#ask theboombutton

[theboombutton]

Am I the only one who remembers that Annabelle explicitly said that The Web took Jon's voice (and those he walked with)?

I mean, that's the basis for why I personally think that Augustus isn't Jonah's voice. She said it was about their voices, and Jonah's wasn't on those tapes. But I also acknowledge that this is a sequel, and sequels often include minor retcons.

And tbh, Annabelle was an avatar of lies and manipulation. It is frankly astonishing how much we as a fandom - myself included - take her words at face value, as legit lore about how the TMA world works.

#tmagp #tmagp meta #the magnus protocol #tmagp speculation #ask #anonymous #anonymous ask #ask button #ask boombutton #ask theboombutton

[twothousandgrumpybees]

Trick or treat!

Treat?! Splinter from TMNT figurine!

#take good care of him #asks #theboombutton

[annabelle--cane]

"the magnus protocol had a whole ARG beforehand? what?"

yes! it did!

"oh so I need to have participated in this whole big thing to actually understand the podcast?"

not at all! from the official post-mortem put out by RQ, "while the ARG was not something that was necessary to participate in to understand the magnus protocol, it was designed to contain a wealth of background story and context that would enrich any player's listening experience."

"a wealth of background context that would enrich my listening experience 👀👀👀 how can I learn about this?"

SO glad you asked. sadly, many of the materials made for the arg have been taken down since the game ended 😔 (ex., the official OIAR, magnus institute, and bonzoland websites. (edit ii: I found partial wayback machine captures! see below) though @strangehauntsuk is still up!), so we're a bit low on primary sources, but in terms of learning about what happened:

for a starting point, I would really recommend this video by @pinkelotjeart

it's super accessible, it was made in real time as the game progressed and follows the solving and revelation of clues as they happened, it hits all the major points of the mystery and moments of community insanity while eliding some of the nitty gritty puzzle grinding, 10/10 would recommend.

here's the official summary put out by RQ, and I'd recommend reading through this once you've already gotten a basic handle on the flow of the story and the basic connections between major clues and events. it's got some fun behind-the-scenes info and lays out the thought process behind the puzzles in simple terms

here's the full masterdoc of all puzzles and resolutions put together in the statement remains discord server. masterdoc my absolute BELOVED, masterdoc my bethrothed, masterdoc my soul mate. I'd recommend this as a second port of call after the above video as it either contains all details about the puzzles or links to other expanded docs that do.

here's the narrative summary doc that lays out all the plot and lore discovered in three pages of plain prose. if you just want to get to the good bits as fast as you can and get blasted directly in the face by contextless lore bombs, this is the doc for you. if you don't want to start with the video, I'd say this is another good entry point.

once you've got the lay of the land, some of the game materials that I found particularly interesting include:

the in-universe east germany expat usenet forum, with all content translated into english. most of it is irrelevant space filler with occasional extremely sus lore, but I still found it fun to read through. love to soak in some fictional forum drama.

chdb.xlsx, the spreadsheet of the names of all the children the protocol 'verse magnus institute was studying/experimenting on. EDIT: here is a version of the sheet without any annotations and with all of the names in their original order, kudos to @theboombutton for catching that the commonly shared copy had the order swapped around.

klaus.xls, a (very corrupted) spreadsheet with what looks like the classifications of a bunch of old OIAR cases.

EDIT: have a few more saved materials from the game that I forgot to include.

an in-universe audio ad to apply to the OIAR that ran before archives episodes and kicked off the whole game.

an in-universe video ad to apply to the OIAR, this one is an official upload that's still up from the game itself. you can subscribe to the OIAR's official youtube channel today, if you so chose.

the robo-voicemail greeting from the OIAR's phone line.

EDIT II:

here is a wayback machine capture of the OIAR's official website.

here is a wayback machine capture of the bonzoland website.

(pretty sure both of the above captures just archived the home pages, though I haven't tried clicking all of the links. I'd say they're still worth looking at, the home pages give a good window into the vibes.)

once you start poking around in these documents, you'll find a bunch of links to others with further information, the materials I've included here just contain what I feel to be the most relevant details to getting a broad feel for the whole game. once again, huge shout out to the statement remains server, I was barely in there as the ARG was in progress and only ducked my head in every so often to find links like these. true mvps of the fandom.

#gonna pin this for a bit because every day I get 2-5 asks saying 'there was an arg? how do I learn about it?' #tmagp #video #marina marvels at life

[eldritchqueerture]

My brain is fixated on The Silt Verses right now, all I want is to watch Faulkner try to shepherd - fishherd? - a bunch of the worst new recruits on a mission because Katabasian Mason fully expects him to get them all killed and it's good riddance.

Also is it too much to ask to be transformed into an inhuman crab monster and become an undoubting agent of the Trawler-Man's will? Asking for a friend

gosh i need to listen to The Silt Verses, I heard its really good

oh to be an inhuman crab monster and an undoubted agent of the Trawler-Man's will... whoever that is.....

#ask #theboombutton

[radiosandrecordings]

Thanks for all the The Silt Verses posts, I'm listening now because of them and having a good time

Ah you’re welcome! Glad you’re enjoying it!

#My Post #Asks #theboombutton

[voiceless-terror]

I wish you would write a fic where...

... Jon and Martin have a "the world is maybe ending so here are my feelings" heart-to-heart the day before Jon has to leave for the Unknowing. The more tragic dramatic irony about what's about to happen, the better.

oh my god this would utterly break my heart in the most delicious of ways and i am fully looking,,,,

#asks #adding to the list #hoo boy #theboombutton

[girldraki]

@theboombutton in 2018 author cimmerian of the scp wiki sent around 200 people pms asking them to Look At His Contest Entry For Him. a bunch of people complained to site staff and he got banned first from the next seven contests and then from contests in general when he doubled down on being technically allowed to do everything he had done. two years later he made a postmortem video on the incident in which he demonstrated that he had learned absolutely nothing and in fact still thought he was in the right. We are currently trying to watch that video and going insane on the dash along with all our other scp mutuals because he is so fatally unself aware it’s getting kind of ridiculous

#txt

[fakecrfan]

Do you have any headcanons for Melanie's appearance?

Yeah.

I see her as having scars. Maybe one on her face, but mostly on her chest/arms/torso from getting into knife fights. There are also some on her hands due to committing self-harmful actions (punching walls, etc) while trying to cope with rage, though those will probably become mostly invisible with time. She ran around on dangerous trips, got shot by ghosts, and fought Jared and the meat monsters with a knife. I feel like getting scarred up is the natural result of the life she starts living as TMA goes on, so I see her accumulating them over time. In fact, it feels a bit weird to me that most depictions of her are smooth skinned when no one is afraid of scarring Jon up.

I don’t usually have face claims but I associate her with Eva Noblezada because I feel like Noblezada has a fierce, powerful voice that reminds me a lot of Melanie. @theboombutton has pointed out to me that Melanie probably is Pretty if she runs a successful youtube channel (destroying my “everyone is ugly” headcanon :( ), so I think this counts. So Noblezada is the one I would cast if I were making a TMA musical adaptation in which they all slowly realize that they’re singing because the Web is making them do so to amuse its precious little darling Annabelle.

Like everyone else, I also imagine her having blue streaks in her hair, but I think she stops redyeing them so the blue fades out over the course of the series. I also think she is the only (ONLY) person in the main cast (outside of maaaaaaybe Georgie) who would wear those LGBT identity pins on her jacket. You know, the ones with the flag colors.

I don’t think she had enough time to heal and get prosthetic eyes before s5, but if she did I think she would initially get ones with SKULL AND CROSSBONES pupils because that sounds rad as hell, but then switch them out for “normal” ones later. It’s just not as fun when she can’t see it, and it causes people to ask questions that felt okay at first but after a while she got tired of answering them over and over again with new people.

#melanie #headcanons

[m-e-w-666]

Pass the happy! When you receive this, list 5 things that make you happy, and send this to 10 of the last people in your notifications.

Alright let’s go

Tma,, I’m listening to this funky little horror tragedy podcast right now and it brings me so much serotonin

Chocolate, as always

Tadpoles!! I saw a vid of them growing and oh my god??? I wish I was a frog in a pond catching flies for a living (also you should play pocket frogs)

Pocket frogs!!! Been playing it while listening to podcasts and I love my babies

Gurgi. It’s been a long time since I saw a pic of him (came across it while doing the 🎁 asks) but I love this cat so much, he’s not even mine, he’s one of the cats that noelle and molly fostered for a while and posted pics on twitter but I love him

Tags: @go-to-ya-friend-oak @poppies-on-a-vase @theboombutton @angelofdumpsterfires @hereshowtheadmiralcanstillwin @sunflowers-and-frogs @lesbian-thesbian666 @sleepeven-deader @dudeiwannasleep @moondraconis

#as always only do it if you want to 💜 #askmew #tagmew

[theboombutton]

Even if I didn't live on the coast, where walruses are known to live - I still think someone using magic to teleport a walrus to my door is more likely than someone using magic to talk to me, because *I* would absolutely teleport a walrus to someone's door just to fuck with them

You are absolutely correct that if it was possible to magically teleport walruses to people's doors to fuck with them, that would be a fairly common occurrence.

Consider, though: if walrus teleportation was possible, we would expect to observe it a lot, because walrus teleportation is so desirable as a way of fucking with people. The observed rate of walrus teleportation being so different from the expected rate of walrus teleportation is in itself evidence against the existence of walrus teleportation.

In contrast, if fairies were real, we wouldn't expect to see much evidence of them. The difference between what we observe in reality and what we would expect to observe if fairies were real is very small.

Encountering a fairy and encountering a teleported walrus would both rewrite my understanding of the universe, but only the walrus would leave me scratching my head, asking "How the hell did I miss that?"

#fairy #walrus #walrus vs fairy #fairy vs walrus #ask #ask button #ask boombutton #ask theboombutton #shitpost #this is the same kind of logic behind proof by contradiction btw #'if x was true then y would be true but y isn't true so x can't be true' #my brain has always been more comfortable working that way for some reason

[theboombutton]

is the tma liveblog discord still running? also hope you have a nice day!

Not really? Like it still exists and there are a few people there but there aren't any active liveblogs.

#ask #ask button #ask boombutton #ask theboombutton

[theboombutton]

I remember someone saying that in the original concepts Jon and Martin would have an argument at Salesa's and this would result in Jon leaving him there and making his own way to London. I'm not sure how true this is but it's really something I'd like to see

I've speculated about that before a few times, based mostly on the loose ends and the weird pacing of s5. As far as I know though, the series creators haven't said anything about a planned breakup.

If you happen to come across any statements to that effect, please send them my way.

#tma #the magnus archives #tma s5 #ask button #ask boombutton #ask theboombutton #ask #chocolate torte

[theboombutton]

when u get this u have to put 5 songs 🎵 u actually listen to, publicly. then, send this ask to 10 of your favorite followers (non-negotiable, positivity is cool)✨

I'm a little confused. What does it mean to listen to a song publicly? I pretty much don't go out in public anymore, and if I did I would have better manners than to listen without headphones.

Is listening to a song in the car with my fiancé public enough? Is it more or less public to crank up the volume and roll down the windows?

What about subjecting people to songs in Discord voice chat? Does the answer change if they've all got the music bot on mute and so I'm the only one who can hear it? Does the answer change if we've all gotten together in voice for the specific purpose of listening to a given album, most of us for the first time?

Or am I completely overthinking this and it's just asking me to admit to it publicly? Which is weird if so, because my tumblr is anonymous?

...

I'll go with songs I've subjected people to on Discord, I guess.

Evil Eye by Franz Ferdinand

Friday by Rebecca Black

The Immigrant Song by Led Zeppelin

We Share Our Mothers' Health by The Knife

On A Boat by The Lonely Island

Also I'm not sending the ask to anyone, if they want to do the thing they can consider themselves Asked. I know you said it was non-negotiable, and I'm not negotiating it.

#ask game #ask #ask button #ask boombutton #ask theboombutton

[theboombutton]

Please say more about aspirated medial stops, I was talking with my brother in law the other day about how we (Californians) don't say t's in the middle of words and I'm really curious about why that is and if this is a universal thing in all accents of English now

Disclaimer: I do have a Bachelor's in linguistics, but I got it more than a decade ago so it is possible that some of the information in this post will be misremembered or out of date.

tl;dr

Knowing how to pronounce t in different locations in different dialects is a nightmare. Old-fashioned British Received Pronunciation pronounced t in the middle of words, but there's a UK language drift called T-glottalization in which ts except at the start of words are often being replaced with glottal stops? It's really obvious in lower-status dialects but it's been creeping into RP as well.

American English usually does a weird muscle flex called a "flap" or a "tap" that's something like a really short d, or a single roll of a rolled r. I think there are some UK dialects that use this tap as well.

I belieeeeeve that Indian English usually pronounces word-medial ts, but I haven't run an actual analysis on the applicable coworkers' speech because that'd be kind of creepy?

No idea about Australia or New Zealand.

As far as I know, there's no special reason why these particular drifts are happening. Linguistic drift and accent shifts are just something that happens with living languages. If anything, we have immensely slowed the natural process of language change through the invention and widespread teaching of standardized writing.

Glossary

Sorry, I tried doing this without a glossary but I kept having to do weird info cul-de-sacs to explain myself. I've ordered them according to approximately when they'll come up?

lol I failed so hard at this, about halfway through the post I started using words without putting them in the glossary first and man idk I've been working on this post for 4 hours now and I don't want to go back through and put definitions for some of this shit, sorry

Phoneme - A single language sound, as it is stored in your brain. Represented with slashes around it, e.g. /t/.

Phone - A language sound as it actually comes out of your mouth. Represented with square brackets around it, e.g. [t].

Phonology - The study of speech sounds, from internal representation to external expression, but not including the study of how they are physically created in the mouth (that's phonetics). Not to be confused with phrenology, the racist pseudoscience of head shape.

Word - Can have a few different meanings in a linguistic context. In this post, will usually refer to either a lexeme or a phonological word. You should be able to tell from the context.

Phonological Word - What you probably think of when you think of a "word." A unit of speech that you could naturally pause on either side of, but could not naturally pause inside.

Lexeme/Semantic Word - A single phonological word and its attached meaning; or, phrase of multiple phonological words, which holds a meaning which is different than the sum of its parts. For example, "Carry the bucket" is not a single lexeme; but "Kick the bucket" is.

Voiced/Voiceless - A sound is voiced if you use your vocal cords to make it, and voiceless if you don't.

Stop - Also called a plosive. A stop is a kind of consonant you make by stopping all air flow. The stops English uses are p, b, t, d, k, g, and the glottal stop.

Aspiration - A puff of air following a sound, usually a voiceless stop. In phonetic notation, it is indicated by a superscript h following the consonant, like [pʰ].

IPA - International Phonetic Alphabet. A standard set of symbols based on the Roman alphabet and used to refer to roughly the same sounds regardless of language.

Glottal stop - A stop which is performed not by your tongue, as in most stops, but by your vocal cords. Think of the word "Uh-oh" - the way you completely stop airflow after the "Uh" instead of just letting it flow into the "oh." That's a glottal stop.

Praat - An audio analysis program tailored specifically for viewing waveforms of speech sounds.

INFODUMP TIME

So the thing about saying words is that the ideas of sounds that you have in your head ("phonemes") don't translate one-to-one to the sounds that come out of your mouth ("phones"); and the ways that these sounds get modified vary between different dialects.

Please keep in mind that when you try to speak slowly or clearly, the sounds that you make change. Linguists are primarily interested in natural speech patterns, not what we do when we're trying to enunciate.

Tater-Tot

Let's take the lexeme tater-tot, because it's the first word I can think of that has all 3 of the major weird things that /t/ does that vary by dialect.

Let's start with the word-initial t. Phonologically there are actually two word-initial t's in tater-tot, the one at the beginning of 'tater,' and the one at the beginning of 'tot.' This is because "tater-tot" is two phonological words despite being one semantic word.

In American and British English, we aspirate our word-initial voiceless stops if they're immediately followed by a vowel, which means we pronounce /p/, /t/, and /k/ as [pʰ], [tʰ] and [kʰ] respectively if they're the first sound in a word (and immediately followed by a vowel). This means we add in a little puff of air following the consonant if it's the first sound in the word. In Indian English, they don't do this - a word-initial /t/ is pronounced [t], without the extra puff of air. To American & British English speakers it can almost sound like they're saying [d], because we're not used to hearing a word-initial /t/ without aspiration.

Next we've got a word-medial t, the second t of "tater." Here, Indian and British RP English speakers pronounce it as a plain [t], with no aspiration. American English speakers pronounce it as what's called a tap or a flap, which is sort of like a half-formed [d] but is actually more like a single roll of a rolled r - and so its IPA symbol is [ɾ]. And many less prestigious British dialects, including Cockney and I believe Scouse, replace it with a glottal stop, with IPA symbol [ʔ].

And our final t is the word-final t of tot. This is a tricky one to peel apart. English generally doesn't release word-final stops - that is, you put your tongue in the correct place to stop airflow to create the stop, but you never actually move your tongue out of the way to "release" the airflow you stopped. So the easy read on the word-final t's pronunciation is that it's [t̚], an unreleased t. However, in many dialects and situations /t/ is replaced with or co-articulated with a glottal stop - for example, after an [n] or an [m], /t/ is almost always pronounced as [ʔ] in English. But unreleased stops after an oral vowel are difficult to tell apart, and if the tongue is in t position while the glottis cuts off airflow - I genuinely don't know.

Tuck/Stuck

These are good for a comparison between an aspirated [tʰ] and an unaspirated [t]. In American English, tuck is [tʰʌk] and stuck is [stʌk].

Truck

American English does weird things with syllable-initial /tr/.

I want to introduce you to the "sh" symbol, ʃ. ʃ is a voiceless postalveolar fricative, which means it's created by air rushing through a narrow space when your tongue is behind the alveolar ridge. Incidentally, when you move your tongue from [t] position to [ɹ̠] position (ɹ̠ being the symbol for the version of non-rolled r that most English dialects use), it will naturally create the ʃ sound as it moves.

We have a special letter combination to the phonemic /tʃ/ in English. It's "ch". As in "change."

You almost certainly pronounce "truck" as [tʃɹ̠ʌk] "chruck" and just don't notice.

So what's going on with Martin?

So first off, Jonny is probably wrong about how the Archivist says "Martin." Complete deletion of the r in that position is standard in RP. I haven't fed The Magnus Archives into Praat or anything, so it's possible he's letting a hint of a rhotic accent bleed in to the Archivist's RP - but I really doubt it.

This isn't unusual! It's very common for people's internal concept of what sounds they mean to make, to get in the way of them accurately identifying what sounds they're actually making. No one thinks they've ever said "chruck" until you point it out to them.

I would probably transcribe the Archivist saying "Martin" as [mɑ:tɪn].

Jonny's attempt at saying "Martin" in an American accent was something more like [mɑ˞ɹ̠tʰɪn]. He did a good job of rhoticizing the vowel, but in his focus on the r completely messed up the second syllable.

I'd transcribe my own pronunciation of "Martin" as something like [mɑ˞ɹ̠ʔn]. It's been my observation that t-glottalization in American English is especially common when adjacent to nasals - and if there's one thing American English likes, it's syllabifying liquids in word-final syllables.

OK I've run out of steam now

This was fun. Sorry about the declining quality of explanation. Please feel free to ask more if you dare to reignite the flames of infodump

#infodump #linguistics #the letter t #phonology #english phonology #english dialects #dialects of english #ask button #ask boombutton #ask theboombutton #jonny sims

[theboombutton]

Tagged by: @fakecrfan

Rules: Post the names of all the files in your WIP folder, regardless of how non-descriptive or ridiculous. Let people send you an ask with the title that most intrigues them and then post a little snippet of it or tell them something about it! and then tag as many people as you have WIPs.

I do a surprising amount of my plotting and writing on my phone - in large part because if I'm at a proper computer, I'm either at work, or playing video games. I have a few drafts on other machines, but this is where the bulk of them live.

So, here are the titles of fanfic-related Notes in my notes app. Many of these are abandoned, some are outlines/notes for fics rather than actual WIPs, and a couple of them are brainstorms on non-fic fan content. A few of them are attempts at the same fic because I didn't like the older version and started over. I guess I'll mark which ones are related by coloring them the same? Default-color titles are standalone.

In reverse chronological order:

Somewhere Else fic

Mrs. Blackwood AU c1: Silver Worms

Romance fluff

TMA entities as classes

Feed the Machine FMV

Mrs. Blackwood AU Timeline WIP

Mrs Blackwood AU snippet

Starvation fic streamlined

Somewhere Else cosmic horror world note brainstorm

S3 blurb about Michael I guess

Michael Fic Early Notes (Divorce Edition)

Michael Fic Timeline

Michael Fic Character Notes

Michael Fic Notes (chronological)

Starvation Fic Notes

Dragon!Harold Revamp Notes

Post 200 starvation fic

Michael Shelley fic written on phone

Michael Shelley's childhood and the Ryan Incident

Fanfic notes for TMA post-s5 where Martin is the Eye

Tags, uhhh I'm counting the files that belong to a single story as a single fic, so that's 11 people to tag? @rubecso @the-wise-queen-of-jokers @soft-and-certain @gildedeggplant @crying-over-really-dumb-things @ninja-kitty-more-like-no @falserib @shakesqueer @m-e-w-666 @voidtone @twothousandgrumpybees

If anybody else feels like doing this, consider yourself also tagged I guess.

#ask game #tag game #tma #tma fic #inexplicables #inexplicables fic #fanfiction #ask button #ask theboombutton #do not archive

[theboombutton]

Your favorite tma character? Your favorite episode? And your favorite ship? I'm just curious...

Thanks for asking!

1. My favorite character is Michael Shelley, in continuity with Michael the Distortion.

For all that we make fun of Gertrude's assistant turnover, for a good 20 years, there were no personnel changes in the Archives. It was Gertrude, Emma, Sarah, and Michael. And when Gertrude decided to sacrifice him, he trusted her, he went without hesitation. Because his found family was a lie, two manipulators and users puppeting their younger colleagues for their own ends.

Michael became a monster not through any fault, but through trusting too much, and wanting too badly to be helpful. In the face of the madness that consumed his childhood friend Ryan - the initial trauma that set him down the road to paranormal investigation in the first place - he chose to help, and he chose to trust Gertrude.

And then as Michael, what pushes Michael to act so out of step with the Distortion that it must be replaced? Not merely his grudge against the Archivist, but the knowledge that the Unknowing will be using his skin. Michael Shelley is still trying to prevent rituals and save the world, even as a monster. He doesn't want anyone to "win." He frames it as pitting sides against each other for fun, but ultimately what he's actually doing is disrupting rituals. He intervenes to give tips for defeating the ritual of the Corruption. He gives aid to the Archivist against creatures of the Stranger, until the Archivist is about to become part of the Stranger's ritual - at which point he decides it's time to kill him. And he had been planning to kill the Archivist eventually, to try to prevent the Eye from winning too.

Also creepy knife hands, and Luke Booys's holy crap he actually laughs like that that's his real laugh.

2. I need to do a relisten before I can say for sure; but if I had to choose one now, I think maybe Jane Prentiss's statement in season 1, the one with "There is a wasps' nest in my attic"? Jonny goes all in on the voice acting for that one, on top of the writing humanizing the season villain in a way that turns her from a monster into a chilling depiction of what the worms might do not only to our heroes' bodies, but to their minds.

3. JonMartin. I'm a basic bitch. I like TimSasha too, but we didn't really get to know Sasha well enough for me to be properly invested in any ship involving her.

LonelyEyes is a lot of fun to meme about, but I don't exactly ship it.

#tma #the magnus archives #ask #ask button #ask boombutton #ask theboombutton #michael shelley #michael the distortion #michael distortion