Weird Tales (Tellers of Weird Tales): A question came up in that entry, namely: Who was the editor of the first-anniversary number of Weird Tales? Some comments went back and forth. I can’t say that we have a definitive answer. I’m not sure there will ever be a definitive answer. But I would like to summarize what we know.

Modern Warfare (Defense One): Ukraine has a network of almost 10,000 acoustic sensors scattered around the country that locate Russian drones and send targeting information to soldiers in the field who gun them down.

Games (Bounding Into Comics): In response to the absolutely massive wave of backlash directed towards those players from the Land of the Rising Sun, the Ubisoft dev team currently working on Assassin’s Creed Shadows has apologized for the fact that “some elements” of the game’s promotional material have “caused concern within the Japanese community”.

New (Nigel Taylor): Worlds of Strangeness: 5 A collection of short stories and articles related to fantasy and horror. Stories from “Doc” Clancy, Richard Toogood, Beverly M. Collins and Graham Andrews.

Tolkien (Notion Club Papers): What is striking is that it is made clear that the corrupting evil of the One Ring cannot ever, under any circumstances, be long resisted by anyone who could and would be able to use it – and this is true no matter how strong and noble their nature and intentions really are.

D&D (Grumpy Wizard): A reader named Pete sent me a question about how to manage a group of six players. He is new to DMing and groups of more than five is giving him some trouble. Good question Pete, thanks for asking!

Review (Grognardia): The first few years of the Old School Renaissance were marked by a renewed appreciation not just of early roleplaying games but also of the pulp fantasy stories that inspired them. This was the time when Appendix N of Gary Gygax’s AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide became a frequent topic of discussion on blogs and forums

Audio (Horror Babble): “The Man of Stone” is a short story written by H. P. Lovecraft and Hazel Heald. Published in the October 1932 issue of Wonder Stories, it tells of two friends who go in search of several peculiarly life-like stone statues in the remote Adirondack Mountains of New York.

D&D (Grumpy Wizard): There is a school of thought that “vanilla” old school monsters, villains, pseudo-European medieval settings, are not interesting and should be set aside for something more creative. What is meant by “creative” is often an aesthetic that is absurd, unusual, and experimental.

History (The Past): The building was awaiting a transformation. It stood in what is now known as Insula 10, Region 9, of Pompeii, and enjoyed an enviable position on the via di Nola: an important thoroughfare leading from one of the city gates towards the forum baths. Like many houses in Pompeii, a narrow corridor funnelled visitors from the street into a central atrium that was open to the sky and lined with rooms.

Tolkien (Darth Gandalf): In this video, we will be talking about Drúwaith Iaur, a mysterious wilderness to the west of Gondor. What was going on there? What did it look like? And did anyone live there?

Conan (Sprague de Camp Fan): Conan the Rebel by Poul Anderson was published by Bantam Books in 1980. This was the sixth book in the Bantam Conan series. The first printing featured a foldout cover by Bob Larkin. This novel features both Conan and Belit. The story takes place during the events of Robert E. Howard’s “Queen of the Black Coast.”

Fantasy (Ken Lizzi): I’m not sure I possess the tools to discuss George MacDonald’s Lilith. This is not, I flatter myself, because I lack the mental capacity, but because I inhabit a different conceptual universe than that of a Victorian-era minister. (Note I do not write Victorian minister: I gathered the impression that MacDonald did not entirely approve of the zeitgeist of his age.)

Authors (Robert Bloch): Gallery of Robert Bloch.

Robert E. Howard (Michael K. Vaughan): Now is the Best Time to be a Robert E. Howard Fan.

James Bond (James Bond Book Review): In this Benson era I am FEASTING like a King reading these books!

Classics (Silver Key): Treasure Island was a treat. I hadn’t read this since I was a kid and it holds up extremely well, both from the perspective of an adult reading a book ostensibly for young men (it was first published in serialized fashion for Young Folks, a children’s magazine), but also a work written in 1881. It’s bloody, but relatively bloodless, the violence ample though at a slight remove.

Fiction (Wormwoodiana): It was 150 years ago today that Lewis Carroll began to write ‘The Hunting of the Snark’. As Goetz Kluge explains at his ‘The Hunting of the Snark’ blog, on 18 July 1874, ‘the very last line of Carroll’s Snark tragicomedy came into his head while out on a walk at Guildford: “For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.”

Fantasy (Wyrd Britain): I’ve never really properly dug into Dunsany’s writing before beyond an anthology short or two but this collection called to me (despite it’s hideous cover art) and proved to be something entirely wonderful.

Weird Tales (Dark Worlds Quarterly): We continue out look at Weird Tales stories that made it onto television with another episode of Boris Karloff’s Thriller. This one was called “Trio For Terror” and it used August Derleth’s “The Extra Passenger” for one of its three pieces.

Comic Books (50 Year Old Comics): In November, 1973, the third bimonthly issue of DC Comics’ The Shadow arrived on newsstands as scheduled, sporting yet another instantly-classic cover by regular series artist Michael W. Kaluta and colorist/washtone-process master Jack Adler.

Science Fiction (Black Gate): Here’s my new look at an SF paperback from the ’70s/’80s. Phyllis Eisenstein’s In the Hands of Glory is a book I eagerly bought and read back when it came out, in 1981. By a writer whose work I enjoyed. From a publishing imprint (Timescape, edited by David Hartwell) that I greatly respected.

H. P. Lovecraft (Tentaclii): More notes on the Sully letters, letters from Lovecraft which are to be found in Letters to Wilfred B. Talman, and Helen V. and Genevieve Sully.

The notes open in November 1933.

Page 327. “… decadence is manifest in one form or another over nearly all the Western World [… yet] It is not too late to hope that revivals of spirit may yet take place here and there

D&D (Grognardia): The people have spoken, which means I shall continue this series for a while longer. In reviewing the suggestions offered by readers, one of the more popular ones was the mind flayer. Since this tentacled monstrosity is also my favorite Dungeons & Dragons monster, I thought it’d make sense to kick off the next round of these posts with a look at mind flayers (or illithids, as they were called in Descent into the Depths of the Earth).

History (Kris Hughes): Who was Loth of Lothian?