Neil Gaiman, co-author of Good Omens:

My first encounter with Terry Pratchett was The Colour of Magic, as read on BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour. I was a young journalist and I reached out to his publisher for an interview, and thus became the first journalist to interview Terry Pratchett, in Bertorelli's Italian restaurant, in Gower Street. (We remembered it as a Chinese Restaurant in Goodge Street, demonstrating either the fallibility of memory or our fondness for Chinese food.) We became friends.

I was lucky enough to read Terry's books as he wrote them, to become one of his beta readers, and then to collaborate with him. Terry had a brilliant eye for the places where reality and narrative tradition intersect: he had a science fiction writer's mind, let loose on a fantasy world, and he loved to explain and show how things came to be. The last time we saw each other he told me I had to read a book about feeding Nelson's navy – and I still wonder, had he lived, about the Discworld novel he would have written, about ships, and naval battles and all, and the lessons he would have taught us. Because at his best, Terry was a teacher. The kind who makes you laugh while simultaneously realising that everything you have taken for granted so far is utterly wrong. I miss him.

Not to be a Boomer but your social media should be your own space, not something employers are allowed to look at to judge you beyond the qualifications stated in your resume and cover letter

On today’s episode of “I want to put my dumb drawings on a shirt”

Trying To Draw Every Muppet By The End Of This Year No. #3: Wilkins & Wontkins.

"It's autumn & the nuts are beginning to fall."

I'm starting to realize that Wontkins was actually a beta version of Beaker. He's modeled with a drawbridge mouth a cucumber- ish nose. He also has the tendency to get maimed and tortured for silly reasons.

Have a great Fall!

Why Bumbleby Matters

Yesterday was the first anniversary of one of the biggest kisses in queer media. Blake Belladonna and Yang Xiao Long, of the cult hit web show RWBY, confessed their love and smooched on March 25, 2023, and I was totally normal about it. I don't have all the manga and figures and a tattoo and half a million words of fanfic; that would be *crazy*, especially compared to socially-acceprable normal fixations like season tickets to sportsball games or thousand-dollar concert tickets. 

A lot of things make RWBY an important show. It's an animated action story that puts its four heroines unambiguously front and center, with arcs that are about *them*, and not as set dressing or motivation for make protagonists. It's increasingly represented sapphic, trans, and nonbinary characters across its nine seasons, and its won awards for taking its silly, cheesy origins and developing a complex story about broken heroes and traumatized villains finding themselves and struggling with love, loss, disability, abuse, and a whole spectrum of human experiences, with the fate of the world hanging in the balance. 

But what's important about Blake and Yang was that they got a real romance that, across nine seasons, they had to fight for. In an era where queer representation is largely still a diversity checkbox for most media (see: Disney crowing about having background characters looking at each other a little gayly while passing on movies like Nimona that actually revolve around queer relationships), or struggle to be more than titillation (Saltburn) and are swatted down by corporate censors (Legend of Korra and She-Ra were years ago, and this year's blockbuster Witch from Mercury was still officially "open to interpretation"), getting an actually romance cooked for nine seasons across ten years... y'know, like you'd expect from a straight slowburn... is huge. 

RWBY's studio was just shut down by Warner Bros, infamous for shelving projects for the tax writeoffs, so who knows if we'll ever get a conclusion to the story. But one year ago, we got a beautiful conclusion to Blake & Yang's love story, one that mattered to queer people around the world. 

cross posted from Patreon

Also... DELETED SCENES ARE OFTEN DELETED FOR A REASON.

Same with initial concepts. Even without an executive pushing deadlines or mandates onto me, my stories have often gone through various reinventing often on the fly.

I'd have something planned out in my head or jotted down in my notes but when writing it out, it ends up going into a direction due to how focusing on the minutia suddenly changes the bigger picture.

Looking back at your first draft after finishing it will make you cringe with how somethings really did just seem like good ideas at the time.

Even if the writers were allowed to cook more, Wish would have inevitiably ended up no where near exactly like what deleted concepts have revealed.

Animation-twitter, animation video essay youtube, etc. would probably be better off if they assumed every upcoming animated movie was going to be CRAP.

The director of INSIDE OUT 2, Kelsey Mann, has talked a bit about the picture recently. After all, it's out in less than two months... And immediately, so much of what he's saying is either being misread or quoted out of context. Something something Anxiety is going to be "the villain", something something they cut characters Shame and Guilt out of the movie because they felt it was too heavy, something something-

And we've got other people freaking out that Pixar showed 35 minutes of it at CinemaCon... LIKE... What's THE issue? Pixar has done that before! CinemaCon attendees were treated to half-hour chunks of Pixar movies in the past, like MONSTERS UNIVERSITY. When TOY STORY 3 was coming out, Pixar prepared a cut of the movie that ended just as the toys were escaping Sunnyside Daycare... to show to college campuses across the country a month before release.

Y'all need to calm down.

This movie isn't even out. We don't know how it'll tell its story exactly. Maybe there's more here than it seems? Maybe Anxiety will be an antagonist in the sense that she's doing what she feels is right, or is straight-up malevolent. I doubt it's the latter, that would be kind of... Not nuanced? For a sequel to INSIDE OUT? Having Anxiety just be an evil scheming bad guy just doesn't seem like it'll happen, nor is it a good idea. I think director Kelsey Mann meant that by her kicking the other emotions out of the main control room, she'll be the "big bad" of the movie. Why she kicks those emotions out could be related to how anxiety tends to work within the human brain. Taking control of your brain, thinking that it's steering you to make the right decision, making you cautious of dangers more so than "Fear" does. Pixar movies have had antagonists in the past that aren't necessarily evil, they just think what they're doing is right.

I also doubt that Pixar would let out a movie that flat-out stigmatizes people who suffer from anxiety disorders, such as myself. Maybe the Shame and Guilt characters were cut from the movie because director Mann, writer Meg LeFauve, and several others just didn't like the direction the story was going with them in it. Maybe it was too depressing for THEM, not because of any concerns for kids in the audience. People tend to associate Pixar with "tearjerking storylines", maybe it's possible that this went WAY TOO FAR at one point? I don't know, neither do you. Pixar's team isn't Disney Animation's leadership. Pete Docter is less controlling than John Lasseter based on everything I see and hear, but there are probably still some ground rules and some do's-and-don'ts. But I think it was ultimately down to the director not enjoying making the film back when it had these characters in it. As a writer/creator myself, I sometimes pull back when I feel something I'm making is causing ME lose the drive to make the thing in the first place. Maybe it hit too close to home for Mann, LeFauve, someone- Just a few variables, ya know? Not just "Pixar is too afraid to be sad", "Disney's telling them what to do", etc. etc.

Maybe animated movies shouldn't have this kind of pre-release thing... How about, just... Movie title, release date, BOOM. Nothing else. No interviews with the filmmakers and cast, no nothing... Wanna know more? You have to see it when it comes out! Put that in big letters in the teaser trailer!

But if they did that, twitter and the YouTube Animation Opinion Industrial Complex would sound the alarm: "They're not saying anything... IS THIS MOVIE IN TROUBLE???"

(sarcasm for those last two sets of sentences)

You can't win. And watch... It'll come out, and it'll be disliked for some weird reason. Probably because it isn't... PUSS IN BOOTS 2 or whatever. While the rest of the world goes, "Yeah, that's was pretty solid." And said population streams it on Disney+ a gazillion times. I'm not part of this "animation fandom" thing, quite frankly I don't even know what half of these people want most of the time. It seems like every movie is an oncoming stinker to them, and it ends up being a stinker. Sometimes the worst thing ever made, a work of evil. You know I still see people raging over that completely harmless CHIP N' DALE RESCUE RANGERS movie from two years back? The fuck is that all about?

I get that INSIDE OUT is a sequel to a beloved Pixar movie, I get that the original movie means a lot to so many people. I love it myself. At the same time, I'm not gonna be weird about a sequel I never even wanted until the day they announced it. Okay, if it isn't very good, I'll just go on with my life. But we're not even there yet... It's not out... This is the only INSIDE OUT sequel. Now if we were coming up on an INSIDE OUT 3, and INSIDE OUT 2 managed to somehow upset everybody? Then I'd somewhat understand...

Others will dole out their dislike of recent Pixar movies as their reason, but you know me... I feel each Pixar movie - for the most part - is a statement of its filmmaking team. Not a Mr. Pixar person coming up with each and every movie. (That was Lasseter in a sense, lol.) If "animation is cinema", then you oughta look at these movies as director-driven. I feel the other way around reduces the films to a brand, and not the people who actually make them. INSIDE OUT is first and foremost a Pete Docter-directed film... Made at Pixar. Not a "Pixar film". Pixar isn't a person nor is it a collective, it's a place. It should be judged on how functions as a movie and as a sequel to INSIDE OUT, not up against other movies made at the studio by other people. Like I'm not here for THE INCREDIBLES or UP, I'm here for an INSIDE OUT sequel. I know, that's a very radical opinion to have. Silly me!

I just don't get it... I'm just gonna do it the old-fashioned way... I'm going to see the movie, and hope that I like it or get something out of it.

You keep talking about the origins of AO3 as this group effort by an actual group of people who were friends and who spent time discussing this with each other in person. It's kind of blowing my mind. Is there a post or a journal somewhere that specifically keeps record of this?

--

I'm dying.

Nonnie, seriously?

No, that's mean, I know you're serious. It's just flabbergasting how much fandom has expanded and how much there isn't a direct link to the past.

Astolat and Cesperanza floated the idea at Vividcon and various places, I think, though I wasn't going to cons in that era. We were all on LJ in those days, and Astolat made a big post nailing her theses to the door. Discussion in the comments was instant and prolonged.

A LJ com was set up to discuss. It was later renamed to otw_news, but if you go all the way back to the beginning, you can see brainstorming mess instead of official news posts.

Fanlore page linking to Astolat's post and giving a little context.

Early brainstorming: https://otw-news.livejournal.com/2007/05/

For example, here I am collecting links to older archives to look at for research when designing AO3.

Fun fact, we never intended to call it AO3. There was a whole call for name suggestions, but nothing was as evocative as astolat's original post title referencing Virginia Woolf. (For those who haven't thought about it, AO3's name is a reference to A Room of One's Own.)

Here's the name discussion

Here's the poll that came out of it

But also notice how many people voted: 562.

That's how many people cared at the time: a few hundred. Maybe a thousand if you count lurkers, but frankly, that community was not as lurkery as now. It wasn't just ten friends. It was a community effort. But what "our" community looked like at the time was vastly different. It was six degrees of Kevin Bacon astolat, not a vast sea of strangers like fic fandom on AO3 is now.

Here's an early post suggesting we ban the under 18s from the site entirely. Pity we didn't do so, given the rise of antis.

Here's the invite to a fundraising party at astolat's in NYC that following Halloween. I dressed as Amanda from Highlander, not very well.

You can tell we knew each other by looking at those comments on astolat's initial post. You can also tell how discussion-based that part of fandom was back in 2007.

The way my tumblr is now with a ton of text, back and forth, and hopping around between threads of conversation, all featuring a consistent set of faces, is very much like LJ. Most of tumblr is not.

What If…