I found a new way how to depict mind breaking lovecraftian entities on screen!

Think I found a way to simulate what looking at a Great Old One would be like, based on Ramsey Campbell's Daoloth

It's a way to really come close to the impossible and mindbreaking way they are supposed to look like, by creating a lot of impossible looking images and let them rapidly change into each other.

This way, if it happens quickly enough you can even portray something impossible like objects being big and miniscule at the same time.

The only problem I still see are the alien colors, but I suspect that rapidly changing colors in a similar way, might also work with this.

Photosensitive people and people at risk of developing photosensitive epilepsy need to stay away from this!!!!!!

https://www.reddit.com/r/Cthulhu/s/TZ706pMUKe

Made a slower and and hopefully more eye friendly version, but am not really sure if this one can be watched by photosensitive people.

https://www.reddit.com/u/unimatrixq/s/MZUsp4t4L3

Do you think this version is still dangerous for photosensitives or can everyone watch it?

 

You might want to add a warning that such a flickering image could induce a photosensitive epileptic fit in some people.

 

Thanks. Hadn't considered that. Do you know how to add such a warning into a gif post on Reddit?

 

Deleted the original and re-uploaded it in a new post on Reddit with a warning for photosensitive people and people at risk of developing photosensitive epilepsy!

 

Made a slower and as I hope more eye friendly version:

https://www.reddit.com/u/unimatrixq/s/MZUsp4t4L3

Do you think this one is still dangerous for photosensitive people?

 

I don't know as it's asking me to log into Reddit. I'm not an expert, but I know that flickering images can affect some people adversely. My own take is that the images would rapidly morph into one another rather than flip - rather like a 4D (or higher dimensional) form such as a tesseract does when intersected by 3D space, but never having seen a Great Old One, what do I know?

 

I'll send you the new version via pm.

Think morphing would take away from the indescibability and the mystery and make it just another shapeshifter. Just being something else in a second, leaves the question about what's actually happening open. Perhaps it's all these impossible shapes we see at the same time and the changing is
just our brain trying to deal with interpreting all of the sanity destroying aspects.

Update: I'm sorry, but apparently it's impossibility to send files here on Trekbbs.

 

Something like a quantum mechanical entity that is either a wave or a particle depending on how you measure it? A process usually known as state vector reduction or wave function collapse - although I'm of the Everettian faction that doesn't believe such a process exists (it's never been demonstrated, having been dreamt up by Heisenberg and unfortunately taken seriously by von Neumann). Perhaps the form would reflect an instantaneous state of the observer's mind that is unable to process the whole actuality of the entity.

 

Yep, that's a great explanation!

By the way, I found a solution:

https://old.reddit.com/over18?dest=...m_name=androidcss&utm_source=share&utm_term=1

This should allow you to view 18+ content without needing to use the app.

 

This is completely insensitive but if one did have an epileptic fit watching that it would be quite an appropriate reaction to seeing an Old One. It is an interesting way to envision the concept and is really strange to watch.

 

It mostly just looks like a fast slideshow of A.I. generated geometric patterns to me.
If this was shown to me with no explanation, there's no chance I'd have guessed what it was supposed to represent.

I think like La Fin absolue du monde (and arguably Blipverts) there's no way to really show it and get across the supposed power of the image.

 

Aren't indescribable eldritch abominations supposed to look this way?

 

But I think they're supposed to drive you insane rather than make you go, "Huh?"

 

If they're indescribable, they're not going to be depictable as that is a method of description. Inducing neural overload and psychosis is probably the way to go.

 

It's like writing a story with a color unknown on Earth.



What the fuck. How am I supposed to picture that. We have all the colors.

And then people make filmed adaptations of the story.

And it's pink.

We have pink on this planet! That's how we made the damn movie!

 

Guess if you would encounter something like that (and probably really big) for real, hunting you and probably trying to kill you, I think the chance is really high that you would end up totally insane

As I have already mentioned in my first post, it would have been probably better to rapidly change colors to create the illusion of a new color that doesn't exist on Earth.

 

All "colors" exist on earth. The most that could happen on another world is to have life forms who have the ability to see beyond the spectrum visible to us or who perceive the world differently so that color would be meaningless to them. Of course, in the real world how I interpret green in my head may be something that nobody else has ever seen.

 

Yes, but generally I believe it may be possible to stimulate the human optical nerves with unusual impressions to show something really unique and probably still unseen. Like it happened with impossible objects during the 20th century for example.

It's interesting that apparently over the entirety of human history, no artist ever came up with something like that, until then.

 

Do we?

 

The concept of qualia means we will never know. Some people have an extra type of cone cell in their retinae (tetrachromatism) to the usual three and they have heightened colour vision - possibly seeing a hundred times more colours than most of us can (usually estimated at one million). Mantis shrimp have between 12 and 16 types of photoreceptor, if I recall correctly.