So what else have I been up to lately?A decent amount of reading. Read through bits of HP Lovecraft, and through Robert Chambers' "The King in Yellow". Lovecraft doesn't spook me as much as I thought it would. The idea of strange, shapeless horrors and Shoggoths...I mean, you talk about otherworldly cylindrical monsters like the Old Ones and I think "My 12th level ranger could beat those guys up". The idea of there being something else out there, even if it's something else that I'm constantly told is "indescribably alien and horrible", doesn't really get me. I don't know. "The Mountains of Madness" struck me more as an exploration story than horror. Maybe it's categorized as horror because there's not really an "exploration" category in most bookstores.
The King in Yellow is more what I was expecting; a familiar yet twisted version of the world where the facts we're presented almost but don't quite fit the explanation. The first half, at least. "Repairer of Reputations" is my favorite of the bunch - I believe it was set in the future when it was written, but time has made it into an interesting piece of counterfactual history, which gives it a vaguely disquieting feel.
Also beat The Ur-Quan Masters (which many of you know as Star Control 2). StarCon rocks. Open Source StarCon is just amazing. I remember there being more of the Yehat and Spathi - I really like the way their ships handle. But this is one of the best games of the 90s. And it's free.
