#shutupmac
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dansemacabre ¡ 3 months ago
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(tw unreality!)
ayo new theory just dropped and bad news! the implications are cosmically horrifying
in the bulletin from time baby in book of bill, he says bill is a “danger to narrativity”, and that he risks the fourth wall. this kept bothering me. why reference the fourth wall here? why have time baby reference it? yeah the heaven page and shit is a bit meta, but thats just how bill talks, right? Well i was a fool
when you put “seven eyes” into the lost files site, this warning pops up from the oracle question mark? from journal three:
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the therapese at the bottom translates to “set coords for dimension: r34lity”.
and putting r34lity into the website gives us this image:
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the text below it reads they found a new home. those are “real” fucking images. the henchmaniacs are in our “reality”. the cryptids page might not have been a goof goof bit- they were “real”. (“real” meaning our reality in the book of bill sense of it but still our reality. is that tracking.)
none of the rest of the cast actually references us as a specific audience, or the fandom, or acts like we know them at all. the cast addresses everything they write to a mystery “reader” who needs to be saved from the book’s influence.
meanwhile, in the book of bill:
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because bill’s not talking to a mystery “reader” who’s reading this book.
bill fucking sees us.
bill sees reality. REALITY reality. like this earth the one with alex hirsch and gravity falls the show and tiktok and shit. book of bill is a book in our reality for us the reader. (ie. there’s a reference to “they both reached for the gun” if you put gun in the website, which would only make sense if bill was sentient in this “reality” right now.) and someone is trying to get here to hide from him. maybe they’re already here.
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dansemacabre ¡ 1 month ago
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this is some escape (the pina colada song) nonsense. affectionate connotation
I just reada really good fic but halfway through I realized "oh shit this is really familiar.... didn't I write something like this once?" And as I kept reading I kept predicting what happened next and the further I went the more convinced I was that they'd ripped off my story-
like, copied the ENTIRE plot and re-written it, just better than I had? The characters were more fleshed-out than mine were, and the POV was more interesting, and the pace made more sense- but it was MY STORY?
So close to the end I was like "holy shit.. do I message them? Ask if my story inspired theirs? Should I be angry? Flattered?" Cause their tags and description didn't mention me AT ALL, which, sure, it's fanfiction to begin with, but if you're using my work than at least credit me as inspo, right? Just to be courteous?
But I get to the end of the final chapter, and it's not finished, and I'm kind of disappointed cause I never finished my story and I was really immersed in their version now and had been looking forwards to seeing how they tied up my loose ends- so I scroll to the bottom to leave a comment, and.
It's MY URL.
IT WAS MY STORY THE WHOLE TIME.
THE ONE *I WROTE*.
In *2013*.
And FORGOT ABOUT
BECAUSE I WAS SO INSECURE ABOUT MY SLOPPY, SHALLOW, AMETEUR WRITING
And I'm just sitting here now staring into space thinking about every shitty story I've ever written now like
IT WAS ALL GOOD?
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IT WAS GOOD THIS WHOLE DAMN TIME??
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I'M A GOOD WRITER?????
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macaqueyfreedom ¡ 4 years ago
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....
How.... uh.... How is one meant to feel when they learn they’re someone’s hall pass????
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dansemacabre ¡ 3 months ago
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i’ve been thinking about “sixer, it would eat you alive” since i read it and. man. every layer you peel back makes it worse. im not a bill apologist but. shit
if you (1) take it at face value, it paints bill as an apologetic murderer in his single (and maybe sole) open moment of regret. he doesn’t let his walls down often- only with ford do we even get to see the remnant of his galaxy, see the “actual remorse” ford describes, get just a hint of his origins. but he does it, because he thinks ford should know.
if you (2) take it from ford’s point of view, as something he committed to journal three, like. wow. imagine being so committed to a being that you’d hunt down and kill the monster that destroyed his home, only to (assumably) figure out later that that being was the monster. the small moments of trust, the “good times”, are so key to manipulation. how long did ford hold onto that one shred of vulnerability? no wonder ford stayed for as long as he did. in his eyes, bill was a survivor. ford wanted to survive too.
(slight tw below for unreality- any time i mention our reality, i mean “our reality” as a narrative device used in the book of bill as a proxy for the idea of bill being in our reality, since he can’t actually be in our reality. all of this is a fictional theory about a show/book with fictional contents!)
but if you (3) remember that “even his lies are lies” and absolutely Nothing bill says should be trusted. Whoo boy. if i read tbob right the book itself is being created in the theraprism (even tho it shows up with the ciphertologists at some point? idk that’s a whole other post). it’s meant to show what the reader wants to see; it manifests in our reality as what the collective fandom wants to see. so if we want to see truth, if we want to see where bill ended up and who he actually is, there’s a non-zero chance that the whole interaction was a complete fabrication.
imagine bill, stuck in the actively harmful, probably earth-illegal theraprism, once again being forced to be “fixed” and molded into something more palatable, being forced to conform no matter how much it hurts. (i know natural uncontrollable mutation ≠ just so much murder and destruction and chaos, but. you can’t ignore the similarities. bill has obviously been thinking about those silly straws.)
he looks back on everything that went wrong, back on his relationship with ford, back through every dimension where he wins. would that one moment, that one truth amid centuries of lies, have saved him from purgatory? if he had just been open? shown his damage? maybe he did think of his parents, or his henchmaniacs (especially the oracle). people who he might have once opened up to. maybe he just wanted to open up to someone again.
so in his own weird way, stuck in a cell, he reshaped reality again. in this reality, for this fleeting moment, he had been someone worth believing. and ford had listened, hell, ford had wanted to help. looking back, knowing how he treated ford, knowing how ford ended up because of it, maybe bill would have said the most honest thing he’d ever told ford: i am the monster, i am not worth your time or belief, and i will eat you alive.
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macaqueyfreedom ¡ 4 years ago
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I know we’re all living in hell right now, but I’ve gotten entirely too many DMs and such on my social media’s about it, and my circumstances being what they are.... Y’all are AWARE of how much I hate admitting I need help and then asking for it.
It’s almost Christmas and then 2 days after is my birthday. I don’t particularly care about either one but some people like to use them as excuses to be nice to someone so we’ll roll with that and see what it gets us.
I’m unemployed since mid-August, I’ve been living off what money I had from my job and am now down to 3.49$ in my account. I can’t buy a soda nevermind food or a roof over my head.
Speaking of roofs over heads, I’m not sure how much longer I have one. I’ve been staying with a friends family and it has been brought to someone ELSE’S attention that I’m “overstaying my welcome” since I don’t have a job and all that. Cos it’s totally my fault that what few places are hiring won’t hire ME cos my drivers license is issued from a different state and I don’t own a car. I can put apps in all day long (and I do put in a lot of apps! I am TRYING) but it doesn’t matter how many I fill out if the place doesn’t wanna hire me!
So I’m staring at an unknown countdown to being homeless and jobless! I’ve no place else to go, and even if I had somewhere I have no money to get there! I don’t even have the 120$ to keep my phone on come next months bill. So I’ll also be looking at owing ATT the remaining 400$ for my phone in January
If anyone wants to get me anything for Christmas or my Birthday, I don’t need THINGS I need MONEY
paypal.me/MacaqueyFreedom
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dansemacabre ¡ 4 months ago
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ohhhh i will be thinking about this forever.
i’ve been having trouble recently trying to wrap my head around what in the book is true. we know the references to euclidia are true. we know the pages from ford specifically are probably true. we know the little bits of information he supplies about dipper’s dreams, the encounter in mabel’s head, and the deal with the axolotl are most likely true based on what we know of canon and (in a more meta sense) things alex hirsh has said were his intentions with gravity falls. and i had assumed that the journal three pages were genuine, but when you look at some of the details, they absolutely might not be.
i keep going back to the fact that ford explains how the book will appear as “whatever you want it to be”. bill actively uses every manipulation tactic possible to get us, the collective reader, to keep reading. and he’s not shy about showing it (stares at secrets of the universe page). so why show the weakness? why assume any bits of truth at all? is the tragic backstory true, or is bill painting himself as a wet cat of a god, so he can be pitied and feared all at once?
i have no answer to this. but i think it’s a fun little exercise, to doubt everything bill’s said and try to map out where in bill’s fuckass psyche it stemmed from- or where the actual truth lies. like the rats. EXACTLY like the rats. bill wrote an entire page on love, and if he felt some love-adjacent attachment to ford, no wonder he talks about ford’s feelings about him and the fallout for so long. the people LOVE doomed old man yaoi. this is for us, whether it’s true or not. this book could literally be bills ford x reader lovers to enemies centuries-long slowburn fic.
also the journal pages being influenced or fully written by bill explains why ford uses the same code bill uses in the rest of the book, not the code from the actual journal three, despite it being ford talking. that was BOTHERING me. that was REALLY PISSING ME OFF
anyway this analysis eats. sorry for adding so much of my piece but the gears have been turning i lowkey could talk about this for years and years
So, for Starters: Book Of Bill Spoilers warning. Another opinion from me below. (Here's my first opinion I shared, if you havent seen it) This new one is about the lost journal pages again, of course.
Originally, I wanted to make a super big crazy essay about all the reasons I think the journal pages in BOB (The Book of Bill’s given name) are fake, and show off my super-cool totally completely sound deductive reasoning techniques in the process.  
Unfortunately, knowing myself I’m not sure I’m actually capable of accomplishing such a feat. You all know how I tend to post things in parts, sometimes out of order, often never finished. However I would like to share something in particular that’s been eating at me that I’ve seen… partially discussed, but only partially. And certainly not the part that I would like to discuss. 
It’s about the rats.
You know, the rats.
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I saw these rats being talked about since before I was even able to have a look at the book myself. 
But before I get further into it all, I would like to start off with a joke: 
Why did dead rats, eggnog, a land orca, shrimp colors, It’s a Small World After All, and an Anti-Cipherite Suit cross the road? 
Well, that’s easy. To get to the other side. 
Of the book, that is. 
If you’re anything like me, you probably skipped right to the journal pages upon contact with the book. And if you’re even MORE like me, you were probably left a little confounded by them. Not only did they seem… wrong somehow. But they also felt random. Full of odd choices of subject that didn’t make a lot of sense. Could these pages really have come from journal 3? If so, why do parts of them feel so… completely out of context? 
And this is where the rats come in. As I mentioned before, I saw many people discussing them. In particular, they were noting their connection to this passage from earlier in the book:
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Many of the related discussions also felt odd to me. Though I lacked the knowledge to be able to articulate why at the time. UNTIL, I read the book for myself from start to finish. That's when I realized something:  This is not the only time something from earlier in the book connects back to the journal pages. In fact, it happens many, many times throughout the earlier passages. (Here is a small collection of them for your perusal.)
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And then it started clicking into place. The reasons the pages felt like they were so abnormally out of context… is because they WERE lacking context!
Now, before you can finish saying “Gin, you’re an idiot.” I would like you to ponder these three questions: 
1) Why, if these pages were taken from Journal 3, should they require context from outside of it to be able to be completely understood?
2) Why is it that this context can be found in what Bill Cipher has been writing in the preceding passages up till now? 
3) If you put food in a mogwai’s mouth at midnight EST but drive it over the CST time zone line back to 11PM before it can swallow, will it still transform into a gremlin? 
Okay, you caught me, that third one is unrelated. But the first two I believe require further thinking. So let’s delve a little further into the idea. Consider this the real third question: 
3) Are we to seriously believe that these, the only pages of J3 still lost to us, just so happen to tie into the new topics from the rest of the Book of Bill over and over like this?  
And since you’ve done so well thinking thus far, I’ll ask a fourth question: 
4) Are you aware of the concepts of Watsonian and Doyalist analysis? 
Assuming you don’t and you won’t google it, I’ll skip to the important part. Watsonian analysis is to analyze a story from within it, as if you yourself were Watson making deductions in a Sherlock Holmes novel.  
Now, from a Watsonian point of view, what happens when we try to answer our earlier questions? Why should it be that the Book of Bill provides so many of these points of reference to the journal pages? 
One possible line of thought could be that Bill wrote the earlier passages of his book *around* the idea of what was contained in the pages, but I think this doesn’t work for a few reasons. For one thing, the purpose of the book is to get the reader to make a deal, not to take a whole novel to set the stage for a 3 day mini Ford adventure. For another, not all of what I described prior is really fit to be called “context”, is it? The rats, the “Small World” cassette, and the Bill-Suit are one thing, but Eggnog? Shrimp colors? Land Orcas? I certainly wouldn’t define them that way. If anything, they’d be better suited to being called “references”. And unlike the more contextual ideas, there’d be no real need for Bill to sneak mere references to the pages into his grand story.  And lastly, there are a great deal of Bill pages that have nothing to do with the content in the journal pages at all.
So what exactly am I trying to say here? 
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If we do intend to think of the callbacks outlined above as references, the only logical conclusion within the story is that the journal pages themselves are referencing back to the Book of Bill, not the other way around.
But… how? And why? Something Ford has written in the 80’s shouldn't be able to reference something Bill is writing post-weirdmageddon certainly. 
That’s because “Ford” isn’t referencing it at all!
And as for why… Well, have you ever noticed when you're writing a story on the fly, things you wrote earlier all come crashing back to you as you try to wrap things up? I believe personally that the journal pages are nothing more than a strange endcap on Bill’s crazy train of thought! And the "references" are just fuel that further the pages creation. Almost as if, to quote someone much more knowledgeable than me on this subject…
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In the end, all I've described above (as well as other aspects of the pages I've not mentioned here) leave me with the impression the pages are not real.
As I stated only a bit earlier, the idea that these pages, the only pages of J3 purported to be lost, should be so connected to the rest of the book is beyond coincidence to me. Not to mention that in order to take these pages as total truth, you must give credence to several other passages of Bill's book as well. And I'm not too keen on having to trust him that much.
To all who have read this far, even to those who may have scoffed at the ideas in here or think I've only written up nonsense. Thank you for reading and considering my thoughts.
I am not saying anyone must agree with me on this. I know some people have found the pages to be important and meaningful to them, and I do not wish to give the impression that I think my view is the end all be all correct one, or that I think lesser of those who believe in them. I only want to share my own opinions. And to anyone else who found the pages to feel "off" somehow, possibly validate their feelings too.
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dansemacabre ¡ 4 months ago
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decoded a stan twins “fun” fact from book of bill below the cut. SPOILERZ
if you assign the bros secret code to a thru z in order (see figure 1):
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then you can decode what ford writes in the journal when he’s thinking about calling stanley (see figure 2, already decoded)
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this is devastating right? this is bad and evil and makes you want to curl up and weep? because he misses his brother so dearly and it’s really tragic that they’ve been so angry with each other for so long? Well it gets worse
there’s a bit in the end where stanley cussed out bill. i recognized the code and Chat i wanted this word to be fuck so badly you had no idea. i would’ve been happy with a bullshit. but INSTEAD it’s SAD AND DISMAL.
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assuming that ! is y (since it’s not legible from the photo) it says LOVE YA BRO. SHUT THE FUCK UP.
this hurts right? this too is bad? because now you’ve let The Implications sink in. because The Implications are that over decades and decades of hating each other and missing each other and Being Complicated both stanley and stanford REMEMBERED the secret code they made together at 12.
and then you go, duh! stanley got his memory wiped. stanford must have RETAUGHT HIM THE BROS SECRET CODE. WHICH IS ALMOST SADDER AND SWEETER.
DUDE. DUDEEEEEE
they are so brothers. this made me really abnormal. if u can’t tell
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macaqueyfreedom ¡ 4 years ago
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dansemacabre ¡ 6 months ago
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hi sorry i don’t go here anymore but i feel a lot of things about the tommyinnit video and i have a lot of bit ideas and i just. i need to make a numbered list
1. obsessed with how his go to story was always “kids in school bullied me for minecraft videos” (bad, awful, sorry this happened) and not “i specifically asked for my teachers to play my minecraft let’s plays in the middle of science”. this is soooo positive and kind and affectionate because this is both something i do now (lie abt personal stories on the internet) and something i repeatedly did as a kid (deliberately got myself into Embarrassing Situations trying to mix internet and irl. i have stories too thomas….)
2. his middle name is michael. LOSER. whos name is michael. only. losers
3. i was like “wow foolish and quackity are in here a lot” until i realized that he Cannot Show Anyone Else. 75% of dsmp clips contain at least One racist and/or convicted felon
4. this guy Cannot keep fading to black and sighing. every transition it’s another fucking fade to black. Please just cut to black please just cut please just cut please please please please
5. THE TOMMY NEG CAMEO……. suddenly it was 2021 and i was on twitter at 4am and my moot was asking me if i hated philza and cheated on my girlfriend bc a random swiftie faked messages with me to be in a joke group chat i was in that dr*am got added to but never actually joined. sorry this isn’t about me but hey that was Fucking wild
6. TOMMYINNIT HAS HAD TWO GIRLFRIENDS???? I AM 20 YEARS OLD GAY AND HOT AND HES HAD 200% MORE PLAY???????? sorry. Sorry.
7. i fuck w the djo! I am crying real human tears though
8. he found himself thru stand up comedy…….. be yourself because then you’ll get more views…………. he is so wise……. i must become the most famous man in nottingham…………..
that’s all. i don’t think half of these classify as bits. this is like a React video but on tumblr which is somehow worse than a react video. doesn’t matter. It’s all love
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macaqueyfreedom ¡ 4 years ago
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Current mental debate: do I wanna bleach my hair or just dye it pink as-is and let the roots be slightly darker?
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dansemacabre ¡ 4 months ago
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are you stuck trying to decode the book of bill but you don’t want the keys handed to you? i was in your shoes literally three days ago! i failed and looked up codes on reddit (because a good grade in book of bill is a normal thing to want and a possible thing to get) but now you don’t have to!! here are some BOOK OF BILL CODEBREAKING HINTS designed to kindly shove you in the right direction!
my credentials are: one summer cryptography class i took in high school, autism, weirdly good pattern recognition (probably because of the autism), and a desperate need to make things make sense. sorry in advance if any of this seems patronizing. hints below the page break!!
general tips:
- A and I will become your bestest friends. like 99 times out of 100 any single letter is a or i. try those out first
- the apostrophe will also become your bestest friend- especially x’x, which will almost always be i’m (except there’s one place in the book where it is not. don’t make my mistakes.)
- themysteryofgravityfalls.com is SO so helpful. for non-symbolic ciphers u can lowkey put in codes and button mash caesar and atbash. godsend. devilsend? idk someone sent it and it’s wonderful
- call every phone number, visit every website. they bought those domains for a reason! i think!
- any list of numbers 1-26 is a1z26. like that’s simply a truth
cipher specific hints now !!!
RUNES (characters taken from norse runes)
- there is a key for this one in the book! maybe u spotted it right away but i did not lol, so look for an instance of 26 rune-y characters!
- the rune code on the inside cover is a graffiti joke- translates to a common thing people write on walls or carve into books made out of brain matter ig
THERAPESE (found in the last few pages during bills court-ordered therapy)
- bill’s picture is labeled in this section, so those characters translate directly to “bill cipher” ! once you have those, you can apply them to other instances of the code and go from there
- the rest of the names of the… things around him on the inpatients page are puns, titles, and/or weird words. they might look wrong until you have Every Character- trust ur key! use the rest of the instances of this code to find the missing letters first, make sense of it and laugh at the clever little joke later
BROSCODE (only two instances, found in journal 3 lost pages)
- the name is a hint by itself- this is stanley and stanford related! both stans use it once somewhere in the book!
NEWBILL (the most common symbolic cipher in the book)
- if you have journal three, the characters are VERY similar to a code there- not the same though, so don’t try and use that key. but like journal three, this code will (almost) always be bill speaking.
- ok lowkey i think the best way to explain this is just to give you one answer. i cracked this by randomly guessing that the small writing by the galaxy drawing on the journal three page “a voice form the past” translates to “forget the past”. go from there my loves
- that being said. everything else from journal three uses the same characters, but a different code. haven’t cracked it yet. looking for advice tee bee haych. i’ll edit this once i find it out
- also: dipper uses this code in his section. that’s pretty helpful to get most of the rest of the characters!
now some page specific hints!:
silly straw page. Oh god
- damn that themysteryofgravityfallsdotcom sure is helpful! Anyway,
- the numbers code is Weird. but the number don’t equal letters. notice the spaces between number groups- pair the groups, try and add a dash somewhere within the first group and a colon somewhere within the second group. you’ll have to use your resources a little
- if that made zero sense: “uhvrxufhv” phdqv brxu idyrulwh ghhsob ohjdo wy vkrz ylhzlqj zhevlwh. ru brxu kxox dffrxqw
- sorry for the vagueness but i really don’t want to spoil this one- i got it spoiled but i think figuring it out on your own would be really rewarding and worth your Time
messages on your tv
- there are strange boxes on the bottom of the page. gonna be so honest don’t know how they mean anything at all to anyone but allegedly it’s a code! i’ll look into it. idk man
okay. i think that’s all i’ve got? please comment if u have questions for me or other folks on here or suggestions on how to sound less like a fucking nerd talking abt this shit. idk i love that people are set on cracking this book asap but i hope this helps ppl who prefer The Thrill Of The Chase and also like to feel smart and important and so very talented
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macaqueyfreedom ¡ 4 years ago
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I learnededed how to can tuna today
30 pint jars, 4 half-pint jars all by mahsef! (In like 45min)
Am v proud mmhm!
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macaqueyfreedom ¡ 4 years ago
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Hey @the-werewolf-queen remember when we used to IN one of those trillion shitty sprite comics not worth mentioning? I kinda miss those days....
What were early 2000's webcomics like?
It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times. Kids who grew up in the 90s manga boom weren’t old enough to get scanners and the like, so the first webcomics were Newspaper comics based on nerdy things.
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Like General Protection Fault, which was an even nerdier version of Dilbert. 
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And, of course, 1999′s Penny Arcade. Penny Arcade’s success would inspire a million “two dudes on a couch playing video games” clones.
A dude saw Penny Arcade and convinced his artist friend to make a comic with him. He wanted a standard 4-panel comic just like in the newspaper. But his friend was a huge weeb, and wanted to have four vertical panels like in Japanese 4koma comics. So they found a compromise format and started a comic in 2000.
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Megatokyo had a lot of video game jokes early on, but quickly morphed into being about anime stuff, which happened to be pretty popular. In lieu of video game jokes, it introduced some light sex humor, a woman with huge boobs who wanted to fuck the gamer dude, and a sentient android that everyone accepted as normal because it was a silly comic and a lot of early-2000s internet humor tended towards randomness.
So you had these two really popular webcomics with elements that had obvious appeal: Dudes on a couch playing video games, sexy chicks with huge boobs who wanted to bang the MC, robots, and a weird square format that happened to be easier to read at lower resolutions. But could these elements be combined? One man dared to dream they could. And in 2002 he made his dream a reality
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Given what a joke it’s rightfully since become, I feel the need to emphasize that CAD was one of the big early webcomics, and helped inspire it’s own share of imitators. It’s probably fair to say that it was more influential than even Penny Arcade, in that it had more elements that could be slavishly copied and passed around.
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(If you ever wondered why it took so long for anyone in Questionable Content to acknowledge the weirdness of all the robots, it’s because random unexplained robots were really popular in webcomics in the early 2000s)
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Meanwhile, it its own little isolated corner of the internet, Bob and George was popularizing “sprite comics”, a genre that consisted of itself,8-Bit Theater the next year, and a trillion shitty comics not worth mentioning. These were less influential than the Penny Arcade ==> Megatokyo ==> CAD ==> Questionable Content progression, but even this early the tiny webcomic scene was start to grow and split. Questionable Content was much more grounded than other webcomics at the time, and it’s rom-com plot was a big step away from the gag-a-day strips, but its influence was dulled because a bunch of other comics were starting to spring up. In the early 2000s, everyone was reading the same things because there were so few comics worth your time, but by the mid-2000s you were starting to see some quality. 
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You were also starting to see people getting serious about monetization. Scott McCloud’s dream of selling your comics for ten cents a pop and making bank in volume had crashed into the twin peaks of “most comics are also good and they’re free” and “credit cards charge fees, idiot”. Some of the better, more respected comics started joining together into one site with all of them that you needed to pay to access, kind of like how Slipshine works now except without the porn. 
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This didn’t work out financially, and it also meant that the best webcomics of the mid-2000s like Digger and Narbonic had really small audiences because you couldn’t read them without paying a fee first. Advertising was less useless then than it is now, but times were tough for the webcomics business in the pre-Patreon days. But some webcomics realized that they could find a profitable niche by appealing to new audiences. Instead of the straight white boys who made up the general webcomics audience, they’d reach out to a new demographic:
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Perverts! 
And, more specifically, 
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Furries! 
Because furries really wanted furry content, and they were willing to pay for it. Pay a lot for it. Furry cheesecake comics prospered, and even though they didn’t have mainstream success, they were pulling it the big bucks compared to your average video game comic. People were starting to realize that 1000 hardcore fans was better than 100,000 casual fans, and a lot of comics started searching for a niche. (This is kind of related to webcomics becoming more progressive/inclusive a bit later, but that’s a whole ‘nother essay that I’m not the one to write)
These webcomics were pretty tame PG-13 stuff like you’d see in the shounen manga its creators were fans of, with nary a nipple to be seen, and a lot of them would die out in favor of straight-up porn.
In the late 2000s, art students realized that making a webcomic was a great way to build a portfolio, and we were hit with the Great Boom Of Webcomics By People Who Can Actually Draw. In 2003, that TwoKinds art was not only acceptable, it was top-tier for a free comic
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By 2006 it was not the top tier
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By 2008 it was no longer acceptable. 
The world of webcomics became flooded with high-quality work by actual artists who’d gone to school and everything. The first generation of webcomics creators no longer ruled as the comics everyone read. Doctor Fun, the first-ever webcomic, ended in 2006. So did Narbonic and Mac Hall. Applegeeks, one of the most successful PA clones, ended in 2010 alongside 8-Bit Theater. Ctrl+Alt+Delete ended and rebooted to the interest of no one. 
While in 2001, a bad artist could build a following just by updating regularly and slowly improving, that became a lot harder to do as the Bush Administration ended. There were too many brilliant artists making great content for someone to break onto the scene with simple art or sprites. And one day a lot of people gave up on ever being able to make a successful webcomic if their panels didn’t look like a magic the gathering card.
And it just so happened that that day, the 13th of April 2009, was a young man’s birthday…
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dansemacabre ¡ 1 month ago
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obsessed w sherlock and co because every so often they’ll face a genuinely deeply distressing experience or spit out a line steeped in Implications like “sherlock holmes the unhuman” and then next episode they’re like oh silly archie! you stole my sausage roll! like Hold on hold on can we . ohhhmry god can we Just paus e for a minnute
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macaqueyfreedom ¡ 4 years ago
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Christmas is in 2 days and my birthday is in 4. It’s looking like I DO have somewhere else to stay soon just need help with covering travel costs now, and I’m still 60$ short for Januarys phone bill, so any help would be super appreciated!
Idk if it’s any incentive but I could try and write oneshots for people that help? Just has to be for something I’m at least somewhat familiar with.
paypal.me/MacaqueyFreedom
Venmo: macfree
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dansemacabre ¡ 4 months ago
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i feel like the revitalized fandom is like a week away from “mabel+stan son or dipper+ford daughter” and i want to preemptively correct that sorting the twins into opposite pairs is unenlightened and using dipper ford mabel stan like genes in a punnet square is the way of light and truth. fuck mbti im dipper main stan recessive
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