aniraven-blog
cuckoo's nest
Views, photos, essays, travels, camaraderie, observations, and the occasional piece of prose or erotica.
All coming to you from my anarcha-feminist, nature-loving, pagan ways. You are likely to run across topics and themes involving love, sex, sci-fi, art, music, birds, spirituality, permaculture, community, and outrage over the practices of the old dying paradigm.
A good sense of humor, the absurd, and whimsy are highly encouraged.
128 posts
Don't wanna be here? Send us removal request.
Last Seen Blogs
khmemeries
Chain of Memeries
pissanddie
Piss and Die
algatoo
Algatoo
hardcoresoftprn
Hard Core Soft Porn
mackneyymajocka
Untitled
Text
Blessings on this Lughnassadh
View On WordPress
0 notes
Text
Cleansing Space
As a Euroamerican witch, I want to make sure I reach back into my own ancestral practices as much as I can, to bring forth the traditions of the pre-Christian Europeans. This is important; if we don’t know our own traditions and practices, we tend to steal the practices of others. This is another form of colonization–and it’s not okay.
And so, when I hear white people say that they need to go…
View On WordPress
0 notes
Text
The Devil
The Devil pops up to warn us to tend to our mental health especially addictions. What's keeping you from doing what you want to do? What's trapping your energy?
daily tarot draw
Something is occluding your light! That just cannot be.
The Devil shows up to let us know that we are being distracted from our responsibilities. Greed, pleasure seeking behavior, and / or addictions are sapping our energy and have taken our resolve to live our lives with purpose.
The Devil from The Paulina Tarot graphic by ani raven haines
Know that line between a good time…
View On WordPress
0 notes
Text
Temperance
Transformation and balance are key. Your life is likely out of balance, and you need to bring it back into harmony. Look for things you’ve been neglecting and give them some love and attention. How’s your own health? Do you need to take a break from busy-ness and over stress? Do you need to fire all jets and get yourself moving? Take a moment and assess that adjustments are needed to bring…
View On WordPress
0 notes
Text
What is an Altar?
What is an Altar? Information about these sacred spaces and building your first one!
Your altar is your workspace for your magical endeavors.
Your altar is a place for your sacred objects. It holds and protects their energy, undiluted, in a space that’s kept clear of clutter and negativity. It is a space that is reserved for the sacred. Some people develop more than one altar in their home, to suite various needs. For example, you might have altars dedicated to each of the four…
View On WordPress
1 note
·
View note
Text
Good Work is Rewarded
View On WordPress
0 notes
Text
Working with the Waning Moon
We all have things that we are looking to end. There are habits that we’ve outgrown. Situations that have become stagnant. Use the energy of the Waning Moon cycle to help you put things in order!
Photo by Bruno Scramgnon on Pexels.com
I love working with the Moon for many reasons. One of the most important things that the Moon has taught me is to be aware of the way energy moves in graduated…
View On WordPress
0 notes
Text
Meditation on the Waning Crescent
Photo by Vladyslav Dushenkovsky on Pexels.com
The waning moon is the witch’s scythe. The sickle of the moon cuts out that which toxic, that which no longer serves. This is the time to focus on removing entanglements, clearing away the ground so that you may walk without being ensnared.
There are sudden changes ahead— I think we can all feel them poised to crash down around us and on us. The…
View On WordPress
0 notes
Text
Moonwise: The Wyrdling Way
I've just published the initial issue of Moonwise: The Wyrdling Way, my newsletter for the Full and New Moons.
Check it out!
The Premier Issue of my newsletter, to be posted on the Full and New Moons
I hope to use this newsletter to inform and inspire people who are interested in all things witchy and wyrd. And just what do I mean by witchy and wyrd? So glad you asked!
Wyrd is an Old English word that means fate, destiny, chance, or that which becomes. The earliest meaning attributed to the “weird” word with which we…
View On WordPress
0 notes
Text
Hello There
View On WordPress
0 notes
Text
I’m quite excited to see this!
REALLY BLOODY EXCELLENT OMENS...
Many, many years ago (it was Hallowe'en 1989, for the curious, the year before Good Omens was published) Terry Pratchett and I were sharing a room at the World Fantasy Convention in Seattle, to keep the costs down, because we were both young authors, and taking ourselves to America and conventions were expensive. It was a wonderful convention. I remember a huge Seattle second-hand bookstore in which I found a dozen or so green-bound Storisende Edition James Branch Cabell books, each signed so neatly by the author that the bookshop people assured me that the signatures were printed, and really ten dollars a book was the correct price.
I could afford books. Good Omens had just been sold to UK publishers and then to US publishers for more money than Terry or I had ever received for anything. (Terry had been incredibly worried about this, certain that receiving a healthy advance would mean the end of his career. When his career didn't end, Terry suggested to his agent that perhaps he ought to be getting that kind of advance for every book from now on, and his life changed, and he stopped having to share a hotel room to save money. But I digress.) Advance reading copies of Good Omens had not yet gone out, but a few editors had read it (ones who had bid for it but failed to buy it) and they all seemed very excited about it, and thrilled for us.
On the Saturday evening Terry left the bar quite early and headed off to bed. I stayed up talking to people and having a marvelous time, hung in there until the small hours of the morning when they closed the hotel bar and all the people went away, and then headed up to the hotel room room.
I opened the door as quietly as I could and tiptoed in the dark across the room to where my bed was located.
I'd just reached the bed when, from the far side of the room, a voice said, “What time of the night do you call this then? Your mother and I have been worried sick about you.”
Terry was wide awake. Jet lag had taken its toll.
And I was wide awake too. So we lay in our respective beds and having nothing else to do, we plotted the sequel to Good Omens. It was a good one, too. We fully intended to write it, whenever we next had three or four months free. Only I went to live in America and Terry stayed in the UK, and after Good Omens was published Sandman became SANDMAN and Discworld became DISCWORLD™ and there wasn't ever a good time.
But we never forgot it.
It's been thirty-one years since Good Omens was published, which means it's thirty-two years since Terry Pratchett and I lay in our respective beds in a Seattle hotel room at a World Fantasy Convention, and plotted the sequel. (I got to use bits of the sequel in the TV series version of Good Omens -- that's where our angels came from.)
Terry and I, in Cardiff in 2010, on the night we decided that Good Omens should become a television series.
Terry was clear on what he wanted from Good Omens on the telly. He wanted the story told, and if that worked, he wanted the rest of the story told.
So in September 2017 I sat down in St James' Park, beside the director, Douglas Mackinnon, on a chair with my name on it, as Showrunner of Good Omens. The chair slowly and elegantly lowered itself to the ground underneath me and fell apart, and I thought, that's not really a good omen. Fortunately, under Douglas's leadership, that chair was the only thing that collapsed.
The crumbled chair.
So, once Good Omens the TV series had been released by Amazon and the BBC, to global acclaim, many awards and joy, Rob Wilkins (Terry's representative on Earth) and I had the conversation with the BBC and Amazon about doing some more. And they got very excited. We talked to Michael Sheen and David Tennant about doing some more. They also got very excited. We told them a little about the plot. They got even more excited.
Rob Wilkins and David Tennant on the second day of shooting.
Me and Michael and Ash aged nearly 2.
What it was mostly like shooting Good Omens: peering into screens while something happened round the corner.
I'd been a fan of John Finnemore's for years, and had had the joy of working with him on a radio show called With Great Pleasure, where I picked passages I loved, had amazing readers read them aloud and talked about them.
(Here's a clip from that show of me talking about working with Terry Pratchett, and reading a poem by Terry: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p06x3syv. Here's the whole show from YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7OsS_JWbzQ with John Finnemore's bits too.)
L to R: With Great Pleasure. John Finnemore, me all beardy, Nina Sosanya (Sister Mary in Good Omens) Peter Capaldi (he played Islington in the original BBC series of Neverwhere).
I asked John if he'd be willing to work with me on writing the next round of Good Omens, and was overjoyed when he said yes. We have some surprise guest collaborators too. And Douglas Mackinnon is returning to oversee the whole thing with me.
So that's the plan. We've been keeping it secret for a long time (mostly because otherwise my mail and Twitter feeds would have turned into gushing torrents of What Can You Tell Us About It? long ago) but we are now at the point where sets are being built in Scotland (which is where we're shooting, and more about filming things in Scotland soon), and we can't really keep it secret any longer.
There are so many questions people have asked about what happened next (and also, what happened before) to our favourite Angel and Demon. Here are, perhaps, some of the answers you've been hoping for.
As Good Omens continues, we will be back in Soho, and all through time and space, solving a mystery which starts with one of the angels wandering through a Soho street market with no memory of who they might be, on their way to Aziraphale's bookshop.
(Although our story actually begins about five minutes before anyone had got around to saying “Let there be Light”.)
from https://journal.neilgaiman.com/2021/06/really-bloody-excellent-omens.html
34K notes
·
View notes
Photo
My cartoon for the latest issue of New Scientist.
36K notes
·
View notes
Text
My latest cartoon for New Scientist
Many more of my science cartoons are here: www.newscientist.com/author/tom-gauld/
8K notes
·
View notes
Text
Ask this question every day. Get everyone on record:
Why are some lives worth millions to save? Why are some lives worthless?
From the point of view of the government, explain it to me nice and slow.
5K notes
·
View notes
