Input Junkie

laughingfox's gaming group is interested in Cthulhu humor, so I'm passing on some good stuff I've seen recently.

bradhicks has about the importance of not engaging in sex with shoggoths and a follow-up.

And here's a much quoted account of what can drive a Miskatonic professor over the edge.

I recently read something about the Harry Potter books being Lovecraftian, with a description of a Lovecraft character who has a disquieting resemblance to Snape and a suggestion that the house elves are really Deep Ones. Does anyone have enough (in)sanity left to remember where it was? I'm pretty sure I saw it on LJ.

And if anyone has other Lovecraft humor to recommend, bring it on.

It turns out that Cthuugle is still the very handy Lovecraft et al. search engine--when I mispelled it as cthoogle, I was redirected to a porn site, and googling established that cthoogle is a common word on such sites. Something very odd is going on, and I hope it's not shoggoth sex.

Ok, Voldemort couldn't kill Harry because of Harry's mother's love. The effect of love on magic seems to be reasonably well-known, so what sort of an idiot super-villain doesn't kill the parents first? Or figure out some way of not killing family members in front of each other? Do I have to explain everything?

Also, I've heard some discussion of love potions in HP, with the conclusion that they might not be very feasible. How about a reverse Dementor effect instead? Every time you're around it, you remember all the best stuff in your life--anything you associated with the reverse Dementor effect would be something you'd want to be around, and if it's human, you'd want to make it happy.

I've just been reading a long, intelligent thread about whether there was serious negligance involved in Draco getting slashed by the hippogriff, and it reminded me of something that puts me out of sync with the vast majority of dedicated Rowling fans.

Now, aside from the fact that I'm not dedicated (I've read each of the books once and have forgotten a lot of details), I don't believe that Dumbledore necessarily knows what he's doing. (I don't think Snape is really a good guy, but that's probably another matter.)

For me, a lot of the charm of the books is that the kids are dealing with a school where they're thrown onto their own resources a lot--the adults are not reliably competent, and sometimes dangerously incompetent. This means that the kids have to use their own knowledge, judgement, and courage more than most children (or at least most of the people reading the books) have had to.

At the same time, it's a livable society--we're not talking about war refugees or (when Harry's away from the Dursley's) grossly abusive families. It's something like real life--it's possible to manage, but people are really just making things up as they go.

One piece of evidence: I made a correct guess about why Slytherin was part of Hogwarts--the founder of Slytherin was one of the founders of Hogwarts. Historical accidents can have tremendous longterm effects, and there doesn't have to be anyone's plan or intention behind them. Perhaps the interesting question is how the Slytherin lack of ethics gets moderated and/or overridden enough that Hogwartz was able to survive.

What happens to a lot of complicated theories if Dumbledore is just scrambling as fast as he can to deal with running a school (and has a severely limited pool of potential teachers--he can't just invoke sane, well qualified teachers out of nothing) and dealing with a major magical enemy at the same time?