Hoo boy it has been TOO DAMN LONG since I’ve had time to write, my fingers are ITCHING for it, please accept this piece of something I spat out in approximately twenty minutes while sick and between jobs.
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“Who were you, before?”
Crowley raises his head off the back of the chair, squinting in confusion through his askew sunglasses. “What’s that supposed to mean?” he asks. Aziraphale runs his hands nervously along the side of his glass, staring intently at an old burn mark on the table. His prim posture is slipping into a slouch, but he’s not as drunk as Crowley — not yet.
“Well, I don’t imagine Crawly was your name when you were an angel,” he says.
Crowley freezes, feeling instantly sober without even making an effort. He sits up, pushing his glasses back straight on his nose, staring at Aziraphale, who is still studiously avoiding his gaze.
“What the he— what on Earth do you want to know that for?” he demands. Aziraphale shrugs, and takes another swallow of wine.
“The humans have started this quaint tradition,” he says, “of sending each other cards at Christmas. Many of them use it to send well wishes to family and friends they haven’t talked to in a while. I wondered if I oughtn’t send a few to my colleagues up in— Well, I suppose they’d find it odd.”
“What’s that got to do with ME?”
Aziraphale takes another generous swallow of wine, and reaches to refill his cup. “Well— apart from check ins with Gabriel and Uriel and some of the others, I really haven’t kept up with what’s going on in Heaven since, well, since I was set to guard the Garden.”
“Can’t let ‘em see you without your sword, it was your signature item,” Crowley ribs him, trying to drag the conversation back into well-trod, safe territory. Aziraphale ignores the dig.
“It was only — I was thinking about the angels I knew before I came down to Earth, and I realized I didn’t know — who you’d been. Before.”
“Before I Fell,” Crowley finishes for him in a monotone. Aziraphale flinches slightly at the word, but he nods.
“Yes.”
“Why do you care now, all of a sudden? Why not ask me right in the Garden?” Aziraphale finally looks at him, if only because he’s scandalized.
“Well that would have been rather rude, wouldn’t it? I mean we were hardly—“ He huffs, turning back to his glass. “It was just that I wondered if I had known you.”
“You didn’t,” Crowley answers, too quickly. Aziraphale looks back at him again, quirking an eyebrow upwards.
“Are you sure? We mostly all knew each other, in the beginning.”
“Oh for Satan’s— why does it MATTER, angel? Whoever that was, they’re gone. I’m a demon. Do you think the name would even mean anything to you? Do you remember who Beelzebub was? Or Asmodeus? HASTUR? Our names were scrubbed from all the records. Except Lucifer, suppose the Almighty wanted to make an example of him.” Crowley slumped back into his chair, reaching for his own glass and tossing back whatever was left, before beckoning the bottle closer.
“But you still remember it.” He looks back to find Aziraphale watching him now, and frowns.
“I told you, whoever that angel was, he’s gone now. I’m just Crowley.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m a demon, Aziraphale. I’m literally a snake. THE snake. What else do you want?”
“Do you think maybe the angel that you were — do you think God… Do you think your fall was—“
“If you say ‘ineffable’—“
They fall silent, watching each other across the table. Crowley sighs, sits back up, leaning towards Aziraphale.
“Don’t ask those questions, angel,” he says softly. “Not those questions.” The drink suddenly feels heavy in his head. He stands up, forcing the alcohol from his system until he’s steady on his feet, and he turns and leaves Aziraphale sitting at the table, quiet and alone.
If you haven’t gone to college, GO TO COLLEGE. Take classes that interest you, and something will inspire you to pursue it for a career.
Here’s the thing they never told us about college: it’s the last time in your life you can focus 100% on education and just increasing your knowledge. It’s also the best time in your life to learn how to think critically, to be challenged in your beliefs, and to explore who you want to be, in a relatively safe environment.
You don’t have to go to an expensive university; you can go to a local community college for your AA or BA, and by the time you graduate, you’ll know if you want to continue with your education, or go on to work in whatever discipline you’ve found that inspires you.
I don’t have a ton of regrets in my life, but one of the VERY big ones is that I don’t have a formal college education, or a college degree. So if I’m giving 20 year-old me advice it’s this: you’re going to regret it for the rest of your life if you don’t go to college, and have the experience of being in college with other people who are your own age who are at the same place you are in your life, studying and learning about things that will serve you for the rest of your existence on Earth.
I’m saying this with absolute conviction and seriousness.
Asexuals and aromantics? I’m your mother now. I’m your big sister. I’m your best friend. I am sick and tired of seeing the amount of hate and abuse we are getting, both on and offline and I will not stand for it.
Problem with aphobes? You come to me.
Needing advice? You come to me.
Want to vent? You come to me.
Getting crap from exclutionists? You come to me.
I’m here. I’m always here. This blog isn’t just a recreational thing I do, it’s something so much more than that. I love each and everyone of you that follow me, new people and old people. You deserve to have a place that is safe. You deserve to have someone to talk to. And if that person is only me, then so be it.
So send me inbox messages. Comment on my posts. Reblog. Send me private messages. Prayer requests. I’m here. I’m here. I’m here.
I love you all to the bottom of my heart. You are always safe here, you are always safe with me. I will not hate you, judge you, or belittle you.
To the aspec/arospec kid reading this,
I love you, I love you, I love you more than you could possibly know. You are amazing, you are awesome, and you are a part of the LGBTQA community. If you can’t stand up for yourself, then I will.
They will not erase us. They will not kill us. They will not silence us. I promise you.
Everyone deserves to be happy and to live their best lives. a-spec people aren’t hurting anyone, and absolutely deserve to be seen, heard, and treated with kindness and respect.
I’m just doing what I can to raise a-spec awareness, and to let my a-spec brothers and sisters and non-binary humans know that, for what it’s worth, I see all of you. <3
being a wiki admin is the modern age’s equivalent of being a monk
This reminds me of an old joke. As short as possible, here goes:
A new monk is accepted into the monastery. The head of the order leads him around, explaining his new duties. They finish in the room where they copy the old texts, and the new monk points at a heavily barred and locked door off to one side.
“What’s in there?”
“Those are the originals our ancient brethren copied from. We continue their tradition of keeping the copies fresh by re-copying them when the copies start to fade or there is a new translation.”
“Oh. Huh.”
“Yes?”
“I just… what if someone made a mistake somewhere? Like… copied down a word wrong or something? Do we just keep copying it wrong over and over again?”
The head of the order smiles benignly. “When you see how diligently we adhere to the texts, you’ll understand. It’s highly unlikely a major mistake was made. Rest assured, my son, we know what we’re doing.”
“Oh, of course, of course.”
However, much later that night, the entire monastery is awakened by a great howling from somewhere deep in the stones. They all, including the newest monk, run about, trying to find the source of the commotion. Eventually, they tumble into the copying room and see the formerly barred and locked door wide open. A flurry of crisp-edged papers have been flung about the room, several ancient texts swiped from their shelves. It’s a disaster.
“Master, are you all right?”
It’s a prudent question, as the head of the order is sitting at the small reading table inside the room, his head in his hands.
Do you ever think, on one of their many, many “Totally-Not-A-Date” lunch dates that Crowley (who only ever seems to eat around the angel) ever just like, orders apple pie for dessert just to be a little shit.
“Sure I can’t tempt you?” he says, proffering the bowl forward where a slice of hot apple caramel pie is slowly melting the vanilla ice scream scoop on the side, “it really is quite good.”
And Aziraphale, declines politely, sipping on his after dinner coffee like a gentleman while the demon shrugs and demolishes the whole thing in under a minute flat. “Suit yourself.”
Or one one other memorable occasion:
“Toffee apple?” the demon asks, the fun fair carnival lights flickering and swirling around them as the sound of children laughing intermingles with the bright clanking jangling melody of the carousel spinning in front of them to a tune that sounds suspiciously familiar.
“What? Oh, no…thank you,” Aziraphale declines, noticing that Crowley only procured the one anyway. “We really should get down to business…”
“Suit yourself,” he says, crunching into it and eating the whole thing, core and all.
He doesn’t even particularly like apples, he just likes the way the angel flusters whenever he does it. Still, these humans were onto something when they took the fruit of all knowledge and dipped it in molten sugar and baked it into pies, like some sort of clever metaphor for making the truth easier to swallow. Bloody ingenious humans, in their own round about way.
Eventually, at some point, the angel concedes and allows himself to be talked into a spoonful of apple pie somewhere down the centuries. It really is quite scrumptious, but it’s nowhere near as delicious as the look on Crowley’s face when he says yes.
I ALMOST LOST MY MIND. someone make this a fanfic because if you don’t I mcfreaking will on God I will if you would allow me!
Or yah know… you could write it 😉
I’ve got like, 1000 words tapped out in Ao3 right now lmao
When director Douglas Mackinnon asked Peter Anderson and his studio to design the opening titles for Good Omens, the Amazon Prime TV series based on the book by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, he had only one major stipulation.
“He said,” recounts Anderson, “‘I want you to promise me that you send us emails that start with, ‘This might sound absolutely mad, but our idea is dot dot dot’. That set the tone for the creative process, which was wonderful.”
It’s fair to say the London-based Peter Anderson Studio came through with flying colors on that brief, Anderson himself describing Good Omens’ animated titles as “a totally bonkers mishmash of all animation styles in a way where they feel as if they belong together.”
The titles certainly feel like something inspired, at least in part, by Terry Jones’ famous animated cut-out vignettes in Monty Python’s Flying Circus. The twist is that Good Omens’ opener employs illustration, physical props, character animation, 3D and even live-action footage to foretell the show’s story about the clash of Heaven and Hell and the coming apocalypse.
“Our titles really mimic the drama,” says Anderson, “because in the show, for instance, you’ve got a classic English countryside and then suddenly a spacecraft that’s been drawn by a child and re-made in 3D comes flying down and aliens come out that have duck heads. We had to work in that same totally bonkers spirit.”
In the opening titles, a myriad characters from Good Omens are in procession — often via escalators up (and down) — to the end of the world. From concepts and storyboards, Peter Anderson Studio launched into a major exploratory process of generating imagery that directly referenced the show’s cast of people and creatures. Ultimately, all the characters seen in the titles actually began as “real,” live-action people.
“It’s me as many characters,” says Anderson. “And then there are different members of our studio wearing the costumes from the actual show, sometimes filmed on a green screen walking on a travelator. Then what we did is we cut them out and we made real people look like strange animations by tracking two-dimensional heads onto them.”
This is where things become even more surreal. Each one of the two-dimensional heads, reveals Anderson, are actually “in-disguise” representations of the show’s two lead actors, Michael Sheen and David Tennant, who play the angel Aziraphale and demon Crowley, respectively.
“The reason we did that,” states Anderson, “is that Neil said that he felt there was good and bad in everybody, and the angels and the demons represented the good and bad that exists within the world. So we’d take Michael and David’s faces and adapt them by, say, adding a mohawk or sunglasses, for example.”
That’s not the only detail to look out for in Good Omens’ opening titles, which warrant multiple viewings to catch several Easter eggs. Anderson says look out for a cactus wilting as a demon walks by, or even one moment where a someone realizes they are on a downward escalator path to Hell, only to start running up the people-mover the wrong way.
“Whether you interpret the titles as the characters choosing their sides to go to war, or as something where we all approach the end of the world and we’re going to go one way or the other, it’s up to you,” concludes Anderson. “I hope there are lots of double meanings in the storytelling.”
