unforum

[dashcat]

Wild and Tame SPEC

[Phaedra]

Interesting thoughts. I'm sort of waiting for more packages because I'm trying to get a feel for the size of that particular game board. For a while it looked like there were nine pieces to the watercolor, then sixteen, now possibly more. But you're right, we definitely already have a lot of information to play with.

In the Wild Spec arena, I find myself really wondering about Bast, in light of her sending us to the Sentry Outpost forum. I'd been thinking of her as the nebulous, myth-and-legend-oriented type psychic, in contrast to the hard-info investigators over at SO.

But what if she's something of a hacker (whether white hat or black hat) herself? How'd she even know about the SO forums? And how'd she get our addresses? We appear in her dreams, so she knows we exist. Okay. But did she also dream our addresses?

Finding us in the real world seems less a job for a psychic and more that of someone with good internet skillz.

Which raises another question for me. From what I understand of the Lovecraft mythos (or mythoi, maybe), the Big Baddies often communicated with their human servants via dreams.

[aliendial]

Next up - the Lovecraft Spelling Bee! Or perhaps it's just the Typing Bee...

[bwochinski]

[Occultus]

Ok - I'm pretty sure I just went off on a HUGE tangent, but just in case there are any grains of sanity in what I found:

I was browsing through the package contents and noticed these two pictures:
http://bsuwiki.arghive.com/Image:Outoftheforest-pic-bottom.jpg
http://bsuwiki.arghive.com/Image:KB-p23-top.jpg
and I looked into them in more detail.

They are manuscripts by Samuel Purchas written around 1613. The second is based on notes from Richard Hakluyt that Purchas completed after Hakluyt's death in 1616. Both are about English exploration around the world.

As an aside (I didn't look too much down this route) Hakluyt is credited with being the main driving force behind English colonisation in America. He founded Jamestown and established the colony in Virginia.

When Purchas wrote these books, he was the rector of St Martin's church, in Ludgate, London.

This letter:
http://bsuwiki.arghive.com/Personal_Letters#Thebruce_--_Kitchener_.2804.2F13.29
uses the word bedlam and there is the asylum pictured in the watercolour. At this time, Bedlam (the infamous asylum) was located just outside London's North Wall about 1/2 a mile from Ludgate.

Ludgate itself (just opposite the church) had been newly rebuilt at the time - it was originally built around AD 60 by King Lud, or named after him by the Romans. The gate was the main route to the Roman cemetry just inside the walls.

Lud (or LLud) was a (possibly mythical) Welsh King of Britain, and is supposed to be buried under Ludgate (and London is alleged to be derived from his name). The interesting bit about him are the stories in the Welsh legends known as the Mabinogion where he and his brother rid Britain of three supernatural menaces.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mabinogion
The Mabinogion may predate and be a precursor for the Arthurian legends (linking to the knight/dragon picture?).

The story of LLud and his brother taking on supernatural enemies of Britain
http://www.lundyisleofavalon.co.uk/texts/welsh/lludd.htm
includes:

[cissmiace]

I always took 'head to the mountains' to mean flee. For example, the saying 'run for the hills'

[konamouse]

Wonderful information, Occultus - I'm learning alot!

[cissmiace]

Wow Occultus, that was incredible

The only trouble with the whole Arthur thing is, every country in Great Britain claims he came from there. Tintagel in Cornwall, Wales obviously, even Scotland and Ireland have all called dibbs on the poor chap

Also, up until a few years ago, scholars believed Arthur was in fact a myth. Until this was unearthed at Tintagel:

Arthur Stone

Wiki

Edited for typo galore

[WolfHawk]

I have not read Lovecraft. Don't know why, just haven't gotten around to it. However, I noticed this reference in a link someone posted in the SO forum (boldface mine):

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cthulhu_Mythos_cults

[Caterpillar]

I'm going to stick this here as it's all circumstantial and not very cohesive, and more importantly probably means nothing.

I was digging around for our "Angel" [again] and thought to go back to the source of it all. I found the one pictured below in a North Providence cemetery. The thing about her that "sticks out" [after many, many encounters with angels this past month] is her finger. I haven't seen one seem quite so prominent.

Then I found that Lovecraft himself was born at 454 Angell Street, and lived at 598 Angell Street from 1904-24.

The other connection with "Angell" comes in The Call of Cthulhu". The story is presented as a manuscript found among the papers of Francis Thurston. In the text, he recounts his discovery of notes left behind by his grand-uncle, George Gammell Angell, a prominent professor of Semitic languages at Brown University in Providence. The name Lovecraft chose for this character probably comes from his childhood home and his Uncle Gamwell, whose name was pronounced with a silent W.

So back to the "Angel" pictured below.

The name on the monument is F.A. ABELL (Fable?...lol) and after a quick google search, what I came up with for "Abell" is this. It reminded me a bit of all the "Space Text" stuff spewed from the file dumps (or whatever you call them).

Part of the accompanying text for the image...

[WolfHawk]

I love Stream of Conciousness investigation; I do it all the time! Start out looking for one thing and end up on something very different and completely unrelated. One search I did for this game began with Lovecraft and ended up with a South Park ring tone. Talk about not even on the same field!!!!!!!!

[Chanur]

Did we get a picture of the angel?

[Chanur]

Speculation on the circled words:

I think that the circled words were meant to be clues to put the watercolor puzzle together. The words that were circled were all on pages from either Mountains f Madness or Monsters of the Sea and all circled words were about sea monsters and mountains.

I think that we've solved the puzzle that those clues were meant for without the clues themselves being understood. I think they were meant to tell us to "look closely" at the watercolors and put together the picture of the sea monster and mountains.

[danteIL]

[Chanur]

I think I may have located our angel.

Check these out:

http://www.rootsweb.com/~iajohnso/Postcard21.htm
http://www.icgov.org/documents/oaklandhistory.pdf

She's faceless, she's missing a finger, she's pointing skyward, and in true gothic/Cthulu fasion.... she's a black angel.