#dredgermen

[rebeccasteventaylor]

Listening again…

Spoilers below

Alice knows more than she’s letting on I think. I know everyone adores her and rightly so but I also don’t trust her.

I think if Freddie tried to update then it’d lose Chester and Norris and that’s why it can’t update. So Freddie was created around the same time as this world’s Magnus Institute burned down?

Practically screamed when Norris said in Martin’s voice - I just couldn’t face the thought of the rest of my life never hearing him again.

Norris sounds like Martin not just in the voice but the emotion and empathy and understanding in his voice. I swear that’s Martin.

Who is The Consultant and The Company in the first story?

Lena is picking on Gwen and I don’t think we’ve been told Gwen’s last name yet (I know it but first listen we didn’t know it). But now we know she’s a Bouchard, her wanting Lena’s job at OIAR is ominous.

Ah, Colin my beloved. Too early to ship him with Sam? Probably. I haven’t defined my ships yet.

Gwen is very curious about Sam.

I may have screamed when Jon’s voice said ‘Magnus Institute ruins’

Spelunking and urban exploring play such a huge role in both Magnus stories. I think what RedCanary is feeling is echoes of the other Magnus Institute - when they feel watched or like someone is behind them.

Symbols? Stains? RedCanary went back there, didn’t they? They’ve gone back to the Magnus Institute and never came out again.

Sam’s shaken by the Magnus Institute reference - blast from the past? But he also has a past with Alice. Do they both have a link to the Institute?

Ooh, I’d missed that before - Alice is Sam’s ex…

So Sam’s life had fallen apart and this job is supposed to be him rebuilding? Echoes of - well, almost everyone in the Institute.

Who is Colin talking to at the end? The computer? Something in the computer?

I tried to have a look at the transcripts but the site has crashed because too many people are accessing it.

And now - episode 2, written by Alexander J Newall

What does DPHW stand for? Sam is very eager to decode the system. And wants to stay. He is investigating?

‘We’ll unpack that ominous silence later’ great line.

Interesting that this statement isn’t read, but we hear the actual voices of the artist and therapist

Oh that poor woman. I feel that. I hate the way I look too, and I understand that need to remake oneself

Ink5ouls serpent design that feels real and the way they behave - is this the Distortion?

More symbols.

‘I could feel when the knife scraped bone’ oh that line is chilling.

Alice just ignores it all? She doesn’t care. But that never works out well.

Outsourcing? Redundancies? Seems like normal office conversations but in Magnus world office language is usually a metaphor for something horrific.

I like how clunky the computers sound. I remember computers like that.

Why was Alice’s brother introduced? Brothers don’t do well either.

Dredgermen dig things up long buried in the depths. And Alice’s brother’s band is called that.

A really good beginning. Loads of intrigue and mystery and some really good characters. Cannot wait for more.

[shoggoth-the-bitch]

In one of the episodes of the Magnus Protocol it's brought up that Alice's brother is in a band. The name they said was something like "the Dredgermen" and at the time I thought "I should look that up" and then proceeded to forget about it entirely and not look it up.

Well, I was going back over my live blogging posts and remembered. And...

So Drägerman, the actual spelling, are rescue workers for underground emergencies.

This is on top of the fact that an episode outright made reference to the phrase "canary in a coal mine" and the fact that what remains of the old Magnus Institute is now apparently an abandoned tunnel system.

All of this is to say, there sure is a lot of symbolism this first season with things like tunnels and mines and spelunking. Much like in the first season of TMA where there was a hard focus of insects very early on, and we all know how the first season ended...

That all said, it does make me wonder, what does a name like The Drägerman mean in this context? Do we think Alice's brother will have some kind of connection with the Buried or will they somehow be connected to the people who seem to be actively protecting people from monsters like in episode 7? You know, with the whole "emergency and rescue" being what a Drägerman is supposed to do.

Or maybe they're just a bunch of idiots who are going to die in a hole somewhere, which will traumatize our poor Alice?

[quotesfrommyreading]

It is August 1854, and London is a city of scavengers. Just the names alone read now like some kind of exotic zoological catalogue: bone-pickers, rag-gatherers, pure-finders, dredgermen, mud-larks, sewer-hunters, dustmen, night-soil men, bunters, toshers, shoremen. These were the London underclasses, at least a hundred thousand strong. So immense were their numbers that had the scavengers broken off and formed their own city, it would have been the fifth-largest in all of England. But the diversity and precision of their routines were more remarkable than their sheer number. Early risers strolling along the Thames would see the toshers wading through the muck of low tide, dressed almost comically in flowing velveteen coats, their oversized pockets filled with stray bits of copper recovered from the water's edge. The toshers walked with a lantern strapped to their chest to help them see in the predawn gloom, and carried an eight-foot-long pole that they used to test the ground in front of them, and to pull themselves out when they stumbled into a quagmire. The pole and the eerie glow of the lantern through the robes gave them the look of ragged wizards, scouring the foul river's edge for magic coins. Beside them fluttered the mud-larks, often children, dressed in tatters and content to scavenge all the waste that the toshers rejected as below their standards: lumps of coal, old wood, scraps of rope.

Above the river, in the streets of the city, the pure-finders eked out a living by collecting dog shit (colloquially called “pure”) while the bone-pickers foraged for carcasses of any stripe. Below ground, in the cramped but growing network of tunnels beneath London's streets, the sewer-hunters slogged through the flowing waste of the metropolis. Every few months, an unusually dense pocket of methane gas would be ignited by one of their kerosene lamps and the hapless soul would be incinerated twenty feet below ground, in a river of raw sewage.

The scavengers, in other words, lived in a world of excrement and death. Dickens began his last great novel, Our Mutual Friend, with a father-daughter team of toshers stumbling across a corpse floating in the Thames, whose coins they solemnly pocket. “What world does a dead man belong to?” the father asks rhetorically, when chided by a fellow tosher for stealing from a corpse. “'Tother world. What world does money belong to? This world.” Dickens' unspoken point is that the two worlds, the dead and the living, have begun to coexist in these marginal spaces. The bustling commerce of the great city has conjured up its opposite, a ghost class that somehow mimics the status markers and value calculations of the material world.  Consider the haunting precision of the bone-pickers' daily routine, as captured in Henry Mayhew's pioneering 1844 work, London Labour and the London Poor:

It usually takes the bone-picker from seven to nine hours to go over his rounds, during which time he travels from 20 to 30 miles with a quarter to a half hundredweight on his back. In the summer he usually reaches home about eleven of the day, and in the winter about one or two. On his return home he proceeds to sort the contents of his bag. He separates the rags from the bones, and these again from the old metal (if he be luckly enough to have found any). He divides the rags into various lots, according as they are white or coloured; and if he have picked up any pieces of canvas or sacking, he makes these also into a separate parcel. When he has finished the sorting he takes his several lots to the ragshop or the marine-store dealers, and realizes upon them whatever they may be worth. For the white rags he gets from 2d. to 3d. per pound, according as they are clean or soiled. The white rags are very difficult to be found; they are mostly very dirty, and are therefore sold with the coloured ones at the rate of about 5 lbs. for 2d.

The homeless continue to haunt today's postindustrial cities, but they rarely display the professional clarity of the bone-picker's impromptu trade, for two primary reasons. First, minimum wages and government assistance are now substantial enough that it no longer makes economic sense to eke out a living as a scavenger. (Where wages remain depressed, scavenging remains a vital occupation; witness the perpendadores of Mexico City). The bone collector's trade has also declined because most modern cities possess elaborate systems for managing the waste generated by their inhabitants. (In fact, the closest American equivalent to the Victorian scavengers – the aluminium-can collectors you sometimes see hovering outside supermarkets – rely on precisely those waste-management systems for their paycheck.) But London in 1854 was a Victorian metropolis trying to make do with an Elizabethan public infrastructure. The city was vast even by today's standards, with two and a half million people crammed inside a thirty-mile circumference. But most of the techniques for managing that kind of population density that we now take for granted – recycling centers, public-health departments, safe sewage removal – hadn't been invented yet.

And so the city itself improvised a response – an unplanned, organic response, to be sure, but at the same time a response that was precisely contoured to the community's waste-removal needs. As the garbage and excrement grew, an underground market for refuse developed, with hooks into established trades. Specialists emerged, each dutifully carting goods to the appropriate site in the official market: the bone collectors selling their goods to the bone-boilers, the pure-finders selling their dog shit to tanners, who used the “pure” to rid their leather goods of the lime they had soaked in for weeks to remove animal hair. (A process widely considered to be, as one tanner put it, “the most disagreeable in the whole range of manufacture.”)

We're naturally inclined to consider these scavengers tragic figures, and to fulminate against a system that allowed so many thousands to eke out a living by foraging through human waste. In many ways, this is the correct response. (It was, to be sure, the response of the great crusaders of the age, among them Dickens and Mayhew.) But such social outrage should be accompanied by a measure of wonder and respect: without any central planner coordinating their actions, without any education at all, this itinerant underclass managed to conjure up an entire system for processing and sorting the waste generated by two million people. The great contribution usually ascribed to Mayhew's London Labour is simply his willingness to see and record the details of these impoverished lives. But just as valuable was the insight that came out of that bookkeeping, once he had run the numbers: far from being unproductive vagabonds, Mayhew discovered, these people were actually performing an essential function for their community. “The removal of the refuse of a large town,” he wrote, “is, perhaps, one of the most important of social operations.” And the scavengers of Victorian London weren't just getting rid of that refuse – they were recycling it.

  —  The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic - and How it Changed Science, Cities and the Modern World (Steven Johnson)

[sammy-the-haze]

Woe.Begone:

Woe.Begone (the violent video game itself. I know it wouldn’t for security reasons but I think it’d look pretty damn cool)

OVER (oldbrush valley energy and resources)

Cutting grass (mowing grass? A band in s10)

The Oldbrush Valley 24-Hour Diner

-

The Amelia Project:

The Amelia Project/Brotherhood of the Phoenix

Les Deux Magots (apparently a real place, but in universe its the source of famous hot cocoa)

Hell (a terrifying theme park for adults only)

Grand Character Station (?) (where most characters come from, it has subway station vibes)

MI-5 (a rival secret organization)

TIP (the Incognito Project, the worst in the business)

Monsieur Rêve’s Dream Interpretorium

Dover Petrol and Pretzels (a gas station, episode 50something)

Die Berliner Luft (no spoilers but it’s a speakeasy, episode 63)

-

If no one has said them yet, the bands that Alice’s brother play in, in the Magnus Protocol- Dredgermen and Penny for the Well

listing in universe podcast shops/bands/musicians/media/anything that might feasibly have merchandise, if anyone has any more please add! I'm going to make some merch badges I think

- The Hatfield Kapos (SBR)

- The Holy Grill (WTSF)

- The Burning Covens (WTSF)

- 'Go Capybaras. Big.' (WTSF)

- Birdie and the Swan Song (TSCOSI)

- Lilly Gilder (TPP)

- someone please remind me what Elinor Lopez's broadcast is called (TPP)

- What The Ghost? (TMA)

- Ghost Hunt UK (TMA)

- Bonzo (?) (TMAGP)

- Augur (sic) Corp (NSP)

- Night Shift Coffee (NSP)

[themariarosariaworld]

DO YOU PREFER TEA OR COFFEE ? Biarritz#barbies#blondes#brunettes#bardelacôte#côte57#cappuccino#côtedesbasques#Carlinalodge#donjuan#dredgermen#espelete#julioiglesias#ken#meagre#posers#playboys#Rio#roundwomen#surf#spain#sunset#tee#tapas#coffee (à Carlina Lodge)

[shoggoth-the-bitch]

Making Adjustments

The new episode was kinda spoiled for me but that's all good. I just makes me feral to watch these episodes.

The music is still so good. It's just place where I can listen to/buy this track? Is there more to it of just that little bit of music, I wonder?

Okay, so they're just quizzing each other?

DPHW. Okay, so what DOES this mean? W stands for the Watcher maybe?

"Time isn't real." Alice, I love and adore you...

Is this how we're doing live statements now? Fun. I don't actually know who's talking right now.

Oh good, body image issues. Relatable unfortunately...

Ah yes, impulse body modification, that's a grand idea... okay, not so impulsive, sounds like you did actually think about this a bit. Occult symbols you say? Alright, what horror did you accidentally stamp yourself with then?

Ew, influencers... Oh god, no. Forced tattooing sounds terrifying.

Another thing with symbols? Like the fears are trying to forcefully establish themselves.

This is feeling kinda like the Spiral?

Oh! She modified herself to match the painting... I don't LOVE this!

This feels like it could be the Flesh too but no, it feels too maddening. It still feels like the Spiral.

Well that was an upsetting story...

Alice, that seems kind of irresponsible...

Hm... no, I don't think I would take that deal Alice. You're so weird though.

Gwen's worried about outsourcing? Interesting?

Alice has a younger sibling? I want so many details!

Dredgermen. Interesting name.

Okay, Sam's looking into the institute. That's probably bad. Alice is advising against it but I highly doubt he's gonna listen for long.