#researcher-serif

[striderl]

(A lil late on my end but hope you like it! Enjoy your cake with minimal cream! Don’t mind the bits of the 4th Dimension decorating the cake tho, it makes it so it caters the consumer to their preferred tastes better kekek!)

Thanks for the birthday wishes! And the awesome art!

Also, I tend to be a tad bit messy when it comes to chocolate cake...

Yeah, happy 19th B-day to me🎉🎉🎉

Thank y'all for the support🤟🏻

[cosmica-galaxy]

-- And here's the last entry from our local menace, @researcher-serif and @cat-and-fox-hub! I feel so bad for this poor drill mimic, he has to raise two babies on his own after his mate died! But at least the human found him and they can help him raise his two youngins!! <: )

[lensman-arms-race]

Oh my goodness. For months I have had first 1, then 2, then 3 'ghost' asks in my Tumblr inbox: Tumblr displayed the number of asks but not the asks themselves, so I assumed it was a glitch. Today, Tumblr randomly allowed me to see them! All this time @researcher-serif had sent me nice messages and I hadn't seen or been able to reply to them! I must have looked like such an ungrateful cow! (As far as I'm aware, neither of us accidentally blocked the other, because we've been able to see and interact with each other's posts. There will be some stupid-ass edge case that Tumblr's spaghetti code tripped over, I'm sure.)

These are so nice! Thank you Serif! 💞

[stargazer4501]

Dusttale: Revived | Research Notes for PERSEVERANCE

[valeriehalla]

I have gotten a lot of messages saying that they really love the presentation of CURSE/KISS/CUTE. Often the commenter in question can’t say what exactly it is about the formatting that they appreciate, but that it just reads well and looks good. Well!!! Allow me to bare my wealth of secret knowledge for you once and for all:

I sorta just did some research into book typography...?

Here’s something you should know about web development, alright: typography on the web is really, really bad. The tools we have at our disposal—HTML and CSS—are incredibly powerful, but they are set up to fight you every step of the way towards Good Typography. When you know what you’re looking for, you can fix all the common issues quickly and easily. But it’s not easy to know what to look for, because

problematic typography is overwhelmingly the norm on the web, and

good typography is invisible.

Here’s a screenshot from CURSE/KISS/CUTE episode 0:

Now, I don’t want this post to come across as prescriptive. It is not my intention to tell you, “This is what good typography looks like, so follow my lead exactly.” I made a lot of choices with the typography of my web novel: many of those choices would not make sense in other contexts. What I want to convey to you is what those choices are, so that you will know they’re available to be made.

I mentioned that the web “fights you” when it comes to good typography. What do I mean by that? Well, check this out:

This is how that passage of text renders “by default.” In other words, this is how a web browser would render that text without any input from me about what styles to apply. It kind of sucks ass! But it also looks pretty familiar, right? This is not that far off from how a lot of websites—even websites full of prose (looking at you, AO3)—render text.

I think the most illustrative thing to do here would be to walk you through my thought process and show you, step by step, what decisions I made to turn this unstyled text into the styled version you see in the novel.

So, first things first:

1. We have got to shrink that text column.

Computer monitors... are wide. They are wider than they are tall. They are so wide, and they have so many pixels. This means you can fit a lot of characters on them. If you wanted, you could just have a wall of characters from the left side of the screen all the way to the right side. Talk about efficient!!

You should never, ever, ever do this.

This is one choice that I actually will make a prescriptive statement about, because it’s supported by quite a lot of research: fairly narrow text columns are more legible. Specifically, research seems to support the idea that a width in the range of 50 to 70 characters per line is the most comfortable for people to read*. Every font is different, so it takes a little doing to turn that “characters” figure into a pixel measurement; I went with 512 CSS pixels for the maximum width of my text column:

Isn’t that just so much nicer to read already?

*A commenter reminds me that I’d be remiss not to point out that the research on column width legibility isn’t completely conclusive. You do want to limit the width of your text columns, but going over the 70 character-per-line recommendation isn’t necessarily the end of the world, and you might have good reasons to do so. I did not: as mentioned, one of my goals was to mimic book-style typography, and books by nature have fairly restrained column widths, on account of they’re books.

2. Picking a font.

I’m not going to give you the blow-by-blow on how I decided what font to use. The short story is that I asked some designers, and one of the recommendations I got was the free font Crimson Pro, which I took a liking to immediately:

It’s just an all-around attractive serif font, but one thing I really like about it for use in a novel is its highly-visible quotation marks. They’re just kinda jumbo! They’re real big! Easy to see! In a novel, those things aren’t just ornamentation. It makes a great deal of practical sense for them to stand out just a bit. It also has a fairly large x-height, unlike a lot of the more traditional options, which is good for legibility on a computer screen.

3. Adjusting the line-height

Web browsers default to a line-height of about 1.2em, which, as you can probably tell, is quite cramped. If you go and Google “optimal line height for legibility”, you’ll get a number of results right off the bat suggesting 1.5em. Sounds good! Let’s do that:

Well... hmm. That’s definitely an improvement, but between you and me, it actually looks a bit too spacey to my eyes. I wonder why?

I’ll cut to the chase: the 1.5em recommendation makes some assumptions about the font you’re using. In Arial, the letter “A” is about 0.6em tall; in Crimson Pro, it’s about 0.5em. That means that there’s no one-size-fits-all solution to spacing your lines, because different fonts have different amounts of empty space baked in. How annoying!

Let me tell you something about the kind of nerd I am. When I had this realization, I grabbed some books off my shelf and pulled out a literal micrometer. I started measuring the line-heights against various font features to see if there were any patterns I could spot in professional typesetting. Here’s what I found:

Almost every book on my shelf spaces lines such that the distance between one baseline and the next is about three times the x-height. How cool is that? I clapped my hands like a seal when I put this together.

Adjusting the line-height to match what I observed in the wild gives us this:

It’s a subtle difference, but to my eyes it feels just right. It’s almost like magic!

4. Paragraph spacing...

Let’s address the elephant in the room. Probably the most controversial choice I made with CURSE/KISS/CUTE’s typography was to opt for book-style paragraph indentation rather than web-style paragraph spacing—like so:

I did this for a few reasons:

It’s what I’m used to. I’ve read a lot of books, and this is just the way that books are formatted. I think for something aspiring to the title of “novel”, there’s value in making it look the way a reader probably expects a novel to look.

A novel has a lot of paragraph breaks in it. A paragraph in, say, an encyclopedia entry might go on for half a page or more; whereas it is unusual for a paragraph in a modern work of narrative prose to run for more than a handful of sentences, especially in any scene with dialogue. Because paragraph breaks are so common, spacing between paragraphs in a novel results in a lot of wasted space. Also, subjectively speaking, the additional space seems to me to lend an undue amount of weight to paragraph breaks. I’m just starting a new thought; there’s no need for a 21-gun salute, you know?

Having said that, here are some good reasons you might decide not to do paragraph indentation anyway:

Doing it right requires a bit of extra legwork. Notice how the very first paragraph in the image above has no indentation. That’s because it’s the start of a new section, and the first paragraph in a section traditionally goes unindented. This is an easy detail to miss, and it can be difficult to wrangle CSS into doing it for you automatically.

Web users don’t expect it. For the first decade of the web’s existence, there was no good way to do paragraph indentation; by the time CSS rolled around and made it easy, paragraph spacing had already become the norm. And while CURSE/KISS/CUTE may be a novel, it is also, specifically, a web novel!

But it’s my house and I get to make the rules, so I went with indentation. Incidentally, there seems to be a dire lack of research into the question of whether indentation or spacing is more legible for readers—but the data that does exist appears inconclusive at best. So, the choice really does come down to vibes.

5. The tragedy of justification.

You’ll note that one way in which I did not make my web novel look like a paper novel is the text alignment. It’s un-justified: the right margin is ripsaw-ragged.

This is because it is not possible to justify text on the web.

Oh, you can try. Look right here: there’s a CSS property for it and everything. Just turn on “text-align: justify” and...

Nightmare! The interword spacing on that first line is almost as wide as the indentation!

Reader, I’m afraid that your web browser is simply too dumb. That’s not the browser’s fault: robust algorithms for justifying text without creating these distractingly huge gaps between words have existed for many decades, and modern computers are powerful enough to run them in real time with little performance impact. It’s just, uh—nobody has ever bothered to implement them into web browsers. It is the damnedest thing.

I tried, I really did. You can mitigate this problem a bit if you enable automatic hyphenation, but browsers are unfortunately also kind of dumb at hyphenating. Firefox, for example, will refuse to hyphenate any word containing a capital letter, so any sentence with a lot of proper nouns in it is a lost cause. I tried manually inserting soft hyphens with a text preprocessor I wrote myself, but still these overjustified lines plagued me: when the text column narrows, for example on a phone, even hyphens can’t save you. The line-breaking algorithm is simply too naïve to optimize for well-justified text, and that’s not something you can fix as a web developer.

As a result, my heavy-hearted recommendation is to never use text justification. It’s just too distracting.

6. And then some extra stuff just for me

I added drop-caps because it looks neat and I made the ellipses spacier because I think it looks good when it, uh, when they are spacier. I think that looks pretty good that’s just my opinion though.

That’s all! Hope you learned something bye!!!

[lensman-arms-race]

Thank you for the ping - I love this! The art is so cute and the description so lovely, it makes me melt. 💜

For the Celtic basis, is he based on a selkie? They shed their 'coats' (their seal pelts) only for the human they love best.

Exclusive Night

Made by Cat, aka Researcher Serif/AW

A somber tune, a blessed night; his screen crackles softly as he sits, more than content with you asleep in his arms. Dear beloved, know that he will shed his coat for you and you alone. It's easy to forsake the sea of static lights if it meant staying by your side. (The love he holds for you spares no expense.)

Who doesn't wanna be cuddled by a large TV unit who cradles and holds you so warmly yet protectively like a precious treasure to be kept safe?

Just like every other OC I have, there's almost no introduction to my goobers as they just suddenly slide into your peripherals lol.

Anywaes for those that don't know, meet [L_TM-WF4335], aka, Gin! My quiet, most handsomest large TV boi!

Main things to know 'bout him is that his head tends to shift in model/type every so often, he always covers up one way or another, he loves his precious savior, you, deeply, and he'll never part with his coat if he can help it.

(You're the only exception. Beloved dearest, guiding star of his life.)

For those that know of my goober (lookin at u @lens-guy-art /silly), we got a lil puzzle for u. Gin is partially inspired by a Celtic being in its mythos, there's hints in the flavor text and here, what do u think it is? U get cookies if u rite!

Either wae, hope u enjoy this Jouice™ of ours!

(_ ˶^ ヮ^˶)/ ♬♪

(Also, psst! TV Enjoyer Extraordinaire™ @lensman-arms-race, mayhaps this beest something thou wouldst enjoy? /silly)

─────────────────────

Check out my main blog: @researcher-serif

Here's my NSFW blog if that tickles your fancy: @grandfather-of-sin

─────────────────────

[commandershepardvasfuckit]

Playing with handwriting!

Been so so so many years since I’ve thought about character handwriting, and I’m not really thrilled with these yet, but some beginning ideas on how the party might write!

Halsin: two types of writing (his notes vs things others will read). His note taking when he’s working on something is a terrible scrawl that really only he can read, but when writing a letter to someone or recording research for others he has a tidy cursive with minimal serifs or embellishments.

Karlach: all print all the time. At one point her handwriting was fairly good, and you can see she knows how to write properly by the way her letters slant (probably used to use cursive) but too many years without it and just not caring about it means a basic print now.

Astarion: fancy. Always a fancy cursive, and very ornate capitals, especially for his own name. He used to be a magistrate so would you expect anything else?

Wyll: a semi embellished cursive, not as ornate as Astarion’s, but as the son of a duke he knows proper lettering and like a simple but high impact cursive that can be read easily at a glance.

Gale: the largest capitals you’ve ever seen with the smallest lower cases possible. Like Halsin he’ll write in a quick scrawl when needed (still pretty tidy though) but for manuscripts, spell books, or love letters? Impractical writing.

Shadowheart: print/cursive hybrid. Fairly upright letters with curved points on ascenders and descenders. Meant for writing quickly and clearly over anything else.

Lae’zel: refuses to write in common. Hates the way it looks and all her letters slant to the left (vs to the right) because of how Tir’su script is written circularly. Lots of crossed out words and letters when she writes in common.

[clusterrune]

npd centered/safe blogs

[npd scentered/safe blogs]

active

@ndcultureis

@narcissisticpdcultureis

@enigma-in-reality

@loverofmirage

@npdemu

@npd--bakugou

@selfdxculture (last posted sept.)

@yourlocalnpd (last posted sept.)

@fixingantinpdableism (last posted aug.)

@narcissist-hoarding (our term hoard blog)

@npdfavs

@prideisforeveryonebutcops

@a-sip-of-milo

@narc0path

@nicepersondisorder

@edrecovery-space (we have not posted in a while but are still active)

@fantasy-store

@cpunkwitch

@your-fave-is-crippled

@vineyard-edits

@archival-arrival

@ego-est-ignis

@objectumluv

@butchcoining

@narcissism-awareness (last posted may)

@mischiefmanifold

@npders (last posted aug.)

@queersrus

@apparentlysubhuman

@sapphic-horror

@your-npd-meme-plug (last posted july)

@puffl3m0n / @acetrappolaswife

@pyrocultureis

@hauntedselves

@empath-abuse-awareness

@citrine-rabbit

@narcissists-true-crime (last posted nov)

@kodiescove

@foolishnpd

@nahmanidontwantto

@alphabet-mafia-collective

@duckduckgoose-exe

@npd-haver

@zombie-dyke

@indifferentvincent

archives

@npdarchive

@npddoll

[inactive blogs moved to new list] here(link)

if any blogs would like to be added or removed please let us know! same goes for any blogs you may have/know that arent on the list and you think should be added.

does not have to be a blog specifically for npd content but at least safe for those with npd.

i would also prefer to include blogs that are screen reader and dyslexic friendly. ie no non-sans serif fonts or coloured text and/or at least includes plane text. as well as blogs that are pro-(researched) selfdx.

[aspd, bpd and hpd bloglists coming soon]

id's in alt text.

[lenetaylor]

That time Paul McCartney stole a London street sign (probably)

Whilst perusing this photo set, my attention was caught by the street sign in the background, fixed to the wall:

The sign says Wellington Road NW; this road runs parallel to Cavendish Ave.

So at first I thought he and Heather were somewhere out on Wellington Road, but this didn't make sense: there are no places to swim (except the canal at the southeast end of Wellington, but, gross), and anyway Heather's wearing a nightgown. But as I looked more closely, I realized the photos were actually taken (by Linda, I assume, perhaps in 1969) the backyard of his house at Cavendish. The crappy paving stones and the multicolor brick wall match other photos at roughly the same time:

Note also the railing and steps, which match the fifth photo of Paul with his leg up.

But where did the sign come from?

These street signs were and are ubiquitous in Westminster. The original signs (installed in the 1950s) are cast iron and use the Crown Estate’s gilted crown emblem and relief lettering in a serif font. They look like this (note the Cavendish Place sign in this lot!):

In 1967, they started replacing them with a new style of sign, designed by Sir Misha Black. From this article:

If you ask most people what the typical London street sign looks like, they will probably describe something that looks very like the classic Westminster design: white enamel with neat black lettering and the postal district in red, then the name of borough in red across the bottom, all in sans serif. This classic and copyrighted design – many genuine examples of which are currently being auctioned online by Catherine Southon Auctioneers – feels historic but was in fact conceived as recently as 1967 by Misha Black’s Design Research Unit. Black was commissioned by Westminster City Council to design a simple and striking template that would replace the existing anarchic street sign policy – which he did with great success.

Here's the new Wellington Road sign:

The old Wellington Road sign ended up in Paul's backyard sometime after 1967. I think he must have seen it on the side of the road and picked it up while he was walking around, or fished it out of a skip. Or maybe he straight up nicked it while they were doing the sign replacement. Who can say?

I'd love to know how long he kept it fixed to the wall.

In conclusion, Paul McCartney stole a street sign (I think).

[chillentertainer]

Archive Classics: Typesetting Fics

TL; DR: the internet is temporary!!! printed books (for your own private amusement) are forever!!!

What I do:

Basically, I choose fics that I think deserve to be printed and typeset them using a software called Adobe InDesign. InDesign is the professional standard in the industry, but there are definitely easier (and cheaper!) options for formatting.

Once I've chosen a fic, there a few different things I have to decide: the font, glyphs, book size, and the hors-texte (title page, contents, etc).

Then, I go about copy + pasting the text into the software, and formatting them. Usually, that just means deleting the blank space of lines that for some reason appears between paragraphs.

Every element, and I mean every single element, is designed for the reader's comfort. At no point should the reader feel lost or unable to continue because of the way the text is formatted. This means using serif fonts instead of sans-serif fonts for the body text and making sure that there aren't any widows/orphan lines. I have specific justification settings so that the spacing between words and letters are even and smooth to the reader's eye.

I also think about headers and page numbers more than you would expect. Should the page numbers be on top or bottom? Centered or at the corners. Should I have headers at all? And if so, what should they say?

When I began, and I still do this occasionally, I grabbed books off my shelves and examined their formatting. Then I'd question why they made this design choice or that. All publishers have their special little quirks and features, and if I spotted something I liked, I would incorporate that into my own works. For example, Penguin Classics love their classic serif fonts and headers. Barnes and Noble Classics have a feature in their hors-texte that is their "From the Pages Of" section.

My favorite part is creating the cover. If you couldn't tell based off the title "Archive Classics," I *borrowed* Penguin Classic's grid. I love to use paintings or other kinds of artwork (like Étienne-Louis Boullée's architectural drawings for Fractals)

Why I Do This:

While there are many amazing and necessary reasons to read e-books, I enjoy the physicality of a printed book. Nothing can beat the sensation of turning the next page, the smell of paper, or the weight of your next great adventure in your hands. Fanfiction more than deserves to be experienced in that way too.

But also, I've always had a lingering suspicion regarding the temporal nature of digital media and of the internet in general. Fanfiction, in particular, are at risk of disappearing forever, and while you can obvs download it (which I always always do), there's a slight chance that you may not be able to access the technology in order to view it. Books don't require laptops or phones or internet service.

It's a silly movie, but Leave the World Behind (2023) showcases this perfectly, albeit with streaming services and dvds.

Finally, with the ever-changing landscape of the internet and technology, who knows if say archaeologists would be able to access ao3 in a 100 or even 50 years. Look at USB-As, and how quickly they're going out of use. Physical media like printed books will certainly last for decades longer. My ultimate (and idealistic) goal is to have a physical, printed library of fanfiction for both private enjoyment and for the academic study of fanfiction in the anthropological and literary fields. The latter will most likely not happen in my lifetime (if ever at all), but a girl can dream!

Copyright

This is slightly sketchy but from what I can tell from my research is that most sites don't give an af if you print like one copy for yourself and you do not print en-masse or start selling them. So like Manacled. Don't do what those kids did and put up your copies on etsy. I don't. I print this for myself and myself only. And I've never gotten a cease and desist letter or anything like that.

Requests are open: if you have a fic you think deserves the archive classics treatment, lmk! I do not accept payment. This is all free.

Examples!

A Current Cover I'm Working On:

This one is a linen wrap, which means it has flaps!

[uwmspeccoll]

Typography Tuesday

QUNZ - Lego Typeface

Since 2016, Dutch printmaker and educator Martijn van der Blom (b. 1973) has been working on designing a Lego typeface he calls QUNZ. He states:

I approach letters as a form of architecture, each letter is like a building. . . . I decided to give QUNZ a more open and playful character, This created space to fine creative solutions to thick and thin lines, diagonals and serifs.

Van der Blom designs while printing and most of his visual research happens in the printing process. He explicitly leaves room to design with the opportunities that present themselves in the act of printing. One result of this way of working is that certain compositions are not taken apart. Elements that have proven themselves are preserved:

I don't break down the compositions anymore. I leave them intact and store them in a dedicated typecase, just like all the other type in the studio.

The letterforms shown here from the second edition of Print & Play The Art of LEGO Letterpress by van der Blom and visual artist Roy Scholten, published in Dutch and English in Hilversum, Netherlands at tacit.studio in a limited edition 250 copies in 2024. Martijn van der Blom and Roy Scholten have been working with LEGO bricks as printmaking material in Grafisch Atelier Hilversum (a printmaking studio in Hilversum, The Netherlands) since 2013. 

View another post from Print & Play.

View our other Typography Tuesday posts.

[copperbadge]

I've been a little stymied and thus somewhat putting off work on the new novel, Simon's chef novel, not so much because I'm blocked but more because I wanted to get Royals/Ramblers put to bed and also I was struggling a little to determine the love interest for the story.

While I often tell the Shivadh stories from dual points of view, there's usually a character I think of as the protagonist and one as the love interest -- like in Infinite Jes we knew Michaelis but I had to build Jes (my initial conception of Jes was a trans woman but I had to shift that a bit for various reasons). I've been talking to you guys about this story for a while so I had a bit of market research I guess, which started fitting things into place, but last night was the first time I sat down and just kind of thought about it for a while, so I think I'm finally starting to get her built.

Someone had mentioned they'd love to see what I believe they phrased as "a salt-and-pepper butch" which I liked, and I've been meaning to introduce more characters of color, but I also knew I wanted her to be native Shivadh, so mostly I needed to work out how to navigate her heritage. I'm going to do a bit more research as I write, but I think I've established her as a Sephardic Jew of African heritage, her family having immigrated from Tangier sometime in the 19th century and still having familial links back to Morocco. She's a chef specializing in Moroccan-Sephardic cuisine opening a restaurant on the Promenade, a she/her butch around Simon's age (mid-fifties) who has basically worked in restaurants her entire life and is now finally getting to open her own. I really like the idea of her using fem pronouns but a male name, so I've been doing some research and I think it's going to be either Jacob or Elias -- I like Elias better but there's already Eddie and Ephraim, and I'm trying not to use the same letters for names over and over (M, G, and C are ruled out, too many of them already). I suppose I could go with the unorthodox spelling Ilias, but that looks odd especially with a sans-serif font.

Anyway, now the research fun begins! Time to come up with an appropriate name for her restaurant and then get cracking on the Meet Ugly (they meet when he accosts her for her ricotta and she tells him to get bent).

[cosmica-galaxy]

Heard u were lookin for DILFs so if u ever need him, I offer you Dole

He totally knows what's gonna happen to him (no he doesn’t)

I NEVER GOT THIS ASK, WHAT THE FUCK TUMBLR?! WE COULD'VE HAD A FUCKING DRILL DILF, YOU DAMN CUNT WEBSITE!! RAAAAAAAH I LOVE IT SO MUCH SERIF. I AM PISSED I NEVER SAW THIS!!

[tinfoil-jones]

For Your Own Good: Intermission

Askbox? Open

If you don't know what this post is about, "For Your Own Good" or tagged as "Early Amnesia AU" on tumblr is a dialogue-only Gravity Falls fanfiction I've been working on that kinda-sorta follows a Mystery Trio -esque timeline, where Ford doesn't build the portal. To sum it up, the whole fanfiction boils down to:

Researcher Ford: I told you I never wanted to see you again.

Mullet Stan: Dude, I don't know who you are or WTF you're talking about right now, but I'm leaving this town and never coming back. You are never seeing me again after this. I'm probably going to forget you in like five minutes.

Researcher Ford:

Researcher Ford: *immediately kidnaps him*

You can consider chapters 1-10 to be Act 1 of the fanfic, and I’m taking a break for at least a week, most likely longer. The chapters so far were already written out in advance, and so was a huge reveal, but I still need to tie things together.

Here’s some authors notes/extra stuff about it, some of it might have already been put in the AO3 before or after notes. These are in no particular order:

This takes place 10 years after Ford and Stan were separated, currently they are both 27 about to be 28. Fiddleford is slightly older than them, being in his early 30s.

Ford is unironically the only person who finds Stan’s really dumb jokes funny.

Ford is the one who displays the most behaviours that would be seen from Mabel and Dipper decades later. Like Dipper, he views washing clothes as a waste of time, and like Mabel he ate an entire tube of toothpaste (granted, it was on accident)

While Ford is the more likely of the two to display traits that later present in Mabel and Dipper, it still happens with Stan as well. Stan has a similar nervous-chewing habit that Dipper displays in the OG series, but his only comes out when he’s particularly anxious. In this case, it was because he had nicotine cravings.

The 'That motherfucker is ugly' line that Stan used on Ford can be considered extra ironic because of how much the Stan Twins look like their dad.

Bill Cipher was originally supposed to speak in Times New Bastard (which is Times New Roman except every 7th letter is jarringly sans serif, a meme from tumblr), but AO3 and tumblr don’t let you change the font.

Stan goes out of his way to avoid using Ford and Fiddlefords given names- but this isn’t because he doesn’t know what they are. In the few times he has used their names, it was a sign that he was being sincere.

If you want to wonder whether or not Fiddleford likes Stan back, consider the fact that he could have walked away at any point, and either washed his hands of the whole thing, or just outright reported Stanford to the authorities. 

Bill is more like Discord from MLP - he’s just chaotic, often to the detriment of others, but he isn’t outright malicious (anymore), and he’s too busy SIMPING to cause any real harm. Basically, Bill is Fords patron for studying weirdness - he helps Ford in his research, but the cost that Ford pays is that Bill is able to possess him when he sleeps, and has unlimited access to his brain.

If Ford knew Rick Sanchez, why didn’t Rick see how similar Stan looked and put 2-and-2 together? Easy; Rick didn’t give a single shit about Ford, so he never committed his face or name to memory. Ford himself only remembered Rick because Rick was such a massive, egotistical asshole. If anything, Rick would think Ford is the lesser version of Stan.

Chapter 10 was the first concrete proof that the Stan we’ve been following likely is Stanley Pines and not some similar conman named Stan Malone. The last time Ford saw Stan would have either been when they were teens, so other than Stans commercials for his failed products there’s no way Ford would know what an adult Stan would even look like, and he’d have to use himself as a reference.

Stan has given some insight on his Thalassophobia (fear of the ocean / large bodies of water). In Chapter 10, he told Ford a number of things he escaped, including the trunk of a sinking car, and cement shoes. Cement shoes are either when you tie someone to a cinder block and throw them into a body of water, or when you literally incase their feet in cement, wait for it to dry, and then toss them into a body of water, so they’ll drown. Presumably, these are still things that would have happened to him even if he didn't lose his memories, so why would it give him a fear of the ocean now? Stan Pines in the OG still had a lot of positive memories associated with the ocean - he grew up on the coast, and had a lot of his hopes and dreams tied to the ocean. But without his childhood memories, he has no positive associations with it, only memories of times he almost drowned. 

Ford himself is not a touchy guy. The reason he hugs Stan even though it isn’t reciprocated is because from his perspective, this is his twin brother who is in pain and has been suffering all by himself for a long time. And Stan - at least how Ford remembers him - had a very touch-based love language. Fords doing it because he thinks it’d comfort him.

Stan seems pretty calm and chill for someone who’s been kidnapped by a ‘stranger’. This isn’t because he’s an overall chill guy because of amnesia, no he’s super pissed and the second he knows he’s free he will let them know that with his words, and incredible violence. He’s remaining calm because he’s been imprisoned and kidnapped enough times to know that pitching a fit or lashing out at his captors won’t do him any favours.

Fiddleford is still married to Emma-May and they do have Tate. But it's one of those lavender marriages (they're both gay and mutually bearding each other)

[stargazer4501]

Dusttale: Revived | Research Notes for INTEGRITY

[lens-guy-art]

Art Fight compilation

In order:

Awry - @h4nk1ller Dole Whip and Gin - @researcher-serif Security - @askthesmoltitans TV 64 - @that-other-dead-person Streak and Whistle - @tabieeee