Latest Posts by spiralling-spires - Page 9

i know every digit of pi

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.

This is actually the best thing

OKAY so on TMA twitter ppl have been making rp accounts and

and so obviously in addition to there being several rp accounts for each character theres also been an avalanche of ppl making twitter accounts for their ‘tmasonas’ who are generally institute employees which is fun but yesterday i noticed that as a general rule all the OC accounts seem pretty in the know re: the deal with the archives/entities/etc. and i started thinking like… what would a twitter account look like for an institute employee that just genuinely has NO idea. is just 100% oblivious to like an almost impressive degree. so i made one and here are some highlights

New bot account format guys! Username made up of a few words usually, no dashes, and with a single random-ish post or reblog on it. They tend not to have their like or follow list visible, and they follow you out of nowhere and then don’t interact further. Interesting construction.

I literally fell to my knees laughing at this and i dont know why

I actually like how after every episode of tmagp some tma-listeners analyse statements like sommelier when he talks about some rich wine like hmmm this one is clearly the lonely with a slight hint of the stranger and maybe notes of the spiral and I think I can sense some desolation in here

What is your favorite colour outside of the visible light spectrum?

PINK! 'OH BUT I SEE PINK' NO, YOU SEE THE MIXTURE OF RED AND VIOLET WAVELENGTHS. ITS AN OUTLIER, A NOT-QUITE, AND I LOVE LOVE LOVE PINK :]))(]

Hey if jon feels the emotions of the statement giver do you think he was feeling jonah’s elation in 160 despite himself being beyond terrified? Hell, was he even terrified at the time? Was he even himself? We don’t know how the “briefly assuming the personality of the statement giver” works. Was he, briefly, just Jonah?

FINALLY made it to a gimmick post on the right day

You can only reblog this today.

For a long time I didn’t care about Breekon and Hope. Okay, spooky delivery guys with a coffin, cool, next thing. And then Hope died and I listened to every time Breekon was around without him and augh this puts it so well

uno how aristophanes belived there were three sexes: male, female and androgynous, who had male and female sex organs, two sets of limbs and two faces. the gods believed them to be too strong and so split the androgynous humans into two beings. they would long for their other half and would spend their lives looking for the matching half of their human whole. that's what today wld be referred to as soulmates.

thats how i think of breekon and hope. two halves of a being that was once one, a long long time ago. they are two parts of a perfect whole, never meant to have been separated. and i dont think its necessarily romantic, because your soulmate isnt always your romantic or sexual interest, they are just whoever makes you whole. and love is just the persuit of wholeness.

SPIDERS GEORG WRAPPED

You ate 36,520,000 Spiders!

Wow! You skewed 8 Billion People's data! That's in the top 0.0001% of all spider eaters!

Vibes are unique, just like you! Your Spiders Vibe is: Sleeping in a Cave.

I had a whole post planned about how the Web has nothing to do with spiders - they make their webs based mostly on preprogrammed instinct and some of them get lucky and catch something and live - but then I realized that the Web doesn’t necessarily know why the threads connect the way they do. The Web understands what strings to pull, how to manipulate the outcome - but it’s the Eye that knows.

Still, is it strategy or instinct that drives the mother of puppets?

Genuinely not sure how separate the fears are. Maybe they’re completely separate like at the end of s5. Maybe they’re all one thing like Gerry’s colours. Maybe they’re both. Schrödinger’s fears

What if the watcher wasnt ceaseless

The life cycle of a subway sandwich meme

unholy amalgamation:

I found the jurgen leitner rant’s olaf-focused twin on hellsite genetics

God I fucking hate Olaf the snowman so fucking much holy shit. Holy shit, every frame he's in, every scene, every gif, every jpeg, he's got this painfully vacant, stupid as shit, fuckass look on his stupid lumpy face. Absolutely no part of his ugly as sin piece of shit character design is endearing. His stupid fucking legs? Who the hell makes a snowman with legs. His dumb flaily fucking twig arms? His shitty, lumpy bastard head? The three thousand percent unnecessary dumbass shitass fucking SNOW BUCK TOOTH that no snowman has EVER FUCKING HAD IN tHE HISTORY OF GOD'S GREEN FUCKING EARTH? God, I hate him. I hate him so much. So FUCKING much. Every time I see a stuffed toy Olaf or an Olaf gif or a shitty goddamn commercial, it ignites my primal rage response and I'm overcome by the need to punt this shitty little homunculus into the fucking sun. "Bhurr blur, I'm Olaf the fuckshit snow fucker, I like warm hugs". Fuck you. Fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you. You look like Tow Mater summoned a patronus. Your dumb fucking twig hair makes your whole shitty head look like a hairy skin tag. I hate your dumb fucking lumpy carrot nose and your stupid, empty googly eyes and your over-the-top goofy ass upbeat asshole personality. Any scene he's sad it invokes all the wrath and fury of a spoiled child having a meltdown over a chocolate bar in a w*lmart checkout line. And I know its irrational. That's the worst part. I know he's just a shitty fucking side character in a stupid fucking children's movie, I know it doesn't matter, I know I shouldn't care. But that's part of the problem. The part where no matter the might and fury of my hatred, the locus of my homicidal intent is alltogether inconsequential. I find myself laying awake in the dark in the early hours of the morning consumed by the spirit of Wrath itself, all the force and might of a flaming hurricane directed at a bottle of piss in a ditch by the highway. The absurdity of it all burns me to my core. What better things could this energy be directed towards? And yet my disdain for this stupid, useless, insubstantial failure of endearing character design utterly eclipses the intrigue of all other pursuits. I hate him. I hate him on a level of my mind reserved for the worst of the world's array of sinners, and I can't even begin to justify it. Shitstick the snow dick is, for all intents and purposes, the animated corpse of all of humanity's saccharine pretenses- every condescending, passive-aggressive statement of meaningless upper middle class suburban drama distilled into a single, hateable form. The fucking. Fuck. I have no words. There is no cuss or epithet in any language that can encapsulate the height of the emotions I am experiencing. God, I hate him so much. I hate him so, so fucking much. I want to light his ugly little dumpster body on fire. I want to graphically beat him to death with his own stupid fucking nose. I want to punch him to death. You know that weird feeling you get, when you see a picture of something so cute you find yourself overcome with the bizarre, inexplicable urge to squeeze it? It's EXACTLY like that, except instead of cuteness it's disgust. The wordless knowledge that his existence as a fictional work is evidence of all the failures of mankind. I find myself possessed by the will of a Holy Angel gone rogue with the belief that God has made a mistake, and I alone must correct it. This is the trial by which Samael himself fell from grace. This wild, meaningless rage. A thousand blades of shining steel cast with inhuman force in the direction of a plastic grocery bag floating on a breeze. What horrors must I have committed in a past life to be plagued by this torment now? I must Unmake this fictional snowman

Sorry if i just spam liked several dozen posts on your account i swear im not a bot im just being autistic 😭

Random thought but what if gertrude let gerry die bc she sensed that he had been marked by all of the fears by virtue of bookhunting and didnt want jonah noticing and abruptly changing plans for who the archivist is

I love linguistic stuff and saw this post screenshotted AGES ago and have been halfheartedly searching for it again because no one believes me when i say sign language has accents AND I FOUND IT

Blind people must save a lot on electricity.

I love when ficwriters portray michael distortion as like a weird eldritch cat. It fits his vibe so well. He says and does things that dont make sense and occasionally interacts with you or gives you things that you may or may not have wanted. Also sometimes threatens you. Weird eldritch cat.

Hex Codes for LGBTQ+ Flags

for all my artists, content creators, and anyone else out there who use specific color palettes for references/designs, here are the hex codes for each of the lgbtq flags for your queer creative purposes. i hope you find these useful. enjoy!

What was your favorite Daniel Radcliffe moment on the pod?

was scrolling through my drafts and realised this unfinished shitpost is infinitely funnier as it is

Runs in here screaming and hitting random items with a large blunt object and then becomes one with the wall and vanishes. Shortly afterwards the room explodes and was never there

The web and the spiral and the eye are all the same thing. Until the finale I kept wondering why all three of them existed since they NEED each other to exist. They are aspects of one Fear. The only reason the Web is separate is because it’s sentient in a way the others aren’t. But just as Knowing isn’t necessarily Understanding, you do need to Know to Understand. Annabelle said more deceptive half-truths than the Distortion did, but in the exact same flavour. Helen did it for fun while Annabelle did it for sneaky plotting (and… probably also fun, tbh). I see the Spiral as having a lot to do with manic 3 am creativity, which is inexorably tied to all the best schemes. The Spiral and the Eye combine to form the Web. Screams loudly

Idk if this is more Vast or Spiral coded. Depends on who you ask I guess. Or maybe it’s both!

"Hey, mom? Can you come pick me up from school? Yeah, the sky is filling with fractals again."

Soooo. I started tmagp. Mind you, I’m not caught up yet, I only listened to the first two. But GODDAMN I will not be normal about this ever. Consider this your warning that tmagp spoilers may be a thing in the future

I had this EXACT thought about an hour before seeing this post and started immediately planning Large Art Projects That I Will Never Finish based on it because That Is What I Do

ok ok, so, I just kind of realised that Simon Fairchild is older than planes right? so, can you imagine how excited he was when they were invented? he felt the fresh fear of the wright brothers for those first 12 seconds and went insane.

OR, alternatively, he invented the aeroplane because he was bored of just throwing people from cliffs

ohmygod. he was absolutely fucking ecstatic. overwhelmed with joy. best day of his life. he would force every other avatar onto a plane immediately

S1 Jon and Martin reacting to S5 JonMartin being lovey-dovey?

so this probably isn't what you wanted, but....