#and to NEIL!!!!!!

[sunbag]

Everyone wake up a new meme template dropped

[stealingpotatoes]

happy neil banging out the tunes day to everyone who celebrates

[crtastrophe]

Neil banging out the tunes in Kid Pix Deluxe 4??

[the-uncanny-dag]

[turquoisedata]

How very depressing that Neil Gaiman had trended not even a tiny bit for demonstrating what a fucking horrific person he is.

As a reminder, he's suing Caroline Wallner, one of his accusers, for breaking her NDA. Not for libel. He's saying she shouldn't have told anyone about it, not that she lied.

He doesn't need the money. He's risking the Streisand effect. He is punishing Caroline, he's trying to intimidate other victims who have signed NDAs to scare them into continued silence.

He is no friend to women, to the LGBTQIA+ community, to anyone quite frankly unless he thinks they are of value to him.

Share the story. Put it on Facebook and bluesky and whatever else you're on. Make it clear what a horrifying person he is. Tell your friends. He's paying Edendale a fortune to try and cover this up. Make this hard for him. Make it cost him money.

[centaurself]

in celebration of april 13, i present all four known photos of neil, who banged out the tunes 19 years ago today

source: theagilerat.com (click right to see all four photos!)

[lotostar]

Go little guy, go!🎵

[the-moon-loves-the-sea]

Shared here today by Matthew Boroson on Facebook. (ETA: Gaining inspiration from other authors is great. Lifting passages and avoiding giving credit isn’t.)

Tanith Lee was the first woman to win the British Fantasy Award for best novel, for the second book of the Flat Earth series. She died in 2015. You can buy Tales From the Flat Earth here and here .

[shadesofmauve]

I want to step away from the art-vs-artist side of the Gaiman issue for a bit, and talk about, well, the rest of it. Because those emotions you're feeling would be the same without the art; the art just adds another layer.

Source: I worked with a guy who turned out to be heavily involved in an international, multi-state sex-slavery/trafficking ring.

He was really nice.

Yeah.

It hits like a dumptruck of shit. You don't feel stable in your world anymore. How could someone you interacted with, liked, also be a truly horrible person? How could your judgement be that bad? How can real people, not stylized cartoon bogeymen, be actually doing this shit?

You have to sit with the fact that you couldn't, or probably couldn't, have known. You should have no guilt as part of this horror — but guilt is almost certainly part of that mess you're feeling, because our brains do this associative thing, and somehow "I liked [the version of] the guy [that I knew]", or his creations, becomes "I made a horrible mistake and should feel guilty."

You didn't, loves, you didn't.

We're human, and we can only go by the information we have. And the information we have is only the smallest glimpse into someone else's life.

I didn't work closely with the guy I knew at work, but we chatted. He wasn't just nice; he was one of the only people outside my tiny department who seemed genuinely nice in a workplace that was rapidly becoming incredibly toxic. He loaned me a bike trainer. Occasionally he'd see me at the bus stop and give me a lift home.

Yup. I was a young woman in my twenties and rode in this guy's car. More than once.

When I tell this story that part usually makes people gasp. "You must feel so scared about what could have happened to you!" "You're so lucky nothing happened!"

No, that's not how it worked. I was never in danger. This guy targeted Korean women with little-to-no English who were coerced and powerless. A white, fluent, US citizen coworker wasn't a potential victim. I got to be a person, not prey.

Y'know that little warning bell that goes off, when you're around someone who might be a danger to you? That animal sense that says "Something is off here, watch out"?

Yeah, that doesn't ping if the preferred prey isn't around.

That's what rattled me the most about this. I liked to think of myself as willing to stand up for people with less power than me. I worked with Japanese exchange students in college and put myself bodily between them and creeps, and I sure as hell got that little alarm when some asian-schoolgirl fetishist schmoozed on them. But we were all there.

I had to learn that the alarm won't go off when the hunter isn't hunting. That it's not the solid indicator I might've thought it was. That sometimes this is what the privilege of not being prey does; it completely masks your ability to detect the horrors that are going on.

A lot of people point out that 'people like that' have amazing charisma and ability to lie and manipulate, and that's true. Anyone who's gotten away with this shit for decades is going to be way smoother than the pathetic little hangers-on I dealt with in university. But it's not just that. I seriously, deeply believe that he saw me as a person, and he did not extend personhood to his victims. We didn't have a fake coworker relationship. We had a real one. And just like I don't know the ins-and-outs of most of my coworkers lives, I had no idea that what he did on his down time was perpetrate horrors.

I know this is getting off the topic, but it's so very important. Especially as a message to cis guys: please understand that you won't recognize a creep the way you might think you will. If you're not the preferred prey, the hind-brain alarm won't go off. You have to listen to victims, not your gut feeling that the person seems perfectly nice and normal. It doesn't mean there's never a false accusation, but face the fact that it's usually real, and you don't have enough information to say otherwise.

So, yeah. It fucking sucks. Writing about this twists my insides into tense knots, and it was almost a decade ago. I was never in danger. No one I knew was hurt!

Just countless, powerless women, horrifically abused by someone who was nice to me.

You don't trust your own judgement quite the same way, after. And as utterly shitty as it is, as twisted up and unstead-in-the-world as I felt the day I found out — I don't actually think that's a bad thing.

I think we all need to question our own judgement. It makes us better people.

I don't see villains around every corner just because I knew one, once. But I do own the fact that I can't know, really know, about anyone except those closest to me. They have their own full lives. They'll go from the pinnacles of kindness to the depths of depravity — and I won't know.

It's not a failing. It's just being human. Something to remember before you slap labels on people, before you condemn them or idolize them. Think about how much you can't know, and how flawed our judgement always is.

Grieve for victims, and the feeling of betrayal. But maybe let yourself off the hook, and be a bit slower to skewer others on it.

[beemovieerotica]

i don't really want to see this retconning of neil gaiman's writing where people are re-analyzing stories like "look...you can see the message under the surface...showing how he was actually abusive IRL...it's all there..."

idk maybe we should just listen to people when they speak up and say they were abused and try to foster a culture of respecting victims and actually enforcing justice against perpetrators instead of doing this weird fucking da vinci code-esque picking apart of his stories. stories which everyone was fine with for decades!! because we understand that the content that people write and produce does not have a 1 to 1 correlation with their real world actions!!!

i fully support people who cannot engage with his work anymore and i do think that because he's a still-living person it's imperative to not give this guy another cent, but we cannot pretend that everyone was just "too dumb" to see the secret clues and turn this into another case of "what you write is what you endorse." plenty of dogshit people write good stories. plenty of good people write dark stories. that's all.

[turntechradiohead]

Oh joyous day! Happy 19th anniversary of neil banging out the tunes and happy 16th anniversary of homestuck

[artbygiraffe]

Happy Neil Banging Out the Tunes Day!!!

[emwheezie]

It's an important day... Neil has been banging out those tunes for 19 years now! Updated version of this as prints available here under Home Goods > Wall Art!

[polartss]

One of many third book makeouts 🫡

[starlight-bread-blog]

Me: I shouldn't disturb Neil Gaiman. I shouldn't send an ask unless I really have no way of getting the information otherwise. I'll check old interviews and all the articles that vaguely mention the subject. Of course it goes without saying that I'll read though the FAQ in its entirety. Only then, will I send an ask. However, I'd be very polite and praise his work, as anyone would. I'd also keep it short, because I don't want to waste his time. But I'd keep it very very respectful. I'd be sending a message to a very talented, amazing author that deals with god knows how many like me. Or I'd just stay in the dark and not send him an ask. Yeah, I'll do that.

My Dash: