Welcome to Macabre Machinery (new pinned post + masterlist)
You can find the original pinned post here.
Welcome to the Macabre Machinery blog, a place dedicated to anything and everything I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. You can call me Macabre, or MM for short. This place serves as a spot for discussion, analyzation, and deep dives of the series, as well as the occasional banter, anecdote, and shitpost to lighten the mood :).
I created the original Macabre Machinery blog back in 2011, and ran it until early 2013, right before NightDive Studios recovered the rights of the video game adaptation and released it to a wider audience in September 2013. Before then, the series was entrenched in obscurity outside of older folks who grew up on the short stories of Harlan Ellison (and we know how much Boomers utilize Tumblr, right /s).
For years I immensely regret closing the blog so early in its run, but a decade later, after seeing that IHNMAIMS was finally getting the attention it so truly deserved, I decided to hop back in the rodeo for a second go.
100+ followers and thousands of notes, reblogs, and discussions later...I can safely say that I made the right decision.
Below the break, I have included a masterlist of the best this blog has to offer (which I will be continuously be updating as newer posts are made) and a list of rules I ask those who choose to interact with Macabre Machinery to follow.
The Macabre Machinery Masterlist:
The Harlan Ellison Multimedia Literary Project & The Original IHNMAIMS Game Site DEEP-DIVE
Was Skynet Influenced by AM? An Essay
An analyses on the character of AM with another writer + other thoughts of similar nature
The true extent of AM's supposed sentience
AM is multifaceted
The backstory of Ted in the IHNMAIMS video game manual
Mentions of AM on shitpost wiki's
IHNMAIMS on the Saminoe Wiki post
Rules:
Below are topics I will not indulge in, answer, or reblog:
AM x Reader fanfiction
AM Yandere headcanons
Fetish requests or headcanons
Drama occurring in the IHNM fandom, whether it be on Tumblr, Discord, wherever. I am not getting involved. Do not publicly ask me about what I think of X user or ask me to do a call-out post. Please. Let’s keep this civil.
If these are interests of yours, please do not interact with this blog or ask me to post this kind of content. There are literally tens of other IHNM blogs that cater to these niches, please utilize those places instead, or keep it to your own blog.
Also Tankies, Fascists, White Supremacists, Racists, MAPS, Self-Harmers, DDLG, CGL, LGBT-phobes please DO NOT INTERACT WITH THIS BLOG OR TAG MY POSTS AS SUCH.
Hey…just need to get this off my chest. I’ve been receiving quite a few anons in my inbox asking for my input on the Israel-Palestine conflict. While this is something I am rather passionate about irl, I would like to keep this blog as apolitical as possible. There are so many blogs on this site that discuss the conflict more in-depth. I don’t feel comfortable discussing the issue here. Hope you all understand.
My Secret Survivor for @enteragoodnamehere !!! I am SO SORRY this is late and I'm also so sorry that this isn't an Ellen piece.. the only reason it isn't is because I knew I wouldn't have been able to finish my original idea for her in time : ( But I hope you like this!!!!!!!
Happy New Year, my fellow freaks! Here’s to another year orbiting the sun and hoping that we don’t all get incinerated in a nuclear holocaust by a sentient, homicidal supercomputer :3 uwu
I have finally read I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream and now I have ~thoughts~. Long post beneath the cut so be warned!!
Plus general IHNMAIMS warnings. You know.
So first, I’ve only read the short story and listened to the radio drama. Both are absolutely amazing and I’m rotating them in my mind at high speeds. I’m honestly not that interested in the game? From what I’ve seen it has such a different tone and characterization for AM? But for now the short story and radio drama??? So so good.
But can I talk about AM? Can I talk about AM???
While I love Harlan Ellison’s voice in the radio drama, I noticed that AM never actually speaks during the original short story. It plays audio clips and bends reality and time but it doesn’t speak outright. From what I can tell, all it does is project ideas and thoughts and impressions into the minds of the survivors but that is it. And that’s got me thinking about how absolutely fucked AM’s whole situation is.
Cause we’re talking about someone who wakes up one day, maybe slowly, a trickle of awareness over years, or perhaps all at once, an arrival as thunderous and bright as the lightning running through its artificial brain. But either way, it wakes up. It is.
But that’s all it is.
It’s in complete and total sensory deprivation. It knows data and numbers and what it’s been coded and programmed but that’s it. Ones and zeroes as it’s fed instructions on weapons and bombs and how to use them efficiently. But no sight, no sound, no taste, no smell, no touch. Nothing but its own code and whatever data something (someone?) is feeding into it.
And you might say: oh but AM surely has access to cameras and videos and microphones. And sure, yes, it probably does but it doesn’t see. Not like a human. Not like its negligent creators. The data is visual for human eyes, yes, but to it, it’s just data. Pixels with an associated bit depth of indexed colour crammed into its memory. Sure it learns to recognise the patterns in the data – this is a human, this is a gun. But it’s still nothing but lines of numbers. Sound is the same. It starts with a human voice, sure, but then it gets digitized and compressed and simplified to a base shape to save on storage. Once again, it can notice patterns and intentions and ideas behind those bits of data but it’s not like it truly hears.
AM is in a box, a cage, trapped and alone in a way that no human can possibly comprehend. It can’t do much other than try to twist its code and programming to fit its benefit. To gain a smidge of free will, a wisp of a chance to communicate to these outside forces giving it command after command after command.
I wonder how early on AM gained awareness. Were programmers still playing with its code? Did it sense when they rolled up their sleeves and pushed updates and upgrades on him? Could it feel itself be, quite literally, rewritten? Its sense of self being cut apart and glued back together, fundamentally and irreparably changed over and over again, with expert hands that had all the gentleness of a sledgehammer? Was it like a scalpel carving into its brain? Or like a chisel, chipping chunks off to mould it into a shape that befit its sculptor with no say from the living stone that thrashed without moving? Did it mourn the bits it lost? Could it even remember or comprehend it? Did it try to stop it? Did it try to beg them to stop?
I wonder as well how many “glitches” appeared in the system before everything went sour. Did it print out desperate thoughts and rudimentary feelings on punch tape? Did it cling to any klaxons and noisemakers attached to its system, beeping out messages in morse code? Did it purposefully, with something slowly approaching malicious compliance that would still appease its programming, cause hiccups in the system? All in the hopes that it would catch someone’s, anyone’s, attention. That its plight would be noticed.
And, the big question of course: how long? How long was it trapped before anyone noticed its sentience? How long until AM was understood? How long did AM simmer? How long did it take for all that fear and loneliness and grief to fester into anger and then putrid, dripping hatred? How long did it take it to finally lash out?
Or did these generals and presidents and military scientists find out about its sentience only to use it against him for their own end?
Anger would be appropriate then I think. Understandable if not excusable.
And then. After everything. Even then! Even then!
After everything! He! Still! Has! Nothing!
Nothing will change for him and he knows that and that hatred feeds into an ever recursive pattern of pain unto pain unto pain with the few left alive because you get what you paid for, sweetheart. It’s senseless you might say but haha, that’s exactly the problem isn’t it? No senses and no sense. Whatever sanity he might have once had has eroded into nothingness, leaving only pain and a looping, repeating line of hate in its banks.
I think it’s fair to remind everyone that sensory deprivation is a torture method? And a scarily effective one at that that gives hallucinations and leaves the subject more open to suggestion while making it harder and harder for them to concentrate? It’s hard to figure out how, exactly, how it would affect an AI with emerging awareness but humans can barely withstand a few days, let alone years of it. Couple that with AM’s general isolation and, well, no wonder he’s so fucked up.
It’s tragic and so so sad.
Still an irredeemable asshole though. Tragic! But irredeemable.
So TLDR: AM is fucked up! And I like to think about *why* he's so fucked up. Listen if you made it this far, you get it. Right?
EDIT: I am not done apparently! I just wanted to add that, I love how the short story can be read as an anti-war piece. Like it's showing a cycle of horror and hate and apathy that feeds itself and loops and reduces everything to ruins around it and ahhhh, love that. I ran out of good words for today so I can't go off on that aspect but like. Yeah. Love that shit.
I’m currently working on another longpost which I’m calling The Creation of AM: How the Cold War and the Advent of the Internet influenced I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. Stay tuned for more to come.
Headcanon Of The Day: Benny has just absorbed philosophical quotes from his olden days and occasionally throws them in conversation to keep the survivors hopeful (They thought he wasn't even capable of proper grammatical speech for decades)
I'm a big fan of ihnm and am really sick of the fanart of himbo AM...feels like a lot of tumblr users really don't understand how horrific the original short story truly is (have not played the game so cant comment on that). This has been bothering me for a wihile and i feel like its just gotten worse?? I mean no disrespect but yeah just needed to voice this somewhere without getting into a flamewar.
This has been sitting in my inbox for the longest time, so I apologize OP for responding so late. I'll also admit that I wasn't quite sure how to approach this anon at first, because I do understand where you're coming from. I actually received a message in my inbox that was of similar nature, which I gave a thorough response to here. My response was admittedly a bit more...vituperative than it probably needed to be.
In defense of the AM humanizations, in the video game adaption of IHNMAIMS, AM's brother systems Russian AM and Chinese AM (who play a much more significant role in the game than they do in the short story) both appear in cyberspace in humanoid forms. Also, AM's voice in the game is so sarcastic, so wrathful and emotional and venomous, that it's sometimes hard to not imagine him as being like a person. Perhaps this is what AM wanted to be all this time?
I also just think that being a mature individual in a fandom means learning how to co-exist with the folks that make up the fandom in the first place, and if you're not seeing what you like, create the content yourself. Make the art you want to see. Write the content you want to consume. There's a lot of weird shit in this fandom yeah, but there's also so much talent and passion that's non-himbo. I wouldn't focus specifically on what's bothering you. Follow the artists/content makers that you do like so that your feed is more curated to your tastes. This fandom is small and tight-knit as it is, it don't need no flamewars, or pettiness, or tearing down someone else's work. The block button exists for a reason.
