#Neil gaiman

[orionsangel86]

There is something about proudly proclaiming a show "tumblrista catnip" that makes me emotional.

Something about how for years tumblrinas were ridiculed by show creators.

Something about Supernatural having a meta episode set at a convention with all the weirdo fans that made the main characters uncomfortable. Something something about Becky and the message that fangirls are gross and obsessive.

Something about Sherlock and the way fans were portrayed as crazy obsessive nutjobs for trying to figure out how he faked his death.

Something about creators mocking fandoms, dismissing them as freaks. Something about queer people not being welcome to engage in their creations because "why do you have to make everything gay?"

Something about the malicious culture of queerbaiting throughout the 2000s/2010s, followed by Bury Your Gays tropes across the media landscape because hell, you should be grateful we even gave you queer characters to begin with - and everyone dies in our show! You ain't special!

Something about Destiel questions being banned from conventions...

And then...

Something instead about Good Omens, and letting the story adapt naturally, embracing the fanbase and leaning into the fanservice.

Something about Our Flag Means Death, and the genuine outpouring of love and affection between cast, crew, and fandom that culminated in an explosion of fanworks that were never once mocked or deemed gross or wrong.

Something about Sandman, and staunchly digging in their heels on the queerness of it all, refusing to give in to the homophobes and instead avidly mocking THEM on social media rather than us.

Something about the writers hearing about fandoms favourite ships and excitedly stating that YES! We DID lean into that because it happened naturally and made sense.

Something about a firefighter coming out as bisexual after 7 seasons...

So yeah, something about a new high quality show made FOR US. By creators that love US. Respect US, and WANT our love.

Something about US FINALLY being a target audience for the best shows being made on TV now.

Tumblrista catnip. Creators saying "we made this for you. You are important. Your voices have been heard."

It just... all got a bit overwhelming for a moment there.

[fearofgodandtolkien]

I was inspired

[scottishmushroom]

[thisismorrigan]

I was unaware this book existed so when I picked it up I had no idea what I was getting into. As I was reading through, my eyes were getting a bit misty (I was crying who am I kidding), I got to the back cover and absolutely sobbed in the middle of my used bookstore.

@neil-gaiman I read through the letters you all wrote for this book, and it just made me wish even more that I had the chance to meet that wonderful man at least once. I knew I couldn't put it back on the shelf and walk away, so I brought it home and it sits on the shelf with the rest of my Terry Prachett and Neil Gaiman book collection where it belongs. 🩷

[bookholichany]

How Neil Gaiman killed me...

[thenightling]

The Truth about Lockwood & Co.'s Cancelation and The Dead Boy Detectives!

The Truth about Lockwood & Co.'s cancelation and The Dead Boy Detectives! Well, now that I have your attention, the truth is... And brace yourselves. It's a doozy. They're not related. They just coincidentally deal with teens solving supernatural themed mysteries. This isn't the first time Netflix has had such a show. In 2021 The Irregulars was a Sherlock Holmes story about the street urchins who often helped him solve crimes, with a supernatural twist.

Lockwood & Co. was NOT canceled to make room for The Dead Boy Detectives. The Dead Boy Detectives had been in development since September 2021 when the characters (played by two different actors) appeared in Doom Patrol. The show was originally going to be on HBO Max but after a big shake up at HBO Max (now Max) The Dead Boy Detectives was moved to Netflix to better connect it with The Sandman since they started as characters in The Sandman comics. Yes, the shows are both about supernatural themed mysteries (particularly ghosts) and teens but The Dead Boy Detectives are... well, dead. And it's a spin-off of The Sandman. The Dead Boy Detectives are NOT why Lockwood & Company was canceled. The show was in production before Lockwood was even canceled. Boycotting The Dead Boy Detectives will NOT bring back Lockwood. This is deja vu of when Lucifer finally, properly, ended at season 6 with a grand finale. There were some fans convinced that Lucifer was canceled (a second time) to make room for The Sandman since Lucifer started as a character in The Sandman and in The Sandman Lucifer was to be played by Gwendoline Christie instead of Tom Ellis. Some Lucifer fans boycotted The Sandman out of spite or believed that if they could get The Sandman canceled it would somehow bring back Lucifer. Thankfully nothing ever came of this misguided behavior and the behavior from some Lockwood fans is equally misguided. The Sandman did not cause Lucifer to get canceled. And The Dead Boy Detectives did not cause Lockwood & Co. from getting canceled. The plot similarities are coincidence. The Dead Boy Detectives first appeared in The Sandman in 1991. No one at Netflix said "These shows are too similar, let's axe one to install the other." Do you have any idea how many similar shows are on Fox or on the CW? "Too similar to a show we would rather do" is not a common reason for a show being canceled.

[daneecastle]

ASTROBLEME - Collab - Page 24

Astrobleme [ as-truh-bleem ] - an erosional scar on the earth’s surface, produced by the impact of a cosmic body, such as a meteorite.

Beginning - Previous - Next

A collab between @vavoom-sorted-art and me. Next page coming out over on her blog on Sunday!

Part 25 coming soon!

https://astroblemecomic.carrd.co/ <- Read the full comic here.

[dduane]

Of parsnips and parsnip soup

So the question of parsnips, and particularly parsnip soup, came up secondary to this quote from an interview with Terry Pratchett. (Thanks to @captainfantasticalright for the transcription.)

Terry: “You can usually bet, and I’m sure Neil Gaiman would say the same thing, that, uh, if I go into a bookstore to do a signing and someone presents me with three books, the chances are that one of them is going to be a very battered copy of Good Omens; and it will smell as if it’s been dropped in parsnip soup or something in and it’s gone fluffy and crinkly around the edges and they’ll admit that it’s the fourth copy they’ve bought”.

And when @petermorwood saw this, he immediately reblogged it and added four recipes for parsnip soup.

These kind of surprised some folks, as not everybody knew that parsnips were an actual thing: or if they were, what they looked like or were useful for.

The vegetable may well be better known on this side of the Atlantic. (And I have to confess that as a New Yorker and Manhattanite, with access to both great outdoor food markets and some of the best grocery stores in the world, I don't think that parsnips ever came up on my personal radar while I was living there.) So I thought I'd take a moment to lay out some basics for those who'd like to get to know the vegetable better.

The parsnip's Linnaean/botanical name is Pastinaca sativa, and in the culinary mode it's been around for a long time. It's native to Eurasia, and is a relative to parsley and carrots (with which it's frequently paired in the UK and Ireland). The Romans cultivated it, and it spread all over the place from there. Travelers who passed through our own neck of the woods before the introduction of the potato noted that "the Irish do feed much upon parsnips", and in the local diet it filled a lot of the niches that the potato now occupies.

You can do all kinds of things with parsnips. The Wikipedia article says, correctly, that they can be "baked, boiled, pureed, roasted, fried, grilled, or steamed". But probably the commonest food form in which parsnips turn up around here is steamed or simmered with carrots and then mashed with them: so that you can buy carrot-and-parsnip mash, ready-made, in most of our local grocery chains.

It also has to be mentioned that most Irish kids have had this stuff foisted on them at one point or another, and a lot of them hate it. (@petermorwood would be one.) I find it hard to blame anybody for this opinion, as one of the parsnip's great selling points—its spicy, almost peppery quality—gets almost completely wiped out by the carrot's more dominant flavor and sweetness.

Roasting parsnips, though, is another matter entirely. They roast really well. And parsnip soups are another story entirely, as it's possible to build a soup that will emphasize the parsnip's virtues.

So, to add to Peter's collection, here's one I made earlier—like yesterday afternoon, stopping the cooking sort of halfway and finishing it up today.

I was thinking in a vague medioregnic-food way about a soup with roasted bacon in it, but not with potatoes (as those have been disallowed from the Middle Kingdoms for reasons discussed elsewhere. Tl;dr: it's Sean Astin's fault). And finally I thought, "Okay, if we're going to roast some pork belly or back bacon, then why not save some energy and roast some parsnips too? The browned skins'll help keep them from going to mush in the soup."

So: first find your parsnips. I used four of them. You peel them with a potato peeler...

...sort of roughly quarter them, the long way...

...then chop them in half the short way, toss them in a bowl with some oil—olive oil, in this case—spread them on a baking sheet, and season them with pepper, coarse salt, and some chile flakes. (I used ancho and bird's-eye chile flakes here.)

These then went into the oven for about half an hour, and came out like this.

While that was going on, I got a block of ready-cooked Polish snack bacon out of the freezer.

On its home turf, this is the kind of thing that turns up (among other ways) sliced very thin on afternoon-snack plates, with cheeses and breads. But we like to score it and roast it to sweat some of the fat out, and then use it in soups and stews and so forth.

So I scored this chunk on most of its sides, browned it in a skillet, then shoved the skillet into the oven for twenty minutes or so. Here's the bacon after it was done.

While it was cooking, I made about a liter of soup stock from a couple of stock cubes. If you can get pork stock cubes, they'd be best for this, but beef works fine.

This then went into the pot and was brought up to just-boiling while the bacon and the parsnips were chopped into more or less bite-sized chunks. After that, the meat and veg were added to the pot and the whole business was left to simmer for a couple of hours while I went off to do some line editing.

Finally I turned it off and left it on the stove overnight (our kitchen is quite cool, it was in no bacteriological danger from being left out this way) and then finished its simmering time around lunchtime today.

And here it is. (...Or was. It was very nice.)

...Anyway, this is only one of potentially thousands of takes on parsnip soup. Recipes for more robust versions—based on mashed parsnips and more vegetables, or different meats—are all over the place.

Meanwhile, as regards how much damage this soup could do to your copy of Good Omens if you dropped yours in it, I'd rate this at about 5 damage points out of 10. ...Call it 5.5 if you factor in the chiles. Soups along the boiled-and-mashed-parsnip spectrum would probably inflict damage more in the 7.50-8.0 range. But your results may vary: so I'll leave you all to your own experimentation.

[stephanieratt]

For one night only, come play witness to the magic of the great Aziraphale!

[stormboundstars]

will forever be thinking about Kashi, the man in the belly of the giant angler. one of my favorite dialogues in Dead Boy Detectives is him saying: “I do not think I have any trauma. Life has been fair.” the Night Nurse then going, incredulously: “You were swallowed by a gigantic fish.”

what an interesting fellow. to be both incredibly unfazed by and fascinated with every terrible and lovely thing happening to him. maybe when I'm going through a tough time, I'll think of Kashi. “It's an adventure! Let's make a home out of a fish.”

[flecker-illustrates]

Michael you're killing me with your acting choices. Aziraphale placing his hand just above Crowley's heart wasn't on my S2 bingo card

[the-fictional-truth]

Still thinking about Dead Boy Detectives and how wonderfully Edwin, his journey, and the confession was handled in that show.

Charles never hesitating to reassure Edwin, to tell him he never had any reason to doubt their friendship, the “I can’t say I’m in love with you the same way, but there’s no one else I’d go to hell for and we have forever to figure it out.”

And don’t even get me started about Edwin in hell with Simon, getting that closure for himself and even trying to bring Simon with him despite everything. (And despair telling him that they’re friends now? God I can’t wait to see what that means for future seasons)

I love this show so much and desperately want more episodes like… now.

[ineffablyruined]

[fennecfoxdavid]

Day #897 of David Tennant as a Fennec Fox 🦊 @neil-gaiman

[nights-are-better]

neil gaimen writing years worth of slow burn just to emotionally wreck a fandom:

[charliewrites99]

Watching the first episode of Dead Boy Detectives...

Has Neil Gaiman ever produced anything even remotely straight?

And if he has...How gay was it?