Warmth In The Cold

I want a story about a king whose son is prophesied to kill him so the king is like “whatever what am I supposed to do, kill my own kid wtf is wrong with you” so he just raises him as normal, doesn’t even tell him about the prophecy, and instead of some convoluted twist of events that leads to the king’s murder the son grows up and when the king is very old and dying and in excruciating pain the kid is just like alright I'mma put him out of his misery.

5 simple exercises to awaken dormant muscles

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English added by me :)

Eye doctor of a different kind

Wants to make his patient blind

The doctor says three sips a day

will make the visions go away

Fussy eater baby Bill

Wouldn't drink unless it's silly

Rock a bye Billy

Please don't you cry

It's not your fault

you have that strange eye

Stay safe with Mommy

You'll never fall

And we'll always love you

Sharp angles and all

"Why did you do it?"

"Sixer, it would eat you alive."

Look man, I don't know. There are a lot of fascist fuckwits trying their best to ruin everything for everyone right now. There have often been a lot of fascist fuckwits trying to ruin everything for everyone. Not to downplay the pain and trauma we're all feeling at having to struggle through this particular go-round when the future looks especially dark, but it's not exactly a new thing in human history. Alas.

There are still many, many people telling the fascist fuckwits to eat shit. There are still long green spring evenings and slow golden summer afternoons and winter nights and autumn leaves. There are still coffee shops and weird little bookstores and small businesses on sidewalks lined with flowered trees. There are still sunrises and sunsets and blue skies and ocean shores and mountains. Oh yes, there are still mountains, which I have an especial fondness for. High up there in thin air, you can see forever.

There are still Gay People In Your Phone and texts and in-jokes. There are your blorbos. There is still fic and fanart. There are still books and music and games and art. There is a lot of art. Even with the AI beast trying to gobble and commercialize everything, there's still art! There are still people who think using your own brain to do things is important! There are still universities and publishing houses and other places where it's our job to think about things that matter!

There is still work that feels fulfilling to do. There are still constant little moments of quiet and beauty and rest. There are still jaw-dropping pictures of nebulae and galaxies and the great immensity of space, as we continue to learn things we never knew before. And amid all those stars, there is still a tiny, beautiful, and vulnerable blue planet which we only get to live on for a very short time, and there are still kids who are counting on us to make sure they get to inherit it in some kind of recognizable form. There is still the weird fact that when you give someone a hug and sit with them for a while and tell them over and over that it will be okay, it actually feels like it might be okay. I think that all means something.

Doomerism is really easy right now. I get it. I honestly 100% do. But I also don't see any point whatsoever in throwing up our hands and letting said fascist fuckwits gleefully terrify us into submission and make us live in fear and act like they're the Actual Meaning of the World (they are not). They suck so incredibly hard, but they're also so small and so stupid and so ultimately insignificant. They will not define this particular moment if we don't let them, and if we stick around to make sure they don't. Fuck 'em. I believe in you.

Courage, etc.

There was a young man from Peru

Whose limericks stopped at line two

At Voxtek, we strive for nothing less than perfection ~

Or something something about feeling inadequate (totally not projecting)

I don’t think any movie will make me feel the same ethereal sense of otherworldly sorrow and disembodied awe as that scene in Lord of the Rings where the loyal son is sent off into a doomed battle to please his vindictive father while Pippin sings a mourning song of his people

I was like 12 and high off this shit

(THE BOOK OF BILL SPOILERS!!)

Thinking about Bill’s appearance at the end of the book…

[ID: BIll when confronting the Axolotl. He is shown in white silhouette, hovering in space, hovering neutrally. Notably, he has a massive crack running through his body, splitting him into multiple pieces, some of which are coming apart. /end ID]

When confronting the Axolotl, Bill is broken. The Axolotl even notes this: "Shattered, broken, not yet dead."

(Which, side note, makes me think Bill might have been lying about having been "kicked out of Hell," if he didn't actually die in Stan's head.)

[ID: Three pictures of Bill in the Theraprism. The first one shows him holding his hand against the side of his head in a dazed expression, sitting in a chair in a white padded room between a wizard with a clock for a face and Saturn (taken directly from the painting Saturn Devouring His Son). The second is a camera recording of him wearing an orange jumpsuit and kneeling in a cell, surrounded by arts and crafts tools, holding a pair of scissors, and beaming his thoughts frantically into a book. The third shows a mugshot of him staring blankly into the camera, his own name written on coded text below him. In all three images, he has a glowing scar where the cracks were, and is in one piece. /end ID]

When he's shown in the Theraprism, we see a glowing, static-y scar where the cracks were. The scar crosses his entire body (and even crosses to the other side of his eye without affecting it!), but he's actually whole, keeping himself together.

But then...

[ID: Two pictures of Bill from the last pages of the book. In the first one he is facing forward and holding up one finger, his eye reddened, his entire form glitching, and his crack is notably worse than prior, cracking through his eye, multiple smaller pieces drifting away. In the second one he is staring blankly at the viewer, his arms hanging limply, his eye wide and blank, the crack worse than the previous image, with more pieces floating away. /end ID]

In the last few pages, we see the scar is gone and the cracks are back, and even more of him is breaking away, including parts of his eye. It's especially bad in the last image, with even more pieces of him breaking away.

Also noteworthy is that the static texture behind him seems to be the same as the blood sample the US government took from him in the 1940s. He's bleeding.

We know from context that these images are meant to be taken somewhat chronologically. After dying (or nearly dying), Bill seeks out the Axolotl, who sends him to the Theraprism. While there, he writes the journal that he's beaming to us. The staff at the Theraprism catch onto this, and allow him to write out the last few pages, meaning those last few pages are chronologically the last of Bill we see.

This means that, after the events of the show, Bill was shattered... and then, upon entering the Theraprism, started to heal, his body coming together and scars forming... but at some point afterward, he started breaking apart again.

I'd made a post previously about Bill's development, how he views himself as a monster after the Euclidian Disaster, and how he continues to act monstrous afterward (and winds up agonizingly lonely as a result). I didn't really touch on this in the post, but I feel like after inadvertently destroying his home dimension...

Bill never left the denial phase of grief.

I could be wrong on this, but I get the feeling that part of his reason for acting monstrous toward just about everybody is because he sees himself as a monster, because "this is just how I am" is easier to accept than "I really really screwed up."

Bringing this back to his shattering... It's interesting to me that after entering the Theraprism, his body is scarring, which means it is healing. But then, at the end, as he's signing off the book, he's shattered again, and looking even worse than he did when talking to the Axolotl. When talking this over with a friend, they pointed out something that struck me:

Bill does not want to heal.

Healing means having to actually think through what happened. It means having to confront his past, confront destroying his home dimension, confront the harm he caused to others, confront the fact that he did not have to be this way.

And he refuses to do that.

He refuses to heal.