Blasphemous geometry
Lovecraft talked about that shit in his stories a lot. Impossible shapes and angles that would drive normal men to madness.
this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2025
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I like the concept of Eldritch horror that it is so fearful and alien that its impossible to describe in terms that could make you feel it. The most that words could do would give a view of the shadow of it instead of the horror itself. To finally understand the horror requires surrendering your sanity. If nothing else its a great literary tool.
This makes all the difference between a good Call of Cthulhu DM and a bad one.
"This horror that stands before you is no man, nor it anything resembling man in any facsimile other than it stands upon two appendages that could be mistaken for feet. The realization of it's mere and miserable existence finds you stricken with a cold sweat akin to the feel of a pale and slimy fish at the market. It's visage strikes in your being a fear that cores your stomach deeper than any forgotten, but suddenly realized promise. "
Shit like that?
Bam. Spot on. That makes for great storytelling. There’s even a sanity mechanic.
That was kinda my thought too, "How would I describe something that is so foreign to anything I've ever experienced that I'm entirely overwhelmed by the sheer realization of it's existence. So much so that I can only describe the fear felt when seeing it?" The focus would first be on primal instincts before your brain could even begin with physical characteristics.
There's an interesting generative experiment somewhere out there on the net that lets you generate "scary" images by progressively rating the output, it's a neat tool, some of what it makes can mimic that horror, lol.
I have no interest in interacting with the "Phobiafinder 5000". 😀
Oh, I'd be very interested in that if you can point me in any sort of direction.
I've been looking but I am sorry to say the market has expanded significantly since the last time I messed around with the tool and now I can't even tell if the tool exists as it did or has been reformatted into one unfamiliar. You have my deepest apologies.
That's a shame. Thanks for trying though!
I think I could be a good DM for it, then. 😃
I literally only sought to read Lovecraft's stuff because several friends of mine I had shared my own stories with, constantly asked if I was inspired by him and how similar my writing was.
Well is your writing your way of expressing how you felt when you found out your uncle was Welsh? That's the real key to Lovecraft.
Nah; I can comprehend the Welsh, even if I may not comprehend Welsh.
I just like trying to describe the indescribable.
The 'firefall' novels ('blindsight' and 'echopraxia') are... Not exactly that, but very close, and better written than lovecraft could dream of. 'Echopraxia' does not hold your fucking hand at all though.
I've been looking for something new to read and this looks like exactly what I'm feeling.
They're really good.
If you look at renderings of what 4D objects would look like intersecting 3D space, this is what I imagine for those. Seeing 3D cross sections morphing continuously but inconceivably into each other without being able to even comprehend the true form of the thing you're seeing glimpses of would be terrifying.
You should look at higher than 4D renderings, like high dimensional hypercubes, as don't forget non-euclidean geometry
Is there an interactive visualizer on the web for this kind of thing? Not that a 3D perspective projected into a 2D screen would help much, but being able to fiddle with the shapes might help visualize it in our mind.
You should check out 4d golf and hyperbolica
I believe the idea of eldritch is in being able to comprehent the true form - but only temporarily, since our minds cannot hold that knowledge, only to be left with a frayed hole in our thoughts
But also as people mentioned, there's some cursed geometries. Hyperbolic and parabolic geometry is interesting (see Hyperholica and Hyperrogue), but things get worse with Nil and Solv
For a more plain existential horror also see Fractal Block World, pretty fun seeing the sense of scale as you shrink yourself ever further revealing detail you couldn't perceive before, and also the sense of scale, as a tiny room becomes an incomprehensibly vast space you cannot hope to cross in your lifetime.
Non-euclidian fuckery
Good name for a mathrock band.
but this is not impossible or out of ordinary though. you can even imagine stacking a couple cardboard boxes into that shape. i think it's out of place because it's too ordinary, because you'd expect some kind of symmetry, regularity, etc. from idealized mathematical shapes, but you didn't. instead you just get some random looking stack of boxes.
Fyi this is just the best known packing of 17 squares, there might be a better one. We just haven't been able to proove it or find a better one since 1998
If killing Cthulhu is all it takes to solve the box-packing problem, Amazon would have already done it. No, this is something far more sinister than that.
I can sense a middle finger coming from this image, somehow.
I see what you mean
I see an amongi
The rub with this design is that the length of the sides of the little squares is not an even integer division of the length of the sides of the big square, though.
Doing it the naive way, i.e. keeping all the edges parallel, you can only fit 16. However it's trivial to fit 17 in there without it looking like a warehouse accident, like so:
Or, a slightly easier to follow rendering:
This may correlate with #17 on your linked list, but I was not rigorous with the math. (I.e. I just traced this off of the screenshot.)
I'm positive I've seen this as a 3D printed puzzle somewhere at some point...
The posted arrangement is the tightest known packing of 17 squares. The outer square has a side length of 4.6756 times a small sqare's. So unless you've just found one no mathematician has thought of since 1998 yours is slightly larger.
Edit:
I found this tool to play around and your packing is 4.7 https://markorastas.github.io/PackingProblem/
Edit edit:
I'm a dummy you just need pythagoras, yours is 4+√0.5≈4.7071
Yep, if I'm not mistaken, your version has s = 4 + sqrt(2) which is approximately 4.70710678119. Very close to the ideal 4.67553009360455 !
Blender calculates this as the optimal packing. It's smaller than the ideal, but I've seen Blender be wrong before.
There's a link for alternate packings on that page, where you can see older versions, some with more aesthetically pleasing patterns of minimal tilted squares or symmetry. All of them use a larger value for s though and it's hard to tell where your version would fit in.
Yeah, I just winged it based on a hazy recollection of a block puzzle I'm pretty sure I saw once. I'm sure the puzzle in question was not mathematically rigorous both so it could look nicer (with the same or similar solution to what I doodled, there) and also so it could be like, you know, actually manufactured.
WITCHCRAFT!
(... which makes it very cool!)