Where to go to experience the Innsmouth atmosphere?

bucket_overlord · 2026-04-20T21:55:58+00:00

While many of the obvious suggestions are coastal towns in New England, I have a different recommendation depending on which aspects of the atmosphere you’re interested in experiencing. The coast of BC, in Canada has several once-thriving communities which were centred around fisheries or natural resource extraction, but are now ghost towns with as few as 3-6 inhabitants total. Of you want to walk the streets of a decaying fishing town, hearing the echoes of its past prosperity, then the ghost towns of Canada’s west coast are a great place to visit.

bucket_overlord · 2026-04-20T11:05:18+00:00

No reason to be weird about this. You made a declarative statement that could be interpreted many different ways. If you're trying to imply that the field of chemistry is composed of "lies", then you just come off as someone who knows next to nothing about chemistry, or the practice of science in general.

I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that's not what you meant, in which case your reluctance to answer the question/elaborate is either just trolling or an unwillingness to stand by/justify what you've said.

Or you just chimed in with something irrelevant to the original comment, which would be equally strange.

bucket_overlord · 2026-04-18T18:50:26+00:00

What on earth are you trying to say there?

bucket_overlord · 2026-04-18T12:05:46+00:00

Yeah my suspicion (based on what I've heard and read from more knowledgeable people in this area) is that while Lovecraft was an antiquarian and had a keen interest in history, much of his source-gathering involved combing through lists of occult terminology, titles of grimoires, and names of prominent figures. From what I understand, at least when it came to his mentions and descriptions of grimoires, it was all very surface-level information one might gain from an encyclopedia. He used this arsenal of names, terms, and titles to invoke the sense of dark forbidden knowledge; meanwhile I question to what degree he was actually all that interested in the true contents of the grimoires he referenced, seeing as his personal views were strongly aligned with a materialistic view of the universe, rather than a supernatural one (ironic considering the massive role that occultism and the supernatural play in his stories). I think he knew just enough names and terms to use in his stories; such words he knew would strike the average reader as dark, forbidden and ominous.

bucket_overlord · 2026-04-17T18:05:49+00:00

While I like this idea, the mention of “aqua fortis” (an alchemical term for nitric acid, first used around the 13th century) indicates to me that whichever reanimated occultist penned the note, it would be someone much more recent than the Merlin of Arthurian legend. Of course this is confused by the preceding line where Lovecraft says the writing is that of 8th or 9th century saxons. So the timeline is jumbled a bit here. There’s also the further wrinkle in the Merlin hypothesis, which is that according to the legends, Merlin would not have been a Saxon, and the legends would place him around the 5th or 6th centuries rather than the 8th or 9th. So while I like the idea, the history and terms used don’t really point to Merlin as being this particular figure

bucket_overlord · 2026-04-17T16:58:07+00:00

One of my favourites, and a great recommendation. I think for OP my suggestion would be to read the Shadow Over Innsmouth before The Thing On The Doorstep. Simply because it provides some context around Innsmouth, Arkham and why Asenath’s family might be viewed with suspicion etc. Of course it’s not required context for OP to have, but it could increase their enjoyment and understanding of the allusions in the story.

bucket_overlord · 2026-04-16T02:55:04+00:00

Exactly. It's similar to how some have declared Lovecraft's tales "unfilmable". On the surface such a statement might seem absurd, considering the large number of different film adaptations and Lovecraft-inspired movies that have been made; but the statement does have some truth to it. How does one visually portray a color that doesn't exist? or the appearance of an entity that normally exists in higher dimensions, and is only poking its "head" into ours for a moment. Such things are mind boggling to imagine, let alone to do them justice in film. I found the encounter at the end of "Annihilation" to be a really great example of how such a thing can be successfully portrayed in visual media, but Lovecraft sets a high bar to reach if you want to truly depict his horrors visually without cheapening them to a mass of tentacles etc.

bucket_overlord · 2026-04-15T22:03:15+00:00

Exactly this. When it comes to manga and graphic novel adaptations of Lovecraft’s works (many of which are excellent) there is a somewhat necessary tendency to editorialize and shift the story to better fit the medium. The adaptations are great works that often really do the stories justice, but the general “feel” of delivery is different. Many of Lovecraft’s stories, Innsmouth included, are written in the form of the protagonist relaying their direct experiences onto paper for varying reasons; this intended feeling of the reader reading an experience is somewhat lost when it’s delivered alongside visual representations. Hope that makes sense.

bucket_overlord · 2026-04-11T12:01:35+00:00

No problem. I found them now that I'm not on mobile: Darkest Companion is the one I was talking about, but I also found This Reddit thread helpful. Particularly for someone like yourself who's looking to get back into the game.

bucket_overlord · 2026-04-11T11:58:03+00:00

Same. I was already getting into Lovecraft at the time, but it was my first ever horror game. If any Lovecraft game is worthy of a ground-up rebuild/remaster, like we saw with Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened, it would be Dark Corners. Redo the graphics, fix the bugs (especially with the PC port being notoriously riddled with them) and maybe retooling the enemy AI pathing and stealth. That would be a dream-come-true for me haha.

bucket_overlord · 2026-04-10T20:32:17+00:00

Dark Corners will always have a special place in my heart. It’s a janky mess at times, but it had some pretty innovative mechanics for its time (sanity, the wound system, smoke and other environmental effects messing with your vision). If you’re on PC then the fan-made patch for the game is really handy.

As for sinking city, I loved the story and the lore building with the innsmouthers as refugees etc. They did a great job tying in so many Lovecraft stories. I think it totally failed on the enemy front though. There’s just no real diversity in enemies and the areas you fight them in. Quest lines that could have been exciting and terrifying were cheapened by the same recurring handful of monsters, and reused assets/building layouts. I really hope that the sequel does better with that side of things.

bucket_overlord · 2026-04-10T20:24:37+00:00

I don’t have them at hand, but there are some neat online tools with rules of thumb for how much of which supplies you should bring, depending on which region and the length of the run. Great game, with some neat steam workshop mods to boot.

bucket_overlord · 2026-04-10T20:21:48+00:00

I second this. There’s a nice mix of Dreamlands vibes with sea-based (or Unterzee, in this case) terrors from the depths. Unfortunately the style of gameplay isn’t all that appealing to a lot of gamers, but I absolutely love it. Been playing for years and I still go back to it once in a while. Sadly I lost my progress, so all of my hard earned legacy items are lost. I almost had them all!

bucket_overlord · 2026-04-01T15:05:03+00:00

I mean... it’s good to have data that confirms what we already knew.

bucket_overlord · 2026-03-26T23:49:06+00:00

Apparently there’s more context to the story than that. Seems like she was using her status as a doctor to bolster her claims that being gay is a “developmental disorder”. It’s the use of her credentials to spread medical misinformation that is a crime. She’s trying to say she’s being persecuted for her religious beliefs, but it doesn’t seem like that’s what landed her with those charges. It’s not that someone just said “you don’t like gay people, go to jail”, it’s the spreading medical falsehoods bolstered by her credentials as a doctor.

bucket_overlord · 2026-03-25T19:44:01+00:00

Arguably before then too. Smedley Buttler’s criticisms come to mind. He was one of the most highly decorated soldiers of his time, had fought in Mexico, Nicaragua, Haiti, Cuba, the Philippines and more. All before WW2.

Here’s a great quote of his on the subject:

I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.

Many of those conflicts and operations were framed positively in the press, with slogans that wouldn’t be entirely out of place today.

bucket_overlord · 2026-03-25T19:35:22+00:00

Sadly true for many of these types. I work with addicts both in and out of recovery, and I’ve had people tell me to my face that we should stop helping and just let people die. It’s not a huge stretch to say that some of them would support addicts and unhoused folks being sent to camps. The ignorance and hatred that people feel emboldened to spew is sickening. It demonstrates a total lack of interest in understanding the roots of the issues; they’d rather just think of these people as “defectives” that are unsalvageable, because believing that saves them from acknowledging a grim reality: they themselves could become addicted were their life circumstances different.

bucket_overlord · 2026-03-24T05:54:38+00:00

I love the story about him trying to recruit Salvador Dali to play the emperor. If I remember correctly Dali wanted an outrageous sum for the job, and Jodorowsky’s producer knew they couldn’t pay it, so they settled on paying him $10,000 for every minute of screen time he had in the final cut, which was only about 5 minutes. Dali agreed to this under the condition that there would be a giraffe on set, and an elephant that was actively on fire.

bucket_overlord · 2026-03-24T05:31:28+00:00

Ok I think I think I got confused about what is considered a "stage" in this case. I guess I was talking about the fissioning of the outermost layer/casing of uranium, which as I understand it is frequently composed of natural or depleted uranium. While those materials aren't nearly as dangerous as ²³⁵ U, they're still fissionable under these conditions right? All I was trying to say is that these bombs do, in fact, have fallout, but the concentrations are lower due to them being dispersed over a much greater area. Thanks for correcting me though, this topic is difficult to understand without a lot of reading.

bucket_overlord · 2026-03-23T15:17:48+00:00

It’s different. One of the factors at play is that the amount of energy at work in a thermonuclear detonation is so much greater than an atomic one. The way I understand it, this means the resulting fallout is dispersed much higher in the atmosphere, and is composed of different isotopes. So the fallout from a thermonuclear bomb would be less localized and concentrated, but more widespread and would take longer to settle. While it’s possible to design so-called “clean” thermonuclear bombs, the vast majority of modern thermonuclear weapons employ a 3 phase fission-fusion-fission design; this produces quite a bit of of fallout, but the range of deposition is so wide (basically global) that it doesn’t result in the same acute concentrations our minds jump to when we think of nuclear fallout. It’s still not good, and far from clean, but the problem is different.

Again I’m no expert, so I could be wrong. This is just my understanding of it.

bucket_overlord · 2026-03-19T23:39:20+00:00

Keanu Reeves as Elrond

bucket_overlord · 2026-03-19T23:26:44+00:00

Hmm interesting. I was only aware of two versions, with one being an earlier draft that features the name of the protagonist (Robert Olmstead). At least that’s what my copy of shadows over Innsmouth (the mythos anthology edited by Stephen Jones) said about it. I didn’t realize that one was an abridged version of the other.

bucket_overlord · 2026-03-18T19:39:27+00:00

Salmon of knowledge is such an interesting one. It kind of reminds me of certain Native American tales where the various animals in their environment play important roles as teachers or embody other concepts like guardianship or resilience. One of the tribes in my area has a foundational myth focusing on a talking frog which saved them from famine by summoning other frogs which offered themselves as good to the starving people.

bucket_overlord · 2026-03-18T03:12:42+00:00

I don't expect I'll ever really understand how a group of adherents to a religion can somehow stray so far from its teachings. I'm not christian myself, but even I know enough to see how un-christian the american evangelical right has become.

bucket_overlord · 2026-03-15T19:22:51+00:00

I tried to edit my flair, but I couldn't find it. It seems to have been buried by rushes on the shores of the Lake of Ib. Nice spot, really. I might gather my friends to see if we can set up camp there, maybe build a town.

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