this time for sure (2025)

a zine i wrote about struggling to create art, broadly. consider this a spiritual successor to Some Artist You Are

if you would like to download this as a single printable or digital image, or give me money for some reason, you can do that over at itch.io: this time for sure

I saw this gif on discord and added half-life sfx to it

Rosamund Pike in die another day (2002)

My friend’s chubby puppy likes to sit like this

hehe

idk how to do image editing but good news everyone!

Maybe someone made a typo and it just got out of hand?

I kinda feel like panic!at the disco started the whole exclamation point thing and then it caught on around the internet, but maybe they got it from somewhere else, IDK.

The world may never know…

Maybe it’s something mathematical?

I’ve been in fandom since *about* when Panic! formed and the adjective!character thing was already going strong, pretty sure it predates them.

It’s a way of referring to particular variations of (usually) a character — dark!Will, junkie!Sherlock, et cetera. I have suspected for a while that it originated from some archive system that didn’t accommodate spaces in its tags, so to make common interpretations/versions of the characters searchable, people started jamming the words together with an infix.

(Lately I’ve seen people use the ! notation when the suffix isn’t the full name, but is actually the second part of a common fandom portmanteau. This bothers me a lot but it happens, so it’s worth being aware of.)

“Bang paths” (! is called a “bang"when not used for emphasis) were the first addressing scheme for email, before modern automatic routing was set up. If you wanted to write a mail to the Steve here in Engineering, you just wrote “Steve” in the to: field and the computer sent it to the local account named Steve. But if it was Steve over in the physics department you wrote it to phys!Steve; the computer sent it to the “phys” computer, which sent it in turn to the Steve account. To get Steve in the Art department over at NYU, you wrote NYU!art!Steve- your computer sends it to the NYU gateway computer sends it to the “art” computer sends it to the Steve account. Etc. (“Bang"s were just chosen because they were on the keyboard, not too visually noisy, and not used for a huge lot already).

It became pretty standard jargon, as I understand, to disambiguate when writing to other humans. First phys!Steve vs the Steve right next to you, just like you were taking to the machine, then getting looser (as jargon does) to reference, say, bearded!Steve vs bald!Steve.

So I’m guessing alternate character version tags probably came from that.

100% born of bang paths. fandom has be floating around on the internet for six seconds longer than there has been an internet so early users just used the jargon associated with the medium and since it’s a handy shorthand, we keep it.

Absolutely from the bang paths–saw people using them in early online fandom back in 1993 for referring to things.

I had been doing it for a very, very long time but never actually knew the actual name for it. This is exciting! I like learning things.

Yoo I never knew this but I now feel very educated and have received the answer to a long held question of mine like wow

I think kids should be taught the joys of wearing headphones on public transport very early in their lives

Dichen Lachman and Britt Lower photographed by Ben Stiller on set of Severance S02E07 'Chikhai Bardo'

they had no reason to be serving challengers realness for hsm promo 😭

oh i'm going to misusle and straight up fuckle this knowledge so badly

New backformations unlocked!

To light on fire repeatedly: little To frequently look at things: people To purchase a lot of GOOG stock: google To cry a lot: saddle To make tea continuously: steeple To put knots in something over and over again: tile To do well in school: ale To liate things often with snail-fog (sfog): sfogliatelle.

“see you at the equator” and then seeing each other at the invisible line that divides innie mark and outie mark

exactly

we used to curse whole bloodlines for less than this

“okay 💖 yay💖” really changed a generation

this evil version of it is killing me

you know what actually, let this be its own post