#forest manuscripts

[arrgh-whatever]

[rainboopz]

very silly cat ദ്ദി ˉ͈̀꒳ˉ͈́ )✧ he got danm wooed me!! he and his bird!!!!

The Wanderer and Archibald belong to @arrgh-whatever 🐈🎶 Love your stuff!

[plushs-stuff]

@arrgh-whatever 's characters!!

I love when two characters are in love but ones in mortal peril!

Not so happy with this but whatever

[illustratus]

Madness of Charles VI: crossing the forest of Le Mans on an expedition against Pierre de Craon, the king, brandishing a sword, mistakes the members of his retinue for enemies and attacks them.

— Froissart's Chronicles

[cuties-in-codices]

hunting a wild man

in an illustrated manuscript containing a german translation of "the travels of sir john mandeville", konstanz, 1476

source: Vienna, Österr. Nationalbibl., Cod. 2838, fol. 68v

[arthistoryanimalia]

#ManuscriptMonday:

Illustration of forest animals from an 1805 Javanese illuminated manuscript of Serat Panji Jaya Kusuma: elephant, tiger, banteng, wild boar, and two deer.

British Library MSS Jav 68 f.42r

"...a Javanese manuscript of Serat Panji Jaya Kusuma dated 1805 (MSS Jav 68), which is shown open at a scene (identified by Lydia Kieven) where Sekartaji and her servant (emban) approach the forest filled with animals including an elephant, tiger, banteng, wild boar and two deer. This tale is one of many versions of the adventures of Prince Panji in his search for his beloved Princess Candrakirana. Stories of Prince Panji date back to the 13th century, and mark the beginnings of a truly Javanese literature no longer overshadowed by the great Indian epics Ramayana and Mahabharata. Panji tales are found not only in Java but were also translated into Malay, Balinese, Thai, Lao, Khmer and Burmese."

info via https://blogs.bl.uk/asian-and-african/2017/07/animals-in-southeast-asian-manuscripts.html

[clemsfilmdiary]

The Secret of Kells (2009, Tomm Moore, Nora Twomey)

5/8/23

[noughticalcrossings]

Put thee not on Silent

[ID: A 4 panel comic made of digital paintings of a zoom meeting between the knights of the Round Table.

Sir Galahad, Queen Guinevere, Sir Gawain, Sir Lancelot, Sir Bedivere, have their own individual screens, and one screen shows a conference room with King Arthur, Sir Mordred, and others who are not named.

Both Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinevere have their cameras turned off, and microphones muted, the entire time.

Panel 1 shows King Arthur with a few of his knights, with Sir Mordred brooding beside him in shadows, and a hand reaching from offscreen to steal snacks from a bowl.

Sir Galahad has his microphone muted, and is in a forest, looking up and to the side. He has brown hair up above his head and very pale skin.

King Arthur asks, "Sir Gawain, canst thou see the PowerPoint slides?"

Panel 2 shows Sir Gawain, who has brown skin, black hair, green clothes, and heterochromia, with one green eye and one dark, replies, "Verily I cannot, I think it be a miasma of the sight."

Behind him for the background is a section from the Green Knight manuscript, showing faded lettering and a green knight on a green horse standing in front of someone with a large axe while a crowd of spectators watch from the sides.

Sir Galahad's screen is now slightly motion-blurred, showing a reddragon's open mouth in front of Sir Galahad's face.

Panel 3 shows Sir Bedivere, labeled Tech Support, who wears a blue shirt and a plumed knight's helm, looking exhaustedly into the camera, pushing his helmet visor up with one hand. He is lit by blue light and has bags under his eyes, asking: "Hast thou sharest the screen?"

His background is of a library. Sir Galahad's screen is now taken up by the motion-blurred side of the dragon that is attacking him.

Panel 4 shows Sir Gawain turned slightly to the side, looking derisively at the camera, saying: "Yea, but I cannot hear Sir Galahad."

The only thing left in Sir Galahad's screen is the motion-blurred, spade shaped tail tip of the dragon chasing him.

End ID.]

Description very kindly added by @describe-things

[prosebushpatch]

this current wip has just been me spending more time doing shallow research about manuscripts in Old French for a single simile rather than writing

[queen-tashie]

Made a moodboard of my manuscript The Quiet Forest :)

[arrgh-whatever]

[ryegarden]

t4t angels inventing new love languages by making constellations out of each others bodies

on my redbubble!

[ID: a digital drawing of two angels on a deep blue background, surrounded by stars, one angel has moss green skin, three faces and firey red hair. They're covered in tattoos and have two wings extending from their back, and six on their head. The other angel is resting their hand on the first ones thigh. They have sky blue skin and golden scars dancing across it, with long deep forest green hair in twin braids billowing out behind them. Their wings are the same shade, two fluffier ones arching out from their back and two smaller ones from their head. Both angels are visibly, deliberately trans. The image has a delicately drawn border of wings, stars, and foliage, reminiscent of medieval manuscript illustrations. End ID]

[annabelle--cane]

so I don’t have the knowledge of details that you have (complimentary) but is there anything in the computer code Colin looking into being written in German and Jonah Magnus’ buddy living in the Black Forest and finding that crypt that one time? Or is that Too far a reach?

vibrating at the speed of sound. so there are a couple of floating details around from the podcasts, the arg, and some promotional materials that may point back to germany having particular relevance. some of this is absolutely me going full pepe silvia, but there are enough threads here that I feel like it has to amount to Something.

so. germany.

archives 'verse:

-> point 1: johann von württemberg. while staying with his nephew in the schwartzwald in 1816, albrecht von closen finds an old mausoleum with the inscription "johann von württemberg" over the door, and it is guarded by a man with no eyes who nonetheless seems to be able to see. in a deep chamber well beneath the ground is johann's coffin, and the room is completely lined with books so old that they'd all rotted through and fused together, the marble shelves they're placed on having little carvings of open eyes all along them. the only two objects in a good state are an illuminated manuscript in arabic that had been kept apart from the rest of the books, and a gold coin with an engraving of a young man with flowing hair, the initials "JW," the year 1279, and the words "für die stille" (google translate tells me that’s “for the silence”). albrecht asks around for any information about johann because the name is unfamiliar despite his quite good knowledge about local history and nobles, and someone says they remember him being called "ulrich's bastard," likely referring to ulrich the i or ii, two counts of württemberg from the 1200s. with that information, in the present day jon is able to find some historical records that point to ulrich i having a son out of wedlock in 1255 who was rumored to keep the company of witches.

-> point 2: the von closens. it seems that a servant nicked the coin albrecht found before he could go home with it, and that was probably for the best for albrecht, because that servant Died Badly from what was ruled to be an animal attack. albrecht did take the book with him, however, and presumably went on to show it to jonah magnus. he then must have gone back for the rest of the rotten books at some point, though, because when doctor jonathan fanshawe visits his estate in 1831, albrecht has a full library of recently re-bound books that he tells fanshawe he got from the tomb, and owning them has done terrible beholding-esque things to him. fanshawe, in his capacity as a doctor, says they should return the books for albrecht's health, and they do so, but just as the last book is returned, albrecht dies, and fanshawe realizes that all the books were blank and finds out that jonah arranged to have them all swapped out by the book binder. when fanshawe performs an autopsy on albrecht's body, all of his insides are covered in eyes.

in his statement from 1816, albrecht says he and his wife carla have been unable to conceive, though in 1831 fanshawe mentions that all of albrecht's sons were away at school when he came to visit. not something that's impossible, they could have managed to have children shortly after 1816, but it does make me raise an eyebrow. magically blessed fertility? dimension shenanigans? fanshawe does mention a tree being burned on the von closen estate that feels remarkably similar to the tree on hilltop road.

anyway, wilhelm, albrecht's nephew, has some children, and the family stays in germany for about another century, but one branch eventually moves to england, and their descendants include mary and gerard keay. according to gerry, mary was big into mythologizing about the von closens and really tried to get him to continue her idea of a legacy for the family, but he thought most of what she said was made up.

protocol 'verse:

-> point 3: colin's comment about source code being written in german. nothing much to explain here, just that it's Weird that source code for some Weird bespoke program for the british civil service is written in german, right? Bit Odd.

-> point 4: the usenet forum. okay so I'm an avatar of the idiot and only read up about the arg after it was already over and don't know anything about code and whatnot, but as best as I can understand: on the OIAR's official website, if you try to submit a form, you get an error message, and if you look into the source code for the error then you find Some piece of code with an IP address shaped hole in it, and there's an IP address hidden in an OIAR advertising video, so you put that IP address into the code, do something else (???), and then find yourself at an old defunct usenet forum from the 90s/00s for people who left east germany.

(it is from here that I got too verbose for my own good, so the rest is under a cut)

notable things about the forum: most of it is pretty normal, and, naturally, it was pretty much all in german, massive shoutout to everyone who helped to translate all 21k words of it. there are threads about finding work in various countries, weird cultural idiosyncrasies, resources, reminiscing about berlin, yknow, normal stuff. the mod “SandmannS” (translates to exactly what it looks like) ran the forum with a bit of an iron fist, which I guess makes sense, it’s the kind of forum that attracted people who wanted to say some heinous stuff and he was really serious about not letting anyone solicit personal information, but he was also kind of overzealous about keeping threads on topic and locking any discussions that he thought were “pointless.” he was eventually strongarmed into opening a thread for cat pictures, and that’s as good an opening as any to talk about some of the Weird things about the forum.

one of the cat photos was posted in february 1994 and shows a cat standing in front of the thames, with what looks like the completed o2 arena in full view (great choice of a red flag landmark to include @ whoever chose it. nice big landmark that was called “the millennium dome” when it first opened, a handy reminder that it was made to celebrate the turn of the millennium and construction wouldn't even have started in 1994). several comments across the threads are dated as earlier than the comments they’re replying to, one person references the content of the phantom menace a few months before its release, and several comments were somehow made after the mod locked the forum in dec 2001/jan 2002.

and okay. the forum locking. I’m going to condense this to all hell because this is already [redacted] words long but basically, “einsamernarr” (translation: lonely fool) was an active user of the forum with a big conspiratorial streak, real paranoid about “the government” spying on him, always getting warnings and just dodging getting banned just before going too far, yknow, a Type of Guy. in december 2001, he mentions in a book rec thread that he was trolling through some databases and found a bunch of old records and he can’t tell if they’re fictional or not, but he’d like to share them if he can. about five days later, he starts posting in several threads that he did something really dumb, people are after him, the meetup they were planning is not safe and this forum is being watched, people should look for him if he doesn’t come back within a week, and he’ll try to leave some info behind for them just in case. a few days later, a couple of people post worried messages asking if anyone’s heard from einsamernarr and that they’ve been getting weird cryptic emails about an “institute” from him, and sandmanns says that he did everything he could, but he can’t keep doing this, and he closes the forum.

marina “avatar of the idiot” annabelle--cane showing my face here again, I don’t know how this next part happened, but it’s possible to retrieve the email einsamernarr sent, open it with a password found in colin’s code repository (that’s a whole ‘nother thing), and find inside: 1. some pictures of bonzobucks, 2. a weird pdf of an old german book on alchemy with a lot of symbols and codes in it, and 3. a spreadsheet of the names, ages, and test results of the hundreds of children the protocol 'verse magnus institute was performing psych studies on. which finally brings us to our next, much shorter section.

-> point 5: “gerard kaey” (sic). gerry’s name is on that spreadsheet, which I think is relevant to this conversation given mary’s obsession with the von closen legacy. archives ‘verse mary keay resented the magnus institute for what she felt it stood for comparison to what she felt she stood for; she saw jonah magnus as a thief who stole away her family’s honor, so what might be different about the protocol ‘verse situation? why would mary keay in this universe send her only heir to go get scrutinized by a bunch of self-important academics?

-> point 6: the berlin dead drop. more arg stuff, we’re getting into things that I’m sure probably have more to be said about them than I’m capable of saying, but from some clues in a picture of cookbooks that einsamermarr posted in the cat pictures thread of the usenet forum to annoy the mod, and a voicemail on the OIAR’s telephone line, people found out the date and location of the first irl arg event, and it was for somewhere in berlin. a newspaper covered in alchemical symbols was found in a bookshop, and from that people somehow derived coordinates, and those coordinates lead to the last irl event where a battered old video tape with a video of a creepy ritual was found (note: the tape was too badly damaged, so another copy of the video came from an arg affiliated tumblr account).

-> point 7: klaus.xls. from a floppy disk found in the second irl arg event, klaus.xls is a spreadsheet originally written in german with about 100 dates and times of potentially paranormal sightings. a lot of it is corrupted and unreadable, but there are columns for category, rank, “TSHU,” and notes. translated into english, notes sections that aren’t corrupted say things like “mr. b,” “war people,” “avoid, “unhappy child,” “ink,” “lady m,” “cats lol,” and “I hate witches.”

-> point 8: albertus magnus and the philosopher’s stone. right, this is where I go a bit off the rails, and credit to this post by @misfitmagpie for discovering some of this. first, nearly every official visual we’ve had for tmagp has been covered in alchemy symbols. they’re all over the logo, they’re all over the in-universe OIAR and magnus institute websites, they highlighted hints in the arg, they’re everywhere, and the end goal of alchemy was the pursuit of the mythical philosopher’s stone, a substance that could turn base metals into gold and produce an elixir for eternal life. the tmagp logo/the coat of arms for the OIAR is centered around an upside down alchemical symbol for the philosopher’s stone, a circle in a square in a triangle in a larger circle. 

albertus magnus (aka saint albert the great) was a bavarian philosopher and scientist who did some writing on alchemy and has been widely rumored to secretly have been a master alchemist, mainly as a result of a lot of people attaching his name to writings about alchemy that he never touched. some have credited him as discovering the actual philosopher’s stone, and while he never made that claim in any way that survives, he did record that he’d witnessed seeing base metals be turned into gold. something of which to take note is that he didn’t go by the name “magnus” during his life, that was appended to him posthumously, it’s just another way of calling him “the great” with a fancy latin word, but it does kind of remind me of that edmond “reimer” halley -> maxwell rayner thing from mag 140. if you discovered the elixir of life and became immortal, you would probably need to nab a new identity at some point, and if people have already been nicknaming you “albert the great,” well…

anyway, the thing that’s really cemented his potential relevance in my mind is his birth and death dates: c. 1200-1280, lining up perfectly with the time period of johann von württemberg (thought we’d moved on from him, didn’t you?). I know magnus timelines are notoriously a bit unruly, especially the further back into the past we get, but it’s scratching at my brain. besides that, I think it would be a really cool move if the magnus this podcast is named for was a completely different person than the magnus the last podcast was named for.

if albertus magnus isn’t directly relevant then I’ve got another theory about the title that I’ll be posting in a hot minute, but it’s not germany related and this ask is already long enough. 

just, to sum up, a lot of protocol content so far has been germany-adjacent, and even if nothing more comes of it I think there are a lot of interesting threads here to speculate about.

[snailygoon]

I don’t know why I’ve avoided posting my thesis work on here for over a year now. These characters mean the world to me, and sharing my love for them with people who are willing to indulge in their magical little universe is a lovely bonus, so share it I must~ This is the book jacket, inspired by the gorgeous and intricately detailed art from irish illuminated manuscripts. I’ll be posting it in parts, but you can see the whole thing on my portfolio site. Here’s a little description to kick things off:

“Do you ever wonder what goes on in the Faerie realm that seems to exist all around us, and yet right beyond the veil of our perception? So does Aiva Abara, a 19 year old aspiring nature conservationist from kilkenny Ireland. This journal documents her experiences that came from becoming acquainted with the Faerie who dwell in the forest around her home. More specifically the Crann Fae: a race of tree Fae who serve as guardians of the natural world, and who are just as mysterious and majestic as the trees they are born from.”

(Next spread >>>)

[painted-kneecaps]

How to Smell Like an Avatar of Fear

-A Comprehensive List-

From a hobbyist perfume collector and avid TMA listener

Did you know that smell, out of all the five senses, is the one most linked to memory and emotion? With my help, you too can invoke a sense of unease in the minds of friends, enemies and strangers everywhere !!

DISCLAIMER: I have not tried every, or even most, of the perfumes on this list. However, I have purchased and enjoyed perfumes from all of the houses listed.

-The Buried-

Name: Geosmin

House: Osmofolia

Scent profile: wet aldehydes, ozone, geosmin, fresh water, petrichor, soil

-The Corruption-

Name: Pile of green goo

House: Death and Floral

Scent profile: Partially rotting wood and oakmoss, white oudh, deep & enchanting crushed rose resins

-The Dark-

Name: The Raven

House: Alkemia

Scent profile: Ebony heartwood, black amber, black pepper, blackseed (habbatul barakah), black Bengal cardamon, black ink, nigella (black coriander), black iris, violet leaves, and leather. 

-The Desolation-

Name: A City On Fire

House: Imaginary Authors

Scent profile: Cade oil, Spikenard, Cardamom, Clearwood, Dark Berries, Labdanum, Burnt Match

-The End-

Name: Bones melting together

House: Death and Floral

Scent profile: Dusty dry bone dust accord, coffin wood, bergamot

-The Extinction-

Name: Industrial Sabotage

House: Alkemia

Scent profile: A cataclysmic wreckage of burnt wires; twisted melted steel; shattered machinery, and gunpowder. 

-The Eye-

Name: Book of Shadows

House: Alkemia

Scent profile: A biblichor of eldritch books - heavy parchment paper, ancient iron oak gall ink, crumbling leather bindings, and wafts of rare incenses.

-The Flesh-

Name: Writer’s Blood

House: Alkemia

Scent profile: iron-tinged blood, a manuscript soaked in spilled black coffee, and an overturned tin of rolling tobacco.

-The Hunt-

Name: The wolf only needs luck to find you once

House: Death and Floral

Scent profile: Crisp forest night air, lunar musk, large drifting oakwood trees, the musky scent of a trailing shadow.

-The Lonely-

Name: The people you love become ghosts inside of you

House: Death and Floral

Scent profile: Heavenly musk, lingering funeral flowers, cold scent of vanilla in an empty corridor, handprints on a foggy window

-The Slaughter-

Name: The Highwayman

House: Alkemia

Scent profile: Sweat stained black leather, night air, a dirt road under galloping hooves, tobacco, bloodstained lace, gunpowder

-The Spiral-

Name: Finally A Star

House: Osmofolia

Scent profile: The glitz of cardamom and sparkling grapefruit stars, outer space ozone, dreamy tuberose, searing gunpowder, and a ham hock for a head. Inspired by Jack Stauber's song The Ballad of Hamantha.

-The Stranger-

Name: Wax museums

House: Death and Floral

Scent profile: Sweet and warm liqueur, elegant suede, black currant, beeswax absolute, magnolia heart

-The Vast-

Name: With the fishes and the dead

House: Death and Floral

Scent profile: Black squid ink and mile long oceans. Black ambergris, black labdanum absolute, salty ocean water, and black pits of stretched out emptiness.

-The Web-

Name: Dustsceawung

House: Alkemia

Scent profile: The scent of forbidden explorations and an olfactory meditation on dust: attic air, the inside of old trunks, abandoned haylofts, library stacks, and abandoned buildings.