#this feels tmagp coded

[daily-tma]

Daily TMA 217 (TMAGP) - You’ve been Alice’d

[podcasts-in-space]

jonny took one look at the underutilised dynamic of timsasha and said "let's go for round two"

[somuchbetterthanthat]

Here's a little thing that's turning into my head after the latest episode.

Gwen has clearly been rattled by Mr. Bonzo and this casement obviously didn't help. And you can feel she wants to talk about it to someone, but she can't go to her Posh Friends she already feels "meh" about seeing because it throws back at her what she assumes to be her failures to progress As She Should in the Capitalist world, because well, they'll assume she's lost it, and she'll lost the last of her credibility.

She can't really go to Lena either, because although Lena is well-aware of everything that's going on, actually, and might have, in another world, be a mentor of sort to help her go through the process of the ugly shit they're doing (still rooting for that in the long term ngl), Gwen absolutely won't show any proper weakness or vulnerability in front of Lena -- I think what we saw of last episode is the most she'll allow herself to be. Being demanding and angry rather than, y'know, have the good cry she clearly wanted to have. Lena is still her superior; she doesn't respect her (yet, i suspect) but she's spent the last few years being openly antagonistic and unashamedly ambitious at her -- Gwen's pride can't let her go "nevermind, actually, you were right" about all of it.

Colin is off the grid, Sam and Celia are the newest babies and, possibly, from Gwen's point of view, not reliable in that they might leave soon (and also having a romance affair, though if Gwen is even just a little bit as jon-coded as she seriously appears to be rn, she has NOT realized at all) so of course, of course, that leaves Alice.

Alice might be infuriating and vexing and an horrible coworker, in her mind, but she's also the one who's been here longest, longer than Gwen. She's a form of stability for Gwen, at this point, and from what we heard in the early episodes of the show, they can, on occasion, actually discuss serious work-related topics that might affect them both. On top of that, Alice asks. Alice, however minimal the effort is, seems to care. Which Gwen seems to be in serious need of, if the coffee-scene was any indication.

So of course she tries to talk to Alice about it. Who else is there?

[riveracheron]

Every little trait, however small, makes my very flesh begin to crawl with simple utter loathing!

[skyeoak]

Photos: composited.

Now I can sleep.

[anarchivalsystem]

I need to redraw these as OIAR employees.

me messaging a casual acquaintance: hello, how are you?

me messaging a best friend w/zero lead-in:

[iwillstabyou]

TMAGP 31 - A Computer Nerd’s Breakdown Of The Error Logs

It’s round 3, bitches! (tumblr crashed twice when I was writing this so I’ve had to start again multiple times. I do in fact see the irony, considering the subject matter)

I was listening to TMAGP 31 and as a computer nerd, oh my god those error messages just HIT DIFFERENT. There are so many subtle details hiding in those lines that a typical non-computery person would probably miss, so I feel it is my duty to explain them and their possible implications. So that’s why I’ve decided to fully break down each part of the error report, complete with what they could potentially suggest — think of this as “the TMAGP theorist’s guide to deciphering Chester’s yapping”

So without further ado, let’s get this party started…

(NOTE: lines from the transcript are in red, ‘translations’ are in purple, jmj specific stuff is is green, explanations are in black)

Starting off with Category: fatal programmer error, notice it says programmer, not program. There is nothing wrong with the code - the user has truly fucked up. Uh oh, Colin has made a big mistake…

Also, clever double meaning here with the word fatal. Obviously we know it was fatal to Colin (RIP king 🥲), but error logs also typically have a criticality level describing if immediate action needs to be taken. There are 6 commonly used levels, with the most critical being, yep you guessed it, ‘fatal’ - this means that whatever Colin was doing was a critical threat to the system. In other words, Colin had figured out the problem and was dangerously close to fixing it so Freddie just went “oh shit, we need to deal with this guy quickly or we are in serious trouble.”

Then we’ve got the next line, attempted host compromise (the Errno611 isn’t significant - error codes vary from system to system). When it comes to network terminology, a host is basically just any device on the network, so in full this line basically means “somebody’s tried to damage part of the network.” Importantly, “host” seems to suggest that the computers aren’t the source of this evil but merely a vessel for it. Freddie is just the mouthpiece for these supernatural forces - a bit like a non-sentient (as far as we know…) avatar. Whatever these forces are, they didn’t come from within/they weren’t created by Freddie.

(NOTE: I will come back to jmj=null in a bit)

The program traceback, Traceback <module> by extension BECHER, is rather interesting. A network extension is a way of providing network access to remote users (think along the lines of a VPN) by creating a personal direct ‘route’ to the network. Therefore if it’s the subject of an error report, it means there’s been an issue with data transmission along that path. So this bit means “there’s a problem with this specific network route that’s allocated to Colin.” However, the darker implication here is that Colin is an extension of Freddie. Although he wasn’t initially a part of all of this, he’s become tangled in the web (no pun intended) to the point that he and Freddie are inseparably intertwined. The OIAR employees may be able to quit their jobs, but they’ll still be a part of Freddie…

There isn’t much to say about Host=self.host in this context. It’s just convention when it comes to object oriented programming. Not important here.

Extension BECHER compromised isn’t just saying “there’s an issue here.” It’s saying “there’s an issue here that is a serious threat to network operation.” In other words, Freddie’s going “uh oh. Colin needs to be dealt with.”

The next bit is pretty self explanatory. I really don’t think I need to explain what <hardware damage_crowbar> means for you guys to understand. This bit made me laugh so hard. One thing that’s interesting though is that it gave it a DPHW, so Freddie processed this like it was an incident… Perhaps this fully confirms that the ‘thing’ controlling Freddie is of the same origin as the cases - it’s not something else entirely?

And now onto Administrator privilege revoked. This was the moment when I fully realised “oh no. Colin is fucked,” because any control that Colin may have had over the situation is now gone for good. Freddie’s basically just said “fuck you Colin. You’re not in charge anymore. I am.”

As you can probably guess, Unexpected data isolated/resolved just means that the crowbar’s been dealt with and the program can run as usual. Similarly, the Colin threat is fixed now he’s not an administrator i.e. he can no longer control the system. However, it then gets weird with Independent operation permissions revoked… It’s not saying Colin can’t use the network independently, it’s saying that Colin can’t be used independently of the network. Remember what I was saying earlier about Colin being a part of Freddie? Yeah, well now he purely is a part of Freddie. They’re turning our boy into data!

NOTE: I know in the audio it said everything was discarded but I’m going by the transcript. Idk why they’re different

You know it’s a bad sign when you hear Re config: self.host - Freddie’s evolving. The network is literally reconfiguring itself to now include Colin. And then Freddie goes through each of his alchemical elements one by one and fucking deletes them! How rude. You go and eat this man only to spit everything out!? I guess he’s feeling generous though, because he decides to keep the sulphur, which in alchemy, refers to the soul… If this isn’t just a coincidence, then that means Colin’s actual soul has been uploaded to Freddie. That could be really cool. And messed up. But mostly cool.

Starting with the final line, everyone knows what New administrator permissions assigned means, but we don’t know yet who they’ve been assigned to. Maybe it’s Gwen? Maybe it’s a new character? Maybe there is no system administrator anymore? It’s a mystery.

Now that’s out the way, let’s get on to the real juicy stuff…

The top few lines are pretty simple - it’s Freddie’s way of saying “Colin was a problem. We ate him. Now he’s not a problem anymore.” The next line, however, is a reminder that none of this is simple” - .jmj error not resolved. There it is again. The infamous jmj error. What does it mean? Jon? Martin? Jonah? Is that you???? Nobody knows. One thing we do know though is that jmj=null (from the start of the error log). Now when it comes to interpreting values, null is weird. It’s not zero, it’s not empty, it’s sort of nothing but it’s not nothing. It’s just null. It means no value, but it doesn’t mean that the variable doesn’t have a value (if that makes any sense to you guys???). Ooh I think I know how to explain it?? Imagine you’re Jonathan Sims, head archivist of the Magnus Institute and you’re digitising some archived ID photos when you find one without a name. The recorded name in the database would be null - you can’t put anything in particular, but that doesn’t mean the person in the photo doesn’t have a name. I guess null means unknown or missing here. So basically, what jmj=null means is that the jmj is unknown and that is a problem because it can’t get ignored/it is important. So what it’s basically saying is that jmj is a mystery not only to us, but also to Freddie.

Take a look at Data integration cycle ongoing <0.02%> - Data integration is the process of combining data from multiple sources into a single source of truth. There are 4 stages: data ingestion, cleaning, transformation, and unification. Thanks to the whole Colin ordeal, I’m sure you are all quite familiar with these stages by now (and that, students, is what we call a case study!). The peculiar thing here though is that we’ve just witnessed most of the data integration cycle - surely it should be higher than 0.02%? Yes, that’s correct. It should be far higher than that. It makes no sense. UNLESS this isn’t about Colin. Most of Colin’s data has probably already integrated. This is something else entirely - something so much bigger and foreign than these computers were designed for (the only comparison I can think of is trying to run the sims 4 with all expansion packs on a 15 year old laptop. It really shouldn’t work, and it probably won’t, but it’s gonna try regardless). This seems to follow on nicely from the jmj=null comments above, because Freddie is clearly struggling to integrate something (hence System function margins down to 82%), and when you try to read data that hasn’t been fully integrated with the system, you end up with a lot of missing & unknown values. Sound familiar? Yep, that’s right - until more data is synchronised, many values will be null, like our good friend jmj. Why is it taking so long to integrate jmj? We don’t know. Perhaps its origins are so supernatural and otherworldly that it’s simply not tangible enough for Freddie to process it? That’s what I think at the moment, at least.

So yeah, that’s my line by line analysis done! Hope you found that helpful/interesting. This podcast is so well written I’m actually going insane! Jonny and Alex, you are the guys of all time! As I’ve already said, feel free to expand on any of this - I’d love to hear your theories

Signed, your friendly neighbourhood computer nerd who is very autistic about TMAGP :)

[theboombutton]

The interesting thing about tmagp episode 9 is that, from one perspective, it's about a pair of dice that kill you if you roll a crit fail. And in TMA that would be very End-coded. Games of chance were End-coded, and death is obviously The End. Open and shut case.

Except it's not, here. The statement giver had never seen anyone roll a 2 before he ran into Gary in that coffee shop, even after thousands of rolls. That's not an End artifact. Those dice are going out of their way not to kill anyone, save those who try to part with them.

The compulsion to roll feels like the Web, but is it? Certainly games of chance can become addicting, but I don't think that's the whole story. The Web is about the fear of the loss of control, yes, but it's also about something else controlling you instead. Here that something else is an embodiment of "random" chance - although again, it's not properly-random, not even pseudorandom. I have thoughts on that but they're best addressed further on.

Weirdly, of all the manifestations of Fear from TMA, this statement seems most akin to Jude Perry's - rolling the dice with other people's lives and fortunes, for the thrill of sometimes devastating them.

Which brings me back to the possibility of AU Fears.

In the Protocolverse, why shouldn't there be a Fear associated with chance and luck and fate and misfortune that happens for no good reason? A fear of lacking control and losing everything, without anyone else necessarily having that control.

This is where the way the dice are rigged becomes possibly meaningful. Their outcomes aren't random - they're what humans expect random to look like. They operate according to the gambler's fallacy, where the longer a chain of bad luck you have the more you're due for a good roll, and vice versa. Snake eyes aren't just a normal outcome of the 1-in-36 chance of rolling 2d6 - they're reserved for when someone is cursed with truly rotten luck. Notably that isn't true of boxcars: those just happen sometimes, without prerequisite.

Logically, a Fear of Misfortune wouldn't operate on the actual rules of probability, would it? It would be shaped by the superstitions of those that feared it.

(Also, I hope this statement puts the "they're not fears they're desires!" theory to bed. This guy didn't want the dice, and didn't especially want to roll them, but seemed compelled to anyway.)

[spirallingdark]

I've been thinking about the tape recorders in the Magnus Protocol and I just want to say: Annabelle Cane, I'm onto you.

Every time tape recorders appear in tmagp, it's near the Archivist or in Archives universe. Some with tma: they're always near Jon. I have a feeling that because of the super late reveal that they are a part of the Web and not the Eye, we tend to forget that they are not actually Eye-related.

So yeah. Annabelle Cane is alive and she's in the tapes (and in the puter? Like strings of code?)

[feralpodcastlistener]

yeah as hard of a dyhard shipper I am it’s literally not that deep. Also I don’t want to make the kids cry but there’s like a really good chance Gwen gets killed. I’m just saying. *hangs head in shame as I am booed off the stage*

tiktok fandom culture is so wild bc why can't people ship things for fun anymore why's it gotta be a canon competition 😭😭😭

like to see someone in the tma/tmagp fan space say THIS ,,,

"just going to end up with sam and alice" JUST GOING ????

not to be the friend that is too woke but a story about a transwoman and a brown man being codependently linked across timelines is actually a very interesting story???? so what if alice and sam are hashtag forever in the end ???? would that be so awful ??????

like don't get me wrong i love dyhard but if you're not picking up that the relationship between sam and alice is driving the plot then i fear you need to turn up the podcast a little louder

[annabelle--cane]

guys I’ve cracked the code. so, I’ve been thinking, the title of “the magnus archives” was central to the whole conceit of the show, and according to word-of-god it was also the name of the mega ritual jonah pulled off with jon as the lynchpin (magnus + archives), but the magnus protocol doesn’t even take place in the magnus institute. we’ve had a case about it, sure, and sam’s investigating, but it’s still a change in approach, it feels less directly relevant. I’d been thinking that the title might mean “the protocol to follow in the event of magnus, what to do when something happens with the magnus institute,” but I’ve been reading some stuff and. I think I have an idea.

on the left below is the official tmagp logo, showing the OIAR coat of arms on a big chunky computer screen, and on the left is the alchemical symbol for the philosopher’s stone, the mythical substance that was meant to transform base metals into gold and make a potion for eternal life.

as several other people have pointed out, the central medallion of the coat of arms is laid out like the symbol for the philosopher’s stone flipped upside down, and if you stare into the black part of the screen on the logo, you’ll see a bunch more very faint symbols scattered all over the place, and all the marketing materials to do with tmagp have just been dripping in these things. can’t move for alchemical symbols. just lousy with ‘em.

alchemy was all about working towards discovering the philosopher’s stone, and this process of changing both materials and the self on a journey of discovery has been referred to as the “great work” of alchemy, or, to use the more common latin phrase, the “magnum opus” of alchemy. “magnus” and “magnum” are different declensions of the same latin word, meaning big, or great, and what I’m seeing when I look at the logo is the big word “magnus” under the symbol for the alchemical magnum opus. I think the title has nothing to do with jonah magnus or the magnus institute, I think it means the protocol for creating the philosopher’s stone.

[cyrus-solaris]

It’s that time of the year again. New TMAGP content. Yk what that means.

I have a theory.

Warning for TMAGP season 2 spoilers and TMA spoilers

Okay so. TMAGP 32. (First off, what the FUCK, Jonny.) It feels very Extinction coded. And yes, yes, IK.

“The Fears don’t exist in this universe. They’re all gone!!”

First of all, TMAGP isn’t over so hush, we can’t know for certain. Secondly, there isn’t supposed to be a giant portal connected to the TMA universe AND YET IT EXISTS. And third, if fucking CELIA. RIPLEY. and claw her way out of that portal, so can an eldritch fear entity. So I don’t wanna hear it 💕

Back on track, the episode feels so much like The Extinction and reminded me a lot of MAG 65: Binary, which (while being mainly Spiral) seemed heavily influenced by The Extinction, arguably the first statement we have of its emergence. The corrupted computer and the person inside the computer and all that creepy shit. And that got me thinking.

What if The Extinction did make it into the TMAGP universe?

Stay with me. I’m aware it’s sounds far fetched, and it probably is, but it’s an interesting thought.

In TMA, Jon never really interacted with The Extinction, or any of its statements, outside of maybe one or two occasions. It was mainly Martin.

And how did the Eyepocalypse come to fruition? Jon had to be marked or touched by each Fear, physically or emotionally.

Except Jon was never marked by The Extinction.

And what caused Jon to fully become The Archivist and have so much power within the Eyelocalypse? Completing The Watcher’s Crown. Power that allowed him to smite Avatars and walk through domains unaffected? Allowing him to travel the Eyelocalypse without much danger? But he never was marked by The Extinction, so what power would he have over it in this scenario?

Furthermore, in TMA season 5, all the Fears have more than one related statement. Except The Extinction. Which only has MAG 175: Epoch.

And that’s weird to me.

Also!!! Just like how all the other Fears feed into The End, especially during the Eyepocalypse, wouldn’t, oh I don’t know, the world literally ending, feed directly into The Extinction as well? Therefore strengthening it?

And out of all the Fears, we know the least about The Extinction because it is so new.

So what if, theoretically, The Extinction DID escape the ending of TMA???

Just a thought.

[dspd]

Help my extremely picky ass ears find another audiodramedy podcast to listen to

ft. an ADHD professional musician with (mouth sounds in particular) misophonia, auditory processing issues, & a physical reaction to certain audio sensory overstimulation.

Loved, Adored, Hell to the Yeahs:

Magnus Archives (loved pretty much everyone and the slow paced plot, ngl Melanie's VA voice type caused physical pain & cringing sometimes when she had a particularly strident/aggressive tone. Unpleasant physical sensation to the audio clipping/distortion.)

Wolf 359 (ADHD rep, tragic backstories, & *waves at everything Dr. Hilbert* Hell Yeah, wish I had my own plant monster to hang out with.)

Aftershock (high-end production is high-end. Loved the lapping waves & the fast paced writing)

Impact Winter S1 (good production value, liked it even though I'm not really into vampire apocalypse or the prophesied savior thing in a vampire apocalypse, Darcy's VA scratches an itch I didn't know I had. Adored Rook's VA)

Unseen (I felt my blood pressure lowering while listening, very interesting & engaging stories but ended so soon & wasn't as big of a fan about the collection of short stories because I couldn't get too attached to anyone. Absolutely obsessed with the timbre of Karin Konfli's voice in particular)

Neutral, Liked, & Liked but didn't finish:

Wake of Corrosion (it was a bit tedious/cliche by the end & a couple VA habits annoyed me but I was sufficiently intrigued by the sci-fi & horror to complete it)

Malevolent (struggled with staying interested sometimes & haven't gone back after the time travel. The Butcher & Yorrick were my favorite characters. Ended up skipping about a dozen scenes due to the eating sounds.)

The Phenomenon (good VAs, loved Jesse, fun alien invasion concepts, loved the little Survivor stories after the main story ended)

Zero Hours (Gabriel Urbina and Sarah Shachat really pull me in but, again, I'm not really into the short stories format. I need a longer format to poke myself with the dimensions of the characters)

Silt Verses (v calm, soothing voices but I'm not into religious stuff)

Welcome to Night Vale (it's really good & I love the comedic horror. Somehow I keep forgetting to go back & listen, so I've only listened to the first 20 episodes or so?)

Archive 81 (at some point I realized I listened to nearly the whole but had no idea who was what)

SCP Archives (thought it would be my thing & loved the first spooky episode but all the redacting & code name string of numbers & letters was a struggle for the easy listen I'm looking for. Felt like I needed a transcript or to take notes)

The Amelia Project (pleasing VAs, interesting, quirky, odd, sneakily fun but somehow never started ep2, will go back & try again sometime)

Hello from the Hallowoods (I liked the VA/sound production stuffs but somehow I didn't feel a pull to go back. Will probably try when I'm in a different mood)

Huh? To Definitely Not For Me:

The Bright Sessions (didn't even finish the first episode. Not formatted in a way that interests me I guess?)

Under Pressure (stopped mid-episode 2. IDK if I was in a mod or what but everyone seems like their own flavor of unlikeable asshole & the sound production was odd. Too bad. I like deep sea scaries)

Ars Parodoxica (after 5 episodes I still had no clue what was going on plus did not play well with my auditory processing struggles)

White Vault, Red Valley, re:Dracula, The Sheridan tapes (according to Spotify, I listened to multiple episodes but I don't remember anything about them????)

I'm looking for something that's got character development like TMA and Wolf359, has humor like Wolf359 and Welcome to Night Vale, and has a compelling overarching story like Aftershock and The Phenomenon. It doesn't have to be supernatural or horror (in fact I'd prefer some lighter stuff like wolf359 or Aftershock to the horror/gore of Impact Winter with graphic, auditory deaths. TBH I haven't gone back to TMagP s2 for this reason). I just want something my brain will actively engage with while I clean or organize with some silly/laughs without being slapstick.

[forgetyoursingalongsandlullabies]

TMAGP 38 Thoughts - Spoilers

I’m gnawing at the bars of my enclosure

- Breaking into a dead person’s flat ✅

- You don’t think what’s going on with Freddie has anything to do with Sam, Celia?? Really? When you’re the only one who recognizes the voices inside Freddie’s systems? You don’t even want to try getting to the bottom of things because you think there’s a chance that the way to fix all of it is actually you going back.

- “Sorry, you’re right. Piss off, boss.” Alice is having a Tim Stoker moment. Makes me nervous for her brother honestly.. OR is Colin her dead brother?!

- Heinrich Unheimlich means creepy

- Why does Gwen know German? I know in the UK it’s common to learn other European languages maybe this is nothing

- Gwen keeps trying to be a hard-ass boss but just ends up giving in to Alice. Gwen tried to put her foot down, got told to piss off and then said okay keep me updated

- Friday the 13th lmao

- “They had really big eyes that looked like a cat” that’s some Stranger shit

- Toy carousel? No! No! The strangers and their Circus can take their shitty toys elsewhere! I know where this leads! NO

- “I couldn’t find anything that meant ‘Is anyone there’ The closest I could find was ‘Who are you?’”

- Heinrich Unheimlich, wirst du mit mir spielen? (Will you play with me?) Heinrich Unheimlich, bist du in den dielen? (Are you in the halls?) Heinrich Unheimlich, oh, bist du in sicht?(are you in sight?) Heinrich Unheimlich, issmeine Eltern nicht (don’t eat my parents) 😳😦

- Ok Alice, Chester just tried to warn you about Heinrich and gave you good information and you rudely take your conversation to the break room? He can still hear you but you’re making him feel left out

- Alice being so confused when Gwen agrees with her. And then Gwen calling Alice out for keeping something back “I can tell” aaaaahhh

- Alice do not go traveling to meet up with a fucking Stranger coded circus man with cat eyes. Not after saying “Piss off, Boss” in this episode!! NO! No traveling like Jon, No circus investigations like Tim! No no no!

- “Don’t be a monster racist”

- Gwen, I know you think you’re being helpful arranging security but if you call Starkwall who is apparently notorious for escalating situations I’m going to be mad.

-Just this interaction

- Capping your expenses. What a Bouchard move!

- Damnit Gwen, I told you not to call Starkwall!!

Okay but I am stressing out so much over Alice meeting with this guy. It’s not going to be good.

Guys is Alice Tim Stoker and Colin is her dead brother?? Is that… is.. No Alice can have her own story. She’s not a doomed parallel.

[masochist-marmot]

What's up with the OIAR?

Disclaimer/spoiler warning: Written after TMAGP ep. 34. Spoilers for all of the Magnus Protocol until this point. Minor spoilers for the Magnus Archives.

These are some theories I've cooked up in the alchemy lab of my mind. They are wild, incomplete and probably contradictory, so take them for what they are. I base all of this on the tria prima theory I explained in an earlier post, so go read that for context.

I decided to only focus on the OIAR in this post. I'll make another post on my Magnus Institute theories later and link to them eventually.

What's the purpose of the OIAR?

Here's what we know:

The OIAR monitors and assesses incidents and (at least in the past) responds to them if necessary

Based on the ARG and Colin's ramblings, it used to be under DDR, probably run by their secret police. Fr3-d1's source code is in German, so that makes sense. The operation was probably moved to the UK after the DDR disbanded.

It employs and (according to Lena) manages "externals". Lena considers this work vital, and Colin blames the OIAR for only caring about the "balance", specifically mentioning mercury and sulphur.

I will start by quoting the German physician and alchemist Paracelsus who first proposed the tria prima as the integral principles and used them in his practice of medicine.

If you have a bone and can say whether it is mostly Sulphur, Mercury, or Salt, you know why it is diseased or what is the matter with it.  The peasant can see the externals, but the physician's task is to see the inner and secret matter. (Paracelsus, Opus Paramirum)

(Translation by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke. I compared it against another translation and the original German, and it's more or less accurate but much easier to understand.)

This may sound far-fetched, but I think the OIAR are practicing Paracelsian medicine on a macrocosmic level. That is, they are monitoring the universal levels of Sulphur, Mercury, and Salt, the imbalance of which is causing these weird supernatural occurrences. Except they can't address every incident individually, so they can only concern themselves with the overall effect (surely a mercury poisoning somewhere balances a salt poisoning somewhere else) and only step in if there is a universal excess of one principle over others. At that point they arrange for their carefully curated externals to go out and do whatever they do to spread their diseased influence. (As an interesting side note, Paracelsus also likes to use the word external (das Eussere), although he mostly uses it to denote the macrocosmos (the nature/universe) which is reflected in the microcosmos (ie. the human body). Occasionally, like in the quote above, he uses it in the sense of "the human body as viewed from the outside".)

If this is the case, then the OIAR employees would function kind of like diagnosticians who assess the nature and severity of the incidents. I also imagine the responses used to be a bit more aggressive until the response unit mysteriously ceased to be. Could have something to do with their associates at Starkwell burning down the Magnus Institute right before they were about to undertake their Magnum Opus (more on that in a later post). A good call, but probably bad for optics. I also think it's a very bad sign that there is currently no one in charge who knows what their actual purpose is.

What's up with Fr3-d1?

I have tried and tried to figure out Fredi's classification system (or as I now see it, the diagnosis), to no avail. I'm fairly certain that the category CAT simply denotes whether the case concerns 1. an individual/living creature, 2. a location or 3. an object or non-living creature. I imagine the rank has to do with the severity or urgency of addressing it. But the DPHW eludes me. I somehow want to link it to the elemental properties (dry, cold, hot, wet) that (according to Paracelsus) are the usual cause for changes in the principles, but the acronym doesn't mesh. I can't help but feel that the answer is somewhere in Paracelsus's writings, as he appropriately wrote in German and could easily provide direct equivalents in TSHU. Or I could be wasting my time and it's something entirely unrelated. I definitely shouldn't go any deeper into that particular rabbit hole. And yet...

I do think that Fredi was originally just a soulless machine created for a purpose, but it's recently been possessed by a consciousness (anima). Unfortunately, I'm not quite ready to buy the John/Martin/Jonah theory, because it feels too much like a red herring. They gave it to us very early on, so clearly that's a conclusion they wanted us to jump to. No mystery writer does that unless it's for misdirection. Though I could potentially buy a version where they ended up in there in mind (mercury) alone. If you read my previous post (and this probably didn't make much sense unless you did), I explained that the mercurial qualities and associations are reminiscent of the Eye, especially the associations to thought, knowledge, universal essence of existence, the fluctuating boundary between corprorality and non-corporality, and the idea of connecting heaven and earth (and possibly other worlds?). What I'm saying is, the three of them, in the eye of the panopticon, were already in a pretty mercurial state. So while I'm not banking on it, I'm also not saying it's impossible.

Whatever the case, I think we can all agree that Fredi (or whoever's in there) is manipulating everyone to their own goals.

[skyeoak]

TMAGP Episode 39 thoughts and feelings

Spoilers below the cut

Luck between universes mentioned again? The first was in that doppelgänger episode, and then Sam saying he was cosmically unlucky. Now 3 people who certainly were not “luckier” in this reality. It makes me think that it’s really bad to have a universe with some sort of eldritch cosmic balance connected to the (allegedly) Eyepocalypse universe.

That really brings into focus some of the parallel statements/occurrences between Archives and Protocol (man eats computer / computer eats man being an obvious one)

MY GOODNESS every part of the setup of this episode is interpersonally messed up and I LOVED IT. I’m super interested in the implications of Sam having appendicitis at the same time as this universe’s Sam, as well as the Eye-dream-like connection that people in the same domain can have.

Wait, hang on. Domains? Is Fr3-D1 some sort of human-assisted domain name server, converting niche eldritch fears into computer-eatable code? That would tie into Celia’s comment ages ago about not knowing if they’d ever repeated the same code twice. (Or do I, a pokemon fan, just have the phrase DNS Exploit permanently tattooed in my brain?)

The Statement

Why did they not realize this was a statement at the time? It’s plausibly explainable but feels really overly plot convenient to me.

This statement made me feel SO MANY THINGS. The intro is so visceral, then the reveal that this is Alice trapped inside of herself makes it come together so well AGH—I am trapped within myself and no matter what I do I will never escape this living tomb—i need to sit down for a sec.

MORE SAM BONES MORE SAM BONES

The melting pot of self hatred and putting yourself through hell (literal) in order to feel any sort of closeness to someone you’ve lost is such a tragic sort of self endangerment. And to go from that straight to PL Alice pleading with Sam and Georgie to stay just hurts. Anyways this one was really good.

Loving someone in their absence as grief… surely there’s no thematic implications in that line…

Fully unrelated, I am going through Tim Fearon withdrawals. Why is Augustus not here this season? Is it connected to the multiverse shenanigans? Or to the damage Colin did to Fr3-d1? (his statements were tailing off throughout season 1 too… much to ponder.) Hopefully he can be dreadful in our eardrums again soon.