Cthugha

Cthugha is a fictional deity in the Cthulhu Mythos genre of horror fiction, the creation of August Derleth. He first appeared in Derleth's short story "The House on Curwen Street" (1944).

Description

He hung motionless in a black, forbidding sky and at first thought he was suspended somewhere in the intrasolar deeps much closer to the Sun than on Earth. But then he realized that the dully gleaming orb which floated before his dreaming vision was not the Sun. Ugly dark blotches mottled the dull orange surface and great columns of spinning flame arced around the rim.... [He watched] the titan sunspots drift slowly across the hideous disc, at times growing larger and merging into great gaping chasms in the fiery atmosphere, while at others dwindling almost to nothingness.... Something was stirring deep within that fiery atmosphere; something monstrous that roared an insatiable anger against the chains of the Elder Gods which had bound it there for an eternity.... Unable to resist, utterly powerless to control his movements, he was diving headlong towards that ravening chaos, that age-old intelligence which was Cthugha.
—John Glasby, "The Dark Mirror"

Cthugha (software)

Cthugha is a music visualization computer program. It was written in the mid-90's by Kevin "Zaph" Burfitt, originally for the PC, and was later ported to other platforms. It was freely distributed.

History

Cthugha was started by Australian coder Kevin "Zaph" Burfitt in September 1993 under DOS for the PC, but not released to the public until version 2.0 in March 1994. It wasn't until release 5.1p in October 1994 that popularity of the program took off; this coinciding with the relatively new availability of cheap sound-cards for PCs, such as the Soundblaster.

Cthugha was released for Linux ("Cthugha-L") in May 1995, and for the Macintosh ("MaCthugha") in January 1996

In 1994 Cthugha was used heavily in the music video for the top-40 song Dead Eyes Opened by Severed Heads, and as the video wall background for the Australian children's TV game show Challenger, hosted by Zoe Sheridan during the late 90's

Burfitt stopped work on Cthugha in January 2001, and there were various attempts by others to carry on the project, but by that time there were so many clones of the software that there was little enthusiasm. Cthugha may have been the forerunner – either in inspiration, or possibly even as source-code – of the numerous and varied "visualisation" plugins for mp3 players and media players on many computer architectures.