Documenting the history of The Beale Institute's parent project PENCIL. Run by former employee. May be slow to respond. ⬇⬇⬇
ABOUT THIS PROJECT: https://pencil-inc.tumblr.com/about
If you don't have tumblr but want to say something:
https://pencil-inc.atabook.org/
Hi all! Think I should be a bit transparent about what’s going on with this project given you’ve had no updates for almost three months straight
In short: mental health and time balancing. Everything feels like it is on fire
Might delete the blog and start over, might not! No idea! This story is too big inside my head and I think I need to rethink how to tell it, as fun as it is to do it like this
I’m sorry to disappoint, but there’s a lot going on and this is one of those stories where it’s practically already written; it’s the medium that’s always been an issue. I wanted you all to get involved but it never really worked? Or I didn’t know how to do it? Maybe it never needed to be that way though
So yeah, it’s gonna be on hold for a long time.
It’s a shame, cause I love Reference and everybody else at PENCIL, however fucked up they are. Hopefully one day you’ll get to see them properly
i also hate how "Ford" formatted this garbage form.
But we needed something quick I guess. This isn't meant to replace a subject's file, it's an initial assessment so we can build out their file.
Subjects would also have intermittent checkup review after the end of a testing program, or a major event that stirs the dynamic of the facility, like a lockdown or breakout... or both, like in the case of FRANK13 (pronounced 'frankie').
Every time we got out from lockdown, you can imagine the bureaucratic nightmare that followed after.
There are also the exit review forms.
If you want to be polite about it, it's for when the subjects are no longer servicing the facility.
If you don't care about the subjects, it's for when they're dead.
If you work in External Research, it's for when their next destination, alive or dead, needs context on what happened to them.
There's so many forms I can go through now I have the willpower to operate this cheap scanner from Cashies. god i hate this thing so much
It’s not the reports, not yet, but it’s interesting enough to post a mile of text about.
This is a bottle of liquid silica. It’s not pure— hell, when is it ever pure— but it’s enough to turn someone toon twice over.
If you’ve handled any toon product, you’ll know silica does not expire. It’s plastic with a pun on the end, why the hell would it-- if anything, it gets stronger, like aging a really fucked up wine.
I choose to believe it was a pun-based reasoning for silica's tooning abilities, since nobody could ever figure it out. Silica? Silly-ca? Get it?
For a while, I wondered how the surge of toons happened as is. Some said it was just pure chance, some thought it was Area 51’s fault, some people thought it was a mass hallucination.
This was the thing: what started it?
A kid? A pet? Alien life, a parasite gone rogue?
The first human to turn toon could know.
So I tracked her down. Easy enough, her records aren’t that well hidden on the internet, and those modern day phone books for people’s information are still legal. Not that you’ll find me that way.
The world was glued to their screens seeing the footage of her turning, so convinced it was AI until the testimonies sprouted into life from the sidewalk cracks, the witnesses overcome with shock, or denial, or that specific strain of ecstasy and dread that only comes when you're among the very first to witness or experience unfathomable history.
I wasn’t there at the time, but a colleague was.
And, by following the paper trail back via them (and about seven different people), I found one Ms TX.
(Look, I know this one's common knowledge, but I have to have consistency on the false names here. I'm not giving you everything.)
The last time I saw her, TX was peacefully living out her days in a newly established sketchbook; an older term for toon-friendly city districts, but she prefers it over 'gallery'. She had a good job, her social media was old school (one handwritten HTML website and one guestbook), and she liked to paint birds. They still sell for a pretty good price, given the economy right now.
Ms TX doesn’t like the press: that’s one thing we have in common. I am not the press; I am barely an authority. When I asked if I could come in, I saw her lips press together so they were pale, before she looked off to the side for half a second. I said something about being a new HOA governor for her street.
Then, she did.
(We’ll get to the silica in a second.)
I hadn’t been out on an investigative crawl like this in a while when we first met, so I was still shaky when it comes to talking to the public. But, you need to connect with people on something if you want to get what you need out of them.
I am always surprised by the variety of toon architecture. She practically lived in a greenhouse, all pencil sketch and watercolour. The sunlight filtered through the windows into a soft wash of yellow, the realistic clouds translucent through the skylight.
So, I started there. I asked her about the build, the furniture, the open plan living from the 2020s. It took some pressing sometimes; the stairlift, the triangle wedge of a closet under the stairs (and the mountain of clothes inside), the rough paint of the entrance hall to resemble realism unlike the rest of the house. I could see the difference between the coats of paint, some flecks of baby-blue just barely visible from behind the bookshelf.
By the end of the cup of coffee she’d handed me, I knew just enough about her to try for what I came here for.
I took out the bottle of liquid silica, and placed it between us.
(the rest of this is sourced from the interview transcript)
"Was this substance your making?"
She looked at me blankly. A forced freeze of expression, maybe.
"Don't get me wrong, you've done a good job of keeping your cards close. With the way you've decked out the place, you might as well have been a toon your whole life... but everyone has their preferences."
She shuffled a little.
"Just a simple yes or no: did you "
Nothing. I shrugged
"Ms TX, you lived the rest of your life in relative safety, haven't you? Sheltering from amateur paparazzi in this day and age is pretty impressive. But there's things here that speak of upturn. An era spent in panic, desperately shedding the things that made your human life what it was, years of normalcy lost in minutes when the solution hit your throat. Am I correct?"
She nodded slowly.
"And this upturn made you ruthlessly overanalyse every aspect of your life, even at your age. The paint, the stuffed closet, the hall stripped of all it's personality compared to everything else.
Ms, why change everything so much if you were so happy living in safety on your own?"
She wasn't looking at me straight anymore. Her lips were pressed again, face taut with annoyance.
"I chose these things. I don't truly remember how this--" she tapped my bottle-- "ever found me, but it was never coercion. It was... like watching the world unfurl around me, before I decided to look closer. Like coloring outside the lines."
She squinted at me.
"For a Homeowners Agent, you're awful picky on your approval criteria. I will not apologise for my taste in decor."
I left not long after.
She doesn't live in that sketchbook anymore, not after that.
I don't know where she is now. She probably still has a website.
hmm what to say.. I have only three ear piercings! One on the left and two on the right! It was completely accidental but it makes me feel like a pirate so it's been like that for years now :]
tagging @become-potatoes @personajan @unknown-is-aaaa @secret-spirit @gravemations @queriesntheories @pencil-inc (got anything to say? :3)
on the basis of fashion: this nosy idiot reporter that got the whole place on lockdown once we figured out she was with the press. yes she was wearing those glasses no we never figured out why.
on the basis of art style: nurse that got into a deal with a fae toon and was stuck like this for the following 20 months. no access to toon features, not many; just cosmetic alternations. it was a strange time for the staff.
images not 100% accurate to the photos in records.
It's a mess. Looking back at it now it’s hard to sift through hard how much of it there was, at least in my head.
It was frayed with complication and constant self-improvement, interweaving ideas of theory and barely correlated statistics, stitched with moments of cloisters of people huddled around glass waiting for something to happen. The thing you're looking for to tie it all off.
Get that proof of theory (at least a few times over), get it "reviewed", publish, profit, repeat.
PENCIL made a lot of its money by ghost-writing research papers, bogus or otherwise, and selling them off, but that’s another story.
The work was only scientific because we deemed it so, because most of the results only appeared where the data could survive, when we cherrypicked and cut corners to fit the molds.
I’m guessing less than half of our findings were genuine. Can’t take back what you put out there though; just debunk, retract where you can, and move on.
The one thing we didn't skimp on was safety and security. Employees that didn't give the game of the facility away, and could stay alive, and wanted to come back and keep working (for the sake of the paycheck or not) were gold star scientists. Even better if they were LEAD ambassadors.
The content of the tests as is... well, I can't breach Tumblr’s TOS.
They were mechanical, verbal, psychological, logical; we just hurled all kinds of things at them (literally or not). The press just got wind of the more brutal ones. I shared one that was just that, with Jamie, because that's how you play the game with this. You play to the heart, you write to shock.
Science was like a game that got boring to those people, so they changed the rules, spiced things up a little. They left the inductivists on the doorstep.
Unpredictability in the face of a science that should be consistent and certainty was the only certainty we had, from method to practice.
I liked (if I can call it a like anymore without sounding delusional) the psychological tests the most. Influencing the subjects with varying stimuli, giving them illogical, paradoxical tasks, observing reactions... that, to me (back then), was the essence of a toon: the reaction, like an inked pen to a page.
Like forcing magnets together.
“The blood and ink and organs are visual wonders to the human mind, yes, but gazing deep into the inner workings of minds we understand even less than our own, perhaps even seeing decades of influence from the world and the animator they came from, feels crucial to the inherent power that toons hold as a foundation for our understanding of them.”
That sentence(!) was left in a chat log from an old colleague; some draft of their research paper that they never finished.
Academics write prose like that all the time, sure, but the test records always looked more performance review than a findings write-up.
Like I said: a game with different rules.
I have a lot of test records lying around- I’ll show you what I mean.
