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Dec. 23rd, 2022 03:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsI started listening through The Magnus Archives podcast in August 2021 and it was important to me to finish listening to it before Twitter met its apparently-inevitable end so I could have the opportunity to review my in-process thoughts as shared with that platform over the past fifteen months.
The Magnus Archives is a horror podcast by Jonathan Sims that (for its first several seasons) takes the form of a series of short stories read out as statements by the new and inexperienced head archivist at the sinister Magnus Institute, Jonathan Sims (no relation), who is working his way through the collection and along the way uncovering the horrors that underlie our reality and also his professional organization.
For me, however -- a professional audiovisual archivist -- the real horror is the fact that my mediocre mentee Jonathan Magnusarchivist is attempting to process the collection by reading every statement aloud into an audio cassette player and making a copy on magnetic tape. My guy! Every archive in the world is in the process of desperately trying to process their collection off magnetic media because it is a dying format! What are you doing!
Anyway, I had a great time with the first four seasons of the podcast; the actual short stories at the heart of the format were pretty fun though sometimes hit or miss (it got to the point that I started giggling every time I heard the word "MEAT" hissed with Mr. Sims' particular ARE YOU NOT UNNERVED cadence) but the thing I really dug was a.) the workplace horrorsatire that suffuses the entire show, b.) the cast's escalating bad decisions in the metaplot and satisfying consequences thereof, and c.) the fun opportunity to critique the archival processes in place. For those of you who are not on Twitter, or who happen to work at evil archival institutions and would like some best practice guidance, here is some of the helpful professional advice I have given my mediocre mentee Jonathan Magnusarchivist,
for posterity:
every time jonathan magnus archivist says 'that [name of potentially sinister entity] rings a faint bell, I should look through older statements' I want to take him gently aside and give him some great news about ocr, searchable transcripts and keyword extraction
cassette tapes [scream] aside, i think there's actually an interesting professional ethics conversation to be had about jon magnusarchivist's decision to do dramatic voices with accents when making accessibility recordings for archival statements
who is this person in episode 33 who gently tries to ask if jonathan magnusarchivist understands the purpose of a unique identifier and learns to our joint polite regret that he absolutely does not? [nb: it was Tim Stoker and from this moment on he was my favorite character]
so they tell you at ischool that you should not expect to to spend your days reading about a subject if you work as a librarian/archivist; most of the job will be data management, customer service, etc. useful career counseling jonathan magnusarchivist sadly never received
you know what, it may have been born out of paranoia and the forbidden desire to add secret extra curatorial notes to the archival record, but jonathan magnusarchivist HAS at least finally intuited that creating duplicate copies is good archival practice. & i'm proud of him.
'discredited section' is such a loose category that even the creepy doppelgangers are calling jon on it now. HOW ARE YOU ORGANIZING WITHIN 'DISCREDITED,' JON. PLEASE TELL ME
i see that jonathan magnusarchivist's [spooky-forces-driven?] decision to render his statements in a presumed-accurate accent does not extend to '1840s Missouri farmwife,' which is probably for the best
i understand it's frustrating for jonathan magnusarchivist in the moment but it's probably for the best that the magnus archivises doesn't keep detailed patron research records given the various complexities of their dealings with law enforcement tbh
jonathan magnusarchivist: wow gertrude requested -- and received! -- truly astonishing amounts of travel funding
me: THERE IS A LESSON TO BE LEARNED HERE. yes okay it's 'gertrude rocked, sinisterly' but also it's 'professional development is available to you --'
anyway 'you know how hard it would be to replace you' 'i ... don't, actually?' is the funniest/most relatable thing jonathan magnusarchivist has ever said & also a huge red flag from elias, there are SO many trained baby archivists who would take a cursed job for benefits
ah we're back on The Unique Properties Of Magnetic Tape i see. jonathan notmagnusarchivist did you ever consider making an episode that's just this passage from my favorite grad school textbook
'we might as well be recording them on wax cylinders' holy SHIT someone said it!! bless you & your actual professional qualification, tim stoker, TRULY hope someone in the comments of the many depressed ask a manager posts you've been writing finds a way for you to quit soon
me: archivists should get travel funding for professional development
#tma 101: if you are sent on travel for work, be on your guard and trust nothing for you are likely to end up in a place of eldritch doom
me, considering past airbnb experiences: fair point. both are true
every time elias complains about how gertrude left the archive too disorganized for world-saving, i'm like, hey, you know what you could have done to fix this, is hire at least one trained archivist along WITH all your supernatural victims? surely you have funding??. this is yet another toxic management practice...refusing to hire trained professionals and blaming your staff for their lack of skills...anyway, in other news, surprise evil performance review in 106 absolutely impeccable. time to unionize
i'm sure i don't need to explain this to most of you but for the record: 'processing a lot of records about weird medical stuff' does not make qualified to perform unlicensed surgery on your friends, especially without their consent
I did tweet a bit more than this about TMA and did try to thread it as best I could so if anyone is feeling completionist about My TMA Thoughts the threads are here (s1-3ish) and here (s4-5ish), respectively. However I want to pull one more particularly archives-related tweet out to talk more broadly about an area where the show thematically fell down a little for me, which is a bit spoilery.
What I said on Twitter at the time I hit this was "jonathan magnusarchivist's evil trauma eating is the closest this show has ever come to engaging with the specific horror of the archive on a thematic level and it KILLS me to learn that he's not then actually archiving those statements. my guy. commit or go home."
To talk about this I have to fully reveal the premise of the show, which is that the big bads haunting the world are fourteen broad personifications of Categories of Human Fear, one of which is the Eye: the fear of being perceived. I do find a lot of the fears quite effective but the Eye is the closest the show really comes to encompassing any of the things that really scare me the most -- state power, bureaucratic injustice, oversight without compassion; things that are scary on an institutional rather than an individual level -- which, coincidentally, is something that is really quite relevant to a lot of the things we think about quite a lot in the archives space, as collecting institutions generally funded either by the state or by donations from quite wealthy individuals, that have a long history of falling into the trap of prioritizing the concept of The Collection over the individuals who have contributed to it. I'm thinking of things like the problem of the Boston College IRA tapes, where oral histories that archivists took for their collection were subpoena'd for trials -- or the various semi-prestigious collections I've worked with that were aggressively courted by large archival institutions, only to sit on shelves unprocessed after being ingested because they weren't quite as prestigious as other collections while the original creators no longer had any way to access them -- or obviously, the ongoing discussions around museum repatriation.
And, like, I am an archivist, obviously I think it's a profession that has value and these are traps that can and are possible to avoid and most people are trying to do their best! But it would have been so, so satisfying for me personally for The Magnus Archives to take a couple extra steps to really engage with these concepts and use the show to genuinely make points and ask questions about archival ethics, to make it a show about the way that archives can be horrific -- and, by extension, the way that institutions more broadly can be horrific, the way that institutional surveillance is horrific, the way that individual stories can be co-opted by larger and more powerful entities -- and every time it never quite gets there. It gets close, sometimes, and the times when it gets close are absolutely the most satisfying parts of the show for me, but it never makes that final leap. Probably because Jonathan Sims is not actually an archivist and therefore not actually obsessed with the questions of archival ethics that I think about day-to-day, and is just more interested, broadly speaking, in Big Eyes in the Sky and Scary Bugs and Meat(TM), and I guess that is fair. But my favorite episode is the one where Jonathan Magnusarchivist eats a woman's personal trauma and it is also my least favorite because he should have archived it.
Anyway, these were all my thoughts up through S4 of the show; I thought the show could be more ambitious than it quite managed to be, but overall I enjoyed my experience very much!
And then I listened to S5, very quickly over the course of the last month, and did not have quite as much fun with it, in large part because they didn't spend any time in the archive and therefore I had no opportunities to offer my mediocre mentee Jonathan Magnusarchivist unwanted professional advice which has contributed enormously to my enjoyment of the experience. But also I think because short horror stories where there is a reasonable and interesting question about what is going to happen and whether the teller is going to get out of it all right are VASTLY more compelling to me than short horror stories that simply describe nightmare tortures that you know nobody is going to get out of at length. That is not a good time, for me, personally, and, like all of the characters who were also forced to sit through them, I spent those segments sort of grimly waiting for them to end and mentally composing my TMA S5 drinking game, which I have included below, also for posterity:
- every time Jonathan Magnusarchivist says 'sorry': sip
- every time Martin says a variant on 'are we there yet': sip
- every time we learn an interesting but irrelevant bit of lore about a character who died several seasons ago: gulp
- every time a villain says 'but you're enjoying [all the endless torture] really, aren't you, Jonathan Magnusarchivist?': gulp
- every time a villain takes time out of cackling to comment on jonmartin canon: drain the glass
All that said I did love the classic horror movie ethical conundrum of the ending & resolution.
The Magnus Archives is a horror podcast by Jonathan Sims that (for its first several seasons) takes the form of a series of short stories read out as statements by the new and inexperienced head archivist at the sinister Magnus Institute, Jonathan Sims (no relation), who is working his way through the collection and along the way uncovering the horrors that underlie our reality and also his professional organization.
For me, however -- a professional audiovisual archivist -- the real horror is the fact that my mediocre mentee Jonathan Magnusarchivist is attempting to process the collection by reading every statement aloud into an audio cassette player and making a copy on magnetic tape. My guy! Every archive in the world is in the process of desperately trying to process their collection off magnetic media because it is a dying format! What are you doing!
Anyway, I had a great time with the first four seasons of the podcast; the actual short stories at the heart of the format were pretty fun though sometimes hit or miss (it got to the point that I started giggling every time I heard the word "MEAT" hissed with Mr. Sims' particular ARE YOU NOT UNNERVED cadence) but the thing I really dug was a.) the workplace horrorsatire that suffuses the entire show, b.) the cast's escalating bad decisions in the metaplot and satisfying consequences thereof, and c.) the fun opportunity to critique the archival processes in place. For those of you who are not on Twitter, or who happen to work at evil archival institutions and would like some best practice guidance, here is some of the helpful professional advice I have given my mediocre mentee Jonathan Magnusarchivist,
for posterity:
every time jonathan magnus archivist says 'that [name of potentially sinister entity] rings a faint bell, I should look through older statements' I want to take him gently aside and give him some great news about ocr, searchable transcripts and keyword extraction
cassette tapes [scream] aside, i think there's actually an interesting professional ethics conversation to be had about jon magnusarchivist's decision to do dramatic voices with accents when making accessibility recordings for archival statements
who is this person in episode 33 who gently tries to ask if jonathan magnusarchivist understands the purpose of a unique identifier and learns to our joint polite regret that he absolutely does not? [nb: it was Tim Stoker and from this moment on he was my favorite character]
so they tell you at ischool that you should not expect to to spend your days reading about a subject if you work as a librarian/archivist; most of the job will be data management, customer service, etc. useful career counseling jonathan magnusarchivist sadly never received
you know what, it may have been born out of paranoia and the forbidden desire to add secret extra curatorial notes to the archival record, but jonathan magnusarchivist HAS at least finally intuited that creating duplicate copies is good archival practice. & i'm proud of him.
'discredited section' is such a loose category that even the creepy doppelgangers are calling jon on it now. HOW ARE YOU ORGANIZING WITHIN 'DISCREDITED,' JON. PLEASE TELL ME
i see that jonathan magnusarchivist's [spooky-forces-driven?] decision to render his statements in a presumed-accurate accent does not extend to '1840s Missouri farmwife,' which is probably for the best
i understand it's frustrating for jonathan magnusarchivist in the moment but it's probably for the best that the magnus archivises doesn't keep detailed patron research records given the various complexities of their dealings with law enforcement tbh
jonathan magnusarchivist: wow gertrude requested -- and received! -- truly astonishing amounts of travel funding
me: THERE IS A LESSON TO BE LEARNED HERE. yes okay it's 'gertrude rocked, sinisterly' but also it's 'professional development is available to you --'
anyway 'you know how hard it would be to replace you' 'i ... don't, actually?' is the funniest/most relatable thing jonathan magnusarchivist has ever said & also a huge red flag from elias, there are SO many trained baby archivists who would take a cursed job for benefits
ah we're back on The Unique Properties Of Magnetic Tape i see. jonathan notmagnusarchivist did you ever consider making an episode that's just this passage from my favorite grad school textbook
'we might as well be recording them on wax cylinders' holy SHIT someone said it!! bless you & your actual professional qualification, tim stoker, TRULY hope someone in the comments of the many depressed ask a manager posts you've been writing finds a way for you to quit soon
me: archivists should get travel funding for professional development
#tma 101: if you are sent on travel for work, be on your guard and trust nothing for you are likely to end up in a place of eldritch doom
me, considering past airbnb experiences: fair point. both are true
every time elias complains about how gertrude left the archive too disorganized for world-saving, i'm like, hey, you know what you could have done to fix this, is hire at least one trained archivist along WITH all your supernatural victims? surely you have funding??. this is yet another toxic management practice...refusing to hire trained professionals and blaming your staff for their lack of skills...anyway, in other news, surprise evil performance review in 106 absolutely impeccable. time to unionize
i'm sure i don't need to explain this to most of you but for the record: 'processing a lot of records about weird medical stuff' does not make qualified to perform unlicensed surgery on your friends, especially without their consent
I did tweet a bit more than this about TMA and did try to thread it as best I could so if anyone is feeling completionist about My TMA Thoughts the threads are here (s1-3ish) and here (s4-5ish), respectively. However I want to pull one more particularly archives-related tweet out to talk more broadly about an area where the show thematically fell down a little for me, which is a bit spoilery.
What I said on Twitter at the time I hit this was "jonathan magnusarchivist's evil trauma eating is the closest this show has ever come to engaging with the specific horror of the archive on a thematic level and it KILLS me to learn that he's not then actually archiving those statements. my guy. commit or go home."
To talk about this I have to fully reveal the premise of the show, which is that the big bads haunting the world are fourteen broad personifications of Categories of Human Fear, one of which is the Eye: the fear of being perceived. I do find a lot of the fears quite effective but the Eye is the closest the show really comes to encompassing any of the things that really scare me the most -- state power, bureaucratic injustice, oversight without compassion; things that are scary on an institutional rather than an individual level -- which, coincidentally, is something that is really quite relevant to a lot of the things we think about quite a lot in the archives space, as collecting institutions generally funded either by the state or by donations from quite wealthy individuals, that have a long history of falling into the trap of prioritizing the concept of The Collection over the individuals who have contributed to it. I'm thinking of things like the problem of the Boston College IRA tapes, where oral histories that archivists took for their collection were subpoena'd for trials -- or the various semi-prestigious collections I've worked with that were aggressively courted by large archival institutions, only to sit on shelves unprocessed after being ingested because they weren't quite as prestigious as other collections while the original creators no longer had any way to access them -- or obviously, the ongoing discussions around museum repatriation.
And, like, I am an archivist, obviously I think it's a profession that has value and these are traps that can and are possible to avoid and most people are trying to do their best! But it would have been so, so satisfying for me personally for The Magnus Archives to take a couple extra steps to really engage with these concepts and use the show to genuinely make points and ask questions about archival ethics, to make it a show about the way that archives can be horrific -- and, by extension, the way that institutions more broadly can be horrific, the way that institutional surveillance is horrific, the way that individual stories can be co-opted by larger and more powerful entities -- and every time it never quite gets there. It gets close, sometimes, and the times when it gets close are absolutely the most satisfying parts of the show for me, but it never makes that final leap. Probably because Jonathan Sims is not actually an archivist and therefore not actually obsessed with the questions of archival ethics that I think about day-to-day, and is just more interested, broadly speaking, in Big Eyes in the Sky and Scary Bugs and Meat(TM), and I guess that is fair. But my favorite episode is the one where Jonathan Magnusarchivist eats a woman's personal trauma and it is also my least favorite because he should have archived it.
Anyway, these were all my thoughts up through S4 of the show; I thought the show could be more ambitious than it quite managed to be, but overall I enjoyed my experience very much!
And then I listened to S5, very quickly over the course of the last month, and did not have quite as much fun with it, in large part because they didn't spend any time in the archive and therefore I had no opportunities to offer my mediocre mentee Jonathan Magnusarchivist unwanted professional advice which has contributed enormously to my enjoyment of the experience. But also I think because short horror stories where there is a reasonable and interesting question about what is going to happen and whether the teller is going to get out of it all right are VASTLY more compelling to me than short horror stories that simply describe nightmare tortures that you know nobody is going to get out of at length. That is not a good time, for me, personally, and, like all of the characters who were also forced to sit through them, I spent those segments sort of grimly waiting for them to end and mentally composing my TMA S5 drinking game, which I have included below, also for posterity:
- every time Jonathan Magnusarchivist says 'sorry': sip
- every time Martin says a variant on 'are we there yet': sip
- every time we learn an interesting but irrelevant bit of lore about a character who died several seasons ago: gulp
- every time a villain says 'but you're enjoying [all the endless torture] really, aren't you, Jonathan Magnusarchivist?': gulp
- every time a villain takes time out of cackling to comment on jonmartin canon: drain the glass
All that said I did love the classic horror movie ethical conundrum of the ending & resolution.
no subject
Date: 2022-12-23 09:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-12-26 02:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-12-23 10:57 pm (UTC)An entire season of endless torture seems like too much torture even to me, a whump enthusiast, especially given that the endless torture involves no archives at all. Couldn't the torture at least take place in the archives? Perhaps the cassette tapes could be involved somehow. Jonathan Magnusarchivist bound to a chair with the magnetic tape unspooled from his carefully recorded cassettes etc. etc.
Fascinated by the passage from your textbook about how bad vibes will DEFINITELY mess with video systems.
Also fascinated by your thoughts about Archive Horror that is actually about archives - the archive records subpoenaed for a trial, the archive acquired by a voracious mega-archive and then neglected. (Are the endless torture sessions at least being recorded for the archives?)
no subject
Date: 2022-12-26 02:19 pm (UTC)AND HE IS NOT, IN FACT, ACTUALLY ARCHIVING THEM. (at least not on purpose)
I love this textbook page and have used it as a slide on every presentation I've ever given since I graduated. It just conveys so much about the Process ....
the thing is that "I'm consuming your trauma, leaving you haunted by the process of re-living it, and then neglectfully storing it away towards ends that I think are good but unfortunately are going to turn out to be evil" is such a perfect horror metaphor for the various pitfalls that we are constantly and desperately circling in an attempt to maintain information storage for good rather than for evil ... come to think of it "the process of storing all this information is actively killing the planet" (wrt data centers and climate change) is another horror-story metaphor that haunts all of us all the time! archives are RIFE with horror.
no subject
Date: 2022-12-26 03:08 pm (UTC)Do you by any chance have any plans to write Archive Horror that is actually about the archives? Because I think you would knock if out of the park.
no subject
Date: 2022-12-26 07:58 pm (UTC)+1.
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Date: 2022-12-24 12:14 am (UTC)I just want to note that if those are the technical terms of the field, I am not necessarily surprised that someone writes a story about an archivist who consumes trauma.
(I never listened to The Magnus Archives; I am sorry it whiffs the full potential of its archival horror, but I really appreciate you explaining why.)
no subject
Date: 2022-12-24 06:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-12-26 02:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-12-26 02:26 pm (UTC)anyway now I'm rereading 'accessioned' would have been the more normal term to use here and actually the more accurate one as 'ingest' generally refers to the process of preparing things for long-term preservation by putting them into some kind of digital preservation system which is exactly what is not happening in this example, thank you for allowing me the opportunity to clarify.
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Date: 2022-12-24 01:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-12-26 02:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-12-24 02:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-12-26 02:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-12-24 08:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-12-26 02:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-12-25 05:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-12-26 02:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-12-25 03:22 pm (UTC)Lmaooo. Also, I love reading your thoughts on this as an Actual Archivist!
I tapped out early in season 5 because I frankly could not take the endless nightmare terrors - I think I got two episodes in, saw the plot description of the third, and was like no, absolutely not - but I may eventually skip ahead and listen to the ending...
no subject
Date: 2022-12-26 02:37 pm (UTC)(And like -- genuine respect, I DO think it's an interestingly brave creative choice to spend four seasons asking 'what if the worst happens' and then going ahead and pulling the trigger and exploring the aftermath, but it's a tricky thing to pull off and maintain narrative tension afterwards and I think undermining themself by having the statements contained within the episodes explicitly lack any possible narrative tension really didn't help with that.)
no subject
Date: 2022-12-28 02:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-01-02 04:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-12-28 01:44 pm (UTC)But also I think because short horror stories where there is a reasonable and interesting question about what is going to happen and whether the teller is going to get out of it all right are VASTLY more compelling to me than short horror stories that simply describe nightmare tortures that you know nobody is going to get out of at length.
I feel the same way about Season 5! The statement givers in the first few seasons felt like fully realized characters, with different ways of reacting to The Horrors, whereas in the apocalypse world, most of them seemed more like allegorical devices for Jonny Writer Sims to do a Clever Writing Thing, or make a Clever Political Observation about our own, slightly less apocalyptic world. And even when I admired the writing and/or agreed with his observations, the storytelling was still pretty far removed from what I'd previously enjoyed about the show. Also, I was just never going to love "roadtrip through The Horrors" as much as I loved "workplace shenanigans BUT SPOOKY."
no subject
Date: 2023-01-02 04:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-01-06 03:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-01-09 07:28 pm (UTC)(and also I am Very With You on s5 being a disappointment, which is plausibly not surprising)