#which tells you something about this website

[saltysciencesixer]

Bill Cipher, The Blind Eye

So, I recently saw this video involving the Destruction is a Form of Creation McGucket doodle page on this is not a website dot com as well as the wallpapers from Dispense My Treat. And I was immediately struck by some thoughts involving that video as well as the Book of Bill in general (as well as looking back on the show). Buckle up because there's a lot of stuff here. The main crux of this theory is that Bill is severely vision-impaired. Let's start with two examples relating to my first point in regards to Bill Cipher's vision impairment.

Squinting here trying to read the combination to Stan's safe.

Arguably, the other example could be in Weirdmageddon when despite Ford having a cleft chin and Stan not having one - Bill was unable to tell the two apart. Now, this could just be because it's hard to tell twins apart in general, and Bill doesn't seem like the type to pay very close attention to detail. But... Let's look at the other evidence. In the Book of Bill, we see this sort of flashback pov from that time Stan punched Bill near the end of Weirdmageddon.

Now, maybe this is just for effect. Or maybe this is how Bill actually saw Stan at the time - covered in static because he can't actually see that well. We also have from the Book of Bill evidence that Bill's vision could have been impacted badly in some way. "Eye doctor of a different kind / Wants to make his patient blind" and "Three sips a day to make the visions go away."

In the Book of Bill, there's also this question in the "Intelligence Test" section. I think this may, in fact, be a legitimate question of Bill's. He sees something akin to this in the same way one might see "floaters" "vision spots" or "vision snow" (in people who have that condition). And then going back to that video of the Destruction is a Form of Creation doodle, I noticed some interesting things. I decided to try and recreate the way the images were overlayed and-

This is the Seeyouinmydreams wallpaper that lines up with the stars on the corner of the McGucket doodle. If you look at the writing within this image, It says "I MIGHT HAVE TO TO TELL FORD I CANNOT SEE HIM." Is this one of Bill's dreams?

HE IS BLIND is right next to this Bill statue (which also has some rectangular boxes scribbled in covered over his eyes). It also has "I might be wrong" here - so this could be an acknowledgment that Bill is not FULLY blind - just partially.

Finally, there's the fact that Fiddleford McGucket is the founder of the Society of the Blind Eye. If Bill Cipher is "blind" as McGucket sees it, does this mean the society was centered around Bill? Food for thought: Why was the Society of the Blind Eye located in what looked to be a Bill Cipher Temple? (Watch the episode again - one of the ways to enter the Society of the Blind Eye temple was through pressing a triangle with an eye at the center of it - and if you look on the Society of the Blind Eye page in the Gravity Falls wiki, it talks about how the Pythagorean theorem is written on one of the pillars in the temple). I have A LOT more thoughts about McGucket and the Book of Bill as well which I will post later.

[lizardsfromspace]

Okay, this is the conclusion to my posts about Sophia Stewart. I'll never do something like this again

Everything I've posted is from her own book or her web presence btw. That's all I'm drawing from and if anyone tells me any information about her they gained any other way I'll block them immediately so uh, don't

Towards the end she reveals some of her other pitches. By showing she copywrote sequels to the Matrix and Terminator

Lots of strange details here - she wrote The Matrix 4 in 2000? They didn't even start filming The Matrix 2 & 3 until 2001. Also, we can see in this book that her pitch has nothing to do with The Matrix or Terminator, but she claims she wrote direct sequels to both?

(Her explanation for how both very different films are ripping off her work - a 1:1 copy, she claims - is, hilariously, that The Terminator plagiarizes it front to back, while The Matrix plagiarizes it back to front. What?)

But also she didn't write it. She registered copyright on a synopsis for The Matrix 4. She has concepts of a plan for a Matrix 4.

The book ends with a pitch for another...she calls it a book, but it's a movie pitch? And this, too, is just a synopsis for some grand epic series, light on detail of character and plot and heavy with lore and rants (in this case, primarily about God and Adam & Eve). Of course her exhaustively long but barely sketched-out epic movie pitch has a prologue, which is also full of Christian-tinged Ancient Aliens pyramid power woo.

Sophia Stewart is unimportant, bc she represents a class of writer. Writers who have Ideas. Who have outlines and plot points but no real story, bc they never write it. But they think just having Really Good Ideas is enough - that you should get credit for coming up with a good idea for a story, regardless of if you make an actual story out of it. They're a "writer", but they never write. Despite this they often have a deep case of Dunning-Kruger, churning out outlines that leave out basic details like "what happens in the climactic battle" and the personalities of characters while insisting that an inability to author anything shouldn't keep you from being praised as a genius author

If that type of person is lucky enough to have money, they become a studio executive or tech guy, both professions awash in the uncreatively creative, or they hire ghostwriters. If they're not, they become the type of person to file spurious lawsuits under the misapprehension they own basic plot concepts. It's the "I coulda made the majors!" of writing, except, you know. Baseball players who didn't make the majors still actually played baseball at some point. I assume from now on all those types will just pump their outline into ChatGPT and try to sell the gunk it slops out and then claim they 'wrote' it so uh, uhhhhhhhhhhhh

The only reason I made these posts was discovering the conspiratorial angle to her work, bc who cares if a major studio has to deal with a spurious lawsuit? That was the part that actually sucks. But also, she does a lot of press: profiles on news websites, podcasts, that documentary was even made by other filmmakers, who actually make films. It's persisted from blogs and chain emails all the way to podcasts and TikToks. All of this uncritically spreads her story, but I also have to ask: how many actual African-American science fiction writers do those platforms profile? How many of them get documentaries made about their work? How much air is being sucked out of the room by the decades long misinformation about the "true" creator of The Matrix? And why is that misinformation so persistent when it takes a trivial amount of effort to find out it just isn't true? It feels good to support the underdog against the big studio, but in this case it just isn't true.

The sad truth is a lot more Hollywood plagiarism cases look like this than are real exposures of wrongdoing, but people tend to accept them at face value since they feel like a little guy taking on a corporation, though in reality it's just two writers suing each other. Take The Holdovers case, where people immediately turned on it, but if you look into it, the two scripts have very little in common, and the accusing writer makes odd claims like a human character in The Holdovers being a ripoff of a billboard in his script.

Or look at Groundhog Day, which was accused of plagiarism by Richard A. Lupoff, writer of the story "12:01 P.M.". The two stories have nothing in common besides a time loop; in Groundhog Day he's reliving a day, in 12:01 PM he's reliving an hour. Groundhog Day is a romcom, 12:01 P.M. plays it for horror. Groundhog Day never reveals the source of its lop but it's clearly fantastical in nature, 12:01 P.M. is explicitly science fiction. In Groundhog Day he escapes the loop, in 12:01 P.M. he never does. You can't deny Lupoff felt personally slighted, but at the end of the day, a world where a writer could own the concept of time loops would be a dystopia where creativity and art would die.

But even though they were wrong, The Holdovers & Groundhog Day cases were based on real works of writing that existed. They were based on a real, if misguided, sense of violation from the writers. But in this case, we have a mere outline of a story with not even basic similarities to the stories she's claiming are a 1:1 copy of her work, and decades of media appearances based on exploiting a community college media student's mistake in 2004. Anyway seems bad

[thecreaturecodex]

Tiddalik

Image © Paizo Publishing, accessed at Archives of Nethys here

[The three themes I'm working with in April are PF2e conversions, wrapping up the World Tour of Oceania, and starting on commissions. This is all three! Commissioned by @vonbaghager. Tiddalik the Greedy Frog is one of the Australian Aboriginal monsters with the highest profile among Westerners, being the subject of children's books, children's plays and an episode of the PBS show Super Why! (sort of a superhero-themed Reading Rainbow analogue). Notably, this behavior is at least thematically consistent with real frogs. The water-storing frog estivates underground during the dry season in a mucus cocoon filled with water, sort of like a lungfish. ]

Tiddalik CR 7 NE Magical Beast This creature is a frog the size of a wagon, its body grossly swollen. You can hear the faint sloshing of water inside it as it moves and speaks.

Tiddaliks are monstrous frogs native to desert climes that survive the long period between rains by absorbing water like a living sponge. Unfortunately, they are peevish and cruel, and move from place to place absorbing as much water as they can, even if they don’t need it, simply for the joy of depriving others. In the desert, tiddaliks are seen as physical embodiments of selfishness and greed, and many tales and legends have sprung up around them. Some of them are even true—the idea that a tiddalik can be tricked into expelling its water with a hearty belly laugh is one of them. Unfortunately, tiddaliks are most easily amused by suffering.

A tiddalik rarely starts fights on their own—although they are carnivorous, they prefer to eat things that can’t fight back, sniping small game with blasts of pressurized water. These jets are also used as a defensive weapon until enemies get close enough that the tiddalik can grab them in its jaws and crush them. Few tiddaliks will bother to chase down fleeing enemies, but likewise they are often too stubborn to flee or surrender themselves.

A tiddalik is about ten feet in diameter. They weigh over twenty tons when waterlogged, and about one ton when empty.

Tiddalik  CR 7 XP 3,200 NE Huge magical beast (amphibious) Init +2; Senses low-light vision, Perception +13 Defense AC 19, touch 10, flat-footed 17 (-2 size, +2 Dex, +9 natural) hp 92 (8d10+54) Fort +12, Ref +8, Will +6 Weakness mirthful Offense Speed 10 ft., swim 10 ft. Melee bite +12 (1d10+9 plus grab) Ranged spit +8 (2d6+6 bludgeoning) Space 15 ft.; Reach 10 ft. Special Attacks disgorge, expel wave Statistics Str 23, Dex 15, Con 23, Int 6, Wis18, Cha 10 Base Atk +8; CMB +16 (+20 grapple); CMD 28 (32 vs. trip) Feats Nimble Moves, Power Attack, Skill Focus (Survival), Vital Strike Skills Acrobatics +7 (-1 when jumping), Climb +10,Perception +13, Survival +9, Swim +18; Racial Modifiers +4 Acrobatics when jumping, +4 Perception Languages Common SQ amphibious, drink abundance Ecology Environment warm deserts Organization solitary or pair Treasure incidental Special Abilities Disgorge (Ex) A tiddalik can release the water in its body willingly as a full round action, and the water is released automatically when the creature is slain. When the tiddalik releases water, it bursts in a 10 foot radius, dealing 8d6 points of bludgeoning damage to all creatures in the area (Ref DC 20 half). This water makes that 10 foot radius difficult terrain. The save DC is Constitution based. Drink Abundance (Ex) By spending 8 hours, a tiddalik can drink 5000 gallons of water. When it does so, it is considered to be waterlogged, which reduces its speed by 20 feet, but it can use its spit attack and disgorge and expel wave abilities. The statistics above assume that the tiddalik is waterlogged. Expel Wave (Ex) As a standard action, a tiddalik can shoot high pressure water in a 60 foot cone. All creatures in the area take 4d6 points of damage and are pushed back 10 feet. A successful DC 20 Reflex save halves the damage and negates the push effect. The save DC is Constitution based. A tiddalik can use this ability once every 1d4 rounds, but only when it is waterlogged. Mirthful (Ex) A tiddalik can be forced to use its disgorge ability with a Perform (comedy) check against a DC of 20 + the tiddalik’s Will save modifier. Spit (Ex) As a standard action, a tiddalik can spit out a jet of water. Treat this as a thrown weapon with a range increment of 30 feet. A creature struck takes 2d6 bludgeoning damage plus the tiddalik’s Strength bonus.

[coquelicoq]

i am such a clown. decided to make stickers for my siblings even though i have ZERO design skills or knowledge of any programs that allow you to rotate text except for powerpoint. so i made them in powerpoint. (this took, mmmm, maybe 6-8 hours btw.) then had to find a website that would print and mail these stickers to me. no i don't want 50 stickers. i want one circle sticker and one rectangle sticker. oh that's not an option anybody wants to give me? okay then i guess i will buy 16 circle stickers (the least offered) and 50 rectangle stickers (the least offered. why not 16 also? a mystery). one of the designs is for my sibling's band, so if they like it theoretically they could use the stickers as merch or something lol. but i'm not holding my breath, on account of the aforementioned lack of design skills. i get away with a lot among my family because they're all so willing to react to my questionable creations with aww look, she Tried! but that probably doesn't work for strangers who are fans of my sibling's band. so i guess they will just have 49 extra stickers that they can idk stick to streetlight poles or something. not my problem.

[the-physicality]

https://thehockeynews.com/womens/pwhl/watch-montreals-full-pwhl-free-agent-signing-press-conference

i hope this is as new and wonderful to you as it was to me :)

[welcometogrouchland]

Also in the replies of the Steph concept art on twitter announcing she was gonna be in a new project at DC (posted by Travis Mercer), there were at least 3 comments saying "will Tim be there?" I don't care how hard you ship timsteph I'm exploding you with my eyeballs if you do that on my girls post again

[musical-chick-13]

Okay, no, sorry, I’m still mad about this. “Be critical of the media you consume and examine why you react to it in the way that you do, support marginalized and stigmatized identities.” Yeah, until it’s about mental illness.

A woman (or even man, if he’s deemed over-emotional) makes music about suffering from mental illness and people just go, “What are they complaining about, that’s so immature, hashtag wangst.” (And then, sometimes, inexplicably, if the mentally ill woman gets better and writes happier music, they then talk about how artistically bankrupt she is now and that she should go back to hating herself.) People LOVE cis white pRoBLeMaTiC (straight) fictional men until they are realistically mentally ill, in which case they’re “whiny” and “insufferable” and deserve to die violently, apparently (or, if fandom is merciful, they’re ignored). (And then they celebrate when they DO inevitably get killed off.) “Do your duty and watch [thing I, mc13, personally find insufferable] For The (white) Gays because it has Gays.” Sure, will you watch c4 Pure, the ONLY show specifically about OCD, then? (No, the answer is no, it’s always no.)

I can’t get anyone to watch Doom Patrol. I couldn’t get people (in general-I did convince a few irl friends thank GOD) to watch Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. One of the most popular and acclaimed shows right now has a character with schizophrenia who was turned into the Big Bad Villain for no fucking reason. One of the most commonly-cited examples of Iconic™ queer media involves a mentally ill man being broken over and over and over again before The Ship™ can reasonably happen. DW introduced a major character who was at one point suffering from mental illness in her past, AND THEN ALL MENTION OF THIS WAS COMPLETELY DROPPED IN THE FUTURE, WITH NO BEARING ON ANYTHING TO THE POINT WHERE I FORGOT IT EVEN EXISTED??!?!? R*tched was a thing that existed despite the Sad Sympathetic Backstory treatment being IN DIRECT CONTRADICTION OF WHAT PURPOSE THIS CHARACTER SERVED IN One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. THEY GAVE. A SAD WOOBIE VILLAIN TREATMENT. TO THE /LITERAL PERSONIFICATION/ OF ABLEISM. THAT IS HER FUNCTION. TO EXIST AS A SYMBOL OF ALL THE WAYS SOCIETY OPPRESSES THE DISABLED AND MENTALLY ILL.

I am!!! Literally!!!!! The only one!!!!!!!!! Complaining about these things!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! THE ONLY ONE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! No one else has said ANYTHING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! No one is talking about it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I’m so tired!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[gender0bender]

ID: A black and white photograph of Ali Cannon holding his baby son close to his chest and looking at the camera. Cannon is shirtless, and has short dark hair and facial hair. He has been photographed in a room with a sofa, armchair and multiple book shelves. His son is resting his head on his father’s chest and seems to be asleep. There is a tagline at the bottom reading: Ali Cannon is a Jewish writer and poet from the San Francisco Bay Area with a poetry book coming out in the summer of 2005. His wife and photographer, Jessica Israel, is a Jewish bisexual woman who is passionate about her trans husband, and maybe even more passionate about their son, Rephael. ED.

Ali Michael Cannon (he/him) is a writer, organizer, activist, and public speaker who is a recognized leader in the transgender community. Professionally, he has worked in the education field for 30 years, serving as a District Administrator and a Non-Profit Manager. Currently he works as a consultant, supporting schools to become more LGBTQ+ inclusive and address issues of equity and bias. A proud father and husband—he lives in Oakland with his wife, Jessica, an Oakland Public School Principal, and their high school son. He has a godson who just graduated from college, reflecting how much chosen family is a vital part of his relationship to building and sustaining queer community.

His writing has been published in From the Inside Out: Radical Gender Transformation, FTM and Beyond. His provocative illumination of Jewish and transgender themes can be seen in the film, It’s A Boy: Journeys from Female to Male and his essay (co-authored with TJ Michels), Whose Side Are You On: Transgender at the Western Wall. Cannon founded the theater group, Transmen Tell Their Tales, and was a long-time writer, performer, and producer of Chutzpah—a Queer Jewish theater group in San Francisco.

Ali earned a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Feminist Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz and San Francisco State respectively.  He served on the Board of Our Family Coalition, the Bay Area’s LGBTQ Family Organization for eight years.

(Note from me: this picture of him was featured in a trans man calender produced by FTM International for 2005-6 called “Heroes: (Trans)Male Role Models, Part 2“, you can view some of the other pictures here)

[thetriangletattoo]

today my nephew asked me what an mp3 reader is I finally understand my elders

[icewindandboringhorror]

Everytime I face a new character limit on a website that didn't have them before/used to have really long ones... AUGHHhhh the modern social media world was not made for people like me (lovers of details, rambling, elaboration, thorough explanation, and nuance)

[just-rogi]

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[agendratum]

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[timeisacephalopod]

Been seeing a weird amount of shit about AO3 on my dash, at least in part because of some alleged DDOS attack on the site but like I gotta say. If you get frothing at the mouth angry when you see 2 letters and a number losing your absolute marbles making up pizzagate ass sounding conspiracies because you have Feelings on fanfiction then I need you to shut the fuck up. You care too much about something that's nothing at all expect in a highly niche online world you're treating like a global meeting of countries looking to slap your puppy in particular and frankly I find it pathetic.

[coquelicoq]

just saw my friend who speaks french and told her about my list of favorite french words to pronounce and as soon as she asked for examples i forgot all of them except ensemencement. so i was like, okay get this: ensemencement. expecting her to be like, never heard of it. but she was like, ensemencement! and i said, it's an insanely fantastic word but it probably doesn't come up in the wild in conversation like at all frequently :( because how often is it necessary to talk about the act of sowing seeds if you're not a farmer? and she was like well it was necessary to me. i used it for sure. and that's when i remembered that she was in france specifically to get a science degree which involved reading agriculture textbooks in french so yeah. without even meaning to i found the one american who already has a relationship with the french word ensemencement. serendipity.

[leefsnakesnake]

There's an EU initiative going on right now that essentially boils down to wanting to force videogame publishers with paid games and/or games with paid elements such as DLC, expansions and microtransactions to leave said games in a playable state after they end support, or in simpler terms, make them stop killing games.

A "playable state" would be something like an offline mode for previously always online titles, or the ability for people to host their own servers where reasonably possible just to name some examples.

I don't think I need to tell anyone that having something you paid for being taken from you is bad, which is a thing that routinely happens with live service and other always online games with a notable recent example being The Crew which is now permanently unplayable.

Any EU citizen is eligible to sign the initiative, but only once and if you mess up that's it. You can find it here. (https://eci.ec.europa.eu/045/public/#/screen/home)

Even if you're not European or you signed it already, you can share this initiative with anyone who is, even if they don't care about videogames specifically because this needs a million signatures and there is different thresholds that need to be met for each EU country for their votes to even count and could also be a precedent for other similar practices like when Sony removed a bunch of Discovery TV content people paid for. EDIT: There are also some things people outside the EU can do, as well as additional things some people in specific EU countries like Germany and France can do that aim to solve this same issue as well. You can find that here. (https://www.stopkillinggames.com/)

(Note: There was a petition for UK people but the recent politics stuff there means it's on hold and has to be resubmitted and that may take some time.)

Additionally if you want to keep up with this you can check out Ross Scott (Accursed Farms on youtube or his website) who has been posting monthly about this and deserves a lot of credit for all this work.

(I hope that's all the stuff I missed)

EDIT 2: I changed the link to go directly to the form instead, this SHOULD work!

[doodlemancy]

Hey, so, Patreon is lying to you about Apple forcing their hand.

Patreon is getting rid of 1st-of-the-month/per-creation billing, claiming a new decision by Apple has forced their hand. This will hurt a lot of creatives, and their excuse is bullshit. Allow me to explain.

In 2018, Patreon tried to impose a new ill-considered fee structure on everyone that would have cost creators a lot of smaller pledges. They ended up apologizing for this profusely; they have now deleted this apology from their website and unfortunately I was unable to find it on the Internet Archive. This was shameful, but to their credit they backed off quickly when things got ugly.

Back in 2021, Patreon discussed plans to force all creators into a rolling bill structure and get rid of first-of-the-month/pay-up-front billing. The community once again very decisively shouted them down, and they had to walk it back again. This whole fiasco damaged the already shaky trust between Patreon creators and staff.

This week, Patreon announced that, along with extra fees, Apple's policies were supposedly forcing them to move everyone over to the rolling fee structure that they first tried to get us to agree to in 2021. Patreon will tell you they are not happy about this. As a person who spent a long time watching Patreon make terrible decisions, I can tell you-- they are probably very happy about this, because it's exactly the smokescreen they needed to do what they've been trying to do for years, which is pull ALL Patreon creators away from 1st-of-the-month and per-creation billing.

The spin in the news I've seen so far is "Apple bullies Patreon, boo hoo hoo poor Patreon". This is very obviously not what's happening. Mind you: Apple does suck, and they are doing something bad here. Fuck apple. But Patreon and Apple are BOTH the asshole in this situation; Everyone Sucks Here. Patreon has options: they can make the iOS app a reader app and do billing through the browser to avoid the restrictions and the extra fees (Netflix and Amazon, notably, both do this), or they can allow creators to opt-out of iOS billing if they want to use billing models that don't work with it.

It seems most likely to me that the Apple situation is a real fire that Patreon has chosen to use as a convenient smokescreen to do what they've been wanting to do since at least 2021, and maybe since 2018.

What do we do?:

They have a feedback form specifically about this.

They also have a creator discord.

And they have lots of social media pages where they probably really, really hope that this doesn't blow up again, because they never learn. The incidents I've described here aren't the only two other times Patreon has pissed off their creators. They know if they don't contain the noise it'll be harder to get away with it, so make some noise. They've done a lot of work to spin this cleverly so you'll have sympathy for them and they won't get the kind of backlash they know they deserve.

Please don't misuse these links and make threats or spam or something. All you have to do is give well-reasoned feedback. Patreon hates feedback. Make sure they get a nice heaping helping of their least favorite vegetable.