#also i am going to finish liveblogging the magnus archives for those of you that care

[divine-swag-summit]

ATTENTION MORTALS

An important announcement regarding the tournament schedule. So, tomorrow is my last day of finals(yay!), which means I’ll finally be able to give all my attention to the tournament!

I am, however going to need a bit of time to finish gathering images of some competitors and putting together the graphics and such for the polls, so y’all will have to wait just a bit longer! I’m estimating this taking maybe, a week?

I’m also going to be splitting up the rounds a bit further because now that it’s summer break, I don’t have to rush the poll schedule. So we’ll end up having four days of round one(higher bracket side a, higher bracket side b, lower bracket side a, lower bracket side b) just because there are so many characters competing.

After that, we’ll have two days of round two(higher bracket, then lower bracket), then each subsequent round will be done all on the same day.

I just really don’t want to have to set up 64 polls in a day, ya know?

I’ll update the pinned post asap so everyone knows what’s goin on with the schedule!

[wgc-productions]

The Magnus Archives 1 Angler Fish Liveblog

I have two deep confessions to lay bare here, on this public Tumblr.

1. I didn't like Waiting To Exhale and I think it is a bad movie.

2. I have never listened to The Magnus Archives which is a cardinal sin for me as a person who makes audio dramas. I plan to rectify this here and now! I want to listen to a lot more the seminal audiodramas so I can be a better student of my craft, and by blogging it I'm likely to get other people's input and thoughts which is also super helpful to me as an artist. So, see? Win win.

You can read my liveblogging thoughts below the cut.

00:00- I think the same thing when I listen to WTNV (which is like One Piece in my opinion) but it's also so, not necessarily strange, but particular when shows that you know didn't have ads initially have ads now. It's sort of like being a post-witness to growth. It'd be like finding Egyptian influence on Kush Artifacts. You just know that it looked different and that there had to be such a seismic shift to get to the change you know must have happened, because it doesn't make sense for it to have started in the state that you are currently experiencing.

04:10- Oh! It's one of the "we have a reason we're recording" shows! Those are fun.

04:39- It's nice to have a voice to go with all the Johnathan Sims fanart I've seen.

05:15- I will say when I was living out in LA for a couple of months in college, I did try listening to TMA but I didn't get into it. So, I do vaguely remember this 1st episode plot though that was about 5 years ago (which is crazy to think! Darn you COVID!)

06:40- Well God forbid Martin has some struggles. Please Johnathan where's your compassion?

09:16- I'm glad he knows I am but an American who knows nothing of Edinburgh.

12:18 Johnathan please. You can't just stare at people on the street. What happened to manners.

13:05- Give the man a bum, John. It's the sporting thing to do! Who cares if he's a little different. We all have our addictions.

14:59 Wait! John is reading a case this isn't his behavior. Oh, for shame. I have been slandering his good name. Sorry, Johnathan.

17:20- I'll be honest if I saw some truly bizarre phenomena that just screamed unexplained horror I would not investigate. There is already too much truly horrifying phenom that's hard to explain. I don't need to pursue the horrors. I'm a Black American, the horrors pursue me.

18:58 It's a shame audio dramas typically don't have characters with thick accented brogues. Could you imagine someone with a thick backwoods Irish or Scottish accent doing this. Think of the texture it would ad.

19:00- I know that all of these stories eventually connect so I'm excited to see how they all blend into a cohesive plot.

That's that on that. I'll keep doing these because I want to and I also think it'll be fun to, once I finish TMA, be able to go back and read through and relive the experience.

[wolffyluna]

TMA Liveblog: Up To Ep 40

I’ve finished season 1! And can I just say: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

(Edit: I meant to post this yesterday, but apparently this got stuck in my drafts. It’s been freed now, hopefully.)

I’m in an awkward position with this liveblog. You see, I like to write up my thoughts about a few episodes at a time, not one by one. So I had some thoughts and theories relating to Taken Ill and Lost and Found-- that got more or less confirmed by Human Remains. So I don’t get to sound as smart and with it any more. (Also, there’s been so much in these episodes that I might be forgetting to say something.)

The thing that got confirmed by Human Remains was the question of how the Masquerade works in this setting. ...which is actually two questions, really. One: Is the masquerade supernaturally or mundanely enforced or both? That is, is the masquerade enforced by people being supernaturally bad at noticing the supernatural (a lá Changeling the Lost) or by mundane means of tampering with files and shutting up witnesses (a lá Vampire the Masquerade, though there is some supernatural enforcement there too.) Two: How harshly is the Masquerade enforced? Are people who find out about the Masquerade told ‘please don’t spread it, okay?’, or do people get “shut up.”

By Taken Ill, I was pretty sure the Masquerade was at least partially mundanely enforced. Losing ~20 people ‘in the system’ is pretty fucked up, to the point where hiding their deaths is almost less malicious? And if you wanted to cover up a horrific outbreak at a care home-- making the paperwork look like it was decommissioned earlier is not a bad way to do it. (As would be any living casualties having ‘work place accidents’). I wasn’t so sure about how strongly it was enforced, but their definitely seemed to be at least blackmail (for ex in Old Passages)

...and then we found poor old Gertrude. And well. That answers both questions.

(Also, Gertrude might have been working with the Lightless Flame? Or having someone else work it on her? One of the two? Argh?)

I’m worried about real!Sasha. I hope she’s... okay. Going to be okay. Going to be okay as she can be.

I also have precisely zero clue what was going on in Sasha and Elias’ end of the Institute. See, Jon and Martin seem like pretty reliable witnesses. They have no reason to lie. Tim was off his face-- but again, no reason to lie. Elias is evasive and I do not trust him not to lie. And Fake!Sasha is obviously a lying liar who lies? So I have no fucking clue what was going on there, because all the narrators are unreliable and aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaghh.

(Also can I say I do not trust Elias? He keeps trying to avoid finding or proving the supernatural in a way that is fucking weird.)

Also, uhm, I’m worried about Jon and Tim. ...not just mentally speaking (though I am super worried about that too), but physically speaking? If I have understood the chain of events right, Jon and Tim opened a trapdoor, had a bunch of worms fall on their heads, and then got CO2-ed to heck and back? Like, I’m pretty sure that much CO2 would fuck you up for awhile on it’s own-- but the quarantine was only ~24 hours, which seems alarmingly short? And pretty darn short for the medical treatment they probably need. Like, they had worms burrowing in their flesh? That would be a lot of open wounds, and fairly deep ones too. Do Jon and Tim have enough blood in them? How are their wounds being kept clean? How much antibiotics are they on, and is it enough? Also, what sort of quarantine is only 24 hours, jeegus.

I’m also worried about everyone’s mental states, too. It’s interesting, because we keep seeing people have obsessive, paranoid, unhealthy ways of dealing with fear/danger-- that work because of the danger they are in. Jon’s ‘I have to know EVERYTHING’ may not be working out for him so hot, but it’s not going badly, and Martin hiding fire extinguishers everywhere and the corkscrew actually saved multiple people. But it’s still hurting them, it’s just stopping them from being dead. (Tim’s bizarre chipperness probably also counts as this too, but I can’t put as firm a finger on it.)

I made a comment a little while ago about how I’d avoided The Magnus Archives, because I thought it had a lot of blood and screaming in it, and I don’t do well with those, but it turns out it’s a much more quiet form of horror, and that’s fine with me-- yeah. Was Infestation arguably ‘worth it’? I’d say so. But goddamn. Jeez. No. All you need is fire and it’d be the full Wolffy Nope Trifecta (and I’m going to count the fire alarm for a good portion of the fire nope, because seriously.)

...but honestly “I feel like I’m being watched” was scarier.

Because it is traditional, it is time for some rampant tinfoil hattery: I think Michael Knifehands and the fractal weird shit are connected. Michael Knifehands sounds alarmingly like the person who replaced Graeme, except for being too tall. The thing that came out of the Ming vase is maybe less clearly Michael like, but it’s still a distinct possibility. And on a more tinfoil level: the statements with fractals seem to be the statements were fear of insanity, the fear of ‘reality is falling apart, and I don’t know if it’s just for me or if it’s for everybody, and both are terrifying’ seem to show up in fractal statements (eg Ivo Lensik’s father and Ming vase guy.) If I recall the spoilers I failed to dodge correctly, Michael has something to do with insanity. And on an even more tinfoil hat level: Fake!Sasha seems to only know about Sasha through observation. They kinda skip over details and are vague in odd places that imply it, anyway. Fake!Sasha is hella associated with the fractal table. ...and Fake!Sasha knows who Michael is, which implies either they’ve been watching Sasha for a long time, or they know Michael independently.

Also: Spiders and worms are not only separate things, but they are antagonistic towards each other. A spider is why the Archive team found the worms early than the worms planned.

Is Mikhaele a Michael? Because if there are two Michaels and a Mikhaele: what the heck, real Jon?

Also, I’m really confused by the statements not!Sasha(?) decided to steal. Stealing original!Sasha’s statement makes sense: it contains important information, and it could potentially be used to prove fake!Sasha is fake. But I’m a bit boggled by the calliope organ one being stolen, because it implies it’s important... and really, the calliope one? That’s an important one? Really? ...I’ll admit, part of my bafflement is because I found that episode negative levels of scary, because the morning before I listened to it, I encountered this:

Which kind of undercut the episode a touch. Just a tad.

And finally, I’m kicking myself a bit. You see, through the first season, I was playing a fun game called “Real Or Not?”, where I tried to guess which episodes contained real events, because maybe some where fake. ...and apparently all or most of the episodes are real. (Or, in universe real. You know what I mean.) We only heard the real ones! Which makes sense from a story telling perspective, but now it means I have to treat all of them as real. I can’t selectively ignore any of them any more. My theories have to be wholly consistent now. Damn!