do you think this is what lovecraft meant whenever he described something as being beyond description
“It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train—a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter.”
— H. P. Lovecraft,
At the Mountains of Madness
This.. actually makes a fine reference to what a lovecraftian eldritch abomination SHOULD BE. not just.. tentacles and darkness. Perpetually changing, not cemented in form, with an otherworldly feel to it. Completely unrecognizable by most human descriptions, and only able to be viable perceived by those fine enough to be an adept wordsmith.
I think that this is very nearly an ideal representation of a lovecraftian eldritch horror, because the video that we see is (I’m fairly certain) footage that has been fed through Google deep dream.
The reason the frog looks so weird is because the program is trying to look at the frog, figure out what it is, and then overlay other images of the same thing.
The the thing about lovecraftian horrors issn’t just that they look conventionally weird or gross or scary. Instead, they are things that are so utterly alien that the human mind cannot properly comprehend what it is looking at. They defy description because they defy understanding.
And here we have a video of a computer, a simple silicon substitute for the human mind, struggling to understand what it is looking at, in much the same way that you would be hard pressed to understand a shoggoth.
My favorite thing about Thomas the Tank Engine is that it canonically takes place in a train post-apocalypse where the Island of Sodor is the only safe zone in a totalitarian dystopia in which steam trains are routinely killed and their body parts are sold or cannibalized for repair
If you think I’m kidding you need to read the original books
could you please direct me to a source? i would feel much better if this was validated.
It took me so long to find this quote online but I did it because it’s so much darker than one might expect from Thomas the Tank Engine:
“…Engines on the Other Railway aren’t safe now. Their controllers are cruel. They don’t like engines any more. They put them on cold damp sidings, and then,” Percy nearly sobbed, “they…they c-c-cut them up.” -”The Bluebells of England.” Stepney the Bluebell Engine. Rev. Awdry, Wilbert. London: Egmont Publishing, 1963.
This illustration, by Gunvor and Peter Edwards, accompanied the above text in the original book, and depicts a pair of unfortunate Other Railway engines moments before being disassembled with a blowtorch.
HOLY FUCK LOOK AT THE ONE IN THE BACKGROUND THEY TOOK ITS FUCKING FACE OMG
the early thomas the tank engine books are pretty standard stuff. saccharine bubblegum type stories and illustrations. if you watched the show, it’s like that in book form.
the second half of the railway series are so fucking dark and surreal i’m convinced they were a result of reverend wilbur awdry doing copious amounts of lsd and having hallucinations of his own death.
Excuse me but the very first story in the Railway Series is about an engine who hides in a tunnel and refuses to run because he doesn’t want to get his paint job ruined in the rain, so railway management seals off the tunnel.
They eventually let him out because another engine breaks down or something, but the original plan was to just leave him in there forever.
On the show, didn’t they also hook up one engine to a generator, so he’d never move again? That was literally one of the lines, I think. It’s on some other post on here. It was chilling.
Yes! This also happened in the books, to an engine referred to only as “No. 2″, but the television series applied the same scenario to an invented character named “Smudger”, in the episode “Granpuff”.
“Smudger,” said Duke. “Was a show-off. He rode roughly and often came off the rails. I warned him to be careful, but he took no notice.” “Listen, Dukie” he snared. “Who worries about a few spills?” “We do here! I said, but Smudger just laughed.” “Hahaha!” “Until one day, Manager said he was going to make him useful at last. Smudger stopped laughing then!” “W-w-why? What did he do?!” “He turned him into a generator. He’s still there behind our shed. He’ll never move again.”
This is so fucked up
No, listen.
Okay, so we see Railway Management doing all this shit, right, but supposedly it’s so much worse in the Other Railways? I mean, sure, you might get turned into a generator or bricked into a tunnel for not doing as you’re told, but at least you’re not cut up and sold for parts, right? It’s not so bad on the island of Sodor, right?
Or maybe that’s just what Railway Management wants the engines to think.
Maybe the island of Sodor is the real totalitarian regime, and the engine citizens (slaves) are fed propaganda, illustrated in hellish grays and sulfuric yellows, about how bad it is everywhere else, at all the Other Railways.
Here is my interpretation of Gengar, aka the greatest Pokeman to have ever existed. I wanted to sort of bring him into the real world, but still keep his cartoony and simplistic design intact.
Sketch commissions are open! I am trying to make a little extra money to help with my health insurance payment this month. Below are a few examples of shaded and unshaded work, for reference. Read through, and if interested please email me at samanthamashillustration@gmail.com
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