wonkyelk

[wonkyelk]

Official investigation determined it to be a gas mains explosion, but… I wonder.

Gertrude Robinson is not who I thought she was.

[wonkyelk]

Are you real?

Interesting question. I try to be. Obviously there's a limit to how much of my real self I can comfortably share with strangers online, but I try to be as real as I can be here.

To be honest it's not for the benefit of any audience, as much as it's a kind of self-preservation. Fame of any level is poison to the soul and you have to fight against its effects even when you're only niche-internet famous. People who think you're famous treat you as both more important and less of a person: they treat you like you're incredibly special, but also like you're public property, acting towards you in ways they'd never do to someone they consider "real".

I try not to moan about it too much, as we all do it - it's just part of how our culture conceptualises fame. I do it about people I think of as famous, treating them like they're unreal. But the danger is that if you're not careful you can internalise it and start thinking of yourself as a famous person. And when you start to see yourself as unreal in that way, it kind of drives you mad, and can turn you into a real asshole.

There's no minimum fame level for it to happen, either. I've seen previously lovely people get a hundred fans, decide they're a big deal, and turn into huge dickheads.

The only antidote to the poison I've found is to do your best to stay real, and it's one of the reasons I try to be offline more than I used to, and spend most of my leisure time watching things I don't post about or hanging out with friends whose names none of you will ever know.

So yeah, I think I'm pretty real. I guess I see 'keeping it real' as a sort of spiritual survival strategy, and try to do so as much as possible.

[wonkyelk]

Now knowing that MAG 78 (the one where Melanie explores the old train carriage) was recorded under a blanket in Martyn and Sams corridor where the light was replaced with a disco light so whenever Jonny and Lydia had to lift up the blanket so Alex could give them pointers they would "start dancing" is so incredibly funny not to mention that throughout the scene where Jon and Melanie were yelling at each other they kept laughing and had to do so many retakes, this is peak information I dont think I'll ever be able to listen to this episode the same again

[wonkyelk]

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: The Magnus Archives (Podcast) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Martin Blackwood & Sasha James & Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist & Tim Stoker, Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist Characters: Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Elias Bouchard | Jonah Magnus, Martin Blackwood, Tim Stoker (The Magnus Archives), Sasha James Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Fluff and Crack, Friendship, Martin Blackwood Has a Crush on Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Pre-Slash Summary:

“Oh, and … as it’s our first day, I thought, maybe we could have a team lunch? For, er, bonding purposes. At my expense, of course.”

The words ‘team lunch’ sat very awkwardly in Jon’s mouth - a man who ate at his desk, unless practically levered away from it; who had never been seen at a works do, except for that one Halloween party, where he’d worked late and had to squeeze his way through a sea of slightly tipsy vampires and werewolves, to get out of the building - but there was no way that Tim was turning down either free food, or the chance to see Jonathan Sims’ earnest attempt at ‘bonding’.

[wonkyelk]

We're taking a quick break from our regularly scheduled programme for some self-indulgent sketching.

Jonathan Sims playing the violin, anybody?

I feel like playing a classical instrument is a hobby he may have, if he has any. That or ballroom dance. But at a competitive level, cause he needs to show everyone how professional he is at all times.

This has been: Cat's Headcanon-Projecting-Hour. Tune in next time for when I force another thing I like onto the wet cat man himself.

[wonkyelk]

The Magnus Archives, Ep 1: Anglerfish

[wonkyelk]

Jontim

[wonkyelk]

A bit old, but my rendition of baby Jon from the Mr Spider episode, I thought it was so silly to imagine our favorite wet cat man as just a little guy

[wonkyelk]

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: The Magnus Archives (Podcast) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist Characters: Elias Bouchard | Jonah Magnus, Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Martin Blackwood, Sasha James, Tim Stoker (The Magnus Archives), Jane Prentiss, Trevor Herbert, Julia Montauk Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, Pre-Slash, Kidnapping, Friendship, Fluff and Humor Series: Part 2 of Supernatural Talent Agency Summary:

Elias knew that it was going to be a bad day, as soon as he got to his office, to find the majority of his staff waiting outside, with a collective air of belligerence and a thick sheaf of notes.

[wonkyelk]

3rd Attempt at the Jon and Nikola scene... Much happier with it

[wonkyelk]

Back with some DoorKeay!

[wonkyelk]

Human Aurora ft the tiny mechanisms

[wonkyelk]

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: The Magnus Archives (Podcast) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Characters: Original Artefacts - Character, Elias Bouchard | Jonah Magnus, Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, The Magnus Institute Artefact Storage (The Magnus Archives), Horror, Humor Summary:

A peek into the shelves of Artefact Storage.

[wonkyelk]

The fact that there was a window of a few years where Jon and Gerry were both at the institute kinda haunts me.

[wonkyelk]

Hello tumblr I humbly offer you agnes montague please imagine she is being served to you on a silver platter

[wonkyelk]

I was meeting a client at a famous museum’s lounge for lunch (fancy, I know) and had an hour to kill afterwards so I joined the first random docent tour I could find. The woman who took us around was a great-grandmother from the Bronx “back when that was nothing to brag about” and she was doing a talk on alternative mediums within art.

What I thought that meant: telling us about unique sculpture materials and paint mixtures.

What that actually meant: an 84yo woman gingerly holding a beautifully beaded and embroidered dress (apparently from Ukraine and at least 200 years old) and, with tears in her eyes, showing how each individual thread was spun by hand and weaved into place on a cottage floor loom, with bright blue silk embroidery thread and hand-blown beads intricately piercing the work of other labor for days upon days, as the labor of a dozen talented people came together to make something so beautiful for a village girl’s wedding day.

What it also meant: in 1948, a young girl lived in a cramped tenement-like third floor apartment in Manhattan, with a father who had just joined them after not having been allowed to escape through Poland with his pregnant wife nine years earlier. She sits in her father’s lap and watches with wide, quiet eyes as her mother’s deft hands fly across fabric with bright blue silk thread (echoing hands from over a century years earlier). Thread that her mother had salvaged from white embroidery scraps at the tailor’s shop where she worked and spent the last few days carefully dying in the kitchen sink and drying on the roof.

The dress is in the traditional Hungarian fashion and is folded across her mother’s lap: her mother doesn’t had a pattern, but she doesn’t need one to make her daughter’s dress for the fifth grade dance. The dress would end up differing significantly from the pure white, petticoated first communion dresses worn by her daughter’s majority-Catholic classmates, but the young girl would love it all the more for its uniqueness and bright blue thread.

And now, that same young girl (and maybe also the villager from 19th century Ukraine) stands in front of us, trying not to clutch the old fabric too hard as her voice shakes with the emotion of all the love and humanity that is poured into the labor of art. The village girl and the girl in the Bronx were very different people: different centuries, different religions, different ages, and different continents. But the love in the stitches and beads on their dresses was the same. And she tells us that when we look at the labor of art, we don’t just see the work to create that piece - we see the labor of our own creations and the creations of others for us, and the value in something so seemingly frivolous.

But, maybe more importantly, she says that we only admire this piece in a museum because it happened to survive the love of the wearer and those who owned it afterwards, but there have been quite literally billions of small, quiet works of art in billions of small, quiet homes all over the world, for millennia. That your grandmother’s quilt is used as a picnic blanket just as Van Gogh’s works hung in his poor friends’ hallways. That your father’s hand-painted model plane sets are displayed in your parents’ livingroom as Grecian vases are displayed in museums. That your older sister’s engineering drawings in a steady, fine-lined hand are akin to Da Vinci’s scribbles of flying machines.

I don’t think there’s any dramatic conclusions to be drawn from these thoughts - they’ve been echoed by thousands of other people across the centuries. However, if you ever feel bad for spending all of your time sewing, knitting, drawing, building lego sets, or whatever else - especially if you feel like you have to somehow monetize or show off your work online to justify your labor - please know that there’s an 84yo museum docent in the Bronx who would cry simply at the thought of you spending so much effort to quietly create something that’s beautiful to you.

[wonkyelk]

An alternate universe where The Archivist forgets to top up his oyster card and misses the train