Paul Gadzikowski's The Hero of Three Faces

Replacement tumblog for @heroofthreefaces, deactivated with no notice, reactivated with no explanation, now an archive. Fanfiction, but it's comic strips with stick figures, but they're triangles. he/him, 12 years old since 1971

[paulgadzikowski]

It's been a little over a month since I dropped out of Tumblr and moved over to Bluesky. I still check over here about once a week though, to see whether there's any indication the mods have shaped up (actually I'm not sure how to check for that); and see whether there's anything in my notes I have a comment on. Looks like I'll still be posting here once or twice a month.

Meanwhile at Bluesky where there's no porn ban I've been going a little crazy with the NSFW stuff. I generally got like this every spring already (I'm now calling it my annual second puberty) but till now for posting I'd have to go to Pillowfort which has never been my primary social instead of to, you know, my primary social. I've even gotten myself a scanner so I can do it with pencil drawing and have refreshed my memory of the production procedures I used on Arthur, King of Time and Space. If you're interested it's here. I've even been drawing OCs. I never invent OCs.

[paulgadzikowski]

Another few months and I'm pretty well settled in over there but I miss the engagement I got over here. Of course I'd been on Tumblr for fourteen years when I walked out. I'd been on Bluesky for four years when I picked up and moved in there and, while I get my fair share of likes and reblogs reposts, I guess, I don't get a lot of comments/replies and I get little or no response to daily The Hero of Three Faces links (when it's not summer hiatus and there are any) or other art.

A post was going around there last month where someone asked what's the best social forum you ever knew and everyone who's been drawing webcomics as long as I have was saying their site's comment section. I never had a comment section on my site, because my webcoding arrested in 1997. I had a free one for Arthur, King of Time and Space at Talk About Comics once. I woulda thought that site disappeared with Webcomicsnation but looking now I find it's still there, though the AKOTAS bbs seems to be gone. I haven't any record of what my password was so I tried to register anew. The forums page says I'm banned, says I can contact the site mod about it, and hides the mod contact link or doesn't have one.

I asked these questions on Bluesky then and got zero response, so maybe here:

Anyone got contact information for TAC?

Anyone got recs for other free phpBB forum providers, or something similar, whatever it is people have nowadays?

Anyone got recs for simple forum software I might run on my own site?

Should I just make a Strawpage and crosspost the answers on my site and socials?

EDIT 7/21/26 I have decided that I'm allowing myself to duck back here more often. Not only don't I (yet) get a lot of interaction with my posts over at Bluesky, I don't (yet) have a followingship which keeps me up to date the way Tumblr does on all the shows I don't watch but probably would watch if I watched more shows than Doctor Who and Star Trek.

[paulgadzikowski]

There's been no response to my shout out for bbs software recs on Bluesky or Twitter. I've done some searching and skimming and decided to investigate seriously August 1st (traditional season premier date is August 17). Then today I thought about Patreon.

I've got one Patreon member right now at free tier so I know it can be done (you'd have to make a login at Patreon, but you'd have to do that at a bbs on my site too, and a Patreon login accesses more'n just me). I haven't been charging the paid tier members for a year or two anyway because of a controversial site policy change, though I still do weekly bonus posts for only them (which include my other blogs' behind-the-scenes posts (like this one)). Right now that's usually the only posting I do there. I could start making more free tier posts there, including the daily cartoons once summer hiatus ends, and try to cultivate that as my comments section. Others are already doing it that way.

But part of the reason I was thinking about software for my own site is the control. If Patreon ever deletes then there would go my comments section. Already had that happen once.

The gripping hand is, the lack of response to the recs shoutouts makes me wonder if there's even any audience for a Three Faces bbs.

[omgthatdress]

I am absolutely ENRAPTURED by this hat that Martha Reeves is wearing on her Hollywood Walk of Fame ceremony! It's so beautiful! It's so fantastic! I love it!

[haunted-hideaway]

That's a HAT. If you are going to wear a hat, everyone should know. I feel this way about earrings too, and practice it in my personal life. MAKE YOUR STYLE CHOICES LOUD, PEOPLE!

[paulgadzikowski]

That's less a hat than it's a restraining order

[securityunit-ese]

Chapter 1 preview of Platform Decay on Amazon

Read a sample: “Platform Decay (The Murderbot Diaries, 8)”

Martha Wells

[paulgadzikowski]

Spoilery speculation based on the "sample"/excerpt

Okay so, two out of three novels so far (where All Systems Artificial Rogue Exit, or Human Preservation was a four-novella series, not a novel) have opened with an action scene which sequed almost instantly into SecUnit and new pal(s) being thrown headfirst into the deep end of a left field emergency.

Those of us who have seen the available blurb know Platform Decay is about a rescue mission; it sounded to me like a novel-length version of the sequence in Fugitive Telemetry when SecUnit had to secure the trafficked escapees without alerting the traffickers. I think SecUnit and Three are going to wrap up their mission in the excerpt but uncover that there are some people in imminent danger and be asked by ART/Seth to go get them instead of come right home.

[paulgadzikowski]

I'm taking nine-out-of-ten for this one

[paulgadzikowski]

Doctor Who: Christmas special plans scrapped as Russell T Davies and Bad Wolf withdraw

The BBC has ended its arrangement with Bad Wolf and Russell T Davies. There will be no 2026 Doctor Who Christmas special.

So, I know what you're thinking now, or have already been wondering if you saw this news earlier today: What's going to be impact of this on The Hero of Three Faces?

I've already been drawing the Billie Piper "Doctor" as the future Doctor in some Three Faces crossovers set during what would have been Season 2027 if there had been going to be one, even if it had consisted only of the now-cancelled 2026 Christmas special*. My plan, of course, was to edit the images once it was announced who was following Ncuti Gatwa in the role for the special and next year. Then recently I decided to keep the "Piper Doctor" in some of these cartoons anyway, as sort of AU Doctor like the Lumley Doctor and the Grant Doctor, both of which have been established in Three Faces continuity as Doctors of alternate fiction-planes sort of like the Pine Kirk in relation to the Shatner-Wesley Kirk or like the other two Spider-Men in No Way Home. This decision was precipitated partially by the cancellation of Buffy: New Sunnydale after some of those characters had already appeared in Three Faces, so the never-weres at least have each other to hang out with.

Meanwhile there was still going to be a gap year where Season 2026 proper was failing to happen. Though the Gatwa-"Piper" regeneration came onscreen at the end of Season 2025, I've continued drawing the Gatwa Doctor as Three Faces' current Doctor in crossovers set in this year's continuities (e.g. Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, and Supergirl when it comes out), even giving him his granddaughter Susan as a companion** in compensation for continued lack of resolution for her Season 2025 story arc (after the planned resolution was cut from the finale), as will almost certainly now be the case when Season 2025's head writer is gone. The point is, I was asserting the regeneration comes just after the hiatus - right before the special when, presumably, the new Doctor would start airing, whatever the followup air schedule developed to be - instead of at the beginning of the hiatus.

So what to do now, when there's going to be no new Doctor, due to there being no Doctor Who, for at least 2027*** and possibly, as those of us fearing the doom of repeating history, years or even decades? (It's no use telling me, "There's plenty of EU you know," when e.g. Big Finish can't give me a post-Gatwa incarnation which won't be consigned to the same AU status as the Grant Doctor**** [who the BBC website was touting as the official ninth Doctor till the tv revival was announced] once there are screen adventures again, assuming I live so long.)

Today I went through the existing Three Faces cartoons set in next year's continuity, decided which ones the "Piper" Doctor could keep, and in the rest replaced her with the Gatwa Doctor. Like the McCoy Doctor in my pencil dailies of 1989-1996, the Gatwa Doctor will remain the current Doctor in my work not just in 2026 continuities but until there's a screen successor.

The in-text rationales, and notations concerning the out-text rationales updated due to today's development, for both the "Piper" Doctor and the Gatwa Doctor persisting are respectively here and here.

* In my spreadsheet the Christmas specials have always been tracked as episode zero of the following year's season, because the first one introduced a new Doctor at the beginning. Unlike every single Christmas special regeneration since then (except, of course, the one we're not after all getting this year). ** Much like I gave the Hurt Doctor a companion, a Time-War-generated-AU version of Cass. I don't invent an OC if I can avoid it. *** The guy whose skeet I reblogged reposted might say "You don't know there's going to be no Doctor Who in 2027" but yeah, the lack of anything like hard dates in the official statement tells me no Doctor Who in 2027. **** Notwithstanding Grant's face in the incarnation collage in Rogue. Unless Rusty's put out an explanation that's never reached me, I think he was just winding us up.

[paulgadzikowski]

Today I realized that I draw the oh, hello Doctor in what till now has been Three Faces' default temporary outfit for Doctors whose outfits haven't been revealed yet, updating the art when the outfit is revealed; which means (when she's going to be a permanent fixture, if as an alternate plane Doctor) I can't use it for that any more. So I'm going to have to come up with another one, which though I acually did already once, for the mustache Doctor before Gatwa released the Instagram photo of the brown checked suit (which, unlike the red leather jacket, he ultimately only wore in fractions of two episodes).

Anyway I also decided to give the oh, hello Doctor a long coat, because the Doctor almost always wears a long coat. When prepublicity for Curse of the Fatal Death came out I wrote, "Long hair, long coat, can't go far wrong with that look," and most of the Doctor's looks since then (and before) have borne me out.

You'll see in one of the old posts linked above I was tempted to do this for the mustache Doctor. I didn't then because it's easier to update the art when there's no coat, but that condition no longer obtains.

So after I hunt up the posts linked above so I can link to them and post this, I'll be editing some of the oh, hello Doctor's existing Three Faces appearances to give her a coat.

[theender36]

Wait I have a new, worse idea for reviving Doctor Who: We make it seem like it's a back-to-square-one reboot where it's just the First Doctor. Then at the end of the season, we reveal he's actually another Meta-crisis Doctor spawned from the tooth he lost in The Gunfighters. We can alienate newer viewers who don't know what's going on and piss off long-time fans at the same time! Nothing to it!

[paulgadzikowski]

It's established you can get metacrisis regenerations from teeth because that's what the Toymaker told us is happening with the Master

[paulgadzikowski]

List of stories both Star Trek and Doctor Who have done:

False afterlife

Evil mirrorverse w/ facial hair variation

Doomsday machine

Evil computer ruling a planet

Prehistoric dinosaur civilization on Earth

Preventing the unhappening of the moment of creation of all life on Earth

Shootout at the OK Corral

[paulgadzikowski]

New!

Dinosaur asteroid origin

"Fifth planet" asteroid belt origin

Vanished ancient Mars civilization

Three birds with one stone!

[jordanbolton]

To the Person Who Asked If I Was OK

Pre-order my new book here

[saxifraga-x-urbium]

https://twitter.com/vagina_museum/status/1628046312275935232

[saxifraga-x-urbium]

YEAH

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Highlighting that this is “considered quite rare” but in actuality we have absolutely no idea how common this, or indeed a great many variants in sexual development, are. Because if it’s not visible from the outside then we only learn about it if doctors (or coroners) go looking, and doctors only go looking if it’s causing a problem.

[scribefindegil]

everyone who is not currently in the process of moving please pause and take a moment to be grateful that you're not currently in the process of moving

[headspace-hotel]

i am an exit is finally complete!

It has been one year since I randomly became obsessed with the character Bucky Barnes and read an absolutely massive amount of fanfiction about him, becoming introduced to fanfiction as an art medium in the process.

After reading so many great fanfictions I had to take a crack at it myself, and i am an exit is what resulted.

Summary

A broken, disillusioned Steve Rogers is afflicted by a delusion that the mysterious assassin who nearly killed him is actually his best friend, who died 70 years ago. SHIELD wants to lock him up and return him to being a perfect, sparkling nationalist symbol as quickly as possible. Sam Wilson, who has wrestled with his own disillusionment and his own ghosts, knows that Steve needs compassion and the support of a true friend, not a forced regime of recovery that takes away what is left of his shattered autonomy. Meanwhile, as Natasha tries to track down the Winter Soldier, her discoveries get more and more disturbing. She uncovers footage of the Soldier being subjected to, and forced to commit, horrific acts to maintain Hydra's cruel hierarchy. What's more, his resemblance to Steve's dead friend is too close to be coincidence. Sam and Natasha grow determined to stop the Soldier from being recaptured by his abusers, but how will Steve react when he learns the true extent of the Soldier's torture, and the true horror of what he was twisted into? Is the Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes? Or is he a thing wearing Bucky Barnes's face? Which of those things is worse?

What it was like to write it

This fic is almost 200k words long. I wrote it in four months. Wow!

I'm convinced that writing this fic was what made all the difference for my final(ish) semester of college. To put it bluntly this was the first semester where I didn't feel like I was dying all the time. It put an end to the longest creative drought of my life and everyone's lovely comments gave me enough joy to carry me through.

I feel like I learned a ton about POV, plotting, and characterization while writing this fic. I'll probably talk about that more in the coming days.

My guiding questions/ideas

I don't really give a fuck about the MCU, but I do give a LOT of fucks about the fanfictional universe that has built around Bucky, and I had several ideas or questions that kept needling at me about this story and what people had done with it.

The whole story of Captain America, where a disabled kid in the 1930's is turned into a physically perfect superhuman, has "eugenics" written all over it. What if I explored that?

It doesn't really make sense that, in the movie Captain America: The Winter Soldier, it seems plausible to everyone that the Winter Soldier is Bucky. I mean, as far as anyone knows he died 70 years ago. What if the other characters assumed Steve was delusional out of grief?

I also really wanted to lean into Bucky/the Winter Soldier as an undead, uncanny-valley monster. A lot of Bucky fics deal with him being dehumanized and treated as a creature or a thing rather than a human, and I wanted to really dig into that, exploring the ways he is a machine and a reanimated corpse and a feral, terrified animal.

I had a craving for more medical horror. Bucky is the perfect character for it but not enough had been written about it thus far that really hit the spot for me.

I read a LOT of fanfictions that portrayed Bucky as a survivor of sexual violence and that compelled me a lot. I wanted to explore this as messily overlapping and entwined with all the other ways his body was invaded and taken away from him (as a lab experiment, living weapon, etc). I also wanted to explore what it would mean if Bucky was forced to commit sexual violence as the Winter Soldier.

What kind of story this is

The most common adjective I get on i am an exit is probably "visceral." I also get "gut-wrenching" a lot.

I do a lot of getting down and dirty with the Horrible Nasty. I went elbow deep digging in the back of my head for the things I don't want to think about.

BUT. I am also really intentional about satisfying softness and healing. The final 1/3 of the fic is the healing/comfort arc and I wrote a lot of self-indulgent fluff. Well, fluff doesn't seem right, because fluff implies something light, and every word is heavy with the horrors, but the healing is real. I was really, really serious about fully and sensitively acknowledging every part of the trauma the characters go through. Think hurt/comfort where both the hurt and the comfort are turned all the way up to the max.

I didn't feel confident writing about any of the canon locations in MCU so I basically sent all my characters to Kentucky.

Due to the person that I am, this fic is full of plants, and the plants are relevant to and intertwined with the plot and characterization. The Appalachian ecology is extremely detailed and realistic and thematically relevant.

Also, Bucky gets a horse.

The MCU doesn't have a lot of female characters, and I got mad about that, so Hawkeye, Thor, and Nick Fury are women in this fic.

I took heavy inspiration from a lot of the common themes and tropes of Bucky fanfiction. The way the narration reflects Bucky's dehumanization is indeed cool, but I can't fully take credit for it because it's a device a lot of fics use.

On content warnings

Each chapter has its own individual content warnings in the beginning notes. There is gore, there is fascism, ableism, and eugenics, there is a lot of medical horror, and there is sexual abuse and rape.

This fic does NOT use the Hydra Trash Party main tag, because the sexual violence is (mostly) "offscreen"/in flashbacks or memories instead of happening in the present in the characters' POV, but the sexual abuse themes are heavy and recurring. I think there are more individual chapters that have a warning for rape, than chapters that don't have that warning.

There is comfort and healing and ultimately a happy ending, but the warnings aren't fucking around.

Conclusion

If this sounds like your kind of thing, you should read it (even if you're completely unfamiliar with the fandom; i am told the fic works great for a fandom-blind reading). See for yourself why the Guy captured my heart and mind so.

[headspace-hotel]

I reblog again to hype myself up.

[capricorn-0mnikorn]

Hey, congratulations on finishing. And I;m so glad it helped you through your semester.

[junkyardbluebox]

Caption This!

[paulgadzikowski]

"I've worn this for three years. Why ought I stop now?"

[capricorn-0mnikorn]

There's a lot of talk in, and around, the Disability Community about "Overcoming" barriers...

How about we break them down, instead?

(I think that's my main objection to the U.N.'s 'Disability Rights' flag.)

[capricorn-0mnikorn]

The whole thing with "overcoming" barriers is Mainstream Society™ saying:

"We acknowledge the barriers are there. And yeah, they might be unfair (totally Character Building, tho). So maybe we'll give you a boost. But we still have the right to put them up. It's our world, and we choose to condescend to let you in."

[boitterfly]

it’s so special to me that so much of fan culture is textual analysis for the love of the game. like thank god there are people in my phone who are also thinking about this thing i love so much that they are writing transformative fiction as character studies and setting clips of the show to music with theme-relevant lyrics and writing long text posts analyzing every line of dialogue like!! yay!!!

[go-learn-esperanto]

Hey. If people aren't aware, Microsoft admitted they know who you and where you are at all times and will give your info to the police.

They have a Global Device Identifier (GDID) Tracker that functions as a fingerprint for your PC that can surpass VPNs, proxy servers and countries. Although it can't survive a clean reinstall of Windows (it can survive updates), because Microsoft forces you to go to the internet and log in into a Microsoft account, they will be able to get to you.

Microsoft kept it secret and it was only found out when the FBI tracked a hacker thanks to the information Microsoft gave them.

You should be paying attention to this, and possibly consider moving away from Windows. If a government, especially the US government, doesn't like you for some reason, this could be seriously concerning.

This article specifically notes:

For journalism, activism, or domestic abuse situations, skip Windows and use Linux routed through Tor instead of a commercial VPN. A GDID doesn’t care which VPN you use, only that it’s still the same Windows installation.

Microsoft admits Windows 11 has a GDID tracker with no off switch, first documented publicly in an FBI hacker complaint

GDID is the persistent Windows ID that helped FBI trace a Scattered Spider hacker despite VPNs. Here's how it works and how to limit it.

Other important quotes:

What has researchers uneasy is everything else the case reveals. Costin Raiu, a well-known malware researcher, asked on the Three Buddy Problem podcast how much of this exists on other platforms, and whether it is linked more permanently to hardware. Matthew Hickey, another security researcher, called Windows “surveillance software”.

Two things back that up:

There’s no consent screen. A GDID gets assigned when you sign into a Microsoft Account. Apple’s advertising identifier needs an App Tracking Transparency prompt and a visible reset; Android’s works the same way. GDID has neither, and a Windows reinstall only gets you a new number Microsoft can still get back to the same account.

Then there’s activation. Massgrave, the group behind Microsoft Activation Scripts, notes that Windows setup sends hardware info to Microsoft and gets identifiers back, the same tokens later used for Store access and licensing: “It’s impossible to prevent Windows from getting a GDID without breaking activation and UWP app[s].” Anyone who lost a license after swapping a motherboard has already met a smaller version of this.

[soupdwelling]

guy with the coolest cane in the galaxy

[paulgadzikowski]

And the bottom looks like Rocky the Eridian

[natequarter]

leela in her first serial is a subversion of the idea of a "savage" companion (an idea rooted in racism) - she's intelligent, resourceful, and gets thrown out of her society for denying the existence of xoanon, aka god. pretty much every story since has ignored all that and written leela as violent, superstitious, and stupid.

[pedanther]

#or at least some stories #stories like robots of death embrace her growing intelligence and deductive reasoning

"Robots of Death", of course, being one of the two later stories that were by the same writer as her first serial. (The other is "Image of the Fendahl"; it's been a while since I last rewatched that, so I don't recall where Leela is positioned relative to the many superstitious people in it, though I remember it does keep her intelligence and curiosity.)

[paulgadzikowski]

In Invisible Enemy (which is not one of the serials written by her first writer) Leela operates the TARDIS to get it from the ship to the hospital. Successfully. Without supervision, because the whole point is that the Doctor can't do it while he's infected with the Nucleus - while she and the secretly infected crewman are carrying the Doctor to the TARDIS, the Doctor's reeling off the coordinates and she's reciting them back.

[the-evil-skull]

is it really ooc for sarah to be hypnotized? it happens to her almost every episode

Oh I don't think it's out of character for Sarah to be hypnotized! What she gets off on is her business. I think Sarah Jane Smith is out of character in the Masque of Mandragora specifically because the Doctor realizing she's been hypnotized at all hinges on the fact that she suddenly starts asking him why she can understand the Italians, which means Sarah would never have asked about that at all if she weren't hypnotized. I take issue with the insinuation that "incuriosity" would be a core character trait of Sarah's when Sarah is literally a journalist. It just feels like they wrote her to be stupider over time

[the-evil-skull]

The core character trait of Sarah Jane Smith is that she's so nosy everyone hates it and wants to kill her about it

[delgado-master]

I’d like to imagine that was one of the first things she asked him lol

[paulgadzikowski]

Okay, the Doctor says he realizes her mind has been tampered with because of those remarks about language. He says it's a "Time Lord gift" that he "shares" with his traveling companions.

We see hardly any companions take note of the lack of language barrier. I can think of Masque of Mandragora, The Christmas Invasion, Cold War, and Eaters of Light. That it goes away when the Doctor's got regeneration sickness in The Christmas Invasion suggests it's something he does to people rather than something the TARDIS does (though I think the fact that this is the only instance we see of it going away due to the Doctor's unconsciousness/regeneration raises more continuity questions than it answers). In Cold War, when Clara has it brought to her attention, it's by an outside agency. In Eaters of Light Bill is less confused about the existence of the "gift" than enthralled with its properties and features, implying she's previously been consciously told about it (if that happened onscreen it's slipped my mind, though it rings a bell a little).

Perhaps part of the "sharing" of the "gift" is the Doctor suppressing curiousity about that it's happening, perhaps because that interferes with how it works. Hopefully he does it by getting permission for it from their subconscious minds. Otherwise it's kind of a violation of consent, though not one that's necessarily out of character, like when Belinda calls him out for taking her DNA sample without asking. The first people he'll have done it to will've been Barbara and Ian, and he's not likely to have asked them out loud first; possibly he just adopted not asking as a matter of course.

Or, if Sarah has asked about the language thing before (or, if his S.O.P. is actually to ask people first, offscreen) then the way the Doctor realizes her mind's been jiggered with is that she's forgotten that conversation.