Blasphemous geometry
Lovecraft talked about that shit in his stories a lot. Impossible shapes and angles that would drive normal men to madness.
I like the concept of Eldritch horror that it is so fearful and alien that its impossible to describe in terms that could make you feel it. The most that words could do would give a view of the shadow of it instead of the horror itself. To finally understand the horror requires surrendering your sanity. If nothing else its a great literary tool.
This makes all the difference between a good Call of Cthulhu DM and a bad one.
"This horror that stands before you is no man, nor it anything resembling man in any facsimile other than it stands upon two appendages that could be mistaken for feet. The realization of it’s mere and miserable existence finds you stricken with a cold sweat akin to the feel of a pale and slimy fish at the market. It’s visage strikes in your being a fear that cores your stomach deeper than any forgotten, but suddenly realized promise. "
Shit like that?
Bam. Spot on. That makes for great storytelling. There’s even a sanity mechanic.
That was kinda my thought too, “How would I describe something that is so foreign to anything I’ve ever experienced that I’m entirely overwhelmed by the sheer realization of it’s existence. So much so that I can only describe the fear felt when seeing it?” The focus would first be on primal instincts before your brain could even begin with physical characteristics.
There’s an interesting generative experiment somewhere out there on the net that lets you generate “scary” images by progressively rating the output, it’s a neat tool, some of what it makes can mimic that horror, lol.
I have no interest in interacting with the “Phobiafinder 5000”. 😀
Oh, I’d be very interested in that if you can point me in any sort of direction.
I think I could be a good DM for it, then. 😃
I literally only sought to read Lovecraft’s stuff because several friends of mine I had shared my own stories with, constantly asked if I was inspired by him and how similar my writing was.
Well is your writing your way of expressing how you felt when you found out your uncle was Welsh? That’s the real key to Lovecraft.
Nah; I can comprehend the Welsh, even if I may not comprehend Welsh.
I just like trying to describe the indescribable.
lovecrafts writing wasn’t even made up, it’s just his actual lived experience
The ‘firefall’ novels (‘blindsight’ and ‘echopraxia’) are… Not exactly that, but very close, and better written than lovecraft could dream of. ‘Echopraxia’ does not hold your fucking hand at all though.
I’ve been looking for something new to read and this looks like exactly what I’m feeling.
They’re really good.
“crikey mate that shit’s fucked, anyway i need to get to work”
Non-euclidian fuckery
Good name for a mathrock band.
If you look at renderings of what 4D objects would look like intersecting 3D space, this is what I imagine for those. Seeing 3D cross sections morphing continuously but inconceivably into each other without being able to even comprehend the true form of the thing you’re seeing glimpses of would be terrifying.
You should look at higher than 4D renderings, like high dimensional hypercubes, as don’t forget non-euclidean geometry
Is there an interactive visualizer on the web for this kind of thing? Not that a 3D perspective projected into a 2D screen would help much, but being able to fiddle with the shapes might help visualize it in our mind.
You should check out 4d golf and hyperbolica
I believe the idea of eldritch is in being able to comprehent the true form - but only temporarily, since our minds cannot hold that knowledge, only to be left with a frayed hole in our thoughts
But also as people mentioned, there’s some cursed geometries. Hyperbolic and parabolic geometry is interesting (see Hyperholica and Hyperrogue), but things get worse with Nil and Solv
For a more plain existential horror also see Fractal Block World, pretty fun seeing the sense of scale as you shrink yourself ever further revealing detail you couldn’t perceive before, and also the sense of scale, as a tiny room becomes an incomprehensibly vast space you cannot hope to cross in your lifetime.
Lost source, via /u/Clobbersaurus:
“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.
but this is not impossible or out of ordinary though. you can even imagine stacking a couple cardboard boxes into that shape. i think it’s out of place because it’s too ordinary, because you’d expect some kind of symmetry, regularity, etc. from idealized mathematical shapes, but you didn’t. instead you just get some random looking stack of boxes.
Fyi this is just the best known packing of 17 squares, there might be a better one. We just haven’t been able to proove it or find a better one since 1998
If killing Cthulhu is all it takes to solve the box-packing problem, Amazon would have already done it. No, this is something far more sinister than that.
I can sense a middle finger coming from this image, somehow.
I see what you mean
I see an amongi
The rub with this design is that the length of the sides of the little squares is not an even integer division of the length of the sides of the big square, though.
Doing it the naive way, i.e. keeping all the edges parallel, you can only fit 16. However it’s trivial to fit 17 in there without it looking like a warehouse accident, like so:
Or, a slightly easier to follow rendering:
This may correlate with #17 on your linked list, but I was not rigorous with the math. (I.e. I just traced this off of the screenshot.)
I’m positive I’ve seen this as a 3D printed puzzle somewhere at some point…
The posted arrangement is the tightest known packing of 17 squares. The outer square has a side length of 4.6756 times a small sqare’s. So unless you’ve just found one no mathematician has thought of since 1998 yours is slightly larger.
Edit:
I found this tool to play around and your packing is 4.7 https://markorastas.github.io/PackingProblem/Edit edit:
I’m a dummy you just need pythagoras, yours is 4+√0.5≈4.7071Yep, if I’m not mistaken, your version has s = 4 + sqrt(2) which is approximately 4.70710678119. Very close to the ideal 4.67553009360455 !
There’s a link for alternate packings on that page, where you can see older versions, some with more aesthetically pleasing patterns of minimal tilted squares or symmetry. All of them use a larger value for
sthough and it’s hard to tell where your version would fit in.Yeah, I just winged it based on a hazy recollection of a block puzzle I’m pretty sure I saw once. I’m sure the puzzle in question was not mathematically rigorous both so it could look nicer (with the same or similar solution to what I doodled, there) and also so it could be like, you know, actually manufactured.
Blender calculates this as the optimal packing. It’s smaller than the ideal, but I’ve seen Blender be wrong before.
WITCHCRAFT!
(… which makes it very cool!)
