#wbg tag tbd

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TY: You look like you're about to cry. Are you about to cry? MIKE: I'm about to do something to do that I'll regret. TY: You won't regret it because you won't remember it unless I tell you about it. And that's not really remembering, is it?

you already know what im thinking about

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MIKE: I don’t get it, Ty. You’ve already won. What’s the harm in letting me talk to Edgar? He knows I’m here. I know that you said that he can’t see me through the two-way mirror but he knows I’m here. He knows that you’re making me watch him. TY: Mike, what you need to understand- MIKE: And stop starting sentences with my name! Calling me Mike does not call me down. It doesn’t work on me anymore, this calm reassuring tone shit. It Doesnt Work. I’ve been stuck inside this compound for too long, I know all of your tricks. TY: Mike, what you need to understand is that we’re both doing important work in the field of time travel biology. Both of you are indispensable to the cause. Edgar is providing vital data and you are the only one able to bring an objective viewpoint to his subjective experiences. You know how he is and you can tell how he changes. You can read him. That’s the only way we can hone this technology. We can’t use a time duplicate because there is the chance that the process would alter their subjectivity. No amount of inventery that we could take could rival the intuitive nature in which you know him. We need you, Mike.

thinking about the timeless children

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(possible out of context spoilers for woe be gone up to episode 24)

(also point of this way-too-long post thats not even about dw is that i think i now have an idea of what a 13-pov/13-narrated season would look like) (if that might entice you to read some of this thing) (it would me, like, i just mean, knowing what the point is usually kinda helps reading a long thing so there you go thats the point)

right so ive been listening to woe be gone and one of my favourite things about it is how occasionally the protagonist just suddenly reveals to us a bunch of stuff hes been thinking about which he hasnt been telling us about

which is a little jarring bc hes the only voice, hes the one tellling us about everything that happens to him, and he walks us through seemingly every one of his considerations and plans

but also it’s something you can expect bc also from the start he draws attention to the fact that when we are hearing the episode, it’s been a while since the events described in them have happened to him, because he needed to... make the episode. duh. episode 2:

Wooooow. Wow wow wow. Your brain will turn anything into a morsel of nostalgia, won’t it? I did a whole episode about the first round of WOE.BEGONE and made it sound like it had a happy ending. And it felt that way, too, when I was telling the story.

The real kicker to this whole thing is that this challenge happened a month ago. You, dear listener, have not yet caught up to the point where you are watching me play WOE.BEGONE in real time.

mike repeatedly, casually, calls attention to the fact that hes in control of the entirety of what we know of the story. not just with these kinda lines but also with the fake ads, the “cue the heist music”, the barely-there line between the mike walters that does the announcements at the top of the show and the mike walters the character (are they the same person?), casually dropping the fact that his name is not mike walters and then never mentioning it again:

I mean, this is a guy who seemed to honestly believe that my name was Mike Walters. Hmm, I never labored under the delusion that his name was actually CANNONBALL in all caps. I wonder which of us had the better call-sign.

in this same episode he also says:

Saying that I was going to fly to Vancouver was actually a sort of silly mistake on my part. I imagine quite a few listeners heard that I was going to fly to Vancouver and wondered if that was even possible. Doesn’t Mike Walters live in America? That [REDACTED] jumbled censor thing sure does sound like Saint Louis– no matter what I did to the voice snippet, damn it! I reversed it and pitched it down and it still sounded like St. Louis. So then I switched the order of the reversed syllables and it still sounded like St. Louis, at which point I just said fuck it, some people will figure it out and it will add a little bit to the mystery-solving aspect of the podcast.

giving us a false sense of knowing the guy, as if he let us have this piece of information for free. he does a similar thing when he moves to oldbrush valley:

I’m sure that you’re wondering about where exactly this place is. Stop trying. I’m being vague on purpose. Don’t come find me. Anne. Don’t come find me.

"dont come find me” and “im being vague on purpose” while giving anne (and whoever really) exactly enough information to find him. there are also repeated mentions of his information security practices:

“So, things weren’t adding up and nobody would give me a straight answer. Nobody knew what to make of your little scene. So, natch, I broke into your apartment and started poking around. You’d do the same for me, right?”

“Sure thing, Anne.” I said.

“Unfortunately for me, it’s not like you wrote WOE.BEGONE on little pieces of paper and scattered them throughout your house for the spry young female detective to find. Also, your computer was bricked? What’s up with that?” She asked.

“Oh yeah, it’s a dead man’s switch. If I don’t enter a password every week, it overwrites my entire computer with 1s and 0s.” I said.

“That’s a long way to go for WOE.BEGONE,” She said.

“Oh, it wasn’t for WOE.BEGONE. It’s just good InfoSec.”

and:

How do I know that he isn’t the only gamerunner? Because he doesn’t log out of gmail when he’s done with it, either. C’mon, dude. At least force me to guess your password or force 2 factor authentication and get the code off the phone that I took off you while I was tying you up. When it started, I thought that the story of WOE.BEGONE would be about the consequences of seeking power, but now I think that the moral is to take your information security seriously, especially if you have something that is worth protecting.

but then also this:

“How are you gonna narrow it down from a whole city full of people?” I asked.

“I have ways,” he said. His eyes narrowed.

“What is that supposed to mean?” I asked.

“Didn’t you go to the University of [Redacted]?” CANNONBALL asked.

“So? I’ve lived here for ten years,” I said. Shit. Why do I still have a Facebook page?

and this, a few episodes after “dont come find me”:

Hunter Jeremiah Hartley has a public facebook page where he posts all the time about the stuff that happens on at O.V.E.R., pictures included. None of what we have access to out here is strictly classified. There are the cabins, but we aren’t allowed in them so unless you’re breaking the rules, you don’t know anything more about them than if you had looked up an aerial view of them on Google Maps. Pictures of them on social media are fine. This made it trivial for Anne to pinpoint where I was at O.V.E.R. No journalist-ing required.

he does all this stuff and says that hes “private” but also that hes not, like, top of the hierarchy at this. ‘sure i do the basics but i could be less sloppy, there are people who do this way better than me’. “you caught the dumbest fish in the pond and put him in a barrel” he says at one point to someone who has him kidnapped

another thing he calls attention to casually and repeatedly is the fact that hes not a great person:

Oh, god dammit. I don’t wanna kill a pig. I mean, I know, I eat meat, specifically pork, and so I’ve just been outsourcing this exact labor for my whole life. I’m a hypocrite if I’m willing to let suffering happen as long as it is just outside my eyeline, but fuck it! I can be a hypocrite. I’m worse shit than that all the time. I’m a liar, I’m a bad friend, I’m a shitty podcaster. Throw “hypocrite” on the heap.

And you might be saying to yourself “well jeez, Mike, you don’t sound like a very good person.” Yeah, no shit. A good person stands absolutely no chance of winning this game or getting their hands anywhere near this tech or any of the other levers of power that this world offers. I can be smart, I can be kind, I can hold the correct political positions. But I can also lie, cheat, steal, take advantage of other people, disregard others’ feelings. When I was growing up my mom told me that I was capable of anything and I really took that to heart. Capable of anything. Even murder.

and then theres this entire monologue on lying:

Bigger, more important lies are mostly the truth. It is only the greasy, disgusting core of a betrayal or act of aggression that must be kept fully hidden. The goal is to be able to enact your heinous plan, not to keep them from ever feeling skeptical or suspicious of you. Your enemy’s opinion of your standing is worthless. They can say that they saw it coming all they want, but it won’t reverse their defeat. Fully blindsiding someone is great, but if you opponent knows you well and gets their wits about them, it isn’t usually an option. If it is an option, you should consider loftier goals with more formidable enemies. You’re capable of so much more!

Richard Nixon and co. created the term “limited hangout” to describe the practice of telling your enemy part of the truth in order to get information from them and to keep the construction of your lie believable. They meant it as “hanging” a “limited” amount of the truth out there as bait, not as a limited time to hang out with someone, which is what I always thought it meant until I looked it up. It’s a very 70s way of putting things. It didn’t have a perfect batting average with Nixon, what with the Watergate and all, but it is a long-standing part of CIA spycraft at this point. It works, but it can’t be your only line of infosec defense.

This is a great tool to have in your arsenal, but it is also important to realize that it is tool in the arsenal of every accomplished liar on the planet. Luckily, knowing that other good liars are doing this is a bit of information in itself. It means that the person who is lying to you might be giving you a lot of the truth as well. You can use that to try and reverse-engineer what lies at the murky core that they are trying to conceal from you. Two liars lying to each other? That’s an arms race.

Four liars lying to each other? This is WOE.BEGONE.

so hes constantly showing us ways in which hes not to be trusted but at the same time he has control over the entire narrative hes giving us. you know you cant really trust him but also what else is there to trust? youve only got his word (reference that no one will get: it’s like trying to figure out who the mole is in widm, the producers arent gonna let us)

so you dont trust him, but also you kinda do, bc you have to, and then occasionally he just opens an episode dropping a bunch of info like “ive been suspecting something else than what ive been talking about has been going on and heres proof now im in the middle of a kidnapping’. that kinda thing.

anyway. the point of all this is just to say, i think im getting an idea of what a 13-pov/13-narrated season might look like

[rearranging-deck-chairs]

2: Right. Hmm. Yep, I’m not surprised but I have any idea what this means. It’s like the pages that we sent to Ryan and to WOE.BEGONE the first time. It’s gibberish.

1: A salted hash…

2: I know that you don’t actually know what that means because I don’t know what that means and I know slightly more than you do. And I don’t think I forgot that.

1: It sounds smart if you say it to other people who also don’t know what it means.

2: I mean I’ll give you that.

1: Hurry up with the pictures already. I’m getting antsy.

2: Well, hi Antsy, I’m Mike W-

1: Shut the fuck up and (laughs) just do it. God.

2: Fine, fine. Just give me a break, it’s 40 pages and they can’t be blurry.

has the doctor done this yet?

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first couple episodes of woe be gone i was like ‘oh this might be a little too scary for me, especially listening to it alone in the dark’, but actually it’s super funny:

“Dragging a body into the woods and covering it up is hard, etc etc etc. You may well have noticed that I perpetually underestimate how difficult these challenges are going to be from a physical standpoint. Maybe I need to start hitting the gym. CANNONBALL was probably great at dragging corpses into the woods. I was super jealous.“

“She was too small to move a body, so I was there to help with that. Maybe most importantly, I was also there to tell her that she was doing the right thing. She absolutely wasn’t, obviously, but it was important that I tell her that she was.”

“With her playing, I won even if she won. It was like having 2 bingo cards. It would be nice going into a conversation with CANNONBALL holding all the cards. They’re playing cards now, not bingo cards, we’ve changed metaphors.”

“But if she doesn’t kill me and someone surpasses her in the game then I die. And if she kills me, I die. People die when they are killed!”

“Scruff is a dating app, mostly for masculine gay men looking for other masculine gay men, but its use is a little bit broader than it sounds from that description and its more feature-rich than Grindr and apparently there are local guys in your area who are down to alter spacetime tonight.”

“I could use the money. It’s not like I’m out here doing ad reads. Don’t you hate standing on your mattress at the post office? Then, you need socks. Warby Parker socks. Whether your hairline is receding while you hike through the  forest in the pacific northwest or your dick doesn’t work right while you sit and write a script for a podcast, Stamp.com is right for you. Enter code WOEBEGONE to get 10 stamps.coms with your first Squarespace order.”

“I have to get ready for my heist. My new heist, much different from my old heist where I opened a door and walked inside a room where I didn’t get the thing that I went there for. The kind of heist where I snake my arm into a mailbox and hope that there is an envelope in there.”

“I was hesitant to put in earbuds and listen to music or a podcast because I didn’t know how if it would mess with the results and I didn’t want to be caught off guard. There could be any sort of surprise out here waiting for me.

Do you remember the cold open? :) Do you remember what the title of the episode is? :) :) Have you figured out what the surprise that was waiting for me was? :) :) :) Are you tired of standing in line at the post office? Then you need Stamps.com[cut]

So there was a bear after all”

“As a murderer myself - not to brag - I know how conflicted I was when I killed Matt.”

“It was my time to strike. And then when I actually struck, it turned out that it was me that hit by / I was hit by / a smooth criminal, Ryan. Except Ryan might not have been a smooth criminal at all, just a… rough miscreant like me. Anne, are you okay? Are you okay, Anne? And that’s enough of that. Too much, even.”

“This whole operation goes much higher than some guy that I met on Scruff one time. Actually, now that I say that out loud, of course it does.”

“But friends manipulate each other all the time, right? Maybe not on purpose, but if you know someone really well and you want them to act in a certain way, then you can do or say things that make them likely to do those things. It just sounds worse the more I elaborate, I’m really digging a hole here.”

“And you know what they say: you can’t make an omelet without tricking someone into shooting Mike Walters. That might be a regional saying.”

[rearranging-deck-chairs]

alright woe be gone, youve got me, im listening

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“I can believe that,” he said. “I mean, I don’t know who sent me here, or why. Or even when they did it from. Or even When Is Now. When is now, by the way?”

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"intentionality is just,, boneless action"

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mike walters nonsense from today: (woe be gone spoilers episode 26-31)

“I think we both have a case of the Mondays,” I said. We both laughed. We didn’t laugh because saying that you have a “case of the Mondays” is funny. It’s not. We were laughing ironically. Like, isn’t it funny that people actually say that? Wouldn’t it be funny if I were actually like that? Do you understand? How when I told the joke I wasn’t just telling the joke, I was—[smash cut] (ep 26) 

thinking about the liar thing again here. the double perceptions. the triple perceptions in that hes explaining the double perceptions to us. (the quadruple ones in how he cuts his own explanation of)

hes from kazakhstan? or at least familiar with it enough to drop more what-google-translate-says-is-russian-? than i expected into a conversation unprompted:

Well, that’s all that I care about. If you’re happy, I’m happy. [Pause.] Well, then I’m happy. Yeah, I had better get to bed, too. It’s getting late. [Pause.] Okay, well it’s late for me. [Laugh.] I’ll text you in the morning. I’m glad you aren’t floating the middle of the Pacific Ocean… that’s a saying that we have back in the old country. [Pause.] The old country, ты не знаешь? Что я жил в казакстане? Я там убил медведя руками. That’s okay, we’re still getting to know each other. I’ll spin you a yarn about it tomorrow. я рада, что ты не плаваешь в тихом океане. I need to get to sleep or I’ll be completely useless on my patrol. Спять устали игрушки книшки спяь! Da da da da da! Some of us actually have to walk around, you know, not just sit at a desk all day. Alright, I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Mmm-hmm. Love you, too. Alright, bye.

what google tells me it says is something like: “the old country, dont you know? that i lived in kazakhstan? i killed a bear there with my hands” (asdfhgjhgj) “im glad youre not swimming in the pacific ocean”, and he references what i gather is a lullaby?

[id: screenshot of google translate translating the last phrase mike said into ‘sleep tired toys books sleep’ or ‘sleep tired books sleep toys’]

well then i guess it makes sense that mike walters isnt his actual name. i wouldnt expect a lot of mike walterses in kazakhstan.

Thankfully, during my last trip into Tier 2, I stumbled across a new way of getting into Tier 2 that would not require me to manipulate my boyfEdgar… my boy Edgar…  into giving me access.

his boyf edgar <3

and then he fUCKING DID IT AGAIN:

From there all I would have to do is reverse-engineer the—

I’m kidding. I bought an RFID reader/writer on Amazon and stole the badge for one night. It arrived just in time, too. I needed access to the Security.exe program in order to safely get the kidnapped Flinchite out of my cabin. Did I mention that yet? This is WOE.BEGONE.

and then he sent his hostage to kazakhstan:

For the location, I chose a sidewalk on a street in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Since it was late at night for me in Oldbrush Valley, it would be midmorning in Almaty, 14 time zones away. As far as why Almaty, Kazakhstan in particular? It’s an incredibly interesting place with fascinating culture and it is faaaaaar away. Even after he manages to navigate getting out of the country without having a passport and probably not speaking either of the national languages, it’s still a grueling plane ride to get back to America. He could make a good vacation of it if he wanted to: eat some kebabs, go skiing, and just generally Отьебись от меня. Ya know?

Пока, Флинчайт. Ты долбоеб. Убогий уебок. Пошел нахуй. Good riddance. Maybe you’ll learn what any of that means while you’re gone.

this was interesting just in a general way idk im thinking about dw again:

I suspect that even knowing that WOE.BEGONE exists is a sort of infohazard, since once you learn about it you become susceptible to the negative consequences of actions you haven’t even taken yet, but that is a hazard I am willing to subject you to, dear listener, and not Edgar.

thats a fun thought and it made me think of this series of short fics, particularly this one? and also these author notes a little bit. (just read those fics theyre short and so good) but anyway, this podcast has me understanding reversed cause and effects more than i ever have before i think. definitely thinking about it a lot more.

Ring ring. My better judgment can’t come to the phone right now. That’s supposed to be a metaphorical “ring ring,” but also onomatopoeia to indicate that I called Edgar. It’s clever if you think about it.

something about framing and the boundaries of the narrator again im definitely overthinking this arent i

[rearranging-deck-chairs]

(sorta spoilers for woe be gone season 2, this is episode 25)

this show is hilarious