The phrase “cosmic horror” conjures up images of massive tentacled beasts that defy all aspects of human understanding. Monsters created by author H.P.

August 14, 2019

The internet is a spawning pool for eldritch horror and I love the energy this generation has put into crafting whole universes with their collective creativity. It's not just one author anymore. Like ants collaborating on a massive colony structure for them to inhabit.

SCP is a wing of cosmic horror unto itself, with entries ranging from the merely odd to the truly mind-bending. Some of my favorites are the locations like 087. A lot of the monsters are goofy but show their modern origins and I'm here for it. It shows that urban legends will never leave us.

Speaking of, a lot of modern monsters and cryptids have disturbing and insightful morphologies. The origins are always indistinct or non-existent but the real horror is in their tangibility. They've strayed into our universe by means of the mundane and thus bastardized the ordinary. A man in a suit becomes Slender Man. An electronic warning system becomes Siren Head.

Sometimes it is we who stray from our universe and end up in the Backrooms. What was once the exclusive domain of dreams is now possible in waking reality. Dreamlike logic and distortions blend with nostalgia and memory to create a collective nightmare realm. What dwells there, if anything, is usually a product of our neglect and guilty conscience.

Corruption of nostalgia yields seemingly endless variety when a ubiquitous pop culture icon becomes a unkillable eldritch abomination. Garfield has never been as voracious. "I'm sorry, Jon," he repeats, with unceasing malevolence and unending hunger. He must consume all, become all.

I imagine that what we create collectively here in the rich, swirling energy of the still developing internet will fascinate future generations as they trace the evolution of their own cosmic horrors back to this cesspit of cultural DNA. Oh, what otherworldly and unfathomable horrors shall crawl forth to devour the minds of their forebears!

\#CosmicHorror

While some of the author's works have been adapted more than once, these five remain relatively unknown and beg for a faithful adaptation.

\-=Help needed=-

I'm trying to remote into my Deck desktop. I have tried a number of things, searched all day, and I can't find anything that actually works.

Steam Link does NOT work as advertised. I can stream my PC (Win11) desktop TO my deck with a Fair connection and no issues. But my PC can NOT connect the other way, it always shows Slow connection and steamdeck offline. I'm on a wired home LAN and I've tried WiFi as well. I've watched "fix your SteamLink connection" videos and read everything but nothing changes it.

AnyDesk was pulled from Flatpak, so every search suggesting that option seems to be null and void. I don't know if or how any other version of Linux AnyDesk might work, or how. And I can't find anything other than "It's on Discover". Not anymore it isn't.

KDE Connect doesn't seem to do much other than let me transfer files. I can mouse click but not move the mouse. I don't see many options here to get it to do what I need.

I want to remotely navigate the Desktop mode from my Windows PC. It shouldn't be this hard. Anyone encounter or understand a solution that could explain it in better than one sentence worth? I'm trying to learn but it's just brutal out there.

\#Steamdeck

• Based on a three-issue comic book miniseries under DC Comics' Elseworlds imprint.

• Tagline: In a city forever in darkness an ancient horror awakens.

If you're like me, there's a lot of crossover in your fandom. That's a commonplace experience these days. Mashups are the remixes of ideas that we might feel have been tapped for everything they're worth, as a way to try and wring something new from the blending. There's a scale of effectiveness for this sort of writing. I won't belabor the point; The Doom that Came to Gotham is of mixed effectiveness. It stands firmly in the realm of a comic hero story, and then adds the elements it needs from Lovecraftian horror to tell the story it wishes to.

There are other ways to convey ideas about the Batman character. Ideas about what he represents, and to whom. Many new adaptations are explorations about who Bruce Wayne is, or indeed whether that is even who he truly is. Adding Lovecraftian elements to his world and his story does allow for some unique insights into the mind of a wealthy man who takes on the image of a leather-winged mammal in order to instill fear into the minds of criminals. But in this story it's the physical and body horror that seems to take precedence, even in a genre known for exploiting psychologically terrifying ideas.

The movie's short run time both helps and hinders it. Doom's pace prevents the audience from really getting a chance to engage with some of its characters, and instead leans on our fully-immersed Batman brains to fill in the emotional gaps. We know all these characters already from a dozen other versions. So it dispenses with the expected amount of character development in favor of a more rapid clip. That pace, on the other hand, does prevent the audience from taking any time to ask bothersome questions about the plot or the mechanics of this new reality.

How much cosmic horror is in The Doom That Came to Gotham? Quite a lot, actually. The story is wrapped in all the usual trappings of Lovecraft. Madness, cults, otherworldly entities, dark histories, and horrific transformations are all represented. What the movie doesn't do is pick one or two of these and tell an exceptional story with them, taking its time to explore the menace of an uncaring monstrosity, or the slow descent into madness that revelation may bring. Instead Doom throws everything into the mix, as if desperate to exude Lovecraft. It's not a damning usage of the tropes, just an unfocused one.

One of the movie's obsessions is re-imagining Batman's rogue's gallery through the lens of these cosmic horror tropes. And given the already monstrous nature of a lot of these characters, there's no shortage of possible cameos. Unfortunately some of these villains only get a brief and ultimately pointless appearance, which leads to the feeling that more thought was put into style than purpose. There is an early plot point that seems important but ultimately leads nowhere and turns out to have been inconsequential; all apparently in service of bringing two more well-known Batman villains into the narrative.

A 1920s Batman, on its face, should be interesting enough. After all, his roots are very old indeed and run through early 20th century America. Bruce Wayne is another iteration of the pulp serialized hero as imagined throughout the 30s and 40s. His wealthy paternal approach to crime fighting certainly needs no introduction to the era of noir. And Lovecraft's writings themselves are era-appropriate. Archaic as his prose was, Lovecraft wrote stories whose themes leaned forward, even if the origins stretched back uncounted eons. His was building on traditions of gothic horror, though, and stripping away the bounds of reality that keep Batman's more grounded world sane and relatable for the mass audience. Lovecraft's vision of horror wasn't appreciated in his time the way he is now. So to blend these two genres is actually riskier than it sounds. Lovecraft says, your money doesn't matter if an inhuman intelligence is bent on devouring the world. And to its credit, The Doom That Came to Gotham does actually bend to this premise.

3 / 5 mi-gos would recommend to genre fans of either

In honor of the holiday, take a tour through Lovecraftian Americana. Eight locations within the United States that influenced Lovecraft's writing. Lovecraft was famously moored to New England, specifically Providence, RI. But locations both close and wildly distant did draw his attention and became the source for some of his best known stories.

Happy 4th, betentacled shamblers! Enjoy a temp icon!

\#CosmicHorror

Few things have been as influential to modern storytelling as the works of H.P. Lovecraft. Here's why we need more.

‘He is in the world’ Site 13 is a 2023 American cosmic horror film about a doctor who awakens from a catatonic state in a mental institution

> > > The intersection of queerness and horror has been fervently dissected these last few years, and now the junction feels more like dated gospel than innovative speculation. The “why’s” may range from otherness to villain empathy, but it is, without a doubt, a genre that resonates with us. Today, the horror genre remains a vehicle for queer filmmakers to share their stories through metaphor, subtext, or even having the Final Girls be trans women. > >