Now, the term “criminally small” gets thrown around a lot on this blog. But I ask you… are you ready to behold true tininess?
This baby Mozambique rain frog [Breviceps mossambicus] was found and phtoographed near the Vis-Agier resort in Sodwana Bay, South Africa. These frogs require no water source to reproduce, instead laying eggs underground which then hatch by direct development into tiny frogs like the one you see above. These frogs inhabit a wide range of central and southern Africa, and are most commonly found after brief periods of rain. Images by Vis-Agie Resort on Facebook.
do you think this is what lovecraft meant whenever he described something as being beyond description
“It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train—a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter.”
— H. P. Lovecraft,
At the Mountains of Madness
This.. actually makes a fine reference to what a lovecraftian eldritch abomination SHOULD BE. not just.. tentacles and darkness. Perpetually changing, not cemented in form, with an otherworldly feel to it. Completely unrecognizable by most human descriptions, and only able to be viable perceived by those fine enough to be an adept wordsmith.
I think that this is very nearly an ideal representation of a lovecraftian eldritch horror, because the video that we see is (I’m fairly certain) footage that has been fed through Google deep dream.
The reason the frog looks so weird is because the program is trying to look at the frog, figure out what it is, and then overlay other images of the same thing.
The the thing about lovecraftian horrors issn’t just that they look conventionally weird or gross or scary. Instead, they are things that are so utterly alien that the human mind cannot properly comprehend what it is looking at. They defy description because they defy understanding.
And here we have a video of a computer, a simple silicon substitute for the human mind, struggling to understand what it is looking at, in much the same way that you would be hard pressed to understand a shoggoth.
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