What Strength Really Means 💪

the two types of billford content

and another thing i really like about bill is just how truly horrific his life on euclidea must have been. not for the social isolation and bullying and medical abuse, but for the cosmic horror of it.

imagine spending your entire life lying on your back, pinned to the earth below you, and knowing that that is your position. everyone else around you believes their world is whole and complete and perfect but you know. you know there is an Up, you can conceptualize a Below, you can understand an Around. and because there are parts of reality those around you cannot see you become keenly aware that there are parts of reality you cannot see.

you know there could be horrors lurking just outside your visual field, things that can see you but you can't see back. just like the lights that are Up shine down on you but no one can see their light. how terrifying, not knowing what threats may lurk and being aware of that ignorance.

i was thinking about it it yesterday and it struck me as very gerald's game in a way, trapped in one position and know there is More but unable to access it, and how the mind erodes due to the what ifs.

i've always thought of the euclidean massacre as starting with bill acting in self-defense, finally backed too far into a corner, his final stand, he will be abused this far no further.

but what if he wasn't lying when he said he liberated them. what if the what ifs became too big and he snapped, realized he couldn't let his people keep living as sitting ducks in ignorant bliss.

what if bill saw something that terrified him.

we know from journal 3 what its like when 3d beings interact with the 2d world. what if bill saw something he really by all accounts shouldn't have.

i don't know. just the thought of being stuck on my back and seeing the vastness of the room and the world around me and imaging both the beauty and the horrors beyond that is enough to make me shudder. i think it's fun

girl's night!!

+ bonus

(here's a follow-up post^^ thanks for all the notes everyone!!!)

It is done (enough)!

I would hype it up more but this is really really simple. It randomly generates a set of symbols, colors, and a word, and then the expected thing to do with those is you draw some sort of character based off the result you get. So it's just an art challenge toy thingy.

There are also some practical features like you can lock parts of the result in place to rerandomize the rest, or hide parts of the generation you don't care about (like if you want to pick your own colors or hate the words being there)

You can try it out over on itch.io!

It should run in browser, but there's also a downloadable version for Windows if you want to use it offline. (No mac/linux versions for now, because I don't have appropriate computers to test those on and I...don't want to deal with mac's developer accounts or whatever their problem is...)

Here's something I made from one of the results I got for the sake of example:

(It's a bit of a rushed drawing sorry I just wanted to get the actual generator out there)

I hope everyone has fun with it :]

It's so funny being a shipper when you're aroace it's like you're an anthropologist, like hey fictional blorbos who live in my head let me study your bonds under a microscope and take notes on what happens when I throw Valentines Day into your enclosure

They got tired of the drama and eloped... together...

What is my guild bro😭

a long list of regrets

I think the best way to explain why I like billford is that I like the canonical implications of their fucked up relationship ya know? Like I don’t want them to be a couple or have been a couple I want to pick their brains apart and study their relationship under a microscope.

I don’t ship them the way that I ship dipcifica, it’s the fact that they canonically have this history of obsession and manipulation and hatred that’s so interesting. Bill used his charm to take advantage of ford, the social outcast desperate for validation, and ford fell for every bit of that praise and did whatever bill wanted to get more for years. It’s such an interesting fucked up relationship whether you think they had a thing or not.

It’s also funny that bill canonically got blackout drunk when ford said he didn’t wanna be partners anymore

award-winning palestinian children's illustrator baraa awoor writes:

"what use is it to be an illustrator of children's books when the world has sentenced the children of your country to the death penalty, to vanish, to genocide?"

some of baraa's illustrations:

this is an illustration for youssef, whose mother is remembered running desperately into the hospital asking if anyone had seen a "small white boy with beautiful curly hair, his name is youssef," a description which was remembered by millions when she finally identified his body:

this illustration is for young omar, who was hugging his little brother and teaching him how to repeat the shahada after him (a prayer spoken by muslims before their death) as he lay on his hospital bed:

"we want a new year that doesn't kill us or our children, we want it a year without blood, without screaming, without pain, we want a new attempt to get our lives back, or something that resembled our life, even if life is a lie we still cling to it, return life to us—a new year's card unlike any other year:"