Can't Afford Art School?

my nephew, who is like 11 or 12, is playing “5D Chess With Multiverse Time Travel”, which is exactly what it says on the tin, and I have never been more terrified of the youth of today

“What? Your ENTIRE home dimensions? Destroyed? How? By what?”

Bill looked distant, more distant than I’d ever seen him.

“By a monster.”

“MY MUSE WAS A MONSTER”

I made this comic for the literature festival ‘Québec en toutes lettres'. If you are in la ville de Québec, I believe you can find this comic displayed on a large panel or as a free postcard in these cute vending machines they’ve set up around the downtown. I don’t actually have proof of either, so if you are in Québec and you see my comic in the wild, please send me a photo!

The theme of this year’s festival is ‘climbing the light’ based on a line of poetry from Jean-Paul Daoust. My comic is a pretty abstract take on that. I was thinking about how great art can inspire people all over the world to create art, and how that art can then inspire future artists and so on, making this unending giving-and-receiving of light through our history. I was also thinking about birds (as I do sometimes), and how they do a similar thing with their songs.

The bird I’ve painted here is an Eastern Whip-poor-will, a night singer.

when the objectively bad person has traumatic and honestly reasonable reasons for why theyre like that but it doesnt excuse their actions and only serves to make them more tragic as a character

everyone needs to stop framing bill cipher as this flat static character that has no significant backstory because it’s pissing me off

due to the release of the book of bill AND the website unlocking new lore, we know that bill literally massacred his whole race/world in an attempt to liberate them through chaos as they denied his ability to see the third dimension

he spent his whole life up until that point being the only one to see the stars (that’s kind of fascinating if you ask me)

ALSO don’t forget that bill is a liar! so many people are jumping to conclusions and deciding that because bill said that he doesn’t care about what happened to euclydia, then he doesn’t care. don’t take his statements at face value because he’s fooling you too!

you have to look at the context and his actions. not only is bill lying to you (the reader) he is lying to himself! the example I’m thinking off is in the book of bill he talks about his childhood and describes how everyone loved him when we know that’s not true (because what he could see was illegal and taboo) after that, when he talks about the massacre everything gets blurry and he can’t fully describe it.

bill is lying to himself to soften the blows of reality. when people like time baby or his therapist try to ask him anything related to his past he clams up and won’t say a word.

he is lying to himself just like he lied to ford, just like he lied to dipper, just like he lied to mabel, and just like he’s lying to the reader.

he is constantly putting himself on a pedestal and convincing people that he’s the greatest! when he knows there’s something wrong and can’t even remember through all the lies he’s created!!!

this is not me saying that he’s an excusable villain (because he’s absolutely not) but me saying that he’s an multi-faceted character that people keep writing off as simple.

MASSIVE TRIGGER WARNING FOR SH and depictions of PSYCHOSIS

I spent days researching schizophrenia for this guy

tweet

Something like this would be so colossally helpful. I'm sick and tired of trying to research specific clothing from any given culture and being met with either racist stereotypical costumes worn by yt people or ai generated garbage nonsense, and trying to be hyper specific with searches yields fuck all. Like I generally just cannot trust the legitimacy of most search results at this point. It's extremely frustrating. If there are good resources for this then they're buried deep under all the other bullshit, and idk where to start looking.

The Marx Understander: We should be voting blue harder

correct. sitting in your room jerking it to fantasies of a revolution that has no leaders, no organizational infrastructure, and no strategy is not more historically progressive than participating in electoral politics. revolutions don't spontaneously self-organize. the revolutionary left in the United States is fragmentary and riven with internecine feuds, and uses abstentionism as an excuse for its irrelevance. anytime somebody suggests that milieu might not be a tenable vehicle for large-scale political change, somebody leans back in their chair, sneers, and offers some cutting remark with zero substance that functions solely to indicate that cool kids don't vote, cool kids don't team up with liberals, cool kids don't care about large-scale effectiveness, they only care about the incestuous world of far-left politics.

they have no substantive defense of their behavior, of course. if they did, they would be able to offer a defense besides repeating Democratic campaign slogans in increasingly mocking tones to indicate their disapproval. the "far left" in american politics these days really is just an unpleasant, cliquish social club on the internet. and once you notice how their model for politics is Mean Girls, how they have no style of communication that isn't dripping with irony so they don't actually have to make a positive claim that they might have to defend, how they have zero ambitions beyond their extremely insular world, it becomes impossible to ignore.

Some people don't get it, but for me, like a BIG part of why I actually ship Billford in a specifically romantic fashion is because well... It just makes everything SO MUCH worse and more painful, doesn't it?

Like the fact that Bill CARED about Ford (and this part is certainly cannon, the romanticness of it might be up for debate, but Bill CARED, Bill LIKED him), the concept that Bill LOVED and still LOVES Ford even after all those years, the fact that Ford is the one person in trillions of years that Bill is open with, and that he can relate to, the one person in the entire multiverse he wants to keep, the one person he loves...

And yet, Bill still hurts him, he still betrays him, he still haunts and abuses him...

It just makes Bill so much worse

He CAN care, he CAN love

But that won't stop him from doing awful, violent, twisted things, even to the one person in the whole universe that actually MATTERS to him.

And that just makes it so much more horrifying and honest to goodness tragic