#Distribution List

[middaydolomite]

The Poetry of JavaScript

New blog post: The Poetry of JavaScript.

Despite our social media presence, a sizeable chunk of our Hotchpotch open-mic members still rely on our email bulletin. Almost exactly a year ago, I started the task of building up a new distribution list after the collapse of the old system. Here’s the story of what’s happened since. After emailing everyone on the list individually, many people wanted to stay on it, a lot wished to stop…

[1nk20ul]

Discovering Jon and Martin’s Birthdays

It’s a wonder how much you can uncover about The Magnus Archives using only a bit of mathematics and a smidge of psychology.

Apparently I have too much time for both and can definitively say that I have revealed the absolute best and most accurate dates for both of their birthdays. Feel free to join me as we dissect piece by piece when these two were born and put to rest the age old question: What is Jon’s zodiac sign?

I’ll put the results in the tags as a TLDR if you’re not interested in reading my method and simply care about what star sign they are or what date to put in your calendar so you can go out for ice cream.

Statement Begins.

To find out the birthdays of Jon and Martin, we first must determine when exactly they joined the Archives. This will be important for the wider picture, as after all, the earliest possible birthday must take place after they start working there. We also must understand the Archive team’s speed in order to understand how to space out our statements and find that aforementioned number.

Gertrude Robinson passed away, according to her file, on the 15th of May 2015. This makes 15th May our earliest possible starting date. The next time the day’s date was specified was on 13th January 2016, when Naomi Herne gave a live statement. This is MAG 13, and our latest start date. Obviously, these numbers are nowhere close to the day we’re looking for, but they act as upper and lower limits. Our answer is somewhere inside.

In Jon’s supplemental notes for MAG 12, he states that Gerard Keay passed away late the previous year. Since Gertrude died after Gerard in early 2015, he must have died in late 2014. This confirms that MAG 1-12 was recorded to tape in 2015. We know that MAG 13, the next statement, was given live on 13th January 2016. This creates, at the very least, an almost two-week gap between archiving statements. This is likely due to the holiday season, so the time between 24th December and up to 1st January can be omitted. To recap, MAG 1-12 was recorded in 2015, and MAG 13 onwards in 2016.

The key to determining archival speed lies with Martin. Martin goes missing right before MAG 17 and reappears at the end of MAG 21. As he gave such a detailed account of those two weeks, our archiving timeline can be significantly accurate. MAG 19-20 were more than likely recorded on the same day, meaning three separate recording sessions took place in two weeks. However, it took a minimum of six weeks to record MAG 14-16.

So far, the timeline looks like this:

Now we have to figure out the left half.

Calculating the average time it takes to archive statements from MAG 13-22 (removing any outliers from our calculations), we can find a true average and apply it to the 2015 year. By March of The Magnus Institute’s 2016 calendar year, the Archive staff was able to archive 1.31 statements per week. I double-checked this number by doing the same with the statements recorded between MAG 22 and MAG 39. By multiplying the average amount of weeks it should take them by the adjusted number of statements recorded, it should equal the number of weeks it actually did take them. If the numbers are the same, the average is reliable. Hoping for the number 20, the number of weeks I had calculated... was 20.11. This average seems relievingly trustworthy and fits Elias’ complaint about the staff “barely getting through one statement per week.”

All we have to do now is multiply the first 12 statements by the 1.31 average to determine how many weeks it most likely took to do the recorded work of 2015. This leaves us with 15.72 weeks and makes the earliest and most probable start date somewhere around 5th September 2015. I will round this to 1st September as I am not expecting the team to start working on statements right out the gate, so these extra four days act as a buffer for everyone to get their bearings and find the tape recorder. Also, it’s convenient for Elias’ financials to start everyone on the 1st of the month.

Now is the fun part - the birthdays. We now know that Jon and Martin’s birthdays must fall somewhere between early September and the end of February. Since March kicks off the Archives living with the threat of Jane Prentiss, they have to take place before then. After that point, the team is far too stressed to have the carefree party heard in MAG 161. We also know that Martin’s birthday has to come before Jon’s, as the team mentions going out for ice cream at Jon’s party. This event has to be long enough in the past for Jon to forget about it, so their birthdays must be reasonably spaced out from one another in the allotted time. Likewise, an amount of time must have passed after their start date for the team to be close enough bond to want to celebrate Martin’s birthday.

Martin’s birth year is easy to determine. Martin tells us his age in MAG 56. His birthday could not have happened at this point in 2017, so his birth year must be 1987. In a Q&A, it was speculated that Jon and Martin have birthdays near each other (and one being slightly older than the other), so only 1987 and 1988 are our options for Jon’s birth year. Let’s look a bit closer at that.

Early ‘88 is closer to Late ‘87 than Early ‘87. At Jon’s birthday party, he says he’s turning 38. Martin is 29 at this time. The obvious conclusion to me is that Jon simply adds a decade to his age. (I find this the most hilarious yet believable scenario.) Jonny was also born in 1988, being 28 himself when that scene would take place. As Jon’s childhood details sometimes mirror Jonny’s, I am taking this as a sign of accuracy.

And by doing some additional work that I will not share here, I can reliably say that these are the best observed birthdays for Jon and Martin:

Martin - 23rd November, 1987

Jonathan - 2nd February, 1988

Also, this makes Martin a potential Valentine’s Day Baby. Do with that what you will.

Thanks for reading!

(Full timeline for those who are interested:)

[astrangetorpedo]

for the sapphics who were too old to participate in the last poll:

[2-dsimp]

Minor Update To-Do list.

Set up an main Itchio page

Finish official M.D.S yandere vn love interests bio (2/3 completed (?)

Azrael’s Profile ← [Currently doing]

Design Game banner ← [Pending]

Set up M.D.S. Game Page ← [pending]

[dramatic-dolphin]

heyyo, sorry if it's a bother but I remember you mentioning somewhere (in the tags of something?) that hungarian might even have more than 18 cases if we count it a different way and I lost that post but I'm still very curious, could you tell me more about this or point me to a source? I love terrorising international friends with the hungarian case system

It's NEVER a bother to talk about linguistics :DD This is gonna be a bit long tho.

The reason for this is that Hungarian has like a million suffixes and not all of them are created equal. So there is a bit of debate over what, exactly, constitues as a "case" here.

The currently accepted safe list of the 18 Hungarian suffixes that are definitely totally cases looks like this:

This is already hilarious, because you, as a native speaker, have no idea what these terms mean, and also because there is nothing at essive-modal in this example. Because we just do not decline the word jég in that case.

(Essive-modal is the -ul in "jutalmul" and "[beszélek] magyarul" btw. Is 'jegekül' a word that exists and makes sense? Discuss.)

These are the "bare minimum" of cases that fit both of the two (currently accepted) rules that 1) a case can be a compulsory argument of a verb (aka you can have a verb that you have to use a specific case with, like "beléptem a házba") and 2) only cases can follow other suffixes (I actually can't think of an example for this rn lol).

Thinking about it, you might even get by with saying we have 17 cases in a pinch, since essive-modal is such a weirdo and useless for like most nouns. Don't quote me on this one though.

Anyways, if you're a bit more daring, you can look at all the other suffixes and say "well, why can't these be cases too?" Like come on, this is missing genitive. Why is it missing genitive? So you put in genitive (embernek). And if that's in, then why can't the others be there too? Which is how you end up with off-the-wall cases like temporal (ötkor), sociative (kutyástul), locative (Győrött), distributive-temporal (hetente), and so on until you reach like 34, or however many suffixes there are. Every suffix can be given a fancy overly specific case name to horrify poor non-Hungarian speakers.

Wait, did I say the bare minimum was 18(-17) cases? Actually no, the bare minimum is ZERO cases. Because you can take the enlightened opinion that "case" as a concept should not be applied to agglutinative languages like Hungarian, and Hungarian cases are actually better understood as postpositions affixed to a noun. (Funnily, this is actually how some of those suffixes became suffixes. Ex: hodu utu rea -> hadi útra.)

So, there you have it. The number of cases in Hungarian is a number between 0 and 35. But probably 18. Unless it's not.

[courseyoulovemeyoudontknowme]

Onward (2020, Dan Scanlon)

20/10/2024

[laurelnose]

every year i do trans day of visibility in the picture books and every year it’s always a little wild to be reminded that in the 0-6yo age range there are like, three times as many books about explicitly nonbinary children as there are either trans boys or trans girls. and by explicitly nonbinary I mean characters who either identify directly as nonbinary in the text or else use they/them or neopronouns—this isn’t counting the (approximately equal) number of books about children with gender non-conformist interests or fashion senses. i don’t really have anything to say about this trend either way, it’s just interesting. if i didn’t already know this and you asked me to guess which way the gender distribution skewed in trans kidlit i don’t know that i would have guessed this was the case

[of-fear-and-love]

Hero (2002)

[recreationaldivorce]

seriously so annoying when ppl act like they can't do XYZ bc they'll "get into trouble" (9 times out of 10 the thing they're talking about isn't even enforced anyway). Like ok let's assume they're talking about something where there is a real threat of eg state retaliation, people do do that anyway and it is kinda just downright disrespectful to the ppl who have put themselves on the line in taking that action to suggest it's simply impossible to do things that you also would get into trouble for. if you personally don't want to risk eg prison or whatever then say that, cause there's plenty of people who feel otherwise. it's not physically impossible to break the law (not to mention that a lot of instances where this attitude crops up, the "getting into trouble" being discussed is not even criminal "trouble" lol).

[tteokdoroki]

someone emailed out their resignation to the entire office 🧍🏾‍♀️

[merge-conflict]

I put some constraints on myself, just one character per franchise and it has to be one that drove me to write something about them- but that's not part of the original tag game. I have never posted my Outer World's or DA stuff but I keep finding more and more old notebooks lying around my apartment so rest assured it exists lmao.

Tagged by @corpocyborg and @biowareruinedmylife

Tagging @wanderingaldecaldo @xx-blueboy-xx @another-corpo-rat

[haveyouusedthispokemon]

Hey y'all, I've made a mistake regarding the availability of some pokemon. This shouldn't affect the poll results, but I'm going to correct the descriptions for the Mareep line, Aipom, and the Pineco line. ^^

[flowering-darkness]

I would really like to go through my archive blog and highlight some of my old work again.. I still need to actually archive some of it, too, since- anything I’ve posted on either this blog or the one I was on before (which was a secondary blog) isn’t actually on it yet

If anyone else would like to see it, my archive is @creations-from-the-void ‑ it’s where I will keep a record of all of the art and writing and so on that I make for my selfships! It would also be nice to use it for anything I make and post on my non-selfship blogs, too ‑ so while that’s much less frequent, I may still archive that sort of thing on them too!

As a related reminder, while I use this blog for posting and talking about my own selfships, I use @astrals-periphery to reblog things to do with other people’s selfships. This is so I can keep it all in one place and share my support! And I just wanted to bring this up so that people were aware of how I do things and can choose to follow those blogs if they so wish.

Thank you for reading!

[quatregats]

If anyone has any messages they would like beamed to Patrick O'Brian let me know

[antisocialxconstruct]

good news: it is real 👍

bad news..... it is so so small 😂😂

tell me in WHAT universe this is an XXL..... I might still be able to style it somehow but I am a little disappointed it isn't the slouchy sweatshirt I was dreaming of. Trials of online shopping I suppose

[courseyoulovemeyoudontknowme]

Onward (2020, Dan Scanlon)

24/05/2024