Jason McKittrick sez,

On sale for 24 hours only! After the dreadful events that occurred in the backwater town of Dunwich, Massachusetts further inquiry was launched by professors at Miskatonic University. Searching the charred ruins of the old Whateley home, a badly damaged but still intact wooden lock box was found among the rubble. This box contained a hideous metal sculpture, seemingly ancient occult documents and a small cypher-encoded notebook with the name 'Wilbur Whateley' scrawled on the cover.

With the help of Prof. Henry Armitage, the notebook was deciphered and it was revealed that the metal sculpture was an idol of Yog-Sothoth, a multidimensional being that had been worshiped by the Whateley family for generations. Several metallurgical tests of the idol yielded no definitive answer as to what material it had been fashioned from and led scientists to conclude that the origin of the material to be non-terrestrial.

The Idol of Yog-Sothoth is hand cast in solid resin and individually signed and numbered by artist Jason McKittrick: Measures 5" x 3", $50+shipping.

THE IDOL OF YOG-SOTHOTH (Thanks, Jason!)

Matthew Borgatti has built an air-powered, 3D-printed robot tentacle that waves in a friendly fashion and lends a helping hand. It is in no way erotic. Nuh-uh, not at all.

So, with a very nice looking tentacle in hand, it was time to start experimenting with robotic air control. I believe I’ve found a system that works in a pretty simple and straightforward way. It still needs some work when it comes to the programming end, but I think the mechanics are well sorted. The idea is to pulse air into the tentacle using a solenoid valve, and have a constant bleed on the line so that flex will entirely be controlled by how long the valve stays on. It’s sort of a low frequency PWM. I’d like to get this working using a visual interface in Processing but, given how little I program, progress has been slow. I’ve got a thread on Adafruit with what I’ve come up with. In the meanwhile, you might like to check a rough video of the trefoil inflating.

The wonderful Ukrainian horror/fetish/steampunk mask maker Bob Basset has produced a two-faced Cthulhu mask; on one side, the betentacled visage; on the other, a lecterine horror.

Call of Cthulhu. One mask 2 faces.

Instructable user DoneDirtCheap posted this "Octopizza" recipe for the site's fast-food contest.

We eat a lot of pizza. Usually that means we take a blank canvas of soft dough and apply our favorite colors -basil, tomato, cheese, meats, veggies- then cut it into triangl-y pieces and eat the pointy ends first. But what if, this time, we changed neither the canvas nor the paints but the whole approach to eating pizza? How about dipping bread sticks in a cheesy, saucy pizza? Well, that's pretty good, except that bread sticks are boring. Then Claramecium (my oldest daughter's Instructables screen name), thought up the Octopizza, complete with pepperoni suckers. I love having kids!

Octopizza Pie: Gruesome and Delicious by donedirtcheap (via JWZ)

From Art Lebedev studios, the "octopus" plunger, which creates the amusing illusion of a tentacled poop-monster's questing appendage reaching up out of the pan.

Вантуз «Октопус» (via JWZ)

Nick Mamatas (author of such wonderful books as Sensation) formerly lived in Battleboro, VT, once home to amateur press enthusiast Arthur H. Good­e­nough, who was a correspondent of HP "Cthulhu" Lovecraft's. Nick discovered a postcard containing an interview between Good­e­nough and Lovecraft, entirely conducted on a single postcard. Good­e­nough kicked it off by sending Lovecraft a postcard with some questions, and Lovecraft answered them in minute writing in the whitespace on the card, using a sewing-needle dipped in ink, then posted it back to Goodenough. Seriously.

Love­craft was acquainted with Good­e­nough, and Lovecraft’s vis­its to Good­e­nough in Ver­mont in 1927 and 1928 are the basis of his won­der­ful nov­el­ette “The Whis­perer in Dark­ness.” After the story was pub­lished in Weird Tales, Good­e­nough sent Love­craft a con­grat­u­la­tory card, and also asked the author a cou­ple of ques­tions. Rather than respond­ing with a card or let­ter of his own, Love­craft wrote the answers in a tiny hand and then appar­ently gave the card to Vrest Orton — a book­man and even­tual founder of The Ver­mont County Store — who returned the card to Good­e­nough per­son­ally dur­ing a trip to the Green Moun­tain State. Then Good­e­nough sent the card back to Love­craft again, with follow-up ques­tions writ­ten in a nearly micro­scopic hand. I sup­pose he knew the local post­mas­ter, and was able to get the card back into the mail sys­tem with­out a prob­lem. Amaz­ingly, Love­craft man­aged to fit the answers to the ques­tions on the post­card in an even smaller hand. Sher­wood told me that he’d guessed that Love­craft used a mag­ni­fy­ing glass and a sewing nee­dle dipped in ink. Here’s an odd thing; Sher­wood had found the post­card at an estate sale. It had been pro­tected from the ele­ments because it had been used as a book­mark in a 1935 num­ber of The Rev­e­la­tor, and that num­ber was a spe­cial issue ded­i­cated to the “gothic tales” of Isak Dinesen.

I bought the card and kept it with me for years — I moved to Boston, and then to Cal­i­for­nia. Only recently have I been able to spare the time to closely exam­ine and tran­scribe the post­card. It took a few weeks. Lovecraft’s hand­writ­ing was dif­fi­cult to read in the best of times, as I learned in 2007 when writer Brian Even­son took me and my friend Geof­frey Good­win to the library at Brown Uni­ver­sity to check out some of Lovecraft’s papers. If any­thing, Goodenough’s pen­man­ship is even worse, espe­cially in the last unan­swered round of ques­tions. There are a few ink splat­ters on the post­card as well, but only one seems pur­pose­ful, as I make note of below. I took the card to work and abused my pho­to­copy and scan­ner priv­i­leges to blow up sec­tions of the card, then turn them into a series of PDFs. I then zoomed in on the PDFs as much as I could, to turn the tiny let­ters into great abstract shapes, to bet­ter see what we would call “kern­ing” if the text had been typset. To deci­pher this post­card, I not only had to read between the lines, as it were, but I had to make sure I was prop­erly read­ing between the letters.

Mamatas and a friendly googler who specializes in fonts managed to transcribe the card, and the link below contains the whole interview.

Brattleboro Days, Yuggoth Nights (via JWZ)