this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2025
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[–] Kolanaki@pawb.social 3 points 5 hours ago

This thing is indescribable!

Goes on to describe it

This word is unpronounceable!

pronounces it

[–] krull_krull@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Well, iirc it's only Chtullu. Other Lovecraftian creatures have a more abstract appearance.

[–] Kolanaki@pawb.social 1 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago)

I like the ones that just look like dog sized brown eggplants with wings (Old Ones; the things from Beyond the Mountains of Madness).

Second are shoggoths because the idea of a biological shapeshifting machine is just dope as hell.

[–] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 34 points 1 day ago (3 children)

"Big ugly squid." I wish I was still that innocent, still unaware of what...they really are. Once you know, once you really understand - or if you are among those damned to witness it yourself - once you know, you will never forget. It keeps me up at night, and if not for my physician's pity I would never sleep at all.

Squids. It's charming, frankly - the Old Gods, with bloated and frowning faces writhing with tentacles like the beard of Neptune. Like a God of Egypt, with a man's body and an animal's head. A curiosity, and little more.

The truth...well, I cannot tell you the truth, not properly, as a man of science should. These things are beyond our science. Still, I understand things about them that explain some of the reports, and perhaps you can carry on my research now that I can no longer pursue it.

It comes down to dimensions. We possess three - height, width, and depth. Grip a billiard ball, feel your fingers wrap around it, and you will understand. Now imagine a creature that existed in only two of those three dimensions, in a universe that described a simple plane through our own. To that creature, the billiard ball would appear to be a simple circle, growing and shrinking as it passes through the plane of the creature's universe. Imagine how our hand would look - strange fleshy circles filled with pulsing fluids, shards of bone, glistening meat. The creature could never understand what it was really seeing, as it could no more conceive of a hand than it could imagine a creature like us, moving freely in three dimensions and gripping billiard balls on a whim.

The Abominations, as you aptly described them, are to us as we are to that benighted creature. They exist in dimensions beyond our own, whose nature we can hardly guess. When they appear to us, we see only fragments of their bodies - long stretches of writhing flesh, glistening with juices that should not exist outside of a body, which whip through the air and vanish back where they came from in a way that our minds simply refuse to accept. Witnesses have tried to describe these as great tentacles, words failing them in the presence of such incomprehensibility. Those who heard the stories seized on this, and explained them as resembling cephalopods. This is a comforting lie, as there is nothing in the most stygian depths of the darkest sea that is not our beloved brother compared to the horrors of the Abominations.

This is a creature who is incomprehensibly alien, and our only glimpse is a sickening flash of writhing, elongated flesh that slips into our world and back out. Worse than the appearance of the creature, though, is its disappearance - your mind knows, on some level, that this creature - this hateful, hungry god of a creature - is not moving it's body between "here" and "away", but between being a glimpse of a writhing horror, and a horror that watches unseen.

Imagine our two-dimensional creature again, and imagine yourself to be a cruel child. If you chose to torment the creature, it would be powerless to resist. It cannot perceive you unless you chose to intersect its plane - you can watch its every move, and it cannot hope to escape your gaze. It would be the simplest thing in the world to push a pin through it, like a butterfly on a card. Take a glass of water and push it into the creature's plane and it will find itself trapped, drowning, in an inescapable sea. The creature is entirely at your mercy, and always will be.

Same as you. Same as me.

[–] KaChilde@sh.itjust.works 7 points 16 hours ago

4d Squid Guy

[–] Pulptastic@midwest.social 2 points 20 hours ago

You should read Death’s End if you haven’t already. It is book 3 in the Three Body Problem trilogy.

[–] mortalglowworm@reddthat.com 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Super cool. Sagan-y vibes in Lovecraft universe.

Where is it from?

[–] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 11 points 17 hours ago (1 children)
[–] rumba@lemmy.zip 4 points 10 hours ago (1 children)
[–] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 3 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

You fool! Mankind was not meant to yeah okay good work.

[–] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 3 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

The real eldritch magick is getting a god dang search engine to work these days.

[–] rumba@lemmy.zip 1 points 6 minutes ago

In asked AI, it found a Reddit user reposting it 5 years ago, prob OP's reference.

I hit a searxng it found that one and a previous repost from the same user 7 years ago, but still redacted. It then unhelpfully mentions I should use the way back machine, even when the article was written post-redaction.

Then I used one of the other unique sentences with quotes and found this one. That referenced the original and the user pre-delete.

Good Cthulhu fanfiction has a tendency to stick around. Get re-quoted. I was hoping somebody preserved the name.

There's probably an entire book somewhere written about if an author deletes their account, morally is their name still bound to the content, or does it become a right to get forgotten at that point?

[–] sundray@lemmus.org 42 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Also, Cthulhu mostly just sleeps? Comprehensible and relatable.

[–] defaultusername@lemmy.dbzer0.com 14 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yeah, I fhtagn every night.

Twice on Sundays.

[–] voxthefox@lemmy.blahaj.zone 47 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Isn't that rationale baked into the tabletop games at least (call of cthulu, etc), maybe the fiction itself as well? I know there are some rules where you make intelligence checks and if you fail (so you're too dumb to comprehend what your seeing), then you're not affected with sanity loss

[–] Gutek8134@lemmy.world 10 points 1 day ago

I shouldn't be allowed to play CoC because I never succeed on those IRL

[–] nednobbins@lemmy.zip 15 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Lovecraft describes it as "non-Euclidean".

If you understand enough math the know that this means altering Euclid's 5th axiom then you also know that most non-Euclidean geometries can't be comprehended by humans.

[–] Bronzebeard@lemmy.zip 7 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

Your house is non-euclidean.

[–] dontbelievethis@sh.itjust.works 6 points 16 hours ago

Your mom is non-euclidean.

[–] SkyeStarfall@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 points 22 hours ago

Until you realize that we literally live in a non-euclidean universe, and we comprehend it just fine. Not to mention that the surface of a sphere, which is pretty much what the surface of the earth is, is also non-euclidean

[–] AngryishHumanoid@lemmynsfw.com 11 points 1 day ago (1 children)

This reminds me of the Arkham Horror board game and my favorite character: the farmhand. His backstory is that he sees a weird animal out in the field killing the cows. Instead of suffering sanity damage like most characters he just figures: well can't have animals hurting the cows, so he grabs his shotgun and kills it.

[–] vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works 6 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

Pretty sure there's a character who does this in a Lovecraft story as well, couple of guys from the Miskatonic University go to deal with an abomination after it's brother gets mauled by the University guard dog anyways one of them just brings a really big gun.

[–] ShaggySnacks@lemmy.myserv.one 6 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

That is the most American answer ever to a problem. Just bring a big gun.

[–] AngryishHumanoid@lemmynsfw.com 4 points 10 hours ago

Now I'm reminded of my favorite quote from the Dresden Files:

Harry: You’re in America now. Our idea of diplomacy is showing up with a gun in one hand and a sandwich in the other and asking which you’d prefer.

Luccio: Did you bring a sandwich?

Harry: Who do I look like, Kissinger?

[–] Kalothar@lemmy.ca 4 points 1 day ago

This is beautiful