I've been listening to the Magnus Archives which is about an archivist at the Magnus Institute who is recording the written statements on tape. I'm not sure why recording it is better than written statements but that's what it is. I think digitizing it might be better. Possibly there is no way to digitize some of the weird stuff as it is a plot point that they need to use a very tape recorder to record these statements.
I think this series would be fantastic as a wiki like document where you can follow and piece together threads. I bet there is something like that but I'm worried about spoilers. I've just finished Season 1 and it was pretty obvious very early on that there was going to be a plot. It's subtle and slow but in the background of the stories there was a larger story being told.
Jane Prentiss and the worms seems to be the major storyline but I'm betting that it ties to the Yorgun Littner books somehow.
The books stuff is actually very interesting and the part that I really want to learn more about.
For someone who prefers to read, listening has been a different experience. I don't feel like I'm processing things fully while listening and its easy for me to accidently zone out and miss things. It doesn't help that I do this while driving so if the road needs my attention, I go deaf.
One episode in particular describes a Littner book that I think would make great story.
The book is about a village that lives at the edge of a cliff. The villagers notice something in the distance that seems to be coming towards them. They call it a god, a demon, a beast, the don't know what. They make preparations to deal with it but everytime they look at it and it gets closer, their preparations are for naught. Eventually the thing towers over them and they realize there is nothing to do. It is utterly too massive to deal with. The villagers throw themselves off the cliffs and dash themselves on the rocks below.
This is a haunting tale and it definitely drives the imagination wild.
I would love to see POVs from different people that live the village. I picture village as being very gray and dark and eternally gloomy. The rain and storms should be constant. There should be nothing nearby. It will be a long time before anyone comes to the village and they would not find anything except that the villagers have all gone missing. The village itself should be perfectly intact with nothing amiss. The entire story could start from this end with the payoff being that that the villagers all jumped.
Another part of the podcast I think there will be more of is the Circus of the Other. That was entertaining to hear about and it also sparks the imagination with the whole idea of a weird circus that goes town to town that doesn't really exist. What happened that the people dare not talk about the next day or ever actually bring it up. But everyone knows it happened and that they were there.
The concept of sectioning is also quite interesting. The idea that you mark some part of the investigation as sensitive and so it can't be made public or subject to freedom of information requests is neat. This way the police can hide the weirder things that happen that they have no real answer for. Though why does the police not have their own investigations happening is strange. The insitute exists and seems to be treated like a real project with funding and government oversight so I would have expected the police forces to have been more involved.
I found the transcripts, there are PDFs on the official site but there are also transcripts on GitHub. I think I've already been spoiled, I saw the NOT!SASHA and I thought it was extremely weird that the voice of Sasha had changed. I thought maybe the actor had changed but I also thought it could be a plot point. It looks like it will be.
Reading definitely feels better, the listening was good but I like this more. I'll read a couple of the transcripts and see if it holds up. I wonder if I'm going to lose something by reading it as it was likely designed for listening.
It’s a life of well-paid drudgery, but I don’t care. Because it means once or twice a year, I can drop everything for a month and disappear somewhere new. The Grand Canyon, the Forbidden City, the Great Barrier Reef. That’s my life. Everything in-between is just the intermission.
This is a quote that hits a bit too close. Though I have no such intermission, so what does that say about me?
Reading is drastically faster, maybe that's why I prefer it. What took 25 minutes is now only 10 minutes of reading. There also aren't any ads now.
I forked the repo, I think a very useful feature would be to have cases that have already been seen actually show up as references that you can hover over.
We’ve tricked ourselves into thinking that computers and people have anything in common? But no matter how good we may program them to be at pretending to think like us, that’s all we’ll ever be. Crossing the line from meat and chemicals into pure digital systems is impossible. And everything else is just sophisticated programming and, and illusion.
This quote is quite timely in this era of AI and LLMs.
Reading is much better for me, paradoxically I can read for much longer than I can listen. We are deep into the night now.