I guess I’m a Good Omens Blog now ...

Multi-fandom, my interests change from week to week. Good Omens, Doctor Who, Fullmetal Alchemist, Fruits Basket, and Discworld are my long time loves. GO Fanfic Sideblog: ineffable-bookworm

[books-and-omens]

Oh. Oh. I am having a moment here.

The *screen ratio* changes when we go from one universe to another. Up until the epilogue, we watch everything in cinematic widescreen, with black bars on the top and bottom.

And then when we reach the epilogue, those bars... they go away. We've broken through.

Oh this is brilliant.

[who81]

A post I saw, but couldn’t repost. But I am so thankful I have found it…🩷

Please read it…for me, it is the biggest Easter egg there ever was in GO…they are sitting in the Garden of Eden, surrounded by the new universes, with Champagne in their glasses (to the world - to our world/worlds), with the apple still intact and without wings…they did it. They gave them their ending as an „us“…hidden, but there. And I love it…🥹

[actual-changeling]

well apparently everyone else hates it. i do not. i love it. i love what they did with it, i love that crowley got to choose, i love that he chose humanity, that he did not choose to run away.

because THAT is who he is. he loves his stars and creations, he loves humanity, he loves the messiness, the good and the bad, the ugly and the beautiful, he loves watching them. he showed jesus all the kingdoms of the world to share that love with someone who he knows already felt it.

in the end, they made that choice together. it's a choice they have made before, over and over, saving humanity over themselves. no god, no angels, no demons, no thousands of years of suffering for all the millions of eternal beings.

personally, i choose to believe that god's last gift to them was integrating them into the fabric of the new universe, so they will find each other in every lifetime. but without anyone watching, without any plan behind it, without senseless suffering, without creating stars just to destroy them.

just the two of them, together, always.

[ebony-steinbach]

Thank you for saying this! I liked the ending, I thought it was very fitting to the books theme of Heaven and Hell messing about too much with humanity and that it was better to leave the humans to their own devices.

Also, I know in my SOUL that Aziraphale and Crowley love each other, I don’t need them to kiss to prove that to me. And it would have felt awkward having them kiss in front of God and Satan anyway

[nat-20s]

Doctor Who season 4 is so delightful because you can tell that The Doctor, on occasion, straight up forgets that he's sad and burned because he's busy being in a sci-fi buddy comedy. And then something will remind him and he'll be like oh! I'm sad and burdened! And Donnas almost always there to be like 'hi sad and burdened. I'm Donna' and he has a completely proportional reaction like 'i would die a thousand deaths for you'.

[suispiria]

people using the I’m just a girl song for their little videos but making them short enough to crop out the part of gwen stephani yelling that’s all you’ll let me be

[soullglue]

The way some people looked at this song and went "omg yeah! i AM just a girl!" With no other consideration is fucking wild to me

[archaeo-geek]

Not gonna lie, I spent years hearing this song on the radio and only partially clocking the message. It took Florence Welch’s cover to make me pay attention:

[grison-in-space]

Wrapping up the Guards! Guards! reread, I hit this passage from Vetinari to Vimes and have to pause to snicker because Vetinari is just so damn young here:

“A great rolling sea of evil,” he said, almost proprietorially. “Shallower in some places, of course, but deeper, oh, so much deeper in others. But people like you put together little rafts of rules and vaguely good intentions and say, this is the opposite, this will triumph in the end. Amazing!” He slapped Vimes good-naturedly on the back. “Down there,” he said, “are people who will follow any dragon, worship any god, ignore any iniquity. All out of a kind of humdrum, everyday badness. Not the really high, creative loathesomeness of the great sinners, but a sort of mass-produced darkness of the soul. Sin, you might say, without a trace of originality. They accept evil not because they say yes, but because they don’t say no. I’m sorry if this offends you,” he added, patting the captain’s shoulder, “but you fellows really need us.” “Yes, sir?” said Vimes quietly. “Oh, yes. We’re the only ones who know how to make things work. You see, the only thing the good people are good at is overthrowing the bad people. And you’re good at that, I’ll grant you. But the trouble is that it’s the only thing you’re good at. One day it’s the ringing of the bells and the casting down of the evil tyrant, and the next it’s everyone sitting around complaining that ever since the tyrant was overthrown no one’s been taking out the trash. Because the bad people know how to plan. It’s part of the specification, you might say. Every evil tyrant has a plan to rule the world. The good people don’t seem to have the knack.”

Ah, yes, sir: because you are very evil, what with the assuming power largely, as far as I can tell, because you're offended by how poorly the system works; you whose first career move was to work to create stability in the city in a bid to minimize blowback, you who are above everything else practical and focused on utilitarianism. Uhhuh.

He's so young. Almost everyone in Guards! Guards! is, of course--Carrot with his law book most obviously--but with Vimes the alcoholic depression and the despairing cynicism has its hooks in so deeply that the overall impact is to see that. By contrast, moving from Making Money to Guards! Guards! reveals a Vetinari who is almost embarrassingly green relative to the Ventinari who trains Moist: he is constantly making arrogant mistakes (ie "there's no dragons, that's nonsense") that his older self would be mortified to see, and then there's little pronouncements like this.

And for that matter, Vetinari himself should know full well that his "bad people" don't necessarily bother with much planning, either; just look at Mad Lord Snapcase. It's possible to view this through a Doylist lens--we just know a lot more about the history of Ankh Morpork by later books than Pterry did when he was writing this one. But I like to integrate Watsonian interpretations into my readings of the text, and so I enjoy thinking about this as partly a bid to undermine any support Vimes might be lending to any bids for power Carrot might make. After all, Carrot hasn't made any commentary about his sword one way or another; it's unclear to both Vetinari and the reader whether Carrot knows about the long lost heir of the city thing, and even more unclear what Carrot might choose to do in the absence of a giant flaming dragon having declared itself king.

Vetinari is in a fairly precarious place in this book, having been Patrician for only a relatively short time as far as I can tell, and after all there has just been an extraordinarily popular movement to replace the entire office of the Patrician with a hereditary king. If Carrot chose to, he could make life quite difficult for Vetinari: he might not win a theoretical power struggle, but he could certainly cost quite a bit of political capital and considerable public belief in Vetinari's ability to create stability. And Vimes, as Carrot's immediate supervisor and erstwhile human mentor, is the single person most likely to be able to influence Carrot away from that leg of the Trousers of Time.

It's an interesting way to plea for the support of a man like Vimes, I'll put it that way. It's wholly truthful and quite earnest, and it's not particularly manipulative: if anything, it paints Vetinari in quite a lot worse light than he could make a reasonable claim to being. It also avoids tugging on at least one equally truthful argument that could be expected to tug on Vimes' own sentiments: Vetinari is, for all his flaws and autocratic opinions, at the very least not a king. While he holds power, there will be no monarchs, no Lorenzo the Kinds to claim divine right to rule. I suppose it's also possible that Ventinari simply didn't know, of course, but--it's such an interesting little speech from a character perspective.

[spifflocated]

Absolutely this.

I always think of Vetinari’s character development in Discworld as learning how to rely on other people. He’s spent the first few [1] years of his rule desperately trying to make the city work, fighting fires from the Snapcase (and probably Winder) regimes and trying not to get assassinated. He’s allowed new guilds entrance to the council, and some of those support him (notably, the seamstresses), but even with them he knows his position is shaky. He isn’t generally liked, or even particularly appreciated as a competent ruler. He doesn’t even trust the staff who work closest with him (at this point, entirely sensibly). And because of that, he makes mistakes.

[1] I have this as 14 years between him gaining the patricianship and G!G! in my fanfic timeline but that’s pretty arbitrary, you could have much less of you moved Sourcery forward.

And then, over the next few years to Going Postal, the city starts to really *work*. Vetinari learns he can rely on Vimes and Sybil, he trusts Drumknott implicitly, he even forms a (slight wary) understanding with Carrot. And, around them at least, he can safely let down his mask a little.

[grison-in-space]

Oh, absolutely. And I mean, Vimes asks him how he gets up in the morning if he really believes that and he sputters and tells Vimes to go away. There's a certain brittle, defensive cynicism here.

And then Vetinari asks what the Watch want as a reward, clearly fully expecting a demand for something that will cost him meaningfully, and is asked for... A quite minor wage increase, probably about enough to bring the position up to the cost of inflation given that Vetinari has been deliberately trying to squash the city watch for some time; a new kettle, and perhaps a dartboard.

The thing is, most of Vetinari's allies at this point are canny, suspicious, ambitious people who have worked their way up from rather dubious beginnings. They are not fools. And they almost certainly trust him even less than he trusts them: he trusts in his own ability to direct them where he wants them, and he knows he doesn't truly mean harm. But the heads of Thieves and Beggars and Seamstresses are not used to this sort of alliance with power and they don't, actually, have the same assurance of his intentions. (This is particularly true of Thieves who, lest you forget, had recently been tempted into the light and then threatened with having their families and children murdered if they got too big for their britches.)

There is basically zero chance at this point that he is spending much time interacting with Dragonbreeding Society branch of the local aristocracy at this point and a much, much bigger chance that he is currently out there grappling with the likes of Lord de Worde and Lord Rust.

The only person we know he trusts and probably has regular contact with at this point is his aunt, who lives in Pseudopolis where she's not too close to him to be endangered. Maybe occasionally Margolotta, by mail or pigeon or whatever dubious routes of correspondence to Uberwald exist at this point. As you point out so astutely, he doesn't even have Drumknott here. Basically his only day to day interaction with a living being that he can relax around is Wuffles, who is at least present at this point in his life. Of course he's painfully lonely! It's fairly clear from Night Watch that he's never been good at making friends, and at this point he seems to basically have built the loneliness into a shield, but--well, no wonder he hits Skirp's people and immediately starts making friends, you know?

[moringmark]

[ebony-steinbach]

DROP BEARS!!!!

[amusementforme]

Star Trek cast dubsmash masterpost.

(feat. the late, great Anton Yelchin)

[thetimetostrikeislater]

I’ve been looking everywhere for this post! I knew the Universe would bring it back to me.

[everythingfox]

“Blind cat gives his favorite pianist a hug every time he hears”

(via)

[witchlinda]

Taisiia Onofriichuk from Ukraine performs her hoop routine to the sound of "Thriller" by Michael Jackson at the 2024 Paris Olympics Rhythmic Gymnastics Individual Qualifiers

[sedlex]

I'm not the biggest fan of hoops but... look at Barbara Domingos' routine. Just look at it.

[approximateknowledge]

ok so hear me out

[heimeldat]

[beebsops]

GANDALF FUCKED UP AND EVIL MOMENT!? WHY DID HE FEEL THE NEED TO SCARE HIM LIKE THAT!?

[naruthandir]

This is so funny

[secondlina]

New Crow Time 🐦‍⬛🦊🌟

[ryanhatesthis]

[crypticmirrors]

i will never not reblog this!

[delta-domine]

This ground is old…un burdened…sacred…

[fantasticcollectorkitten]

everyone who sees this must reblog

[landmineblogging]

god left in 2012

[moringmark]

[emmasternerradley]

I shouldn’t do this here because this is the “no marketing” website and I want it to stay that way but… I have just snuck into the realm of traditional publishing and my weird book about assassins (aka The Murder Siblings TM) focusing on stupid jokes, sword fights, masked balls, 🏳️‍🌈gay sex🏳️‍🌈, mental health issues, and rebelling against the rich isn’t being seen in the jungle of hetero TikTok picks and Sarah J Maas books. (Even tho it’s been sold as Six of Crows meets The Princess Bride.)

If Snowblooded doesn’t start getting noticed by people, I think my career in trad pub might be over just as it started. So during this our pride month could I perchance ask you to signal boost this post to support a lesbian and poly author trying to break in to the trad pub jungle? (Also, the book can be bought HERE )

Blurb:

Valour and Petrichor are esteemed members of the Order of Axsten, an assassin’s guild tasked with keeping order in the rough city of Vinterstock. Plucked from the streets as children and raised to compete for their guild’s approval, Valour uses her brawn to survive, while Petrichor strives to be a gentleman assassin. When they’re given their biggest job yet—to kill Brandquist, the mysterious leader of the city's illegal magic trade—it’s a recipe for disaster. If they can quell their rivalry long enough, the reward will be enough to settle their debts with the Order and start new lives.

If this job wasn’t dangerous enough, Valour is saddled with looking after a famed hotelier, Ingrid Rytterdahl. Valour finds her dangerously attractive, but the aspec Petrichor can’t wait to be rid of them both. He begrudgingly accepts Ingrid’s knowledge and connections as they navigate the city’s criminal underbelly in pursuit of Brandquist.

As secrets bubble to the surface, the duo must outwit the thugs on their tail, keep Ingrid alive, and—hardest of all—work together without murdering each other.

[learnfromthesky]

@thebibliosphere would you help this get wider reach?

[thebibliosphere]

Surely can do!