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I want it to skitter up to me on all its little legs because it's *so sure* that what I need to fix my problem is to be censed with myrrh, and then do a jump of surprise and let out a smoke ring when I wave it away.
I feel bad immediately and lure it back over with the combustible bay leaf off my dinner.
A gardener reports that I really should stop feeding them, because a flock of incense peacocks has burnt through a prized lavender bush and the smoke has sedated his beehives.
Marcel Duchamp kicked the bucket 55 slutty, slutty years ago and you can't get him out of your head. You're half as old as he is dead and you are worshiping at his altar, you are drinking his piss. He won.
I saw this this morning when spider posted it, went “oh I’m not going to subject people to that,” but then I was thinking about this all day so I came back, all this way, to reblog it
Apparently I’ve just only been exposed to extremely biased sources on the situation. I was under the impression that Anish kapoor bought vanta black and made it so he was the only artist who could use it commercially
I figured as much. And it’s really not your fault, that’s what everybody thinks, because that is very specifically the narrative that Stewart simple propagated to the media, which worked because it launched his career. We all hate the idea of an elitist asshole gatekeeping something, especially in the name of art. But as I’m about to explain, nothing is further from the truth than that narrative.
So in order for me to explain this to people who’ve only ever heard the Stewart simple version of the story. I need to reset the narrative around Vantablack so let’s discuss the following framework.:
What Vantablack is: Vantablack is a substance made out of carbon nano tubes, originally grown in a lab and functions as the darkest synthetic material on earth. Under a microscope Vanta black looks more like shards of glass, sticking out as tubes. The original version of Vanta Black was so difficult to work with that there was no possible way it could be used outside of its original intent.
What Vantablack is not: a pigment. A paint. Vantablack is not something that you were supposed to use to paint with.
Who creates and distributes Vantablack: an engineering company named Surrey NanoSystems.
Who does not do those things: an art house. A distribution company. Any kind of company that creates and distributes pigments on a massive, artistic scale.
Who was Vantablack made for: Vanta Black was made by aerospace engineers for aerospace engineers, looking for something to coat the insides of massive NASA telescopes.
Who it was not made for: artists.
———————————-——————————————
Hopefully already just by understanding what Vantablack is, what it was made for, and who it’s made by you and other people are beginning to see what the problem is with Stuart simples narrative around Vanta black. 
But you may be wondering if Vanta black is a highly toxic unstable substance made out of carbon nano tubes by aerospace engineers for aerospace engineers, working in space, then how did we get here? well, Vanta, black 2.0, if you will was created in such a way that it could be sprayed onto substances in a certain way meaning that theoretically it could be used artistically. Surround nanosystems held an exhibition where they displayed Vanta black and when artist saw this, they were inundated with calls from artist, wanting to use it in their work. But as we’ve already established surrey nanosystems is not a distribution company. They’re an engineering company. And they made the decision that they could only work with one artist, because they simply did not have the physical ability to produce Vantablack at a scale that allowed them to work with more than one person. (To this day, vanta Black has to be distributed by a specialized robotic arm that creates it in painfully small amounts in an enclosed box that can then be given to someone in a lab. )
Enter Anish Kapoor: Anish Kapoor, at this time was already a world, renowned artist, and the creator of many public facing pieces, such as cloud gate, a.k.a. the Chicago Bean. His entire life‘s work was dedicated to how light is refracted and interplays with the void, making him not only the perfect person to be chosen because of prestige but also because his life‘s work spoke to the engineers who created Vanta black.
Now this should’ve been seen as an incredible accomplishment and honor for this Indian artist to be chosen as the soul licensor of Vantablack as this company was only able to choose one person and people were really excited about this for him and that’s where the story ends, right? Right? Right? 
Enter Stuart Semple: Stuart simple was a 25-year-old man in the UK living with his mother when she came into his room and told him about Vantablack. As an artist himself, Stewart simple wanted to try Vanta Black, and was told by the company that he could not. It was then that he discovered the only person on earth licensed to use Vantablack was Anish Kapoor. Please keep in mind that Vantablack is not a paint, and it is so difficult to work with that Anish Kapoor has only ever produced one singular piece of art with Vantablack. So like a child who has just been told by their mom that they can’t use something, Stewart simple decided to throw a hissy fit. He created a pink pigment that he conditionally said everyone could use except Anish Kapoor and then launch this pigment with the hashtag #ShareTheBlack. 
This caught the attention of the news media, and when asked about this situation, that was previously relatively unheard of, Stuart simple, went onto describe Anish Kapoor as this tyrannical elitist who “banned“ the use of Vantablack to keep other artists from using it. But hopefully you can already see how that is Literally not true. Anish Kapoor does not make Vanta black. Anish Kapoor cannot sell Vanta black. Anish Kapoor cannot give you permission to use Vanta black. And Vanta black is not even a paint. 
But the narrative of some elitist asshole gatekeeping, a color, versus some poor, struggling artist, was so catching that tens of thousands of people on the Internet flooded Anish Kapoor‘s social media, pages to talk shit about him and to this day when Anish Kapoor is brought up, it’s always “fuck Anish Kapoor“ meanwhile Stuart has launched an entire very lucrative career around slandering and smearing Anish Kapoor when Anish Kapoor literally never did anything but be qualified enough to be the one person chosen by a company that is literally only able to work with one person at a time. 
The fact remains Stewart simple, very intentionally allows this narrative to continue because it makes him money. He has made a ton of money off of slandering Anish Kapoor as if Anish Kapoor is the reason he can’t use Vanta black when the reason he can’t use Vanta black is because no one can use Vanta black, and the only person who might be able to use it is Anish Kapoor and that is not Anish Kapoor‘s fault. 
It is not lost on me that there are racial connotations to the story as well. There are actual companies and artists in the world who have trademarks around certain colors that they do not allow other people to use in public showcases. But we really as a community allowed this white man to smear and slander an Indian artist, based entirely off of misinformation, and to this day people jump on the Internet, saying fuck Anish Kapoor because of it. Now, Anish Kapoor is not some struggling person. He is probably a multibajillionaire And doesn’t necessarily need our sympathy. But I think the story of Vantablack is a really good case study of how misinformation spreads, and how people never bother to question the framework of a story. 
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fuck i can’t believe i wasted my entire life being moved by art and beauty and the indomitable human spirit ugh i should’ve been making money through internet scams
I hope Elias shows up as Gwen's completely zonked out fail uncle. I hope he smokes weed on audio & says shit like "far out, dude". I hope he does a fake out "Gwendolyn, your constant lack of results is a disgrace to the Bouchard name!" in the Jonah!Elias voice & then breaks down laughing "man could you fucking imagine" before taking another hit. I hope he drives her up the fucking wall.
i love dropping my pen putting my glasses on my desk and rubbing my face like an exhausted divorced academic in the 1980s who is greying and sexily tousled and has been up for hours digging through the yellowed pages of old obscure treatises about etruscan pots
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as much as i am insanely picky and opinionated about media the one craft that doesn't extend to is music. i know nothing about music. i have no complex opinions about music. a song is either Fun or Unfun. i dont know what a chord progression is and i have no interest in learning. play a song and hold a gun to my head i wont be able to tell you what genre it is
Probably unintentional but Melanie's arc happens to work great as a metaphor for how much easier it is to work on your personality problems when you've had a previously-unknown medical issue resolved.
Gertrude did not sacrifice her morality. In fact, she stuck to it even when those morals meant making difficult decisions. The fact that you do not like her moral principles does not mean she compromised them.
And Jon compromised his morals multiple times throughout the story, including both by feeding on the suffering of innocent people in season 4 and by going back on his decision to kill the fears in season 5. In fact, him becoming a monster is directly due to him being willing to compromise morality for the sake of saving himself--something that he comments on himself in MAG 155 when reading about Tova McHugh.
First he justifies feeding from people because his human connections "might need him," thus pretending his decision is about care for them. Then he disregards the wishes and wellbeing of all those human connections to trap them in a hellscape where they'd watch every human alive die slowly and in pain, all for the greater good of killing the fears. Then he reneges on killing the fears, too.
How many more times would he have to backpedal on his moral pronouncements for you to realize that part of Jon's characterization is that he is not extremely moralistic? The point is that he is an ordinary, contradictory person who will do what feels right based on instinct and impulse.
Jon becoming a monster is not a heroic, moral act. It's an indictment on his character, a sign that he has been marked as a useful tool by malicious forces due to his impulsiveness and malleability.
WARNING: This post will include discussion of a name that might be Alice Dyer's deadname. I won't be calling Alice by this name or using it in the context of that name being a pointer to Alice, but I will be using the name, uncensored, when talking about where and why the name appeared in chdb.xls .
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You may know that as part of the ARG, the sleuths on Statement Remains uncovered a document called chdb.xls, allegedly a list that has something to do with The Magnus Institute. There's a list of names, ID numbers, first and last names, dates of birth, and information apparently related to each person's "score" in an assortment of psychological/personality tests. Three of the names in particular have stood out in a lot of analyses: Samama Khalid, Gerard Kaey [sic], and Connor Dyer.
You likely don't know that the commonly linked version of the spreadsheet, ported to Google Docs and linked in the TMAGP ARG Masterdoc, is presented out of order. (I'm guessing they didn't lock down editing until it was already all out of order from various people messing with it - totally understandable, this is not a callout post, thank you for making this easily accessible to people.)
But let me tell you about something I discovered by looking at the spreadsheet in its original order, and the almost certainly incorrect rabbit hole of theorizing it has sent me down.
Bad Fictional Data
Until episode 2 I had the same thought about the Dyer listed in the spreadsheet that I think most people did: that it was Alice's deadname, and that she had therefore been one of the Institute's young subjects. But after Alice had absolutely no reaction when Sam mentioned the Magnus Institute to her in episode 2, I now think this is significantly less likely.
Don't get me wrong: it's still reasonable to think that the Dyer listed in chdb.xls is Alice. Maybe she had some kind of supernatural experience that wiped her memory. (It probably wasn't that Alice was too young to remember, as the Dyer on the spreadsheet is listed as being at Piaget Stage 3, which occurs from 7-11 years old; but it's always possible that the Magnus Institute was using the names of legitimate psychological tests to hide their tracks when recording more esoteric data.) The point is, this isn't hard evidence that Alice has no connection to the Magnus Institute; it just made me go looking for more evidence.
I went back to the spreadsheet to look for more clues about whether or not this was Alice's deadname. What I found instead was some extremely sloppy fake data at the bottom of the spreadsheet.
For context, here are first ten names in the spreadsheet:
Note how each ID begins with the name's first and last initial.
Now check out the last ten names:
Not only do these IDs no longer always match their subjects' names, they occur in order: CD, EF, GH, IJ, KL, MN, OP, QR, ST, UV. The first names of each pair match the first letter of each ID, but many, though not all, of the surnames don't match the second letter.
My first thought was that whoever Rusty Quill had contracted to generate these names had gotten sloppy at the end of the list, created the IDs all at once using this alphabetical pattern, and picked names to fill in that roughly matched the IDs. But hey, we could use this to our advantage! Any name that was filled in as part of a series of IDs with an alphabetical pattern like this could be removed from consideration for red string analysis - we'd know they were meaningless fakes added by a lazy contractor, and not clues or characters that might show up again later.
Scrolling back up the spreadsheet, we can see the person generating the data having more care the earlier we go. We find the beginning of the AA/BC/DE/FG/HI pattern at line 136, but at first, the names mostly conform to the initials they've been given. JK09874 "Josie Jordan" at line 154 is the first break from the "first two letters of the ID are their initials" pattern; and breaks occur more often the further you go down the sheet.
Scrolling up to before line 136 (AA09911 - Aaron Atkinson), while the pattern isn't yet at AB/CD/EF/GH levels of obviousness, the first initials are still in alphabetical order. Zoe Hart follows Yara Logan follows Xavier Freeman follows Wyatt Edwards. The data creator skips a few letters - for example Niamh Fenton is followed by Phoebe Emmett, and S and T are together in the same line in Skye Travers.
We can follow this less-obvious version of the alphabetical pattern up to an abrupt break right at line 118, above which the IDs don't follow an alphabetical pattern at all. (They might follow a different pattern, but it's not one that I've found yet.) So that means we can discount all the names in line 118 and below as purely fake, generated lazily by a contractor, and not worthy of our attention for the purposes of red-stringing. Right?
What the fuck?!
(highlight is my own, it is not present in the original document)
My first thought was that the sloppy data generator had done the funniest thing imaginable, sending everyone on a wild goose chase about Alice's deadname just by having the name "Dyer" on the brain while looking for a surname that started with D. This would be Very Funny. No plot relevance, no implications, just the brain fart that launched a thousand theories.
My second thought was that maybe Connor Dyer was the last legit name on the list, and whoever started filling the rest of the sheet in with alphabetical junk data was inspired by the "CD" initials in the first place - whoever it was went on from there.
These are both valid thoughts! But I prefer my third thought:
What if it's on purpose?
Fictional Bad Data
There is a very obvious break between the set of data that doesn't look obviously* fake, and the set of data that is immediately identifiable as such. If we assume that this was intentional - and I want to reiterate that it all being unintentional is still a very real possibility here - why would someone at Rusty Quill want the data to be structured like this?
If the sharp dividing line between reasonable-seeming data and obviously fake data is intentional on RQ's part, it would suggest that we should take the data above row 118 as in-universe real data, and the data below row 118 as in-universe falsified data. It suggests that someone, either at the Institute or after its demise, was adding nonexistent children to the roster of The Magnus Institute. Why would someone want to do that?
There are all kinds of possible reasons, but here are a few off the top of my and my theorizing buddies' heads:
Financial fraud (institutional edition). If the Magnus Institute received funding on a per-child basis, they'd have an incentive to inflate their numbers.
Financial fraud (researcher edition). One or more people on staff were blowing off their child-analysis sessions and recording fake numbers for fake children. This would be ballsy as hell if they could be fired for it, but it was the Magnus Institute, so there's decent odds they couldn't be.
Scientific fraud (faking conclusions edition). The Magnus Institute in the Protocolverse claimed to be doing research on giftedness in children, which is the kind of thing that you'd normally publish in a scientific journal. It's not unheard-of for dickhead academics to falsify data to generate statistically significant results, since statistically insignificant results aren't going to get you published.
Scientific fraud (obscuring paranormal bullshit edition). If the Magnus Institute was using legitimate psychological test names to record Fear-related test results, it's possible their results showed different patterns from what you would expect from the real tests. They could have added the fake children to balance out the dataset as a whole.
Pseudonyms. The children are all real, the Institute just started using fake names for them for privacy purposes. They couldn't go back and change the names they'd already written properly for some reason. Probably something paranormal.
Those are all pretty interesting possibilities, and if we could narrow them down, it might tell us something about what things were like at the Magnus Institute before it burned down!
And the other big question is: why did RQ make the dividing line between the two sections, the first likely-fake entry, Connor Dyer?
One straightforward reason could be as a troll, a red herring to watch fans get in a lather over. And once the community inevitably noticed all the obviously falsified entries, RQ could eat popcorn and watch us lose our minds over whether or not that's even a real entry! (That sounds really fun, I would absolutely do that.)
But let's dig a little deeper, and look at what Connor Dyer being on the border between the real and fake entries would mean in-universe. Because of its position as the border between real and fake, it would be very easy for that entry to be accidentally included in the wrong group - a real research subject discarded as fake, or perhaps more interestingly, a fake research subject accidentally reclassified as real.
Remember, if a name is fake in the context of the Magnus Institute's research, that doesn't mean that the name itself is made up. If I was trying to think of a name that fit the initials CD, and those were the initials of my next door neighbor's kid, I might just write their name in as a lark. Especially if it was my first time trying to get away with falsifying information: this is a kid that verifiably exists and lives in the area.
My theory, supported primarily by my love for The Implications instead of actual evidence
Twenty years on, after all institutional memory of the fraud was long gone, trans icon Alice Dyer applied to work for the OIAR - an institution that (according to this theory) has an unofficial preference for hiring former Magnus Institute kids.
They are very confused when Alice proceeds to act nothing like a former Magnus Institute kid. It doesn't occur to anyone that her entry might have been falsified. What reason would anyone have to do that?
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* Of course people with a background in data analysis or statistics will see immediately that even above line 118 this is a wild-ass dataset that would raise red flags for falsification, but at least it's not "the alphabet over and over" levels of obvious.
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Apparently if you find a tagged Horseshoe crab and report it to Fish and Wildlife they’ll send you a certificate with info about your crab AND a pewter horseshoe crab pin! Keep your eyes peeled 👀
(Photo from the Nantucket Conservation Foundation)
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