#also i am wondering if the last few eps they re-edited and re-uploaded?

[mejomonster]

maybe i love angst but ep 32 was one of my favorites. (i think its been like ep 22, 27-8? and 32? basically big zhou zishu or big gu xiang scenes). 

like i loved that wen kexing was facing both his past legacy and future hopes, and current consequences, and ZHANG CHENGLING is there. i love that zhou zishu came and crashed the whole thing because of course he did. and of course he says to zhang chengling “do you trust me” then even though he doesn’t get an answer, goes down to choose wen kexing’s side. oh my god my heart. he really has no idea what’s going on but he’ll pick killing all these people to save wen kexing any day. ;-; and the entire wanderers family is going THROUGH it because gu xiang just ran away as a fugitive, is trying to keep wen kexing’s secret plan secret but she also has little idea wtf is going on and is STRESSED, cao weining’s own master meanwhile is a shady ass power hungry traitor so his world just TOTALLY upside down. u got cao weining actually probably picking wen kexing to trust cause the man never lied to HIM, meanwhile you got Zhang Chengling’s entire recent life upside down because the Scorpion KIDNAPPED and tortured him but he’s at his ‘uncle’ Zhao Jing’s side, meanwhile his adopted dad Wen Kexing is THE bad guy ‘who killed his whole sect’ and is now yelling to kill all these ‘righteous men’ and his other adopted dad who he trusts More even trusts as an assassin spy ;-; shows up and instead of calming zhang chengling down with some explanation, the last time zhang chengling saw him he had to KNOW zhou zishu was lying to comfort him.

and zhang chengling meanwhile worried wen kexing would die just RECENTLY. worried zhou zishu was dead like his dad! now zhou zishu’s back, but he goes and sides with wen kexing! and zhang chengling - i highly suspect from that big toast at the feast after the death - he KNOWS some manipulations are going on. he can’t possibly still be this naive. yes he was played at that big fight

yes his emotions got the better of him, and he trusted wen kexing and hey wen kexing SAID it was his fault about zhang chengling’s dead family, he SAID kill him. and while zhang chengling was likely suspicious of Zhao Jing and most people’s motives, hell probably even wen kexing’s for SURE in that moment. he also has been trusting wen kexing for ???? the entire recent past. and he came to find out if wen kexing was really the ghost master, if he really killed his parents. and wen kexing SAYS he did. so of course zhang chengling is predisposed to believe him. if no one else there, zhang chengling is probably bafflingly most likely to believe the ghost valley lord. especially when he says something confirming what everyone else said and zhang chengling was already afraid it was true. 

so zhang chengling attacking wen kexing is the only thing he’d really BE able to do. zcl doesn’t care about the glazed armor though! and i feel like he knows all these bullshit sects are up to something. 

anyway. back to the part where zhou zishu says “do you trust me?” then gets no response and jumps down with wen kexing to fight. shut up. Also is there a line “you’re my person” or is that from another episode? Because i did NOT see/hear that line at all during the episode, but based on gifs i expected it when he jumped down to join wen kexing.

everything zhou zishu does after? painful as all hell. but so well acted. and very in character. for show him anyway. ep 1 we know how intense he will get if a loved one dies. if he realizes his hopes have been destroyed (in ep 1 case over the course of 10 years). whereas this is his gut reaction after all his hopes shatter in a MINUTE. and his most loved one, the person who REALLY understood him, is gone. (not to mention he thinks he’s failed gu xiang and zhang chengling right now). the dude’s been extreme, it just leaps out now. also i have no idea what he plans? but im guessing he took out the nails so he’d have his full martial arts abilities?? and hes just like ‘well if they shatter from the strain, at least i’ll kill some motherfuckers in revenge on my way out.’ right? that’s what i’m guessing his ass is planning. 

[willsilvertongue]

show your process

To continue supporting content makers, this tag game is meant to show the entire process of making creative content: this can be for any creation.

RULES - When your work is tagged, show the process of its creation from planning to posting, then tag up to 5 people with a specific link to one of their creative works you'd like to see the process of. Use the tag #showyourprocess so we can find yours.

tagged by @malortsev a few days to talk about this gifset which is cool bc for once it’s an edit that i actually have a lot to say about other than my usual colouring complaints. this got long and i’m getting embarrassed thinking of anyone actually reading this the whole way through but here we go x

planning:

jesper’s recap of the crows’ failed mission was one of my favourite parts of the last s&b ep and i knew i wanted to gif it in a way that featured the scenes he was referring to mostly bc in my head i got the vibes of the luis recapping sequence in the ant man movies lmaoo. originally i was going to do a ten gif (540 x 350 px) set that you read from up to down but that seemed too boring and i wasn’t sure the quality would come out great with the dark scenes so i thought i should try out something more creative. and it seemed like the type of edit that needed to be just as fun as the quote anyway. i’ve been meaning to try out the multiple-different-sized-gifs-in-one-canvas layout that’s been trending so i settled on that but boyyy was that a process that involved a LOT of simple math which i am ridiculously poor at!!! but i looked at this post for reference and help

usually when i plan a set i write down a few lines of the idea/theme in my notes app and then match them with the corresponding scenes but this time i actually drew out the thing bc i had to see for myself which layout would look the best and i also wasn’t sure that i liked the dimensions in the example post (i ended up using this post as inspo for the first big gif). anyway here’s the terrible Art (i can’t believe this paper was still lying around):

giffing:

i’m not gonna go into detail about the actual gifmaking process bc it’s not very interesting - just the usual screencapping/colouring/saving steps. i will say tho that looking for the scenes took the longest bc i’m not familiar enough w the show to know where the ones i wanted were (only confident with ship scenes rip) and screencapping was the Actual Worst bc i had to use a new program that’s compatible with the version of the show i downloaded. and i’m still using this program which is why i’m even slower at getting stuff out if anyone was wondering :))

arranging:

so the steps for putting the gifs onto 1 canvas are to make sure they’re all the same number of frames, to convert them into smart objects that you can move onto the canvas (which should be in timeline mode), and of course to make sure the canvas is the right size to contain them all. you can divide up the canvas between any number of gifs as long as they total to the height and width (always 540 px) of the big gif, and account for the spaces in between each gif (which is 4 px). so if you want 3 gifs of different sizes next to each other, you need to make sure that their widths combined equal 540 minus 8 as there are two spaces between the three of them. my example for the row below is 130 + 272 + 130 = 532, and when accounting for/adding the 2 x 4 px spaces, the total amounts to 540. 

this was a lot of trial and error bc i’m bad at this kind of easy math and honestly just typing this up took me forever (but if anyone actually uses these instructions it might be worth it). so basically i calculated the sizes i wanted then created the gifs + arranged them accordingly and went back and forth in case i made mistakes. there *is* still one glaring mistake in the gifset which is that the small gifs in the above row don’t line up with the small gifs in the first big gif but i’m too lazy to resize and re-upload. do keep that in mind though bc it looks so much cleaner when done properly. otherwise i must say it was very pleasing to see them all come together

posting:

i posted this close to 5 pm which is surprising bc i usually post at 3 am but it just proves how delayed i was getting this out bc i’d meant to post the edit 3 days before then. so obviously i was fed up by the time i published it and i tried to act nonchalant about it in the tags bc it honestly looked incomplete to me and still does, and i know more effort goes into edits with this kind of layout but whatever! it got good reception and it really was a learning experience for me :-)

ANYWAY tysm for tagging me seed!!<3 i’ll tag:

@number5theboy for this edit / @rockyblue for this edit / @jimhcpper for this edit / @lordbelacqua​ for this edit / @swanthief for this edit and soo many other creators + creations that i admire but am too tired to tag

[fearfearer]

more thoughts about the magnus archives as i reread the transcripts

i was thinking about how gertrude robinson was really an extraordinary person (not extraordinarily Morally Sound, but extraordinary) just because of who she was, whereas the only extraordinary things about jonathan sims are things that have been arranged for him (i.e. his role). i don't mean this as a diss for jonathan, as i'm not extraordinary either. it's just striking that gertrude was so driven and confident compared to jon. of course, now we know that basically everything she did was in the pursuit of a moot goal (i.e. killing people in order to stop rituals that were already doomed to fail) so maybe my point is somewhat moot as well.

i've been doing some rereading of episodes on my phone (i.e. away from this text document on my computer) and i'll have a realization like "right, i should note that down when i get back to my computer" and i have forgotten all of them now that i am back at my computer. suffice it to say there are quite a few things i misheard/misunderstood on the first listen, unsurprisingly.

reading through the first 20 or so episodes i'm surprised by how well i remember each of them, considering i was listening like 4 episodes a day when i started. then again, it was only a month or two ago that i even listened to them, so one should hope my memory is at least this good. anyway the first episode i'm re-listening instead of rereading is 22 bc that's the first one where we hear martin's voice, i'm pretty sure

i've also noticed some errors in the official transcripts, which aren't a big deal because obviously what matters most is the audio, but still... some of them have been simple typos. magnus archives hire me as your official transcriptionist and i'll make all your transcripts 100% error-free bc im smatr

(reading through the rest of the transcripts and my standards went way down in terms of grammar/stylistic consistency, as most of the later ones are fan transcripts by several different people. i found quite a few mistakes, but obviously i have no particular way to help fix them short of sending an email to the tma transcripts fansite person like “hey there’s all these mistakes. upload my good version instead?” bc i’m not that much of a dick)

the whole reason martin went to the spider guy's building was because he didn't want jon to be disappointed in him for not doing Due Diligence. he says so twice. then he went back for the same reason. it seems the fandom joke is "jon asks his assistants to do crimes for him" but in this case martin is like "oh no maybe i didn't do enough crimes to satisfy jon"

jon was doing his archivist voice HEAVILY in season 1, huh?

tim's first appearance is so jovial compared to how he ends up...

if this boat lady is speaking spanish in brazil, then it doesn't matter if it was "bad spanish" or not. anyway now i understand why we already knew peter lukas was serving the lonely by the time jon mentioned offhand that peter lukas was serving the lonely. it was my whole “let’s not bother noting down any FREQUENTLY RECURRING names”

well i guess robert smirke was a real person. should i feel dumb about this? idk. it’s such a fictional-sounding name, to be fair. but i guess that set the precedent of using a real person as an important historical figure in the fiction that we see happening again when edmund halley is referenced later on. also episode 35 has foreshadowing for the separation of 14 powers, and people thought it was 13 because they mention 13 halls PLUS the one they came through.

totally forgot about tim goofing around in episode 39... he was really not having the worst time at this job before bad things started happening and he realized he was trapped, huh

the worms were trying to make a doorway into the Worm Wealm

ep 40 jon's like "I need to hear it. I need to record it. Or else I can't finish." (lightly abridged)

listening to the season 1 Q&A for the first time and EARL BIGMAC

also good to know there's only going to be 5 seasons. very good to know. this seems like a good kind of series to write with a fixed endpoint in mind, as it's very easy to do an episode that has effectively no bearing on the MetaPlot but which is still a short story in itself and therefore doesn't count as "filler"

jonathan sims performs with a mythical space pirate music cabaret. so he IS a ham

jonny says, "no rude words. i could say bums, maybe..." (alexander j newall does a laugh while i do the exact same laugh irl) "...but i won't."

some dumbass writing into the Q&A to ask if the background music is diegetic... get a podcast brain, ya fool. though for my part, i have to say that one of the most striking things about this podcast when i first started listening (though i never made a note of it before) was the Too Spooky Music, and i didn't like it at all. the reason was that i am, and have been, vulnerable to Getting Spooked about irrational things at night, such that it becomes really hard to fall asleep... and one of the things that has an outsize effect on my level of Spookédness is spooky audio. so if i was watching a video at night and i was worried it would Get Me Spooked, i would just turn the sound off, and it would turn out fine. but obviously you can't turn the sound off on a podcast. and i've been listening to podcasts after work, i.e. after 5pm, and i go to bed at like 8 or 9pm because i'm old. so the way it turned out was that even if the actual subject of the podcast wasn't that scary to me, the music would amplify it in an unpleasant way and make me more likely to have trouble sleeping. also i think most of the episodes would have been fine without the music, or maybe with some less intentionally-disconcerting background music.

this just in: i seem to have totally missed episode 50 on my first listen-through, despite having gone in linear order. bc i'm listening to it now and i've definitely never heard this before. fortunately it doesn't seem to have much of a bearing on the rest of the series, so it's not like i missed any crucial information. tbh the only worthwhile bit was a brief moment of tim being a ham, which was good. i hope i didn't miss any other episodes the first time... still don't know how i managed to miss this one.

the official transcript said [EXTENDED SOUNDS OF BRUTAL PIPE MURDER] ...

so gertrude and leitner WERE played by jonny's parents <:3c i'd thought as much when i saw the cast names but i like that it's confirmed. his mom is a really good actress too. i always find the gertrude episodes to be striking in a certain way

"it's Fine working with your parents. it's Fine." as someone who worked with my mom for like a year i can confirm this

i'm tickled to find that the official transcripts have a sense of humor. i wonder who is behind them. i also wonder, what is the excuse for not having a full set of official transcripts when it is a script-based show? surely you know what is going to be said beforehand, and you have it written down, and if someone ends up saying something different in the final recording, surely it wouldn’t be too hard to give the original script a little edit, and bam! that’s a transcript. i wonder if this approach is not feasible for some reason.

whenever martin reads statements, he says something about jon... whenever he talks to someone, he says something about jon

i think episode 110 is an instance of the tape recorder turning ITSELF off... at the end of the episode. because they walk away, and they say something distantly, and then it turns off. lots of other times, there had to be a diegetic reason for the tape recorder to turn off at the end.

i noticed something which i missed last time, which was that there is a rumor between melanie and georgie and basira that implies that jonathan is asexual. worth noting, i think. [side note added in later: yeah it’s canon. cool]

also i listened to episode 103 again and yes. i had thought-- i had been SURE-- that the person interrogating the traffic cop (using the asky ability) was martin. but it was actually jon. how did i possibly manage that mistake? i'm not great at distinguishing voices, but i'm not THAT bad. the only possible answer: when i was listening to the episode for the first time... i must have been eating a crunchy snack.

"it doesn't have to make sense! alex has to make it sense." (jonny sims re: writing the spiral)

glad to know that jonny sims regrets using his own name for the protagonist. doesn't make a difference either way at this point but yeah

YES i knew episode 100 was improvised. and i see, all the statementers had actually had supernatural experiences, but because the archivist was absent, their statements didn't have the coherence and clarity normally lent to them by the eye (in exchange for becoming cursed). i think melanie or basira actually said pretty much that in the episode itself, but i still couldn't be sure that all of those people had something real to talk about.

"in the same way that tim is dead, michael is helen." good shit

the archivist is canon a bit of a drama queen. the first bullet point in my first tma notes document is vindicated

jonny sims mentions another podcast (apocrypals) that sounds 100% up my alley, so that is appreciated, i will add that to my list i think. (listened to episodes 0 and 1 of apocrypals and i'm heavily struck by how VERY clearly i can hear the smiles in chris sims's voice. i did not know smiling could be so audible, truly.) (listened to quite a few more episodes of apocrypals and it’s certainly entertaining at times. i should’ve been reading along though. maybe some other time)

I DIDN'T LISTEN TO THE SEASON 4 TEASER THE FIRST TIME AROUND.........................................

i must confess something that people who know me well may already know: i hate when stories have a bad ending. an unhappy ending. a painful ending. a hopeless ending. bittersweet is the furthest in that direction i can tolerate. my perspective, which is pretty deep-seated, is that there's no point in getting to know and love characters if you're only going to be hurt by that connection to them when the end turns out to be bad. if i have even a mild inkling that a story is heading toward a bad ending, i make a conscious effort to regard all characters from afar and not develop any strong attachments. this is not so much "how i think all stories need to be," but rather, "the characteristics a story needs to have to appeal to me personally." so i understand that my view is very subjective and mostly based on my own mental weakness. but i can't help but apply it to the media i consume. and the idea that someone would do something like "make characters very human and strongly developed" IN COMBINATION WITH "heading toward a bad end" makes me upset. like, picture a horror movie. think about the characters in a horror movie. with the exception of a main character, if there is one, there's no guarantee that anyone is going to survive to the end of the film... BUT... the characters generally aren't fleshed out and very sympathetic. i wouldn't go so far as to say they're disposable, but you're not SUPPOSED to cry when they die; you're just supposed to get scared. their purpose is as objects of fear, and you never expect or even hope for a happy ending. but in the magnus archives... all i'm saying... is that i would cry if any of the remaining members of the main cast died. and it seems clear that we're not heading to a happy ending. so i'm somewhat afraid, and not in a good way. i don't know how much i can trust jonny sims to give me the story i want, and obviously, i'm not entitled to it.

if your name is jonathan and you want to shorten it, the short form is jon. it ain't john, no matter what the official transcripts say. where'd you get that h, huh? stole it from someone else's name? are you shortening it like JOnatHaN? you can’t just be that sneaky!

i listened to scrutiny again and it hits so hard. now, in heart of darkness, when manuela begs jon not to force her statement, it's really heavy given the direct context of the previous two episodes where we see how compulsion works and how it hurts.

also when jon was talking about how to destroy the dark sun and he was like "i just need to see it," when i first heard it, i assumed he meant something along the lines of, "by seeing it, i will learn how to destroy it." but now i understand that the mere act of the eye seeing it destroys it, because being known is what the darkness is weakest to.

the magnus employees who work in the library probably at least have a LITTLE BIT of a feeling that they work in an almost normal place, given that jon and all his assistants were able to have that impression before transferring to the archives. so i wonder how the magnus library people feel about their institute's director getting arrested for double murder and now the big boss is a completely unrelated ship captain who seems to want nothing to do with the place but simultaneously is trying to continue business as usual

on second listen, listening to jon ask helen when the guilt stops (wrt hurting people in order to feed one's patron fear) is pretty chilling. because it seems like he's definitely accepting that he will have to hurt people, and what he's concerned about is how bad it makes HIM feel. of course, helen then answers with precisely what i just wrote, so...

i should've read the transcript for episode 159 instead of relistening because i forgot that peter lukas's actor got so gravelly and hard to listen to in this one. anyway, time to re-listen to the season 4 finale... then i'll listen to the season 4 Q&As and stuff... and then the new episode. (DOKI DOKI DOKI DOKI DOKI)

i heard in the Q&A that the voice of peter lukas did multiple takes for episode 159?! but it was because of technical difficulties. right. because i can’t imagine the way it turned out being deemed the best take. sorry

ok, things i missed last time i listened to 160: daisy and the other two hunters are missing. also jon mentioned "magnus's body" and martin mentioned "an old man's corpse" and at the time i took this to mean (somewhat unthinkingly) that when jon and martin returned from the lonely, they killed elias/jonah's body. which would be a weird thing to happen "off-camera," so to speak. so i think i must have been wrong? slightly confused. ok, no, i'm now sure that elias survived, so i must have misunderstood. definitely alive.

as martin leaves and jon is about to begin the statement, he sounds so peaceful and satisfied. that's good acting.

by the way, in one of the previous few episodes, i noticed that jonah seems to have body-swapped by switching out his eyes into his preferred body, which i'm pretty sure i missed the first time.

i like that jonny sims checks reddit to see whether people have solved the mystery. that's just a really funny way to do things, sneaking a peek like "hmm how mysterious is my mystery? let's see who has figured it out..." and for the record, i wasn't even close to figuring it out. but to be fair to myself, i didn't try. like i said from the beginning, i started listening with the intent of going along for the ride. plus the mystery had already been solved before i started listening to the series, so it's not like i had a lot of time in between updates to contemplate whether elias was jonah, etc.

JON'S AMERICAN ACCENT FOR THE IONIZED YEAST AD

ALEX WAS THE VOICE OF JARED HOPWORTH?! i mean it was so messed up it could have been anybody but god

ALEX DIDN'T LET GERTUDE CACKLE

i've listened to the bloopers (including a gertrude cackle?) and the season 5 trailer (martin seems slightly cavalier about the end of the world but maybe he's just trying to keep his shit together for jon) and i'm going to listen to the new episode Soon.

final conclusion on rereads/relistens: i had pretty poor comprehension of some important happenings. i’m realizing just how easy it is to mishear/fail to hear exactly what is happening in a podcast when you’re doing other stuff at the same time. there are still a couple things i don’t quite understand, but i think i’ll have a look around the wiki one of these days.