Asia’s Next Biggest Disappointment

I’m in my unemployed era

[kaleidoscope-vol2]

It was Crowley.

[and-this-of-all-my-hopes]

So, I feel like I’m losing my mind. I keep seeing metas about how Aziraphale wants Crowley to return to Heaven and be an angel again because he wants them to be on the same side/be good/change/etc., etc., etc. but I don’t see that at all. I actually see it as the very opposite.

Aziraphale loves Crowley just as he is. But there’s something more. Something huge.

Aziraphale loves Crowley and because he is an angel who is stuck in seeing things as black and white, he constantly praises Crowley for being nice. For being good. For being kind.

Aziraphale has watched Crowley on and off for 6,000 years. He watched him thwart the plans of Heaven and Hell because it was unjust. He spared the lives of innocents. He did small things that made Aziraphale happy just because (like making Hamlet successful and saving valuable books). And because Aziraphale sees things in black and white, he sees all the things Crowley has done as nice, as good, as kind.

Crowley vehemently attests he’s not nice or good or kind.

He’s not exactly wrong nor is he lying when he says this. When Crowley spares goats during a cruel bet over a righteous man and swallowing laudanum to prevent a suicide, when he prevents Armageddon by working with Aziraphale and stopping the Anti-Christ from being the Anti-Christ, he’s not doing the nice/good/kind thing.

He’s doing the right thing.

Crowley chooses to do the right thing without hesitation. He is better than all of Heaven and Hell who have callous and dispassionate view of all existence because he questions, because he makes choices. Crowley sees the world for all its messiness and he sees himself. He sees a place where he fits in. He sees the blurred edges.

And Aziraphale sees that, even if seeing the blurred edges is hard for him.

But here’s the thing that Aziraphale can’t voice.

It’s the reason why he told Crowley about being allowed to return to Heaven and become an angel again. He doesn’t want Crowley to change. He doesn’t think Crowley is flawed. Or not enough.

It’s something that is so monumental that it cannot be put into words. Because to put it into words would be more than blasphemy. It’s down right unthinkable for anyone in Heaven, Hell, or Earth to say what Aziraphale knows deep in his soul.

God was wrong to cast out Crowley.

Aziraphale believes Crowley can/should return to Heaven because he knows that Crowley should never have fallen in the first place. He wants him to be forgiven because when Crowley fell it was unjust. Aziraphale is trying to correct a mistake. He’s trying to do the right thing.

Yes, Crowley would never accept returning to Heaven. And Aziraphale was wrong to even suggest it (although that conversation is another can of worms to unpack).

Aziraphale loves Crowley. He loves him exactly as he is. He doesn’t want him to change. Aziraphale knows that Crowley the best of all of them. He wants to change Heaven because of it. Because God was wrong and Aziraphale knows it.

Aziraphale may have difficulty seeing beyond black and white, but when it comes to Crowley he sees everything crystal clear and in vivid color.

[ato-dato]

Aziraphale, I’m getting a feeling You're not taking movie night seriously

[troutwizard]

DONT WATCH GOMENS 2 IT RUINED MY LIFE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[inhonoredglory]

Aziraphale’s Choice, the Job Connection, and Michael Sheen’s Morality

I’ve had time to process Aziraphale’s choice at the end of Season 2. And I think only blaming the religious trauma misses something important in Aziraphale’s character. I think what happened was also Aziraphale’s own conscious choice––as a growth from his trauma, in fact. Hear me out.

Since November 2022 I’ve been haunted by something Michael Sheen said at the MCM London Comic Con. At the Q&A, someone asked him about which fantasy creature he enjoyed playing most and Michael (bless him, truly) veered on a tangent about angels and goodness and how, specifically,

We as a society tend to sort of undervalue goodness. It’s sort of seen as sort of somehow weak and a bit nimby and “oh it’s nice.” And I think to be good takes enormous reserves of courage and stamina. I mean, you have to look the dark in the face to be truly good and to be truly of the light…. The idea that goodness is somehow lesser and less interesting and not as kind of muscular and as passionate and as fierce as evil somehow and darkness, I think is nonsense. The idea of being able to portray an angel, a being of love. I love seeing the things people have put online about angels being ferocious creatures, and I love that. I think that’s a really good representation of what goodness can be, what it should be, I suppose.

I was looking forward to BAMF!Aziraphale all season long, and I think that’s what we got in the end. Remember Neil said that the Job minisode was important for Aziraphale’s story. Remember how Aziraphale sat on that rock and reconciled to himself that he MUST go to Hell, because he lied and thwarted the will of God. He believed that––truly, honestly, with the faith of a child, but the bravery of a soldier.

Aziraphale, a being of love with more goodness than all of Heaven combined, believed he needed to walk through the Gates of Hell because it was the Right Thing to do. (Like Job, he didn’t understand his sin but believed he needed to sacrifice his happiness to do the Right Thing.)

That’s why we saw Aziraphale as a soldier this season: the bookshop battle, the halo. But yes, the ending as well.

Because Aziraphale never wanted to go to Heaven, and he never wanted to go there without Crowley.

But it was Crowley who taught him that he could, even SHOULD, act when his moral heart told him something was wrong. While Crowley was willing to run away and let the world burn, it was Aziraphale (in that bandstand at the end of the world) who stood his ground and said No. We can make a difference. We can save everyone.

And Aziraphale knew he could not give up the ace up his sleeve (his position as an angel) to talk to God and make them see the truth in his heart.

I was messed up by Ineffable Bureaucracy (Boxfly) getting their happy ending when our Ineffable Husbands didn’t, but I see now that them running away served to prove something to Aziraphale. (And I am fully convinced that Gabriel and Beelzebub saw the example of the Ineffables at the Not-pocalypse and took inspiration from them for choosing to ditch their respective sides)

But my point is that Aziraphale saw them, and in some ways, they looked like him and Crowley. And he saw how Gabriel, the biggest bully in Heaven, was also like him in a way (a being capable of love) and also just a child when he wasn’t influenced by the poison of Heaven. Muriel, too, wasn’t a bad person. The Metatron also seemed to have grown more flexible with his morality (from Aziraphale's perspective). Like Earth, Heaven was shades of (light?) gray.

Aziraphale is too good an angel not to believe in hope. Or forgiveness (something he’s very good at it).

Aziraphale has been scarred by Heaven all his life. But with the cracks in Heaven’s armor (cracks he and Crowley helped create), Aziraphale is seeing something else. A chance to change them. They did terrible things to him, but he is better than them, and because of Crowley, he feels ready to face them.

(Will it work? Can Heaven change, institutionally? Probably not, but I can't blame Aziraphale for trying.)

At the cafe, the Metatron said something big was coming in the Great Plan. Aziraphale knows how trapped he had felt when he didn’t have God’s ear the first time something huge happened in the Big Plan. He can’t take a chance again to risk the world by not having a foot in the door of Heaven. That’s why we saw individual human deaths (or the threat of death) so much more this season: Elspeth, Wee Morag, Job’s children, the 1940s magician. Aziraphale almost killed a child when he couldn’t get through to God, and he’s not going through that again.

“We could make a difference.” We could save everyone.

Remember what Michael Sheen said about courage and doing good––and having to “look the dark in the face to be truly good.” That’s what happened when Aziraphale was willing to go to Hell for his actions. That’s what happened when he decided he had to go to Heaven, where he had been abused and belittled and made to feel small. He decided to willingly go into the Lion’s Den, to face his abusers and his anxiety, to make them better so that they would not try to destroy the world again.

Him, just one angel. He needed Crowley to be there with him, to help him be brave, to ask the questions that Heaven needed to hear, to tell them God was wrong. Crowley is the inspiration that drives Aziraphale’s change, Crowley is the engine that fuels Aziraphale’s courage.

But then Crowley tells him that going to Heaven is stupid. That they don’t need Heaven. And he’s right. Aziraphale knows he’s right.

Aziraphale doesn’t need Heaven; Heaven needs him. They just don’t know how much they need him, or how much humanity needs him there, too. (If everyone who ran for office was corrupt, how can the system change?)

Terry Pratchett (in the Discworld book, Small Gods) is scathing of God, organized religion, and the corrupt people religion empowers, but he is sympathetic to the individual who has real, pure faith and a good heart. In fact, the everyman protagonist of Small Gods is a better person than the god he serves, and in the end, he ends up changing the church to be better, more open-minded, and more humanist than god could ever do alone.

Aziraphale is willing to go to the darkest places to do the Right Thing, and Heaven is no exception. When Crowley says that Heaven is toxic, that’s exactly why Aziraphale knows he needs to go there. “You’re exactly is different from my exactly.”

____

In the aftermath of Trump's election in the US, Brexit happened in 2018. Michael Sheen felt compelled to figure out what was going on in his country after this shock. But he was living in Los Angeles with Sarah Silverman at the time, and she also wanted to become more politically active in the US.

Sheen: “I felt a responsibility to do something, but it [meant] coming back [to Britain] – which was difficult for us, because we were very important to each other. But we both acknowledge that each of us had to do what we needed to do.” In the end, they split up and Michael moved back to the UK.

Sometimes doing the Right Thing means sacrificing your own happiness. Sometimes it means going to Hell. Sometimes it means going to Heaven. Sometimes it means losing a relationship.

And that’s why what happened in the end was so difficult for Aziraphale. Because he loves Crowley desperately. He wants to be together. He wanted that kiss for thousands of years. He knows that taking command of Heaven means they would never again have to bow to the demands of a God they couldn’t understand, or run from a Hell who still came after them. They could change the rules of the game.

And he’s still going to do that. But it hurts him that he has to do that alone.

[ato-dato]

Piss off!!! Thanks!!!!!!!!!! :)))))

[ppaemeu4]

Bentley loves them

[shesnake]

this is the representation nepo babies deserve

[tiwaztyrsfist]

I think it's important to know, there's an older picture of David signing stuff, with his father-in-law WHO WAS THE FIFTH DOCTOR, holding a very similar sign behind David's back. I don't have the pic, but you can probably find it if you look a bit.

[dharmabeatdownblog]

[ripempezardexerox]

[globeshaped]

[filbertthefrog]

Their theme

I just want to bring attention to these two scenes, especially focusing on the background music!

You can hear there’s a specific motif there, which we have already heard in the good omens opening title and various other tracks back in S1. And I saw a post from @ineffably-in-love talking about how this motif is THEIR theme here, please give it a read it’s super interesting.

Thinking about the timeline chronologically, the Job scene happened first. It was also the VERY FIRST TIME this motif was used (in the timeline of these two knowing each other). To me, this motif represents of the creation of their group of two-this was the first time they were on the same team, the start of their side. I also really like the notes in minor creating the suspense, when Aziraphale was contemplating about the bleating crows, before reaching the resolution in major and arriving at the theme representing THEM.

The two melodies are in different keys as you can hear. Job’s one was in a higher key and felt brighter, personally i think it fits well with the excitement Aziraphale felt when he uncovers that Crowley was doing good deeds. Church’s one was at a lower key; more mild, soft and romantic. We don’t have to talk about the church scene, i think we all know what the angel was feeling there (I’m looking at you Michael Sheen).

I apologise but there’s no satisfactory conclusion here, I simply wanted to point out the significance of the motif.

I love them and they love each other so much that i want to die.

I’m sorry if this doesn’t make any sense, I’m not a good writer but yea.

[nice-and-accurate-ramblings]

Casting a spell of Pay Your Actors And Writers And Give Us Season Three, likes to charge reblogs to cast

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Kickstarting a book to end enshittification, because Amazon will not carry it

My next book is The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation: it’s a Big Tech disassembly manual that explains how to disenshittify the web and bring back the old good internet. The hardcover comes from Verso on Sept 5, but the audiobook comes from me — because Amazon refuses to sell my audio:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/the-internet-con-how-to-seize-the-means-of-computation

Amazon owns Audible, the monopoly audiobook platform that controls >90% of the audio market. They require mandatory DRM for every book sold, locking those books forever to Amazon’s monopoly platform. If you break up with Amazon, you have to throw away your entire audiobook library.

That’s a hell of a lot of leverage to hand to any company, let alone a rapacious monopoly that ran a program targeting small publishers called “Project Gazelle,” where execs were ordered to attack indie publishers “the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle”:

https://www.businessinsider.com/sadistic-amazon-treated-book-sellers-the-way-a-cheetah-would-pursue-a-sickly-gazelle-2013-10

Keep reading

[falloutnewvegastransedmygender]

DRM ON FUCKING BOOKS???

[magess]

The publishing industry 100% loves DRM on books. Like the publishers themselves will often insist upon it because they think it stops piracy.

[foobar137]

The only media industry that doesn’t 100% love DRM is the music industry, and that’s because they released digital content without DRM before they realized they might need it. (You might have heard of it - it’s called the Compact Disc.)

(I’ll put a cut here, this got long.)

Keep reading

[davetheinverted]

For a while, I was de-DRMing my Kindle books specifically so Amazon couldn’t spontaneously decide to just…take them all back. I should probably look at doing that more.

[wilwheaton]

I love it when Cory does this.

[maybeasunflower]

Aside on How People Defeated The Music Industry With a Felt-Tip Pen/Sharpie.

CDs, like records before them, store their data in a long spiral track. Music CDs go from the inside out; data CDs go from the outside in. This prevents your CD player get confused/ruined by trying to play a data CD - it will look at the middle, see nothing, and go “nothing for me here!”. This is good.

When you put a CD in a computer’s CD player, it will check the outside first (assuming it’s more likely to be a data CD), then check the inside (so it can still play your tunes / rip them).

So a music exec came up with a dastardly plan: put something that ‘looks’ like a small data file on the outside of music CDs. CD players will still be fine (they will start from the inside), but computers will think it’s a data CD and ignore the music! No ripping possible!

… except people realized you could just do a quick line around the outside with your favourite black pen. The computer wouldn’t be able to read the data file on the outside, so would then (correctly) think it’s a music CD.

The ‘small file on the outside of music CDs’ thing died very quickly after that.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

“Last year, Warner Bros. Discovery chief David Zaslav made $246.6 million; Disney’s Bob Iger made $45.9 million; and Paramount Global CEO’s Bob Bakish made $32 million. These individuals make more money per year than almost any entertainment executive before them. Just a small portion of each major CEO’s annual salary could cover the cost of the guilds’ reasonable structural and financial demands, and yet, they say it’s not possible. How could that be? Because it’s not about the money. It’s about power and perception. Almost none of these CEOs built the companies they run. We are not negotiating with Jack Warner or Walt Disney. We’re not even negotiating with the people who enriched these companies, like producer Robert Evans at Paramount in the 1970s. These CEOs are basically people who just work there—and who have contracts that allow them very large amounts of money. And right now, they don’t want anyone to know that. They don’t want anyone to know that they don’t actually build anything. They don’t want anyone to see them capitulate and bend the knee to any degree by making a deal with the writers and actors who build the product they fund and distribute. They don’t want to reasonably negotiate with these artists, because they think it will make them look weak. They think it will make them look like chumps, make them look simply like the employees of these companies that they are.”

— Justine Bateman on the Destruction of the Film Business (via wilwheaton)

[dduane]

This is absolutely it. All this crap is about nothing but the perceived power that comes with having a big fat paycheck, and (the fear of) losing face.:/

[jeliwyre]

i slithered here from eden, just to hide outside your door

[fuckyeahgoodomens]

HOW TO RATE THE SHOW ON AMAZON PRIME - AND HELP MAKE S3

Go to the Amazon page for S2 (not the primevideo one)

2. Click on Details

3. Click on Rate this video

4. Give a good review if you want to help to make S3

Found a page with 2 other ways to try if this doesn't work for you! :) ❤

[kogla]

"Why I couldn't be enough?"

The worst part is that now Crowley would believe that he just wasn't enough to make him stay or that he only would want him as an Angel QnQ

[staff]

tumblr tuesday: the ineffable husbands return!

...and with them, your ineffably beautiful fanart of Aziraphale and Crowley. It's also worth pointing out that most of this art was posted in the last day or so. The show has been out for a mere weekend. Please never change, Tumblr <3

(This post goes out to everyone who has seen the second season. SPOILERS AHEAD. MILD BUT STILL SPOILERY. PLEASE BE WARNED.)

@fiovske:

@lydiajoypalmer:

@snarkspawn:

@ppaemeu4:

@eden-4004:

@blewsee:

@forestofsprites:

@surfinded:

@wisesnail:

@m-arouet:

@poreyneel:

@egg-oo:

@liinchaan:

@dragonroad98:

@stab-of-hunger:

@tanjashu:

@yelloartt:

@nicosusername:

@nickeldean:

@iwillluvs:

@mistysblueboxstuff:

@pinkravat-art:

@edibleeel:

@legbird:

@loboniehlar:

@lookitsstevie: