Eggsistential-breakdown - Am I Too Late To This Party? - Tumblr Blog

Watched that m night shyamalan movie about the cringefail girl dad who gets stuck at a concert. the plot was holier than the bible and i have one hundred bones to pick with it but I had fun

Alternate versions based on trailer 2 under the cut

Some "human" Bills! He wants to be 3D but he is soooo 2D. Loser

whole slew of ian doodles from various @reblogincarnation-blues writings!

From left to right, top to bottom:

Badass Mindscape Ian from Chapter 4 of All the Old Familiar Places

Same as 1

Very normal Bian (he's ok) from Chapter 5 of The Mirrored Heart

Soulmate AU Ian as Mira meets him in Chapter 3 of The Mirrored Heart and an older version because he survives to a happy ending and I'm giving him one (1) break (soulmark design inspired by this awesome art by @that-ghost-pal!)

pissy little baby Ian!Bill from Chapters 4 and 9 of All the Old Familiar Places

Twice divorced gray eyesed Ian (my favorite chew toy) from Chapter 1 of The Mirrored Heart

Sick of this bullshit Bian from Chapter 5 of The Mirrored Heart

This bullshit Bian from Chapter 4 of The Mirrored Heart

tdp season 6 shitpost doodles

Have you ever drawn Lucy Ann? I love your art btw

I have now!

And thank you so much!!! I love your art too, your Lucy Ann is super cute, I hope you don't mind that I referenced her for this :P

Reincarnation Bluesverse + Will Wood lyrics

1.1 & 1.2 (couldn't decide which I liked better so have two of them) & 2

Fic: @reblogincarnation-blues's The Mirrored Heart chapter 1

Song: ... well, better than the alternative

3

Fic: @marypsue's What Friends Are For

Song: BlackBoxWarrior - OKULTRA

4 & 5

Fic: @marypsue's Something Borrowed, Something Blues chapter 17

Song: Mr. Capgras Encounters a Secondhand Vanity: Tulpamancer's Prosopagnosia/Pareidolia (As Direct Result of Trauma to the Fusiform Gyrus)

Kept these very fast and loose to try to break out of a creative slump. Based more off of vibes than silly trivial things like canon and facts and anatomy. None of these should be taken literally or metaphorically or physiologically or radiologically. Twice divorced gray eyesed Ian still lives rent free in my head sorry

TWO FULL DECADES AROUND THE SUN

woohoo!

Update

More votes are in! Numbers have changed! And I'm gonna do a followup on some of the previous stats I did and also some new tests! More graphs and numbers under the cut! This one's a little more text heavy and deals more with stats lingo, but I tried to keep it digestible. tl;dr at the end.

First and foremost, last test I did assuming everyone who voted in this poll was AFAB, there was an approximately 9% chance of seeing a vote for "exactly the same height" as high as we did. That vote has gone up, at the time of writing this it's 10.4%. Furthermore, the total number of votes has gone up a lot, it's around 83k at the time of writing but I rounded it up. I used the same methods to redo the simulations for an all AFAB voter group using the new conditions and voila!

Now 0% of the simulations had a proportion of the votes be exactly the same height as prev as high as we are currently seeing. There's no way to know for sure, but my preferred theory is seeing that your prev has the same height as you catches your eye and makes you more likely to vote. But for all I know, the standard deviation of heights of tumblr users is 1 inch. Can't go much further than this without rounding all of you up and measuring you >:).

Now for new stuff!

Since my last post, the gap between the taller and shorter votes has gotten bigger. At the time of writing, 44.6% of the votes are for shorter and 45% are for taller. That's only a difference of 0.4%, but on a scale of 80k+, it might mean something.

My next hypothesis is that you are less likely to vote on this poll if you are shorter than prev than if you are taller than prev.

There's a couple ways we can go about looking at this. I'll start with some of the more general ones (including same height votes) and go narrower.

Method 1: Bar Charts

Bar charts! Generally a pretty good way to visualize the distributions, but it may not be too helpful here.

On the left is what we should be seeing if all of my hypotheses (including the one about same height) are false, and you vote regardless of your height relationship to prev. The proportions here are 46.4% shorter, 7.2% the same height, and 46.4% taller. On the right is what we actually see. You can see that the same height bar is taller and can maybe see that the taller bar is slightly taller than the shorter bar, but it's pretty hard to eyeball.

At the very least we have a baseline of what the proportions should be if (given the tumblr population reflects the general population (big given here)) the likelihood of voting on this poll is independent of your height relationship with prev. This'll be my expected distribution, the good ol' aitch nought if you will.

Method 2: Chi-Square Test for Goodness of Fit

This is a good test to use to see if the distributions of categories in a sample that you are observing (y'all poll voters) matches the expected distribution of categories. I don't have a nice looking graph for this one, you basically just input your observations and expectations into a math formula, you get a number and stick that number in a graph, and the number it spits out (called the p-value) tells you how likely, in a very large number of simulations, that you get results as different from what is expected as the ones you observed, given that your hypothesis is false.

In this case, I'm just looking for if the distribution we see in our sample is likely given that the true distribution is 46.4 - 7.2 46.4. And lo and behold, my p-value was 3.4e-292. This is zero. For all intents and purposes, there is a 0% chance of seeing the results we did if all of my hypotheses are false, but we already knew this.

Method 3: Exactly the Same Thing I Did Before

Beyond this point, the actual underlying distribution of tumblr voters' heights don't matter, which is more conceptually fun for me.

This time, I redid my simulations and graphs for the percentages but using taller and shorter rather than the same height. Since the proportion of same height answers are so much higher than expected, I just factored them out completely. This left me with an expected 50/50 for what remains, and an observed 50.2/49.8 difference in taller versus shorter:

And these look pretty promising! In both cases (this makes sense, they're symmetric), only 1.3% of the simulations fell into the areas as extreme as our observations got. In the showbiz we call this statistically significant, but it doesn't win any asterisks. So it looks like this supports my hypothesis. But wait! There's one more thing we can do!

Method 4: Z-test for Proportions

Since we're just looking at two groups now, taller and shorter, we can pretty much assign a boolean flag to each observation. Let's just say that we're looking at the proportion of voters who are taller than prev. Again, we would expect this to be 50%. No fun visualizations for this one either, pretty much the same procedure as method 2 but using a different formula and different graph.

I got a p-value of 0.12. Aw shucks. In the showbiz we call this not significant and I get fired and shunned forever. Basically if we ran this simulation a whole bunch of times where voters actually were equally likely to answer "taller" as they were "shorter", in 12% of these simulations, we would see results that deviate at least as far as 50.2% voting "taller". Not that many but not enough to make any claims. I've failed you all, sorry.

SURPRISE REPLICATION CRISIS MENTION

Now, see, I could have chosen not to share that last test with all of you, and in science, a lot of the time, you wouldn't have seen this. This is because if that little number, if that p-value doesn't reach 0.05, you're not getting published. And if you're not getting published, you're not getting paid. And so there's all sorts of incentives for scientists to do a little this and a little that to their data and their experiments that end up showing you something that might not reflect what's really happening. And the only way to really tell is when other scientists try to replicate those studies (not very often because this isn't profitable), they can't get the same results.

This is a real problem in science, called the replication crisis, and in a lot of big name journals across many fields (even medical ones oh no), the number of studies that don't replicate vastly outnumber the ones that do.

Anyways I attended a talk once about ways in which we could counter the replication crisis, and for every suggestion someone made, someone else came up with a method you could use to circumvent that suggestion. People are always going to be able to find ways to wriggle their ways into filling all those requirements to get paid. This isn't to scare you from science or demonize scientists (most probably? aren't doing anything wrong), just point out that the machine is not the best.

Disclaimer: I'm not a professional, I'm just a student right now, so any number of things I said may be wrong. I could also just be lying to you and so could all the poll voters.

tl;dr

It is even more unlikely at this point that given the tumblr population is representative of the global population, we'd see a percentage of 10.4% the same height just by random chance, people are only maybe more likely to vote if they are taller than prev than if they are shorter than prev (legally I can't say), and replication crisis jumpscare!

pspspsps

do any of my followers like statistics

Okay so I saw the "shorter" and "taller" were pretty much exactly the same and I thought yeah that makes sense it's pretty surprising how much that makes sense, you pull a random sample of 2 people of different heights and the odds you pull the taller one first is the same as you pulling the shorter one first. But 10.2% (percentage at the time I'm doing this) seemed a little high for randomly pulling people that are exactly the same height. So that got me curious, assuming the tumblr population reflects the global population (which very well may not be true), what are the odds that we see at least 10.2% of the population being the same height as the person pulled right before them?

Kinda longish stats rambling under the cut so if you don't want to look at it (I'd rather you would :D) you can go right along. There is a tl;dr at the end if you just want results.

Take this with a grain of salt, I'm not sure how good my practices are. Human height is bimodal, two normal distributions, one female and one male, obviously a simplification of the human experience, but it'll do for the height distribution I'm going to use. I took the means (69 in and 64 in) and standard deviations (3 in and 2.8 in) for heights for each sex from this site, I didn't vet it but the numbers didn't seem unreasonable. It uses height data from Europe, North America, Australia, and East Asia from people born between 1886 and 1994. Looked for tumblr sex distributions and found conflicting reports so I'm just going 50/50 for simplicity. I found this site and this site suggesting it is 50/50 so hopefully I'm not too far off.

Hypothesis testing time! My hypothesis being people are more likely to actually vote on this poll if they are the same height as the prev.

I ran 10,000 simulations of pulling a random sample of 50,000 people and for each simulation recorded what percentage of people had the same height (rounded to the nearest inch) as the person pulled directly before them. Each person has a 50/50 chance of being AFAB or AMAB, and then their specific height is picked from a normal distribution based on sex. I then made a histogram for all of these simulations to visualize these results and:

WOW! that's quite far away. Pretty much 0% of these simulations had a percentage at or above 10.2%. So uh. Pretty unlikely. Pretty cool! I'd put a handful of asterisks next to this figure.

But tumblr has a reputation for being mostly female, whether or not that's true I thought it would be fun to look at a scenario where the voters here are 75/25 split female/male and a scenario where the voters are all female and all male. So here's the breakdown for these guys, I knocked the simulations down to 1,000 because I am impatient and didn't want to wait more than 2 seconds.

For all females:

Actually a decent chunk of the simulations (0.9%) make it above the 10.2% line. Still kind of unlikely but definitely not outside the realm of possibility.

For all males:

Again 0% chance of landing at or equal to 10.2% of the votes being equal height as prev! And that's just a 0.2 inch difference in standard deviation.

And my 75/25 female/male breakdown:

Also 0%. Jeez that's far.

I did one more 85/15 split just for funsies:

Still 0%. Kinda wild that introducing a little bit of sex variation changes it this much. If I'm doing something wrong conceptually, please feel free to let me know.

I'm aware that there's been a lot of change in height in the past century when the original stats were taken, so the baseline standard deviations might not be right for these purposes. Also, tumblr users tend to be concentrated in a couple countries and definitely do not reflect the real age distribution of the population. I tried looking into tumblr's country breakdown then going to the major countries' height census data but that was falling a little too deep into the rabbit hole and I don't know German. Surprisingly enough it looks like governments aren't champing at the bit to tell you the standard deviations of the heights of their populations :/.

Anyways it looks like given the very many assumptions I made about the tumblr population, there's a fighting chance that seeing your prev has the same height as you makes you more inclined to actually vote on it! (yes I'm aware correlation is not causation I just thought this was neat)

tl;dr it is pretty damn unlikely that given the tumblr population is representative of the global population, we'd see a percentage of 10.2% the same height just by random chance

I've taken the other posts down, it seems like Tumblr has finally let my post live in public. Again, apologies for the kerfuffle if anyone was able to see it

Apologies if you guys have seen the same post a bunch of times. Tumblr kept hiding and unhiding and hiding the post so I was running a bunch of tests to see if I could figure out what was going on. The latest version of the post on THIS BLOG, not any of the ones on @eggsistential-basket is the one I'm intending to keep. If the post is still visible in a couple hours ALL of the other versions will be deleted so I can have it consolidated into one post. I'm going to keep the others up for a bit in case I can't get a stable version on this blog. Sorry for the confusion

Apologies if you guys have seen the same post a bunch of times. Tumblr kept hiding and unhiding and hiding the post so I was running a bunch of tests to see if I could figure out what was going on. The latest version of the post on THIS BLOG, not any of the ones on @eggsistential-basket is the one I'm intending to keep. If the post is still visible in a couple hours ALL of the other versions will be deleted so I can have it consolidated into one post. I'm going to keep the others up for a bit in case I can't get a stable version on this blog. Sorry for the confusion

trying this ONE MORE TIME are you kidding me. this is the definition of insanity. none of you will believe what I've been going through with this one silly sketch page

tumblr are you ready to not be mira phobic aka I'm going to murder you

The original caption was just "shaky mira car doodles" but I thought the captions for the 20+ tests I did were more fitting

I CANNOT tell you how much trouble I had getting this to show up. this wasn't showing up on dashboard or in any tags. good chance this one will decide to not turn up for a bit also. tumblr hates mira. cannot believe this. Also the fact that this was supposed to be my 250th post and I kept redoing it means my activity looks like this:

went in a completely different direction with this i misread it and missed the "in every flashback" part. anyways i had a visceral vision of having to live in a reality where humans all of a sudden start birthing muppets and i Did Not like it

muppet adaptation of any far future TAU story like RB where in every flashback, people that lived before the transcendence are played by humans and everyone born after it is played by muppets

we never explain whether this is artistic license or supposed to literally indicate a supernatural muppetscendence occurred.

it is so late right now but I had to

You can click this for a minor surprise if I did it right

the haunting of ian beale, 2/?

uh this one got long lol. part one here.

---

Ian looked around him.

He looked at who was next to him, and what he was wearing and sighed deeply.

"Well, it's not the Symbolism Room at least."

Henry nodded. "It's the Symbolism Beach, which will obviously be better."

"Was that a joke?"

"Rest assured, I do not engage in any type of jokes, frivolity, japes or shenanigans."

"Well as long as that's settled."

The beach was... endless, sand in all directions on either side of him, water in front of him. Ian didn't look behind him; something inside told him that he wouldn't like it. Normally that would have had him immediately looking from sheer spite but his gut was telling him

he would see Nothing

truly, Nothing.

could he handle seeing Nothing? no, okay, let's move on then because

this chair was very comfortable.

Henry and Ian were in Adirondack chairs, and Ian knew it wasn't his mind supplying he beach because he had never heard that term in his life. Thankfully, something knew him well enough to pair his swim trunks with a shirt and sun hat.... though considering his trunks were covered in yellow triangles, and his shirt had a Radical Dude Doing Sik Sk8 Trix on it, he was still clearly being fucked with.

Henry, Ian was bemused to see, was still in his weird pre-Transcendence 'preacher' outfit, though tonight at least he had short sleeves on.

"It's beautiful, isn't it?"

Ian looked out at crashing waves, water so dark as appear to black, a blue cloudless sky. It felt... calming. Meditative. The waves were just enough to provide sound, but not so violent as to actually disturb the sense of calm tranquility.

His brain, Ian realized, was quiet.

Quiet in that every time he felt the panic rise, it felt like a big fist came to kindly push on his chest until he settled down.

He should probably be worried about that but

oh. hey. A fruity tropical drink in his hand. Convenient, that.

"What brings you here this time?" Ian asked. "I"m not sure how many after school specials I can handle."

Henry frowned a bit. "I'm not entirely sure myself. Quite frankly I'm amazed I'm here spea-"

Henry disappeared. Ian took the opportunity to will his drink from a virgin pina colada to a margarita.

He looked out at the ocean.

He didn't look behind him.

"My apologies." Henry was still the same, though his glass had now turned into a mug that read 'World's Best Grandpa.'

"Not exactly fun being constantly in the midst of an existential crisis, I get it."

Henry looked around him. "This... this is my daughter's beach."

The mindscape of someone dead a thousand years. But

"You seem... relatively calm, about that," Ian finally ventured.

"You mean, as compared to Alcor?" Ian must have pulled a face, because Henry let out a bittersweet little laugh.

"No. I am sad my daughter is gone. But I am happy knowing since then she has had a hundred different life times to experience joy-"

"-and pain-"

"-and that too but one is not outweighed by the other. It just is. We see each other in-"

Henry kept talking but for a minute all that came out was radio static. Ian had a feeling that even if Bill or Alcor were here, they too would only hear that static as well.

"-also, with all due respect for my brother, it has been a millennium. Everyone and everything involved has moved on."

"But not him," said Ian with full disrespect.

"No." Henry took a drink and adjusted his visor. "in a way, I pity him, deeply. I think he will forever be locked in the trauma of losing everyone and everything he knows. There is a part of him that cannot change, cannot move on, and he knows it."

"Okay, but that's bullshit though?" and oh, was he mad? Okay, he was not only mad, but pretty mad, even with the chest pushing blanket on him.

"I'm sorry, but a thousand years, and nothing has changed? Seriously? Also have we forgotten that vampires also can live a very long time, or dragons, and I don't see them doing... doing-"

Ian waved a hand to indicate everything Alcor had done, ever.

"Vampires don't have infinitely expanding and growing power at their beck and call."

"And that makes a difference how?" Man the combination dreamarita, dream beta blocker, and the constant rage that bubbled under his skin was actually a really good combo, the words were flowing but the heart rate was not accelerating, 12/10 feeling.

"My life, Mira's life... they're different because Alcor is in them- and not always for the better."

"Bill might have happened anyway."

"Point. But would I be missing an eye, would-"

Ian stopped, because he didn't want to tell Henry about the pain, the sadness, the absolutely tremendous amount of stress on all of them, because the preteen with the power of a god decided to come into their lives and play with them like dolls.

He didn't deserve that truth, yet.

Everything was silent for a minute, save for the breaking of the waves and the cry of the gulls.

Finally, Henry managed to say, "I think, I am a little upset to hear you say that. But if I put my emotions aside for a second, I do not think you are entirely wrong, either."

Ian was still. He had seen Henry crush the plastic armrests under his hands, caught the hot iron tang of blood in his nose and a flash of meat in the antlers.

"Has he told you, about my children? His nieces and nephew?"

"No. He hasn't? I'm... sorry?"

For a minute, Henry disappeared. But this time it felt like it was because he chose to do so himself.

Henry blipped back in, now also holding a dreamarita. "My apologies. I did not realize how that would affect me. And I did not hold space for your extremely valid criticisms."

Looking at him, Ian felt a wash of pity come on him. What was it like- no, what had to have happened that even a thousand years later you felt the need to exert that level of control over oneself?

"Anyway," Henry went on. "We had triplets- Acacia, Hank, Willow. They were our everything. Alcor was their fourth parent." The math must clearly have not been mathing on Ian's face because Henry added "We also had my father-in-law with us. No but... I don't regret having Alcor with us, having Alcor raise the kids. He loved them, more than anyone or anything else-"

"-except Mizar."

Henry looked like he bit a lemon.

"Yes. Well. My point is, I don't regret it but thinking about it... we were all affected in some way, letting a demon into our homes, into our bed. And... it wasn't always all good." Henry paused. "But it wasn't all bad, either."

Ian thought about it, really, truly thought about it for a minute.

"It's not all bad," he finally agreed. "But he seriously needs to fix his shit."

"I'll have a talk with him-" Henry's hands and feet blipped, appeared quickly hanging from his antlers, then appeared back where they should be. "Or I'll try to anyway."

They drank their drinks. At some point, a goat wandered onto the beach.

Ian still didn't feel tempted to look back behind him. It felt like being fourteen. It wasn't a good feeling and oh, the calm down hand was pushing him down again-neat!

"I am a little embarrassed that I am just now having this realization," Henry said as he began his second dreamarita. "It feels like something I should have recognized a long time ago."

Ian was now three dreamaritas in and beginning to see 5-D colors. "I wouldn't sweat it, it's probably because your consciousness was violently ripped apart and the resulting energy used to power a demon and now the million fragments of your soul are slowly beginning to piece themselves together and wait, how do I know this?"

"You know the answer."

"Ugh. Him."

"But you are probably correct."

"Orrrrrr, and just throwing this out there- none of this could be real and it's simply my brain trying to process the absolute shitshow of the last few years."

"Perhaps. I know that I, personally, do not feel very 'real' right now, which is also very disconcerting."

They sat. They drank their drinks. The goat was eating a seagull, an image that Ian was almost going to immediately throw on a storyboard for the next episode when he woke up.

"Why are you here? Doing this?" Ian finally asked.

"I don't have anything else better to do. Dipper won't listen to me."

Ian was not going to touch that with a ten foot pole but he went on. "That's not your vibe, that's what assholes like me say."

"I am trying to be witty, but that has never been my strong suit."

Which was why Ian wasn't going to point out that that had been nowhere near wit but-

"-I thought you could use someone to talk to, about all of this."

"Okay, but we already had this conversation and I am pretty sure you are not a licensed therapist."

"Very much not; I was a librarian."

"That tracks."

"So no, I am not a therapist. I certainly can't 'fix' you, nor do I have any intent on doing so."

That flare of anger again. "Okay, but my life would be considerably easier if my brain wasn't constantly trying to crash into the ocean and explode, so I'd rather like some fixing, thank you very much."

Henry held his hands up in supplication. "My apologies, I was trying to go for more 'we are defined by our life experiences.'" He looked down. I'm not always the best with.. talking to people. Understanding them. That was all-"

"Mira." Unbidden, her name out of his mouth.

"Her."

On Henry's arms, Ian could see dozens of little round scars, up and down. His hands clasped his mug, and Ian could see that two or three of his fingers were crooked.

Ian had a feeling why Henry had a hard time with people. It wasn't a good feeling.

"But look. One good talk won't fix everything forever. I think you could use someone to talk to about this a little more regularly. I don't know all of what you've been through, our experiences aren't a one to one comparison but, I get it. Really. And I know in retrospect, I should have talked to someone myself."

"Wait. I'm sorry, you didn't have a therapist? Or anything?"

It was disconcerting to see a middle aged man who could instantly obtain and wear the mantle of Death blush beet red.

Ian could see where this was going. "Henry did you ever talk to your wife about any of this?"

"A... a tiny bit, I think. I hope. But, I think I didn't want to burden her... which in and of itself created a burden on her. I trusted her, more than anything else in the world, but I... I couldn't talk to her."

Henry looked down at the drink in his hands. "It was always so much easier to talk here, than it was in the real world."

Control.

Ian thought about the control it took to keep the anger at bay, keep the temper cool, keep everything inside, at all times.

Control, that was more akin to a prison.

Aloud though, all Ian said was "Oof," because honestly he wasn't sure how to handle this level of honesty from a guy he was only talking to for the second time ever, also who was super dead.

"My apologies, I know that was a lot of- as my kids used to say- 'oversharing.' But I just dont want you to make the same mistakes I did."

A chill trickled down Ian's spine. "Um, I'm actually emotionally available and talk to my fiance like a real person, thank you very much. To say nothing of the multiple therapists I am currently seeing."

Henry ignored Ian's barbs and went on. "I know you talk to Mira-"

"How-"

"I can see inside you," Henry said, nonchalantly.

Not even magic airborne anxiety medicine would keep Ian's heart from immediately jackhammering in his chest, stop his temper from instantly snapping like a twig."

Ian's voice was low. "I am sick and TIRED of people, especially people I don't know, RUMMAGING inside of my head."

Henry was flushing but this time there were stormclouds in his face, which tough shit.

"It all comes down to BILL, always and forever, and apparently that's a legitimate reason to invade my privacy? In the most violating way possible?"

"That was certainly not my intention, could I please explain?"

Ian was standing up now, albeit wobbly because those dreamaritas were hitting hard, and looked out to the ocean beyond. He resisted the urge to dump a devastating one liner and began to wade out into the ocean. He'd just swim until he woke up, and then put "learn how to lucid dream" on his calendar so he could peace out right away next time this happened.

"Wait, Ian you should not go out in that water-"

Ian flipped him the bird and kept going.

"No, seriously, I think that's a rip tide-"

Suddenly, it felt like two hands grabbed Ian's ankles and pulled and now he was flying through the water, further and further from shore. He tried swimming sideways, but the not-hands on his ankles held on tighter and pulled him under."

It was a dream so obviously, Ian didn't need to breathe.

But

Everything around him was wine dark and suffocating. Underneath his feet was tens of thousand of feet of water and more than that was a deep crushing M A W, a great big stingray's mouth that sought out pray and sucked it in to crush it between it's two great grinding plates and he was drawing closer and closer and

Something else wrapped around his waist. Something... wood? It wrapped and it Pulled

And the maw and the wine dark sea and the bird eating goat and the beach were gone, all gone, and it was just him, and Henry, in a blank white space.

"I'm sorry, I tried to take you to my space but-"

For a second, everything flickered around Ian and he was in a forest but flicker again and it was the blank white room.

"-but I think that part of me is gone, right now."

"So. Thank you for saving me, but counterpoint, what the fuck was that murder beach?"

"I did not realize that her beach had.. not quite gotten a mind of its own. Say was akin to a machine left on way too long, running the same processes until it burns out-"

"And those processes are?"

"Eradicate intruders by destroying them, and dispersing their energy."

"And," Ian said after a long minute, "that was your daughter's mind."

"She was going through some things." Henry paused. "In retrospect, quite a lot of things."

Ian sat down, and Henry next to him.

"I don't- it's not on purpose, I promise."

Ian sighed. "I had a feeling. Honestly, you don't give off that kind of vibe. It's just-"

"You've been violated. Several times." There was an edge to Henry's voice and for a second the air around him smelt of blood and pine and wait, was he getting mad on Ian's behalf? Oh, that was... unexpected. But cool, thanks!

Henry closed his eyes, took a breath, and the air cleared. "I want to let you know I am not reading your mind-"

"Oh my stars, is that one theory that souls just watch the living like TV true? Because I got to tell you, I am deeply not sure how I feel about that existentially."

"No. I mean, kind of but-" radio static, again.

"I didn't catch any of that but I'm guessing no one is watching grandma go to the bathroom from the afterlife."

Henry shuddered. "Absolutely not. I can just..." He paused, clearly trying to think of a way to phrase it so that mortals could understand. Finally, he just reached out and gently tapped Ian's chest.

"I see that."

"Are you telling me you can see my heart? Because that is unimaginably corny."

"I can see that you are a good man, who loves and is loved in return."

For once, Ian had nothing to say.

The room began to dim, and Henry looked around. "I think you're starting to wake up."

"Oh, uh... okay."

There was an awkward pause, but finally, Ian extended an olive branch. "It feels like you still have more to say."

"I do."

"Then, I guess I'll see you around."

----

A pillow smacked into his face.

"Dude, why are you groaning so much?"

"Love you too, starshine."

"Seriously though, you practically woke yourself up. Weird dreams?"

Ian's brow crinkled. He couldn't remember anything but-

"Did I drink last night?"

"Um, unless you managed to do it in the 2 minutes we were apart before bed, no?"

"Huh. It's weird but I feel... hungover?"

this goes here too

@eggsistential-breakdown

IVE BEEN WORKING ON A UNIFIED THEORY IF I MAKE IT THROUGH TONIGHT EVERYBODYS GONNA HEAR ME OUT

went the complete opposite direction. behold: ian who's one of those guys that look like they're in their 30s as a high school freshman.

i respect the smart aesthetic judgement of every ian artist that doesnt draw him like alex would have looked in the yearspan when RB takes place because Oh My Fucking God he looked like he was in 10th grade until he was like 27

2010:

2011 (the shenanigans and hooliganry in this photoset is unmatched and frankly the long hair is working):

2012 (oops nope he cut it this was a bad idea):

2013 (king u are so close to figuring out the mustache you can do it come on):

2014 (oh my god he did it. 😭 bring the troops home):

hee hoo

ruh roh! If you kick the cuckoo out of the nest, don't be surprised to find it desecrated and your eggs destroyed. In trying to protect Mira Alcor dooms her to the narrative :D

I'm curious in your interpretation, in a universe where Ian never meets Mira and Alcor how does the Bill stuff go down if it does at all?

GAH that's terrifying I love it. My one request is the laugh track is awful and Ian is the only one who can hear it. I need to point and laugh at him. He needs to be a trapped in a haunted vhs tape. It won't fix or help him but he needs it.

Ian and the twice-divorced gray-eyesed rift Ian from the first chapter of @reblogincarnation-blues's fic!

anyways the closest experience I've had to the the feeling of reading the second chapter is taking my roommate to the ER for four hours for suspected appendicitis only to come back with a UTI diagnosis and an antibiotic prescription. and it breaks your one year streak of roommates getting appendicitis. in a good way.

It has literally just occurred to me after three years that there is a benign interpretation (you can use an onion for culinary purposes) and you can in fact use an onion non violently

Is... is this a threat?