Latest Posts by spiralling-spires - Page 10

Yknow what? Fuck it. Boosting my luck stat for this week

so I got into grad school today with my shitty 2.8 gpa and the moral of the story is reblog those good luck posts for the love of god

Slaying a princess. A lot of times

duality of man

Sure

Hey, could you do me a favor?

Could you just RB this?

The little RB statistics chart is so pleasant and stimmy to look at and I want to see what it looks like when it gets really REALLY huge because it makes me think of some deep sea lifeform

Reblogs a nearly four year old post i found while looking up stuff about gertrude’s assistants. This is now canon in my mind

Hey so like, apparently Emma Harvey was the one keeping Michael Shelley completely ignorant of all the paranormal nonsense going on at the archives. And it seems everyone (including me) interpreted this as ‘‘Gertrude Robinson never spoke about the paranormal stuff openly, making it easy for Michael to stay uninformed.’‘

But consider an alternative:

Gertrude isn’t super chatty around her assistants in general, however neither does she mince words around them. When she is off to try and find a way to disrupt the Flesh ritual, she just is putting on her coat and outright saying ‘‘Alright I’m going to go and snoop around the place that evil dark monster ate some children. Please leave any statements I need to look at on my desk while I am gone.’’ Michael is like 20 years old and he’s like, uh what.

‘‘I should be back in 3 weeks. Emma, keep that polaroid of me on my desk so if a changeling comes back pretending to be me you’ll know.’‘

Michael: ?!?!?!?!?!?!

Emma just smiles gently and says yes Gertrude, of course dear. And then once Gertrude’s gone and Michael is still shooting Emma alarmed looks, waiting for an explanation, she takes him aside.

“Ms. Robinson is… quite a character,’‘ Emma says with that lilt people make when they mean batshit crazy and should probably be in a home. ‘‘The Institute has always drawn in people with… unconventional beliefs.’‘

Michael understands instantly. “Oh,’‘ he says.

Emma grimaces. ‘‘It didn’t used to come up so much,’‘ she says. “But since Fiona disappeared… well. She’s started to see spooky things everywhere.’‘

And Michael just thinks that’s just the Saddest, you see. What a poor, tired old soul, warped into frenzied paranoia by the loss of her coworker. What a Tragedy. And so now, every time he sees Gertrude cutting out eyes from magazine clippings or recording conversations religiously on tape, his heart just breaks a little. He had a friend, once, who was always half-convinced he was being followed by things that couldn’t exist.

So Michael goes into Protect and Nurture mode.

So yes, Michael does hear Gertrude talking to Emma grimly about how she’s planning to ‘‘save the world.’‘ He catches a few conversations she has about Entities or Powers or evil books that eat you. But all it takes is a few Shared, Knowing Glances with Emma and he just wants to wrap this poor old grandma in a blanket and give her some tea and tell her yes, she is Very Brave and Very Hardworking but she can take a nap now :)

Gertrude, meanwhile, eventually figures out that Michael thinks she’s off her rocker but suddenly out of the blue going ‘‘I know you think I am crazy but really there are 14 eldritch fear powers, you have to believe me’‘ is 1) incredibly undignified and 2) will not make Michael believe her. So, resignedly, she decides having an ignorant assistant probably has its uses.

Does she suspect Emma? Yes. Does she ever have enough proof to confront her? No. No she does not.

Inconsequential headcanon: Gerry Keay didn’t wear socks most of the time. He’d just put the shoes on and call it good

Helen would combine vivid indigo with dark magenta

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

So i just started slay the princess and idk if the narrator has a canon design but if he doesn’t I can and will draw him as the jarchivist because it would be really funny

Anatomy students b like bone apple teeth

Hello Jon, apologies for the deception but we’ve been trying to reach you about your cars extended warranty-

The ads here are all very Stranger. I like saving them to dissect their Wrongness later. I like this cake one, though. No cursed faces, no floating limbs, no almost-words, just cakes!

This ad feels like a lure of the stranger but a very innocent and new lure. Yes. That is cakes, good job.

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.

Okay but jon is like mostly scar tissue by the end?? Counting off things that probably scarred:

- worms

- daisy kidnapping him

- michael stab

- shaking jude’s hand

- he was in the middle of a plastic explosive going off during the unknowing and no one talks about it. Like yeah he survived but also he was semi-dead for half a year, that shit probably left a mark (ha, ha) other than him becoming abruptly more avatarlike

- rib removal

- melanie stab

- i feel like im forgetting something but i cant say what

Happy bpm day btw!! I got caught up deciding which bpm post to reblog, got distracted, reblogged none of them. Uhh insert jurgen leitner copypasta here

Yee

Reblog this post if your aromantic and/or asexual

I'm trying to prove a point

New experience: browsing tumblr, reading some long thread, had to put my phone down for a minute, left it on because I was going to pick it back up in a minute anyway. Watched as someone glanced at my phone, and realized I had forgotten what I was reading. Until I was able to get it back and check, I was stuck wondering if they’d seen detailed fandom analyses (branding me as a nerd) or ridiculous essays on linguistics (also branding me as a nerd) when they looked at my phone

I made a half-joke once that martin is constantly about eight seconds away from murder and the only way he keeps himself from committing violence is by making tea. I think i was right

ok, i have finally gotten to season 5, and i have got to say one thing. this fanbase infantilizes martin to Hell and back and i do NOT understand how you can do it if you finished this damn podcast, i understand hes very sweet and he has a really cute voice but from 165 to 175 i think i have heard him pretty cheerfully ask jon to kill people about twice per episode on average,

What if jonah prefers symbolic/nonmoving eyes and doesn’t look through other people’s eyes very much because he’s prone to motion sickness and looking through moving eyes is sort of like watching someone else play portal. Gerry’s tattoos also don’t/didn’t get looked through much for the same reason

the map gertrude gave to michael of Zemlya Sannikova was one of those mazes you see on kids' menus at restaurants, btw

One thing we don’t talk about enough is that michael distortion looks… basically normal. Like canonically.

Wiki excerpt: “Michael is a very tall man, approximately 6.5 feet, with a round face. His hair is blonde and forms ringlets that come down to his shoulders.”

He only looks like our silly horror guy with knife hands when viewed through reflections or warped glass. So technically almost all fanart done of michael is actually a reflection of a much more normal-looking drawing of a random blonde guy.

How many rituals were stopped with Large Explosion or Throwing People Into It

What is spiders georg an avatar of? The obvious answer is the web, but he *eats* 10,000 spiders a day. That doesnt sound like web avatar behavior. Maybe web victim? But that doesnt give us insights into what he’s an avatar of, because someone so powerful of an outliar is clearly an avatar

Looking at my drafts for something to post and all my drafts fall into one of a few categories:

1. TMA thoughts that i had in quick succession and draftified in order to space them out. Quality ranges from “absolute shitpost” to “really insightful deep dive into some random part of the podcast”

2. Rants under multi-month-old posts that i opted not to post because it didn’t actually add anything to the post (generally multiple paragraphs long

3. The most unhinged half written posts youve ever seen. One of them just says “The Web is just” about 14 times followed by “The Eye is just” another 14 times and i dont remember what i was planning to do with it

I’m actually working on a corruption michael design (inspired by a bit with a friend involving jane prentiss and worm on a string) because jane and michael are really quite similar when you think about it. Im genuinely tempted to do a set of designs for him based on each fear now, seeing how each fear could overtake the same character is so fascinating. And this interpretation of the dark, going from the more traditional literal darkness and the unknown within it, to an intentional ignorance (whether intentional on your own part or another’s)… it seems obvious in retrospect but it never really crossed my mind, somehow!

Aaah! Lovely thoughts!!

If he hadn’t been sacrificed, I feel like Michael would have been more a victim and/or avatar of The Web.

I highly doubt Michael was stupid. To be honest, he strikes me as neurodivergent of the “if I just go with what they say, they won’t hate me” variety. He trusted gertrude to not… y’know. Kill him. I feel like that’s a pretty low level of trust, all things considered. He probably knew she was planning *something*, though he grossly underestimated the scale. Consider also that Gertrude was trying to intentionally deceive pretty much everyone so that she could go around obliterating Rituals and being a general pain in the ass to Jonah. It’s not a mark against someone to have been tricked by Gertrude. Hell, he was in an echo chamber designed to keep him ignorant!

Point is, Michael wasn’t stupid. He was scared. He was scared of being hated and left behind and not being enough for others. He was scared of failing people. He’d fall into anyone’s schemes, take any number of hits, whatever it would take to have people stick around and hopefully, maybe, protect him in return.

If it hadn’t been Gertrude and her assistants specifically, if it hadn’t been Fears and supernatural entities and attempts to end the world, he would have been manipulated, rather than lied-to-and-manipulated. He could break the Great Twisting because he *had* been lied to, not because it was the core of his fear. (Ignore for now that the Twisting wouldn’t have worked anyway, if 160 is to be believed.)

And every fear has a bit of manipulation in it, Gerry’s colour analogy rant and all. But The Web relishes in manipulation, in telling you true things that will lead you to the wrong conclusions to do what it wants. Michael was told he could stop a great evil. True! Sort of!

Anyways, Web!Michael when

what is tumblr for if not rendering the weird dreams i have about tumblr posts. behold: the thing i woke up at 4 am to write in a discord server after having a prophetic vision of it last night. i have no idea what any of this means or what the links led to. it's not letting me have the underlines unless i make proper links so i added the link to a song i've been listening to a lot lately, but i'm pretty sure that wasn't what it was in the dream

This one turns you into mulch, this one actually respects you, this one prevents Hugh Jackman from turning into a —.

Link 1

Link 2

Link 3

Unrelated to the last post but what if the distortion was actually like. The output of one of the early machine learning image generators trying to make a person. Like hear me out ok. Struggles with hands, never looks quite right, tends to go a bit crazy with colours, may or may not be one with the background. Plus have you ever watched one of those timelapses of a ML program generating an image. Thats exactly how the distortion moves. Also fucked up geometry

I had a really gut wrenching realization about tma and opened a new post to write it and then i forgot help

It was like. The worlds saddest fanfic concept or something. Like i hated it and loved it in equal measure because it hurt in a good way, you know what i mean? Like when you really like something and you know its gonna hurt but you cant stop. Wait im just describing the experience of being a tma fan now

This is why we dont let the cicada ruminate on fandoms after 2 am. Their attention span decreases to about a half second

If he hadn’t been sacrificed, I feel like Michael would have been more a victim and/or avatar of The Web.

I highly doubt Michael was stupid. To be honest, he strikes me as neurodivergent of the “if I just go with what they say, they won’t hate me” variety. He trusted gertrude to not… y’know. Kill him. I feel like that’s a pretty low level of trust, all things considered. He probably knew she was planning *something*, though he grossly underestimated the scale. Consider also that Gertrude was trying to intentionally deceive pretty much everyone so that she could go around obliterating Rituals and being a general pain in the ass to Jonah. It’s not a mark against someone to have been tricked by Gertrude. Hell, he was in an echo chamber designed to keep him ignorant!

Point is, Michael wasn’t stupid. He was scared. He was scared of being hated and left behind and not being enough for others. He was scared of failing people. He’d fall into anyone’s schemes, take any number of hits, whatever it would take to have people stick around and hopefully, maybe, protect him in return.

If it hadn’t been Gertrude and her assistants specifically, if it hadn’t been Fears and supernatural entities and attempts to end the world, he would have been manipulated, rather than lied-to-and-manipulated. He could break the Great Twisting because he *had* been lied to, not because it was the core of his fear. (Ignore for now that the Twisting wouldn’t have worked anyway, if 160 is to be believed.)

And every fear has a bit of manipulation in it, Gerry’s colour analogy rant and all. But The Web relishes in manipulation, in telling you true things that will lead you to the wrong conclusions to do what it wants. Michael was told he could stop a great evil. True! Sort of!

Anyways, Web!Michael when

The Magnus Archives is genuinely so funny from an objective pov because for four full seasons it’s this really tense horrifying portrayal of losing yourself to your fears and then the last season is just two very grumpy British boyfriends, one of which is just a regular nerd who loves tea while the other one is literally the antichrist, taking a road trip through a post apocalyptic wasteland during which the nerd constantly complains about his eldritch boyfriend’s habit of needing to sustain himself via recording his emo slam poetry.