#primeline

[madokamanga]

[sassy-pistachy]

PRE SEASON 2 RECAP (spoilers for the end of TMA and TMAGP's Season 2 trailer)

We're so close to be back! I have SO MANY Important questions that are gnawing at my mind... It's a long post so, keep reading to join my meltdown :D I want to know your thoughts!

-Where are SAM and the ARCHIVIST?

It seems both are currently in the PRIMELINE (as the Season 2 Trailer Transcript says), aka TMA's original universe. We all assumed it got rid of the Fears after TMA's finale, but the Transcript says "sounds of unsettling not-quite human things can be heard". So… it’s not as clear as we thought. Was Jon and Martin’s sacrifice for nothing? :( Also, it seems they don’t come out together. If you read the transcripts, the Epilogue describes Sam exiting the rift in “London’s Exclusion Zone” without mentioning the Archivist. Then the Season 2 Trailer describes the Archivist exiting the rift without mentioning Sam…

-THE ROYAL SOCIETY, THE MAGNUS INSTITUTE, THE OIAR and STARKWALL

THE ROYAL SOCIETY is an organisation of High Achieving Intellectuals (like Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke), researching alchemy (among other things), and erasing dangerous knowledge when needed through executing Protocols. 

At some point, some alchemists founded THE MAGNUS INSTITUTE to research Alchemy together, as “they had reached the limit of what they could achieve alone”. Their end goal was completing the Millenium Ritual in the year 2000, but they were stopped.

The OIAR “manages the bad guys”. There’s opposite forces (both benevolent and not) in the world, and the OIAR monitores them to keep the balance. The Response Department used to work with STARKWALL and executed at least one Protocol that we know of:

The Institute got destroyed by Starkwall in 1999, under the orders of the OIAR's Response Department and William Price, who ran the department. At some point after this, Starkwall and the OIAR ceased working together, and the Response Department disappeared.

-List of executed PROTOCOLS (that we know so far)

-1666: The Great Fire of London

Procedure: FIRE

Executed by: The Royal Society

Trying to stop: The bubonic plague?

-Around 1684: Newton’s Laboratory

Procedure: FIRE

Executed by: The Royal Society

Trying to stop: Newton’s research on Alchemy and experiments on Arbor Philosophorum Perfecta

-1999: The Magnus Institute

Procedure: FIRE

Executed by: Starkwall, under OIAR's orders

Trying to stop: The Institute’s research on Alchemy? The “Millenium Ritual”, planned to happen in the year 2000, attempting “Universal Transmutation”

-2016: Hilltop Centre branch of Oxford Peoples Trust?

Procedure: FIRE

Executed by: Starkwall

Trying to stop: Something like a ritual

The 2016 Fire at Hilltop apparently happens after the OIAR and Starkwall cease relations. So... WHO ordered that Protocol?

-Why is CELIA in this universe??

After TMA's finale, its easy to understand why Jon, Martin and Jonah get pulled through the Rift at Hilltop and spit somewhere else. But WHY CELIA?

Also, how long has it been since they arrived? Alice says the text to speech started 1 year ago, and Celia says her son Jack is around 1 year old. But she also says she had "a couple of wild years after she moved here" before having Jack...

-FR3-d1 (or Freddie), The Incidents and Voyeurism

Who records the Incidents? Whatever it is, it has access through many types of technology. But I find more interesting asking, who's listening to the OIAR staff? We spy the lives of the OIAR workers through the podcast. In TMA, they explained the "voyeurism" of the listeners through The Web. It was The Web, through the tape recorders, who wanted to spy and listen to the characters. We listened to whatever The Web was interested in. Whose intentions are we listening through now?

And what triggers the text to speech? At first, I thought only the "text to speech" incidents were "supernatural" in nature, similar to TMA's "only records on magnetic tape". But Lena says to Gwen in ep13 "whatever horrible case you read, it happened". So if ALL incidents are "real", what makes the text to speech ones different?

Previous | Next

[bonzos-number-1-fan]

TMAGP 31 Thoughts: Extended Sounds of Brutal Crowbar Damage

And we're back again, after quite a wait, but it's a nice easy one to get back into the swing of things. Nothing explosive happened this episode really but a lot of foundation setting. However we've finally hit the part of the show that is now a sequel to The Magnus Archives. So, if any of you have somehow not listened to that and are interested to hear why things are so fucked, that would be how you go about it.

Spoilers for TMA, and TMP episode 31 below the cut.

I didn't cover it elsewhere so I'm going to start with Season 2's trailer. It's a nice, short, and sweet trailer so there isn't a whole lot to get into. There are a few bits in the transcript that are worth pointing out though. Firstly, it's referred to as the "London Exclusion Zone, Primeline" and "Primeline" doesn't appear anywhere else in this trailer nor episode one. That's likely a portmanteau of Prime and Timeline which I would take to mean this is the universe from Archives. Given the warden's worry about tapes and a few other notable bits of text from the premieres transcript I would say it's all but confirmed. The only other thing I think is worth mentioning here is that the scuttling creatures are described as having "too many legs". Which isn't incredibly relevant but does at least show they're supernatural in some sense.

Okay, onto the episode proper and now we can all say goodbye to the number 3 blorbo, Colin. I'll always remember the way he called me a gobshite because I sent him an email during the ARG, and the way he lost his mind because gays were in the computer. RIP, Colin, rest in processors.

There isn't really a load to say on this ep is general IMO. I think it's all pretty surface level but as with the trailer there are some interesting bits and pieces to pick out of it. In general though, I thought it was a very solid start to a season. Picks up right where things left off and lays a lot of groundwork for what's to come and isn't a load of info dumping.

So there are a couple of things to pick out from Colin's very messy and unearned death. During the long string of "Discard data"s there is one that reads "upload data" in the transcript which is for sulphur. Sulphur being one of the tria prima and an incredibly important element to alchemy. Now, the actual audio does say "discard data" and it might not be anything more than a mistake but it's an interesting coincidence if that's all it is. The elements listed are also in order of abundance in the human body.

hardware damage_crowbar/DPHW 4600

I believe this joke was written purely for me. No one can convince me otherwise. It's going in the masterdoc.

I don't think there is much to say on Gwen's, Alice's, or Celia's showing in the episode. They're all more or less doing "normal" stuff. The only thing I would point out is that Celia does do some lying in the episode without the usual distortions around those in the audio. At least not that I heard.

Sam is bringing the wet cat energy the Primeline was missing since TMA's finale. It's being met with mixed reception. Most of what goes on here is all pretty obvious I think. We meet yet another version of Georgie who is a little more rugged and generally done with everyone's shit. She's introduced in the text as "Georgie P" which I can only assume is Georgie Prime. This is further reinforced by Heidi's statement describing exactly what we saw of London post-Change. With the additional talks of domains and circuses I think it's fairly hard to argue this isn't TMA's universe post-season 5. Which has some fairly strong implications for exactly how that all went down and how much the world both remembers and has changed, but I feel like that might be bet to get into elsewhere. And likely by other people. Them naming a van after Gertrude is very sweet tho.

I think that's about all I've got to say on this one. Nothing to mindblowing and not a lot of crumbs to follow but it's a great start to a season.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Incident/CAT#R#DPHW Master Sheet and Terminology Sheet

DPHW Theory: 5555 sounds about right to me. It's not exceptionally spooky in any single sense but is pretty broad spectrum. Pretty standard stuff. Might as well mention that Hardware Damage (Crowbar) being at 4600 also lines up very well.

CAT# Theory: Our very first 123 which is something I've personally been waiting on. I've been very vocal about how I don't think the Person/Place/Object theory makes a lot of sense. However, this is one of the ones I wouldn't argue for there if you want to stretch it to Colin still being a person after "Integration", or you want to say that JMJ also count. Not that I buy the idea any more. Although it should be noted that Johnny says in the Q&A that the first few cases are wrong. Which means if it is P/P/O it should match up perfectly if you start from the bottom until you hit a point where the wrong ones end. I don't think it would from what I recall on my essay about why it's not P/P/O but it might. I was supposed to use the break to do some more work on CAT# but then I didn't. So I've got no real insights into this one.

R# Theory: B lines up pretty well. It would be confirmable that Colin is at least missing, but getting eaten by a server rack isn't particularly likely to be why.

Header talk: Integration (organic) -/- Computer (Hardware) is a fairly standard description IMO. I can't see much to really dig into there.

[imheretofuckspiders]

tmagp - s2 trailer transcript

what is the primeline. does it stand for primary timeline. if so, how is that decided. is that the tma universe?

[ERROR] archivist is probably from the tmagp universe (hence probably not Jon), if it's in 'a new world' and this world is the tma universe that would make it a tmagp original.

primeline is gonna fuck me up until we get some answers in 13 days

[disco-archetypes]

INTERFACING - Under the green PRIMELINE a yellow SAVED button catches your eye... You wonder what the lieutenant's default radio station is

[placeholder-mcd]

This might have been asked before.

Could you give any advise on writing+on definite traits of PHMD, and maybe a sort of how he is characterized in both Admonition and Paraline?

Asking this due my own autism hindering my ability somewhat on identifying his traits and behaviors on part.

(ps. your works are awesome and have inspired me in some of my own works!)

I'm kind of figuring it out as I go, honestly. Like, Primeline McDoctorate is very similar to me as a person but has some slight differences in personality that I haven't quite nailed down yet, but intend to as I continue to endlessly rewrite Archetypicals into something I can respect as a first novel. So figuring out how an alternate version of Place responds to alternate scenarios is largely dependent on the scenarios and the archetypal function he's destined to serve therein, rather than being a function of his underlying personality. He's put in a position where he's willing to completely destroy himself as a character to become something differently entirely. The nature of what he wants to become remains to be seen and giving pointers on that would effectively be a spoiler.

TLDR what's going on in his head will remain mysterious out of both personal and narrative convenience

[kikunai]

PHIL WAS MEANT TO DIE IN ON GUARD 43 PRIMELINE????

[dino--draws]

idea for Paraline that when Dougall was redirecting the waste from AAF-D and fractured off the timeline, Ambrogi, Markey, and Del Olmo felt their primeline deaths at the exact moment the timeline split due to weird old guy shenanigans (the other victims wouldn't get those due to not sitting in the middle of the facility full of the uncontained's waste or not sitting across from the breach's cause in the first place). Del Olmo would likely think about it for a few months before letting it fade out of mind, only remembering it after the Paraline breach. The two techs would be shaken for an hour or two before it was overshadowed by Phil's death.

ooohhh man… they felt in in their bones, a gapping absence where something should have laid. And it hurt.

But nothing happened. Everything is fine. Yet something is wrong.

[gobodegoblin]

Maids are actually the natural predator of rats, vermin and black mold, they are a human splinter species in the same way that dwarves or elves are. They operate in packs and require large “domains” in order to not clash with other Households of Maids. They exist in a symbiotic relationship with Primeline Humans as their search for food and consumption of food leaves places in a clean state. while not domesticated, Home Sapienci Maidus do form relationships with humans, treating humans as protectors of the domain. This can lead to conflict as if two humans who have maid infestations show aggression to one another it can cause their respective Households to also develop a fued with the other. Maids are also known to exhibit camouflage, mimicking their surroundings; This is why Maids in fancy homes tend to appear more regal and refined, while Maids in poor areas will appear in workmens uniforms and scrubs. It is also noted that Maids local to poor areas tend to be more sociable than those in rich areas, likely due to the abundance of food and more frequent contact with other Households of Maids.

The funniest thing about how maids are depicted in a certain kind of fiction is that, like, at least half the time the people who ostensibly own the place don't even really seem to want them to be there? It's often genuinely unclear who their actual employer is, or whether they're getting paid at all – it's like looking at a universe where if you build a fancy enough house, maids just show up, like rats.

[cscleansolutions]

The smaller-footprint CLEANSORB PS models feature a back-up column, allowing production to be run to completion even after the capacity of the main absorber column has become depleted. The larger CLEANSORB PD model incorporates two full-size absorber columns plus a back-up column; one main column can remain active absorbing exhaust gas with full SEMI-S2-compliant safety protection, while the second column is independently purged before removal from the cabinet for refilling.

[riffingtheverse]

I want to believe we'll see a Colin in the primeline at some point

[madokamanga]

[sassy-pistachy]

(open for full size)

PRE SEASON 2 RECAP (spoilers for the end of TMA and TMAGP's Season 2 trailer)

1 day untill Season 2! (at least for the Patrons and the Bakers). Let's celebrate with some obsessive note-taking.

-Where are SAM and the ARCHIVIST?

It seems both are currently in the PRIMELINE, which I'm assuming means TMA's original universe. At least, The Archivist is, as the Season 2 Trailer Transcript says. We all assumed it got rid of the Fears after TMA's finale, but the Transcript says "sounds of unsettling not-quite human things can be heard". So… it’s not as clear as we thought. Was Jon and Martin’s sacrifice for nothing? :( Also, it seems they don’t come out together. If you read the transcripts, the Epilogue describes Sam exiting the rift in “London’s Exclusion Zone” without mentioning the Archivist. Then the Season 2 Trailer describes the Archivist exiting the rift without mentioning Sam…

-THE ROYAL SOCIETY, THE MAGNUS INSTITUTE, THE OIAR and STARKWALL

THE ROYAL SOCIETY is an organisation of High Achieving Intellectuals (like Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke), researching alchemy (among other things), and erasing dangerous knowledge when needed through executing Protocols. 

At some point, some alchemists founded THE MAGNUS INSTITUTE to research Alchemy together, as “they had reached the limit of what they could achieve alone”. Their end goal was completing the Millenium Ritual in the year 2000, but they were stopped.

The OIAR “manages the bad guys”. There’s opposite forces (both benevolent and not) in the world, and the OIAR monitores them to keep the balance. The Response Department used to work with STARKWALL and executed at least one Protocol that we know of:

The Institute got destroyed by Starkwall in 1999, under the orders of the OIAR's Response Department and William Price, who ran the department. At some point after this, Starkwall and the OIAR ceased working together, and the Response Department disappeared.

-List of executed PROTOCOLS (that we know so far) -1666: The Great Fire of London Procedure: FIRE Executed by: The Royal Society Trying to stop: The bubonic plague? -Around 1684: Newton’s Laboratory Procedure: FIRE Executed by: The Royal Society Trying to stop: Newton’s research on Alchemy and experiments on Arbor Philosophorum Perfecta -1999: The Magnus Institute Procedure: FIRE Executed by: Starkwall, under OIAR's orders Trying to stop: The Institute’s research on Alchemy? The “Millenium Ritual”, planned to happen in the year 2000, attempting “Universal Transmutation” -2016: Hilltop Centre branch of Oxford Peoples Trust? Procedure: FIRE Executed by: Starkwall Trying to stop: Something like a ritual

The 2016 Fire at Hilltop apparently happens after the OIAR and Starkwall cease relations. So... WHO ordered that Protocol?

-Why is CELIA in this universe??

After TMA's finale, its easy to understand why Jon, Martin and Jonah get pulled through the Rift at Hilltop and spit somewhere else. But WHY CELIA?

Also, how long has it been since they arrived? Alice says the text to speech started 1 year ago, and Celia says her son Jack is around 1 year old. But she also says she had "a couple of wild years after she moved here" before having Jack...

-FR3-d1 (or Freddie), The Incidents and Voyeurism

Who records the Incidents? Whatever it is, it has access through many types of technology. But I find more interesting asking, who's listening to the OIAR staff? We spy the lives of the OIAR workers through the podcast. In TMA, they explained the "voyeurism" of the listeners through The Web. It was The Web, through the tape recorders, who wanted to spy and listen to the characters. We listened to whatever The Web was interested in. Whose intentions are we listening through now?

And what triggers the text to speech? At first, I thought only the "text to speech" incidents were "supernatural" in nature, similar to TMA's "only records on magnetic tape". But Lena says to Gwen in ep13 "whatever horrible case you read, it happened". So if ALL incidents are "real", what makes the text to speech ones different?

Previous

[bonzos-number-1-fan]

TMAGP 34 Thoughts: Burying the Hatchet

This is a very exposition heavy episode but it's not a lot of new information IMO. I think most of the big stuff here is more confirmation of what I would call, potentially arrogantly, obviously inferable information. Which isn't a bad thing but as you're all probably very aware by now I don't really retread the explicit stuff in these. So we'll see what I've got to say.

And, yes, I did forget what day it was on Thursday and then procrastinate this until now. Blame the Spiral. Tomorrow's post will probably be on time.

Spoilers for TMA , and TMAGP episode 34 below the cut.

Okay, so, as I've mentioned, this is all quite explicit. Sam's in TMA London and it's all spooky still. I do love how over everything Georgie is, and it's nice to see her fearlessness expressed as apathy and annoyance. Even with all the blatant info dumping there are a couple of interesting things to pick out from this whole section though. Part of London, presumably the part that was around the Magnus Institute/Panopticon, didn't revert to its pre-Change state but the interesting bit is other parts of the world didn't either. Obviously the Institute, being the epicentre of the Eye's power on Earth, makes sense but what other places didn't change back? Did every Fear have a location like the Panopticon and those all remained? Is it about the domains of powerful avatars? It doesn't seem like the creatures in the London Exclusion Zone are particularly related to the Eye, so is that true of every location still affected? Or is the Square Mile unique in this respect because of the Eye's central position for the Change? A lot of things going on there. I'm not sure any of that will come up to be honest, I think most of that is probably irrelevant, but it's got a lot of world building potential.

The other thing to note is them being called "wardens". The major organisation people would think of for civil defence in the UK would be either the Civil Defence Service (1935–1945) or the Civil Defence Corps (1949–1968). The Civil Defence Service started its life as the Air Raid Precautions Department and then later created the Air Raid Wardens' Service. These wardens were largely responsible for making sure communities were doing what they were meant to as to not get bombed to shit. As the nature of civil service in the UK evolved both during and after the war so did the role of the wardens but it was generally about community organisation and leadership, recon, and reporting. Captain isn't a rank of Warden in any incarnation as far as I'm aware, but the UK also doesn't really have current civil defence either. Which is interesting in so far as the implication that the UK government is treating it like war. At least in the primeline, in TMAGP's time it seems a lot more clandestine than that.

The section with Georgie and Dave I don't have much to add to. It's all something we've seen with [Error] before and in the interest of getting this post done I'm not going to talk out my ass like I might usually do.

Sam and Georgie do some more exposition. Honestly, this is mostly just a last season recap and I've talked about all that before. Obviously Georgie is worried this is John, and I've seen a lot of people wanting it to be, but I think that would probably be the worst thing they could do here. Especially with Chester in the mix doing the whole "John is a monster" thing and having John be all monster feels a little trite to me. I'm fairly sure they're not doing that in either case. Especially when they've cast Beth Eyre as [Error] already, the bait and switch there would feel sorta shitty IMO.

The Gardener's statement was really well done. I know the TMA season 5 statements are contentious but I think there are some incredible bits of short form fiction in there. This one is no different and I think builds upon season 5 wonderfully by subverting the expectations those statements built. In TMA season 5 the statements were pretty aggressively about their Fear. It wasn't often, if at all, that the listener was ever in suspense about what the Fear at play was. This statement initially seems no different. Starts off very Buried but is very clearly a Slaughter domain by the end of it and it's a really interesting one too. Very boiled down to the basic aspects of the Fear. Good stuff, well written, well acted, no notes.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Incident/CAT#R#DPHW Master Sheet and Terminology Sheet

DPHW Theory: N/A

CAT# Theory: XXXX, I guess? CATXXXX is actually pretty interesting in that it's basically the only way you can wrongly X out that string. The dates got the correct number of Xs for the maximum length a date can be in the DMYYYY format. CATXXXX doesn't match the maximum length, nor any reasonable combination. It's pretty much the most wrong thing they could've written. Which does, obviously, mean it was directly aimed at me and written out of spite.

R# Theory: N/A

Header talk: ERROR (Unknown Source) is probably the single most interesting heading we've ever seen. Back in the TMAGP universe we've seen that Freddie has no problems with filing incident reports that [Error] has collected. In TMA there was some implication that the audience was the Eye only to then subvert that expectation. The current implication is that our PoV is that of Freddie and this reinforces that, it got a fucked filing but did get a filing, but I do wonder if this is laying the ground work for that sort of twist. It also raises the question about what makes this incident different to any of the others. The obvious reason is that the Gardener is from another dimension but [Error] doesn't seem to be operating any differently. So either the Mechanisms are quite different or is the experience. TMAGP's universe never has a Change, as far as we know, and so hasn't had domains and as such there wouldn't be anything to file this under assuming Freddie can accurately do that. The link between Freddie and [Error]/her tapes, is also interesting too. Is this unique to [Error] or can Freddie do this to anything that's connected via a tear? If it's unique to [Error] is that because of JMJs connection to the Eye, and [Error's] status as an Archivist, or is there something else at play? Like I said, more interesting than Building (Angry).

[imheretofuckspiders]

tmagp 34 live reaction

spoilers under cut.

god finally some answers. also i like that they didn't spend fucking ages faffing around with 'how are you from a parallel universe', because that's overplayed and boring

sam my baby shrimp. it's not his fault he's maybe doomed another universe

georgie darling. i have to say, she's an incredible leader. and i like seeing the sternest side of her, and the veiled grief she feels understanding that not only is jon as he was human gone permanently, he might be back as a full monster.

the tape recorders are little creatures now! this is not horrifying at all! and this isn't web bullshit, this is pure distilled Archivist juice now.

IT'S ALL EYES BABEY DAMN RIGHT IT IS

fuck right in the feels. she thinks jon's back and he's gone full people-eating soul-sucking monster.

also in my staunch belief that this is Not. Jon. it's not any form of Jonathan Sims. It's an Archivist. my question now is what were the tmagp magnus institute doing with archiving.

SPOOKY STATIC IS BACK BABY

god i missed spooky static

and we're getting a freddie classification for primeline statements now? i know it's an ERROR and the classification is just XXXXXXXXXXX, but why do these classifications even exist in the first place?

also this statement takes place in the tma universe so entity maniacs eat your heart out. the slaughterrrrr

beth eyre my beloved. their performance perfectly characterised the archivist more as a hungry creature than a tortured soul.

[alcoraplant]

Schumacher offers longer-lasting straw chopper knives

A tungsten carbide coating not only prolongs the service life of Schumacher’s latest straw chopper knives but also promotes a self-sharpening effect to maintain performance. The PrimeLine knives added to the manufacturer’s Radura product group have a tungsten carbide coating applied using laser cladding technology to the upper side of the knife only. See also:  New Holland CR11 combine takes…