The Necronomicon in Madison?

The Dulcinea sent me this this link to a little Flash game inspired by H.P. Lovecraft. It's an amusing way to spend a few minutes of a boring day. It reminded me that I never posted anything about my time spent at Cthulhu One a couple weekends ago. I missed most of Friday because of work and much of Saturday due to Elaine Pagels' speech. What Marv and I did end up doing was watching a few horror flicks, persusing merchandise, and having some cocktails with Ann Koi. While I'm sure that I would have found the speakers interesting, what I'm most disappointed about is that I never got a chance to game. I would have loved to have gotten in a Call of Cthulhu game or the CoC CCG. I've never played the CCG (in fact, I've never played any CCG, such as Magic: The Gathering) and I thought it would be interesting to give it a go. Compared to most of the people there, Marv and I were positively normal. I mean, there were some serious hard-core geeks there who were waaay more into Lovecraftian terror than either he or I.



Much of the merch was Cthulhu-related but there was also just a country ton of sci-fi/fantasy stuff as well horror. Books, magazine, videos, et al. One of the things that caught my eye was all the anime. Despite my rather high dork score (17, at least), I've never gotten into anime. Ann was kind enough to give us a very brief lesson in the subject but all I can remember was her advice to avoid watching Neon Genesis Evangelion first. Not the stuff for neophytes, I guess. Anyway, I really didn't buy much. I bought some postcards which featured details of Botticelli's "Madonna and Child with Five Angels". Towards the bottom of the stack of cards was a picture that looked familiar.



It was Roger Dean's painting which ended up as the cover art for Gentle Giant's Octopus. I made some remark about progressive rock and Ann chimed in saying something about how she hid a secret desire for some prog. How cool was that? She confessed to having a love for Genesis. (I would later learn that Nursey Cryme and Abacab were her favorites.) Marv and I went out for cocktails with her on Friday night. The conversation veered from tales of GenCon to how Ann found a robot that had been left behind when she bought her house. She was a really fun person to hang out with. Not only was she creative, geeky, and beautiful, she also eyed up chick's asses at Mickey's when they bent over while shooting pool. I'm thinking that she is, how to you say, broadminded. Here she is all decked out:



Among the highlights of goodies were free issues of Cthulhu Sex and Book of Dark Wisdom. I found out that there's a Lovecraftian MUD hoolie called Lovecraft Country. It is "A text-based multiplayer online role playing game set at Miskatonic University". Kinda like Zork but scarier and with more people. And, as I mentioned above, there were lots of horror flicks. In the Mouth of Madness is always fun but the real gems were the independently made videos. A couple of them obviously had some $$$ sunk into them. I wish I could remember the names because I'd love to get my hands on some of them.

There was a wedding reception across the hall from us on Saturday night. The convention's organizer, Darrick, said that someone had asked what was going on - all these weird-looking people dressed in black with pictures of eldritch creatures everywhere. He replied that we were a satanic cult having its annual convention. The reveler quickly moved away...Darrick was really nice. He seems to be heavily in the occult as he performed a Walpurgisnacht ceremony Saturday night. I, unfortunately, was dead tired and headed home before it transpired. Next year, hopefully. Oh, here a picture of Marv reading The Necronomicon: