Category Archives: Censorship

Tentaclii now at www.jurn.org/tentaclii/

22 Friday Oct 2021

Posted by in Censorship, Housekeeping

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Due to high-handed and unannounced censorship at WordPress — about what they don’t say, so I can’t fix it — my Tentaclii blog (about the life and work of H.P. Lovecraft) is now abruptly suspended there. I have now re-located the blog to http://www.jurn.org/tentaclii/ Please update your links. The blog works as before, though some older images are at present missing. If anyone has a full local archive of Tentaclii on their PC, I would appreciate a Dropbox .ZIP with just the site’s images.

For those who can do search/replace across their blog or site, this is what you need to change all your links:

Search: https://tentaclii.wordpress.com/
Replace: http://www.jurn.org/tentaclii/

The new blog’s RSS feed is now: http://www.jurn.org/tentaclii/feed/

Those who were WordPress subscribers to the old site will now need to subscribe to the new one, which will be continuing as normal.

Thanks for your continuing support, and especially my Patrons at Patreon and those who can donate via PayPal.

Morgoth’s Review on “Nyarlathotep”

29 Wednesday Sep 2021

Posted by in Censorship, Podcasts etc., Scholarly works

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New on Archive.org today, a Morgoth’s Review podcast lecture on “Lovecraft, Nyarlathotep And Our Changing World”. This turns out to be a YouTube podcaster with a slightly-difficult accent and obvious high intelligence, who has discovered Lovecraft’s fiction via the Warhammer game of all things. Here he’s bowled over by Lovecraft’s prose-poem “Nyarlathotep”, and points out the congruence of the short tale with our current times, and many pithy points are made. An entertaining and illuminating view from a Lovecraft newcomer.

But worthy of automatic censorship? He does seem to be from that wing of the Christian-Right which believes in the existence of evil-as-an-active-force (but presumably doesn’t frown on the likes of Warhammer as an abode-of-demons?). But there’s nothing objectionable in his lecture and partial reading that I can hear. Nevertheless spotting it popping up on Archive.org made me aware of the existence of the curious ‘Deemphasized Collections at Internet Archive’ category, to which the lecture has presumably been auto-added by bots rather than the uploader. The category includes “Adult and Mature Comics” and “Vintage Men’s Magazines”, and in general is an amazing collection of weirdness and smut. All of which is presumably suppressed in searches. But which Archive.org then allows you to search all in one go, very conveniently for some.

Here ‘lovecraft’ means something very different, though a search for his name does sometimes give a few results in contexts other than a tawdry scan of a 1970s Busty British Bar-maids Vol. 1 and suchlike. For instance I see that Thomas Ligotti’s acclaimed The Conspiracy Against The Human Race and even Lovecraft’s Collected Works languishes in this suppressed category, nestling against the ‘Ancient Aliens’ Collection and other such high weirdness. Possibly the crap front-cover and the word “Conspiracy” in the title were enough to damn a great writer, but who can fathom the unexplained caprices of censorship these days? A lone copy of a 1920s Weird Tales is even consigned to the category, once deemed suitable fare for juvenile readers and distributed to every city news-stand in America.

Good news for del Toro

10 Monday May 2021

Posted by in Censorship, Lovecraftian arts

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Good news for movie director, writer and collector Guillermo del Toro. His acclaimed ‘not-Lovecraft but still fish people’ movie The Shape of Water had been hit, soon after its success, with a rather shaky-sounding plagiarism claim. This related to a 1969 U.S. Flipper-tastic TV movie in which a woman ‘bonded’ with a dolphin. Such things were hot, back then when dolphin language decoding seemed a real possibility.

Entertainment Weekly now reports that the legal challenge has finally dragged through the courts and come to a result — the U.S. Ninth Circuit federal court has definitively ruled there was no plagiarism.

Solomon Kane: The Original Marvel Years Omnibus

06 Monday Apr 2020

Posted by in Censorship, New books

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Due in July 2020, the 624-page collection Solomon Kane: The Original Marvel Years Omnibus, collecting all the Marvel comics featuring R.E. Howard’s Puritan adventurer.

I’m not keen on the cover. I guess it helps sales, though, since it makes him look vaguely like Conan or a generic pirate. But personally I’d walk straight past it and not recognise Solomon Kane the Puritan.

Also it seems you can no longer trust Marvel’s new reprints, as they’ve started censoring and pasting out things like Wolverine’s cigar. And probably other things now deemed ‘politically incorrect’. It’s a slippery slope. How long before tight shiny spandex, on slightly-too-curvy “boobs ‘n bums”, gets covered up under stick-on shrouds?

Anyway, I just took another look for the 2010 movie of Kane, hoping that by now there might be a longer Director’s Cut. A flop at the time, I seem to remember it was hardly released. I found it good entertainment but very choppy in the first half, as though large chunks had been hastily cut out. But no… it seems the 2010 theatrical release of the movie is all we have in 2020.

More on trademark trolls

05 Thursday Dec 2019

Posted by in Censorship, Lovecraftian arts

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More on trademark trolls, a nasty instance of which was recently covered here at Tentaclii. In the UK there’s been a ridiculous and expensive case against the 1960s band ‘The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band’, over their own use of their own name no less. This stupid state of affairs has finally roused the ire of Parliament. Apparently, if a sensible British government is returned at next Thursday’s general election, such matters…

will be pursued further in Westminster with the assistance of some supportive MPs, so that other bands do not have to suffer the same nightmare.

… and hopefully any resulting legislation will also spill over to benefit many other indie creatives.

Monster trolls

15 Friday Nov 2019

Posted by in Censorship, Odd scratchings

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Evil sludge company and trademark-trolls, Monster Energy, bully a maker of a children’s storybook. They threatened to set their lawyers on the author of Albert and the Amazing Pillow Monsters, and have seemingly prevented him from publishing more such books.

Many readers of this blog are experts and historians of horror art and metal music. As such does anyone out know of any “prior art” on the Monster Energy “claw” logo + the word “Monster”, which would help invalidate such claims? The company began 2002, and I can’t believe there isn’t some sort of “prior art” on some old heavy metal album cover, videogame, or even a pulp magazine cover.

Update: I’ve already found Monster manual (1994). I’d imagine this would hold up quite well in court as “prior art” on the matter in relation to books and comics and suchlike.

The Censorship from Beyond

16 Friday Aug 2019

Posted by in Censorship, Odd scratchings

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The popular DuckDuckGo search-engine’s ‘safe search’ mode censors one result from the following search…

site:http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/ pleasure

This should find all instances of the word “pleasure” in the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft.

On close comparison the censored item turns out to be the unremarkable round-robin story “The Challenge from Beyond” (1935), which DuckDuckGo appears to think is adult content and blocks. I can only assume this may be because the phrase “naked fundamentals” and “physical delights” occur near to “pleasure”…

With the honesty possible only when life is stripped to its naked fundamentals, he realized that he remembered with pleasure only the physical delights of his former life.

This line is also the highlighted snippet in the Duck’s search results.

In this case we can’t blame Bing, a main upstream provider for DuckDuckGo and possibly the worst of the big search engines. Since Bing can’t handle a site: search at that level of URL specificity. Nor does Bing block “The Challenge from Beyond” with its own Safe Search on and a trimmed-back URL.

Nor does anything untoward happen with the far more worthy Russian search-engine Yandex, the Duck’s other main upstream provider.

The conclusion must be that the Duck is implementing its own dumb censorship filter based on keywords and phrases. Something to bear in mind if you’re using it to site: search www.hplovecraft.com/writings

Cephalopods of the Multiverse

15 Saturday Dec 2018

Posted by in Censorship, Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works

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As the new Aquaman movie apparently romps to worldwide success, the oceanic tentacular becomes even more alluring. What better time for a comprehensive survey of the tentacular aspects of the popular game Magic the Gathering. It’s newly published in the Journal of Geek Studies as “Cephalopods of the Multiverse” by Mark A. Carnall, curator at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.

On Aquaman, I’ve not seen it yet but it apparently throws DC’s usual preachy ‘grimness and angst’ overboard, in favour of a well-made fun adventure with epic CG sets and lively CG sea-monsters with Lovecraftian tendencies. And let’s face it, that’s really all we want from most superhero movies. It’s been lightly censored for gore, in UK cinemas, so as to get a 12A rating.

Morton on obscenity

25 Sunday Nov 2018

Posted by in Censorship, Historical context

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Lovecraft’s anarchist friend and correspondent James F. Morton, Jr., in Publishers Weekly, on the problem of capricious censorship (8th July 1916, reprinted from Case and Comment). From the article we can infer something of the ‘state of play’ on the matter, which Lovecraft encountered when he first began writing again…

“Everybody can readily learn exactly what is meant by burglary or forgery as defined in our penal statutes; but nobody can tell just what a given judge or jury will say to a particular writing or picture accused of being obscene. The vague and meaningless definition of Reg. v. Hicklin, L. R. 3 Q. B. 360, imports obscenity into any matter the tendency of which is ‘to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences, and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall.’

Under this criterion, the abnormal mind is made the standard, and the normal tendency completely ignored. No such loose doctrine is held in any other branch of law, nor would it be tolerated elsewhere. Imagine criminal libel against the person being defined as ‘language which tends to create a suspicion or dislike of the individual on the part of those whose minds are afflicted with prejudice against him, and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall’! Under such a standard, the freedom of the press would be in much worse situation than in Russia.”

Imagine, indeed.