#Chell's Mind | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

prinnamon · 1 month

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notes on Chell's Mind (CyhAnide)! linked a playlist since this is one of the trickier ones to find, given that all the videos are unlisted. i'm not too worried about archival since they're on Internet Archive and Cyh, as of two years ago, seems to have no intention of ever taking them down/making them private. however, it does seem like the two bloopers episodes are probably lost for good! too bad.

by the way, outside this post, i'm probably going to refer to this series' protagonist as CyhChell instead of something like ChellMind because there were/are lots of other Chell's Mind series! i plan on at least watching the one by Rychotech eventually. CyhChell is the one elevated to the status of "mindverse canon" by other mind series creators, but that doesn't mean others' efforts aren't worth appreciating :3

keep in mind that Cyh wrote and produced this series before the release of Portal 2! as such, there are ways in which Chell's Mind might not be canon-compliant. feel free to point them out in a reblog. i'm not very well-versed in portal lore yet!

EPISODE 00

Chell wakes up and isn't feeling or breathing so good! instinctively searches her brain to attribute it to having drank something the night before.

pleased with the additional jump height granted to her by the advanced knee replacement prostheses.

wants some coffee…

recalls having answered a questionnaire of some kind. cuts herself off before elaborating.

when she hears that the particle field will vaporize the box, she immediately picks it back up. she wants to see that. she specifically uses the word "torture." she wants to do HARM to this inanimate object and while she does so she wants to pretend it can feel pain

it tingles to walk through the Aperture Science Material Emancipation Grill! feels like static electricity.

heavily critical of all the issues (shaky elevators, suspicious floor stains) in this "nice, new" facility supposedly worth billions

“i wanna go home”

12 is a good number. she feels this way because people have told her 12 is a good number.

creeped out by the cameras at first but then starts sorta playing with them and baby-talking them

VERY nervous at the prospect of losing a limb to a badly-timed portal closure

freaked out by GLaDOS's remark about "prolonged exposure to the button." gets away from it as fast as possible. when she's out of the perceived danger, she quickly realizes it sounds like bullshit and probably isn't dangerous

complains about the use of the word "emancipation." unnecessarily long and complicated word to use when a shorter/simpler one would work just fine, she thinks.

despite her distaste for it, she gets the word “emancipation” stuck in her head after GLaDOS describes the Emancipation Grill. uses “emancipate”/”emancipation” repeatedly after this.

feels completely fine until GLaDOS suggests that the Emancipation Grill sometimes emancipates teeth. then she suddenly panics and says she can taste metal. i'm getting the sense that it is very easy to get CyhChel riled up.

thinks the portal gun is AWESOME. very excited to have it.

“i wanna go home"… 2!

prefers blue (portals, but also the color in general) over orange (portals, but also the color in general)

says she has a "bad hair day" every day. doesn't like her hair i guess :(

wants to hold onto the gun. worried the emancipation grill will take it. elated when it turns out she gets to keep it

very hungry. can't remember when she last ate.

wants more oxygen? i guess she still feels like she's having trouble breathing.

EPISODE 01

ever-present desires: food, coffee, soda, companionship, and to go home

calls the portal gun her only friend in this place. immediately starts trying to think of a name for it other than Aperture Handheld Portal Device/ASHPD.

considers the name Sebastian (Sebby or S-Diddy for short); considers the name Quirinus (she loves the letter Q); tries to think of a good anagram of the letters ASHPD (Shapd, Shpad, Dash-P, or P-Dash)

tells GLaDOS to shut up, she's busy talking to her friend the portal gun.

settles on the name ASHPoD. thinks that makes it sound like "a vegetable or an alien"

starts appealing to "Miss Computer Lady" for something to eat or drink

apparently missing lots of memories/context, which she attributes to a lack of oxygen earlier. anyway, she cannot for the life of her remember anything about GLaDOS the computer's name other than that it starts with a G

her deep hatred of storage cubes continues. she wants to vaporize them soooo bad.

starts to pick up on GLaDOS's passive-aggression and dishonesty

"I wonder which unforgivable ass-hat decided to put me in a pure oxygen environment, anyway. Sure, it was probably so that my knee replacements healed faster, and I could get on with the testing, but still….Well, okay, there was some nitrogen, but no NOS. The least they could have done was give me laughing gas. Then suffocation wouldn't have felt so terrible." ✍️ This will be important later!

remembers that meatloaf is bad. doesn't remember eating meatloaf; just remembers knowing that it's bad.

claims to have signed up for this test. can't remember why she did, but she seems sure she's here voluntarily.

says that it was between Black Mesa and Aperture, and Aperture was offering more money (for what? you’ll see.)

considers briefly that her mom might have put her up to this. it's too hard to remember, so she quits trying.

"i feel like i've never ever eaten anything in my entire life, which is freaking me out."✍️ This will be important later! but that aside, this is real. sometimes you get so hungry you get Scared

smugly suggests Black Mesa is better funded and more advanced than Aperture

incredibly attached to ASHPoD. says they'll be best friends forever even if they can't hug or have staring contests or go to the beach

pronounces her name with a soft "ch" like she’s saying the word “shell”! (in the comments of one of the episodes, Cyh confirms the name is short for Michelle, so that would be why.)

remembers her name! and… not her hometown! wow, yeah, okay her amnesia in this is far greater than i was expecting! and she's handling not being able to remember key details of her life incredibly well.

shares the freeman brothers' trait of being easily hypnotized. she loves swirling ball of light.

"all i remember is taking that test, then being told that they'd fix my legs, then going out to party, then waking up in here and suffocating." JESUS. OKAY. so CyhChell's reason for being here is coming back to her. i'm wondering,,, was this a popular theory pre-Portal 2? that Chell was lured to Aperture for testing under the guise of it just being for experimental knee surgery? or was this just a Cyh original??? like, i recognize “Chell was visiting the facility because a relative worked there and she got kidnapped” is not exactly good, but damn!

uh. anyway! she's finally circled back to the questionnaire she interrupted herself about in episode 00. apparently it asked for her favorite color at two different points and then accused her of lying when her answer changed from one shade of red to another. that's a reference to the Enrichment Center Test Subject Application Process from the now-defunct Aperture Science website! check out an archive of all the questions here on Combine OverWiki!

Chell's answers, by the way, were crimson and sangria.

"Kill me now. Death sounds awesome at this point."

slur count: 1

notices and calls out the fact that there's no scientists in the observation rooms.

thinks GLaDOS's voice might be a figment of her imagination.

fun chellism: "son of a one-eyed prairie dog"

"i wanna go home"… 3! (there was a "can i go home?" earlier as well)

one of her teeth is emancipated after the seventh test. oopsie.

EPISODE 02

slur count: 2

really broken up about the lost tooth. demands medical supplies from GLaDOS (or, if she plans to just continue emancipating all Chell's teeth, to at least prepare some soft foods for her to eat once she's no longer able to chew).

begins threatening to kill GLaDOS in various creative ways

would "slaughter a man with [her] bare hands for a Mountain Dew right about now." *excitedly tabs over to the mindverse character soda preferences spreadsheet once again*

thinks briefly about drinking the sludge.

chell "not a fan of long and complicated words when a shorter/simpler one would work just fine" lastname is certainly having fun saying "emancipated" and "accursed" (accursed? as in farms???) and "egads!" and "mucosa" this episode.

claims that smelling the acid in this room is "worse than being trapped in an unventilated room after spraying an entire bottle of tilex on every wall and rubbing my face in it! which i have never done. not even when i was drunk….okay, maybe once. when drunk. but my friends told me to do it"

sings "mary had a little lamb" in japanese in the elevator to amuse herself. she loves japanese :]

FINALLY, an opportunity to vaporize a storage cube. she thoroughly enjoys it. she does a voice for it and pretends it's pleading for its life and then laughs maniacally as it is incinerated. she incinerates five cubes before deciding to do the actual puzzle

hasn't been promised food but is expecting it.

when GLaDOS says "quit now and cake will be served immediately," chell is ECSTATIC. like, she gets to stop doing this AND she gets food? exactly what she wanted.

black forest cake is her favorite type of cake.

realizes she's not getting cake and is very upset.

is going to call GLaDOS "HAL" now as a form of retribution and as a threat

"♪ mary had a little lamb. her father shot it dead. now it goes to school with her between two chunks of bread. ♪" why aren't we talking about this. can anyone hear me

EPISODE 03

notices signs of clawing/scratching on the elevator's padded walls. she says it looks "as though trapped individuals had once tried desperately to claw their way to freedom," but she seems not to believe that's actually the case.

going to call GLaDOS HAL "Hallie" now.

does a voice for ASHPoD. gives it a british accent and makes it address her as "madam." tells herself in its voice that she's going out of her mind

calls herself "short" and "a tiny person"! SHORT CHELL CONFIRMATION 🎉

finds the momentum puzzles significantly more enjoyable than everything that came before.

references Bleach, i think. i have not seen Bleach, i have no comment on this

hates physics. does NOT want a lesson on physics from GLaDOS "this early in the morning and prior to breakfast."

hearing an echoing whispered voice in her head! was just doing voices before but is legitimately hearing voices now.

the voice in her head claims to be CNN and ultimately leaves her alone because they "have to make sure [they] TiVo'd the game," prompting Chell to wonder, "Is there… TiVo… in my head?" and to request the voice also TiVo the show Fringe for her.

the voice does not like Fringe. for this offense, Chell dubs the voice "evil twin."

slur count: 3 (this one is said by evil twin)

so happy to get the second portal gun! "look, ASHPoD! it's your brother! let's hope he's not evil, like my imaginary twin. she's no fun at all."

in response to this, evil twin says "seven days."

chell thinks the situation is bad but not as bad as it could be

RED VS BLUE REFERENCE. RVB FAN CHELL.

if this is an rvb season 3 situation, she's excited to meet her clones. she'd love a clone army

more emotionally attached to the left side of her body than to the right. would sell her right kidney for $30,000 in a heartbeat if given the opportunity

assumes the result would be catastrophic if two portals collided. something about black holes and dividing by zero

getting a blister from carrying ASHPoD everywhere. it's heavy!

preferred ice cream flavors are blueberry cheesecake and pistachio

dreaming about food… cuts herself off with "i'm shutting up before i kill myself."

wants to be a ninja someday

dancing excitedly while she watches herself in the portal, now that she can put both portals on either side of a tight hallway

EPISODE 04

bets Hallie the computer has a goatee, since evil people always have goatees and the computer is evil

"along with goatees, eyeliner is shorthand for demonic possession….perhaps the computer wears eyeliner as well?" she is designing a GLaDOS humansona inside her head the likes of which the world may not be ready for

mistakes a wall light for daylight. bummed that she can't escape through it.

has had monster movie marathons. considers that a type of survival training

the only disease she'd like to contract is Worseley's Supplement. (from the comments: according to Cyh, Worseley's Supplement is "an obscure reference from an even more obscure book, the title of which escapes me every time I try to recall it. Basically, it means you're incapable of judging amounts, including zero, which leaves you guessing like a crazy person.")

"if ebola made you psychic, i think i'd wanna catch it." Okay

aware she's immune to gravity but still skeeved out by heights

needed to fill out a birth date and death date for a report she was doing on Ross Perot, but he was still alive, so she asked her teacher if she could pick a random date in the future for the death date. "'no,' says my teacher. 'wouldn't you feel bad if he actually died on that day?'…and i smiled at him and replied flatly, 'i wouldn't feel bad, no! i'd feel powerful.'" i LOVE herrrrr, this is a great anecdote

evil twin returns. apparently real-life power outages affect the headspace TV, interrupting the game evil twin was watching.

slur count: 4

new voice in her head who makes exactly one appearance. the fortune-teller. "virgos with beards who are brushing their teeth will die today." unhelpful!

makes an infinite freefall setup for fun and enrichment! it stops being fun very quickly, and she falls for SEVERAL MILES according to a title card because she cannot figure out how to stop. very shaken and relieved when it's finally over

is sick of the cameras staring at her. wants it to stop.

realizes she can knock the camera off the wall with portals. fascinated. elated. agog.

"(in a silly voice) i need mountain dew before i kill again!!!" she is so thirsty let her sip

"then again, illusion is preferable to despair." if she was offered a drug that would let her mentally escape from this situation, she'd consider taking it.

decides it's a good time to start plotting world destruction

references yu-gi-oh

"i've come to the conclusion that life is a game. my life, specifically. however, every game has its cheats." oh that's a good line

references sonic the hedgehog

she has retained the idea from earlier that the buttons emit dangerous radiation and that there are actual consequences for "prolonged exposure."

starts rambling about Erasmus and madness, seemingly trying to convince herself she "has every right to lose her mind. thoughts of terror and carnage are okay! they're totally okay because Erasmus says it's okay."

and now i have to interrupt the flow of this because this was the point when i decided to scroll down and read some of the comments on this video, and

[Start ID. A YouTube comment by @/CyhAnide from 14 years ago. It reads:

@/Whackjood: She's not starving or malnourished. She's just never eaten food, which causes the sensation of hunger. Because she's a clone. GLaDOS kept her in stasis in the relaxation vault prior to testing. Health-wise, she's theoretically perfect, since that's how GLaDOS operates.

End ID.]

and i didn't find this one until later, but here's a comment on a different episode along the same lines:

[Start ID. A YouTube comment by @/CyhAnide from 14 years ago. It reads:

@/MaxOfS2D: Unfortunately, none of that was ever confirmed by VALVe. Ergo, I can decide her story. They neglected to give Chell a background for the purpose of letting players choose what her past might be. There are also theories that she's Cave Johnson's daughter, a clone of a test subject from before GLaDOS was commissioned, she's actually an android, etc.... I don't like the idea of her getting caught on bring your daughter to work day, so I went the route that brings Black Mesa to the fore.

End ID.]

wowowowowow. that was a bombshell to just suddenly discover! the canon is that the CyhChell we follow through this series is a clone! so... whatever happened to CyhChell Prime? maybe she just came in, answered a questionnaire, had some of her DNA taken, and then got sent home with a check. i hope she at least got the knee surgery she was promised before being sent home. how many Chells came before the protagonist? what number is she? (twelve is a good number. or, so she's heard.)

huh. man. anyway..! after processing some of the implications of this, i went ahead and moved onto the last installments of the series.

EPISODE 05 (PART 1)

it's a weight off her shoulders to let go of the idea that she has to stay "sane."

remembers what it's like to rip your nails to shreds in a cheese grater obsessively trying to grate the last bits of cheese. sanity is a cheese grater

still believes the situation could be worse!

goes back to bargaining with GLaDOS instead of threatening her. "condition me to respond favorably by giving me things! preferably expensive things."

"I Lost You (Through a Portal to Hell)" is playing from an inaccessible radio in test chamber 14.

seems to believe portal guns will eventually be mass-produced. ("ASHPoD, you're gonna make people very lazy one day.")

undershoots a jump and slams into a wall.

hates mosquitoes.

can't remember speaking to anyone at Aperture since getting here. (so who administered your questionnaire, silly?)

she'd like it if someone was around to comfort her. anyone. she'd take an evil/creepy mad scientist.

vaporizes another cube for fun.

hates Valentine's Day.

wants a nap. mmm. elevator naptime.

EPISODE 05 (PART 2)

never mind about naptime, she gets up literally as soon as the elevator ride ends.

fun chellism: "oh, for the love of waffles"

reacts to GLaDOS's comment about complimentary grief counseling. "who's gonna be grieving? am i? will you be taking ASHPoD from me? or will ASHPoD be the one grieving? 😰"

"cripes, i throw like a girl. …wait, i am a girl." feels transgender in some direction

vaporizes one of the cameras.

"I Lost You (Through a Portal to Hell)" is playing from another radio. it seems inaccessible, but chell grabs it!! now that she can hear the song better, she likes it. she enjoys rock music.

trying to figure out a way to get the radio past the emancipation grill. "now that i've attained music, i can't imagine being without it. the silence was killing me inside."

"maybe i can hide [the radio] in my jumpsuit? uh… no. that won't fit. if my boobs were smaller, then we wouldn't have this problem, would we?" finally,,, a tiny bit of evidence i can point to for my transmasc/bigender CyhChell theory (wishes her boobs were smaller... just like me...)

hears the song say "portal to Hell" and gets so freaked out she vaporizes the radio. so much for music. and it makes a VERY unpleasant sound while being destroyed (she describes it later as "the radio that shrieks in pain") which hurts her ears

"portal…able… areas….por-tal-able. portable? portal-able?" can't find an easy adjective for "able to have a portal placed upon it."

doesn't understand trigonometry. feels that understanding trigonometry would make this easier.

oh, and she's been calling the high energy pellets "superballs" for a while. forgot to note it whenever it started.

"lucky for me, fortune favors the psychologically deviant."

doesn't like the phrase "more quickly." prefers her version: "quickler."

wants to get wasted at a bar after all this is over.

plans to take a nap in THIS elevator.

hears the elevator playing music for her and then talking to her (it's the voice of ian riley! yay!)

the mind series fandom wiki led me to believe that the series had been silently canceled, and that was true for a long time, but two years ago Cyh actually left a comment under episode 05 (part 2) which provided some closure!

[Start ID. An edited YouTube comment by @/CyhAnide from 2 years ago. It reads:

So. Now that pinned comments are a thing, allow me to answer some frequently asked questions... (WARNING: TEXT WALL AHEAD.) Q) Next episode when? A) Never. I'm sorry, but I'm not planning on continuing this series. Mostly because it's so old? And because I can't guarantee that I would finish it even if I did start it up again--which wouldn't be fair to the ten or twenty people who actually want it to go on. The YouTube environment is exhausting on the mental health, people. For cereal. And my channel a decade ago was nothing compared to some of today's numbers! Goodness, it even tore SBFP apart. How does Pewds survive? Q) What you up to? A) Life is going swimmingly~! I'm almost always on YouTube, but as a viewer only. You're most likely to spot me commenting on random spookytube/mysterytube videos. Also, the creator of Barney's Mind and I got married! Been together since the heyday of the MasterMinds, actually. No kids yet, but we do have an African Grey who is stealing my voice. Q) You gonna delete your videos??? D: A) Nope. At least, not all. I've made the bloopers and some of the extraneous stuff private because they're either purposeless or bothered me in some way, but I plan to leave the Chell's Mind main series up for the foreseeable future. They will be unlisted; however, I'm keeping the playlist front and center on my channel page. The reason for this is simple: I don't want them on the algorithm anymore, mostly because it only brings more people to the channel who are doomed to disappointment. To those who attach nostalgia to my series, however, I'm leaving the playlist of unlisted episodes up just for you. :D I'm sure various wiki links or whatever should also still be able to find them that way. Also, YouTube now monetizes EVERYTHING, and I don't want to contribute. =_= My videos were ad-free from birth, darn it. Conclusion: Anyway, I apologize for...ELEVEN YEARS OF SILENCE???? You all probably don't know or care, but I'm honestly kind of atrocious at keeping up with social interaction of any flavor. I'm basically the personification of every "sorry I vanished for three months" meme. Except I can vanish for years at a time without feeling pressured to return. As demonstrated by this channel. I don't even own a smart phone. Because I'd rid myself of its [ping! ping! ping!] presence within a week. XD Still, I'm happy that some of you still look back on this series and smile. It was immature at times--and probably even horribly non-PC by today's standards--but still, it's nice to know that I managed to entertain a few of you, at least a little bit. ^_^ Much love, my friends, and thank you. I hope that all my viewers, new and old, go on to lead happy, peaceful lives. =_= ~*(cyh)*

End ID.]

i think i got a little deeper into finding extra facts about one than i did for the others, but the series definitely deserved it! plus, it was short, so i could afford spending a little more time with it. although i started and finished the series and my notes for it yesterday, i took today to scroll through the comments on each video, looking for any more bombshells like "canon clone cyhchell" which i might have missed. none so earth-shattering as that, but i'll share some of my finds (in a reblog since this post is getting very long)!

#prinna's posts #prinna's machinima notes #suicidal thoughts #ask to tag #chell's mind #chells mind #chell's mind (cyhanide)#chells mind (cyhanide)#cyhchell #cyhchell's mind #chychells mind #mindverse

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