I Will Never Forget The Day I Was Walking Around And Saw Someone With A Trans Flag Patch On Their Jacket.

I just saw an ad for angry birds in the same shitty format as every other shitty mobile game ad right now? The kind that’s a weird skit where two random people are talking and then one starts infodumping unprompted about how the game is free and has no ads? It was kind of funny brcause those game ads suck, but kind of sad because i remember when ads didn’t look or sound like that, and they shouldn’t have done that to a mobile game legend like angry birds.

Goncharov dir. Martin Scorsese

Imagine if the distortion’s hallways respond to the person trapped in them, but in different ways

Door (pre-michael): automatic and pretty fast. Just root out the things the victim finds most unnerving and change form to echo that

Michael: it’s still automatic, but the part of michael that is something sort of like a “who” keeps being surprised by the hallway shapes it’s currently in. Not surprised enough to react, especially not after years of being michael, but still “huh, that’s a new one”

Helen: no longer automatic, but a lot more precise. Human-helen’s experience with real estate means she’s seen a lot of buildings and talked a lot of strangers into buying those buildings at a higher price than maybe they should have sold for. She makes sure that the design of the corridors is optimized in a way the distortion never quite bothered with

As much as i love ruminating on michael, i also love helen, because i see her as being the best of both human and spiral, able to use everything she has from both experiences in a way “existence tied to its pointlessness” michael never really could

i would love to hear more of your thoughts on michael shelley!!! 🌀🚪✨

you're in luck because i've sat on thoughts about him for years and i finally feel like i can articulate them. because michael shelley is such a well written case of tragic horror in the horror tragedy podcast. and, despite my criticisms of season 5, it really did do an excellent job in concluding his character arc with the gertrude backstory episode. in a podcast where a common in-universe theme is that knowledge, and the pursuit of knowledge, is dangerous, michael is a subversion in that his ignorance of the horrors of the world he lived in not only didn't save him, but was intentionally engineered to make him vulnerable to exploitation and harm (which, on a broader scope, emphasises the futility of the world of the magnus archives - regardless of whether you participate in or turn a blind eye to the systems at play, involved or uninvolved, you are not safe).

furthermore, i really appreciate the subversion of traditional tropes of the sacrifice as a typically female figure taken advantage of by a male father, brother, or lover, whose tragic and horrible death is used to motivate him (whether to greatness or self-destruction), with michael being a son sacrificed by his mother (or grandmother) figure, who never actually loved him and whose 'frail' and 'nurturing' qualities were weaponised incompetence used to gaslight and manipulate him - and who continues to operate successfully (at least in terms of what can be said to be 'success' in a world like the magnus archives) without being haunted by any apparent doubt about the decision she made, or any hesitation to use others in similar ways, following this betrayal. which makes the fact that he's sewn into the fabric of a being that represents lies in their most insidious form, used as a weapon to devour people and destroy their lives, all the more abhorrent in hindsight - he is forced to not only relive his trauma in an endless loop (or spiral, if you will), but to become the mechanism which enables it. michael is taken to the edge of something evil (at least from a human perspective), and pushed over the threshold with no hope of recourse. there's almost a reverse orphic quality to it - he descends into terrifying other world, one which exists side-by-side with but fundamentally seperate from his own, against his will, and looking back will only cause him pain as he's assaulted by memories of a life he will never be able to reach.

i think a lot of people forget to look past the surface with michael, despite there being an entire episode dedicated to doing so. which is understandable, he's a very outwardly expressive character - but this is intentional obfuscation to hide an incredibly damaged victim whose hatred of this part of himself is integral to his entire reason for being, and which the rejection of causes him to be unmade, incapable of existing as this contradictory nightmare any longer. it's a mercy killing, and yet it is violent and painful, because michael cannot and should not exist, and excising that graft used to muzzle the distortion is as agonising as latching it into place was in the first place. when michael-the-distortion says about michael shelley "he was born. he was pointless. and he should have died." there is an implicit longing there, a rage at the way he was used, his decisions made for him and used to imprison something else instead of ever being allowed to exercise any measure of free will. because michael shelley probably would have died for the archivist, given the opportunity, but he never got the choice.

The tma fandom seems to have unlocked our psychic capabilities. Let me explain.

If you’re on the tma tag, or just have a lot of tma art on your dash, you see art of characters you have only heard the voices of. And you go “Oh, that’s Jon!” “Oh, that’s Melanie!” “Oh, that’s Tim!” And only a handful of these characters have distinctly described traits (like Gerry’s eye tattoos), and fewer still have recurring appearances, or that we hear the voices of. And yet we all agree, roughly, on what they look like. Even if someone has a different design, instead of going “who the hell is that”, you go “well, that’s not what I think Georgie looks like, but I know it’s Georgie without having to check the tags”.

This gets even more interesting when you look at Sasha. Because she gets *replaced*. And so many drawings of not!Sasha label her as Sasha for the bit/for spookiness, but we all somehow *know* when we’re looking at not!Sasha, even when the drawing has no other spookiness.

Ive seen this extend too far sometimes, with a lot of Malevolent art being inadvertently assigned to tma characters, but rarely have I looked at a piece of tma art and gone “who the hell is that??”

Some of this comes down to a collective agreement on designs that happened before I got to the fandom - by the time I got here, pretty much everyone’s designs were largely nailed down. Even so, art where the designs deviate from The Socially Agreed Design are still readily recognizable as the characters. I’m getting to see this with Alice, too - I can look at almost any Alice drawing and go “yep, that’s Alice” and she’s only existed in our collective consciousness for like three months and her design isn’t solidified yet.

I did a little 180 degree spin this is so cool

[ Click image below to see ]

Got inspired by the fantastic @the-stove-is-on-fire , I wanted to make something more complex but this will do >:)

The life cycle of a subway sandwich meme

unholy amalgamation:

everyone living in EU - please support the citizens initiative for safe and accessible abortion!!

Kinda weird how the music that was popular when you were in grade school was mostly made by people substantially older than you, and yet that music is societally connected to your age group rather than the age group that made it. This is less so now that pretty much anyone can get their hands on audio software now, but skill still needs time to develop so most of the good stuff is written by people in their 20s at least.

I wrote a computer program to calculate what's the most masculine name of all time, but I don't think it works. It keeps saying the most masculine name is "Gregxander"