#unwarranted infodump tag

[kn-1013]

modern au larry would actually be hype as fuck that tapes are coming back into vogue now, but he's also extremely pissed that gen z doesn't actually have access to any good quality tapes or any good quality stereos to play tapes. every single fucking last one of the modern tape players at this point in time are absolute fucking garbage and it makes him want to start blowing up buildings

[lutes-of-the-world]

Hi, I found your blog through the Ender's Game tag, and I found this post interesting.

I think of this too. I study the renaissance lute, an instrument for domestic music making from a quieter time, when the loudest ambient noise was generally the local mill.

People sang songs and played instruments together, and, depending on custom, they prayed together too.

This is a facsimile of a printed lute song in table format from 1612 England. The left page shows the cantus (treble) part with a lute accompaniment in tablature - the cantus singer was expected to play the lute as well. The altus, tenor, and bassus parts on the right page face different directions - the singers all sat around a table and read from the centrally placed page.

This scan I found is too small to read, but the text is sacred. This is a song for family devotion.

I've only studied the European 15th-18th centuries in academic detail, but I imagine that similar scenes have always existed across time and space. We have iconography from nearly all cultures and times showing communal music making.

Robert Tournières, Concert, France, 1690s, showing a baroque cello, virginal, singer, violin, and French baroque lute.

Palace Music (宮樂圖), Tang Dynasty

This is, at least, one answer to our question. I hope this unwarranted infodump has not been unwelcome.

Sometimes I get curious about historical silence.

Two decades ago I couldn't stream nearly any song, show, or movie I wanted at a whim just to fill the volume of my living room. With background noise. Eighty years ago I couldn't turn on the TV and let it run during the day while I donut her things. A century ago I probably wouldnt have had a radio, and another 50 years before that a phonograph would have been a novelty not a household commonality.

What did homemakers and those who existed mostly in the domestic sphere do before technologies of recording and broadcast became common? Did they have other ways to divert their attention? Was the world literally quieter? Were they simply acclimated to it? Was conversation - forced or natural - the medium of the time?

Sometimes I get curious about historical silence, and how our forebears shaped it.

[fucked-up-and-evil-geneticist]

Intro.. post?

Guess this is what’s used a lot- hello, my name’s Phillip and this is a blog made solely because it seems people on the Internet know how to create great moodboards for science- along with uh, my own daily ramblings and thoughts.

Don’t worry, I’ll have tags denoting my own thoughts because that’s a thing that exists on this site.

{{Hello welcome one and all to yet another impulse blog made!}}

{{This is gonna be a semi-serious blog meant to store all the cool mad scientist moodboards I see… along with in-character action of my OC, Phillip Onstreth!}}

{{it’s also a way for me to infodump info of him and as him.}}

~The Tags~

radioactive sparks: me, just talking, not prompted by anyone.

unwarranted guests: that’s for the ask box, because I didn’t ask for anyone to send messages yet they Do.

scientific proof: anything containing a picture of me or my surroundings, not the same as the moodboards and shit.

personal inquiries: this is specifically for certain people if they ever decide that entering my ask box is a good idea. In the same ballpark as “close friends”

(just in case: if you ever wonder what the stance is on LGBTQ+, discrimination and such, check this post right here )

[kn-1013]

i know i've been on my anti-modern AU propaganda lately and it's just because i've been delving deeper into the sally face ao3 tags and i just keep finding them over and over. it's frustrating because there are a lot of really interesting concepts out there that would fit really well and make for a genuinely really interesting story in the 90s, but they get thrown off because the author doesn't know enough about the 90s to write for that time period, so they make it into a modern au instead. there's nothing inherently wrong with that, and i think there's room for modern aus to be done well here, i even have my own half-serious modern au, but i do think you often lose part of what makes sally face special when you turn the story into any other kind of contemporary love story/horror story/etc where all the characters just have ~iphones~ and use ~snapchat~ and all these things.

like, the 90s was not some kind of alien planet, and a vast number of the problems that you're solving with smartphones can be worked around very easily with just a bit of research or thought. long distance walkie-talkies, pagers, and PDAs were all (though sometimes expensive) perfectly capable contemporary technologies for talking to people when you are not physically with them. in fact, a lot of the abbreviations and slang we use over text right now was developed by young people in the 90s using pagers to talk to their friends. PDAs were a bit more out there in the 90s than they were in the aughts, but it's still completely plausible for henry in particular to have one, considering he already owns a home computer, which was not at all ubiquitous in the 90s. considering the apparent financial limitations that he and sal live under (it's never stated explicitly, but i mean, they live at addison's, they can't be in a great financial situation) and how insanely expensive computers were back then, it's more than likely that henry's job requires a home computer of some sort, meaning that a PDA would probably be incredibly useful to him if he were away from it, because there's no way in hell he's getting himself a luggable or another kind of early laptop to bring with him, that would've been too expensive.

and that's ignoring the fact that so many situations where two characters are apart form each other but need to communicate could just be fixed by rewriting the plot so that they can meet in person. i know that's not what people wanna hear because rewriting sucks, but you can find a lot of reasons for characters to meet each other randomly or to have reasons to meet up later if you give it a bit of problem-solving. part of what makes the pre-smartphone era interesting to write for and so optimized for horror, and probably a big reason that gabry chose this time period for the story in the first place, is the level of disconnection between each character in the story BECAUSE they don't have things like smartphones. having to work around this technological limitation is part of the fun, because you get a very enjoyable push and pull of closeness vs. disconnection between each character.

this is great for alienating ash, the only one who doesn't live in the apartments (except for neil), and causing her internal conflict about her relationships with the rest of her friends, especially as the story progresses and they start discovering more shit about the cult, and her instincts are to call the cops because she's a lot more normal than her friends are. or, it's good for alienating travis, who also doesn't live there and is far more isolated than everyone else (more on that next), or for creating an unhealthy and codependent relationship between sal and larry, who, with the walkies, are the only two in the friend group who DO have semi-instant access to each other all the time--all of which are plot points i put into my writing.

and if that's not enough, think about the implications for travis's character in particular. his father is a preacher, and a huge talking point of christian extremists in the 90s was that things like television were evil and demonic in some way. they campaigned against these things heavily. with the kind of person that we know kenneth phelps to be and the way many technologies we take for granted today, including TVs, were still being adopted by older generations, it's not out of the question at all that travis doesn't own something like a TV or a VCR, putting him even more out of the loop with what other people his age are doing than he already would be, having approximately 0 friends. he doesn't know what DND is, and he doesn't know how to look it up because he's not familiar with computers or the internet, he just knows his dad thinks it's demonic, so he steers clear of it.

the intention of cult leaders like kenneth is to keep their victims as isolated as possible, and not owning a TV, VCR, home computer, etc, is a great way to keep travis and his sisters isolated and disconnected from their peers, and therefore more connected to the cult, and it's a lot easier to justify not owning these things in the 90s, where the story already takes place, than it is if you're writing a modern au. a modern au for this situation would require all kinds of technological workarounds to make sure that travis owned a phone but couldn't do anything his father didn't want him doing on it. he's the kind of father who would go through and monitor his kid's texts, he wouldn't just let travis have snapchat or whatever, but i digress.

i know i'm just doing my petty bitching and people can do whatever they want however they want to, but i really do feel like there's a huge piece of the story that is lost in turning the sally face story as it is into some kind of modern au, and it's pretty unfortunate to me that people seem to think that the 90s was such a primitive alien world of incomprehensible technology that they don't want to write for that time period at all. it's really not as terrifying as it seems, genuinely. a surface level understanding of the era's technologies would be straightforward enough for anyone who wasn't there to write something perfectly coherent, if lacking in specific cultural/technological details that nobody but me cares about because i have autism.

if you're a sally face fan reading this and you struggle with writing for the american 90s because you weren't there, go look up pagers (also called beepers) and PDAs (which are basically early pocket computers) and how they work. ask older family members if or how they used them. go look at the different kinds of home computers of the era from companies like packard-bell and IBM. learn what a pentium III is/was, or what it means to be X86 compatible. look at the history of the CD-ROM, and how when it was invented, it could contain so much data that consumers had absolutely no idea what to do with them until people started putting video games on them. go watch cathode ray dude, LGR or techmoan on youtube.

go learn things about this era, it's good for you and you will have a lot of fun, even if you're not like me, i promise, and your fanfiction will be better for it. please learn about this era. take my hand. we can go to beautiful places together.

[kn-1013]

you can call me KN, i’m 21, he/she butch dykefag on T. this is my fandom/main art blog. it's been inactive for a while but i'm trying to revive it. my main is @reallyverynormal, it's where i interact from.

i like don’t starve together, MP100, sally face, deadpool, creepypasta, gundam, my own OCs, and some yuri manga on the side. i don't update this blog as frequently as i'd like as i am full of the illness that makes me not draw or write, but feel free to send me asks about characters, headcannons, or general requests and i'll try to get to them when i can :)

if you like sally face, consider joining my sally face tumblr group.

my toyhou.se is kn95-art, my ao3 is canis_rising, and my SFW twitter is kn95_art (barely used lol).

my art commissions are open; PM me for details.

i don't have a DNI, if i don't like you i'll just block you. however, there are two notices i'd like to put here:

i do not support underage NSFW content. if you do, you won't like me. i don't care about literally any other kink or porn related discourse of any kind (including every single one you see useless callout posts for). do not bring shipping or kink discourse or any of that nonsense into my ask box, you will be blocked.

i don't plan on posting NSFW to this blog, but that said, there will be NSFW jokes, blood & gore, body horror, suicide/self harm, the occasional cartoon penis, and other things of that nature, so viewer discretion is advised.

fandom tags:

my art tag

my fics tag

my exploratory surgery tag (uncontextualized drabbles, basically)

my headcannons tag

my OCs tag

my DST tag (don't starve together)

my MP100 tag (mob psycho 100)

my SF tag (sally face)

my Alligator Blood (AU) tag (a sally face AU where the cult has no magic)

my SF Modern AU tag (a vague sally face "everyone lives and grows up" AU, sometimes related to the ABAU)

my CRP tag (creepypasta)

I also have other tags related to fandoms, such as tagging original posts with the names of characters, (i.e. #sal fisher), so you can search for specific characters on my blog if you like, or I also might tag a reblog that reminds me of a certain character with their name and a -core suffix, (i.e. #larrycore) just for the memes.

personal tags:

txt (textposts)

reply; (replying to other people)

ask (asks)

unwarranted infodump tag (what it says on the tin)

in my onion (opinions tag)

[kn-1013]

this is why they have to do that btw. analogue media from different countries tends to frequently be extremely incompatible due to differing signal standards and electrical requirements, causing a PAL tape to not display images/color, and the audio to be sped up when put into an NTSC player.

the signal standards are mostly referring to the color/image display signals, which are what's most incompatible. this is why you can't get an image, but you can get (albeit sped up or slowed down) audio out of doing this. the UK and a lot of europe used a standard called PAL (where english dub moomin tapes were made for), while america used a standard called NTSC, and SECAM was a standard used in other parts of europe, france, russia, etc. within these standards, there were a ton of variations in and of themselves, i.e. there's a difference between american NTSC and japanese NTSC, but that gets really into the weeds of analogue signal standards.

some NTSC players can be used to play PAL tapes by displaying a black and white image with (albeit potentially distorted/incorrectly pitched or sped) audio, while some don't display any image at all, but have incorrectly sped audio. still mostly unwatchable, but neat. some NTSC players can even play a PAL tape just fine, or some PAL tapes but not others, though you'd be hard pressed to find these in america, since america never used PAL and didn't have a use for that feature.

there, now you know the real secret about this WIP fic: it's an excuse to infodump about one of my special interests to the reader.

i am NOT gonna let you forget this story takes place in the 90s.