Watching Sense8 was almost like a religious experience for me. I don’t know how else to explain it. Every time I hear What’s Going On it takes me right back there and damn I miss it

talking to people while holding a beverage is awesome because you don't have to know what to do with your hands and when you don't know what to do with your face you can just take a sip

the older I get, the more the technological changes I've lived through as a millennial feel bizarre to me. we had computers in my primary school classroom; I first learned to type on a typewriter. I had a cellphone as a teenager, but still needed a physical train timetable. my parents listened to LP records when I was growing up; meanwhile, my childhood cassette tape collection became a CD collection, until I started downloading mp3s on kazaa over our 56k modem internet connection to play in winamp on my desktop computer, and now my laptop doesn't even have a disc tray. I used to save my word documents on floppy discs. I grew up using the rotary phone at my grandparents' house and our wall-connected landline; my mother's first cellphone was so big, we called it The Brick. I once took my desktop computer - monitor, tower and all - on the train to attend a LAN party at a friend's house where we had to connect to the internet with physical cables to play together, and where one friend's massive CRT monitor wouldn't fit on any available table. as kids, we used to make concertina caterpillars in class with the punctured and perforated paper strips that were left over whenever anything was printed on the room's dot matrix printer, which was outdated by the time I was in high school. VHS tapes became DVDs, and you could still rent both at the local video store when I was first married, but those shops all died out within the next six years. my facebook account predates the iphone camera - I used to carry around a separate digital camera and manually upload photos to the computer in order to post them; there are rolls of undeveloped film from my childhood still in envelopes from the chemist's in my childhood photo albums. I have a photo album from my wedding, but no physical albums of my child; by then, we were all posting online, and now that's a decade's worth of pictures I'd have to sort through manually in order to create one. there are video games I tell my son about but can't ever show him because the consoles they used to run on are all obsolete and the games were never remastered for the new ones that don't have the requisite backwards compatibility. I used to have a walkman for car trips as a kid; then I had a discman and a plastic hardshell case of CDs to carry around as a teenager; later, a friend gave my husband and I engraved matching ipods as a wedding present, and we used them both until they stopped working; now they're obsolete. today I texted my mother, who was born in 1950, a tiktok upload of an instructional video for girls from 1956 on how to look after their hair and nails and fold their clothes. my father was born four years after the invention of colour televison; he worked in radio and print journalism, and in the years before his health declined, even though he logically understood that newspapers existed online, he would clip out articles from the physical paper, put them in an envelope and mail them to me overseas if he wanted me to read them. and now I hold the world in a glass-faced rectangle, and I have access to everything and ownership of nothing, and everything I write online can potentially be wiped out at the drop of a hat by the ego of an idiot manchild billionaire. as a child, I wore a watch, but like most of my generation, I stopped when cellphones started telling us the time and they became redundant. now, my son wears a smartwatch so we can call him home from playing in the neighbourhood park, and there's a tanline on his wrist ike the one I haven't had since the age of fifteen. and I wonder: what will 2030 look like?

Sir Terry Pratchett: on writing Good Omens with Neil Gaiman

I love the whole interview but this little snippet most of all:

Terry: “You can usually bet, and I’m sure Neil Gaiman would say the same thing, that, uh, if I go into a bookstore to do a signing and someone presents me with three books, the chances are that one of them is going to be a very battered copy of Good Omens; and it will smell as if it’s been dropped in parsnip soup or something in and it’s gone fluffy and crinkly around the edges and they’ll admit that it’s the fourth copy they’ve bought”.

You can never own enough Good Omens copies.

For anyone who hasn't seen them before, Hidden Search Operators are handy tricks you can use when you're either searching or filtering AO3.

summary: string is a generic way of explaining that you can search AO3 for a specific word that appears in a summary. You can do this from the search bar in the header, from the Any Field box at the top of the Advanced Search form, or from the Search Within Results box at the bottom of the filter menu.

Examples:

summary: Bruce

summary: "Bruce Banner"

summary: Bruce OR summary: Banner OR summary: Hulk

You need to put quotation marks around your search term if it is more than one word. The quotes make sure that the site searches for those two words together.

The other two operators listed work best in the Search Within Results box.

expected_number_of_chapters: 1 will return results where every fic has only 1 chapter currently posted.

You can use expected_number_of_chapters: -1 if you want results where every fic has more than 1 chapter currently posted.

otp:true will return results where there is only 1 relationship tag on the fic. If you want results where there are 2+ relationship tags (and no fics with only 1 relationship tag) then you can use otp:false

PSA: Don't use Open Office

I keep seeing people recommending Open Office as an alternative to Word, and uh... look, it is, technically, an open source alternative to Word. And it can do a lot of what Word can, genuinely! But it is also an abandoned project that hasn't been updated in nine years, and there's an active fork of it which is still receiving updates, and that fork is called LibreOffice, and it's fantastic.

Seriously, if you think that your choices are either "grit your teeth and pay Microsoft for a subscription" or "support free software but have a kind of subpar office suite experience", I guarantee that it's because you're working with outdated information, or outdated software. Most people I know who have used the latest version of LibreOffice prefer it to Word. I even know a handful of people who prefer it to Scrivener.

Open Office was the original project, and so it has the most name recognition, and as far as I can tell, that's really the only reason people are still recommending it. It's kind of like if people were saying "hey, the iPhone 14 isn't your only smart phone option!" but then were only ever recommending the Samsung Galaxy S5 as an alternative. LibreOffice is literally a version of the same exact program as Open Office that's just newer and better – please don't get locked into using a worse tool just because the updated version of the program has a different name!

People who have never taken public transit before seem to be under the impression that everyone on a bus is ready to stab you meanwhile I have never had that problem and I get to read while I’m stuck in traffic and they don’t.

Also I don’t get stuck in traffic much anyways because the drivers keep going on the freeway even though it gets clogged up with traffic and it’s literally faster to drive on the surface streets where the busses go but whatever I don’t need to pay for a gym membership because I walk to the bus and meanwhile what are you spending your money on? Oil changes so you can keep getting stuck in traffic?

Lost Hat (A short comic) 

This was the scene that inspired me to draw the comic. The idea has been in my head since June, after the release of the Good Omens episodes. It went lying in my folders for a while, but I’m glad to finally have it finished!  Thank you for reading :)

i remember adults telling me, as a kid, to listen to doctors and get my flu vaccine and any shots i could because they remembered Before.

then they started fighting Covid precautions.

i remember adults telling me, as a kid, that the ozone was disappearing and the earth was dying and we needed to recycle and save the planet.

now my parents think climate change is a myth.

i remember adults telling me, as a kid, that racism was a plague, that we had to love and accept everyone, that we should never judge before walking a mile in their shoes.

then they told me that protesting for my Black siblings was wrong.

i remember adults telling me, as a kid, that we needed to give to the poor. working at soup kitchens. making quilts. collecting food and money and supplies. building houses. because it was the christian and just plain right thing to do.

now they look at me, on food stamps with their grandchildren, and lament the "welfare state".

i remember adults telling me, as a kid, that it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven and that any rich man, especially an immoral one, should never run our country.

you can guess who they voted for.

i remember adults telling me, as a kid, so very much.

when did they forget?

Neil Gaiman about David Tennant: He's a wonderful man. He's one of our finest actors. He's really funny. He's astonishingly Scottish. He's a great father to his kids. He's extremely flammable.

sweetest post ever??? 😭

Okay, I know I acted silly about this, but the fact that there is 1 singular year round roller skating rink in the city of Philadelphia home to 1.6 million people is kinda fucking horrifying when you think about the broader implications of it.

Home is where I am with you 🏠🩵