I took Tzapo to a different PetSmart today. I hoped that being in the middle of the biggest city that it might be busy but there weren't many dogs there, except for one section: doggie daycare. They had the day camp visible to the store, so you could hear and see the dogs romping around in there. I'm sure you could smell them too if you had a dog's nose. So even though they weren't right out with him, I figured that the sounds of excited dogs who were visible to him would be a good distraction and proving ground for Tzapo.
First we worked on general obedience several feet away, making sure he could listen and stay focused on me at a distance. Then we repeated while closing the gap. No issues whatsoever. We did some quick heeling walking around the store, and then I placed Tzapo into a sit-stay right in front of the glass.
You can see there were dogs of various sizes in there, and they were aware there was a dog outside of their area. That lovely white bulldog was very interested in watching us for a while in particular. Tzapo did really well even with the distractions. So I upped the ante and asked him for a down stay in front of them. I then walked to the far end of the aisle to take this photo:
I don't know the distance but it was definitely over twenty feet. He held it the entire time even with my back turned to walk away. I'm pretty pleased to say the least! The dogs were quite loud and were running all around behind him, so I'm glad he could still maintain the down stay.
Next, I went and released him from that, gave him some pets, and then asked for another down. Then I asked him to settle. We stayed in that location right in front of the doggy day camp.
He was doing a good job settling when out of nowhere he broke the down and immediately started pawing for my hand. I told him to leave it and return to his down but he proceeded to offer his pressure tasking and was insistent on forcing me into petting his chest. He didn't care what I had to say, he was doing it. I wasn't aware of any symptoms of anxiety or anything, but a couple minutes after he began offering those behaviors, I could feel my chest was starting to tighten up like it does during a panic or anxiety attack. It wasn't super painful yet but it definitely was hurting. He also twisted his head to give my mouth a good sniff before renewing his efforts to task. Which goes back to my theory that he is picking up on my cortisol levels already without formal training, but I really don't know for sure. I just know he clearly seems to have picked up on his own that his comfort task goes with some change in me.
Admittedly, the pessimist in my head is asking "but maybe that was coincidence, maybe he was the anxious and stressed one and he just wanted pets". But the chest pain definitely happened and is still low grade present but it never got to the level it does. So ?????? Maybe he is tasking on his own ????? I don't know!!! I just know he does good at stay!
The Magnus Archives and Horror: An Analogy of Why the Horror Within Doesn’t Always Work
The Magnus Archives has been widely regarded as a good example of how horror podcasts can work very well and have an ability to incite horror with just sound alone. It is personally one of my own favorite podcasts, especially regarding how it incorporates LGBT characters without the need to kill them off or show them in a villainous light and its amazing story telling. Horror podcasts as a whole are such an interesting genre within podcasts because of how it forces its’ writers to only use sound alone to set the world for their listeners. This comes to say that the genre of horror is such a complex and somewhat tricky genre to make work no matter what media you work with and I believe that the Magnus Archives is a very strong piece of ongoing media that is able to depict horror well. To a degree.
What does this mean?
I feel that with the Magnus Archives, it can get largely exaggerated as to the horrors within the podcast and that the Magnus Archives does not keep a consistent tone of being scary; there comes a point in which the episodes have a sort of predictability to it that dilutes what is being presented but it is definitely not to say that there are no episodes that scared me. I’ve kept a small note of what episodes I found scary and it’s when I noticed that most of these episodes were still prior to its heavier ongoings within plot development (Which is to be said that this point is mainly season three for me.) that there became a clear trend. Older episodes simply faired better in terms of horror than those more recent. I know that in the Magnus Archives’ defense that all of this was structured long before it had started but again, this is meant to touch on why I’d felt like these episodes worked so well especially while lacking in plot. And that fact is that these episodes were still largely unexplained.
Before you go further into why that shroud of the unknown in the beginning worked so well you have to acknowledge how horror is typically built upon. The two main components of horror are typically depicted as:
Personal: Under this, your goal is meant for the audience to feel fear for themselves as to what your antagonist presents and for the antagonist being able to enable a presence even after your story has ended.
Sympathy/Empathy: Under this, your goal is to get your audience to relate and/or care for your cast of characters so that when your antagonist becomes known or is a current threat to your cast, your fear as the audience who are only able to be on the sidelines is stimulated out of not knowing who is going to die or being able to prevent it.
These two components build off each other and are what help to make a stronger horror story. However, there are various examples that simply try to present horror with only one component or are attempting to utilize both but fail by poor writing and execution. By looking how first-person horror games can stimulate fear but lack in the use of a wider cast, making for the fear reliant heavily on how the writer presents it and the player itself and the contrary being horror movies working to try and get you to care about a cast of characters but only sprouted from being able to relate and wanting to see them thrive and not out of fear of your antagonist, move to prove the previous statement. This isn’t to say that there aren’t pieces of media that aren’t able to stand strong with only one component, but it’s to say that most of them typically don’t. The episodes of the Magnus Archives I felt were scarier were mainly because they fell under Personal and not Sympathy/Empathy. I did not have much of a reason to care about them in the beginning, yet even when I became heavily invested in characters and listened to characters meet their demise I did not feel scared for them and I still don’t now. This stems from the fact that I never felt like they died. I never felt like Gertrude died, I never felt like Tim died, and I never even felt like Daisy died, no matter how much they worked to try and convince me so. So the moment in which Jon ventures into the Buried and is able to retrieve Daisy, I was largely unfazed by the overall event having already fully expected for her return. Why the Magnus Archives doesn’t fully work under the Sympathy/Empathy component is because when we were met with further expansion on our cast characters, we are also given expansion upon the universe in which they live in. With this, there came a beginning to why things would occur. You could break down as to why Tim’s death never really why felt like his death nor why Daisy didn’t feel like her death, but I believe the strongest topic to expand upon is why I could never really believe Gertrude is dead.
Quite far from the typical stages of grief, my acceptance of her death had come from when it was first spoken in episode one only to lead to disbelief as we began to learn more about her. This disbelief stemmed from the fact that since we have mostly listened to Jon’s perspective in the first seasons, we can only come to understand the universe from his eyes. How Jon would describe Gertrude as disorganized, uncaring, or someone who just never seemed fit for her position as an archivist- I’d easily believe it in the beginning. There wasn’t room for me to question it in the beginning nor did I have reason to as the story progressed. As Jon begins to delve into the truth of the institute and of Gertrude, we along with him, his doubts became one with my own. I only know as much as Jon speaks and illustrates with his words, leaving whatever blanks that he doesn’t fill as blanks I am also left with. Yet I’d heard when Martin discovered her dead body under the archives and I’d heard when Elias had shot her down; I still didn’t believe it then. My disbelief is stemmed from Jon’s own misconceptions and lacking understanding in the full character of Gertrude. His doubt of Jane Prentis’ death had left me with the lingering feeling that she never died and I kept expecting her to make her return at any given moment. I’d only got over this when I learned that avatars could die. As for Gertrude, her character has been shown to be someone who’s rather wise and understanding to plan further than spontaneously. A death so simple as gunshots seemed something seemingly so tame compared to the rest of the entities and fears she’d come in contact with. Maybe I just thought she was just too much of a badass to die by just a singular bullet. Regardless, this point convenes to the fact that her death cannot fall under the Sympathy/Empathy category. She died by relatively human means and due to the fact that we were only given a recording of her death deep within the story when we’ve learned a heavy amount of her character, I could not care for her when her death was primarily relevant within the beginning seasons when we knew her by the mess Jon described her as. In fact, the fact that none of these characters could really fall under the Sympathy/Empathy category is because they didn’t die by the horrors in the story, they died through devices created by humans. Gertrude died by her gunshot wounds, Tim died by the C4 detonations and Daisy was presumed to have suffered the same fate as Tim. Even if these deaths were influenced by the fears and their entities, they died a way humans have died before. This presents an issue because without someone that we learned about and watch develop to have died to an entity you don’t completely feel the threat the entity is supposed to signify to the cast. These are threats that have solutions today and the fact that there are ways to avoid them is what softens the severity of the threat meant to be presented. The stakes feel relatively low knowing this and help to dilute how the audience perceives an entity. A counter-argument could be that Sasha was one of the only ones to actually have been taken by a fear, namely the Distortion. However, Sasha cannot fall within the Sympathy/Empathy category due to two reasons: The first is that we did not know much about her character when we lost her. We were given a not-Sasha for a much longer time than when we had the original Sasha. Not-Sasha is not in equal personality to the original Sasha so the listener’s appeal to Not-Sasha would not be the same for the original Sasha. Even with that said, if the listener were to feel guilty in not realizing that our original knowings of Sasha were long gone this is the post the fact that she was taken long ago. The second reason is that we were never given a confirmation for her death. Sasha, Micheal, and Helen were all victims to the distortion but it is never described what really occurred to them and we are to presume them as dead. The fact of the matter is, Sasha could very well be around still but in a way that we aren’t presented with. None of these deaths can fall under the Sympathy/Empathy category leaving for the Magnus Archives to be heavily reliant on the category to Personal experience. And does it work?
Well. It depends on what you choose to focus on. But for the purpose of this analogy, the Magnus Archives can provide amazing executions of horror, but mainly in the beginning.
Truth be told, podcasts may be the perfect type of media if you really want to get personal with your listeners. Stories within podcasts do not have to be dependent on a wide cast of characters, but they do help to strengthen the story you give. An example of a story that gets personal with the viewers is episode ninety-four, All Right, from Welcome to Night Vale. Despite Welcome to Night Vale not being a horror-centric podcast, the idea that a listener can feel a connection to the story without a mention of every personal detail relating to you shows that podcasts have the potential to give you a personal experience. In this episode, Cecil Palmer, the radio host of Night Vale, speaks directly to the listener and helps to encapsulate them by having the audio for the episode alternate between earbuds. It is necessary for the listener to possess earbuds and to match the actions in which he dictates in order to feel the full immersion of what is going, but the overall experience is able to solidify the connection between narrator and listener very strongly. This then raises the question of whether the Magnus Archives is able to form this same connection between narrator and listener. And the answer is yes, but in a way that is far different than how Welcome to Night Vale had done.
The Magnus Archives’ connection with the listener varies in that when listening to statements, you are meant to feel as though you are currently witnessing the statements that Jon reads. Even if horror doesn’t always have its’ presence in statements, the Magnus Archives does a very well job of being able to encapsulate the listener into feeling as though they are able to experience these statements along with their statement giver. This is done through heavy descriptions that are still able to leave room for the listener to insert themselves into and audio design that is able to capture the environment in which it takes place. In describing sound effects, they are not entirely present to the listener when invested in what is being told but they are subtly put in in a way that helps to give the feel that the listener is within the environment. This is an incredibly strong point because immersion is an important aspect of getting a story to feel personal. For a story to feel personal, it is not necessary for you to be present within the story but be able to be given enough information to understand the main character’s perspective (Or rather the perspective of the statement giver, in this case.) and motivations as though it were your own. Now, when it comes to being able to tell a horror story meant to immerse the listener and scare them, things begin to get tricky. Horror is subjective to a person. That is a fact. Our fears are driven by our past experience and own mindsets and are most likely not the same as another’s. The episodes I found scary were namely the episodes centered around the Flesh but they were the ones I ended up taking the most interest in and soon becoming my favorites. In truth, there were other episodes that had scared me coinciding with other fears but as I got deeper into the series none of these episodes could really scare me anymore and would at most give me slight discomfort. Why? It was the idea of the unknown. I was scared of the meat episodes because I didn’t know what influence was going on behind them. I didn’t know anything about the fears nor of what qualities they possessed. I liked them a lot more before I knew any of these things. The issue is that once I began to understand what the influence was behind these statements- I wasn’t scared. It was because I was able to categorize and identify the fear that was present. This is an issue. For most horror stories to work, it is best to let influences be left unknown. Exposition in things such as horror movies, that infodump the entire background for an antagonist and list how they were able to survive and give the opportunity for the main cast to prevent this evil- it doesn’t work for me. This applies to the Magnus Archives in the sense that Elias did explain a huge portion of what was going on in the middle of the Magnus Archives and that Gertrude’s notes gave her studies of the fears and of their rituals. If I am able to know about the entity behind the evils present in the story, there is nothing to stop me from learning that there is some way to stop them. By giving the influences behind a statement an unidentifiable factor or a lack of a resolution in Jon’s follow up (i.e. their disappearance), then I feel as though I am given a reason to be scared because it goes to show I don’t have the full understanding of what this evil is capable of and that there is no room for me to let my guard down. It is not to be said that this evil should go entirely unknown that makes the statements and their antagonists unidentifiable as actual evils and not just pure fear of the statement giver’s own mind and that the Magnus Archives’s original structure of the listener being presented with statements with little information behind it is what makes a structure for a strong and encaptivating horror story.
So with the end of the Magnus Archives beginning to near, there is one final question left: Can the Magnus Archives work to still scare listeners? Yes, but it cannot be done under the Personal category of horror. It must be done in the Sympathy/Empathy category. I believe if you would want to reincorporate horror within the final pegs of the Magnus Archives, you would have to work to deteriorate a character's mind from the external events that affect them. By doing this you are able to emphasize the horrors external and that their effect is much more damaging and lasting than their attacks alone. Though Jon falls as one of the best contenders of someone who has fell victim to the paranoia of his own mind, he cannot be the prime person whose downfall is themself, seeing as his character is being led in a way to detract from this. However, the only other alternative is to kill a member from the cast of characters that we have been following. They must die by a fear in order to give emphasis on the threat that the fears actually are to our cast and we must be given the sense that any of the other characters we’ve come to love have the potential to suffer the same fate. I cannot fully recommend this route though. With the main cast consisting of LGBT/LGBT-coded characters, it would hurt to see the Magnus Archives fall under the same trope of badly mistreating characters for the purpose of furthering a story.
Overall, this is not meant to present any distaste to the Magnus Archives. I enjoy the podcast heavily but I understand that I am here more for the plot of it rather than it being a horror anthology like I’d once originally started out with. I understand I cannot change what has happened or what will happen next, but I believe by breaking down the components in which the Magnus Archives falls weak or strong as a horror podcast can help in understanding and studying the genre of horror as a whole.
CGC Final Prep Day 3 - Car Dealership, Deaf Chat, Groomer's, and Heeling Practice
My car broke down a couple days ago, which means I had to kinda nix my original plans for the past few days. So I wound up taking the past two days as basically break days with little training while I focused on other things. This morning we started again on more challenging things as I took him with me to various things.
Before we left: an argument sparked me to strong anxiety. I sat on the bed and called Tzapo over. He immediately set to giving pressure and pulling my hand to pet him. Perfect response from him.
Car Dealership - Tzapo was a little squirrelly from the cold to get into the building but was great once inside. Heeled well, no inappropriate sniffing, responsive and focused, held his commands well. He was happy to see my car aka "his car".
We drove home, grabbed his coat and refilled the treat bag, then we drove to where the deaf chat meeting group was being held. We arrived early so we walked around outside for a while to help wear out any nervous energy before asking him to be still for a long time again. After it turned to the right time, we went inside to wait near the entrance but off to the side. I placed Tzapo into a down to make him comfortable as we waited out of the way.
He held it very well. There was a toddler who was VERY interested in him and the mother was diverting the kid well, but the little one did come close and was squeal-screaming loudly. Despite this, Tzapo was calm and didn't break his down until I released him. He heeled well through the venue and settled as the deaf chat began. He was very calm and relaxed, only getting up because we were moving tables to fit more people but easily re-settling without much input from me.
We left early as I am incredibly rusty on my ASL and I didn't want to stay so long I got severely anxious. So I scheduled the grooming appointment to give me a reason to leave early.
Groomers: Tzapo is not thrilled to go to the grooming salon. I don't know what happened prior to me getting him, but nail trimming is a severely stressful thing for him. As soon as he feels the pressure of the trimmer on his nail, he screams. The Dremel, however, he tolerated much better and has only gotten better with as we work with him on it. Today he did incredibly well and only tried to pull away on the final paw and didn't complain much when they resumes on that paw. The folks there all love him and are so kind with him. We've worked hard to reduce his stress around his nail care and it's really showing.
Heeling Outside: After we got home, I took Tzapo on a walk. I wanted to work off the last bit of bad energy with the groomer being a five minute drive away. So we did a short walk and his heeling was really nice and easy. He had a good time doing the short jaunt and I was pleased to see how easily he's falling back into heeling after a high level distraction, like sighting a squirrel moving fast. I took only a short video since I was so shaky, but it still shows his easy heeling outside with me - even after such a long day! So his stamina is getting better too 💙
you're really fun to see across my dash and i dig your threads, you're very verbose and you get across your characters certain...energy
@starburdened
❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ you're so wholesome & sweet, your blog is one of my top favorites!! bless you
@ccjoh
hi i love your oc sm and with how long I have been following, I've been seeing growth from Vesna (no pun intended but take that as you will tbh) but how you write her and how good she feels as an actual oc? top tier. Would follow all over all of my blogs 10000/10.
//Bless bless bless you<3<3<3
I can not say how happy you all make me so I want to say thank you for all or you and I hope to make better content here
