With the release of Vulture magazine's feature (un-paywalled) expanding on the stories of the individuals abused by Neil Gaiman who had previously come forward, now more than ever it's important to continue to keep the PR machine from trying to bury the stories.
LINKS
Firsthand account of abuse by NG and AP of trans man posted with permission by the mods at Redditt's /neilgaimanuncovered sub on 27 March, 2025.
Updated transcript of the Tortoise Media podcast to include episodes 5 & 6.
Am I Broken- Survivor Stories Episode 4-2 Complete Unofficial Transcript
Katherine Kendall's Friends of Calliope post about how you can support her and fellow survivors.
Courtnee Fallon Rex's account of ending their friendship with Neil Gaiman
muccamukk's link round-up of Neil Gaiman Assault Allegations
Reddit's r/neilgaimanuncovered forum
Legal filing from 3 February 2025 naming Gaiman and Palmer defendants in a civil lawsuit for the Human Trafficking, Assault, Battery, Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress, Negligence, and Negligent Infliction of Emotional Distress against Scarlett Pavlovich.
IMPORTANT REMINDER
Individuals providing testimonies of abuse is evidence.
When people say 'so we are just supposed to take her at her word?' the answer is YES.
If the only reason you take his word over his victims is because you want to believe that someone whose work you admire isn't capable of such actions, then this is a reality check. You can never know what is it another person's heart and mind. You cannot judge them solely by their words. You can only truly take their measure by their actions.
Examine your internal biases and ask yourself why would someone come forward and share stories of abuse by someone with significantly more power at great personal risk if they weren't true? They have everything to lose, and yet they came forward anyway to try to prevent Neil Gaiman from harming any other vulnerable individuals the way that he harmed them.
Only 2-8% of sexual assault allegations are found to be false.
The myth of accusing the innocent of sexual assault as some kind of revenge is exactly that: a myth perpetuated by rape culture that persists because when one cares for or admires the accused, people want it to be true.
That fence that you believe that you are standing on is an invisible line drawn in the sand.
Believe survivors. Amplify their voices. Share their stories. Hold people accountable. Actions have consequences.
THINGS WE CAN DO AS INDIVIDUALS
Repost articles and transcripts as they appear in the trades and the mainstream press, and tag them with the appropriate trigger warnings and content warnings.
Keep amplifying the voices of the survivors, and showing up with compassion and empathy and support for the untold numbers who have yet to come forward.
Keep talking about the allegations of abuse and sexual assault levelled at Neil Gaiman. Do not let it fade into the background, or be drowned out by vigorous promotion of his upcoming works. Boost the signal, particularly to raise awareness across fandoms so fans can do their best to protect themselves from potential abuse in the future.
Make donations to RAINN and The Survivors Trust, and find out what you can do on a local level to support survivors of sexual assault and abuse.
Do not tag fan works such as fanfic, fan art, quotes, gifsets, and meta discussions about Gaiman's work or live-action adaptations of Gaiman's work with #Neil Gaiman so that you are not doing the expensive PR team's work for them by helping to bury the story of Neil Gaiman's abuse of vulnerable people on social media.
Do not bully Neil Gaiman's peers in the industry, friends and family, or actors currently involved in live action adaptations of his work for not immediately making any kind of public statements.
Do not bully fellow fans. Everyone is working through their very complex feelings and relationships with both the text and the man at their own speed. Please give them the space to grieve that loss, but continue to center the stories of the survivors and express sympathy and empathy for all of the survivors who have yet to come forward.
As others have noted, The Tortoise Media Slow News podcast that initially broke the story is run by a group of well-respected journalists, and Ms Johnson is not a full-time member of the staff but was only given a shared byline on the story because one of the survivors contacted her privately which is what kicked off the year long investigation.
Filter out noise such as kink-shaming, anti-BDSM discourse, and other editorial comments and instead focus on the actual words of survivors recounting their experiences.
Remember that despite using the language of BDSM, what the survivors have recounted is in fact examples of coercive control and abuse cloaked in the language of kink. It's very important to note that BDSM nearly always includes extensive negotiation of consent to specific acts and partners check in with one another constantly, establish safe words, and engage in aftercare. That is absolutely not what was described by the survivors thus far.
Sexual assault is not about sex so much as it is about power. In every instance reported thus far, the common thread has been predatory behaviour toward vulnerable individuals. In more than one case, people who were employed in Neil Gaiman's households and were reliant on him for their housing and livelihood.
Do not guilt trip or shame people who are attempting to separate the art from the artist. allow people to love what they love about the novels, comics, and media adaptations, value the friendships that they have made because of them, and keep the joy that those projects brought them. Do not let Neil Gaiman's behaviour rob generations of fans of the stories that meant so much to them. He has already taken so much from so many; don't help him take more from you or others than he already has.
If you reblog (and I sincerely hope that you will) please keep the tags intact. The goal is to continue centering the voices of survivors and attempt to limit Neil Gaiman's access to vulnerable individuals, particularly those in fandom.
Do not invite him as a guest speaker to your events, a guest of honour at your conventions, or a guest lecturer at your institutions. Without jeopardizing the financial future of your institution or theater, do not book speaking tours, book signings, launch parties, etc. as these events have proved to be a fertile hunting ground and provide ongoing income directly to Neil Gaiman.
I have a gift for falling in love with random objects. One time, my aunt got me a little rubber chicken, and whenever I squoze it, a little egg thing popped out. Very silly. Except that chicken became something like my best friend. I carried it with me to school, and I kept it with me in my pocket, and whatever social hazards there were about Being The Guy Who Got Stressed Whenever His Rubber Chicken Was Missing were far outweighed by being The Guy Who ALWAYS Had a Rubber Chicken On Him. There's a lot of comedic opportunity that comes with always having a good prop on your person.
Of course, the chicken did eventually. Explode. And such was my grief that I did not eat for 36 hours. This was very stressful for many people. Mostly my mom. I was a very strange child to work with. She took parenting so incredibly seriously, and then I'd pitch her these curve balls like refusing to eat for a day and a half because my rubber chicken died. No parenting book tells you what to do when that happens. You just have to feel it in your heart.
A less tragic story of an object that I fell in love with was a large, foam toad that I found in a trinket shop. The toad was the size of a very large grapefruit. Much too large to carry with me to school (thank god) but enough that I could move it around the house, to keep me company during my solitary pursuits. If I was reading, the toad was there, and if I was tinkering with legos, the toad was there, and even when I slept, I would wrap the toad up in layers and layers of blankets, and then spoon it. I did this until the rubber coating on the foam started to wear out, and the foam started to get brittle and break down and leak this repulsive yellow powder. Then I simply put the toad in the playroom and would consult it on matters of great importance. Eventually I stopped doing that, and someone took the opportunity to dispose of it. Not sure who. By the time I noticed its absence, too much time had passed for me to actually be sad. As an adult, part of me thinks I would have maybe liked burying the toad, but part of me also thinks I might have refused to part with the toad, which would have resulted in it leaking more repulsive yellow powder into the house. So I understand why that decision was made.
I want to state that this does not happen often, and it does not happen on purpose. I don't choose to fall in love with random objects. And it's always a little bit embarrassing when it happens.
Which brings me to my wife.
Before meeting my wife, I did not often go to places with crowds. I didn't really think of it as avoiding them - those places just didn't seem fun to me. But she liked those places, and I really liked her, and being with someone who really likes something can kind of sell you on liking it too, so I'd take her to places and watch her Visibly Enjoy the Fair and go: Alright. The fair is pretty sweet.
Which is a thing that happened. After fourish months of dating, I took her to the fair. And she fell very visibly in love with a large series of quilts, and she stayed near them for a while, which she thought was very embarrassing, and I got to pretend to be understanding as an outsider, because I thought it would be much more impressive than also being the type of person that would fall in love with a quilt.
Do not do this. The gods punishment for my hubris was that the room next to the quilts was full of butter sculptures, which was an entirely new thing to me, and I immediately fell embarrassingly in love with all of them. It was like the biggest, sappiest non-sexual crush you've ever had, but not only did the other person not recipropcate, they could not, because they were made of butter. I actually got yelled at for pressing my face against the glass, which is fair, but also, I hadn't realized I was pressing my face on the glass, I just started leaning forward because after approximately 30 minutes of staring wistfully at a cow made of butter my legs got tired. And I think I should be given some grace for that.
Anyway. My wife was very patient with me taking more time to look at the butter sculptures than the average person might spent at the Louvre, and she also felt much less embarrassed over falling in love with a quilt, and we had a good laugh about it on the ferris wheel.
A few weeks after that was my birthday. And I don't know what I expected, exactly - but I did not expect what she did.
Dear reader, she made me a butter sculpture. Of a duck.
She picked a duck, because our first kiss was at a Japanese friendship garden. It was our second date, and she'd made up her mind not to do any kissing until the third date, but as we sat on the grass, a duck walked past me, and I'd just seen the hold-duck-gentle-like-hamgurber meme,
so I sort of impulsively reached out and snatched it. I honestly didn't think it would work. I don't know who was more flabbergasted, me or the duck. But we looked at each other, and then I looked at her, and then she looked at the duck, and she looked so incredibly envious that I assumed that must have wanted the duck so I just handed it to her.
It turned out she was actually envious of the ability to just grab a duck as it walked by, but she accepted the duck and stroked it a few times before releasing it. (She also made up her mind to kiss me in that moment, which was very nice.)
Anyway.
She made me a butter duck of my own. Obviously, I fell in love with it immediately. I cleared out all of the freezer-portion of my mini fridge, and I put the duck in there, and for the next several months, when I felt sad, or lonely, I would open the door up and spent some quality time. Just me and my duck.
But this is, of course, not the end of the story.
Because.
After several months.
The mini fridge died.
I really didn't use it that often. It was mostly my duck storage container. But one day, I walked by it, and it struck me that it wasn't humming. So I opened the door, and it was just. Far, far too late. The duck was dead. Dead dead. Turned into a foul-smelling slime dead.
I cried. I did. After the rubber chicken thing, I thought I had changed, but I had not changed, and the unexpected death of my butter buddy left me pretty shook. I texted my then-girlfriend now-wife about how sad I was, and she actually came over to help me say goodbye. We didn't even bother scraping the duck out of the mini-fridge, we just said our goodbyes to both and threw them together in the nice dumpster behind the chapel, because it seemed appropriate to put it in God's dumpster. And it did actually help quite a bit. I certainly did not go 36 hours without eating again.
And that was, for some time, the end of the butter duck.
However. Three (or four?) years ago, for my birthday, my wife was looking around thrift stores. And she found something interesting.
The original butter duck had an odd pose. She'd sculpted it laying flat, intending to raise it up later. But the butter was less flexible than she thought, and she was afraid of cracking it so she left it down which left the duck with a very elongated, very in-motion appearance. And she found a brass statue of a duck in the same, running posture.
It wasn't the original. But it was oddly on the nose. It was a yellow brass, it had the same strange posture, the same crude little face feathers.
I think it was $3, but it remains perhaps the most thoughtful gift I have ever received. I got very choked up when I unwrapped Butter Duck, The UnDying.
Babs, last year our entire family was involved (mostly involuntarily) in a weeks-long love affair with a mini pumpkin that had a cat face drawn on it with marker. And I just. Your description of your mom is weirdly consoling to me today. 😂
Oh, the old draw-a-face-on-it trap. I get got by that all the time. Most manipulation attempts just slide off me, but when someone draws a little face on an object and says "that's a person", my brain goes "that isn't just a person, it's my new best friend."
Fall for it every time. Live and don't learn.
Good luck with your kids. I don't have any yet, but I'm excited to reach that stage in my life. I'm also scared to death of it. I look at everyone that's already made the leap and can only admire the bravery.
It brings me so much joy to know that mine is not the only family that has had an Adopting Small Pumpkin(s) event.
I'm a middle child, sandwiched between an older sister and younger brother in both age and on long car trips, and a few months before the Pumpkin Adoption we had adopted a cat who we named Pumpkin. We all shared a smallish room, and would all try to lure him to sleep on our beds only to have him inevitably go and sleep with my parents rather than deal with the insistent bothering of primary schoolers, and were all at least a little put out over this.
At one point, we decided to unionise and hold a strike against my mother, demanding she deliver pumpkin before we got out of bed for school. My mother, being in possession of both a garden and a sense of humour, instead went out, picked two butternut pumpkins, and handed them over to my brother and I (my sister had fallen back asleep). This backfired tremendously when my brother and I adopted said pumpkins and slept with them every night, carrying them around with us. My sister, initially upset at being the only sibling to not receive fresh produce, quickly became superior in her intelligence and maturity in not adopting a vegetable.
My ever practical mother, always against wasting food, decided to steal the adopted pumpkins while we were at school and turn them into soup, claiming she had lost them, only to have this backfire when she presented the soup to us two days later and my eight year old mind realised halfway through the bowl that
a) my pumpkin child had disappeared recently, last seen by my mother
b) my mother did not particularly like my sweet baby boy
c) my mother was the only one who cooked in the house
I stopped eating to stare at my mother, slowly asking her if MY pumpkin was in the soup. Her silence was answer enough.
My brother and I were *inconsolable* in our rage and sorrow, realising that not only had my mother murdered BOTH of her grandchildren, not only desecrated their corpses and cannibalised them herself, but had snuck around, stealthily trying to get US to eat the DEAD BODIES of our CHILDREN.
The pumpkin soup was declared evil and inedible, and the whole family was forced to attend a funeral for our dinner, a dollop of pumpkin soup buried in a berroca container in memory of the short lived Butternut and Pumpkin the 2nd.
I've been dreading making this update but it's not going to update itself.
I had to reschedule the cleaners because we weren't able to raise enough money to pay for them. So they are now coming in September, and we are concentrating on what we can do in the meantime to prep the house for the deep cleaning.
Which means getting furniture into storage, the removals folks in to get things out to the tip, all of the laundry bagged up and sent to the wash and fold, and the air filters cleaned and hopefully someday the ductwork cleaned.
In the meantime, we put together an Amazon wish list of pantry staples and are working on keeping the kitchen at sink zero. We still have an infestation of fruit flies, which we are working on. and we are both trying to get things ready to be sold on eBay.
So that's where we are currently and hopefully the forward progress will continue. I shall update the GoFundMe shortly. and as always, if you want to donate without GoFundMe taking a cut, you can PayPal us.
Funny way of sleeping together, Diana using Bruce directly as her mattress. And Bruce seems strangely at peace despite the position. But there is something emanating from this image. A lot of calm, quietude, trust, and love.
I've been dreading making this update but it's not going to update itself.
I had to reschedule the cleaners because we weren't able to raise enough money to pay for them. So they are now coming in September, and we are concentrating on what we can do in the meantime to prep the house for the deep cleaning.
Which means getting furniture into storage, the removals folks in to get things out to the tip, all of the laundry bagged up and sent to the wash and fold, and the air filters cleaned and hopefully someday the ductwork cleaned.
In the meantime, we put together an Amazon wish list of pantry staples and are working on keeping the kitchen at sink zero. We still have an infestation of fruit flies, which we are working on. and we are both trying to get things ready to be sold on eBay.
So that's where we are currently and hopefully the forward progress will continue. I shall update the GoFundMe shortly. and as always, if you want to donate without GoFundMe taking a cut, you can PayPal us.
Today was going... well, not great per se but better than usual right up until my dad rang and frustrated me so much that I decided to go take a nap except when I crawled into bed I discovered that the cat had peed on the bed. which cat we're not sure. and I am all out of Nature's Miracle so now I am lying on the sofa waiting for a Target delivery and feeling all kinds of ways about it. and even once the delivery arrives I still have to wash and dry all of my bedding and then scrub the hell out of the mattress and flip it so that I'm not lying directly on cat pee soaked into the mattress.
I'm leaving for Florida on Tuesday and I really wanted things to be better before I left and right now things are not better and I am sad.
ETA: grocery order came and apparently I purchased the Nature's Miracle for dog urine rather than Nature's Miracle for cat urine. but I flipped my mattress anyway after saturating it because I am so fucking done with today. So done.
I've been dreading making this update but it's not going to update itself.
I had to reschedule the cleaners because we weren't able to raise enough money to pay for them. So they are now coming in September, and we are concentrating on what we can do in the meantime to prep the house for the deep cleaning.
Which means getting furniture into storage, the removals folks in to get things out to the tip, all of the laundry bagged up and sent to the wash and fold, and the air filters cleaned and hopefully someday the ductwork cleaned.
In the meantime, we put together an Amazon wish list of pantry staples and are working on keeping the kitchen at sink zero. We still have an infestation of fruit flies, which we are working on. and we are both trying to get things ready to be sold on eBay.
So that's where we are currently and hopefully the forward progress will continue. I shall update the GoFundMe shortly. and as always, if you want to donate without GoFundMe taking a cut, you can PayPal us.
The immediate unfortunate consequence of rewatching Man of Steel is that now all of the gaping holes in the plot of The Flash are so apparent that I cannot look away from them. How did Zod get to Earth if Clark never inserted his command key into the scout ship up in Canada, thus activating its distress call? How was Zod able to not just stab Kara but remove the codex from Kara? They were not on the Black Zero. They were not in space. She was not shielded from the sun's radiation. She was invulnerable. Stabbing her should not have been possible. Also where exactly was Martian Manhunter during this fight? Because Martian Manhunter was absolutely 100% present for this fight. So what the hell?
I do like the fact that the only reason there was a chunk of kryptonite in the Indian Ocean was because it lodged in the hull of the Black Zero during the destruction of Krypton and was deposited there when the world engine was destroyed and that is the only piece of kryptonite in this particular universe.
I also only just parsed that apparently kryptonians live a really freaking long time because Zod and Faora had barely aged a day in the 33 years since they were freed from the Phantom Zone by the destruction of Krypton. Now granted we do not actually know exactly how long they were even in phantom zone. But I'm okay with it.
It is just kind of hilarious to believe that in only 4 years Dylan Sprayberry would grow into an incredibly jacked Henry Cavill. mostly because I watched all of Teen Wolf and I know exactly what Dylan Sprayberry looks like all grown up and is nothing at all like Henry Cavill.
I also find it really weird that the Kent farm is as dilapidated as it is at Clark's funeral since we know for a fact only 2 years prior Clark repaired all of the damage from Zod throwing a truck through the building and cleared out the dry rot up in the joists.
It occurs to me though that since we see Clark bicycling to work all of the damage in downtown Metropolis appears to have been repaired so it must have been a decent amount of time after whatever they called it in universe. I mean it's called zero day sort of kind of in My Adventures With Superman and it was called the Black Zero so maybe it's the same? Anyway the Battle of Metropolis.
It bugs me that we never find out if they filmed the Daily Planet on location or if they built it in the sound stage in Michigan. They said it was based on the Tribune offices but definitely not the Tribune offices I remember working in in the late '90s. then again, I was in the old Tribune building which is like a thousand years old and probably full of asbestos? I also desperately want to know if the bar where Lois meets Woodburn is Billy Goat's because Billy Goat's is THE newspaper bar in downtown Chicago. They had Kupp's wake there.
So when I rewatched Man of Steel I was looking at it with an eye to how it's set up Dawn of Justice and I don't think Lex actually did the same leg work that Lewis did to track Clark down just because he wouldn't have to. at that point, all he would have needed to know was why the aliens came to Earth and went straight to Smallville Kansas. That he could have found out from the US government easy as pie. From there all he would have to do would be to access the scout ship's logs.
The real question is how long did he know that Bruce Wayne was Batman? Long enough to embed someone at Wayne Enterprises to plant the paper trail leading to incriminate Wallace Vernon Keefe. Did Lex really approach Keefe only after he vandalised the memorial in Heroes Park? The movie made it seem as if all of the payments to Keith had been returned since November 2013, which would mean Batman had been on Lex's radar and Lex had been aware of Bruce's identity long before Superman showed up. And it's not as if Lex is a reliable narrator under the best of circumstances.
I do find it a little odd that they insert both Barry and Bruce into Zero Day and nobody noticed them. Barry because he was able to save a kid and he was wearing a weird get up and running ar the speed of light, and Bruce because he's a billionaire and a very very well-known public figure.
But I do feel really dumb for not clocking before now that Lex also knew exactly who Diana was, and lured her to the same gala at his home that he did Clark and Bruce. How else would she have known that he had the photograph, and that she was in danger of exposure in the first place?
I have a gift for falling in love with random objects. One time, my aunt got me a little rubber chicken, and whenever I squoze it, a little egg thing popped out. Very silly. Except that chicken became something like my best friend. I carried it with me to school, and I kept it with me in my pocket, and whatever social hazards there were about Being The Guy Who Got Stressed Whenever His Rubber Chicken Was Missing were far outweighed by being The Guy Who ALWAYS Had a Rubber Chicken On Him. There's a lot of comedic opportunity that comes with always having a good prop on your person.
Of course, the chicken did eventually. Explode. And such was my grief that I did not eat for 36 hours. This was very stressful for many people. Mostly my mom. I was a very strange child to work with. She took parenting so incredibly seriously, and then I'd pitch her these curve balls like refusing to eat for a day and a half because my rubber chicken died. No parenting book tells you what to do when that happens. You just have to feel it in your heart.
A less tragic story of an object that I fell in love with was a large, foam toad that I found in a trinket shop. The toad was the size of a very large grapefruit. Much too large to carry with me to school (thank god) but enough that I could move it around the house, to keep me company during my solitary pursuits. If I was reading, the toad was there, and if I was tinkering with legos, the toad was there, and even when I slept, I would wrap the toad up in layers and layers of blankets, and then spoon it. I did this until the rubber coating on the foam started to wear out, and the foam started to get brittle and break down and leak this repulsive yellow powder. Then I simply put the toad in the playroom and would consult it on matters of great importance. Eventually I stopped doing that, and someone took the opportunity to dispose of it. Not sure who. By the time I noticed its absence, too much time had passed for me to actually be sad. As an adult, part of me thinks I would have maybe liked burying the toad, but part of me also thinks I might have refused to part with the toad, which would have resulted in it leaking more repulsive yellow powder into the house. So I understand why that decision was made.
I want to state that this does not happen often, and it does not happen on purpose. I don't choose to fall in love with random objects. And it's always a little bit embarrassing when it happens.
Which brings me to my wife.
Before meeting my wife, I did not often go to places with crowds. I didn't really think of it as avoiding them - those places just didn't seem fun to me. But she liked those places, and I really liked her, and being with someone who really likes something can kind of sell you on liking it too, so I'd take her to places and watch her Visibly Enjoy the Fair and go: Alright. The fair is pretty sweet.
Which is a thing that happened. After fourish months of dating, I took her to the fair. And she fell very visibly in love with a large series of quilts, and she stayed near them for a while, which she thought was very embarrassing, and I got to pretend to be understanding as an outsider, because I thought it would be much more impressive than also being the type of person that would fall in love with a quilt.
Do not do this. The gods punishment for my hubris was that the room next to the quilts was full of butter sculptures, which was an entirely new thing to me, and I immediately fell embarrassingly in love with all of them. It was like the biggest, sappiest non-sexual crush you've ever had, but not only did the other person not recipropcate, they could not, because they were made of butter. I actually got yelled at for pressing my face against the glass, which is fair, but also, I hadn't realized I was pressing my face on the glass, I just started leaning forward because after approximately 30 minutes of staring wistfully at a cow made of butter my legs got tired. And I think I should be given some grace for that.
Anyway. My wife was very patient with me taking more time to look at the butter sculptures than the average person might spent at the Louvre, and she also felt much less embarrassed over falling in love with a quilt, and we had a good laugh about it on the ferris wheel.
A few weeks after that was my birthday. And I don't know what I expected, exactly - but I did not expect what she did.
Dear reader, she made me a butter sculpture. Of a duck.
She picked a duck, because our first kiss was at a Japanese friendship garden. It was our second date, and she'd made up her mind not to do any kissing until the third date, but as we sat on the grass, a duck walked past me, and I'd just seen the hold-duck-gentle-like-hamgurber meme,
so I sort of impulsively reached out and snatched it. I honestly didn't think it would work. I don't know who was more flabbergasted, me or the duck. But we looked at each other, and then I looked at her, and then she looked at the duck, and she looked so incredibly envious that I assumed that must have wanted the duck so I just handed it to her.
It turned out she was actually envious of the ability to just grab a duck as it walked by, but she accepted the duck and stroked it a few times before releasing it. (She also made up her mind to kiss me in that moment, which was very nice.)
Anyway.
She made me a butter duck of my own. Obviously, I fell in love with it immediately. I cleared out all of the freezer-portion of my mini fridge, and I put the duck in there, and for the next several months, when I felt sad, or lonely, I would open the door up and spent some quality time. Just me and my duck.
But this is, of course, not the end of the story.
Because.
After several months.
The mini fridge died.
I really didn't use it that often. It was mostly my duck storage container. But one day, I walked by it, and it struck me that it wasn't humming. So I opened the door, and it was just. Far, far too late. The duck was dead. Dead dead. Turned into a foul-smelling slime dead.
I cried. I did. After the rubber chicken thing, I thought I had changed, but I had not changed, and the unexpected death of my butter buddy left me pretty shook. I texted my then-girlfriend now-wife about how sad I was, and she actually came over to help me say goodbye. We didn't even bother scraping the duck out of the mini-fridge, we just said our goodbyes to both and threw them together in the nice dumpster behind the chapel, because it seemed appropriate to put it in God's dumpster. And it did actually help quite a bit. I certainly did not go 36 hours without eating again.
And that was, for some time, the end of the butter duck.
However. Three (or four?) years ago, for my birthday, my wife was looking around thrift stores. And she found something interesting.
The original butter duck had an odd pose. She'd sculpted it laying flat, intending to raise it up later. But the butter was less flexible than she thought, and she was afraid of cracking it so she left it down which left the duck with a very elongated, very in-motion appearance. And she found a brass statue of a duck in the same, running posture.
It wasn't the original. But it was oddly on the nose. It was a yellow brass, it had the same strange posture, the same crude little face feathers.
I think it was $3, but it remains perhaps the most thoughtful gift I have ever received. I got very choked up when I unwrapped Butter Duck, The UnDying.
Back in the day I worked at a certain very famous and very high caste art museum in the US as a junior curator. Part of my job was to catalog the objects in the museum database. This includes details like provenance, measurements, and a visual description of what the object looked like.
Like I said, the museum was a pretty snotty institution. It’s got a LOT of objects it’s way famous for possessing, but nobody knew about the absolutely massive collection of Moche erotic pottery it had because the curators were totally embarrassed by this stuff.
Some examples:
Pretty hot shit, right? They never, ever put any of this stuff on public view or published it in any catalogues but - we legit had like several hundred pieces of Moche ceramics in the “dirty pots” category. Anyway, I was left alone to just do my job with regard to the database for several years, ok? And I figured, well, these’re accessioned objects in the museum’s collection - better get down to bidness.
I catalogued every goddamn bestiality, necrophiliac, cocksucking, buttfucking, detached penis, and giant vulva drinking cup in that collection. I’d be like,
A drinking vessel in form of a standing man wearing a tunic and cap. He holds an oversized erection in his hands and stares into the distance (note I did not say “like he’s hella-constipated”). The vessel has a hole at both the tip of the penis as well as around the rim of the figure’s head, thus forcing the drinker to drink only from the penis or risk spilling wine all over themselves from the top of the vessel. Red and orange slip covers the surface of the piece.
Pretty straightforward, right? Apparently the deep seated fear of these objects that the curators exhibited was meant to spread to me as well, but - no one ever gave me that memo, because I guess Midwesterners reproduce asexually. When the curators understood that I had catalogued all of these objects in addition to the other, non-sexy pieces in the collection, they were apparently livid, but knew they had no legs to stand on in terms of getting pissed at me for it.
I visited the museum’s online public access database a few years back and - every single description I wrote of these pieces has been totally neutered to say something like Male figural vase.
Long story short? Just call a dildo a fucking dildo. It’s all gonna be ok, I swear.
Museums should have sections dedicated to artifacts like these with a warning that says “There’s a lot of private parts in here but we’re dedicated to displaying history so we won’t censor these. Enter at your own risk” or something. It’s prudish to deliberately hide history because of some ding dongs.
okay but now I really need to know which Midwestern Museum this was because if it was the Field Museum then I need to go there and ask them so many questions.
ETA: um... so not everybody got the memo about eradicating the sexy sexy records.
Which now unfortunately makes me question the validity of the story up above. :(
there's something inherently hilarious to me about Bruce Wayne a) living in a glass house literally as if he has nothing to hide and b) said glass house is a probably 800 square feet and has no closets. where is this man keeping all of his shoes? these are important design questions! I get that he is living the modernist dream and probably has not changed a single stick of the original furniture from like 1965 but I'm just saying where exactly is the kitchen? Is there a bathtub? where is the entrance to the batcave? I mean I am really working overtime to make this make sense in my head but SERIOUSLY.
I can't get the image out of my head of when Arthur sees it from the outside for the first time and is like bro why do you live in an aquarium the size of a double wide? The house I grew up in was bigger than this. You have more money than fucking God and you are literally in a studio apartment.
I mean obviously the answer is that he doesn't. I mean not really. It is all just a carefully curated tomb. and like Tony Stark with his workshop Bruce probably lives in the cave and only occasionally sleeps and makes coffee in his actual home. although whoever he had in his bed when he woke up after the nightmare he was comfortable enough having her there while he had a bunch of prescription meds on the bedside table so either it's somebody he knows and really really trusts or somebody whose phone is still in the glove box of his car so she can post no selfies to Instagram before he has a very nice Uber driver take her back to wherever she came from.
I mean that is right after the cage fight with KGBeast so it's entirely possible that she's not really going to bat an eye at his scars or his borderline opioid addiction, if they met at the venue...
Also I really want to find photos of Alfred's airstream because right up until I found that photo, I genuinely assumed that the man was living in either groundskeepers house or the carriage House on the property. I mean I'm sure his commute to work is still about 12 minutes maximum. but the thought of him living in an airstream is kind of hilarious.
Also the flip book with text by David Goyer explaining that Bruce and Alfred built the cave themselves and like oh really. they laid every giant slab of brutalist concrete and they installed every gigantic 10 ft high piece of tempered glass that makes up the walls of three storeys of batcave?
Just the mental image of Bruce and Alfred going through the sharper image catalog to find the exact right office chairs but then having them delivered and putting them together like in the garage and arguing because they don't have the correct Alan key is endearing.
The complete and total lack of bookshelves of any kind is less endearing but more forgivable than no closets. Everybody needs something even if it's just a peg on the wall to hang a jacket.
okay so I think I found the closet. The art director has a case study that has no actual floorplan on it but it does have photos of the set after it's been dressed and a video of it being built.
ETA: to comparing it to the floor plan of Philip Johnson's glass house which is 1700 ft², with 18 ft wall panels of glass, I think it might be much, much closer to the Farnsworth house?
The only problem being while there is a great shot of the kitchen side of the cube in the middle (the center of which is the bathroom) we never actually see the entrance to the bathroom. It looks as if the galley kitchen basically as cabinets to cover everything so I presume the doors to both the bathroom and the small walk-in closet are out of frame next to the bed on Bruce's side of the bed. I also need to go back and look but I think the television must be above the fireplace, hidden behind the same kind of cabinet doors that hide the kitchen counter and appliances. The only scene I can remember with the television I think actually takes place in the Wayne Boardroom.
EMETA: okay so I was wrong. there's a very narrow corridor where the galley kitchen is and on the other side is the widescreen televisions and the cupboards and drawers that one presumes hold all of Bruce's worldly possessions. Also I was reading that Philip Johnson conceived of it as a glass cage and so that kind of makes sense because the Bruce Wayne persona is more of a cage whereas the bunker underneath the three stories of batcave is what's real and that's where he keeps all of his actual stuff. The lack of books and bookcases however continues to make me twitch.
EMEMETA: I wonder if the space is heated by running the smoke from the fireplace under the floor like a petchka. I can see that they installed blinds at the very least on the bedroom side in some of the photos I've been able to find. and I bet it could have been modified to be actually really incredibly efficient in terms of heating and cooling. because instead of just having the little round brick fireplace there's a 12 ft wall box basically in the middle with a fireplace sharing a wall with the walk-in shower. but the walls don't go all the way to the ceiling and the only lighting is that square over the bathroom. Everything else is lit with floor and desk lamps. I'm so used to ceiling lights that seeing the white expanse of plaster completely unbroken reflecting the sunlight onto the red and black 3 ft by 3-ft tiles genuinely confused me.
The Farnsworth House and Johnson's Glass House were vacation houses or pavilions, absolutely. The idea of a fictional character living in that house full time since he was 18 years old is absolutely hilarious to me. I mean it's not like he's going to hang up a Farrah Fawcett poster over the bed but it is still a fascinating design choice. but it's so curated and so staged and it's so fake. I mean it's like Bruce Wayne decided to live in a movie set designed by an art director to be the ultimate expression of the 21st century billionaire.
Snyder's idea was that he moved into it because it was his mother's favourite place and because the house was simply too much house for just the two of them (and it was Alfred's idea to move out of the house and into the summer house). In this iteration Alfred was never a butler, he was hired as head of security and he was Bruce's bodyguard as a child before becoming his adoptive father. I remain incredibly incredibly salty about the fact that we never actually see the airstream where Alfred has lived for the past 25 odd years when the story takes place. and it does bring up the question of well where the hell did Dick live??)
Also I choose to believe that the batcave actually started life as an underground bunker sort of like Philip Johnson's painting gallery, combined with a bomb shelter. and the precast concrete and glass bat cave is really where both of them actually live. The lake house and the airstream are just where they sleep and occasionally one presumes shower.
I also find it deeply surreal that we never see the exterior of the hangar where the troop carrier is actually being worked on and where Bruce has set up the whole Justice League search when we first see Diana viewing the computer files. I don't think he took her to the cave until after everybody is coming back from Star Labs to go use the bat computer to get the location of the mother box after Silas died. So it makes me wonder if the hanger is also on the property somewhere, disguised.
I really wish we could have seen the scene where Bruce was like 'Congratulations! You're going to Kansas to dig up Superman.' and then Barry just being completely confused until presumably on the drive Diana explains who Clark was, and how the three of them do not actually apparently have secret identities.
Although this is the universe where Lois first meets Clark because she tracked Clark down and knew he was Superman, and he only gets the job at the planet when he follows her back to Metropolis. So whatever Lois Lane could find out in a week or a month probably only took Lex Luthor a day. What's more interesting to me is that he clearly also knew about Bruce, and something tells me that info was a lot harder to get a hold of.
Also while Bruce's house is like super classy built in 1950 whatever, Lex's house is ridiculous. It looks like an experiment rather than a building that someone would live in. It took me two viewings of the movie to clock that that was actually Lex's house and not a space rented for the Friends Of The Library gala.
I also found out while combing through a zillion articles that the sword at the museum that the curator is dragging Diana over to gloat over is a prop replica from 300.
I figure there is not an artist on this planet who does not like to hear nice things about their work and seeing people be actively interested in how they do it?
my geek, let me show you it @taraljc - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
