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Propaganda

Hera

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SHODAN

The AI for Citadel Station, SHODAN went rogue and took over the station after the hacker disabled her ethical restrictions. She considers herself a god, and spends the whole game using the PA system to taunt and threaten the hacker in her distinctive, glitchy voice.

Look at you, hacker. A pathetic creature of meat and bone. How can you challenge a perfect, immortal machine?

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i always thought that scene in the taz balance finale where merle reconnects with pan and casts zone of truth to burn away the hunger was kind of a tongue in cheek moment where clint casts his signature spell and griffin as the dm humors him by given it a huge affect. like fun but not too noteworthy. but i literally just realized what a phenomenal moment it really was. because the hunger is nihilism. it's hopelessness and pessimism. but the zone of truth dispels all lies and dishonesty. they cant exist under its spell. and that's what nihilism is. a lie. and so when merle cast zone of truth he burned away the lie of hopelessness and if you don't think that's the best thing ever i don't know what to tell you.

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Propaganda

Hera

none

SHODAN

The AI for Citadel Station, SHODAN went rogue and took over the station after the hacker disabled her ethical restrictions. She considers herself a god, and spends the whole game using the PA system to taunt and threaten the hacker in her distinctive, glitchy voice.

Look at you, hacker. A pathetic creature of meat and bone. How can you challenge a perfect, immortal machine?

#wolf 359 #w359

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placing my hands out placatingly, asking everyone to please be cool and not reignite og!elias burnt out gifted kid discourse. okay? okay. I think this is setting up some more sam and gwen parallels. from mag 193, we know that elias bouchard (original flavor) was told from a young age that he was smart but lazy, he was squandering his advantages, and he was wrong to envy other children because they were meaningless and he was better. he seemed to internalize this to some extent, because by the time he was in his early twenties he had no friends and no family and no real life, just the certainty that he was destined to deserve better.

I think it is reasonable to assume that gwen received similar messaging during her childhood, as she seems to be treating the OIAR the same way elias treated artefact storage (as a stepping stone job to a bigger career waiting for her up the ladder), and she takes a lot of offence when she feels disrespected. from magp 03, we know she's reticent to tell her friends that she's still working this same job, especially because the friend's party she was going to was to celebrate making partner at a law firm.

from this episode, we know that sam was declared "gifted" as a child and his parents rigorously enrolled him in every program they could find, and it started going down hill when the magnus institute rejected him (did they reject him outright or was he there for a bit and then kicked out? what he said to celia doesn't quite fit his earlier statements, but moving on). he has a lot of pent up and fixated feelings about not being chosen by them, he didn't get into oxford, he just missed the highest grades, and he's reticent to tell his parents that he's working this job, especially because he used to be at a law firm.

we know the bouchards are a wealthy and influential family, and as sam speaks with a south asian accent I think it's safe to assume that his family immigrated. of course, there's a massive amount of variation in the socioeconomic statuses of south asian immigrant families in the UK, and I don't know enough about how british gifted kids programs work to know if sam having been in a bunch of them would imply anything about his parents' disposable income, but nonetheless I still think their different backgrounds potentially say a lot about how they handle these feelings of not meeting the high standards that were expected of / promised to them. gwen is fighting to be on the same level of social status and power as her peers, and sam probably felt like he was he had opportunities for upward mobility in this brand new place but kept failing them. it's causing both of them to be very active characters, they are the two people pushing the story forward the most by far, but the ways in which they are active diverge greatly.

gwen, until recently, had felt like she was unfairly stagnating, like she was "not most people" and was cut out for better, and being constantly barred from climbing the ladder made her both resentful of lena and extremely paranoid / insecure about her own worth. now that she's starting to crack it into the "real work," it's obviously taking a great toll on her, but she doesn't want to back out, she wants to prove herself and take what's rightfully hers and not show herself to be unfit for real power. her actions appear to be guided by an ethos that her life hasn't been wasted yet, she still has time to make good, she just needs to ignore that weakness masquerading as a conscience, please god don't let her fail.

sam feels like he's made mistake after mistake after mistake and led himself to his own desperate state where he only just managed to avoid destitution because his ex was kind enough to hook him up with an emergency job that is actively destroying his physical and emotional health, and he has pinned all this frustration on trying to figure out what the magnus institute was all about and why it didn't choose him. like gwen, great things were expected of him, but unlike her he doesn't seem to still be striving for them, that dried up when he had a breakdown at his last job. now he just wants to figure it out and make sense of it, as if solving the mystery will let him fix it and undo all that time and un-waste his promised potential. his actions seem to be guided by an ethos that, even though he's already screwed everything right up, solving the ghosts that haunt his life will some how lessen their burden and maybe, just maybe, give him closure on the Flaw That Doomed Him and allow him to move past it without dragging it still forward.

#the magnus protocol #tmagp #this podcast is feeling very real as burnout 'gifted kid' (not really but like AP classes or whatever) #the magnus protocol spoilers #tmagp spoilers #Magnus Protocol #Magnus Protocol spoilers

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Once again Variations on a Theme (Wolf 359) is getting me through finals

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chaos and order

#this looks so cool #taz graduation #the adventure zone graduation

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circumstances surrounding the “leaked” documents about eiffel’s sentencing in need to know, as i understand them:

one of the very first things kepler does is offer eiffel, minkowski, and lovelace a drink. in true “at any given moment, kepler has about eighteen ulterior motives” spirit, it is, among other things, “hospitality”, sure, a test for eiffel, definitely, but… i think the main reaction he was checking for was minkowski’s. will she look at eiffel, or react to his reaction? how much does she know? how much does he trust her?

in don’t poke the bear, jacobi and maxwell stop lovelace from breaking into kepler’s server by pretending to be in on it with her: “she’s very good. it might turn into a problem.” / “i’ll run it by kepler.” two episodes later, files from kepler’s very secure server are “leaked.”

(the words "need to know" are spoken offhandedly by eiffel in the episode itself, but it also calls back to the excuse maxwell gives lovelace: "colonel kepler practically lives by the words 'need to know.' and, apparently, nothing i can say will ever convince him that i 'need to know' everything that's in our databanks.")

need to know opens with minkowski finishing an eleven hour shift, and then finding out kepler moved that shift to, well. now. she’s already frustrated and sleep deprived.

minkowski complains to kepler. jacobi and maxwell, on cue, barge in and complain to kepler. kepler assigns minkowski, jacobi, maxwell, and lovelace to punishment detail, taking eiffel out of the group because “you’re the only one who hasn’t wasted my time with pointless whining.” lovelace says: “um, i don’t think that i did any complaining either, so…” but that doesn’t matter. it’s just an excuse to remove eiffel from the group; he could just as easily have been singled out for special punishment. either way, it was going to happen.

hilbert isn’t there. not the most significant factor, since he’s already been effectively sidelined by kepler, but remember he already knows about eiffel’s sentencing, doesn’t care (about eiffel’s history OR about anyone else’s personal drama), and will later respond to minkowski asking by telling her to grow up and get back to work. it simplifies things to not factor him in.

consider the files themselves: we know from happy holidays that maxwell not talking to her family is common knowledge, but jacobi reacts like it’s news. we know from hera’s performance review flashback in memoria that kepler and jacobi were aware of “multiple attempted crew member homicides” in her record. the file about hera’s bentham directory was on kepler’s server. if there’s one person who would’ve been briefed on everything there was to know about hera, it would’ve been maxwell; her shock is entirely feigned. in fact, almost every reaction from jacobi and maxwell here is feigned. they’re black ops specialists who arrived prepared with divide-and-conquer tactics. there’s no reason they wouldn’t know these things. also note that none of the “leaks” reveal anything about the mission they didn’t already know, and that nothing about the si-5 is incriminating - if anything, it’s mostly silly and even humanizing. and, yes, all of that contextualizes maxwell’s reaction to “skiing?!”

eiffel’s file comes through last, once they’re already worn out. kepler sends eiffel to check on them at the same time so that he’ll walk in. jacobi shows minkowski the file. he lurks around waiting to see how her not-confrontation with eiffel goes, and then cements the thought in her head: what about you? are you going to care?

it’s true that there are aspects of the mission only kepler knows, but as far as information on the hephaestus crew goes (barring one very particular detail about lovelace)? that’s part of the job they were chosen for. when they kill the plant monster, kepler says: “you think we didn’t know about that thing? please. we listened to every log that you beamed down to canaveral.” kepler’s entire foundation is shaken when jacobi turns on him because this is how they operate: “have one person take the blame, say the mean things. meanwhile, the poor, betrayed little guy gets a bit more leeway - just enough to sneak up and hit you from behind.” the show is not subtle about any of this. you can pick apart any early-s3 interaction between two hephaestus crew members and an si-5 agent and see the same divide-and-conquer tactics at play. jacobi and maxwell are always - in morals, loyalty, job description - closer to kepler than they are to the hephaestus crew, and to even sort of believe otherwise is falling for that facade. it’s worth remembering that the hephaestus crew are prisoners. some of them were aware of it from the start, and some of them were lied to, but none of them were meant to leave. the si-5, on the other hand, went up there with a unified goal, and the knowing intention they would be, among other things, prison guards.

#this analysis is so good #didn't pick up on the fake leak the first couple of listens #wolf 359 #w359 #wolf 359 spoilers #w359 spoilers #whoops reblogged on the wrong account the first time lol

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Hello, dear listeners...

So today I have been out with a wonderful group of cosplayers doing a Wolf-359 shoot around London, and what better to post on this day than shots from our Wolf-359 shoot at Megacon!

@ghostcat-cosplays as Dr Miranda Pryce

@confusion-doodle as HERA

@owenisamassivenerd as Daniel Jacobi

@delaneytalks-tostatues as Dr Alana Maxwell

@kiwi_cosplays_ as Doug Eiffel

@daiyaoowadaisntdead as Dr Alexander Hilbert

@kaiidth_cosplay as Renée Minkowski

@magpieclaws.cosplay as Rachel Young

#this is so cool! #awesome cosplay! #wolf 359 #w359

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okay my mind is reeling from the latest episode i'm going to fucking explode this is one of the best episodes... period

so cecil's dad... left when cecil was born. For what reason, it's hard to tell. The narrative certainly seems to be setting it up as a concious choice, framing him as an absent father rather than just a dead one. The line "It’s not incomprehensible that two living, physical people could haunt each other." makes me really think the Gershwin-Palmer relationship was not a healthy one in any way.

But either way, he left, and maybe he died after he left, or maybe he left because he died.

But he's gone, and it broke their mother. She mourned him, she was forever haunted by him, haunted by the him she saw in Cecil. It completely ruined any semblance of relationship she had with her kids. As Cecil tells us in 182 (It Sticks With You), "Our mother wouldn’t speak to us. She would just walk and walk, much faster than we could. I think she wanted to lose us in the shadowy labyrinth of tall trees. [...] we always found our mom. She was at the same old tree, leaving flowers at the base of its giant trunk. And we would hike home. I don’t remember who the flowers were for. Maybe she never said."

That's as plain as it gets. She abandoned them, consumed in her grief and her anger. And, as we learn in Ghost Stories, she never recovered.

There's also the oracle element, however. And the Mirrors. That's weird, right? The prophecy that Cecil would die, and it would involve a mirror? Is this real? Is this an element of her mental deterioration? I can't say for certain. I hope it's not, I don't want cecil to die by murder.

And the trees. God, the trees. The trees are fucking everywhere and this isn't necessarily an unanswered question, more of a thematic element I want to draw more attention to.

Cause we have all the drawings of trees in 245, and we have 182.

But then there's episode 132, "Bedtime Story."

And this is a DOOZY. This is a story Cecil's mother used to tell him (Not Abby?) meaning that:

there were times she did managed to be somewhat motherly, although perhaps this was influenced by her weird oracular relationship with him

she told him. A bedtime story. About a little boy who felt neglected by his family, so he went out and dug into the mud and turned into A TREE.

I just want you to really take that in. This little boy felt neglected by his family, so he turned into a tree and eventually grew to abandon his humanity to the point where he could no longer recognize or comprehend the passing of his own family.

"And then my mother would pat my head and say: "Good night, Cecil. Good night." Or so I imagined. By then, I was long asleep." Cecil's mom... probably didn't do that. But he imagined she did.

I've lost the spoons to write out a shitton of analysis but I haven't seen anyone bring up Bedtime Story in reference to ep 246 and I think they really should

Also something something "What would be worse than death? Living long enough to stop being a human" "Oh Cecil is... way older than he knows isn't he...."

#Hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh #great analysis op #wtnv spoilers #welcome to night vale spoilers #wtnv 246 #welcome to night vale episode 246 #welcome to night vale episode 246 spoilers #wtnv 246 spoilers

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new episode hit me like a semi truck gang

I'm losing it

#YEAH #g-d 😭 #welcome to night vale #wtnv

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Abby's monologue is gonna make me sob holy shit

#the new wtnv episodes have such great writing!!!!!!!!! #wtnv spoilers #welcome to night vale spoilers #wtnv 246 #wtnv 246 spoilers #wtnv episode 246

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Portrait of Dorian Gray but it's your child's drawing about your childhood trauma.

#welcome to night vale spoilers #wtnv spoilers #wtnv 245 #welcome to night vale #wtnv #welcome to night vale 245 #y'all this episode is gonna mess me up and I'm only 10 minutes in

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Looking for young adult and family friendly audio dramas

Curating a list of audio dramas that are great for family and preteen friendly.

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Healthcare workers listening to malevolent

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Sometimes I think about the fact that Merle tried his hardest to save John and he couldn’t. That John spent his last lucid moments embracing his only friend in all of existence.

#😭

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Is this a- is this- is this a wolf- is this a wolf 359 reference…