Morwenna's Tower

Bookseller in Hay-on-Wye, Good Omens fan, Eigon on AO3, she/they

[nattousan]

ok so, I approached my local library with a proposal to donate a mural as a way to A: build portfolio/gain practical experience and B: give back to a beloved public institution. The director was very enthusiastic about it and i've been working on it since the beginning of March. Come with me as I endeavor to paint what is in all honesty an excessive amount of birds

I wanted the birds to look like they were actually in the space so first thing after doing the draft was to do a lighting study

after that I covered the walls in letters in lieu of a projector/vr headset bc i have neither of those :) Then i take a picture of the section of wall and superimpose the lineart over top of it so I can pencil in the lines

et voila

and that was a whole week on it's own so next comes the paintin' >:)

[nattousan]

and now, the birds

Birds 1 and 2/14: Red Winged Blackbird, Male and female, Agelaius phoeniceus

[nattousan]

Bird 3/14, American Robin, Turdus migratorius

[nattousan]

hoo boy, ok *out of breath*

GIVE IT UP FOR BIRD NUMBUH 5, THE CANADIAN GOOSE, Branta canadensis!!!!

this guy took me about 4 days to completely finish, all of those freakingk coverts were a bear to render

[nattousan]

speaking of obnoxious coverts:

bird 5/14, Bluejay, Cyanocitta cristata

the friggin stripes almost got me chat, i may not make it

[nattousan]

Madam....

[nattousan]

birds 6 and 7: American Goldfinch, Spinus tristis, male and female

pleasantly simple to paint! next is the flickerrrrr

[nattousan]

*melts into goo*

BIRD NUMBER 8, (yellow shafted) NORTHERN FLICKERRRRR, Colaptes auratus

genuinely made me start questioning my sanity around day 3, it's half the size the of the goose, WHY did it take me 4 days to finish??

nothing but pain and suffering, i'm sure hope the next bird will be much easier and with FAR less barring :)

[nattousan]

in other news, I am losing my mind hairline

[nattousan]

SHE'S DONE!!

Bird number 9: Red-tailed hawk, Buteo jamaicensis

my chains are broken i am FREE. although i did have a great deal of fun with this, the barring on the wings itself took me like four days and i am READY to move on

this was a week and a half of continuous work so please excuse me for getting a little emotional in the bg 🙏

[nattousan]

*does a little jig*

BIRD NUMBER 10!!! The Male Mallard Duck, Anas platyrhynchos

the male and female ones are gonna be posted separately bc they're taking a lot longer lol but yea! super happy i was able to capture the iridescent green of the head, i found metallic green and blue paint at a craft store that really made his head POP. it looks better in person i promise

ALSO!! As this is the 10th one, BIG announcement. The end is in sight!!!!! I plan to finish within the next 3 weeks and there will be a small dedication ceremony/ unveiling happening at the library to commemorate its completion on the 16th of May. If you live in the Western New York region and want to check it out for yourself shoot me a dm!

Also thank you everyone for your kind words and support throughout this whole process, it's been a genuine treat thinking there are potentially thousands of you out there cheering me on while I paint this 🥹

[nattousan]

aaaand another one bites the duck,

we're movin right along with bird numero 11!! The lady Mallard!! Anas platyrhyncos

the 16th is looming in the distance so i'm trying to get thru these as quickly as i can so i can have as much time for the GBH as possible. i still need to do the names next to all of them so i've got about a week and a half to finish everything which is GREAT because i have adhd and nothing gets my ass in gear like a fuckin deadline, let me tell you

[nattousan]

power couple that they are, here's bird number 12 and 13,

the Northern Cardinals, Cardinalis cardinalis

and NOW that they are complete, ITS GO TIME, in the next five days (library's closed for mother's day 😭😭) i need to have the GBH fully rendered, the names of the birds vectored, weeded, masked, applied to the wall, and then painted, plus additional cattails throughout. I may be able to get away with just getting the GBH done in time for the unveiling and then just have the names and cattails added later, but i'm gonna really try to get it all done in time. BUT, i have a plan. Part of why i take so long on these is because i really am just figuring it out as I do it lmao. there have been many a time where i am sitting on top of the ladder googling "how to paint birds" but I think if i take the time tomorro to do all that figuring out how to approach it beforehand, this will go a lot faster. I may also recruit some of my artist friends to help with the placing of the names... hrmm we'll see.

Anyways, shout out to the librarian who tracked down exactly the thing i needed so i could figure out where to place the highlights in my birds eyes, ur the real mvp

[nattousan]

thanks for the reminder, kid

[nattousan]

at long last, we've reached the end...

Bird number 14 out of 14,

The Great blue heron, Ardea herodius

thank you to everyone who reached out or got excited about this project, it genuinely gave me the fuel i needed to keep going. In total, the 480+ total hrs it took me to cover this wall pales in comparison to how long its expected to spend on there, hopefully imparting a sense of beauty and love for the natural world to the next generation and here's hoping i'm only getting started with these.

i'll see y'all soon :')

[aydracz]

"The finale of Amazon Prime’s fantasy series Good Omens was supposed to be a gift to its fans, bringing closure and peace to the love story between the angel Aziraphale and the demon Crowley. How did it end up leaving so many furious and brokenhearted instead?"

From the article "Good Omens Revels in Heartbreak" - read below

[headspace-hotel]

it's definitely my predisposition to extreme frugality+redneck engineering, but i'm now obsessed with creating things literally without buying Anything. no supplies no tools no nothing, only the stuff you can just find outside, like Plants, Sticks, and Rocks.

I'm making textiles with nothing but foraged plant materials using no tools except sticks. Nature allows you to do this! There's no rules! I mean okay well maybe there might be some rules sometimes but they're just weak human rules! The plants themselves? They're like "Why sure! You can make yarn with nothing but fibers from the dead stem I don't need anymore, a couple sticks from that tree over there, and your own body and mind! Why not?"

Plants like to give us gifts! And nobody has the power to stop them!

[headspace-hotel]

Once you know the ways of the plants, the ways of our capitalist society become silly and hard to understand, sometimes even instilling you with a sense of dread.

I was looking at the textile books in the library to try to learn about plants you can make textiles from. I was shocked to discover how incurious most books are about the origin of the very matter from which textiles are made!

For one thing, there were whole shelves of books on how to weave, how to knit, and how to quilt, but barely a single complete volume on how to create yarn or thread to begin with.

Of the books that did cover how the yarn is created, many of them discussed only wool, and those books didn't concern themselves with how to get the wool off the sheep, or how to find such an organism and enter a mutualistic partnership with it in the first place...

If you know the ways of the plants, you will be almost offended when a book about how to make a thing, starting from the beginning of that thing, tells you immediately to buy something. You don't mean "one or two steps further back in the process of a thing being assembled"—you mean the BEGINNING beginning. You seek to learn how the thing is born from the living Earth, not where to buy a Product in a less assembled form.

Where do Products come from...?...According to the capitalist, consumerist way, they come from other, simpler Products of course, which ultimately are born from Industries. I found a book or two which made some attempt to give a more exhaustive list of possible textile materials, with sub-section for plants, which included: Flax, Cotton, Hemp, Jute, Ramie, and some allusion to other possibilities such as Nettle. This of course is a list of plant fibers for which a Huge Industry exists. Regarding plant fibers for which there is no huge industry, the books either said nothing or said something like "...but sadly, there is no huge industry based upon these plants (so they are not worth talking about any more)"

I found a few cryptic statements saying that the range of plants that could be used for textile purposes is theoretically limitless...but none of the books were interested at all in those theoretically limitless plants.

It's not that only those few plants are really good for textiles and the other ones are inferior, either. I have learned from my delves into the Internet, that many plants now considered totally useless to humans and not investigated for their potential applications at all...have actually been used by some human culture on Earth for thousands of years as a fundamental part of everyday life.

Native Americans for thousands of years utilized plants native to this region for textiles. These ones are among the plants I have been gathering; they are plants that naturally grow here and can be harvested sustainably, in fact in many cases they benefit from being harvested.

Apocyonum cannabinum, also known as Dogbane, is essentially a North American analog to hemp or flax; you extract the bast fiber from the stem by beating it until the woody part breaks into pieces and falls out and the outer bark flakes off. This plant is native to all U.S. states except Alaska and Hawaii and I reckon that's because of its importance as a textile plant.

I've collected big bundles of the stuff by picking over fields that have been mowed already by a brush cutter; it's so easy, because the fibers are so strong that they are not broken by the brush cutter. Instead, I find mats and bundles of fiber 1-2 feet long stretched out over the ground or trailing from the stubs of stems, often with the woody parts and outer bark already beaten out by the mowing. Simply mowing a field where dogbane grows essentially pre-processes the fiber so your work is half done for you.

It is amazing to me that a person can see how the fibers do that if you mow the plants in the fall, and not immediately think, "We should be making string or rope out of that." Early colonial texts call this plant "Indian hemp" and say it is superior to actual hemp. Likewise what few resources I can find on Native American textile plants, list dogbane as one of the main ones.

So I gather the dogbane. It is astonishingly strong, fragrant when you handle it, and beating the fibers is loads of fun, just a great way to blow off steam. The fibers range in color from almost pearly white to cream to peach to beautiful shades of orange and copper, and have a lovely sheen to them.

After I've beaten the fibers and gotten them to mostly separate I tease them out with my fingers and scrape out all the remaining little bits of bark, and pull them through a plastic comb until the soft and lustrous fibers are separated and all that's left is some nubby bits of lint.

The last picture is what it looks like after combing and cleaning. The color looks more washed-out than it is for real because of my white lamp.

These fibers weren't quite as well-processed so the end result was kind of rough and scraggly, but I experimented by making some string:

All I used to spin it was a stick with a notch in the top so I could twist with my fingers, holding the other end of the stick steady and pulling the strand back towards myself. Whenever I finished a little more I would just loop it over the bend in the top of the stick and keep going.

The other fiber I've been experimenting with is milkweed seed fluff. This one is an interesting one because it was the first material I became interested in spinning, and the first I experimented with to the point of making a yarn. It took a long time to figure it out, I have quite a bit of single-strand seed fluff yarn now, and intend to spin this into a three-ply yarn to make it strong.

I was so happy! My first yarn! Spun with nothing but a stick. It's delicate but it holds together and handles being unwound and rewound just fine, and I think making a 2 or 3 ply yarn would make it pretty workable.

So imagine my surprise when I begin reading about textile arts and the possible uses of the plants i'm working with, and learn that spinning milkweed seed fluff is impossible?

Milkweed bast fiber has been used, like the dogbane bast fiber, but according to the internet, spinning the seed fluffs into yarn is something that cannot be done, because they are too short, smooth, and fragile. Many have tried! It doesn't work!

That was news to me.

As I read more about spinning the more conventional plant fibers, though, I consider what a deep knowledge humankind has cultivated of the ways of wool and flax and cotton, and think...is my total lack of knowledge about spinning yarn, the reason I was able to spin the milkweed fluffs?

Normal people would have armed themselves with the proper tools for undertaking a new activity, but I didn't even bother to look up what I was doing, because MacGyvering cool stuff out of materials from nature you can find anywhere outside is basically half my personality at this point, and makes me feel unreasonably powerful. As a result, I made a technological approach to spinning yarn that was designed specially for the challenges of spinning milkweed seed fluffs, and only later realized that 1) this is not a normal way to spin yarn and 2) i'm not supposed to be able to spin this stuff at all.

And it's because I came at it backwards. Instead of trying to use existing technology to spin milkweed fluffs, I became determined to spin milkweed fluffs and developed my technique based on what would work to do that, without any knowledge of what I was "supposed" to be doing.

If I had been normal about it and thought "Hmm, I should buy the right tools to do this" or even thought "Hmm, I should start with fibers that are usually used to make clothes" this would not have happened.

I'm coming at everything backwards: instead of "Where can I purchase Thing I Want To Work With?" it's "What does Nature provide, and what cool stuff can I do with it?"

I didn't even set out to work with textile materials. It's just that the plants kept giving me textile materials. This hobby absolutely snuck up on me out of nowhere this was not my idea

People have had success blending milkweed fluffs with other stuff, so I'm going to try to blend it with the dogbane next! I am fully going to go all the way and make like clothes or bags or blankets out of this stuff. There is no turning back for me, the euphoria of creation and the profound wisdom of the plants have inflicted a fascination with my task.

[dr-dendritic-trees]

What's the staple length of that milkweed please? I am fascinated by it.

[headspace-hotel]

You mean like the length of the individual fibers? They're like an inch on average, the biggest seed pods have fluffs a little longer.

Basically the reason it works, I think, is that I'm twisting the strand with my fingers, pulling back toward my body and using the other end of the stick as an anchor point/leverage. There is something about the warmth and moisture of touching the fibers so much that makes them want to bind together more.

There is a lot of twist to the yarn, but it's not a problem, in fact if you twist until it kinks up, you can just...mash the kinked part between your fingers really hard and it'll flatten out and you can keep going. The fiber is springy and pliable in a way that lets you do things like that with it.

Where a lot of people messed up was they tried to card it. All you need to do is spend some time gently pulling the fibers between your fingers to separate the individual fibers in each "tuft" that attaches to a single seed. If you're too rough with it, the fibers will just break and that's not good. But you do kinda have to play with it in your hands? I don't know if it's the oils in your hands or what, but touching it a lot makes them want to mold together to each other more.

I can really see how this material is totally different than anything else you could spin in many ways.

[headspace-hotel]

Top: Dogbane bast fiber

Bottom: Dogbane bast/Milkweed floss blend

On a different note I went thru mom and dads closet to find really old clothes to practice sewing and embroidery on, and I am so mad!!!!! at how much more sturdy and robust clothes from the 1990's are compared to today.

I am just staring in fascination at these clothes from a few decades ago like "Wow they are so strong and sturdy...the fabric is such high quality...." What HAPPENED?

[headspace-hotel]

Inner bark fibers of first-year grapevine twigs. They can be processed into incredibly fine strong soft strands with soaking, stripping off outer bark and gentle crushing by rolling a round rock over them

[motsimages]

Thank you for this.

I have been on a personal quest (that is now in stand by due to life events) about flax. I live in a village that was famous for its flax, hemp and wool fabrics. Its name is literally related to the hemp-farming. And currently, nobody ever grows any of these plants and what I find surprising, with my very limited knowledge of botanics, is that... there are no rest of them either? Even in the first half of the 20th century some people still worked the flax in the traditional way, and now there aren't any carried-by the wind rests anywhere? no abandoned farms where it poorly grows anymore? no decorative reasoning to have them in your garden?

People don't remember, they don't even know. Linen was an estimated fabric and this village had enough to dress its inhabitants and sell the left-overs around. Same with the wool. Only the old people remember because they still worked it. Other villages, with larger textile industries, also have lost this memory.

The moment you look at things the way op mentioned, with the "how do you get this done?" mind, things change. Its value change. I only wish I had more time and more health to really make myself a linen tshirt, from scratch. To make myself a woolen blanket, from scratch. Particularly, I have the wool because my parents have sheep. I could do so many things if I dedicated every bit of time off and energy to it, but alas I can't. I do it when I can, little by little. I envy you, op. Please, keep us posted of your progress.

[sunrisenebula]

I'm thinking of this one time time I was bored while catsitting... I went out on my friend's property, found some sticks and rocks, improvised a spindle, brushed the cats, and spun up some yarn. One cat has slightly darker fur, and they are both long-haired and very soft, so I was interested to see what the yarn would feel like.

My original spindle fell apart, and they must have just cleaned the yard because I couldn't find sturdy enough sticks for replacement, so I did admittedly use borrowed bic pens instead of purely natural supplies...

I ended up with a few strands of 2 ply cat hair yarn! It was kind of scratchy and felt like twine. It wasn't the easiest to spin compared to the wool I've worked with, but boredom is a powerful motivator!

I left the yarn with my friend as a memento, but I'm considering making more the next time I catsit so I can try actually knitting something with it.

[dr-dendritic-trees]

@headspace-hotel

I have another dopey question about your milkweed experiment if you aren't out of patience yet.

Did the books that claim milkweed is unspinneable mention what tool they were using (drop spindle, wheel etc)? Because I just reread the post and it sounds like you had the spindle in your hand the whole time, rather than letting it hang freely in the air?

That's a specific style of spinning I'm currently failing to learn: supported spinning, and its specifically often used to spin short, delicate fibres, and/or very fine delicate thread, but its not done very often in anglo-european traditions, so I'm wondering if there was some Distinct Cultural Biases in the books you were referencing.

[makerandbean]

I also wanted to ask how your cat yarn and milkweed yarn have held up? I’ve spun with cat hair “fresh off the cat” before - I just groomed my resident beast and then pulled the hair out the comb and spun with a drop spindle - but I’ve found it’s not held up very well. I knitted a teeny tiny swatch with it and it’s fuzzing and sort of slowly edging towards either felting or just sort of falling apart :(

might have worked better if i plied it, or I might have underspun it bc I was very new to spinning when I did it, but… I do wonder also when people say “you can’t spin with that” whether they sometimes mean “the yarn falls apart very quickly so don’t bother”

[headspace-hotel]

Two very good questions from @dr-dendritic-trees and @makerandbean !

First: Yes! I haven't posted photos of my spinning in a while, but yeah, I essentially use a stick with a side branch at the top that I use as a spool. I hold the stick in my left hand and twist the strand together, letting my left hand slide down the stick as I spin, then when the strand is as long as the stick I wrap it around the top and continue.

I'm actually really happy you brought that up, because I had no idea what the technique was called, and had never heard of it before despite it being a fairly intuitive, ridiculously low-tech way to spin that gives you a lot of control over the strand you're putting together.

You basically pinch a big thick tuft of your fiber between your index finger and thumb of your right hand and splice it into the strand you're working on, and as you work you pull the tuft downwards so it slowly distributes all the fibers into a long strand.

This is especially effective when you're working with dogbane bast fiber, which inevitably has a great number of fibers of just 3-5 centimeters, and a smaller but still significant amount of fibers 10-20 centimeters long. The long fibers give the strand a backbone and the short fibers give it more weight and fuzziness.

The staple length you could get from dogbane fiber if you processed it carefully is, I feel certain, longer than any other natural fiber that exists.

Using dogbane, I have figured out how to get an incredibly smooth even thread by twisting the strand, then scraping my fingers up and down the strand to make stray fibers stick up, and untwisting and retwisting it in short sections at a time so the stray fibers get twisted into the strand.

I think it helps the final result to alternate between holding the strand in the hardest twist you can manage and then letting it relax to whatever extent it wants to, and twisting again.

It's slow but I'm getting steadily faster and faster at it, and it feels plausible that a person using this method could produce enough string for weaving into a garment on a Neolithic type amount of free time.

On the second question: I havent actually tried turning the milkweed yarn into anything since I can't knit or crochet, however, I think it would be so clearly better to blend the milkweed fluff 50:50 with another fiber (possibly milkweed bast fiber!) that I haven't really tried experimenting with pure milkweed fluff much more. I will hopefully show y'all how the bast/fluff blend goes!

My experiment shows it's possible to spin milkweed fluff, however I think it wouldn't be sturdy enough for an item for daily wear unless blended. However blending the milkweed and dogbane has excellent results.

I actually did some research online into milkweed fluff, and the main purpose for milkweed fluff in textile-adjacent things is actually stuffing. It apparently makes amazing stuffing for pillows, blankets, and jackets—it is incredibly warm, hypoallergenic, and so buoyant that it can be used to stuff life jackets.

[drbread]

i did see a whitepaper awhile back documenting the usefulness of milkweed-wool blends. it may also be useful beaten into a felt. supposedly it turns yellow when exposed to soap and turned back to white when exposed to vinegar

[isaacsapphire]

All I have to add is that I have hand spun a little dog-shed in the past in boredom. Dog fiber is Not a single thing, with the two layer coat undercoat (eg husky, rough collie) being commonly shed in spring. It removes well by hand while idly petting and hand spins easily. I am told some people wheel spin dog fur or a blend too. Unfortunately the dog breed specifically fiber developed by the Native Americans is extinct, although the dna should still be available (hint hint anyone who has dog cloning money).

[morwennastower]

When I was re-enacting, I used to comb people's dogs and spin the hair in front of them. Great fun!

[halcydn-deactivated20151101]

Reblog if you write fan fiction

Doesn’t matter if you write in a frequent basis, or once in a blue moon, just how many of us are there?

[morwennastower]

Mostly Good Omens over the last few years, and a couple of Rivers of London crossovers with Good Omens or Dresden Files, but also some obscure 1960s TV series like The Champions, The Saint and Randall and Hopkirk, Deceased. I think I'm the only person on AO3 to have written a Flashing Blade fix-it fic (French swashbuckling series, great fun - but he went off with the wrong girl!)

[rikelister]

They're having a romantic and wet date night 🍷

(I'm an unknown artist, please help promote my drawings. Thank you all!)

[knivesandteeth]

Anyone else think the reason ds9 deeply resonates with Queer people is because, at its Heart, its about a third space created but a group of patriotic people fundamentally alienated from their own people. Like obviously garak and quark but consider how were told in the first episode that Kira has been sent there to get her "out of the way" of the civilian government, how the things shes needed to do to both survive and secure their freedom seem deeply uncomfortable to all the civilian leaders. Dax considering both Joran and her eagerness towards reassociation make her basically a non entity on Trill. Bashir takes a while but the augment reveal puts him firmly in this Category. Obriens difficulty with his ptsd and moving passed personal préjudices puts him at odds with a lot of federation ideals. Siskos deep trauma around the loss of his wife and inability to move pass this, makes him very inconvenient to a federation desperate to pass itself off as a Utopia. He then becomes more and more unacceptable as he leans further into his role as in emissary, with the federation seemingly very uncomfortable with this religious expression. Jesus, Worf begins his tenure by getting himself exiled from klingon space.

Like idk, I dont think its all that shocking a Bunch of Queer people most liked the show about having a complicated relationship with your culture and never being allowed to go home.

[unamccormack]

Exile never ends, so you just make a new home somewhere else or maybe from what’s left behind.

[joyandotherstories]

You know who would love it if we became a fractured-beyond-repair fandom? If we became a fandom who harasses people?

That Fucking Man.

So. Hate the finale, love the finale, be somewhere in the middle about the finale, headcanon the finale away—

But be kind to each other.

And be kind to the cast, crew, and other people who worked under VERY tough circumstances with what they were given. Or at the least, simply avoid interacting with those folks.

(The only one we don’t need to be kind to is That Man)

Please, please, speak kindly and respectfully to, and about, each other. Everyone who’s not harassing someone has some kind of valid point. Everyone feeling strong emotions is valid in those feelings. Avoid content that throws off your equilibrium, but comfort each other whenever you can.

The real Good Omens always were the friends we made along the way. Let’s stay that way. To our world. 🤍🥂🖤

[emfandomitewrites]

THIS. 👆👆👆 💯

Be as horrible to NG and his horror-writing cronies who couldn't be bothered to get to know our Ineffables and the World we all loved as you want. Don't care if you fill THEIR socials with horrible crap back.

But leave the cast, crew, Rob, and Rhianna alone. I think they did everything in their power to mitigate that dumpster fire of a finale. I think (just my own theory, based on his past history) NG NDA'd everyone involved within an inch of their sanity in exchange for supposedly "walking away" (he clearly didn't, as he's listed TWICE on the writer's credits). I think those NDAs are the reason anytime cast or crew talk about the show, they do so in a tight-lipped, clearly forcing praise out kind of way. They don't deserve our ire, or any kind of harassment.

And nor does anyone in the fandom. If you see a post you don't agree with the opinion of and you can't be kind about it, just keep scrolling past. Remember the real point of this fandom is appreciating GO, our Ineffables, the World they (and we) love, and each other. We made it through COVID holding up S2 production for 2 years. We held each other (virtually and physically, depending) through the Final Fifteen. We endured 3 years of not knowing if or when we'd even get S3 by creating our own art, fics, and theories. We closed ranks around the survivors when the allegations broke, and proved over and over that we're at our best when we're kind and protective of victims and survivors. I believe we are capable of coming together, now, too. We are capable of being on OUR side, on the side of our Ineffables, no matter how we feel about S3.

I ❤️ you all!

To OUR World. 🌎🐍🪽❤️

[morwennastower]

Cool building at Stonehenge

View this post on Instagram

[noneorother]

I wrote an essay about the ending of Good Omens, and you can read it now.

You can't bite the apple twice.

How I learned to love the finale of Good Omens for what it is (and maybe you can, too).

It got so long I had to find another home for it, but if you're feeling sad, confused, lonely or even ambiguous after the finale, maybe reading some hopeful analysis will ease the way. I haven't written an essay in 12 years but this is what this show has done to me so here we are.

[morwennastower]

This makes a lot of sense to me

[morwennastower]

I'm sorry to hear that Michael Keating has just died.

He was the reason I first got into Blake's Seven. I'd been at college, in a broadcasting blindspot where someone had to hold the portable TV's cable in the air to get a chance of a picture, so I hadn't been following the new SF TV show (there were TV rooms, but I never got organised to go to them when anything interesting was on). So my first full episode of Blake's Seven was the beginning of season 3, when Vila is calling for help from the surface of a planet, and he's cold, and hungry, and he thinks he's broken his arm - and I thought that it was such a refreshing change from square jawed heroes being brave that I wanted to see more of him.

Later, of course, I got to see the full series, and the glorious double act with Avon, and he was in Doctor Who and the Sunmakers, too, just before Blake's Seven.

[theineffablecon]

With thanks to those that requested it, we are organising a sympathy card for Rachel Talalay following the loss of her husband and would like to invite Good Omens fans to sign:

Group Cards - Sign Rachel Talalay's card

Add your message to Rachel Talalay's card.

This is simply an opportunity to extend condolences and kindness during a difficult time.

Whatever opinions or disagreements people may hold, harassment is unacceptable. We do not condone that behaviour, and it should never define this fandom.

Compassion costs nothing and it is reflective of the community many of us want to be in. If you'd like to sign, please do so by Sunday 24th May - otherwise, please scroll on by.

[ao3cassandraic]

Let's do the right thing, folks.

[fuckyeahgoodomens]

[mayfairnursery]

We'll be together. We'll be fine.

[iminlovewithmybentley]

I've just seen a post where somebody said

"Judge neil gaiman more harshly because his work reflects that he knows how to be a decent person, he just chooses to be the opposite"

And

I couldn't have put it any better myself.

Fuck Neil Gaiman. Fuck Amanda Palmer.

[desertfiredance]

[ineffabildaddy]

good omens fanfiction britpicking pack interest survey

click the link above and answer the questions if you feel you would find a britpicking resource for good omens fic writing useful!

the survey is short and only two questions are required. neither of these involve typing. the optional parts of the form are there for people who have specific questions they want answered via this project, or people who want to contribute to it themselves. this is the main question:

please reblog this for reach and share the link in your discord servers or on bluesky if you have a spare minute! it would be great to get as much info as possible on this. thank you in advance!

EDIT: pls follow @goodomensbritpickinglibrary for updates!

[vague-humanoid]

Guy finds Google Chrome is quietly installing a 4GB AI model on our devices

Google Chrome is reaching into users’ machines and writing a 4GB on-device AI model file to disk without asking, Alexander Hanff writes.

Google Chrome is silently installing a 4GB AI model on each of our devices without consent, says Alexander Hanff, a prominent computer scientist and lawyer. According to him, that’s both illegal and extremely costly for the climate.

Hanff said on his blog he’s discovered that Chrome is “reaching into users’ machines and writing a 4GB on-device AI model file to disk without asking.”

The file is named weights.bin, and it lives in OptGuideOnDeviceModel. Essentially, it’s the weights for Gemini Nano, Google’s on-device large language model.

Moreover, the file appeared with no consent prompt, Hanff says. There is no checkbox in Chrome Settings labeled “download a 4GB AI model.”

The download triggers when Chrome’s AI features are active, and, of course, those features are active by default in recent Chrome versions.