better phrasing, mostly racist, junji ito is an absolute cinnamon roll by comparison And yet both are legendary horror writers that very few have managed to come even remotely close to Maybe Stephen king, but I personally just can’t get into his writing style, or his theming
Wasn't this exact point the same reason Shinji Mikami got the role of director of Resident Evil? Because he's a big scaredy cat and everyone at the offices at CapCom knew he was a big fraidy cat?
Ito seems more fascinated by horrifying things, like an enthusiastic puppy who brings you nightmares instead of newspapers. “Oooh, I see a lot of spirals in nature…can I make them scary?” Yes, yes he can.
OH MY GOD YES YOU'RE ACTUALLY CHECKING OUT OSP Red's videos definitely are worth two watches due to the speed: 1. A full watchthrough just to hear Red's rapid fire commentary. 2. Watching the screen to check out the humorous captions and dialogue she shows off onscreen.
By the way, Red saying that the one Dude on Cthulhu's Island 'trips on a corner and clips through the map'? That is actually what happens in the book. I am NOT kidding.
The 'Non-euclidean geometry' that Lovecraft was trying to describe is supposed to be more like super warped perspective geometry. Fun house mirror style. You might see a straight pillar at a distance, but as you get closer, you realize that not only is it not straight, but it's bent and twisted at angles that make your eyes hurt to look at. Or as you get close to a building, it's upper levels seem to bend further and further towards you until somehow it hangs over you like a cliff, instead being just a straight facade. The effect in R'lyeh was so bad that the noon sun appeared to even be in the wrong place in the sky, casting shadows in bizarre ways. Visually it'd be weird to look at, with angles that seem obtuse but are acute, convex where you think concave is, and nothing 'feels' right. Like even walking on the floor might feel like you're climbing a steep hill or about to fall 'forward' off an impossible cliff. Think... MCU Doctor Strange's Mirror World realm, and how it operates. That's R'lyeh.... all the time.
Which probably explains why he used the term "non-euclidian", though it probably would have been better if he had used a world like "non-terrestrial geometry", but you can imagine that Lovecraft loved injecting bizzare words that he found with appropriate enough meanings to apply to his works, when he was not just making up the bizzare vernacular of the cthulhu mythos's alien languages that are exceedingly hard to pronounce by design.
The reason he’s became famous is indeed because his friends spend nearly 30 years(he didn’t blow up and start being popular until the 1960s) trying to bring his work into the public light. Though it wasn’t for money(most of them were just fine), it was because they throughly enjoyed his work and wanted their friend to get the recognition he deserved.
from my understanding, lovecraft wasn't so much hateful as he was terrified as for the math thing, from what i understanding math at the time was taught in poorly circulated rooms where the teacher would use chalk to write on a blackboard, so someone with lovecraft's health couldn't really handle that environment
I can't remember who said it originally, but I have seen several people who said that rather than racist a much better word to describe lovecraft would be xenophobic. Anything/one that was different terrified him. And given his issues, i find it hard to blame him, even if it did lead to some crazy places. I mean supposedly the shadow over innsmouth was inspired by him discovering his grandmother was Welsh.
@@Pylo-ry6ff his life story is often ignored. But he's actually a success story over racism, BUT he didn't become the pro-minority extremist that people demand people be today...so he's a "unforgiving racist"
Do not let this video discourage you from reading any of Lovecrafts works - Red is just covering stories that would give you an idea of his general themes Some examples of his bouts of genuinely good writing include but are not limited to: Short stories such as: Pickman’s Model, The Outsider and The Thing on the Doorstep And (for the most part) The Dream Cycle; a series of books - some more involved than others - about a place know as The Dreamlands(no relation to Kirby)
I’d like the add “The Shadow Out of Time” and “The Whisperer in Darkness” to that list as well. Something interesting I noticed is that those three (AtMoM, TWiD, and TSOoT) work as companion pieces, since they reference each other; AtMoM brings up the Mi-Go from TWiD, and TSOoT brings of the Elder Things from AtMoM. Some of his collaborations are good, even if they rely on concepts that are now considered impossible. I recommend “The Mound” and “Out of the Aeons.”
@@RyunosukeHachi Personally I put "Shadow out of Time" and "The Mound" into the "Great concept, sub-par execution"-category. "Shadow" because it gets a bit too rambly and overexplains everything even by the standards of a Lovecraft story and "Mound" mostly because of its inconsistencies and generally nasty rhethoric. There's a reason many suspect that it was basically the first draft of "At the Mountains of Madness" which is a massive improvement as a story. But "Mound" might be my favourite purely as a concept. Another story I would put in that category is "The Horror in the Museum". Solid concept and some really good moments but also overexplains things and there is that "sinister" Arab character that's only in the story to make the reader more suspicious of the museum because it employs a "spooky foreigner" who just grins ominously on occasion. "The Rats in the Walls" is one of the scariest, that is if you read a version of the story that changes the cat's name. Otherwise it gets a bit tricky trying to immerse yourself in the plot cause its really jarring. Apart from the ones already mentioned in the thread, I really like "The Doom that came to Sarnath" because it's probably Lovecraft at his most self-aware. He also really manages to restrain himself in that one and keep things mysterious, letting the reader fill in the blanks, which makes the ending more eerie. But "Colour out of Space" is probably Lovecraft's most well-executed story. One of the few that perfectly pulls off the cosmic horror theme and also doesnt fearmonger against a random ethnicity that Howard spotted on a bus that week.
I kinda dislike Red's comment about "all of our geometry being non-euclidean", because that's just.. not correct? Yeah the Earth is a sphere, but the scale is so different that our geometry is effectively euclidean.
Non-euclidean sounds scarier, because it's a complicated word that, ironically, sounds more alien than just saying alien. If you know nothing about the subject, of course.
Oh man, you started with one of the best ones. Beautiful. I don't remember if it gets mentioned specifically, but Lovecraft's works were picked up and published by his friend and fellow author August Derleth after his death, though many of them were published in magazines during his life, which helped him pay rent. Lovecraft had a large circle of author friends who also became pretty famous, my favorite two being Robert E. Howard (creator of Conan the Barbarian, Kill the Conqueror, and Solomon Kane), and a young man named Robert Bloch, who would one day go on to write Psycho. Ursula in The Little Mermaid is speared through the gut by the bowsprit of a ship. Hence "rampaging Disney villain." The Color Out of Space is definitely one of his best stories, and the recent adaptation starring Nicolas Cage is unironically great. Not for the faint of heart, or weak of stomach, but very, very good.
I saw that film and wouldn't reccomend. It has some good moments but plenty of bad ones, which really ruined the atmosphere for me. Instead I'd reccomend the the on Sci-Fi Central YT channel.
3:50 is even funnier when you learn that Red has a degree in mathematics and her real job involves some really high level math/computer science/programming.
For the record, Lovecraft wasn't actually afraid of air-conditioners. That's a bad joke that's been perpetuated because people assume that because Lovecraft didn't fully understand how they worked and used one as a plot device, he must have been afraid of them; this is objectively not true and is in fact a meme older than the internet. In truth, Lovecraft actually hated air-conditioners quite a bit because he did not care for the noise, extreme cold, excessive moisture leading to mold, or for the repairmen that would come to service them, but he understood the necessity of having them for especially hot days because he also hated extreme heat. So he encapsulated his distaste for having to rely on the air conditioner and the sometimes frantic need to maintain them by creating a story where a man literally requires a functional AC unit to live. He frames the air-conditioner as something beyond the abilities of normal people to maintain and operate, with the horror coming from the mystery associated with the good doctor's condition and why he's so obsessed with this radical new technology, rather than making the air-conditioner itself an object of dread. Lovecraft was an anxious wreck, but he wasn't THAT bad off when it came to his fear of technology. To put it more plainly, he'd be more afraid of the mildew caused by an air-conditioner than the AC itself.
As an aside, didn't early AC units use Ammonia to dissipate heat? Any leak would contribute to odors that evocate the aspects of the sea he feared so much.
By your description it really sounds like he was xenophobic towards air-conditioners which honestly makes it even more hilarious that joke that could have easily have nothing to do with reality actually have ground lol
10:20 vidoe does not go into it but he had an actual friend group with some being writers (author of Conan the Barbarian being just one of them) alongside couple that actually managed to make him tone down his belief in his final years.
yeah, generally Lovecraft's whole thing seemed to just be fear of stuff he didn't understand, he had a fair bit of a pattern that all it took was for him to get to know 1 single person from another race or culture for him to suddenly stop being racist towards that particular race/culture (of course that still left hundreds of other cultures that he still didn't understand and was therefore still terrified of and racist against) but on the whole I've seen people making what I feel is a good point about him. it's less that he was racist and more that he was very, very xenophobic. not xenophobic in the way that the word is currently used (where it's basically just another word for racist) but xenophobic in that he was actually terrified of anything and everything that he was unfamiliar with, including (but in no way limited to) every person, race, and culture that he didn't know. he basically saw unfamiliar cultures in the same way he saw non-euclidian geometry, non-visible light, and air conditioners. he didn't understand them properly so the mere possibility of their existance terrified him beyond all logic.
Supricingly Lovegraft had many penpal, including makers of Conan and Tarzan, and after his death they created publising house to print his stories internationally: Lovecraft became a hit in europe.
The Lovecraft Circle, formed by himself and some of his colleagues in the Weird. Names include Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard (Conan), Robert Bloch, Frank Belknap Long, and August Derleth.
From what I can tell, Howard's egalitarian-primitivist proto-objectivist attitudes had _zero_ room for Lovecraft-style blind fear. Cringing away from the unknown was anathema to Howard's life philosophy. You wanna hate the foreigner, hate his deeds, not his face. They were both suicidal men. Lovecraft mastered his despair but not his fear. Howard mastered his fear but not his despair. They seem to have been moderating influences on eachother. Howard grew to like grand mythology, and Lovecraft incorporated some spine into his heroes. >:)
@Joshua Sweetvale yeah, Lovecraft getting some backbone for his protagonists makes sense when Howard's protagonists nearly die all the time, especially Conan amd Solomon Kane. Like, Kane nearly died fighting a literal Demon to protect a Native African village that helped tend to his wounds, or when he killed giant Vampire gorilla monster men to save a different village but did ut with his Shaman friend. Not one feat of which made it to Howie's protags very often, but it's a nice change. It was a shame neither men could truly conquer all their demons and took their own lives, because they were both fantastic authors who had a number of unfinished works.
41:50 Bonus fact! Water sources are a common way to spread radiation, and consuming it can reaaally mess you up as well as the area surrounding it. Considering the rest of his works, Yhe Color Out of Space is probably the "most accurate" in scientific terms.
@@Airier Odds are good that he did have some basic understanding of radiation theory at the time but not a lot beyond that. He was known to be a prolific reader and could well have come across it in newspaper or journal articles. Much like he did when Pluto was discovered and he made it into the most recent home world of one of many races of aliens interested in establishing an outpost on Earth.
“I only left my pinky because the cups are so freaking small“ congratulations, do you have unlocked the secret reason for pinkie lifting, you were rich enough to be able to buy those really tiny fiddly delicate cups.
Hair going white from trauma is called Mary Antoinette Syndrome I have no idea if it's an actual thing, but it's so named because Mary Antoinette's hair suddenly and unexplainably turned completely white on the way to her execution
You get the wrong idea about Sonia Greene. She wasn't rich. She owned a hat shop. But she met Lovecraft through her hobby, this ridiculously high quality amateur publishing association that she ran. She liked his writing.
To be *slightly* fair on the math thing, folks used "constitution" in a *very* broad sense back then. *I'd* probably have been described as having "too delicate a constitution for math" given how heavily I rely on calculators and I *frustrated* I get around anything that isn't basic geometry. And I understand *that* because I can *hold* tools and *draw* pictures to solve the problem. Everything else just becomes a soup of floating numbers and symbols. Lovecraft wasn't stupid so much as paranoid, bigoted, and *very* incompletely educated. In The Colour Out of Space, he did a remarkable job describing the effects of radiation poisoning at a time when those effects on the Radium Girls was just coming out.
I think it's important to know, H.P Lovecraft near the end of his life grew to despise himself and regretted his racism. Obviously it doesn't disregard his racist implications in his writings, but I think it's good to know he atleast knew he was wrong for it before he died.
Strongly recommend Journey to the West as Red’s best work. Various things in the miscellaneous myths series, her Halloween specials, and trope talks which cover writing analysis.
I'd honestly recommend everything BUT Journey to the West considering that series isn't finished yet. In a "save the best for last" kinda deal as well.
@@williamrichards8682 Just saying, since the series isn't finished yet, it's probably best to keep it for last, rather than starting with it and forgetting half of it because he watched the entire rest of their catalogue before the next one came out.
In short, he's famous because he's deeply tied to a lot of other famous authors and stories, actively encouraged other people to use his work when he was alive, and then there were no copywrites after he died While Lovecraft was largely unknown in his time, he did run multiple small publications and shared work with many other writers including things like Conan The Barbarian. While doing that he encouraged the authors he published to use his creations and openly took inspiration from them, as such Conan actually shares a decent portion of it's mythology with Lovecraft's. He's also inspired a lot of other authors, notably Steven King, and his fame is more recent based on those more modern inspirations. A big reason Lovecraft is known about is because of the work his widow didn't do. While separated from his wife for many years, they didn't actually get divorced. So when he died, all of his copywrites went to her. She didn't do anything with it and it eventually went to public domain instead of a company. Because of this, many of his ideas will get picked up and placed into a new book/movie/game without even having to file the serial numbers off. Many have done just that over the years, taking gods like Cthulhu, Dagon, or the shoggoth; places like Innsmouth or Arkham; or concepts and cosmology
Oh fun! This was also my first OSP video! youtube kept recommending it, so I finally went "Fine! I'll watch it, but you better not make me feel *too* guilty for liking cosmic horror." And I really liked it, and kept watching!
I really don't know if you can blame Lovecraft for not understanding science and math properly. If I remember correctly, he suffered from periodic nervous brakedowns which forced him to leave school for extended periods of time. He very clearly either suffered from some undiagnosed mental or physical ailment from a young age, possibly both.
03:52 If you don’t get why she paused, Red has a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics, so I imagine she was a bit peeved. 25:48 Ursula from The Little Mermaid. Prince Eric rammed/impaled her with a broken prow (though I doubt her appearing to be STRUCK BY LIGHTNING made things better).
Also lovecraft became famous because one of his pen pals had deep pockets and connections to get his books published not just around the country but internationally
My favorite thing that came out of Lovecraft stuff is Nyarlathotep. Unlike the other gods, he’s not asleep, dead, or far away. He’s on Earth and can do literally ANYTHING he wants to whoever or whatever he wants. Hastur is a very close second. The King in Yellow is so damn iconic.
Interestingly, "The King in Yellow" actually predates Lovecraft (it was published in 1895) and was a major inspiration for his writing style. Good ol' Hastur is the creation of the author Robert W. Chambers, who ironically enough also came from the East Coast. The King in Yellow was retroactively adopted into the larger Cthulhu Mythos due to its similar themes (along with a bunch of creations from Lovecraft's author friends), which is pretty cool actually.
The Disney villain that is killed by a boat is Ursela from the Little Mermaid, if you have seen that one. I am really excited that you are starting to check out OSP. Both Blue and Red do absolutely fantastic work
In Cool Air, a scientist uses an air conditioner to keep his apartment so cold that he won't die after he dies. Basically Frankenstein, only with air conditioners instead of lightning.
I remember hearing somewhere that the human eye is actually capable of seeing a little bit into the ultraviolet under the right conditions (i.e. the lens has been removed) so if true there technically is a color most of us have never seen before, but I don't think they would've known that at the time
Yeah, the lens has a UV blocking property which reduces how much UV gets through to the retina. But for people who have had lens replacement surgery, the artificial lens may not block UV (depends on how it's made, how new it is). So their retinas can get full-blast UV; very not healthy, they need to wear polarized sunglasses. But it still causes additional stimulation to the S-Cones. S-Cones have peak sensitivity at the 420-430 nm range, and UV-A light is 315-400 nm. The lens can normally absorb anything below 380 and even from 380-400 is mostly absorbed. So for a person with a low enough peak sensitivity on their S-Cones, and a non-filtering artificial lens, they'd get extra Blue stimulation a bit further into the UV range than typical people do. There's also _Tetrachromacy_ where a person has a 4th set of Cones. Often, they are only partially receptive which results in better ability to distinguish slightly different colors. Its basically the opposite of colorblindness; you could create a dot-pattern test in which normal-vision people *can't* see the letter/number but a person with Tetrachromacy *can* see it. But some report having fully active TC and report sources of UV light having a "silvery" appearance.
4:17 gets even funnier when you know Red, who, as a woman would be considered at the time to have a "delicate constitution," HAS A MATH DEGREE. That "really" look is real.
@@Airier He also did a ghost-writing piece for Harry Houdini while he was living in Brooklyn, "Under the Pyramids". Lovecraft got it into his head that a lot of normal jobs were beneath him, part of what caused his separation from Sonia after her hat shop went under, and tried to make a living with his writing. While he was prolific and a lot of his stuff eventually sold to pulp magazines he frequently under-sold himself.
After finishing this one you should definitely do more OSP. The other Halloween specials are great, as are the Trope Talk series and the Miscellaneous Myths series.
"my poor brain would suffer harm should I study mathematics with any seriousness" So Red does literature and mythology & the animation. On the Red side I'd recommend pretty much any of the "Miscellaneous Myths" series. Blue does history and architecture. On the Blue side I'd recommend Alexander the Alright Alright Alright videos, or the Roman Republic or Empire videos, or Pope Fights. I'd REALLY recommend Pope Fights.
I'm pretty sure the guy who slipped the screwdriver back into the demon core when it slipped simply said "well, that's it then..." and was dead a week later
Tbf, I don’t think Lovecraft unironically described futuristic architecture; if anything, he probably just heard the term “non-Euclidean geometry,” had no idea what it was, thought it sounded scary, and just slapped it onto descriptions of scary places in his books so they would seem scary without him having to deal with actually describing them
So after a bit of digging, Lovecraft was apparently not only scared of everything, but might have suffered some sort of mental issues given his mother. Apparently she suffered a Mental Breakdown and was admitted to Butler Hospital, where she admitted to "seeing strange creatures that would rush out at her from behind buildings"; possibly hinting to some sort of Dementia. We don't know because the documents were destroyed in a fire, but we can safely assume that she (and to some extent, Howard as well) suffered from some form of Schizophrenia. That, and she wasn't the best mother, being fairly abusive to Lil' Howie. And the constitution for Math thing? Old school rooms, especially math classes, were Dusty as all Hell and he had breathing problems. He had a weak physical constitution for stuff like chalkdust. And what he had was sorta worse than regular Racism: Xenophobia. While I like the guy well enough, there is no denying that he was pretty crappy to his fellow Man, and that's because he never really decided to travel and learn beyond (which ironically could have made his work scarier as he really could reconstrue elements he actually understands) and never once moved away from his roots. True, he treated his friends nicely, Robert E Howard is a good example of that; but one look at how he treated his Jewish wife and one look as to the writings he made before his death showed tbat his change was slow, hard but ultimately better for himself. Also, about the "relative publishes works past his death" thing: YOU ARE ALMOST CORRECT ON THAT!!! When he died, his friends woth publishing connections got other works of his published - ones that he in particular had yet to release - and he managed to get a resurgence in popularity in the 40's after people noticed some crazy similarities between that Color from Outer Space and those two Suns we dropped on Japan. SIDE NOTE: The character of Inspector LeGrasse has his own spin-off series investigating other paranormal and supernatural phenomena of the Lovecraftian Cosmos, as written by CJ Henderson.
OSP is a great channel Red does fantasy, fiction, mythology and tropes Blue does history, wars and figures Edit: Ursula Little mermaid, died by a ramming of sicken ship
Two notes on Sonia choosing him: 1. 20s women that had some power very often seemed to develop a taste for keeping men as their pets, kind of the start of the “boy toy” thing. 2. Evidence strongly suggests she may have swung for the other team and he was nothing but a beard to appease business partners that were less than accepting. (Bonus: she may have ended up killing him slowly by poison, but the body was dealt with in odd ways based on her claims of what he wanted)
18:35 The "for ritual purposes" thing is something of a meme among archeologists. A lot of times, when an object has no clear intended practical purpose, archeologists will say that it is "ceremonial" or "a ritual object" without really any basis for that conclusion beyond "we don't know what it was made or used for".
For recommendations: On Blue's side of the channel: - History Hijinks - History makers - some of my random favorites include: - Pope Fights (any of them) - Chicago's Tribune Tower - The Acroplis - Minoan Greece - Hawai'i - Cleopatra - Thebes' Greatest Accomplishment Ever - Alcibiades On Red's side of the channel: - Journy to the West playlist - Halloween episodes (there is no playlist, but it contains, Edgar Allen Poe, Dracula, Frankenstein, Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde, the Wild Hunt and Werewolves - The Miscellaneous Myths where she goes into the origins of some of the gods, Loki, Dionysus, Hermes Aphrodite, and "Hades and Persephone - The OSP Troy Story playlist that doesn't exist but should (chronological order more or less): - Iphigenia - The Iliad - The Trojan War - The Odyssey - The Oresteia - The Aeneid - some of my random favorites include: - The Great Norse Seal Fight - The Zodiac - El Dorado - Atlantis - King Arthur
While I certainly understand the distain for the man I would like to point out he had several psychological issues not limited to paranoid schizophrenia which probably didn't help his racism. Another detail that osp didn't mention was that his mother was known for telling him and others that he looked repulsive which was probably caused by her own schizophrenia. This also explains things like the end of Shadows over Innsmouth and The Outsider in general.
Quick note, it took a while before radiation was both known AND considered bad. For a long time glowing radiation like Radium was used in a lot of commercial products, and no, the factory workers didn’t have safety equipment. Even when they learned it might be dangerous it took a while for it to stop being used, because it was so marketable. I’m not sure on the timeline for that, but it’s entirely possible that he could have heard of radiation but also not really.
I all honesty, if Lovecraft were to see our modern day, he'd probably have a complete breakdown. Science everywhere, multi-culturalism much more widespread, the nobility/aristocracy all but gone, and so on. Our modern day is basicly his worst nightmare brought to life.
Lovecraft was very into the 'imagination is just socially acceptable madness' trope. Artists are framed as the ones who can best visualize the eldritch horrors he envisions, but they're also usually the first to go over the edge, either becoming loonies that everyone ignores or cultists. The common folk are blissfully ignorant, but they are also the most unprepared for when Cthulhu comes bearing girl scout cookies. Scientists and men of reason sit in the middle ground, having their worldview challenged by the eldritch horrors they inevitably encounter, and are the ones capable of fully understanding the gravity of the cosmic threats facing them and thus ground the story and its overwhelming sense of dread in reality. To put it another way, Lovecraft viewed himself and other contributors to the Cthulhu Mythos as the artists obsessed with cosmic horrors from beyond the stars, the people who didn't read those work or were just starting as the ignorant masses, and the readers who were invested in the mythos as the scientists slowly having our sense of sanity, reason, and safety eroded by a work of fiction.
Definitely recommend jekyll and hyde story osp did. It gives a full insight on what the book was about and how it changed from the known culture icon most folks see when they hear jekyll and hyde
Speaking as someone that enjoyed OSP's videos, Airier, I would recommend them - but I'd also advise paying close attention to fine details and taking remarks with a grain of salt because often times they let personal bias creep into what they are saying. For example; as good as this video is, Red is constantly going on about Lovecraft being a racist (when Xenophobic would have been more accurate, all things considered) because of racial influences regarding his monsters, and made that point clear the first time she said it at the start of the video making the other five times throughout the video thereafter needless - but then in another of her other videos she would highly applaud Del Toro as being bold because his monsters are racially inspired by white people, despite Lovecraft also having a lot of white villains in his stories that can be summarized as "every Alabama joke ever." Hypocrisy rubs me the wrong way, especially when it comes to personal politics. But that aside, as I said, their videos are generally good and I would still recommend them.
So glad you're doing OSP. Red and Blue were guests at JoCat's Crap Guide to DM vid. All their vids are awesome. Also love your takes on actual science (acknowledgeing your own limits at the same time) cause it makes for a very good commentary. Also, as a doctor - very accurate. And I agree - it's disturbing having to say HPL was "right" (unintentionally and in a twisted way) about radiation poisoning, seeing as he understood NONE of it.
I used to be a fan of lovecraft based on youtube lore dives and stuff like that. Then I decided to listen to audiobooks of his original works, starting with Call of Cthulhu... About a third of the way in, I stopped listening and the entire mythos had been ruined for me. The entire story was so heavily pinned on the premise that other races were basically animals and any old statues or architecture discovered couldn't possibly have been made by them, that it ruined my ability to take any of it seriously.
Just so you know, and have a ittle more context to her math asides, Red was a very successful math major in college. I love Red's series on "Journey to the West" and the Nordic Val Halla stories, and I love Blue's travel logs.
Finally! Been hoping you'd eventually cover OSP. One of my favorite channels on the internet. Hope you continue to the next part soon. Some good videos to watch would be some of their analysis of gods, trope talks, and myth videos, all done by Red on her side of the channel.
24:30: "Non-euclidian geometry is geometry on a sphere" is... kind of an oversimplification. More accurate is "geometry on a sphere is an example of 2-dimensional non-euclidian geometry". If you want to see what 3D-non-euclidian geometry would actually look like, there are some nice renderings on RUclips. Lovecraft didn't have those though, and won't have understood the matter well enough to imagine them.
Women would marry just so they could have money back then. Not joking women in the US couldn't even have their own bank accounts till the 1960s and 1970s (state by state varied). There is a lot of this guy's history heavily dependent on period understanding, including that old trope of new technology is scary which is the air conditioning, it was new tech at the time and thus it scares him.
Another thing to know about Lovecraft is that his father had either a severe nervous breakdown or a psychotic break while away on a business trip and also died in a sanitarium. After that, Lovecraft's mother latched onto him HARD ... she wouldn't even let tall people hold H.P.'s hand lest they pull his arm out of it's socket.
@@DDlambchop43 Yep. And she was clearly afraid of losing him. She mothered H.P. incessantly but also told people that he was ugly (which he apparently internalized). He grew up pretty isolated, sickly, and a nervous tendency ran in the family. He was pulled out of school several times and since it wasn't a requirement back then just stopped going eventually.
And the whole "when stuff does this you don't touch it" brings me to Kyle Hill's video yesterday. 3 guys in Georgia back in 2001 (the former Soviet state, but I can pretty much see this happening in our Georgia too) were out getting firewood, got blocked in by snowfall, found two metal canisters that were A) heavy for their size, B) sitting on steaming ground untouched by snow, and C) way too hot to touch. These guys used the canisters as heaters to REALLY horrific effect. If you see something that just looks like a metal tube that has inexplicably melted a couple feet of snow deep in a six foot radius around it, maybe stay away.
I think you’re referring to the peacock mantis shrimp. They have fifteen color receptive cones. They also have a punch with the same acceleration as a 22’ caliber bullet and with a force of at least 2,000 newtons. They’re super cool, and pretty.
Pantone 7-27 aka the wall and door behind you. Recommendation: OSP basically has 2 branches of awesomeness. Red and blue. For Blue is recommend _History Hijinks_ or _History Makers_ and for red I recommend you either start at the second beginning and watch the illiad and odysse recaps (warning. Very old ) or look into some miscellaneous myths. While I would also love to recommend Red's Journey to the West, I won't be the one to do that cause it's not finished.
About the only thing I truly liked about Lovecraft was that he pretty much introduced me to the concept of both “deep time” and just how insignificant the human species is in the cosmos. Granted it helped spawn some interesting media over the course of time. There’s a lot of truth behind said “time” and “cosmic significance”
I think that one thing that is really understated is that, since we didn't had nukes at the time, steamboats were the most powerful man-made device. And it was rammed into cthulhu and didn't do do squat. Remember that lovecraft didn't live to see the a bomb
Honestly, I feel more pity for Lovecraft than anything else, despite the racism (which is bad!), being an anxious, depressed agoraphobe myself, I can completely relate to the state of horror and uncertainty he would feel in life, interacting with other people, going outside, encountering situations that were unfamiliar, even people that seemed strange in behavior or appearance. I've had the good fortune of being born in a time period where there is a general awareness about these issues, and in a country that is quite tolerant and helpful in supporting me despite my mental health issues. I feel quite confident, that had I lived during Lovecraft's time, my life would probably have taken a rather dark turn as well, and I can certainly understand how this general anxiety of everything can very easily lead you down a very dark and bigoted path. Generally speaking, I've learned to recognize my own anxieties, and correctly identify my various discomforts around other people as a "me" problem, not anything they are doing or inherently wrong with who they are - but I can see how easily it could've gone the other way, if I'd had no awareness of my own shortcomings and struggles (for reference, I used to be terrified of little old ladies on the bus, especially if they sat right next to me - I can't explain why, don't even ask - I distinctly remember a childhood nightmare of being trapped on a bus full of evil witches trying to kill me.) The kind of irrational fear one can feel, when suffering anxiety and phobia can be a very difficult thing to handle, which leads me back to my original point: I feel very sorry for Lovecraft, as a person, his life would've been a horrific nightmare of unending terrors and threatening people all around him, leaving him in a perpetual state of stress and tension... Not unlike the protagonists of his own stories. Imagine living your entire life like that. Must've been hell inside Lovecraft's head - I know it sometimes feels like it in mine.
Lovecraft was such a wreck as a human, imagine him being alive in modern time and roam the cursed abyss of Twitter. That would be a nightmare on its own
@@Airier Lovecraft was a prolific writer of short stories and did ghost-writing for several magazines and Harry Houdini one time. He wasn't much of a businessman, though, and consistently undersold his work.
in call of cthulhu its not that HP lovcraft was SCARED of artists, as yknow he WAS one being a writer and all, its jsut in the story almsoteveryone was getting the dreams but it was especailly potent on artists cause in this context their minds are much more special and awesome and susceptible to the strange and unfathomable as they're super special awesome comapred to most normal folks. like, jsut cause they'e experiencing horrorific shit and exist withn a horror story doesn't mean the author was partcualrly afraid of THEM or vilifying THEM. I'm jsut clarifying.
The most pertinent aspect of Euclidean/Non-Euclidean geometry is regarding parallel lines. On a flat plane, parallel lines will remain parallel and equidistant. But on a curved surface (or in curved space) parallel lines will either converge (positive curvature like a globe) or diverge (negative curvature like a saddle). So Lovecraft's Dunning-Kreuger understanding of Non-Euclidean geometry was basically trying to imagine parallel lines that don't stay parallel. Like a door that _should_ be rectangular with right-angle corners, but the sides just refuse to stay straight and seem to spread apart or converge together, like a "rectangle with only three sides" or "a rectangle with one too many sides". He couldn't conceive of space, itself, being curved or of lines along the surface of a sphere being considered "straight". In other words, he had the same kind of mentality as a flat-earther.
4:20 so part of the reason why Red pulled out was because she actually has a degree in math. 25:45 Ursala. Eric killed her when she was a Kaiju by ramming a dilapidated boat into her stomach.
Actually the weird thing is most of the Cthulhu Mythos was created years after his death most lovecraftian horror is not actually written by Lovecraft and as far as the Disney villain killed by a ship ironically it was Ursula the sea witch
“Lacking the constitution for math” could also be due to the HEAVY use of lead weights, lead pencils, lead whitened paper, lead ink, and leadened greased tools used to study the materials back then, plus the cheaper “gold” items being a lead plating. Also likely explains his mother’s decent, some of his brain, (lead poisoning as a kid tends to lead toward heightened anger, lower reasoning, lower intellectual power, and heightened paranoia amongst other issues) and possibly his family’s fall from grace. Also explains more of his health issues too.
![Seungmin "그렇게, 천천히, 우리(As we are)" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/kAzmhLHePqU/mqdefault.jpg)
The little skip-jump to Red's avatar at the beginning is an inside joke to the longtime OSP audience: Red has a degree in mathematics and her friends like to occasionally joke with her, because she has a successful RUclips channel that doesn't really have anything to do with math.
Oh good, someone else said it already.
*maths
Math is the US and Canada, Maths everwhere else@@theperson8539
@@theperson8539 HE'S BRITISH GET HIM
@@theperson8539No, Red's American, "math" is appropriate.
Lovecraft wasn't afraid of people who were able to imagine things. He simply put artists and "sensitive" people as more likely to be able to sense the horrible things his mother saw. Which, if you know nothing about hallucinations or schizophrenia (as we can presume Lovecraft had no idea what was up with his mother), is actually a fairly logical leap to make.
Also, the "for ritual purposes" thing is legitimate. There was a handicrafts lady who went to a museum and they had some objects as "for ritual purposes." She recognized the items as drop spindles, because she USES drop spindles, and she showed them how it worked. In the same vein, apparently the ancient dodecahedrons were for knitting? Handicrafts people worked that one out too. So, yeah. "For ritual purposes" honestly just means "basic tool that we don't know what it did yet."
Yeah, a lot of "for ritual purposes" is "we don't know".
Some of the others are "we don't want to call the thing that is obviously an ancient dildo a dildo".
so "ritual purpose" is the new "ceremonial"?
But it's not a catch-all term. There are plenty of objects that archaeologists know what the purpose is for, and they're simply that, objects used for rituals and ceremonies.
I mean sure, but there are also a lot of things that used for ritual purposes. If in 1000 years, someone digs up a giant pair of Golden scissors are they supposed to assume that they were Giants wandering around? Or that we occasionally ceremonially cut things?
@@EvilDMMk3 I sincerely hope they know it was the latter.
Airier: "Wait, there was a Disney villain killed by a boat?"
Me: "Well, yeah. Ursula from the original Little Mermaid."
People keep telling me about this. But I just can't seem to remember it. 🤷♂️
Weird.
So…the only little mermaid?
@@enzioassansin4378 the original had a sequel, so did most classic Disney movies. Heck, some even got a trilogy like Cinderella.
To be fair, the idea of a author that is good at writing horror because he's scared of everything is not exactly uncommon, if you look up any interview with *Junji Ito* it becomes very clear that he's similar to Lovecraft (minus the prejudice) in the sense that they are scared cats capable of channeling "the bitch in their hearts" to put "the bitch in our hearts".
I mean he's technically not wrong considering toxoplasmosis-
Except that where lovecraft came off as extremely paranoid and, for lack of better phrasing, mostly racist, junji ito is an absolute cinnamon roll by comparison
And yet both are legendary horror writers that very few have managed to come even remotely close to
Maybe Stephen king, but I personally just can’t get into his writing style, or his theming
@@kuronaialtani Stephen King _accidentally_ writes horror. He tries to write thrillers and horror comes out.
Wasn't this exact point the same reason Shinji Mikami got the role of director of Resident Evil? Because he's a big scaredy cat and everyone at the offices at CapCom knew he was a big fraidy cat?
Ito seems more fascinated by horrifying things, like an enthusiastic puppy who brings you nightmares instead of newspapers. “Oooh, I see a lot of spirals in nature…can I make them scary?”
Yes, yes he can.
OH MY GOD YES YOU'RE ACTUALLY CHECKING OUT OSP
Red's videos definitely are worth two watches due to the speed:
1. A full watchthrough just to hear Red's rapid fire commentary.
2. Watching the screen to check out the humorous captions and dialogue she shows off onscreen.
Red's videos are the only ones I watch since I don't care all that much about history.
@@alexjewett7455 You're missing out. Blue is a lot of fun too.
@@Crazael maybe I'll check out some of his videos, too. If anyone could make history interesting, it's these two.
@@alexjewett7455 You should also check out Extra History.
@@alexjewett7455any update?
I'm so thrilled you're checking out overly sarcastic productions
Ariel will love their videos on Frankenstein and Dracula.
By the way, Red saying that the one Dude on Cthulhu's Island 'trips on a corner and clips through the map'?
That is actually what happens in the book. I am NOT kidding.
The 'Non-euclidean geometry' that Lovecraft was trying to describe is supposed to be more like super warped perspective geometry. Fun house mirror style. You might see a straight pillar at a distance, but as you get closer, you realize that not only is it not straight, but it's bent and twisted at angles that make your eyes hurt to look at. Or as you get close to a building, it's upper levels seem to bend further and further towards you until somehow it hangs over you like a cliff, instead being just a straight facade. The effect in R'lyeh was so bad that the noon sun appeared to even be in the wrong place in the sky, casting shadows in bizarre ways.
Visually it'd be weird to look at, with angles that seem obtuse but are acute, convex where you think concave is, and nothing 'feels' right. Like even walking on the floor might feel like you're climbing a steep hill or about to fall 'forward' off an impossible cliff.
Think... MCU Doctor Strange's Mirror World realm, and how it operates. That's R'lyeh.... all the time.
Which probably explains why he used the term "non-euclidian", though it probably would have been better if he had used a world like "non-terrestrial geometry", but you can imagine that Lovecraft loved injecting bizzare words that he found with appropriate enough meanings to apply to his works, when he was not just making up the bizzare vernacular of the cthulhu mythos's alien languages that are exceedingly hard to pronounce by design.
The reason he’s became famous is indeed because his friends spend nearly 30 years(he didn’t blow up and start being popular until the 1960s) trying to bring his work into the public light. Though it wasn’t for money(most of them were just fine), it was because they throughly enjoyed his work and wanted their friend to get the recognition he deserved.
That's surprisingly wholesome.
Get yourself homies like this
And one of his friends was Robert E Howard, writer of Conan the Barbarian, and the two would sometimes reference each other's works in their stories.
I mean his work was clearly the less problematic and the most "interesting" thing about him so I can get that
from my understanding, lovecraft wasn't so much hateful as he was terrified
as for the math thing, from what i understanding math at the time was taught in poorly circulated rooms where the teacher would use chalk to write on a blackboard, so someone with lovecraft's health couldn't really handle that environment
Oh! So his constitution was literally too delicate to handle being taught math in such and environment. Good to know.
I can't remember who said it originally, but I have seen several people who said that rather than racist a much better word to describe lovecraft would be xenophobic. Anything/one that was different terrified him. And given his issues, i find it hard to blame him, even if it did lead to some crazy places. I mean supposedly the shadow over innsmouth was inspired by him discovering his grandmother was Welsh.
@@Pylo-ry6ff his life story is often ignored. But he's actually a success story over racism, BUT he didn't become the pro-minority extremist that people demand people be today...so he's a "unforgiving racist"
@@codyraugh6599 His views softened, but not eradicated
@@Pylo-ry6ff So Shadow Over Innsmouth's protagonist WAS a self-insert.
Do not let this video discourage you from reading any of Lovecrafts works - Red is just covering stories that would give you an idea of his general themes
Some examples of his bouts of genuinely good writing include but are not limited to:
Short stories such as: Pickman’s Model, The Outsider and The Thing on the Doorstep
And (for the most part) The Dream Cycle; a series of books - some more involved than others - about a place know as The Dreamlands(no relation to Kirby)
At the Mountains of Madness is probably his best work.
Addendum: In Praise of Shadows is an underrated horror and horror-adjacent video essay channel, please check it out.
@@Mare_Man don’t remind me that we ALMOST got Guellermo del Toro making that as a movie…
I’d like the add “The Shadow Out of Time” and “The Whisperer in Darkness” to that list as well. Something interesting I noticed is that those three (AtMoM, TWiD, and TSOoT) work as companion pieces, since they reference each other; AtMoM brings up the Mi-Go from TWiD, and TSOoT brings of the Elder Things from AtMoM.
Some of his collaborations are good, even if they rely on concepts that are now considered impossible. I recommend “The Mound” and “Out of the Aeons.”
@@RyunosukeHachi
Personally I put "Shadow out of Time" and "The Mound" into the "Great concept, sub-par execution"-category. "Shadow" because it gets a bit too rambly and overexplains everything even by the standards of a Lovecraft story and "Mound" mostly because of its inconsistencies and generally nasty rhethoric. There's a reason many suspect that it was basically the first draft of "At the Mountains of Madness" which is a massive improvement as a story. But "Mound" might be my favourite purely as a concept.
Another story I would put in that category is "The Horror in the Museum". Solid concept and some really good moments but also overexplains things and there is that "sinister" Arab character that's only in the story to make the reader more suspicious of the museum because it employs a "spooky foreigner" who just grins ominously on occasion.
"The Rats in the Walls" is one of the scariest, that is if you read a version of the story that changes the cat's name. Otherwise it gets a bit tricky trying to immerse yourself in the plot cause its really jarring.
Apart from the ones already mentioned in the thread, I really like "The Doom that came to Sarnath" because it's probably Lovecraft at his most self-aware. He also really manages to restrain himself in that one and keep things mysterious, letting the reader fill in the blanks, which makes the ending more eerie.
But "Colour out of Space" is probably Lovecraft's most well-executed story. One of the few that perfectly pulls off the cosmic horror theme and also doesnt fearmonger against a random ethnicity that Howard spotted on a bus that week.
The whole confusion regarding "non-euclidean geometry" is why I prefer the term alien geometry instead to describe physically impossible geometry.
Definitely a better choice.
I always assumed it mean curved geometry trying to exist in a flat plane.
I kinda dislike Red's comment about "all of our geometry being non-euclidean", because that's just.. not correct? Yeah the Earth is a sphere, but the scale is so different that our geometry is effectively euclidean.
Non-euclidean sounds scarier, because it's a complicated word that, ironically, sounds more alien than just saying alien. If you know nothing about the subject, of course.
Oh man, you started with one of the best ones. Beautiful.
I don't remember if it gets mentioned specifically, but Lovecraft's works were picked up and published by his friend and fellow author August Derleth after his death, though many of them were published in magazines during his life, which helped him pay rent. Lovecraft had a large circle of author friends who also became pretty famous, my favorite two being Robert E. Howard (creator of Conan the Barbarian, Kill the Conqueror, and Solomon Kane), and a young man named Robert Bloch, who would one day go on to write Psycho.
Ursula in The Little Mermaid is speared through the gut by the bowsprit of a ship. Hence "rampaging Disney villain."
The Color Out of Space is definitely one of his best stories, and the recent adaptation starring Nicolas Cage is unironically great. Not for the faint of heart, or weak of stomach, but very, very good.
Nicolas Cage already cool in that movie follow by Willy Wonderland.
I saw that film and wouldn't reccomend.
It has some good moments but plenty of bad ones, which really ruined the atmosphere for me.
Instead I'd reccomend the the on Sci-Fi Central YT channel.
3:50 is even funnier when you learn that Red has a degree in mathematics and her real job involves some really high level math/computer science/programming.
What do you mean “real job” she and Blue have repeatedly said that this channel is their job.
@@Levsa399 I think when people say "real" job, they mean "meatspace" job.
For the record, Lovecraft wasn't actually afraid of air-conditioners. That's a bad joke that's been perpetuated because people assume that because Lovecraft didn't fully understand how they worked and used one as a plot device, he must have been afraid of them; this is objectively not true and is in fact a meme older than the internet. In truth, Lovecraft actually hated air-conditioners quite a bit because he did not care for the noise, extreme cold, excessive moisture leading to mold, or for the repairmen that would come to service them, but he understood the necessity of having them for especially hot days because he also hated extreme heat. So he encapsulated his distaste for having to rely on the air conditioner and the sometimes frantic need to maintain them by creating a story where a man literally requires a functional AC unit to live. He frames the air-conditioner as something beyond the abilities of normal people to maintain and operate, with the horror coming from the mystery associated with the good doctor's condition and why he's so obsessed with this radical new technology, rather than making the air-conditioner itself an object of dread.
Lovecraft was an anxious wreck, but he wasn't THAT bad off when it came to his fear of technology. To put it more plainly, he'd be more afraid of the mildew caused by an air-conditioner than the AC itself.
As an aside, didn't early AC units use Ammonia to dissipate heat? Any leak would contribute to odors that evocate the aspects of the sea he feared so much.
@@Ragnarok2kx The sea _and_ embalming fluid! At which point he's got plenty of nightmares to get inspired by! :D
It’s a joke. It doesn’t need to be true
By your description it really sounds like he was xenophobic towards air-conditioners which honestly makes it even more hilarious that joke that could have easily have nothing to do with reality actually have ground lol
So you could say “Cool Air” was just his way of...venting?
Red made that face when she said his constitution was too fragile for math because Red is a mathematician. She has a math degree.
10:20 vidoe does not go into it but he had an actual friend group with some being writers (author of Conan the Barbarian being just one of them) alongside couple that actually managed to make him tone down his belief in his final years.
yeah, generally Lovecraft's whole thing seemed to just be fear of stuff he didn't understand, he had a fair bit of a pattern that all it took was for him to get to know 1 single person from another race or culture for him to suddenly stop being racist towards that particular race/culture (of course that still left hundreds of other cultures that he still didn't understand and was therefore still terrified of and racist against)
but on the whole I've seen people making what I feel is a good point about him. it's less that he was racist and more that he was very, very xenophobic. not xenophobic in the way that the word is currently used (where it's basically just another word for racist) but xenophobic in that he was actually terrified of anything and everything that he was unfamiliar with, including (but in no way limited to) every person, race, and culture that he didn't know. he basically saw unfamiliar cultures in the same way he saw non-euclidian geometry, non-visible light, and air conditioners. he didn't understand them properly so the mere possibility of their existance terrified him beyond all logic.
Supricingly Lovegraft had many penpal, including makers of Conan and Tarzan, and after his death they created publising house to print his stories internationally: Lovecraft became a hit in europe.
He was a ghostwriter for Houdini once too
And because of his friendships the King in Yellow and others APPEAR in Conan and others from that time.
The Lovecraft Circle, formed by himself and some of his colleagues in the Weird. Names include Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard (Conan), Robert Bloch, Frank Belknap Long, and August Derleth.
From what I can tell, Howard's egalitarian-primitivist proto-objectivist attitudes had _zero_ room for Lovecraft-style blind fear.
Cringing away from the unknown was anathema to Howard's life philosophy. You wanna hate the foreigner, hate his deeds, not his face.
They were both suicidal men. Lovecraft mastered his despair but not his fear. Howard mastered his fear but not his despair.
They seem to have been moderating influences on eachother. Howard grew to like grand mythology, and Lovecraft incorporated some spine into his heroes. >:)
@Joshua Sweetvale yeah, Lovecraft getting some backbone for his protagonists makes sense when Howard's protagonists nearly die all the time, especially Conan amd Solomon Kane. Like, Kane nearly died fighting a literal Demon to protect a Native African village that helped tend to his wounds, or when he killed giant Vampire gorilla monster men to save a different village but did ut with his Shaman friend. Not one feat of which made it to Howie's protags very often, but it's a nice change. It was a shame neither men could truly conquer all their demons and took their own lives, because they were both fantastic authors who had a number of unfinished works.
41:50 Bonus fact! Water sources are a common way to spread radiation, and consuming it can reaaally mess you up as well as the area surrounding it.
Considering the rest of his works, Yhe Color Out of Space is probably the "most accurate" in scientific terms.
It’s painful that he accidentally explains how radiation poisoning works.
Although it would probably be funny it he ever realized that. Most likely terrifying for him. 😁
@@Airier I just realized he would be absolutely terrified of glow sticks too.
@@Airier Odds are good that he did have some basic understanding of radiation theory at the time but not a lot beyond that. He was known to be a prolific reader and could well have come across it in newspaper or journal articles. Much like he did when Pluto was discovered and he made it into the most recent home world of one of many races of aliens interested in establishing an outpost on Earth.
“I only left my pinky because the cups are so freaking small“ congratulations, do you have unlocked the secret reason for pinkie lifting, you were rich enough to be able to buy those really tiny fiddly delicate cups.
Hair going white from trauma is called Mary Antoinette Syndrome
I have no idea if it's an actual thing, but it's so named because Mary Antoinette's hair suddenly and unexplainably turned completely white on the way to her execution
You get the wrong idea about Sonia Greene. She wasn't rich. She owned a hat shop. But she met Lovecraft through her hobby, this ridiculously high quality amateur publishing association that she ran. She liked his writing.
To be *slightly* fair on the math thing, folks used "constitution" in a *very* broad sense back then. *I'd* probably have been described as having "too delicate a constitution for math" given how heavily I rely on calculators and I *frustrated* I get around anything that isn't basic geometry. And I understand *that* because I can *hold* tools and *draw* pictures to solve the problem. Everything else just becomes a soup of floating numbers and symbols.
Lovecraft wasn't stupid so much as paranoid, bigoted, and *very* incompletely educated. In The Colour Out of Space, he did a remarkable job describing the effects of radiation poisoning at a time when those effects on the Radium Girls was just coming out.
I think it's important to know, H.P Lovecraft near the end of his life grew to despise himself and regretted his racism. Obviously it doesn't disregard his racist implications in his writings, but I think it's good to know he atleast knew he was wrong for it before he died.
Strongly recommend Journey to the West as Red’s best work. Various things in the miscellaneous myths series, her Halloween specials, and trope talks which cover writing analysis.
I'd honestly recommend everything BUT Journey to the West considering that series isn't finished yet. In a "save the best for last" kinda deal as well.
@@Justic_ Yes, but Journey to the West won't be finished for years. While he could wait, it'd be weird to wait for so long.
@@williamrichards8682 Just saying, since the series isn't finished yet, it's probably best to keep it for last, rather than starting with it and forgetting half of it because he watched the entire rest of their catalogue before the next one came out.
The "too delicate for math" bit is even funnier because Red has a math degree.
In short, he's famous because he's deeply tied to a lot of other famous authors and stories, actively encouraged other people to use his work when he was alive, and then there were no copywrites after he died
While Lovecraft was largely unknown in his time, he did run multiple small publications and shared work with many other writers including things like Conan The Barbarian. While doing that he encouraged the authors he published to use his creations and openly took inspiration from them, as such Conan actually shares a decent portion of it's mythology with Lovecraft's. He's also inspired a lot of other authors, notably Steven King, and his fame is more recent based on those more modern inspirations. A big reason Lovecraft is known about is because of the work his widow didn't do. While separated from his wife for many years, they didn't actually get divorced. So when he died, all of his copywrites went to her. She didn't do anything with it and it eventually went to public domain instead of a company. Because of this, many of his ideas will get picked up and placed into a new book/movie/game without even having to file the serial numbers off. Many have done just that over the years, taking gods like Cthulhu, Dagon, or the shoggoth; places like Innsmouth or Arkham; or concepts and cosmology
Oh fun! This was also my first OSP video! youtube kept recommending it, so I finally went "Fine! I'll watch it, but you better not make me feel *too* guilty for liking cosmic horror."
And I really liked it, and kept watching!
I really don't know if you can blame Lovecraft for not understanding science and math properly. If I remember correctly, he suffered from periodic nervous brakedowns which forced him to leave school for extended periods of time. He very clearly either suffered from some undiagnosed mental or physical ailment from a young age, possibly both.
We don't need Lovecraft to write a horror story about nuclear weapons. We have Godzilla.
My favorite cut away joke with the "too delicate a constitution for math" is even funnier when you know that Red has a math degree.
03:52 If you don’t get why she paused, Red has a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics, so I imagine she was a bit peeved.
25:48 Ursula from The Little Mermaid. Prince Eric rammed/impaled her with a broken prow (though I doubt her appearing to be STRUCK BY LIGHTNING made things better).
(Winces) completely soaked, too. That almost sounds more damaging than being speared by a broken wood beam.
Also lovecraft became famous because one of his pen pals had deep pockets and connections to get his books published not just around the country but internationally
My favorite thing that came out of Lovecraft stuff is Nyarlathotep. Unlike the other gods, he’s not asleep, dead, or far away. He’s on Earth and can do literally ANYTHING he wants to whoever or whatever he wants.
Hastur is a very close second. The King in Yellow is so damn iconic.
Interestingly, "The King in Yellow" actually predates Lovecraft (it was published in 1895) and was a major inspiration for his writing style. Good ol' Hastur is the creation of the author Robert W. Chambers, who ironically enough also came from the East Coast.
The King in Yellow was retroactively adopted into the larger Cthulhu Mythos due to its similar themes (along with a bunch of creations from Lovecraft's author friends), which is pretty cool actually.
The Disney villain that is killed by a boat is Ursela from the Little Mermaid, if you have seen that one.
I am really excited that you are starting to check out OSP. Both Blue and Red do absolutely fantastic work
I thought about whale from Pinocchio
In Cool Air, a scientist uses an air conditioner to keep his apartment so cold that he won't die after he dies. Basically Frankenstein, only with air conditioners instead of lightning.
I remember hearing somewhere that the human eye is actually capable of seeing a little bit into the ultraviolet under the right conditions (i.e. the lens has been removed) so if true there technically is a color most of us have never seen before, but I don't think they would've known that at the time
Huh, I definitely need to look that up. Sounds really cool. 😯
Yeah, the lens has a UV blocking property which reduces how much UV gets through to the retina. But for people who have had lens replacement surgery, the artificial lens may not block UV (depends on how it's made, how new it is). So their retinas can get full-blast UV; very not healthy, they need to wear polarized sunglasses. But it still causes additional stimulation to the S-Cones. S-Cones have peak sensitivity at the 420-430 nm range, and UV-A light is 315-400 nm. The lens can normally absorb anything below 380 and even from 380-400 is mostly absorbed. So for a person with a low enough peak sensitivity on their S-Cones, and a non-filtering artificial lens, they'd get extra Blue stimulation a bit further into the UV range than typical people do.
There's also _Tetrachromacy_ where a person has a 4th set of Cones. Often, they are only partially receptive which results in better ability to distinguish slightly different colors. Its basically the opposite of colorblindness; you could create a dot-pattern test in which normal-vision people *can't* see the letter/number but a person with Tetrachromacy *can* see it. But some report having fully active TC and report sources of UV light having a "silvery" appearance.
You can also see Near Red Infrared when you close your eyes and see spots of Reddish Glows.
4:17 gets even funnier when you know Red, who, as a woman would be considered at the time to have a "delicate constitution," HAS A MATH DEGREE. That "really" look is real.
Take a shot every time this guy punctuates his sentences with "yeah"
Would not recommend this. You Will get pass out before the half way mark. 😁
You questioned how Lovecraft made money, he worked as a ghost-writer for several literature magazines that were published at the time.
Oh yeah, people used to be able to do that. 😯
@@Airier He also did a ghost-writing piece for Harry Houdini while he was living in Brooklyn, "Under the Pyramids". Lovecraft got it into his head that a lot of normal jobs were beneath him, part of what caused his separation from Sonia after her hat shop went under, and tried to make a living with his writing. While he was prolific and a lot of his stuff eventually sold to pulp magazines he frequently under-sold himself.
After finishing this one you should definitely do more OSP. The other Halloween specials are great, as are the Trope Talk series and the Miscellaneous Myths series.
"my poor brain would suffer harm should I study mathematics with any seriousness"
So Red does literature and mythology & the animation.
On the Red side I'd recommend pretty much any of the "Miscellaneous Myths" series.
Blue does history and architecture.
On the Blue side I'd recommend Alexander the Alright Alright Alright videos, or the Roman Republic or Empire videos, or Pope Fights. I'd REALLY recommend Pope Fights.
Which, honestly, is pretty much how I feel about math. I'm not stupid (I'm quite bright in most other subjects), I just can't handle *math.*
History hijinx are pretty fun and the Alcebedis one
The phrase is “a little learning is a dangerous thing. Drink deep, or taste not, the purian spring”
I'm pretty sure the guy who slipped the screwdriver back into the demon core when it slipped simply said "well, that's it then..." and was dead a week later
Tbf, I don’t think Lovecraft unironically described futuristic architecture; if anything, he probably just heard the term “non-Euclidean geometry,” had no idea what it was, thought it sounded scary, and just slapped it onto descriptions of scary places in his books so they would seem scary without him having to deal with actually describing them
Little known fact, that H.P. Lovecraft used Howard Phillips as a pseudonym, and he was actually born Hewlett Packard Lovecraft.
So after a bit of digging, Lovecraft was apparently not only scared of everything, but might have suffered some sort of mental issues given his mother. Apparently she suffered a Mental Breakdown and was admitted to Butler Hospital, where she admitted to "seeing strange creatures that would rush out at her from behind buildings"; possibly hinting to some sort of Dementia. We don't know because the documents were destroyed in a fire, but we can safely assume that she (and to some extent, Howard as well) suffered from some form of Schizophrenia. That, and she wasn't the best mother, being fairly abusive to Lil' Howie.
And the constitution for Math thing? Old school rooms, especially math classes, were Dusty as all Hell and he had breathing problems. He had a weak physical constitution for stuff like chalkdust.
And what he had was sorta worse than regular Racism: Xenophobia. While I like the guy well enough, there is no denying that he was pretty crappy to his fellow Man, and that's because he never really decided to travel and learn beyond (which ironically could have made his work scarier as he really could reconstrue elements he actually understands) and never once moved away from his roots. True, he treated his friends nicely, Robert E Howard is a good example of that; but one look at how he treated his Jewish wife and one look as to the writings he made before his death showed tbat his change was slow, hard but ultimately better for himself.
Also, about the "relative publishes works past his death" thing: YOU ARE ALMOST CORRECT ON THAT!!!
When he died, his friends woth publishing connections got other works of his published - ones that he in particular had yet to release - and he managed to get a resurgence in popularity in the 40's after people noticed some crazy similarities between that Color from Outer Space and those two Suns we dropped on Japan.
SIDE NOTE: The character of Inspector LeGrasse has his own spin-off series investigating other paranormal and supernatural phenomena of the Lovecraftian Cosmos, as written by CJ Henderson.
OSP is a great channel
Red does fantasy, fiction, mythology and tropes
Blue does history, wars and figures
Edit: Ursula Little mermaid, died by a ramming of sicken ship
Two notes on Sonia choosing him:
1. 20s women that had some power very often seemed to develop a taste for keeping men as their pets, kind of the start of the “boy toy” thing.
2. Evidence strongly suggests she may have swung for the other team and he was nothing but a beard to appease business partners that were less than accepting.
(Bonus: she may have ended up killing him slowly by poison, but the body was dealt with in odd ways based on her claims of what he wanted)
18:35 The "for ritual purposes" thing is something of a meme among archeologists. A lot of times, when an object has no clear intended practical purpose, archeologists will say that it is "ceremonial" or "a ritual object" without really any basis for that conclusion beyond "we don't know what it was made or used for".
For recommendations:
On Blue's side of the channel:
- History Hijinks
- History makers
- some of my random favorites include:
- Pope Fights (any of them)
- Chicago's Tribune Tower
- The Acroplis
- Minoan Greece
- Hawai'i
- Cleopatra
- Thebes' Greatest Accomplishment Ever
- Alcibiades
On Red's side of the channel:
- Journy to the West playlist
- Halloween episodes (there is no playlist, but it contains, Edgar Allen Poe, Dracula, Frankenstein, Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde, the Wild Hunt and Werewolves
- The Miscellaneous Myths where she goes into the origins of some of the gods, Loki, Dionysus, Hermes Aphrodite, and "Hades and Persephone
- The OSP Troy Story playlist that doesn't exist but should (chronological order more or less):
- Iphigenia
- The Iliad
- The Trojan War
- The Odyssey
- The Oresteia
- The Aeneid
- some of my random favorites include:
- The Great Norse Seal Fight
- The Zodiac
- El Dorado
- Atlantis
- King Arthur
25:44 Yeah, there's a Disney villain who was killed via boat ramming. Ursula, the octopus witch lady from The Little Mermaid.
While I certainly understand the distain for the man I would like to point out he had several psychological issues not limited to paranoid schizophrenia which probably didn't help his racism. Another detail that osp didn't mention was that his mother was known for telling him and others that he looked repulsive which was probably caused by her own schizophrenia. This also explains things like the end of Shadows over Innsmouth and The Outsider in general.
Kinda annoying that people just fixates on Lovecraft is racist, cant deny his contribution to fiction.
Quick note, it took a while before radiation was both known AND considered bad. For a long time glowing radiation like Radium was used in a lot of commercial products, and no, the factory workers didn’t have safety equipment. Even when they learned it might be dangerous it took a while for it to stop being used, because it was so marketable. I’m not sure on the timeline for that, but it’s entirely possible that he could have heard of radiation but also not really.
I all honesty, if Lovecraft were to see our modern day, he'd probably have a complete breakdown. Science everywhere, multi-culturalism much more widespread, the nobility/aristocracy all but gone, and so on. Our modern day is basicly his worst nightmare brought to life.
Lovecraft was very into the 'imagination is just socially acceptable madness' trope. Artists are framed as the ones who can best visualize the eldritch horrors he envisions, but they're also usually the first to go over the edge, either becoming loonies that everyone ignores or cultists. The common folk are blissfully ignorant, but they are also the most unprepared for when Cthulhu comes bearing girl scout cookies. Scientists and men of reason sit in the middle ground, having their worldview challenged by the eldritch horrors they inevitably encounter, and are the ones capable of fully understanding the gravity of the cosmic threats facing them and thus ground the story and its overwhelming sense of dread in reality.
To put it another way, Lovecraft viewed himself and other contributors to the Cthulhu Mythos as the artists obsessed with cosmic horrors from beyond the stars, the people who didn't read those work or were just starting as the ignorant masses, and the readers who were invested in the mythos as the scientists slowly having our sense of sanity, reason, and safety eroded by a work of fiction.
Interesting
Definitely recommend jekyll and hyde story osp did. It gives a full insight on what the book was about and how it changed from the known culture icon most folks see when they hear jekyll and hyde
Speaking as someone that enjoyed OSP's videos, Airier, I would recommend them - but I'd also advise paying close attention to fine details and taking remarks with a grain of salt because often times they let personal bias creep into what they are saying. For example; as good as this video is, Red is constantly going on about Lovecraft being a racist (when Xenophobic would have been more accurate, all things considered) because of racial influences regarding his monsters, and made that point clear the first time she said it at the start of the video making the other five times throughout the video thereafter needless - but then in another of her other videos she would highly applaud Del Toro as being bold because his monsters are racially inspired by white people, despite Lovecraft also having a lot of white villains in his stories that can be summarized as "every Alabama joke ever." Hypocrisy rubs me the wrong way, especially when it comes to personal politics. But that aside, as I said, their videos are generally good and I would still recommend them.
So glad you're doing OSP. Red and Blue were guests at JoCat's Crap Guide to DM vid. All their vids are awesome. Also love your takes on actual science (acknowledgeing your own limits at the same time) cause it makes for a very good commentary.
Also, as a doctor - very accurate. And I agree - it's disturbing having to say HPL was "right" (unintentionally and in a twisted way) about radiation poisoning, seeing as he understood NONE of it.
So there is a quote about Vincent Van Gogh that I feel also works for Lovecraft:
None of the books are worth him living a happy life.
“I’m sure that’ll never backfire at all” *laughs in now he suffers with us waiting for the next Journey to the West segment*
Lovecraft is one of those things where you respect the subject but not the artist.
I used to be a fan of lovecraft based on youtube lore dives and stuff like that. Then I decided to listen to audiobooks of his original works, starting with Call of Cthulhu...
About a third of the way in, I stopped listening and the entire mythos had been ruined for me. The entire story was so heavily pinned on the premise that other races were basically animals and any old statues or architecture discovered couldn't possibly have been made by them, that it ruined my ability to take any of it seriously.
So it’s Rurouni Kenshin?
If HP was alive today he'd be writing stories about the horrors of 5g.
25:46
Ursula from "The Little Mermaid" was killed via boat... specifically the pointy front end of the boat.
Just so you know, and have a ittle more context to her math asides, Red was a very successful math major in college.
I love Red's series on "Journey to the West" and the Nordic Val Halla stories, and I love Blue's travel logs.
Lovecraft's understanding of stuff was so bad that he either wrote something completely dumb or somewhat accurate on a complete accident
Love over sarcastic Productions, you learn so much about mythology
That math moment contained extra judgement because Red from OSP was a Math major in college.
Finally! Been hoping you'd eventually cover OSP. One of my favorite channels on the internet. Hope you continue to the next part soon. Some good videos to watch would be some of their analysis of gods, trope talks, and myth videos, all done by Red on her side of the channel.
24:30: "Non-euclidian geometry is geometry on a sphere" is... kind of an oversimplification. More accurate is "geometry on a sphere is an example of 2-dimensional non-euclidian geometry". If you want to see what 3D-non-euclidian geometry would actually look like, there are some nice renderings on RUclips. Lovecraft didn't have those though, and won't have understood the matter well enough to imagine them.
Women would marry just so they could have money back then. Not joking women in the US couldn't even have their own bank accounts till the 1960s and 1970s (state by state varied). There is a lot of this guy's history heavily dependent on period understanding, including that old trope of new technology is scary which is the air conditioning, it was new tech at the time and thus it scares him.
Always fun to see osp reactions
Another thing to know about Lovecraft is that his father had either a severe nervous breakdown or a psychotic break while away on a business trip and also died in a sanitarium. After that, Lovecraft's mother latched onto him HARD ... she wouldn't even let tall people hold H.P.'s hand lest they pull his arm out of it's socket.
Woah. That does explain a lot. 😯
I'd heard Howard Hughes' mom did the same with him; she was a total germaphobe...which explains quite a bit about his OCD
@@DDlambchop43 Yep. And she was clearly afraid of losing him. She mothered H.P. incessantly but also told people that he was ugly (which he apparently internalized). He grew up pretty isolated, sickly, and a nervous tendency ran in the family. He was pulled out of school several times and since it wasn't a requirement back then just stopped going eventually.
The disney villian killed by a boat is Ursula from the little mermaid. Poor lady gets impaled by a boat.
"poor lady"...she manipulated an innocent girl, stole her BF, locked up her father and almost KILLED EVERYBODY.
And the whole "when stuff does this you don't touch it" brings me to Kyle Hill's video yesterday. 3 guys in Georgia back in 2001 (the former Soviet state, but I can pretty much see this happening in our Georgia too) were out getting firewood, got blocked in by snowfall, found two metal canisters that were A) heavy for their size, B) sitting on steaming ground untouched by snow, and C) way too hot to touch.
These guys used the canisters as heaters to REALLY horrific effect. If you see something that just looks like a metal tube that has inexplicably melted a couple feet of snow deep in a six foot radius around it, maybe stay away.
Ursula from the little mermaid got shanked by a boat
Space nuke poop is an accurate description of the main antagonist of Colors out of space.
I think you’re referring to the peacock mantis shrimp. They have fifteen color receptive cones. They also have a punch with the same acceleration as a 22’ caliber bullet and with a force of at least 2,000 newtons. They’re super cool, and pretty.
Pantone 7-27 aka the wall and door behind you.
Recommendation: OSP basically has 2 branches of awesomeness. Red and blue.
For Blue is recommend _History Hijinks_ or _History Makers_ and for red I recommend you either start at the second beginning and watch the illiad and odysse recaps (warning. Very old ) or look into some miscellaneous myths.
While I would also love to recommend Red's Journey to the West, I won't be the one to do that cause it's not finished.
25:44 "Wait, there was a Disney villain killed by a boat?" Someone didn't watch "The Little Mermaid."
About the only thing I truly liked about Lovecraft was that he pretty much introduced me to the concept of both “deep time” and just how insignificant the human species is in the cosmos. Granted it helped spawn some interesting media over the course of time. There’s a lot of truth behind said “time” and “cosmic significance”
If only Love Craft could be brought back from the dead to see the dating game “Suckers For Love”
I just looked up Pantone 727; it's called Delux Heritage, and it's like a slightly tan fleshtone, so yeah.
I think that one thing that is really understated is that, since we didn't had nukes at the time, steamboats were the most powerful man-made device. And it was rammed into cthulhu and didn't do do squat. Remember that lovecraft didn't live to see the a bomb
Honestly, I feel more pity for Lovecraft than anything else, despite the racism (which is bad!), being an anxious, depressed agoraphobe myself, I can completely relate to the state of horror and uncertainty he would feel in life, interacting with other people, going outside, encountering situations that were unfamiliar, even people that seemed strange in behavior or appearance.
I've had the good fortune of being born in a time period where there is a general awareness about these issues, and in a country that is quite tolerant and helpful in supporting me despite my mental health issues. I feel quite confident, that had I lived during Lovecraft's time, my life would probably have taken a rather dark turn as well, and I can certainly understand how this general anxiety of everything can very easily lead you down a very dark and bigoted path.
Generally speaking, I've learned to recognize my own anxieties, and correctly identify my various discomforts around other people as a "me" problem, not anything they are doing or inherently wrong with who they are - but I can see how easily it could've gone the other way, if I'd had no awareness of my own shortcomings and struggles (for reference, I used to be terrified of little old ladies on the bus, especially if they sat right next to me - I can't explain why, don't even ask - I distinctly remember a childhood nightmare of being trapped on a bus full of evil witches trying to kill me.)
The kind of irrational fear one can feel, when suffering anxiety and phobia can be a very difficult thing to handle, which leads me back to my original point: I feel very sorry for Lovecraft, as a person, his life would've been a horrific nightmare of unending terrors and threatening people all around him, leaving him in a perpetual state of stress and tension... Not unlike the protagonists of his own stories. Imagine living your entire life like that. Must've been hell inside Lovecraft's head - I know it sometimes feels like it in mine.
Not the new series I was expecting, but definitely creators deserving of all the love they have.
Lovecraft was such a wreck as a human, imagine him being alive in modern time and roam the cursed abyss of Twitter. That would be a nightmare on its own
Lovecraft sent a bunch of his stuff to magazines who paid him for his work.
Mostly Weird Tales and Astounding Stories
I keep forgetting that used to be possible.
@@Airier Lovecraft was a prolific writer of short stories and did ghost-writing for several magazines and Harry Houdini one time. He wasn't much of a businessman, though, and consistently undersold his work.
in call of cthulhu its not that HP lovcraft was SCARED of artists, as yknow he WAS one being a writer and all, its jsut in the story almsoteveryone was getting the dreams but it was especailly potent on artists cause in this context their minds are much more special and awesome and susceptible to the strange and unfathomable as they're super special awesome comapred to most normal folks.
like, jsut cause they'e experiencing horrorific shit and exist withn a horror story doesn't mean the author was partcualrly afraid of THEM or vilifying THEM. I'm jsut clarifying.
The most pertinent aspect of Euclidean/Non-Euclidean geometry is regarding parallel lines. On a flat plane, parallel lines will remain parallel and equidistant. But on a curved surface (or in curved space) parallel lines will either converge (positive curvature like a globe) or diverge (negative curvature like a saddle). So Lovecraft's Dunning-Kreuger understanding of Non-Euclidean geometry was basically trying to imagine parallel lines that don't stay parallel. Like a door that _should_ be rectangular with right-angle corners, but the sides just refuse to stay straight and seem to spread apart or converge together, like a "rectangle with only three sides" or "a rectangle with one too many sides". He couldn't conceive of space, itself, being curved or of lines along the surface of a sphere being considered "straight". In other words, he had the same kind of mentality as a flat-earther.
4:20 so part of the reason why Red pulled out was because she actually has a degree in math.
25:45 Ursala. Eric killed her when she was a Kaiju by ramming a dilapidated boat into her stomach.
Actually the weird thing is most of the Cthulhu Mythos was created years after his death most lovecraftian horror is not actually written by Lovecraft and as far as the Disney villain killed by a ship ironically it was Ursula the sea witch
Was not expecting a reaction to OSP but I am here for it. Love Red and Blue’s content!
“Lacking the constitution for math” could also be due to the HEAVY use of lead weights, lead pencils, lead whitened paper, lead ink, and leadened greased tools used to study the materials back then, plus the cheaper “gold” items being a lead plating. Also likely explains his mother’s decent, some of his brain, (lead poisoning as a kid tends to lead toward heightened anger, lower reasoning, lower intellectual power, and heightened paranoia amongst other issues) and possibly his family’s fall from grace. Also explains more of his health issues too.
Overly Sarcastic Products is amazing.
EDIT: You have to watch the video they got on the Pope Fights!
that artist bit actually kinda explains hokusai in fgo
Overly Sarcastic’s “Journey to the West” is glorious and must be seen by as many people as possible!
So, yeah. That’s my recommendation.
New writing challenge: Write about a mundane thing in a way that sounds terrifying and lovecraftian
15:27 "WHY DID YOU SAY THAT NAME?" Angel asked calmly.