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What's happening now with USAID will impact millions of lives around the globe. It's unconscionable.

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Adirondacks

Champlain Valley, Vermont

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pretty much the only good thing about the paper of record anymore, the crossword

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Leverage is not a "drama" or a "crime show." Its genre is actually "Columbo-like," wherein every episode a rich asshole that you already know Did It gets not just caught but absolutely lit the fuck up by our hero(es) at the end of it

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Your first pride story was touching and all but you still married a man.

Yeah, bisexuals do that sometimes.

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@cryptotheism could make a podcast out of this

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Tbh up the Canadians. Let’s fucking go.

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I’m noticing an increase in new fic writers on AO3 who…uh…mayy not know how to format their fics correctly..so here is a quick and VERY important tip

Using a random fic of mine as example..

The left example: ✅✅✅

The right example: ❌❌❌

Idk how many times I’ve read a good fic summary and been so excited to read before clicking on it and being met with an ugly wall of text. When I see a huge text brick with zero full line breaks my eyes blur and I just siiiigh bc either I click out immediately or I grin and bear it…it’s insufferable!

If a new character speaks, you need a line break. If you notice a paragraph is becoming too large, go ahead and make a line break and/or maybe reconfigure the paragraph to flow better. I’m not a pro writer or even a huge fic writer but…please…ty…

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I’m still processing how it happened and wondering what it all means, but today a big pink hamfaced English guy tried to fight Dr Glass in a parking lot (!) and a completely unrelated, amazingly tall woman appeared (!!) and charged the other guy in defense of Dr Glass (!!!) shouting at him so effectively that he got in his car and drove off.

Dr Glass doesn’t look like anything in particular or even do that much, he is so ORDINARY. He just emits some kind of magnetic field that causes Events, and yet the magnetic field also creates feedback that insulates him from the Events. Doesn’t even have to do his own fight scenes!! just magnetically attracts a TALL BRAVE WOMAN to destroy the entire fighting premise. No one can prepare for this. I feel like I’m the only person who notices it

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Tl;dr how you can personally make Neil Gaiman lose money (and not be a jerk to others.)

I see a lot of folks upset that NG will financially benefit from residual and other compensation surrounding his involvement in the adaptation of Sandman and Good Omens (and he will.) But the answer isn’t “rage at the fans who are so emotionally attached to his blorbos because they grieve differently, and then somehow NG will be financially punished.” That’s lower-class/middle-class thinking. NG is too rich and financially diversified to really be hurt by little boycott or a couple of show cancellations (though said cancellations can cause life-changing poverty to the little guys who signed contracts and turned down other opportunities before all of this came out. And boy does NG love women in poverty 🤮)

So if you want to substantially reduce the wealth of someone at NGs financial level—you need to do it with professional services fees.

Details below the cut:

The firm that NG has apparently engaged for online reputation management (ORM), called edendale, was once paid for their professional testimony in an unrelated slander lawsuit, which was delivered in the form of report outlining the strategy ORM firms use and just how ludicrously expensive those professional services cost. (credit to horrornobody77 for digging up the report.) We’re talking hundred of thousands of dollars for a small potatoes case, where NG’s could easily get into the millions for ORM and associated legal fees.

It’s not that long of a read, but to summarize the key action items you can take:

-ORMs wait for the discourse to die down because active discourse is much more expensive to counter. Wanna cost NG money? Talk about the accusations over time. Set a quarterly calendar event in your phone to remind yourself to post (and otherwise engage on other people’s posts) about the Vulture article. This needs to happens for years, so that NG has to pay for more comprehensive ORM and for longer.

-Make discourse that is Google-friendly. Use the words edendale will find concerning (they’re already running fluff pieces with the terms Neil Gaiman Uncovered to try and bury the similarly named subreddit.) If you just post a link without much comment, it’s not gonna be prioritized by search engines. Similarly, if you make a low effort post and then no one else engages with it, it’s not going to make it to the top ten search results. Engage with each other, for heaven’s sake!

-Don’t let the fluff sit unaddressed. If you see random bot posts sharing NG quotes captioning random fantasy art (probably stolen) with the comments turned on? Respond! Make it hard for the bots to understand your comment but easy for humans. “Nice quote! Mega bummer about what NG did, I used to really like him.” is hard for a bot to auto-delete. “Fuck NG” is practically doing the bot’s autodelete command for it.

-If/when you post fan works for properties strongly related to Neil Gaiman, leave a lil callout in the authors notes. Nothing that will get you sued, just a few words like: “I would definitely personally choose to not ever meet Neil Gaiman at a comic con.” Maybe throw in a link to your fav tumblr summary.

Anyway, to the person being paid hundred or thousands of dollars per hour by Neil Gaiman for professional services—you’re welcome for the extra billable hours 😘

Also Edendale sounds like a law firm in a Good Omens legal AU fic, and I can’t believe it’s real.

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Sword Opera S1

The first of two sessions trying out Sword Opera, a ttrpg of action, melodrama, swords, and romance. It’s a new adaptation of Forged in the Dark to cover a variety of genres. The Kickstarter runs through Feb 11, 2025. You can check that out here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/…   

This is part of Open Hearth Gaming Community, you can find out more at openhearthgaming.com

Our audio version of these episodes can be found here: https://playingatthehearth.openhearth…

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i love how Gandalf invested in Hobbits in year one and has been pushing them ever since. Thorin, i hear you need help with a breaking and entering. Can I recommend one of these little cunts? Silent as fuck, trust me. Elrond my dude i know you're skeptical but these four chucklefucks just transported a weapon of mass destruction all the way here. Theoden, you've gotta get yourself a hobbit man, I've got a spare one here. Denathor you big prick, take a hobbit - literally this is the bottom of the range but listen to him sing. Beautiful little bastard.

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talking about Rosie The Riveter, fun fact: while the We Can Do It picture has become the most-well known depiction of her in modern times, it wasn’t really a famous image when it was made–in fact, it wasn’t even intended to be her

the most famous depiction of Rosie The Riveter during WWII was probably Norman Rockwell’s painting 

note what she’s resting her foot on

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my creative writing prof also HATES fantasy. as in if she asks for an example of symbolism in a book, and you give something from a fantasy novel, she’ll ask for an example from a “non-commercial book” instead.

I dunno man, people can have preferences, but the second you discount the artistic merit of sci fi and fantasy I stop taking your opinion seriously. and there’s such a big culture in Canada of only valuing literary fiction, to the point where one of our biggest authors, Margaret Atwood, refused for a while to classify her books as sci fi or fantasy. she said they were “speculative fiction”, which is entirely separate and very highbrow (sarcasm).

and I could go on about how Octavia Butler and Ursula Le Guin wrote books every bit as intellectual (and honestly, even more so) than their literary counterparts, but I am also an enjoyer of schlock!! I think there’s artistic merit in animorphs, and in isekais where a japanese schoolgirl reincarnates into a magical spider who has to level up like it’s a video game! it’s like with everything, you can’t draw a clean line that separates ‘art’ from ‘non-art’ or even ‘lesser art’, and pretending you can do so just makes you look ignorant and goofy. in my opinion.