funkylilfellow - Tumblr blog

[funkylilfellow]

You get a new job. The pay isn't great. Your co-workers are your ex and a workaholic. You get nightmares from The Horrors. You just got an email from a cryptid. The IT guy wants to fistfight you.

[funkylilfellow]

"jesus christ" "i go by alice now, actually" THE TRANSGENDERISM SLAY ALICE I LOVE YOU DARLING

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Alice would be a horrible archivist. Just negative eye vibes going on. Alice gets stalked by a mysterious person or thing with no clue what it is and she heads to work and agrees to be walked home, as any normal person should. Sasha would show up three days late to work with an unbelievable story about how she cornered and confronted the thing.

John would have already been kidnapped by now.

[funkylilfellow]

Jonny and Alex, very aware of their audience, writing in the fact the statement giver doesn't like DnD to indicate that they're a villain

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parallel to showing my father (a librarian) the magnus archives and immediately sympathizing with jon’s annoyance at the state of the archives

Showing my mother (an IT specialist) the Magnus protocol and watching the look of horror form on her face when she hears "Windows NT 4.0" and "bedrock that the whole system is based on, and it’s been at least fifteen years since anyone actually knew how it worked."

Laughing my ass off and saying "that's not even the horror part of the podcast"

Only to be met with "yes it is"

[funkylilfellow]

in the stripped club. straight up "jorking it". and by "it", haha, well. let's justr say. yuor arms off

[funkylilfellow]

If Lena is to be believed - and I think she might be telling the truth - then I think it explains why the OIAR's filing system is so... nonsensical.

In TMA, when Robert Smirke developed his categorisation system, he defined the Fears as fourteen separate entities - this wasn't wrong, but it also, explicitly, wasn't right either. At what point does the fear of being alone in an empty space embody the Lonely more than it does the Vast? When does the fear that you don't know what's going on cross from fear of the unknown to fear that you can't trust your senses?

What differentiates Purple from Pink, and at what point does it change?

But in that same sense, because the Fears operate on a sense of dream logic and 'if it feels right, it probably is', I think Smirke's Fourteen separated the Fears somewhat - it divided them into more discrete categories and manifestations. Not enough to truly separate them, but enough that they felt distinct - and thus, became distinct.

Furthermore, it meant that everything got consolidated. Fear of the uncaring bombardment in a war came together with other Fears of general violence and bloodshed. The Fear of parasites, the Fear of filth, of germs and disease, of rotting and infestation all congealed into a singular force. In some ways this may have made them more powerful than they might've been.

So how do you combat these things? How do you make sure they don't grow too powerful, but at the same time, keep them in balance? You separate them as much as you can, as finely as you can. You don't want the terrifying serial killing children's mascot to feel like it's on the same side as other terrifying serial killers or terrifying children's mascots. Every division you can create is another fracture you can use to keep them from realising they're all working for the same general goal.

Then you keep track of everything, keeping things in opposition to themselves. If one thing starts to get too far, you balance it out with whatever seems opposed to it - I don't know what Bonzo is 'opposite' to, but the OIAR's higher ups clearly thought they needed more horrifying violence committed by Mr Blobby WIth Teeth to act as a counterweight.

We've seen what happens when an ambitious mind connects the dots and realises there isn't really a defining line between the Fears - and if someone's listened to the tapes, they might've figured out the same.

You can't eliminate them - but you can suppress them. And sometimes that's the best you can do.

[funkylilfellow]

THAT DAMNED SPREADSHEET

DOES ANYONE TO HEAR ABOUT MY ADVENTURE IN THE SPREADSHEET?

Cause I'm pretty damned sure I know what getting "High" on Milgram means.

Talking about his being rejected by the Magnus Institute, Samama said:

[That definitely feels like when it all started. […] Well, after that it all just went downhill. Didn’t get into Oxford, so I went to Nottingham.]

And that does not sound like what one would say about something that happened when they were, like, eight. So I went to take another look at the spreadsheet. Of course I was wrong, because The Magnus Institute burned in 1999, so he couldn’t have been more than nine, but I found out other stuff.

A thing that bugs me in how I’ve read some discussing the spreadsheet is that Sam has the highest empathy score, and that it made him “too nice/good” for the Institute’s purposes (not necessarily this directly but it has been implied, including in the “recruiting future avatar theories, and… well, implying that low empathy makes you more likely to become a literal monster is quite disgusting, actually).

First, I think we got one thing wrong on the Kohlberg column. Since they are kids, it doesn’t seem shocking that they’d be around stages 1 to 3 of his “Six stages of moral development”; but it doesn’t say Stage 1, 2 or 3 it says Level 1, 2 or 3, and I don’t think it’s a mistake.

His six stages are divided into three levels: Pre-Conventional (1,2), Conventional (3,4) and Post-Conventional (5,6).

People in stages 1 and 2 (Level 1) have a sense of morality that is linked to the direct consequences of their actions on themself — stage 1 is “don’t hit the dog because you’ll be punished” and stage 2 “give her half your banana and you’ll get half her chocolate bar” (very simplified).

People on stages 3 and 4 (Level 2) have internalized their surrounding’s sense of morality and act accordingly — stage 3 being “I’ll get a good grade in being a person by following the rules” and stage 4 “the rules I learnt are true and real, failing to follow them is Wrong and upholding them is Right” (idem).

People on stages 5 and 6 (Level 3) have a personal sense of morality that is critical of societal norms — stage 5 being “there are rules, and those rules can and should be changed through compromise to be fair to the greatest number”, and stage 6 “unfair rules should not be followed, direct consequences like punishment are irrelevant when it comes to deciding to do what it right” (very, very, very simplified).

If I’m right, the spreadsheet is so much more understandable.

First thing I wanted to do was put numbers on how singular Sam’s results are:

He gets “High” on both Milgram and Asch when the overwhelming tendency is that the higher your other scores are, the more likely you are to get “Low”, and the numbers were, indeed, that among the 49 children who scored “High” on both, 33 were in Piaget’s stage 1, 15 were in stage 2 and only Sam was in stage 3.

The 33 kids who were in stage 1 are the opposite of Sam:

(Abbreviating so it’s easier to compare values but P=Piaget, K=Kohlberg, Ps=Prosocial, S-A=Sally-Anne, U=Ultimatum, EI=Empathy Index)

33K: (P) Stage 1 :: (K) Level 1 :: (Ps) Low :: (S-A) Fail :: (U) Unfair :: (EI) ≥62%

Sam: (P) Stage 3 :: (K) Level 3 :: (Ps) High :: (S-A) Pass :: (U) Fair :: (EI) 98%

So that’s weird. And when I went to filter by Kohlberg levels… absolutely no kid that was on “Level 2” scored High on Milgram and Asche.

In fact, among the 99 kids on Kohlberg Level 2, none got “Low” for prosocial, none got “High” on Milgram, only 2 got “High” on Asch.

And when we read “Level 2 (Conventional Morality) instead of “Stage 2 (Pre-Conventional Morality, what benefits me directly)” we can make sense of this: 

“To reason in a conventional way is to judge the morality of actions by comparing them to society's views and expectations. […] Conventional morality is characterized by an acceptance of society's conventions concerning right and wrong. At this level an individual obeys rules and follows society's norms even when there are no consequences for obedience or disobedience. Adherence to rules and conventions is somewhat rigid, however, and a rule's appropriateness or fairness is seldom questioned.” (by Kohlberg himself, from Wikipedia)

Adults can be Level 2, by the way. Adults can even be Level 1. Subjects of the Milgram experiment are displaying peak Level 2 behavior.

“High” on Milgram is “Did not electrocute/Disobeyed”

“High” on Asch is “Did not conform”

GOSH THAT IS SATISFYING

Bonus: the average empathy index is 79,1%, the median is 82% with 116 kids below 82%, 13 kids at 82% and 120 kids above. Of the 116 kids below the median, 11 got “Low” on Milgram. Of the 13 median kids, 3 got “Low” on Milgram. Of the 120 kids above, 91 got “Low”.

If we take the average instead, of the 163 kids more empathetic than the average, 100 got “Low” on Milgram, and 2 got “High”, of the 86 less empathetic than the average, 5 got “Low” and 59 for “High” on Milgram.

So actually here, low empathy is inversely correlated to willingness to hurt if ordered to.

And it makes sense. Low empathy is often associated with anti-social personality disorder, autism, depression — and you know what’s very associated with anti-social personality disorder? Disobedience.

Now I have to make another post about the weird kids in red's names.

[funkylilfellow]

tmagp spoilers, CAT123 alchemy theorizing

for your viewing consideration: the OIAR's logo, showing what appears to be an inverted alchemical symbol of the Philosopher's Stone...

so, let's talk Category 1, 2, and 3, today CAT1 in particular. I think these may be matching to the alchemical primes: 🜍 ☿ 🜔 Respectively: Soul, Spirit, and Body - all seen in the sigil of the OIAR What elements of fear and dread might associate with each of these? Let's start with Category 1. Our category 1 statements so far have been: -Reanimation (partial) -Needles! -Mr. Bonzo! -Mr Bonzo again Or, to approach this from the other angle: what is *not* in the CAT23 statements that is in the above: (Red Canary and the Tattoo (corpse) -/- compulsion) I think there's a strong case for Category 1 being that of Body. The reanimation had a focus on the remains, Needles and Mr. Bonzo are highly visceral. There's a focus on flesh, less so on spirit/soul. In contrast, RedCanary was much less physically visceral and much more driven by emotions and curiosity and desire to know - similar to the other 23 statement. Lena Kelley: "In order for the wheels to keep on turning, all these forces need to be monitored and balanced. That is where we come in."

previously: nice job everybody who voted that the OIAR might be monitoring and maintaining "alchemical" balance! Lena's recent words seem to support that...but who knows if she can be believed~

[funkylilfellow]

gwen when she first finds out that lena didn’t succeed in murdering someone: pathetic. embarrassing. you can’t even kill a man with your bare hands? couldn’t be me.

gwen after finding out that she may have inadvertently caused the death of a few people:

[funkylilfellow]

Is Colin Becher Still Alive:

Yes!

Colin Becher Has Survived:

100 days!!!!!!!

[funkylilfellow]

An idea regarding the most recent episode of the Magnus Protocol.

Lena talking about how the OIAR balance forces and manages the 'bad guys' makes me think that the reason they have the numbering system for the categories is to sort of build up a tally. When one tally gets too high or far before another the 'externals' are used to cause some carnage.

This then puts these forces back in balance.

Now, regarding the idea of some 'benevolent' and 'opposing forces' I have no idea. Someone more in tune with this is going to have to figure out.

But I think the idea that the OIAR is making sure the 'fears' stay in balance and don't end up causing a ritual is correct.

Therefore,

A) the 'Magnus Protocol' could refer to the effort to keep these forces in balance.

B) The Magnus Institute was most likely doing something similar to the OIAR with the rating of 'catalyst' and what not, perhaps creating avatars or perhaps actively trying to throw stuff out of balance.

[funkylilfellow]

Mods? Take him to the stump of his favorite childhood tree.

[funkylilfellow]

it’s monday i’m in the labyrinth

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reblog if you’ve read fanfictions that are more professional, better written than some actual novels. I’m trying to see something

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we diagnose you with a creeping sense of alienation forever. incurable

[funkylilfellow]

You're 19? Do you think things will get better or worse from here?

i think i will grab things by the throat and make them what they need to be