thedogmanarchives

[thedogmanarchives]

those decorative fruits made from styrofoam that are often displayed in waiting rooms in beautiful vases... WOULD ROGER EAT THEM? PLEASE TELL ME.

Roger doesn't really care for fruit for the most part, so no. If you told him they were real and adamantly reassured him that they were not fake, you could probably convince him to eat them!

[thedogmanarchives]

So I know Gingi and Callum have.... some kind of weird connection or something but what I'm wondering is if younger/pre-memory wipe Callum would even like Gingi. Like considering they aren't super interested in being a productive part of society I wondered if Callum would dislike Gingi for choosing to be "useless"

Definitely not.

There's an important thing to acknowledge in Crown's backstory: Crown was seen as different/expendable and it influenced how people treated him. This influenced how he thought, governed and even bled into the town motto: 'All are welcome here in Dialtown!

I think Crown'd have a lot of sympathy for Gingi, especially from chapter 3 onwards, recognizing its value to the town and the people around it. Crown tends to root for the underdog and takes issue with how society itself is structured. Crown would view someone who's willingly unemployed as not an individual failure, but a systematic one. An identifier of a society that has failed to find a niche for many of its citizens.

[thedogmanarchives]

hi dogman!! last night i was doing some research and realized various government/military projects like MKUltra (1953-1973), the Edgewood Arsenal experiments (1948-1975), and Project 112 (1962-1973, so it would have started during Callum's presidency) would have taken place while Callum was in office. i'm curious, did he condone these experiments or help lead them at all, or did they not even exist in the dialtown universe?

With the exception of certain technological advances (many of which happened even sooner, like the moon landing shifting into the early 60's), the general rule for anything from 1961 to 1965 is that it happens roughly 4 years later on the timeline. (Operation Northwoods, for instance, was shifted later into the timeline as Cuba + the Bay of Pigs happened a term later amidst Crown's chaotic tenure as the head of the UN... Which led to JFK getting an earful from Crown.)

Ofc, Crown had his own weapon development initiatives during his term, which are a whole other topic.

Funnily enough, MK-Ultra is actually something I've considered. Yes, it still happened, but research died down during Crown's term since he pulled people from the project to work on other projects. He did voraciously consume (not literally) all of their available research/findings during one of his late night binges, which hilariously means that Crown knew who the Unabomber was before he even was the Unabomber. Sorry, strange side-note.

A few other projects were also temporarily dissolved, with some being brought back after his term ended and the rest discarded entirely.

[thedogmanarchives]

Marla Crown facts:

A little known fact is that Marla Crown was also disabled, like her husband, and Mingus' iconic cane belonged to Marla (sans the cat head, which Mingus added in the same way she added the concrete cat head to Town Hall.)

In her early days, she was a journalist/radio news reporter and was instrumental in getting Crown elected as the mayor of Dialtown. While it's possible Crown might've found a path to success on his own, what he didn't expect were the workers who flooded in from nearby towns looking for work, hearing about him from Marla's radio broadcasts where she depicted him as pro-worker, someone who took care of his own, come hell of high water. In many ways, you can attribute the start of Crown's political movement to her.

She believed in Crown's mission with the same ferocity that he had and in the early days, pushed him to harden his rhetoric and seek out the best outcome regardless of the cost. The Crown saviour narrative was her invention more than his.

She was particularly close to her husband's best friend and vice president, Milton R. Wallace and balanced out Crown in more ways than one. Aside from her generally smart advice, she was the only person in Crown's life that his honeyed words never worked on.

After the end of Crown's presidency (and doubly so after his memory was erased), Marla's post-political career was quiet and withdrawn. Having to raise a kid on her own and being legally responsible for the husk of her husband was enough stress for her, especially with a turbulent conscience. For decades after her public life ended, she was occasionally hounded by reporters demanding information from her about her husband.

While history books are kind to Marla Crown, coverage of her at the end of her life was unfairly negative due to the timing of when she withdrew from the public eye. Since it coincided with the end of her time working with Crown (and she returned to a normal civilian life), many pundits assumed that Crown had carried her with him and that her work in his administration was something he granted as a token courtesy.

Archives of her early broadcasts of her Crown interviews were buried when Crown became a national candidate (to not polarize the electorate with Crown's harder socialist rhetoric), so a lot of her early contributions are lost to history.

Most frustratingly of all, a novelty arcade machine was mass produced and sold to funfairs/arcades nation-wide. Fitted with a crystal ball, an outfit resembling the vibrant hue of purple she often wore and dubbed the 'Madame Mediocre Clairvoyant' (sharing its initials with her), these machines can occasionally still be found around the country, often in rundown places (due to a catastrophic programming error that rendered the machine basically unusable.)

[thedogmanarchives]

mingus question number a BILLION. i think you've . mentioned her father a lot but i havent heard much of mingus' mom ! is there any information about her that you have or has that not been thought about a lot yet ? :-) also how tall is mingus . what is her height .

Mingus' mother is a mystery character because she wasn't in Mingus' life and Mingus' feelings on her aren't positive (she was really only close to her grandmother.) I might get around to writing that short Mingus story soon now that the DLC's out (as a warmup for the Olandy route!) Been meaning to post more short stories, I just also don't wanna dump too many lengthy text posts on here.

What do you guys think? I've definitely got a few more of these in me.

[thedogmanarchives]

Hey hound silly question here. Which of your characters could you beat in a fight?

I'm confident I could beat: Randy

I think I could beat: Jerry, God, Stabby, Shooty, Roger

50/50: Oliver

I'd lose a fair fight with: Norm, Theoroar

I'd be annihilated by: Bigfoot, Mayor Mingus

Not included is Gingi (who fights very dirty but isn't actually that physically strong. I have no clue where I'd place this thing) and Karen, who is too powerful for me to even mention (outside of this sublistual paragraph.) Thank you.

[thedogmanarchives]

Do phone heads have sensitive cords/dials/buttons and stuff

To some extent, yeah. For buttons/dials in particular, they're kinda like fingernails (or tortoise shells) in that they're hard material without nerve receptors, but they sit over flesh that have nerve receptors. The sensitivity would depend on how the head's internally configured and what the buttons/dial is sitting on!

[thedogmanarchives]

Not sure if this has been asked before, but what kind of head would Dialtown Satan have? ⁽ᴾᵉʳˢᵒⁿᵃˡˡʸ, ᴵ ᶦᵐᵃᵍᶦⁿᵉ ʰᶦᵐ ʷᶦᵗʰ ᵃⁿ ᵃᵗᵃʳᶦ ʲᵃᵍᵘᵃʳ.⁾

I'm actually not 100% sure, since I've gone back and forth with a few designs I've really liked.

First design I considered was an AM radio, which he'd use to play songs that he thinks people hate (but usually failing to get a rise out of anyone), but I'd probably go for something with a screen if I showed the character, so I could use it and give his design a visual parallel to God.

[thedogmanarchives]

heya hound! if callums presidency ended in 1965, how come he had the means to send norm to space in '66?

Oh, huh, I thought I'd changed that line. Did I forget to patch it?

Short answer is, he didn't. The timeline shifted slightly while I was writing Dialtown (when I came up with other events and realized it worked better if I shifted stuff around slightly) and that line wound up getting missed on revision. The revised year is 1964, so final year of the Crown presidency. Norm missed the finale.

[thedogmanarchives]

Stupid question, but it's leaving me sleepless, for some reason.

Assuming furries exist in the dialtown universe, would they have the same head as animals in dialtown do? Or would they be based off animals head pre-dial-up? Antique style, I guess.

My assumption is that object heads would be the norm since they'd likely be easier to spoof (and could even double as a socially acceptable way to appear more like your fursona in daily life), but there'd almost certainly be a split in people's preference due to a cultural quirk caused by one of the Dialup's intended psychological effects.

Crown wanted to blur the visual boundary between humans and animals in order to hopefully incite humans to care more about the various species. While one way to do this was to give animals unique niches/functions (which many do not perform at all usefully, as reality isn't written like an episode of the Flintstones), another key aspect of the change was to make humans care more by making animals look more like people - and vice versa. People care about what they can intrinsically relate to (and of course, see themselves in.)

This idea didn't really pan out on any level.

Anyway, this is where we get into the psychological nuance caused by this shift and why either design might be preferable.

Wearing an object head that matches your fursona's species, assuming you want to be seen as an anthropomorphic animal in DT's universe is certainly one way of going about it. Hell, you could literally swap your original head's casing out for a reworked replacement outer layer of whatever your animal OC's head is, and it'd look exactly like the animal you're basing it off. Imagine if you could buy a blinking/hyperreactive fursuit head in our reality that looked 100% like an actual fox's face. I'm sure there's people out there who'd want one.

...However, that brings up a question: What if someone didn't want to look like an actual animal? Most fursuits don't aim to be truly photo-realistic of course and instead go for something more stylized. Flesh head designs could be the equivalent of this since it's something you can't encounter in the wild in any form.

Ironically, I could also imagine a small minority of people who want their designs to be more animalistic taking this approach too, since like I said, the Dialup made humans and animals look more similar. By creating something that appears fundamentally organic around a normally inorganic head, you would look less human in DT's world - and by proxy, more like an animal.

Finally, worth noting: I'd have to imagine that there's also a lot of zoology nerds who have an interest in pre-Dialup biology and would thus want it depicted in their designs. Y'know, kinda like how people make fursuits of extinct animals like saber-tooth tigers. A lot of furries are zoology enthusiasts and I have to imagine finding out at some point in your early life that EVERY animal had bizarrely different designs just a few generations ago would be something people would wanna get artistic millage out of.

Hope this helps!

[thedogmanarchives]

Yo, just wanted to know if omair, from the Roger dlc, had last name or anything

He does actually!

So, I realized a lot of the basegame names are mostly English based so I wanted to give the new characters some more etymologically distinct names for the sake of variety. Obviously I usually base my names off neat little puns or etymological links, and the new names are no different.

Fabron's name basically translates to 'young blacksmith', which I felt suited a young IT guy. His surname, Farrow, is a surname also associated with smithing. Obviously 'IT Guy' wasn't a job when most surnames were linked to professions, so I felt something that involves metalworking fits an IT guy at a factory.

When I was deciding what name to give Omair, I figured I'd also make one of the names Blacksmith related, but wanted the first name to be different. I looked up names that meant 'problem solver' (which is also a good approximation of what an IT guy does) and Omair came up and wound up being my favourite of the names.

Since the name has Arabic origins, I thought a matching surname would work, so I went with Haddad. It's quite common in the Levant, kinda the regional equivalent of 'smith', so I felt it'd work. Bonus points, the name's also associated with a Mesopotamian bull god of Thunder, who has links to some of the other entities I based bits and pieces from DT's inner story on, so it was just sort of a perfect fit.

Hope this helps!

[thedogmanarchives]

odd question, unsure if this has been answered but is gingi radioactive? like, if you put a geiger counter next to it, would it go off?

Given that Gingi sleeps in a crate with a hiohazardous symbol on it... Definitely.

[thedogmanarchives]

could you perhaps confirm whether or not shooty and stabby are brothers/related… i wanna draw ship art of them because their relationship feels romantic but i’m scared it’ll get confirmed they’re related ☹️

they're not related, i can confirm that much at least

[thedogmanarchives]

what happened to all the companies that made hair+face products after the dialup?

Depends how diversified they were.

Many dissolved (liquidated) and a few big ones remained and went all out on their other products. Johnson&Johnson must still exist if Dialtown has their own brand of knock off bandaids called 'bandy-aids' since they're the holders of the patent for that word (which should've been genericized years ago!!!)

[thedogmanarchives]

Does Callum watch The Muppet Show in the nursing home

i'd have to assume so. i could imagine him sitting there, basically comatose in front of the TV, then out of nowhere, when gonzo comes on screen, him shakily sitting up, pointing his jittering right index finger at the screen towards gonzo, like he recognizes the guy somehow, and lingering in this pose for a few prolonged seconds before then slowly leaning back, re-entering into his old state. nobody around him notices.

[thedogmanarchives]

Howdy hey!! I'm back with another question relatin to the Crowns (and Milton). As always, I'm sorry if you've already answered somethin similar to this!

So we all know (or at least, we think we know) Callum had somethin with his vice president, but did Marla know? And if she did, was she okay with it? I see a few people ship all three of em together, but it always makes me wonder if she actually knew about Callum and Milton or not. I feel like I've seen you answer somethin similar to this before, but I can't find anythin on it for the life of me.

(Also, great work on the Roger DLC!!!)

I've never stated concretely what the exact nature of Crown + Milt's relationship was. People are correctly reading between the lines and can tell that there was an undeniable attraction between the two.

However, whether or not they ever expressed this to each other (and to what extent) is lost to history, like much of what happened. This is by intention as it's pretty consistent with other past historical figures that people speculate about the sexuality of. They lived in different times and like you said, Crown was a married man, so no first hand sources really answer the question definitively outside of flowery notes Crown wrote to Milt (which are shockingly not that uncommon. At least one of Garfield's memos to James Blaine reads as pretty gay under a modern lens.)

But to answer the question itself, with that context in mind: Did Marla have suspicions? Yes. Her perception changed over time, particularly exasperated when Crown became more insular later into his presidency and shared less with her. The truth is, Crown did the same thing with Milt, but Marla's perception for a time was that Milt had supplanted her. This notion was temporary though, and by the time she had her last conversation with Crown, she no longer felt it was the case.

[thedogmanarchives]

do you listen to Will Wood?

>If yes, what is your favorite song/album?

>If no, this is a sign

oh yeah, big time.

for will wood, there's a lot of his songs i like. Skeleton Appreciation Day, Willard and Self + Ish are favourites.

I answered this recently enough in another ask, so I'll add a bit so it's not just the same: Willard in particular is interesting bc it reminds me a LOT of the character of God in DT, including stuff the audience doesn't necessarily know yet. Like, almost every line works. When I heard the song and had the thought, I was kinda floored and had to send my notes to a collaborator. It genuinely felt tailor made to the character when I first heard it, though the similarities are obviously just a coincidence.

Esp all the Socrates mentions. God is directly mentioned in-game to have once been Diogenes of Sinope, the Greek philosopher, who REALLY looked up to Socrates and followed his teachings. Also fits really well with Plato's Cave, which was written as a Socratic dialogue and roughly sums up God's specific and eldritch kind of loneliness.

"You might seem behind bars, but friend, this cage is inside out"

Is pretty much also what enc0unter says, with God being one of the few NPCS who's definitely aware of it.

Yeah. I can't go too in depth without spoiling character deets, but man. It fits really well.