Peanuts/Cthulhu tee

Today only on Tee Fury, Queenmob's "Call of Snoophulhu" $10 tee.

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

MORE: Comics • Copyfight • cthulhu • happy mutants

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Ants and Stars: Bruce Sterling and Jasmina Tesanovic visit the Sardinia Radio Telescope in Italy

The Snowden Principle

gmills

I was initially excited to show this to my 9 and 11 year-old because they love Cthulhu, but then I realized I’d have to explain to them what Peanuts is. This is a strange world.
http://www.disoriented.net/ angusm

“It was a dark and stormy night …”
hypnosifl

Totally ordered. But quick question, is that curvy cartoon hexagram with the eye in it from some other illustration? I feel like I’ve seen it before…maybe just deja vu or mysterious unnameable dread…
- pKp
  
  If by “curvy cartoon hexagram with the eye ” you mean “curvy pentagram with the eye”, then yes, it’s an old representation of a bit of Lovecraftian lore called the “Elder Sign”, used by the Elder Things (barrel-shaped tentacular aliens that colonized Earth before Humans existed) to repel minions of the Elder Gods (Cthulhu and its ilk). Kinda weird to see it used directly under Cthulhu/Snoopy, unless the doghouse is used in some kind of containment ritual.This particular representation of it isn’t Lovecraft’s, but August Derleth’s, who was Lovecraft’s friend and continuator. The original Elder Sign looked like this : http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/02/Elder_sign.jpg
  More info at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elder_Sign
  
  Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn !
  
  TL;DR : it’s a sign created by Cthulhu’s creator HP Lovecraft, used to repel beings in the service of said divinity.
  - hypnosifl
    
    Sorry, was composing my own comment below when you replied so I didn’t see it before posting…thanks for the info on it being used to ward against minions of Elder Gods though (although from the wiki entry it doesn’t sound like Lovecraft had any notion of what the sign was used for besides warding off “Deep Ones” in Shadow Over Innsmouth, so I assume this idea that it wards off “minions of the Elder Gods” would have been a later addition in Derleth’s more Christian-influenced version of the Cthulhu Mythos where Cthulhu and the evil Elder Gods and their various creations were all seen as being on the “same side” in a cosmic good vs. evil battle against the friendly Elder Ones)
- hypnosifl
  
  Never mind, figured it out with some googling and research into forbidden tomes–apparently there’s something in Lovecraft lore called the elder sign, and although Lovecraft himself drew it as a sort of branch, thanks to a description made up by Cthulhu mythos writer August Derleth it’s often depicted as a warped pentagram, and for some reason a lot of people seem to draw it the same way (apparently this version of the drawing appears in the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game, maybe that’s how it became the “standard”)