Disregard everything I said earlier about Eridians making Grace some Earth plants so he doesn't get sad - new idea!
One of his students finds out about the "human no see plant get sad" phenomenon and gets the class together to make him lil plants for his bubble so he doesn't become sad.
They're children, so the plants are not even vaguely plant shaped. They're mostly just rocks that have been painted with something they're are pretty sure is "green."
Anyway he loves them so much he starts leaking everywhere and puts them in special places all over his bubble. He's incredibly protective of his lil "plants" and is completely devastated when they get confiscated for being accidentally suuuuuper poisonous to humans. So the Eridian scientists make green paint that won't accidentally kill him and his students redo them.
And once it ends up in the news, he starts getting "plants" from kids all over the world. He's like Santa receiving letters if those letters were all incredibly heavy attempts at alien plantlife by blind children. He couldn't be happier.
Okay but really the more I look over this gifset the more I get really emotional about Aziraphale just welling up with excitement to talk about how he and Crowley met in Eden when Anathema asks them what’s going on.
Aziraphale has been absolutely bursting to talk about how great Crowley is and how much he likes Crowley and how Crowley’s funny and clever and inquisitive and wily and how Crowley’s always so sweet to him and Crowley Crowley Crowley… Like, if we’re counting the unfilmed scene from the script book, there are multiple occasions in the series where Aziraphale just gets so giddy and excited just thinking about Crowley that he almost comes out to his boss because he’s so excited to have the chance to even have his husband’s adversary’s name in his mouth. Clearly he’s been wanting to have somebody to talk to about Crowley for a really, really long time.
And then Anathema is there and is like “what the hap is fuckening you guys” and finally Aziraphale has someone who doesn’t belong to either side but who already knows there’s supernatural things going on so she’s, like, the first person in six thousand years that Aziraphale doesn’t actually have to lie to even a little bit if he doesn’t want to.
No wonder he immediately launches into an explanation of his and Crowley’s meet-cute instead of anything pertinent to what’s actually happening.
I was thinking about this again because it’s a thing I think about regularly and listen, I’m still not over it.
It’s a horrible thing, to love someone so much and not be able to share it. To be afraid to share it because the consequences of your love could be actively dangerous. And it’s bad enough that Aziraphale and Crowley are still, after six thousand years, dancing around the edges of their shared affection because the fallout if they’re discovered could be so dire. That’s painful as hell on its own
But the thing is… when you’re in love, you want to share the happiness of that with people around you. My wife girlfriend and I are going on three years together and I’m physically incapable of shutting up about her. I literally tell strangers about her, like I’ll be making chit-chat with somebody in an elevator or at a concert or smth and my love for my partner just comes bubbling up out of me if something even tangentially related to her happens to come up.
I’m sure it makes me super annoying to literally everyone around me at all times, but I don’t give a shit frankly. I spent twenty plus years of my life in denial about my love for women, shoving it down and stifling it and pretending, even to myself, that it didn’t exist. And even once Taylor and I were together, I was so scared for so long, because I wasn’t really out aside from to a few close friends, and talking about this thing that brought me so much happiness was also so scary. So yeah, now that I’m at the point that I will happily out myself just for the joy of being able to talk about how wonderful my partner is? You’re damn right I won’t shut up about it.
Aziraphale, though… Aziraphale doesn’t have that. He doesn’t have an outlet for all this beautiful love that he has for Crowley. He’s just boiling over with affection, and not only can he not share it with Crowley, he can’t share it with anyone. He’s so in love, and he finds so much joy in talking to Crowley and spending time with Crowley and thinking about Crowley, but he can’t express that in any way that’s safe.
So yeah, it’s not a shock at all that the second he has someone he can talk to about Crowley that he doesn’t have to also lie to, he just bubbles over in his excitement to spill the story of their meet cute— a story he has probably never had the opportunity to share with another living soul, but which he undoubtedly cherishes, given that it was the start of their long and winding road together.
He’s like a soda bottle of love that’s been shaken up violently, and if you twist the cap even a little bit it just explodes and starts leaking everywhere. Except instead of getting your hands all sticky, you get an excitable angel that literally will not shut up about how great his demon lover is.
Hi! Just discovered this and it's so sweet of all of you to run this blog! I'm a sucker for truth serum/spell fics where one or both (of A/C) have to resist the urge to give in and just spill all of their feelings. I've read the lovely cyankelpie's Thou Shall Not Lie & others with a similar vibe, but I'm trying to find more niche ones. Wondering if you know of any? Thanks!
Hello. Here are some fics to add to our #truth serum and #truth spell tags...
Synchronized by EdosianOrchids901 (T)
“Aziraphale. What did you do?”
Aziraphale’s expression wrenched with something. Pain, maybe. And then he blurted, “I read a spell from the book aloud because I was curious, and I think it was a real truth spell, and now I can’t lie.”
Nothing but the truth by UnproblematicMe (T)
It is around 8 pm. Anathema is at Crowley’s door, supporting a dopey-grinning Aziraphale.
True Love by AppleSeeds (T)
His love for Aziraphale, the apothecary's son, is Prince Crowley's most closely-guarded secret, but keeping his mouth shut under the influence of a truth serum might prove to be more than he can manage.
And Nothing But the Truth by 29Pieces (G)
Gabriel wants answers about how Aziraphale survived the hellfire. He's determined to get the truth, by any means necessary, and a truth serum seems just the thing. He's about to get way, way more than he bargained for... A story as told by the Bookshop and the Bentley.
A Midsummer Afternoon's Curse by cyankelpie (G)
(Aziraphale is the victim of a love spell, and needs Crowley’s help to break it. Which is a problem, because it’s very difficult for Crowley to focus while Aziraphale lavishes him with affection.)
The rest of the sentence got knocked out of him by a large, off-white blur that flew out of the door and tackled him. “Crowley,” said a familiar voice, though the breathy fondness and affection in said voice was anything but familiar. “I knew you’d come.”
Oh. It was Crowley. Crowley was the target of Aziraphale’s magical infatuation. Aziraphale wanted Crowley’s help ridding him of this newfound affection for Crowley.
And Crowley, who somehow needed to be the level-headed one in this situation, was utterly fucked.
Sigh No More by KitschyKit (E)
“Aziraphale?” He prompted as he fiddled with the seal of the bottle, tugging at the stubborn cork. His sharp fangs came down to worry at his bottom lip. “Your idea?”
“I’ll get to it in a minute.” Aziraphale looked practically disheveled, and beautiful, and despite everything that happened, he looked perfectly, utterly, calm. “I was hoping to talk about us.”
The cork gave, and Crowley hit himself in the face.
Crowley’s venom is a truth serum, one he has used on himself for centuries, dosing himself in private to admit to his own carefully buried feelings— but accidents happen, and Crowley bites himself the night after the Apocalypse.
There are a thousand and one ways to say I love you, and consent is a part of every single one.
Of Truths And Other Absurd Notions by WaitingToBeBroken (M)
Crowley is hit with a curse that makes it very deadly not to Tell the Truth. Which, considering the fact he is a demon and has been hiding a particular secret from a particular angel for 6 thousand years, is not ideal.
The way Aziraphale is fretting over him and touching him is really not helping.
The Whole Truth by Aethelflaed (G)
London, 1999
An ancient, mysterious tome bearing a powerful curse arrives in AZ Fell's - and Aziraphale is tasked with finding out why the demons want it so much.
But his strange behavior quickly suggests that the curse is affecting him, too.
And what is the secret that Crowley keeps for twenty years?
She got the idea for the study while walking with her advisor at Stanford to discuss her thesis topic, and the paper she eventually published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2014 is sharp enough that it should have ended the seated meeting on the day it came out.
She ran 4 experiments on 176 people. Same person tested twice. Once sitting, once walking. The creativity tasks were the standard ones psychologists have used for decades to measure how good a brain is at generating novel useful ideas.
81% of participants in the first experiment produced more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. In the second experiment, 88%. In the third, 100%. Every single person walked into a more creative version of themselves. On average, people generated 60% more novel useful ideas the moment their legs started moving.
The skeptical question is the obvious one. Maybe it was the fresh air. Maybe it was the scenery passing by. Maybe it was the change of environment doing the work, not the walking itself.
Oppezzo killed every one of those explanations with one experimental decision. She put people on a treadmill facing a blank wall. No scenery. No fresh air. No environmental change. Just legs moving in place while staring at white drywall. The 60% boost held.
Then she ran the experiment that closed the case completely. She took participants outside in two conditions. Half of them walked through a Stanford courtyard. The other half were pushed through the exact same courtyard in a wheelchair. Same outdoor stimulation. Same scenery passing at the same speed. The only difference was whether the legs were moving.
The walkers produced dramatically more novel high-quality ideas than the wheelchair group. The outdoors did almost nothing on its own. The walking did everything.
She also tested the opposite kind of thinking. Convergent thinking. The kind where there is one right answer and you have to narrow down to it. Word puzzles where 3 words share a hidden fourth word that connects them. The seated participants did slightly better on these. Walkers got slightly worse.
Walking is not a general intelligence enhancer. It does one specific thing. It opens up the divergent search inside your brain. The part that generates options. The part that produces unexpected connections. The part that takes a problem and finds five ways into it instead of one.
When you need to converge on the single right answer, sit down. When you need to find the answer in the first place, get up.
The mechanism is now well understood. Walking selectively activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network, the system inside your brain that runs when you are not consciously focused on anything. The DMN is where mind-wandering happens. Where memories cross-reference each other. Where ideas that have been sitting in separate folders inside your head finally bump into each other.
When you sit at a desk and force yourself to concentrate, you suppress the DMN. When you walk at a natural pace, the executive part of your brain gets just busy enough handling the walking that the DMN comes online and starts doing the work that focus was blocking.
The most useful finding in the entire paper is the one almost nobody quotes. The boost did not turn off the moment people stopped walking. Participants who walked first and then sat back down stayed elevated. Their next round of seated creativity work was still significantly better than people who had been sitting the whole time. The rest lingered for at least several minutes after the legs stopped moving.
You do not need to do creative work while walking. You need to walk before the creative work. The brain holds the state.
I've been spending a week telling myself that the ending of Good Omens S3 didn't affect me because the only canon boys for me are the ones in the book, but...
that's probably untrue because I also seem to have written a whole fanfic just to retcon it.
I don't consider this a fix-it fic, it's more of a I DARE YOU TO PROVE THIS DIDN'T ACTUALLY HAPPEN fic.
So here you go, spoilers under the cut:
And Everything Else
It was dark. Aziraphale had the unpleasant sensation of a million trillion atoms buzzing back into place. He could see nothing past his… nose? He thought there was a nose. Which was odd in itself; that wasn’t supposed to be.
“Crowley?” He ventured.
The sardonic groan that answered him from the void was reassuring.
“I say, Crowley! I thought we were dead!”
Somewhere below his left ear, Crowley wheezed. “Not dead, discorporated. Though I’m starting to wish it, got a whopping great headache.”
“But - why? How?”
“S’wot bloody happens when reality explodes, I should think.”
“No no, how are we still here? I distinctly remember nobly extinguishing ourselves from existence in a rather stirring act of self-sacrifice. You were there too, don’t you remember? Demands were made of the divine, the nature of reality was debated, certain feelings were disclosed…”
The angel stopped short, a sudden swoosh through the darkness seeming to indicate that his newly re-formed wings had shot up.
“Crowley!” he gasped. “Do- do you suppose that’s what saved us? Is our bond stronger even than the dissolution of time and space?”
Aziraphale couldn’t see his rangy companion but he could just feel the ironical arch of those brows.
“That’s one theory” came the languid reply. “Or could be… I dunno, could be that both our names are still written in the Book of Life.”
Something about his tone said he was suppressing a self-satisfied grin. Aziraphale swiveled toward him.
“Whatever do you mean? There’s no interference of the divine, remember? The new universe doesn’t have a Book of Life.”
“Right, but this universe does.” The demon flexed a wing experimentally. “This universe sticks around so long as the book does. We wrote a new one, if you’ll recall. And what do you suppose it says?”
Aziraphale strained to remember, and found his lips moving over the words like a half-forgotten rhyme. “There were four of them in that bookshop, which was the whole world…” he whispered.
“Exactly. Four beings… including yourself. Including yours truly. Still listed, still very much existing.”
Aziraphale tried to concentrate. He could feel the last of his molecules reassembling, and it made his fingers tingly. “But God said-”
“She said we can’t exist in the new universe. Didn’t say anything about the old one then, did she?”
“But- but Crowley!” cried the angel, wringing his hands, “Then what was the point? You said you wanted a new earth! A new start, without the meddling of the divine! You said a world without free will isn’t worth living in.”
“I did, and it isn’t. Think, Angel. Four of them in that bookshop. Where are the other two? The prime meddlers, if you will."
Aziraphale paused and blinked about into the void.
“Why yes - the devil and the lord herself, what’s become of them?
“It seems,” Crowley droned, sounding very much pleased with himself, “that when we requested an impromptu celestial reset they both jumped at the chance. Became rather occupied mucking about in an alternate universe where they don’t nominally exist, or some such. Probably a confounding affair with vague doppelgängers and the likes, if I know them.
Aziraphale started. “They left, just like that? To go exist in another universe?”
“To go not exist in another universe. But they’ll never not be entirely. S’long as there’s good, long as there’s evil. You wrote it yourself, God was here the whole time. Bit of a paradox but it’ll do in a pinch.”
“So” began Aziraphale, slowly, “if they’re off being nonexistent in another universe…”
“Then they’re not interfering in this one, just so happens” finished Crowley. His eyes twinkled, Aziraphale knew they did.
“Crowley!” he cried, somewhere between scandalized and impressed. “You mean to tell me this whole time- that it was all a ruse to get heaven and hell to finally leave the world alone?”
“What,” said the demon, “did you really think I was just going to throw away 8 billion people? Ninety trillion perfectly good star systems? And after all the trouble we went through trying to save them the first time.” He sniffed. “Ruddy waste if you ask me.”
“Why Crowley, you dear thing! I…. I don’t know what to say! You’ve saved the day! You’re a miracle!”
“Alright, alright,” he grimaced. “Don’t rub it in.”
“Don’t be modest, dear boy! Why, you’ve saved the entire universe!”
“We did, Angel,” he muttered. “Us.”
Aziraphale placed a hand on what he thought must be Crowley’s shoulder and squeezed it fondly.
“Though…” said Crowley, thoughtful, his tone sharpening abruptly, “I suppose I don’t have to tell you any of this.”
Aziraphale straightened. “Whatever do you mean?”
“Just that you jumped onboard with my throw-out-the-universe-and-die pitch awfully fast. You really mean to tell me you didn’t want to save the world just as much as I did? Have a little go at subverting divine will?”
“I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.”
Crowley’s voice was closer to his ear now. “Awfully convenient, wasn’t it, your happening to write our names down in the Book of Life like that. Without knowing it would save us.”
The Angel pursed his lips. “I… may have had an inkling.”
Crowley threw up his hands. “Of course you bloody knew! So why the charade? Do you get off on listening to me re-explain it all?”
“Oh, but Crowley!” the angel huffed, flustered. “It’s just, you do so love saving me.”
“I want you to know that I’m rolling my eyes, Angel,” said Crowley, “even if you can’t see it.” But he did not sound displeased.
Aziraphale brightened. “Well, to business then! The universe, you know - it’s rather… missing at the moment. How are we supposed to get it back?”
He felt Crowley shrug. “Rewrite the book, I suppose. I think there’s still a pen in my - yes, seems I’ve got my pockets back.”
“Re-write the entire universe! That will take ages! Eons!”
“You have somewhere else to be?”
The angel looked about into the vacancy. “Nowhere at all, it seems. I’ve nothing but time. Or lack thereof, I’m not sure time exists yet. Well then… how shall we write the world? Put back everything just as it was?”
“What, you want to put everything back? Including Gabriel?”
“Now Crowley…”
“Ooh and let’s leave out slugs. Never could stand them, all squiggly-like. Maybe we start with ‘No Gabriel, no slugs.’”
“Gabriel stays. And I don’t know, I rather liked slugs. All the overlooked things. They were… important.”
“Fine” drawled Crowley. “Have it your way. Here, I’ll start it off.”
“But what will you write?”
“I dunno, does it matter? Best of times, worst of times. Dark and stormy night. Call me Crowley. Take your pick.”
“Mind your penmanship!”
“I can’t bloody well see, now can I?"
“Wait! I’ve a good opening." Aziraphale groped about until he located something distinctly pen-like and something distinctly book-like. And he said the words as he wrote “Let… there… be - light.”
There was, and it was good. But also rather far away. The faint glow seemed a small question on a non-existent horizon.
It was enough for them to make out the gray outline of pages, though. Crowley contemplated their lines of script for a moment, then plucked back the pen back and hurriedly scrawled “And everything else.” He handed it off to the angel for approval, looking doggedly pleased.
Aziraphale pulled at a curl. “Perhaps a bit vague?”
“Sure, but it’ll save us buckets of time. 'Everything else' ‘bout covers it all. Humanity, polar bears, airplanes, Queen albums.” Crowley shuffled. “…Love. All that rot.”
They stood side by side in the yawning gray. Aziraphale suddenly found himself unsure what to say. So they gazed into the elongating dim, and they waited. The light was growing stronger, minuscule but steady. Somewhere far away and faint, Aziraphale thought he could hear the call of birds.
“Everything else. It’s coming closer,” said Crowley.
“I expect it is.”
“Taking it’s time, isn’t it?”
“Patience, now. The universe wasn’t built in a day.”
“Seven, if I recall.”
The light continued to grow, as did a great far-off din of jungle noises and the muddled song of rushing rivers.
Crowley bounced on his heels.
Aziraphale hesitated. “Crowley. Was it… all an act?”
“Hrm.”
“You know. The part where you looked at me like that, was it real? Just before we discorporated. Like you weren’t sure if the universe really would end, or if everything would work out, but that it somehow didn’t matter just then. The way you were looking at me, it was as if I was the whole universe.”
Crowley had assumed the demeanor of a deflated beach ball. “Are you really going to make me say it?” he muttered. “Last time I tried to tell you it didn’t work out so well.”
Aziraphale felt suddenly small. “Tell me what?”
The demon studied his feet. “Oh, that I love the world, but… s’not much good to me if you’re not in it.” He looked up at Aziraphale then, helpless, and it was a question.
It was almost here now, the Everything. The steady swell of light, the din of waters and winds and animals; a cacophony of life, surging towards them.
In the growing bright Aziraphale could finally make out the bedraggled figure next to him clearly. Crowley looked like he had been through every ring of hell and back and tripped down every escalator of heaven to boot. All for his sake.
The angel faltered. “Oh, Crowley. I’m sorry, dear fellow. So sorry for leaving you. I never should have gone. Only, I wanted so badly to put things right for the world but I ended up making a terrible muddle of things instead. You must know I never wanted to go - that it was all for you, because of you. That of all the things I love in the world, I love you the most. Oh, what dreadful ideas I get sometimes, running off and leaving you with no one but house plants and gangsters for company! Why if only I had stopped to think-”
Crowley's gaze softened as he looked at the babbling angel, adoring. The universe was closer now, so close, and the sheen of a thousand expanding nebulas danced in his eyes.
“I’m sorry, Crowley,” Aziraphale stammered on, “terribly sorry.”
It was with infinite fondness and not even a hint of irony when Crowley touched his face and murmured back “I forgive you.”
The Everything rushed upon them then. And when they kissed it was with the brilliance of every star and a symphony of madly whirling planets and the chaos of a trillion galaxies exploding into being. There was a giddy leap of waves, and the great sigh of leaves in summer and friends calling out to one another and the tiny shuffling of every insect; a great burst of sunflowers and love songs and feel of their hands as they touched and the dizzy corkscrew of time itself. Reality brimmed over with with nightingales and orangoutangs and libraries and mugs of tea and the great contented shiver of all the things that ever were or would be as they clinked back into place.
It was awfully good, Aziraphale thought, as they held onto each other. There was so much light. And everything else.
this post has been up for five hours and has two notes. i think tumblr shitcanned it because it has pictures of women wearing bras on it. very cool. no censorship message, just vanishing it
AHHHHHH someone put all the info from the now-extremely-hard-to-read, 10+ year old bra post into one nice infograph! THAT POST WAS MY BOOB BIBLE. Yay Boob New Testament!
further FYI: it is EXTREMELY common for breasts to be different shapes and different sizes. if you find that your breasts are different to the point that it's hard to find a bra, if your cup sizes are extremely different, you may find that masectomy aids are helpful - ranging from variations on bras to partial forms or shapers!! a lot of insurances in the US will aid with cost if you ask your doc for a script, and a lot of docs are willing to write that script bc not only is breast support critical, the emotional impact is no joke. you don't have to have had a mastectomy to use these aids!! it's ok!!
here's one place that will let you see what is available but there are a number of sites -
A new study published online today, April 25, in the scientific journal Science provides the strongest evidence to date that not only is nat
From the article:
“If you look only at the trend of species declines, it would be easy to think that we’re failing to protect biodiversity, but you would not be looking at the full picture,” said Penny Langhammer, lead author of the study and Executive Vice President of Re:wild. “What we show with this paper is that conservation is, in fact, working to halt and reverse biodiversity loss. It is clear that conservation must be prioritized and receive significant additional resources and political support globally, while we simultaneously address the systemic drivers of biodiversity loss, such as unsustainable consumption and production.”
This massive meta analysis (for those not familiar, a study analyzing the results of many studies on similar topics) found that the vast majority of conservation efforts show much much better results than doing nothing. In many cases, biodiversity loss was not only stopped but reversed.
This shows that conservation efforts really work and money invested is put to very good use. Legally protecting endangered species really works, restoring habitat really works, removing invasive species really works, returning land to Indigenous communities works. All of the blood, sweat, and tears being poured into protecting the natural world has been making a real, big, tangible, difference on a global scale.
We fixed it. We did fix it and we can fix it and we are fixing it and we WILL fix it!!!
Forty years ago there were zero condors in the wild.
There are over 300 condors now, free and wild and breeding by themselves without our help.
We did that. We did. Lots of people said "that's stupid, you won't succeed" but people made condor puppets and they said "fuck you we're gonna try anyway" and they fed the babies and raised them up wild and did their best with their big human brains and human cooperation and WE FIXED IT!!!!
nothing on this god's green earth can convince me that peter parker doesn't have an ao3 account where he is elbows deep in a 'rise of skywalker' fix-it fic. like, fully invested in it, been writing it pre-spider bite with ned, who is just as enthusiastic about it. but the thing is, it's really hard to do updates when you are literally spider-man.
every three months he'll post and in the author's note there's some shit like "sorry this took a while, i got shot seven times :/" or "i know it's been a minute, i literally got hit by a bus and then stabbed in the leg, but i'm all good!" or sometimes ned would log in and post with a note "hey i'm a friend posting on the author's behalf, they're healing from severe hypothermia but promised an update, so here it is!"
and the fic just gets increasingly more popular for the author notes alone. a good handful of the comments are something along the lines of "i'm not even in the star wars fandom, i'm just here to see if the author is good" or "every update i cheer for another day the author gets to live at this point"
and any reader who is a native new yorker kind of pieces together that holy shit the author might be spider-man because the timeline adds up, and they just fully embrace it. spider-man will stop a robbery and the guy behind the counter will ask when the next chapter will be up. spider-man returns a stolen backpack to a girl and she'll tell him that he "really got poe's voice down so well, it's really impressive."
ned thinks it is hilarious. mj finds out about the fic from twitter, to peter's absolute horror, and changes peter's contact name to "friendly neighborhood ao3 author". but the worst thing to happen is after an avengers battle where peter took a pretty big hit and ends up in med-bay. and during a press conference, when someone asks how spider-man is healing, tony just drops "spidey won't be down for too long. the star wars fic will be updated within the week, probably."
I don’t normally do reposts but it’s been a long time and I thought I might just repost Forever and a Day, in case any of you are interested in a story in which an angel and a demon move into their new cottage in the South Downs. 🥰
turnnoffyourmind
baratheonpilled
areudirty
romaincrisis
snowghoul
