sylvestris123

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Day #1075 of David Tennant as a Fennec Fox!

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No Wrong Answer

I saw this writing prompt a while back and it was stuck in my head until I finally cranked out a short story about it.

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Brainrot embroidery continues.

I’m not fast, I’ve been sick. And stabbing stuff with needles distracted me from the hell cough.

Also can someone come to my house & take away the sparkly embroidery floss? I know it is annoying to use but I can’t stop!

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My first Discworld book was the Wee Free Men. I loved it, and read it over and over again. But since that was the only one my local library had, for the longest time I thought it was a standalone. Imagine my delight when, years later, I discovered the rest of this fantastic series.

The City Watch books in particular struck a note with me, and they’ve quickly become some of my all time favorites. So of course I had to draw this to celebrate.

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Bad Omens?

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I have wanted to talk (rant) about a miracle in Good Omens that, I feel, does not get enough exposure (such as in the meta posts that discuss miracles, like this one, but also in general discussions of Good Omens awesomeness). The miracle of Aziraphale&Madame Tracy getting to Tadfield airbase with Shadwell.

We get to see just the start of this miraculous flight in the TV show.

(GIF source - thank you, @fuckyeahgoodomens​)

The book describes this scene in glorious detail - first 

Putputputputput and a blue nimbus began to outline the scooter and its occupants with a gentle sort of a glow, like an afterimage, all around them.

- as we see in the show. And then:

I would like to draw attention to the “probably wasn’t going at more than two hundred miles an hour” bit. The top speed I can find Crowley going is 120 mph (in London, after the bookshop fire). While Aziraphale may be wary of Crowley’s driving, let it be remembered that the Angel is not afraid to go fast (well, at least in a physical sense. Okay, that still sounds wrong. In a literal sense. I’m not talking about 1967 here!)

To be fair, Aziraphale did slow down some over time. Per script book, he crosses the M25 at a mere 100 mph. And how saddened I am that we do not get to witness that crossing in the show!!! Even though it is described in the script briefly, the book offers a full, colorful description:

WHAT AN IMAGE!

But apart from the sheer aesthetic of it, I would like to discuss the more functional/mechanical aspects.

Crowley drives the Bentley to M25 as fast as the terrain allows, including in the book crossing the River Thames, apparently, across its bottom, which is special in its own right, and blasts across M25. Through an astounding and much celebrated feat of imagination and sheer willpower, with white knuckles, clenched teeth and glowing eyes (something-something “biospatial feedback?” per the book? always been curious about that little detail) he keeps himself and his most immediate belongings from combustion - in the book it is noted that he moves Agnes Nutter’s book to “the safety of his lap”. Then and for the following 30 miles Crowley keeps the Bentley together, but it becomes a fireball, a mess of burnt metal with no paint left and completely melted tires. It is damaged beyond repair, and memorably explodes in the show. 

And by all accounts, Crowley is exhausted by this process. In the book he “wasn’t feeling very well” by the end of the journey. In the original TV script he falls down upon exiting the remnants of the Bentley.

Let’s compare this to Aziraphale’s miracle.

Aziraphale lifts a scooter with two corporations 40 feet into the air, and flies it 40 miles to the Tadfield airbase at speeds of 100-200 miles per hour. Even more impressively, he generates a sort of force-field bubble, which is unharmed by the flames of M25 other than fading at the edges and completely protects the scooter, its passengers and their belongings (the Thundergun) from harm.

It is explicitly stated both the in the book and the TV show script that the impact of M25 is not limited to the ground, and flying over it is no easier than crossing at the ground level.  

SCIENTIST 1: Everything you are telling us is ridiculous. The temperature immediately above the M25 right now is somewhere in excess of 750 degrees…

SCIENTIST 2: Or minus a hundred and fifty. 

SCIENTIST 1: Or minus 150. It’s probably just a mechanical error. The point is, we can’t even get a helicopter over the M25 without winding up with helicopter McNuggets.

The M25 is so terrible that even a Duke of Hell cannot protect himself from it. In fact, Crowley seems to believe there is no way for a human to get across.

A screaming, glowing ribbon of pain and dark light.* Odegra. Nothing could cross it and survive. Nothing mortal, anyway.

Well, I guess someone forgot to inform Aziraphale of this. While Crowley applies all his powers to keep from catching fire and has to remember not to breathe, the protection Aziraphale affords his human companions is so absolute that Madame Tracy thoroughly enjoys the flight (while Shadwell is simply terrified, but never mentions other discomfort).

And apparently Aziraphale does this without visibly breaking a sweat? The landing is not described, but there are no mentions of “stumbling away from the scooter”. In fact, the whole journey is never mentioned again, like it’s no big deal. (How cool is that?!)

Crowley has an amazing imagination, and his ability to stop time is highly impressive. But as far as transporting goods and people across occult obstacles - I think Aziraphale takes the cake.

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Crowley sipping wine. #GoodOmens #GoodOmensdanarts #Ineffablehusbands

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Mrs Potts had a problem. It was a problem no-one had really had for several hundred years, and one which the modern world was ill-equipped to solve. She clutched the telephone handset nervously.

"It's our Neville," she told the nice young man on the phone.

Mrs Potts was not an imaginative woman, which is why she had first called the police, the doctor, and her MP, but after their responses, even she felt a tremor of trepidation as she continued:

"He's turned into a frog."

"Ah," said the nice young man with an air of resignation. "That sounds more like my colleague's department, please wait just a moment while I transfer you..."

Instructions Not Included

-by @brightwanderer

>>> Click here for more Good Omens fic recs <<<

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My latest cartoon for New Scientist

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GNU Sir Terry. Thank you so much for sharing everything with us.

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pratchett is such an insanely good writer like it still floors me sometimes how good he was at putting together a book. you read the phrase "you do the job that's in front of you" one million times in night watch and sometimes it's about vimes stepping into his mentor's role in history and sometimes it's about cops who keep their heads down when bad things happen to people and sometimes it's about clearing off your own gravestone every year and sometimes it's just about surviving the barricades and the phrase picks up steam and meaning every single time until you get to the end. the revolution was always going to happen and the lilac was always going to bloom. they did the job they didn't have to do and they died for it🪻🥚

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How Do They Rise Up

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“You know what day it is, Ping?” said Colon. “Er…25th of May, Sarge.” “And you know what that means, Ping?” “Er…” “It means,” said Nobby, “that anyone important enough to ask where we’re going—” “—knows where we’ve gone,” said Fred Colon. The door slammed behind them.

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And a hard-boiled egg!🌟

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Happy Glorious 25th of May!

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ill never and i mean NEVER get over the lilac as a metaphor for the watch. one of the first things vimes does in night watch is smell lilacs and remember. lilac went together with the song of the fallen. once a lilac tree is planned it will give rise to hundreds of other lilacs. a hundred members in the watch where there were only three a few years back. the good old days fading like lilac. the hold of the watch over the city growing weaker and weaker with each year after the revolution. remember the smell of lilac? you thought about those who died. lilac was common in the city. it was vigorous and hard to kill and had to be. there was nothing he could do about the big stuff. lilac was going to bloom.

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the older i get, the harder this line hits.