Indie Squid Kid

Nyarlathotep, Cthulhu, baby Shoggoth

Lovecraft’s Mythos has never been warmer and fuzzier than Toy Vault’s plush Cthulhu line.  Since the line debuted in 2000, they have produced a wide variety of stuffed Lovecraftian monstrosities, including several variations of the Big C himself. Quite a few are out of print (such as the Nyarlathotep and Shoggoth shown above), but I imagine most of them can be found online if one looks hard enough.

Incidentally, a Toy Vault Cthulhu hand puppet is the star of the video podcast Calls For Cthulhu.

Toy Vault also made this vinyl Cthulhu figure (shown here with some of his favorite books), but it too is no longer in production.

R’lyeh is for lovers!, originally uploaded by jvsquare.

Here’s a close up of the R’lyeh “Other World” space on the core Arkham Horror game board. The heart is an Arkham stamina token. The Cthulhu figurine is from a different game—Unspeakable Words by Playroom Entertainment.

Cthulhu clearly holds a special place in the hearts of the editors at BoingBoing.net…Cory Doctorow in particular. Here is a selection of Cory’s recent(ish) posts featuring everyone’s favorite Great Old One:

Cthapitol T-shirt by Fo’ Paw Productions.

Hand-knit Cthulhu ski mask

Leather Cthulhu mask by Ukranian artist Bob Basset.

Cthulhu cake!

Born in Providence, Rhode Island on August 20, 1890, Howard Philips Lovecraft would come to be considered one of the most influential American horror authors of the 20th century

He is best known for the creation of what has become known as the Cthulhu Mythos, a series of stories and novels that feature a pantheon of cosmic entities so horrible and incomprehensible to the human mind that the mere knowledge of their existence is enough to drive a person insane. These tales of cosmic horror were often set in his native New England, and they featured a number of memorable fictitious Massachusetts towns such as Arkham (home of the equally fictitious Miskatonic University), Innsmouth, and Dunwich. Lovecraft also created the concept of the Necronomicon—an ancient book containing secret knowledge pertaining to these Great Old Ones.

Other authors, such as Lovecraft’s friend and publisher August Derleth, would go on to write their own stories of the Mythos, elaborating and expanding on the themes, settings, and mythology of Lovecraft’s bleak and fascinating universe.

Lovecraft died in 1937 of intestinal cancer. He was 46.

Lovecraft's original sketch of Cthulhu

I came across the above image on the Ectoplasmosis! blog. They do a regular feature with the fiendishly clever name Cthulhu Cthursday (a name I wish I had come up with!). I wonder what Lovecraft would have thought if someone had told him that his work would be so revered and influential (as well as controversial) 119 years after his birth?

Remember board games like Monopoly, Clue, and Candy Land? Arkham Horror is nothing like those games. In fact, Arkham Horror leaves those games quivering in the corner, gibbering incoherently at mind-shredding visions of extra-dimensional terror. Also there are tentacles.

Published by Fantasy Flight Games, the epic board game specialists, Arkham Horror is based on the works of H.P. Lovecraft and the extended Mythos he created. It’s the 1920’s, and the university town of Arkham, Massachusetts (as wall as the neighboring communities of Dunwich, Innsmouth, and Kingsport) is beset by cosmic forces that are determined to rip through the thin boundary between our world and any number of strange and terrible outer realms. The goal of these Ancient Ones, as you might imagine, is to devour all of humanity. In this cooperative game, the players are all investigators working together to find clues, fight monsters, and arm themselves against the teeming servants of these ancient gods. With a little skill and no small amount of luck, they just might succeed in preventing the awakening of such horrific beings as Nyarlathotep, Azathoth, Yog-Sothoth, and even Cthulhu himself.

Arkham is a sprawling game with hundreds of bits, and rather complicated rules. It blurs the line between board game and role playing game (in fact, it is based on the Call of Cthulhu RPG). You select a character representing one of many period archetypes—the reporter, the professor, the private eye, etc.—, and each has a special ability, a range of skill points, and stamina and sanity points that represent their physical and mental well being. You can obtain weapons both mundane and magical, spells, artifacts, and allies to help you the other investigators survive the dangers that lurk around every corner.

All you need to play is the core game (recently back in print!), but there are, at present, six expansions (the two most recent, Black Goat of the Woods, and Innsmouth Horror, are not pictured above) which add new cards, characters, monsters, board segments, and rules variations.

You can pick up Arkham Horror at your Friendly Local Game Store, or, barring that, the game and all expansions are currently available for purchase at www.fantasyflightgames.com.

I am generally not a fan of puns. But when I saw this shirt at the OffWorld Designs booth at Dragon*Con a few years ago, I just had to get it. In case it’s not clear what’s going one here, Cthulhu, in silhouette, is getting his groove on while listening to a familiar-looking white mp3 player. The caption reads:

“Welcome to the digital magic revolution. 7,500 blasphemies in your pocket. Works with sanity or without. Over six billion doomed. The new cephaloPod.”

Yes, I realize that shirt is a play on an ad campaign that is becoming less relevant with each passing year, but it still makes me laugh. Plus the click wheel of the iPod cephaloPod has a little Elder Sign on it!

“cephaloPod” was designed by Aaron Williams, and you can buy it from OffWorld Designs ($20 USD). You can probably also find it at a science fiction convention near you.

OffWorld Designs has a number of other Cthulhu-themed t-shirts including:

“Horton Hears Cthulhu”

“Miskatonic Mouse Club”

“My Little Cthulhu”

OK, so this doesn’t have anything to do with Cthulhu Week, but I thought this story was cool enough to break protocol.

Paleontologists in the UK have discovered a fossilized cephalopod so well preserved that the creature’s ink sac was still intact. In fact, scientists were able to extract a portion of the ink and use it to draw a picture of what the creature looked like when alive!

The 150 million year old fossil of Belemnotheutis antiquus was found in a recently rediscovered dig site in north Wiltshire that was first excavated during Victorian times. The excavation was lead by Dr. Phil Wilby, and was sponsored by the British Geological Survey and the Curry Fund.

B. antiquus was a belemnite, an extinct form of cephalopod closely related to modern squid and cuttlefish. Belemnites were abundant during the later part of the Mesozoic Era, but they went extinct at the end of the Cretaceous period. They resembled living squids, although they had ten hook-lined arms of equal length (no feeding tentacles) and an internal shell which protected the rear portions of the animial. This “guard” is usually the only part of a belemnite to become fossilized.

Via Daily Mail Online

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!

Rising from the non-Euclidian halls of sunken R’lyeh comes a week dedicated to our favorite cosmic squid god. The green, sticky spawn of the stars. The being so freaking eldrich that they named an entire Mythos after him. The Ayatollah of Rock ‘n Rolla. The Dread Cthuhlu.

Cthulhu (typically pronounced kə-THOO-loo) was created by H.P. Lovecraft and first appeared in the short story “The Call of Cthulhu,” originally published in 1928 in the pulp magazine Weird Tales. Cthulhu is a member of a race of extraterrestrial beings of immense size and power called the Great Old Ones, who are worshiped as deities by various human cults. The Cult of Cthulhu waits for the day when their terrible god will awaken from his slumber beneath the sea and rise to consume the world. He likes long walks on the beach, candlelit dinners, and devouring your immortal soul.

Learn more about Cthulhu on Wikipedia

“That is not dead that can eternal lie.

And with strange aeons even death may die.”

-Abdul Alhazred, the Necronomicon

Here is the contents of yesterday’s mystery package—a specimen of the seldom seen terrestrial cephalopod commonly known as the Tufted Cuddlestache. Natalie Metzger is the world’s leading expert on Cuddlestache biology and natural history, and the following account is from her website, The Fuzzy Slug (where you can also see one of the only known photographs of a Tufted Cuddlestache in the wild):

Extremely rare and elusive, the Tufted Cuddlestache is native to the dense temperate rain forests of the Pacific Northwest.  It was believed that they were hunted to extinction for their luxurious mustaches, which were used in the making of novelty stick-on mustaches and eyebrow replacements. However, while searching for Sasquatch in the remote backwoods of Washington state, field scientist, Dr. Crumpen Von Ludwig,  stumbled upon a small surviving population of the Tufted Cuddlestaches. Little was known about them as the last known living specimen died in 1910. He discovered that they were quite friendly and unafraid of man. Whether that was from isolation, or natural behavioral traits, studies so far have been inconclusive.  Since this great discovery, a  breeding program has been established by Washington State University in order to help restore wild population numbers and to gain valuable knowledge about the behavior and biology of these wonderful creatures. Currently, wild numbers are still very low (estimates are somewhere around 20 breeding pairs) and the Tufted Cuddlestache is listed as critical on the endangered species list.

In addition to being a reknowed cuddlestache-ologist, Natalie is also an artist, cartoonist, and photographer. She designed the Indie Squid Kid logo, and the famous “Bourbon Drinking Squid.”

…arrived today with a mysterious package.

More information to follow.