AtomHeartFather

I’m just an old guy with a lot of opinions. I am a sysadmin by trade. I like Linux, cool gadgets, Sci-Fi, DC comics, bass guitar, prog rock/metal, and annoying my kids with dumb dad jokes.

  • 11 Posts
  • 36 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Polaris strikes me as the retelling of a fever dream. I did enjoy The White Ship more than Polaris because it seemed to be a little more cohesive. Either story could easily be the basis for a concept album by Rush or an epic song by Iron Maiden.

    I have to admit that I don’t much care for these early writings. They are brief and somewhat disjointed, a little too dreamlike to hold my interest. I do hold them in some regard since they show the beginnings of his Dreamlands ideas that take on fuller form in his later writings.


  • The Doom That Came To Sarnath was my first introduction to the writings of HPL many many years ago. I enjoy re-reading it as much as I did the first time. This time I opted to listen to it on HorrorBabble, the narrater was very good.

    I always find myself thinking about little side stories in the same setting. What did the “people” of Ib ever do to deserve the hate of Sarnath? The beings that inhabited Ib seemed to just keep to themselves. They are described as having “bulging eyes, pouting, flabby lips, and curious ears, and were without voices”. Is it just simple pure xenophobia that drove the people of Sarnath to kill them all, or were there unstated incursions into Sarnath? The story does does not describe the denizens of Ib as anything other than ugly, and maybe that was enough for the people of Sarnath.

    In the end the people of Sarnath got what they deserve, which is a somewhat surprising result considering how deeply xenophobic HPL was at the time of the writing. One would expect a Sarnath apologist viewpoint.

    I always feel like Doom has an almost cinematic feel to it. Even though the story is brief the setting is lush and very interesting.






  • I don’t hate it. It makes room to tell new “old” stories without just completely dismissing canon. The idea of a “fixed point in time” is a concept that I think originated with Doctor Who. The Strange New Worlds concept is similar, but instead of a fixed point its a fixed event or fixed outcome.

    I do wonder though, how much of this “time pushing back” is actually that? Or is it actually just the “Federation Time Cops” from the far future making sure things happen even if someone successfully meddles with history. I actually kind of hate the concept of time travel being a thing in Star Trek. Leave it to shows like Doctor Who.


















  • Community discovery that spans all federated instances should be one of the top things that development should be working on. And it should be integrated into Lemmy, not as a separate website people have to go to and search.

    Peoples are lazy. They don’t want to have to go to some separate website and then search for something. And lets not even get started on the difficulties of adding a remote community if your instance doesn’t know it exists, its wonky at best.

    If a user cant type “Stephen King community” in the search bar on their instance and then get results, they are either going to assume it doesn’t exist and give up OR they are going to be hitting that “Create Community” button.


  • Of the themed instances that exist now, I’d be willing to bet that in addition to their local communities they host that they also subscribe to other communities that aren’t strictly related to whatever theme they are going with.

    For example, I’m sure the Star Trek instance also subscribes to the lemmy@lemmy.ml community so the admin can stay abreast of Lemmy news. And probably also follows other technology related communities as well.

    I think most people would just want to gravitate to whatever they want to be identified with. There’s nothing stopping you from joining a music themed instance and then adding some non-music subscriptions to your list. It doesn’t force those subs on anyone else on the instance.

    And if you don’t want to be identified with any specific topic or community, you can always join a general Lemmy instance like Beehaw or Lemmy.world and subscribe to whatever you like piecemeal.