How Would HPL Have Felt About the Internet?

[Robert W]

For HPL, the autodidact, the internet would have been a dream come true. Can imagine for a man with as keen an intellect and curiosity as HPL had to be able to, at a mere keystroke, to have near instantaneous access to the world's store house of knowledge. For him that would have been a heaven on Earth.

Also, can you imagine HPL on Skype? C:=

[T. Kelly Lee]

Also, can you imagine HPL on Skype? C:=

I really wish there was someone who did HPL impersonations like that guy who re-enacts M.R. James.  An HPL Youtube page would be awesome.  I can see him in vest, tabbed collar, rolled up shirt sleeves, loose tie, a cat on his lap, and a double decker ice cream cone in one hand.   

[LambethWarp]

Here's a thought. The idea of totally banning or suppressing a book is now meaningless, since it only requires a single electronic copy to be made and that can then be replicated indefinitely, at no loss of resolution, for virtually no cost and virtually instantaneously. So, if the Necronomicon existed in real life, isn't it likely to almost certain that some evil lunatic would have scanned it to PDF and uploaded to a free public filesharing site by now? 

[Bob Lovecraft]

I'm not sure about that, LambethWarp. I think that if you had access to the Necronomicon, then you would want to keep it private. Too many other people out there would be looking for it. And if you are using it, chances are you would know exactly how rare and unique it would be. Now, I do think that in your scenario a copy might be out there with massive amounts of encryption being passed around some private networks, just not getting disseminated to the public. Kind of like the idea of a group like say the Masons are modernized at this point, but you don't see copies of their rituals and practices being bandied about the net. They know how to keep there secrets.

Bob

[old book]

When I tried to scan the Necronomicon, the images were all wrong. Curved lines became straight, eldritch glyphs turned out like Hello Kitty icons, certain passages appeared to shimmer under the light of the passing scanner head and were useless. When I persevered and attempted to form a PDF out of the page images, all sorts of illegal PostScript operations were reported. Eventually I took screen shots of the graphics I had, grayscaled them and just threw them into a batch PDF creation job. When I tried to upload it, my house experienced a brown-out, as if the AC frequency were off, or ungrounded somehow. The television picture reduced to about half size, then everything flickered out. The electricians who came out the next day said it was the damndest thing they'd ever seen, and there were no blackouts or brownouts anywhere else on the line. By the time I got the computer running again, the directory where I had everything had become corrupt and unreadable.

I've never had anything like this happen with my secret Masonic rituals collection or the Project Paperclip stuff. Shortly after all this happened my house was burglarized. The only things missing were some salad mushrooms from the fridge and--you guessed--it the old N book.

Maybe wikileaks will have better luck getting this out. Maybe when they release the Bigfoot files they can do this, too.