#they have work to do

[see-arcane]

"Mum, Papa, look! He was following me around the moors! Can we keep him?"

In which little Quincey Harker meets a big Barghest friend*. A little Ko-Fi commission that's allowed me to make my first ever attempt at illustrating the Son Boy. And company.

*The Barghest has sniff-inspected the Harker child. The Harker child is not of the undead. Life permitted. Scritches are also permitted. Once.**

**...Perhaps a few more. And a belly rub.

[bearrverine]

me and gang at the haunted house

[copepods]

crazy how 4 hours of work will literally take up my entire 15+ hour day. who allowed this

[holographings]

someone on twitter said Imagine what s2 jayce would give to talk to s1 viktor just one more time. and someone had a time travel alternate dimension fic ready to go. and i read it. and now my face is being eaten by 3750 feral dogs i think

[eatinghisheart-inthemarketplace]

I can't believe the horse is back in the fucking hospital

[ered]

Here’s my take on the whole audio books vs. reading:

Oral tradition of storytelling predates written ones by millennias, and honestly, which one you like is just a personal preference.

The actual difference is

when listening, you have no idea how to write characters’ names

when reading, you have no idea how to pronounce characters’ names

hope this helps!

[thelaurenshippen]

watching bridgerton and obviously there were a lot of things wrong with the way socializing has worked in the past, but honestly the idea of a "calling hour" is so appealing. office hours for friendship. you can show up unannounced at my home between 1 and 3pm. you must leave by 3pm. I may give you a pastry. lets bring that back

[mangozic]

my dead goth son and his friendly neighborhood personified concept of insanity

[dovesick]

endless night

[wardensantoineandevka]

David Lynch's Weather Report 3/6/21, 4/10/21, 2/20/22... among others! It was a very recurring sentiment. He wanted everyone to have good luck and fun with our projects.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

I love you Safety Wizard.

(Inspired by @keroascrazy)

[whatkindofnameisella]

can you believe that we have fanfiction. that we have websites dedicated to fanfiction. that there is a place that you can go and read tens, hundreds, thousands and thousands of pieces of writing that strangers have made. people who are not "writers". people who come home at the end of the day and have feelings and say, i am going to put that into words. i am going to share those words. short, long, sweet, sad, horny, funny, wonderful words. we are all just human and we all love to make and remake and share that with others. can you believe that.

[inkskinned]

i got rickrolled today but it didn't work because i have adblocker installed, so youtube just told me i violated the terms of service. yesterday i was trying to edit a picture as a joke for my girlfriend, and google made me check a box to prove i'm human because i wasn't "searching normally".

it isn't just that capitalism is killing fun and whimsy, it is that any element of entertainment or joy is being fed upon by this mosquito body, one that will suck you dry at any vulnerability.

do you want to meet new friends in your city? download this app, visit our website, sign up for our email list. pay for this class on making a terrarium, on candlemaking, on cooking. it will be 90 dollars a session. you can go to group fitness, but only under our specific gym membership. solve the puzzle, sign up for our puzzle-of-the-month-club. what is a club if not just a paid opportunity - you are all paying for the same thing, which makes you a community.

but you're like me, i know it - you're careful, you try the library meetings and the stuff at the local school and all of that. the problem is that you kind of want really specific opportunities that used to exist. you are so grateful for libraries and the publicly-funded things: they are, however, an exception - and everything they have, they've fought tooth-and-nail to protect. you read a headline about how in many other states, libraries have virtually nothing left.

do you want to meet up with your friends afterwards? gift your friends the discord app. you can choose to go to a cafe (buy a coffee, at least), a bar (money, alcohol) or you can all stay in and catch a movie (streaming) or you can all stay in bed (rent. don't get me started) and scream (noise complaint. ticket at least).

you want to read a new book, but the book has to have 124 buzzwords from tiktok readers that are, like, weirdly horny. you can purchase this audiobook on audible! your podcast isn't on spotify, it's on its own server, pay for a different site. fuck, at least you're supporting artists you like. the art museum just raised their ticket price. once, they had a temporary exhibit that acknowledged that ~85% of their permanent art galleries were from cis white men, and that they had thousands of works by women (even famous women, like frida! georgia o'keefe!) just rotting in their basement. that exhibit lasted for 3 months and then they put everything away again.

walmart proudly supports this strip of land by the street! here are some flowers with wilting leaves. its employees have to pay out-of-pocket for their uniforms. my friend once got fined by the city because she organized a community pick-up of the riverfront, which was technically private property.

no, you cannot afford to take that dance class, neither can i. by the way - i'm a teacher. i'm absolutely not saying "educators shouldn't be paid fairly." i'm saying that when i taught classes, renting a studio went from 20 bucks an hour to 180 in the span of 6 months. no significant changes to the studio were made, except they now list the place as updated and friendly. the heat still doesn't work in the building. i have literally never seen the landlord who ignores my emails. recently they've been renting it out at night as an "unusual nightclub; a once-in-a-lifetime close-knit party." they spent some of those 180 dollars on LEDs and called it renovating. the high heels they invite in have been ruining the marley.

do you want to experience the old internet? do you want to play flash games or get back the temporary joy of club penguin? you can, you just need to pay for it. i have a weird, neurodivergent obsession with occasionally checking in to watch the downfall and NFT-ification of neopets. if i'm honest with you all - i never got into webkins, my family didn't have the money to buy me a pointless elephant. people forget that "being poor" can mean literally "if i buy you that toy, i can't afford rent."

you and i don't have time to make good food, and we don't have the budget for it. we are not gonna be able to host dinner parties, we're not made of money, kid. do you want some kind of 3rd space? a space that isn't home or work or school? you could try being online, but - what places actually exist for you? tiktok counts as social media because you see other people on it, not because they actually talk to you.

there was a local winter tradition of sledding down the hill at my school. kids would use pizza boxes and jackets and whatever worked, howling and laughing. back in september, they made a big announcement that this time, rules were changing, and everyone must pay 10 dollars to participate. when im not scared shitless, i kind of appreciate the environmental irony - it hasn't gone below 40. so much for snow & joyriding.

i saw a bulletin for a local dogwalking group and, nervous about making a good first impression, showed up early. the first guy there grimaced at me. "sorry," he said. "there's a 30-dollar buy-in fee." i thought he was joking. wait. for what? the group doesn't offer anything except friendship and people with whom to walk around the city.

he didn't know the answer. just shrugged at me. "you know," he said. "these days, everything costs money."

[crowkip]

yeehaw, baby!

[hinamie]

10 years later

[cosmicpines]

I think a lot of people haven't actually read Flatland so you may not realize A. What Bill's eye mutation means and B. What precisely Bill did to destroy his homeworld.

Bill's home isn't completely the same as Edwin Abbott's Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (notably, women and men can be both polygons #feminism) but we can assume most of the mechanics are the same. The basic premise is that the world is 2D. Everyone perceives the world in a 1D way, along the plane. There's a part of Journal 3 that describes this pretty well.

Bill can see up to the stars because his eye is on the flat surface instead of on the side like everyone else, like this:

(He's also slightly 3D, as we can see in the show.)

But there's one more important Flatland detail. The denizens of Flatland (and therefore likely Euclydia) do still have organs "inside" their bodies. Since there is no depth, they're just on the inner radius of their bodies. The 2007 Ehlinger movie adaptation shows that:

If Bill wanted to "give his world a new perspective" and "show everyone what they were missing," he wanted to get everyone to look upward.

Meaning he probably tilted the entire world.

Meaning everyone not only slid off of the plane, but all of their organs spilled out and everyone died.

...Hence "so much blood."

(The only issue with this is that it doesn't account for the number of times Euclydia is referred to have been burned ("saw his own dimension burn / misses home and can't return", he only has ashes leftover), but I'm sure the act of turning an entire dimension upwards expends a lot of energy.)