Someday Im Going To Appear Here With Like Ten Long Ass Essays About Tma And You Will All Realize Just

ABACUSYNTH by ELIAS JARZOMBEK [2022]

Abacusynth is a synthesizer inspired by an abacus, the ancient counting tool used all around the world. Just like an abacus is used to learn the fundamentals of math, the Abacusynth can be used to explore the building blocks of audio synthesis.

“posts that have 10k to me” -boring, cliched, causes mild alarm

“Posts that will have 10k” -threatening, inevitable, sounds like a curse

Tumblr is boring. I think if you double tap a post to like it and you do that like ten times in a row it should make confetting appear or something

Had a moment halfway through this where I was like “hm. This list seems. Familiar. OH WAIT”

I truly hate the word “unalive.” There are so many other euphemisms that fictional Italian mobsters worked so hard to provide you with and you just ignore them.

One of the others walks in and sees him explaining the problem to the duck and thinks he’s properly lost it (well, more than they already did) because they aren’t programmers

debugging

I think if you spend too much time hating something, you start seeing it in places where it isn’t

I feel like id be a really annoying eye avatar. Annoying to beholding specifically. Id be summoning its attention all the time like “ceaseless watcher whats the square root of 906” “ceaseless watcher check out this cool rock i found” “ceaseless watcher whats the song thats like (bad singing)” “ceaseless watcher did you know cellar spiders hunt by pretending to be caught prey and then eating the other spider” “ceaseless watcher where did i put my keys” eventually it’d stop listening to me. And then id be invisible muahahaha

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.

Wow. That’s a hell of a reblog. Nice tags there, past sleep-deprived me

Gender roll of the day:

Today's gender roll is: Werewolf 😎

I physically cannot make this decision theyre both the best and also all the eliminated ones are the best too help

FINAL ROUND! THIS IS IT, THIS IS WHAT YOU'VE ALL BEEN WAITING FOR!