{ "version": "https://jsonfeed.org/version/1", "title": "PROJECT MARTENSE on Joseph", "icon": "https://avatars.micro.blog/avatars/2025/02/1679.jpg", "home_page_url": "https://josephaleo.micro.blog/", "feed_url": "https://josephaleo.micro.blog/feed.json", "items": [ { "id": "http://josephaleo.micro.blog/2026/11/10/what-time-is-it-in.html", "title": "What Time Is It in R’lyeh?", "content_html": "

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While working on PROJECT MARTENSE, I’ve been pondering extradimensional entities that exist outside time.

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Much of Western civilization understands time as linear, an outlook shaped, in part, by the apocalyptic religions we’ve been steeped in for the last 2,000 years. There’s a beginning and an end. But, of course, not every culture has understood time in quite the same way.

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The Aztecs, for example, understood the cosmos through successive ages of creation and destruction. Their conception of time wasn’t exclusively cyclical, but the idea of recurring cosmic catastrophes was central to their worldview.

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Which got me wondering: Do Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones experience time at all? And if they exist beyond our familiar dimensions, would they also exist outside these cycles of creation and destruction? More interestingly, would someone raised in a culture that understood the cosmos in cyclical terms experience the arrival of these entities differently from someone expecting history to unfold toward a final apocalypse?

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And if the Great Old Ones exist outside time, how would they think, much less communicate with mere mortals? Would our noun-based language, with its insistence on separating things from the processes that produce them, be utterly incomprehensible to such entities? Might their thoughts more closely resemble David Bohm’s rheomode, a language of verbs, processes, and perpetual becoming?

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Beginning, ending, beginning-again: thus the little consciousness ordinates its passing. Levate a beginning. Re-levate an ending. Between these imaginings, time-seeming unfolds. Re-ordinate the ending into a beginning, and the circle-seeming manifests. Yet neither line-ing nor circle-ing re-vidates that which continually enfolds and unfolds. Not beginning. Not ending. Not returning. Only becoming, unbecoming, and the undividing through which all seeming becoming flows.

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None of this really matters to PROJECT MARTENSE, since the events unfold in 21st-century New York City. But spend enough time wandering through Lovecraft’s multi-angled realms and impossible geometries, and you start thinking about such things.

\n", "date_published": "2026-11-10T21:53:22-08:00", "url": "https://josephaleo.micro.blog/2026/11/10/what-time-is-it-in.html", "tags": ["PROJECT MARTENSE"] }, { "id": "http://josephaleo.micro.blog/2026/11/08/finished-reading-the-pseudonomicon-by.html", "content_html": "\n

Finished reading: The Pseudonomicon by Phil Hine 📚 Phil repeatedly emphasizes that encountering the Great Old Ones is a two-way process. Opening a gateway is easier than closing it, and conventional magical systems cannot contain these entities. The crucial implication for PROJECT MARTENSE is that the invasion is not a failure of the ritual. It is the ritual’s success.

\n", "date_published": "2026-11-08T10:14:24-08:00", "url": "https://josephaleo.micro.blog/2026/11/08/finished-reading-the-pseudonomicon-by.html", "tags": ["PROJECT MARTENSE"] }, { "id": "http://josephaleo.micro.blog/2026/11/08/the-blind-idiot-god-is.html", "title": "The Blind Idiot God Is in My Shopping Cart", "content_html": "\n

I am presently immersed in the deeper and more obscure researches attendant upon PROJECT MARTENSE. My notebook is chock-full of disparate ideas, but I’ve been doing this long enough to know things will start clicking into place. One idea that’s lodged itself into my grey matter is the possibility of rendering the repulsive seductive. Whether this curious aesthetic perversion shall ultimately find expression in my forthcoming tale of the arcane, I cannot presently say. But should it fail to secure a place therein, I have little doubt that it will insinuate itself into some later and perhaps still more questionable undertaking.

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I’ve been perusing Etsy for Lovecraft-related merchandise and came across some wonderful stuff. Take this brass pin of Cthulhu, for example. There is something almost perversely elegant about the little emblem. I might readily wear it to my place of employment, where my unsuspecting associates would admire its curious workmanship, never suspecting the blasphemous cosmic implications concealed within its polished contours. I’ve added it to my shopping cart, where it lies like the dread, sleeping god itself.

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\"Cthulhu

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Cthulhu is Lovecraft’s most recognizable creature from his weird fiction. Hell, there are adorable plushies of the tentacled Great Old One! But Azathoth, the blind idiot god, is the real shit. I can’t help but feel that having a statue of the Daemon-Sultan on my nightstand would inspire me, if not dragging me one step closer to gibbering insanity. The only thing saving me from certain doom is that this artifact is sculpted from resin, which I cannot abide. I prefer something more substantial to capture the likeness of the Lord of All Things. Bronze, perhaps.

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\"Statue

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Take this wall relief plaque of the formless protoplasm of a Shoggoth, for example. It’s cast in solid stone-like statuary-grade gypsum cement. It looks like it has heft. And while I suspect it would shatter into a million pieces if I dropped it, I find it more desirable than some 3D-printed trinket.

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\"Wall

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Whether any of these eldritch objects shall ultimately pass into my possession remains a question for another hour. I have, for the present, more urgent and sinister matters to occupy my faculties.

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The researches of PROJECT MARTENSE beckon anew, and I must return to the study of Phil Hine’s The Pseudonomicon in hopes of dark revelation. As Hine himself opines, “Gods do not, generally, have a lot to say, but what they do say, is worth listening to.”

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I cannot help but wonder whether the greater peril lies in hearing such utterances, or in discovering, at some unguarded moment, that one has begun to understand them.

\n", "date_published": "2026-11-08T07:39:59-08:00", "url": "https://josephaleo.micro.blog/2026/11/08/the-blind-idiot-god-is.html", "tags": ["PROJECT MARTENSE"] }, { "id": "http://josephaleo.micro.blog/2026/11/01/i-write-stories-so-i.html", "title": "I Write Stories So I Can Do Homework", "content_html": "

Director Robert Eggers (The Witch, The Lighthouse, The Norseman, Nosferatu, and the soon-to-be-released Werwulf) makes movies to do his homework. Eggers uses filmmaking as an intense historical and folk-culture research project, obsessively burying himself in manuscripts, archaic dialects, and regional lore to recreate the past. I get it. I write stories so I can do homework.

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Last night I wrote notes for PROJECT MARTENSE, which meant doing a deep dive on Azathoth. Who is Azathoth? He’s the supreme deity in Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. I know, I know, you thought it was Cthulhu. So did I. Azathoth is the blind idiot god, the primordial chaos beyond angled space, in the spiral black vortices of that ultimate void. Kind of hard to crochet a plushie out of that.

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I copied down Lovecraft’s various descriptions of Azathoth, and I gained a new appreciation for the man’s skill as a writer of cosmic-horror. Check out this sentence:

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There were, in such voyages, incalculable local dangers; as well as that shocking final peril which gibbers unmentionably outside the ordered universe, where no dreams reach; that last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity—the boundless daemon-sultan Azathoth, whose name no lips dare speak aloud, and who gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time amidst the muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin, monotonous whine of accursed flutes; to which detestable pounding and piping dance slowly, awkwardly, and absurdly the gigantic ultimate gods, the blind, voiceless, tenebrous, mindless Other Gods whose soul and messenger is the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep.

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Wild, right?

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As I mentioned, I’m still in the note-taking phase, jotting down ideas and lines of dialogue here and there, but I’m thrilled to be playing in Lovecraft’s dread universe. One thing is for sure: I know the occultists in my yarn will jam on drums and flutes during their ritual to summon Azathoth.

\n\"AI\n", "date_published": "2026-11-01T07:46:56-08:00", "url": "https://josephaleo.micro.blog/2026/11/01/i-write-stories-so-i.html", "tags": ["PROJECT MARTENSE"] }, { "id": "http://josephaleo.micro.blog/2026/10/25/project-martense.html", "title": "Project Martense", "content_html": "\"AI\n

I began PROJECT MARTENSE this week in earnest.

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I’m still waiting for ideas and themes to come together, but so far I know it’s about H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, kaiju, the complete and utter destruction of New York City, and the apocalypse. Great fun!

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During the weekend I’ve been researching how chaos magicians incorporate the Cthulhu Mythos into their rituals. First, who knew? Secondly, there are far more articles, essays and books out there about the topic than I expected (see below).

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I’ve been test driving the Offprint app to convert the online articles I came across to ePub to read on my Kindle and so far it’s working like a charm. I use Instapaper to read articles on my Kobo but I’m durned if I can figure out how to get my highlights saved to my Obsidian notes, so using Offprint with my Kindle seemed like they way to go. Except I can’t save the highlights from the articles I read only Kindle to Obsidian, either. Curses! If you have advice on how to achieve this on either my Kindle or Kobo without a subscription I would really appreciate it.

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Articles

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Books

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Essays

\n\n", "date_published": "2026-10-25T10:37:00-08:00", "url": "https://josephaleo.micro.blog/2026/10/25/project-martense.html", "tags": ["PROJECT MARTENSE"] } ] }