TGIF

It's being one of those mornings. You know. The ones where you wander around very slowly pulling breakfast together, responding to your cats' pleas for attention by saying "Lost Carcosa! Does kitty know what they do in lost Carcosa?"

...what, you mean everybody doesn't have those?

Strange is the night where black stars rise
And strange moons circle through the skies
But stranger still is
      Lost Carcosa.

Apparently I'm on a Lovecraft kick.

When words make brains go *click*

Browsing through Websnark.

There are moments when someone else has managed to articulate *exactly* what you'd say if you were going to say it, and there's a weird shock that's more like recognition than revelation. Eric Burns has a great long post mostly about pulp heroes, and stuffed into the middle of a paragraph where he's explaining what's so cool about the Shadow is the line

I need horror turned against evil instead of for evil.

Oh, damn, *yes*. That's it exactly.

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Miskatonic University seems like it's turning out okay. It starts out with the author addressing a few considerations about running games in the Mythos universe; how strictly you'll adhere to canon, how to handle players who've read the stories, things you want to keep players from doing, how to handle the sacred cows--

--and this is about when it hit me.

This is fanfic. Fanfic in a slightly stretched and weird way, that isn't telling stories in the traditional sense, but is certainly telling stories.

*Anything* with the Mythos is fanfic, or fanfic piled on fanfic. "The Watchers Out of Time." "Cold Print." "A Colder War". "'The King', in Yellow". "A Study in Emerald." Some of Lovecraft's stuff was fanfic to begin with--he didn't invent Carcosa, or The King in Yellow, or Nodens.

Hell, outside of Lovecraft's work, the *Necronomicon* is fanfic.

I must think on this.