Things that I feel like would happen when you’re in a relationship with Simon Riley.
Simon Riley masterlist
1. First off he hates the word ‘boyfriend’.
Maybe it’s because he’s in his mid thirties or something but he can’t stand being called your boyfriend. He’s more than that but also not at the same time. You live together, have access to each other’s bank accounts (which is only because he hates it when you try to fight him about him giving you money), and you’re each others emergency contact. He thinks of himself as your husband. The man wears a silicone ring when he’s home and a necklace with the ring that’s totally not a wedding band when he’s working. Price has seen the chain once or twice and smirks, shooting him a knowing look but never says a word.
Simon cannot stand it when people get nosy and want to know what your relationship status is. You’re together and that’s all that matters. No one needs to know that you’re the beneficiary of his will and life insurance policy or that he’s put you on all of his accounts. No one needs to know that he buys you anything you want but has only ever bought you two rings; a thin gold band with a flower engraved on it and its twin a matching emerald ring. No one needs to know that when he gifted them to you, there were tears and promises of safety, love, and happiness whispered against feverish skin. No one needs to know that he has your name woven into his chest tattoo.
No one needs to know any of that because your relationship is between him and you only.
2. You are not some submissive little house wife. You are a strong independent woman and he prefers it that way.
I know this one goes against what most people say but hear me out on this. Simon has been independent since birth practically. He’s only had himself to count on for years. Even in the military, he’s only been able to rely himself. Sure the others watch out for him but if it came down to it, he’s the only one who’s going to get himself out alive.
The thought of someone else relying on him in that way is terrifying. He can’t even fathom what it would be like to look at another person and fully trust them in that way. Half the time he feels like he can’t even be trusted to take care of himself let alone another human. In theory a sweet docile housewife is great with the meals and clean house but not for him. He needs to know that you can hold your own. He needs to know that you can be independent and carry on without him if something happened while he was working. He needs to know that you will be okay if he doesn’t come back.
You have to be okay without him no matter how much it pains him to think about it.
Like I said before, he’s made you the beneficiary of everything so he knows you’ll be set financially but that’s not enough. He’s made Price promise to keep an eye out for you. He’s made you promise to let Price do that and you agreed because it’s Simon who’s asking but you’d tell anyone else to fuck off.
In addition to all of that, he’s installed the best security system the government has to offer in your house. You have a very expensive and large safe in your shared closet that he’s instructed you to only open if you feel unsafe. While you might not like it, you agree to go shooting with him so he can sleep at night knowing that you could protect yourself if he’s not home. He’s gone as far as to make sure you have all of the licenses and certificates that are needed to legally own firearms in the UK.
He’s not leaving any opportunity for you to be vulnerable or have your ‘safety checks’, as he calls them, taken away.
3. Simon Riley is a godless man…until he meets you.
Now this is entirely my own headcannon with no evidence to support it so bear with me.
Simon had a shitty childhood where his mom would pray to a god who never listened and his dad would shout verses at him when he was drunk. God was a mythical figure that he was told stories off with nothing to show for it. He did believe at one point but then his dad never got better, his mom wore bruises of every shade, and his brother found comfort in drugs.
He found himself praying when he was being tortured by the Mexican cartel. Between the flashbacks of his abusive past, he prayed to a god who had failed him so many times before to help him. He prayed again as he dug himself out of that Texas grave with the major’s jaw bone. He wailed his prayers when he found his family executed after Sparks tried to kill him.
After that he deemed himself a Godless man. Years of praying had passed with nothing. This god had decided that Simon was not worthy of a miracle so why would he continue to worship him?
That was until he met you. He finds himself praying before every mission, every time he has to leave you, every time he’s on his way home, and just about any other time he thinks of you. He doesn’t know what exactly he’s praying for other than for you to be there when he gets back.
He whispers his prayers to an absent god against your skin as he worships your body, soul, and heart. He promises to be devoted to you until his last breath and vows to find you again in whatever afterlife awaits you. He pledges to find solace in you and only you when his haunting nightmares return. He makes an oath to your heart that it will never weather another storm alone again for his will take whatever beating that comes your way. He shows you that he will love you in the same manner as a Hozier song; putting you above all else because you have become his religion, his faith, his beliefs, his life.
You have become all that he is and he thanks the god he once believed in for you. He prays again but to you, his heart, his love, and his beacon through the enteral storm of life.
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notes/replies on that last post (about Florida moving to ban all HRT for adults) suggest it was struck down by a judge, which is a relief obviously. but i do wanna pick up on the response being "set up DIY networks for HRT! organise and help each other!" which is cool and all but... as the latest reblog comment points out, T is a controlled drug.
some quick and dirty googling confirms testosterone is a Schedule III controlled drug in the USA, with most legal sources suggesting possession and/or distribution of Schedule III drugs is a 3rd degree felony. conviction can mean up to five years in prison and a $5,000 fine. crucially, in Florida (where this law was intended to come into force), selling or distributing a Schedule III drug to minors pushes it up to a 2nd degree felony with a harsher fine/sentence.
i make this point because the response to HRT being restricted is often some variation of "mutual aid DIY network" or just flat suggesting DIY to people as the solution. which is cool if you're on estrogen, but possessing testosterone without a prescription is a literal felony in the USA. T is also a controlled drug in the UK, where trans people face long waiting lists for HRT - it's not illegal to possess T for personal use, but it is illegal to get them sent to you from abroad (importing a controlled drug) and to give them to other people (supply). to legally get T you need a prescription from a doctor.
in a hostile transphobic environment there is no guarantee that prosecuters will decide not to charge trans people for DIYing HRT. "set up DIY networks" for transmascs basically translates to "set up an illegal drug ring".
this is a form of transphobia that affects transmascs but does not affect transfems. it also affects nonbinary and intersex folks seeking or using testosterone HRT. in fact it could potentially impact some nonbinary trans folks worse because the medical gatekeeping around trying to transition as nonbinary is already an uphill struggle.
it is not easy for those of us on T to just DIY it and fuck the system. without a valid prescription our HRT becomes a banned illegal steroid that can land us in serious legal trouble if we get caught, especially if we're distributing it to other people as part of a mutual aid setup. i know we're all very "be gay do crime" for the memes but we are talking about an actual factual go-to-jail-irl crime here.
the fact that our HRT is an illegal drug unless prescribed by a doctor is a form of transandrophobia that affects trans men, transmascs, nonbinary people on masculinising HRT, and intersex people who want or need testosterone. it means that:
we cannot DIY transition without committing a crime, and have to weigh up that risk when considering DIY as an option
setting up a mutual aid testosterone DIY network is even more of a crime, especially if you want to use it to help trans teens
we are thus more dependent on placating medical practitioners and convincing them to prescribe us HRT
we will always be more impacted by any moves to restrict or delay access to HRT because we don't have an easy, legal DIY option
when access to HRT is limited for transphobic reasons, the DIY option comes at much higher risk
where access to HRT is severely delayed (as it is in the UK by years-long waiting lists), it is easier for transfems to start DIYing while they wait than it is for transmascs to do the same thing. in fact in the UK they've started selling estrogen HRT over the counter for menopause, so here if you want to start estrogen DIY all you have to do is get a cis lady friend to ask a pharmacist for menopause treatments. if you wanna start T you have to go on the fucking dark web (I'm exaggerating but... not a lot)
none of this is intended to suggest that transfems don't experience medical transphobia or gatekeeping and this isn't a "trans men have it worse universally across the board" post. there are undoubtedly some areas where it's harder to be transfem. however, this is one area where it is clearly and demonstrably harder to be a trans man. i am pointing this out because i keep seeing people saying that transmascs have it easier or there's no systemic or structural transphobia targeting trans men or we only ever experience misdirected misogyny or whatever. here is your proof that that is not true. this is a form of structural and systemic transphobia that impacts trans men and not trans women. and there is no possible world in which you can argue that testosterone being a controlled drug is somehow misogyny.
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"Doctors have begun trialling the world’s first mRNA lung cancer vaccine in patients, as experts hailed its “groundbreaking” potential to save thousands of lives.
Lung cancer is the world’s leading cause of cancer death, accounting for about 1.8m deaths every year. Survival rates in those with advanced forms of the disease, where tumours have spread, are particularly poor.
Now experts are testing a new jab that instructs the body to hunt down and kill cancer cells – then prevents them ever coming back. Known as BNT116 and made by BioNTech, the vaccine is designed to treat non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), the most common form of the disease.
The phase 1 clinical trial, the first human study of BNT116, has launched across 34 research sites in seven countries: the UK, US, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Spain and Turkey.
The UK has six sites, located in England and Wales, with the first UK patient to receive the vaccine having their initial dose on Tuesday [August 20, 2024].
Overall, about 130 patients – from early-stage before surgery or radiotherapy, to late-stage disease or recurrent cancer – will be enrolled to have the jab alongside immunotherapy. About 20 will be from the UK.
The jab uses messenger RNA (mRNA), similar to Covid-19 vaccines, and works by presenting the immune system with tumour markers from NSCLC to prime the body to fight cancer cells expressing these markers.
The aim is to strengthen a person’s immune response to cancer while leaving healthy cells untouched, unlike chemotherapy.
“We are now entering this very exciting new era of mRNA-based immunotherapy clinical trials to investigate the treatment of lung cancer,” said Prof Siow Ming Lee, a consultant medical oncologist at University College London hospitals NHS foundation trust (UCLH), which is leading the trial in the UK.
“It’s simple to deliver, and you can select specific antigens in the cancer cell, and then you target them. This technology is the next big phase of cancer treatment.”
Janusz Racz, 67, from London, was the first person to have the vaccine in the UK. He was diagnosed in May and soon after started chemotherapy and radiotherapy.
The scientist, who specialises in AI, said his profession inspired him to take part in the trial. “I am a scientist too, and I understand that the progress of science – especially in medicine – lies in people agreeing to be involved in such investigations,” he said...
“And also, I can be a part of the team that can provide proof of concept for this new methodology, and the faster it would be implemented across the world, more people will be saved.”
Racz received six consecutive injections five minutes apart over 30 minutes at the National Institute for Health Research UCLH Clinical Research Facility on Tuesday.
Each jab contained different RNA strands. He will get the vaccine every week for six consecutive weeks, and then every three weeks for 54 weeks.
Lee said: “We hope adding this additional treatment will stop the cancer coming back because a lot of time for lung cancer patients, even after surgery and radiation, it does come back.” ...
“We hope to go on to phase 2, phase 3, and then hope it becomes standard of care worldwide and saves lots of lung cancer patients.”
The Guardian revealed in May that thousands of patients in England were to be fast-tracked into groundbreaking trials of cancer vaccines in a revolutionary world-first NHS “matchmaking” scheme to save lives.
Under the scheme, patients who meet the eligibility criteria will gain access to clinical trials for the vaccines that experts say represent a new dawn in cancer treatment."
-via The Guardian, May 30, 2024
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Good Omens graphic novel update: June 2024
Welcome to the June update. A lot of behind the scenes work at the moment but we're grabbing the travel sweets, popping in the Bentley and hitting the road. More on that below.
Admin
Ongoing reminder that the project FAQ can be found here.
I pledged using my Apple ID, or no longer use the address my pledge is attached to, or I cannot work out what email address my pledge is connected to. What should I do?
Please contact us via your Kickstarter account where the pledge is connected; we will be able to see on our system which address it is. If it's one you have access to, great! The FAQ has information on how to resend your invite link to access the PledgeManager. If it's one you are not able to access, then you can let us know which email is preferred and we can update this on the system, which will automatically send a new invite.
Events
We've had a lot of queries about when the Good Omens team will be attending events more formally, after some Aziraphale and Crowley spotting at conventions we'd been to previously. Well, we're excited to confirm the first: Good Omens HQ will be at ACME Comic Con in Glasgow, Scotland this September.
We'll be bringing the actual-real-life-home-to-Crowley-and-his-plants Bentley from Season 2 of Good Omens, the first time the car has been made available publicly for fans to come see and get photos with, ahead of its journey back to the set and the start of Season 3 filming.
We also see Quelin Sepulveda, aka Muriel, has been announced for the event for some additional ineffable joy.
You can get your tickets for ACME Comic Con here. We hope to see some of you there.
While we won't be rocking up with the Bentley to this next one, we want to let you know about Ineffable Con which, though sold out in person, is also taking place virtually in July. The fan-run event hosts great panels, auctions and more, with money raised going to Alzheimer’s Research UK, in memory of Sir Terry Pratchett.
Where next? We have - not an exaggeration - a list of about 200 events somewhere from when we asked fans this on Instagram and while we can't promise quite that amount of convention attendance, we're certainly looking to do some more things in future with Good Omens at large. Watch this space.
Good Omens items...
This month has largely seen prototypes and samples for the wider Good Omens merch store arriving, and while we can't share those yet, we are certainly excited to see more fan product suggestions coming to life. That does, however, leave our public item updates a little slim on the ground.
To make up for that, here's some new panels from Colleen:
Also known as, "What could possibly go wrong?" And:
Also known as, "Well why don't you ▇▇▇ ▇▇▇▇▇▇ ▇▇▇ ▇▇!@#▇" or words to that effect, we'd imagine.
Update from Colleen
Following such a positive response to Colleen's piece last month, bringing you behind the scenes into making the Good Omens graphic novel, we are delighted to say that she has agreed to write something for our updates going forward! For June, she's going more in depth into the process of flatting and the technicalities of colouring on screen vs print. Over to you, Colleen.
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I mentioned the other month that I use a flatter to help me with technical work on GOOD OMENS, and here is a great example.
This is my original, hand drawn line art.
And this is the flatting file which was created using the MultiFill computer program.
It will put your eyes out.
The raw image above demonstrates how the color art lines up solidly under the line art. If it doesn't do that, you get a weird phenomenon in print called ghosting, a tiny little line of white around each segment of color. I had this issue on one major project and ended up redoing every single color file after I got a look at the first printing. Nearly two weeks of work.
The same image with the line art on top.
The layer order looks like this.
Background copy is the clean, line art layer.
I scan the art at 600 dpi, then make the blacks pure black, the whites pure white. Then I convert back to greyscale, then RGB, then duplicate the layer. Then I delete the white on the upper layer so the line art layer is transparent but the blacks on that layer are not.
If you have blacks on a layer that has been multiplied, you can see slight color through those blacks. You want pure black.
The lower layer is where I use the MultiFill program to create the digital flats. First you use MultiFill to drop in the random colors, then the companion plug-in Flatter Pro to make those colors seal under the black lines.
This probably sounds like a silly thing to worry about, but if the flat colors don’t line up perfectly under the black line art, you get the dreaded ghosting I mentioned. You can see it below in this image. It’s a tiny little white line that will appear around the black lines and color areas.
This drives me nuts and is an absolute nightmare to fix.
It’s a very common problem, especially for people who work for web and don’t anticipate the problems going from web to print.
What looks great on your computer can cause big problems in print.
From here, my flatter Jul Mae Kristoffer, who is way over in the Philippines, does flatting that is more in keeping with the areas of color I want to isolate. As you see on Layer 1.
But again, this is still pretty ugly, and not what I would use for final color. Flatting is a technical issue, not a creative one, though in some cases a flatter will make choices you may use. Most of the time they don't.
Here is my final color page.
Sometimes my MultiFill flats are so wonky I have a hard time getting my brain to snap out of what I see before me. If I get stuck, it's a good idea to just pick at it and come back to it later.
If it really, really bothers me, I’ll take the MultiFill flatter layer and desaturate the color so it doesn’t poke my eyes out.
Here’s an example. The digital flat file.
The desaturated flat file that doesn’t make me want to poke my eyes out.
And the final color.
Sometimes I just put in a solid white layer so I don’t see the flats at all. Flatting is there to allow you to easily pick spots to color in, and doesn’t usually appear in the final work.
Sometimes I want to create my colors using transparent color over a white ground, which is more delicate in the final.
Here’s an example from Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. I also selected all black line art here and converted it to sepia to give it a vintage look. Except for the fairies. They’re green.
A colorist must also consider color settings.
Different clients can have different requirements. I find these color settings, which I got from the Hi-Fi Studio, to be pretty solid. I use them as my default for all my projects unless otherwise requested. If your publisher has other settings, they’ll usually send you a csf file which you can upload to Photoshop. The program will save your files and you can just switch between them as you need them.
This tells the printer things about the paper and the spread of the ink you will use. That’s what dot gain means - it makes printed color look darker than intended, so you set up your files to account for it.
When you hover your pointer over each box, it will tell you what each setting is supposed to accomplish.
Another really important thing to consider when coloring comics is color range.
I’m coloring this book in RGB range, but for print you use CMYK.
I’m about to confuse the heck out of some people with this post, I’m afraid. But here we go.
Here is this shot in RGB color setting.
And here is the same page calibrated for print in CMYK.
The biggest shift is in the reds. Print cannot match those reds.
You may not see much difference here, but it’s the sort of thing that drives artists crazy.
A computer should be perfect for conveying exactly what you want, right? It's all just 0's and 1's, binary information, and that information should be the same from one computer to the next?
Nope. Not even close.
First off, computer monitors must be calibrated. You can use a computer program or a tool that measures the color on your computer screen and then adjusts the color to an industry standard.
Have you ever been in an electronics shop where a bunch of TV shows were on display, all of them playing the same show, and have you noticed how different the color was from one TV to the next?
It's like that.
I freely admit I don't pay a whole lot of attention to calibration, but if I were a professional photographer I would. I'd have a little spectrometer attached to my screen and software would adjust my monitor to the best possible standard range. As it is, I just use the default setting on my computer and hope for the best.
If your monitor is properly calibrated and your art is shown on another monitor that is properly calibrated, the art will look almost identical from one monitor to the next.
YAY!
But from one monitor to the next, that's about where the resemblance ends.
Colors are calibrated to something called RGB, or Red, Green, Blue.
All colors come from a mix of red green and blue. At their greatest intensity, all the colors in the spectrum together become pure white light.
This is why RGB is called ADDITIVE color, because you ADD colors from the spectrum to get ALL colors, and all colors create the entirety of the rainbow, and pure white light.
Your computer monitor, your phone, your television, all images are created via light using RGB, a gamut that covers all possible colors that can be created.
That's a lot.
And that's why some of the colors you see on your TV or phone are so deep and intense.
For the widest possible range of color and intensity, you use RGB.
Unfortunately, there is what you can create with light, and then there is what you can create with pigment or ink. And that is why printing what you see on your computer almost never looks exactly like what you see in a book.
For printing, you must use a color setting known as CMYK. This stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Key/Black.
In printing, the pure blue is actually Cyan and the pure red is actually Magenta.
CMYK color range is not created by addition, but by SUBTRACTION. In order to get the color you want, you reduce the percentage of one of the four colors for ink mixing. Mixing all colors, instead of giving you white, gives you black.
The gamut of CMYK is limited to what can be created with ink.
You've probably heard the term four color press? This is what that means. Four colors, with each color of ink run over the paper on rollers which, combined in varying layers of opacity, create all the printing colors you see.
But remember, what you see on your computer monitor and what CMYK gamut can handle are two different things.
Now, I’ve been really careful with the color settings on Good Omens, so there haven’t been any big surprises, but let me show you a snippet of a project I did for the French fashion house Balmain.
The RGB version:
And then this shot after it was converted to a CMYK file for print.
That's a pretty big difference.
Now, you see this shift mostly with vibrant colors, such as that pink there. But other colors hardly changed at all, right?
That's because this issue is about range of color. CMYK and RGB occupy a shared range which you can see demonstrated by this graphic I got from Wikipedia.
The graphic shows the RGB ranges supported by various digital formats. SWOP CMYK is the most common range my publishers use. Note that the bounding box line shared by the RGB and SWOP CMYK formats shares about half the range space. So whatever RGB colors you use that are outside that range will be digitally converted to the smaller SWOP CMYK range.
And you may not like what you end up with.
As you can see, some of the most ethereal and intense colors get lost outside of the SWOP CMYK boundary.
A look at the Dark Horse Comics color settings in Photoshop. Theoretically, this information should prevent your art from looking like mud on publication.
Now, after I just told you the dangers of coloring in RGB then converting to CMYK for print, I tell you I am coloring Good Omens in RGB anyway. There’s a couple of reasons for this.
Remember, RGB give you a greater range of color, so it can be to your advantage to preserve your original files using a format that gives you the greatest range.
Again, here is the unaltered file.
You can see what the CMYK result will be simply by clicking the Proof Colors button here. This will show you how the art will convert.
And the Gamut Warning will show you which colors are out of gamut range for print.
The intensity of that magenta and that purple in the top right are not going to print true.
This is how it will look in final.
So even if you do what you think is perfect color on screen, there is no way it can perfectly convert to print. Almost everything will involve a little bit of compromise.
Even though you have to consider the color shift issues, preserving your files in RGB gives you greater wiggle room, especially if you get lucky someday and get to work with a printer who can print in 6 colors. Or maybe some technology you don’t know about will pop up and make printing super glorious. Who knows.
Regardless, you should keep an eye on that gamut and color for CMYK print, while preserving your master files in RGB.
Until next time.
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