So he said it can't be a Black. So I said, "For God's sakes, Judge Murphy, that's the whole point of the Goddamn story!" So he said, "No, it can't be a Black". Bill just called him up and raised the roof, and finally they said, "Well, you gotta take the perspiration off". I had the stars glistening in the perspiration on his Black skin. Bill said, "Fuck you", and he hung up.
Just to add context for those not aware of the impact of this story.
The reason it was so important for narrative purposes, was that the plot concerns the visit of the Astronaut, in his completely opaque spacesuit, to a planet populated entirely by self-aware robots (originally from Earth) who have built their own society and are petitioning to be allowed to interact with Earth again as equals.
They have a democratic government and free choice of careers etc. as the orange robot serving as guide tells the Astronaut.
The Astronaut notices that there are two different types of robot on this world; the orange ones, who are in charge, gifted access to all information and facilities. and the blue robots, who are seen as more limited in function, have less access to information and resources, and are not allowed positions of power or as wide a choice of employment opportunities. Even transportation is segregated.
The Astronaut investigates further and discovers that the blue and orange robots are actually structurally identical, there is absolutely no difference between their potential or capabilities, and it is only because the orange robots are instructed by their Educator system to consider themselves superior, that the difference exists.
The Astronaut tells the robots they are not ready for re-alignment with Earth, until they come to terms with their own unfairness, and how Earth had had to deal with this issue themselves. When that time comes, the robots will be able to ally with Earth.
Then he leaves in his spaceship, and it's only in that one final panel that we see the Astronaut is black.
Not subtle, nor should it be, but for 1950 this was a breathtakingly powerful statement, perhaps the first of it's kind in the genre.
The black character was not a caricature, or comedy relief, he was a main character in his own right, a human who "simply" was black.
Ok, but this story is sadly revolutionary even now.
That is not just a human who happens to be black, as far as every other character in this story is concerned this is the most important, maybe even the only human they ever see, who happens to be black.
As depressing as that is, but a black person just casually representing the entirety of humanity is a breathtakingly powerfull statement even today, a quarter of a century later.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
â Live Streamingâ Interactive Chatâ Private Showsâ HD Qualityâ Free Actions
Free to watch ⢠No registration required ⢠HD streaming
âPratchett went back to older throwaway jokes (like dwarves being apparently unisex) and used them as metaphors to discuss social change, racial assimilation, and other complex issues, while reexamining the species heâd thrown in at the margins of his world simply because they existed at the margins of every other fantasy universe. If goblins and orcs and trolls could think, then why were they always just there to be slaughtered by the heroes? And if the heroes slaughtered sentient beings en masse, how heroic exactly were they? It was a long overdue start on redressing issues long swept under the rug by a parade of Tolkien successors who never thought of anyone green and slimy as anything but a notch on the protagonistâs sword, and much of the urgency in Pratchettâs last few books seemed to be related to them. âThereâs only one true evil in the world,â he said through his characters. âAnd thatâs treating people like they were things.â And in the last of his âgrown-upâ Discworld books, that idea is shouted with the ferocity of those who have only a few words left and want to make them count. Goblins are people. Golems are people. Dwarves are people, and they do not become any less people because they decide to go by the gender they know themselves to be instead of the one society forces on them. Even trains might be people, and youâll never know one way or the other unless you ask them, because treating someone like theyâre a person and not a thing should be your default. And the only people who cling to tradition at the expense of real people are sad, angry dwellers in the darkness who donât even understand how pathetic they are, clutching and grasping at the things they remember without ever understanding that the world was never that simple to begin with. The future is bright, it is shining, and it belongs to everyone.â
â John Seavey, The Evolution of the Disc (via liquidlightandrunningtrees)
This informal survey aims to gather statistics on the length and completion status readers on AO3 prefer for fanfic.
The survey is not aff
I put together a relatively short survey (about two dozen questions, mostly multiple choice, all optional) to get some data on what fic lengths and completion statuses readers on AO3 prefer or avoid. If I get enough answers to have a good sample size, it should give us some insight into how people search and read on the archive.
If you find this interesting, feel free to share it with AO3 users elsewhere or post it to other platforms. I'd like to get a good crossection of readers that isn't biased by platform, if at all possible.
The survey is just for fun/curiosity, and isn't associated with any university, company, or other entity. It's just me asking you this stuff here :)
I'm not putting a deadline on this, I'll just let it run until I've got some good numbers, but whenever I do have enough I'll post the results here. You can track this post to watch for that update.
Apparently some people still need to hear this so: using an 'ai checker' is still using ai. If you are feeding someone's fic to one of these checkers, you will still not be sure their fic is ai because they are not 100% accurate, but you can be 100% sure that you are using ai. For fic. Furthermore you are doing the work of an ai scraper for them. You are, personally, feeding the machine. There is no actual excuse for using an ai checker on fanfic as a hobby. YOU are the problem.
If you think a fic is ai, mute it and move on. That's it. That's all you do.
also according to michael collins when the three of them were discussing what neil armstrong should say when he first stepped on the moon, collins suggested armstrong say âOh, my God, what is that thing?â and then scream and cut out his mic.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
â Live Streamingâ Interactive Chatâ Private Showsâ HD Qualityâ Free Actions
Free to watch ⢠No registration required ⢠HD streaming
It was a huge milestone of scientific and technological advancement. (Plus, at the time, politically significant). Humanity went to space! We set foot on a celestial body that was not earth for the first time in human history! Thatâs a big deal! Iâve never thought about it before but now that I have, itâs ridiculous to me that thatâs not part of our everyday lives and the public consciousness anymore. Why donât we have a public holiday and a family barbecue about it. Why have I never seen the original broadcast of the moon landing? It should be all over the news every year!
Itâs July 20th. Thatâs the day of the moon landing. Next year is going to be the 54th anniversary. Iâm ordering astronaut shaped cookie cutters on Etsy and Iâm going to have a goddamn potluck. Youâre all invited.
PITCH: We call it Moon Day, and then every 7 years when it falls on a Monday, that's an even BIGGER deal and we call that Moon Day Monday and go absolutely apeshit about it (the next Moon Day Monday is in 2026 so we have a couple trial runs first)
not my tweet or my fic (and thereâs a good chance of this comment being a bot) but yeah, donât do this. sure, some writers wouldnât mind having fanfics (or direct continuation) of their fanfics written by someone else. some may even be thrilled and happy. but the fandom etiquette is that if you want to write a fanfic or a continuation of someoneâs fanfic, YOU POLITELY ASK THE WRITER FOR THEIR PERMISSION. not their readers.
also 5 months isnât long at all. 5 months is 5 minutes when it comes to fanfics. Iâve waited years for my favorite fics to get updated (one of my favorite fanfics was updated by the author after 13 years) and Iâve never said anything to them about âitâs been ___ years, I donât think it will get updated anymoreâ. because another fandom / fanfic etiquette is that fanfic writers write for free in their free time, they donât owe you anything. maybe they will update one day. maybe they wonât. if you want your favorite fic to get updated, you comment something like âthis is good!! Iâm excited for what happens nextâ and maybe your positive comment will motivate the author to update. but you donât say âitâs been ___ months or yearsâ. fanfics writers write for themselves and their own enjoyment. theyâre just kind enough to let you read their works for free. stop being rude and entitled to fanfic writers.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
â Live Streamingâ Interactive Chatâ Private Showsâ HD Qualityâ Free Actions
Free to watch ⢠No registration required ⢠HD streaming
how are you gonna be 31 and posting fandom content bro leave it to the teenagers
People 10 and 20 years older than me are writing your favorite fanfics, and drawing your favorite characters. You'd have no fandom without the people you think are 'too old' to have hobbies.
Who the heck do you think started modern day fandom with Star Trek? It sure wasn't teenagers.
Who do you think makes professional quality fanart and fanfic? People who've been practicing it for ten, fifteen, twenty years!
Or even people who've been practicing it for thirty, forty or fifty!!!!!
example: Diane Duane. Currently in her seventies. Star Trek fangirl since the original run. Goddess-level Ascended Fan who has created official tie-in works in more forms of media than pretty much anyone else alive, possibly even Rodenberry himself because they didn't have audiobooks or video games when he was with us. Writer of Spock's World, The Wounded Sky, Doctor's Orders in TOS. Co-writer of TNG script Where no one has gone before, and writer of the tie-in novel Dark Mirror among others. Writer of a half-dozen Star Trek Comics. She has adapted her own work for audio, has written for the Star Trek manga series, has written short Trek fiction for anthologies, and plotted and wrote the video game Star Trek: the Kobayashi Alternative.
In other fandoms, she was a personal friend of Terry Pratchett himself. As a scriptwriter, she's also worked in fandoms like Scooby-Doo, Transformers, My Little Pony, Gargoyles, Batman: The Animated Series, Spiderman: Unlimited (and a trilogy of tie-in novels still in print) and Barbie: Fairytopia. ...And that's just cherry-picking her imdb page.
While she can't give out specific details due to Obvious Reasons, she's still active in the Sherlock BBC fandom - and there's a specific subset of her fans who love guessing which of the legendary fanfics might be her work (I am not one of them, BTW, as it is None Of My Business. I'm old-school that way).
Fandom is not for teenagers. Fandom is for everyone of good heart and enthusiasm for a good (or even bad! No judgement!) story.
Just wait until you grow up, Anonymous OP. Wonder how long it'll take you to change your mind.
...Some days when you're feeling tired and sad, and wondering "what the hell is the point... why am I even bothering?"... it's nice to be reminded that you're supported.
Why Good Omens season 1 has already fulfilled Sir Terry Pratchett's wish
Neil Gaiman said he wouldn't make a sequel to Good Omens
Neil Gaiman at SXSW in Austin, Texas in 2019:
[Gaiman also confirmed the series will only be six episodes, with no intention of trying to go for another season if successful. "The lovely thing about Good Omens is it has a beginning, it has a middle, and it has an end," he said to appreciative applause. "Season 1 of Good Omens is Good Omens. It's brilliant. It finishes. You have six episodes and we're done. We won't try to build in all these things to try to let it continue indefinitely."]
Source: Entertainment Weekly (2019)
"It's a buddy road movie through time."
2018 - Neil Gaiman on X- Twitter
Tweet link here
Also Neil Gaiman in 2023:
["It won't be confirmed unless enough people watch Season 2 to make Amazon happy...
...But obviously Season 3 is all planned and plotted and, if I get to make it, will take the story and the people in it we care about to a satisfying end."]
What happened?
Were the profits and ratings high enough to create two more seasons out of thin air? At this point, seasons 2 and 3 seem more like a greedy stretching of a beloved story already told in its entirety in the first season.
Has the first season already fulfilled Sir Terry Pratchett's wish?
As read above, Neil Gaiman himself said: "Season 1 of Good Omens is Good Omens."
Gaiman was very opened about how pleased he was with Season 1 and how he made it having Sir Terry Pratchett's wish in mind.
Interview for The Verge (May 30, 2019)
Link : Neil Gaiman had one rule for the Good Omens adaptation: making Terry Pratchett happy
Interviewer: Do you feel pressure from knowing this has to be the definitive best adaptation it could be?
Gaiman: No. All I wanted to do was to make something Terry would have liked. It wasnât like, âMake the best thing.â...
...Gaiman: The lovely thing about Good Omens [the miniseries] is that itâs still Good Omens. If you loved the book, this is that thing that you loved. And I will make you fall in love even more with Sergeant Shadwell. I will make you fall even more in love with Newt than you thought you could, I hope. It does demonstrate that I do kind of know what Iâm talking about, which is a nice thing to know.
...Gaiman: So with Good Omens, I feel like what I got to do was put the thing I made with Terry on the screen and then buttress it. What I added isnât completely different from the original. Itâs not out of left field.
Neil Gaiman on an interview for The Guardian in 2019.
Link: Neil Gaiman: âGood Omens feels more apt now than it did 30 years agoâ
There are times, he insists, when âyou make something you like so much that you donât really care what anyone else thinks of it.â Thereâs a clue to this, perhaps, in the showâs final frame, which reads âFor Terryâ. âHe didnât believe in heaven or hell or anything like that,â Gaiman says, âso there wasnât even a hope that there was a ghostly Terry around to watch it. He would have been grumpy if there was. But I made it for him.â
Why was Good Omens season 1 so good and you could really feel Sir Terry Pratchett's contributions?
Gaiman himself has already told us the answer:
...Gaiman: So with Good Omens, I feel like what I got to do was put the thing I made with Terry on the screen and then buttress it. What I added isnât completely different from the original. Itâs not out of left field.
Neil Gaiman for The Verge (2019).
There was original material to work with (Good Omens, published in 1990), on which we certainly know that Sir Terry Pratchett himself actively worked from start to finish.
Is there a proper sequel to Good Omens the book on which to base 2 more seasons of the series?
Neil Gaiman says the following on an interview for GQ in 2019.
Link: Neil Gaiman Says No to Adapting His Own BooksâExcept This Time
...But with this, it was like: Okay. Terry is gone. He wanted me to do this. He wanted me to do it for him. And that gave me a kind of weird impetus. And it meant that I felt very much at liberty to take every conversation that Terry and I had ever had about Good Omens. Not just the book, as written, but everything beyond it. We planned a sequel, never written, so I got to steal the angels from the sequel. I got to steal from every conversation Terry and I had about how we would do this. It felt very personal, and I guess kind of⌠holy. If that doesnât sound too ridiculous. But it was a mission.
Two conclusions can be drawn:
1) Informal conversations about the plot of a sequel do not equate to an officially written sequel.
2) Neil Gaiman has already used many of the ideas he and Terry Pratchett had planned for a never-written sequel to Good Omens and those ideas were largely added to and executed in the TV adaptation of Good Omens (2019).
Why keep stretching those ideas if the co-writer is no longer able to actively contribute and help to create a proper sequel?
If Gaiman were the sole creator of Good Omens we'd have a different conversation, but that's not the case. The first season of Good Omens was already a beautiful homage to Good Omens and Sir Terry Pratchett's work on the book.
Did Terry Pratchett write around 75% of Good Omens?
Link for the post here.
Link for the post talking about the video and sharing the video here.
Edit: I wanted to bring this point up to point out Terry Pratchett's important contribution to the making of the book, not to highlight it as an excuse to distance Gaiman from the novel. We will have to accept that he also contributed to the creation of the book.
Sir Terry Pratchett's last wish
2017 - Rob Wilkins on Twitter (X)
Terry Pratchettâs Unpublished Work Crushed by Steamroller
By Sophie Haigney - The New York Times
Terry Pratchett, the well-known British fantasy author, had a wish fulfilled two years after his death: A hard drive containing his unpublished work was destroyed by steamroller.
Mr. Pratchett, a wildly popular fantasy novelist who wrote more than 70 books, including the âDiscworldâ series, died at 66 in 2015. That year his friend, the writer Neil Gaiman, told The Times of London that Mr. Pratchett had wanted âwhatever he was working on at the time of his death to be taken out along with his computers, to be put in the middle of a road and for a steamroller to steamroll over them all.â Mr. Gaiman added at the time that he was glad this hadnât happened.
Now, though, it has. Mr. Pratchettâs estate manager and close friend, Rob Wilkins, posted a picture of a hard drive and a steamroller on Aug. 25 on an official Twitter account they shared.
Shortly thereafter, Mr. Wilkins wrote that the deed was done.
I have not been able to find the exact reasons why Sir Terry Pratchet wanted his unfinished and unpublished works destroyed, but we can respect his last wish as a way for him to have control over what he felt he was ready to share with the world and what he was not.
Is Good Omens the exception?
With all that has been presented so far, I can only conjecture, but not be sure. I can believe that there was Terry Pratchett's permission and desire to make an adaptation of Good Omens, the original book published in 1990, but to my mind, creating two more seasons of a never-written sequel doesn't fit as part of Terry Pratchett's desire.
He is not among us to actively participate in a sequel and if his last wish was to destroy his unfinished works, I can't believe that he would have wanted to give his approval to something new published under his name and without his supervision.
Sir Terry Pratchett talking about a never-written sequel to Good Omens
âNeil and I thought about a sequel an awful lot initially. We talked about it on tour. And I think it was a big relief to both of us, when one day we looked one another in the eye and said, 'I thought you wanted to do a sequel.'..
Interview for the Magazine Locus. Locusmag archive page
This is me speculating, but I don't think there was real enthusiasm for creating a sequel until Gaiman alone saw profitable potential in the TV adaptation....
Good Omens also belongs to the those who love the story
I think it's okay to still love the story of Good Omens. Personally, I will always be grateful with the story and the characters for giving me confort in troubling times, but I find seasons 2 and 3 as some kind of excuse from Gaiman to keep profiting and benefiting from the story (more now than ever due to the SA allegations*).
Aziraphale and Crowley will always live happily in a lovely cottage as long as we want to. Even before season 2 was announced, many of us had already accepted that. Many artists have imagined lovely endings for our innefable husbands and in my eyes their works won't be any less valuable than whatever Gaiman had planned.
Note:
I don't like talking about Season 3 of GO without mentioning the current SA allegations against Neil Gaiman (Main writer of seasons 2 and 3 and showrunner), so in case you want to know more about the allegations against Neil Gaiman. Here there's a great Round Up link (Podcasts links, transcripts, etc.)
Credits for the Round Up link to Muccamukk. Thanks a lot!
Cool, so you want natural fiber costumes with no/nuanced corset slander, people wearing colors, historical hairstyles, people wearing hats or headcoverings and long sleeves outside during the day, no potatoes or pumpkins in pre-columbian Europe, actors with textured skin and wrinkles, minimal makeup, consulting HEMA groups and weapons scholars for all the weapons and fight scenes, a good soundtrack that includes traditional instruments?
Oh, you mean you want 100% white people. Even in crowd scenes in port cities. There's a different word for that.
@anthropologist-on-the-loose get peer-reviewed because your shared experience with the subject of the painting really heightened the emotional impact of this artwork for me ( An impact which was already high tbh. The idea that Pompeii was built by generations, buried by generations, uncovered by generations. What if I just started screaming and never stopped. )
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
â Live Streamingâ Interactive Chatâ Private Showsâ HD Qualityâ Free Actions
Free to watch ⢠No registration required ⢠HD streaming
in more pleasant news: this year is seeing the biggest humpback migration in Australian history, bigger than it was PRE whaling. That's right, there are more humpbacks migrating off the coast of Australia than there were BEFORE industrial whaling started.
A huge, fat W for environmentalists and Greenies. what an achievement
