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For the things you make, the things you find, and the things you cannot quite explain — #CthulhuTuesday
Something is going to happen on Tuesday.
Nothing catastrophic, probably.
Beginning now, Obscura Fantastica is inviting the strange, the inexplicable, the beautiful, the grotesque, the funny, the unsettling, the handmade, the machine-assisted, the carefully researched, the accidentally discovered, and the thing you photographed in a thrift store because nobody you knew would believe you otherwise to gather under one flag on Bluesky:
#CthulhuTuesday.
There is one rule.
Be weird.
That is the prompt.
Every Tuesday, post something strange and tag it #CthulhuTuesday.
A painting. A drawing. A photograph. A poem. A story. A paragraph. A sculpture. A collage. A creature design. A piece of music. An animation. An embroidery. A comic. A digital experiment. A handmade mask with deeply questionable intentions. A photograph of the peculiar plush animal you found staring at you from the bottom shelf of a pharmacy at 11:47 on a Monday night.
It can also be something you found.
Some people make extraordinary things. Some people are extraordinary at finding them.
We want both.
Dig through archives. Find forgotten artists. Unearth strange photographs. Point us toward an obscure story, an impossible building, a bizarre object in a museum collection, an illustration from a book nobody has opened since 1923, a strange piece of local history, an inexplicable roadside attraction, a scientific specimen that appears to have been designed by a committee operating without adult supervision.
Share it.
Tell us where you found it. Credit the creator when you can. Give people somewhere to keep digging.
Research is participation.
Curiosity is participation.
Noticing something everyone else walked past is participation.
And, yes, the enormous tentacled entity in the name is there intentionally.
We love weird fiction. We love cosmic horror. We love the sprawling, argumentative, endlessly mutating culture that has grown around Lovecraft and the Mythos—the writers, artists, scholars, obsessive readers, game designers, collectors, archivists, and assorted keepers of forbidden indexes who have spent generations expanding, questioning, dismantling, rebuilding, parodying, contradicting, and adding new chambers to that particular impossible architecture.
So bring us your Lovecraftian work.
Bring the eldritch paintings.
Bring the doomed expeditions.
Bring the impossible geometries, blasphemous manuscripts, suspicious coastal communities, unfortunate professors, alarming genealogies, cyclopean masonry, incomprehensible marine biology, and protagonists who have made the extremely poor decision to continue reading.
Bring the fan fiction.
If you write in the Mythos, we want to read what you have.
But Cthulhu is the flag, not the fence.
You do not need tentacles.
You do not need cosmic horror.
You do not need horror at all.
The strange has never belonged to one genre, one aesthetic, one technique, one technology, or one approved collection of gloomy objects arranged beneath tasteful moonlight.
We are looking for everything weird.
Beautiful weird.
Ugly weird.
Funny weird.
Quiet weird.
Pulp weird. Literary weird. Folk weird. Domestic weird. Erotic weird. Scientific weird. Historical weird. Surreal weird. Cheap weird. Elaborate weird. The weird thing your grandmother kept in a drawer and refused to explain.
If you look at something and think, #CthulhuTuesday might enjoy this, you have probably understood the assignment.
The tools people use to make art are changing quickly, and the conversation around those tools has become, to use the technical editorial terminology, a goddamn mess.
Human artists make work with pencils, cameras, paint, scissors, tablets, software, code, synthesizers, printing presses, darkrooms, digital brushes, databases, found material, and increasingly, artificial intelligence.
#CthulhuTuesday welcomes all creators.
Different processes produce different work. Different artists care about different things. Nobody is required to use the same tools, admire the same techniques, or reach the same conclusions about where technology and art should meet.
If AI played a significant role in something you made, disclose that honestly. If you are sharing somebody else's work, credit them when the information is available. If you made something with your own hands, your own camera, your own words, your own strange collection of materials, tell us that too.
Maybe this experiment fails spectacularly.
Perhaps by the third Tuesday the entire tag will consist of six octopus photographs, an AI-generated cathedral, someone's unsettling sourdough starter, and one person earnestly posting a 14,000-word story about a Massachusetts antiquarian who should have minded his own business.
We would consider this an encouraging start.
Because the point is not to manufacture another carefully controlled aesthetic district on social media.
The point is to make a clearing.
To be different. To be weird. To be strange.
Every Tuesday.
#CthulhuTuesday