At the Gates of Dawn

And I do think the gems adapt to a slower life once steven is born but like, theyre still thousands of years old, even if it felt longer in the moment, looking back, 4 years would feel like. a few minutes to them probably. Every parent says kids grow up too fast every parent kind of babies their adult kids a little but can you imagine being thousands of years old, not fully understanding human growth yet, and it LITERALLY feels like its only been a few days at best when you look back. That dread of steven’s ever fleeting mortality must be such a heavy weight on them to have to bear. I’m sure he thinks about it too. wonders what they’re going to do when he’s gone. Worries if they’ll be able to handle it or if they’ll fall apart like with rose. Fears losing them too and having to leave them behind like that.

Take a moment and ask yourself, a project like this requires a lot of time, money and dedication of resources, why would scientists dedicate that time to something that could just be done by a tree?

The answer is they wouldn't. So that means this claim requires further investigation!

This project is called LIQUID 3, and it's not meant for cities with wide open spaces, it's meant for cities like Belgrade in Serbia. These cities are densely populated and heavily polluted, to the point where pollution actually chokes out current trees and makes creating green spaces difficult.

Liquid 3 was a PhD scientists answer to these problems. The microalgae tank is intended for spaces where you either:

Don't have enough space to plant full trees, or

Don't have enough time to plant trees and wait for them to grow up.

The tank is extremely efficient when you consider the amount of space needed compared to the amount of CO2 turned into oxygen. The tank can operate throughout the winter. And most importantly, it can be quickly set up in areas that desperately need relief from air pollution NOW not in 10 years when trees are done growing. Children currently suffocating on polluted air can't wait for trees to grow, they need to be taken care of now, and Liquid 3 is one of the ways to take care of them. Depending on the species of microalgea used, a number have shown a pretty amazing capacity to pull heavy metals out of the air which is something trees can get choked up by.

The tanks aren't just tanks either! Liquid 3 have solar panels placed on top, they have lighting and mobile phone charging, and they work as public benches. The designers of it want to encourage green spaces where there's room, but where there isn't room or time, Liquid 3 can step in. Realistically, this isn't a replacement for trees. It's replacing boring metal city benches with new, cooler benches that also clean the air (and have at least some heating during the winter).

Not only that, but the microalgea that grows is native to Serbia and all that microalgea has a ton of great uses! It makes for great fertilizer, compost, wastewater treatment, cleaner biofuels and even for helping create new tanks for further air purification. They only require a quick algae divide once a month, and the produced algae can be carted off to where ever it's needed. This makes them effective solutions for areas that can't sustain complex installations.

And then that gently concentrated supply of heavy metal goes into people, which is considered sub-optimal.

Almost nothing. You'd need massive quantities. Which is why we don't mine by crushing rocks and planting stuff that's known for their uptake of specific metals.

It's not cost effective: You'd spend more to do it than the yield is worth.

It would be very handy if we could, because it'd solve so many issues with mine tailings and the toxic runoff of [Inset industrial endeavour here].

I see a lot of folks upset that NG will financially benefit from residuals and other compensation surrounding his involvement in the adaptation of Sandman and Good Omens (and he will.) But the answer isn’t “rage at the fans who are so emotionally attached to their blorbos because they grieve differently, and then somehow NG will be financially punished.” That’s lower-class/middle-class thinking. NG is too rich and financially diversified to really be hurt by little boycott or a couple of show cancellations (though said cancellations can cause life-changing poverty to the little guys who signed contracts and turned down other opportunities before all of this came out. Boy does NG love women in poverty 🤮)

So if you want to substantially reduce the wealth of someone at NG’s financial level—you need to do it with professional services fees.

Details below the cut:

Let’s play the biggest game of kick the can on the internet.

That felt like an understandable adaptational choice. With Crowley and Aziraphale being upgraded to the Actual Main Protagonists, their characterization shifting from "complicit agents of cosmic imperialism" to "victimized corporate cogs", the changing nature of humor from the 90's to Present Day making Random Cruelty seem less Automatically Funny and just generally the other changes Crowley's character making him even more ideologically disconnected from Hell then he was originally....

But, that whole concept of inventing random mundane annoyances was such a central part of Book!Crowley's character I just... didn't really accept the idea that aspect of his character was truly gone, I just thought it was downplayed. I mean, the M25 project still happened, Crowley is still introduced doing his infrastructure sabotage shtick even if the inner monologue explaining his logic for why this is a legitimately effective technique for temptations is cut, Crowley still claims credit for inventing the Selfie even if it's not as strongly confirmed as the random annoyances he created in the book...

I thought that, yeah, Show!Crowley doesn't even have the token cynical allegiance to Hell that Book!Crowley had, but he still likes inventing annoying taxes purely because he is a show-off smartass and because staying on Hell's good better side by being an exemplary employee was better for his self-interest even if he doesn't give a shit about how it benefits them. I even theorized it might be kinda connected to his new 'helped design Nebulas' backstory. Like creating shit like Manchester and Furbies is the closest equivalent to the joy of creating stars that he think he'll ever be allowed as a Demon...

But as we moved into GO2 and GO3, it became more and more clear that this aspect of the character was dropped pretty much completely in adaptation. The M25 was most likely the only large-scale Evil project Show!Crowley has done, he really is just bullshitting excuses for the phone things, and he was definitely just stealing credit for the Selfie. And it's just... a huge bummer I think. Again, this was one of Crowley's defining characteristics in the book, and a major running joke in both the canon and the fandom. It's true that, like I said, in the 2020's maybe you can't immediately introduce one of your Main Lovable Protagonists the guy whose job it is to make sure you had a shit day at work and he's actually kinda proud of it?

But I feel like there was a way to loop Crowley's projects back into the narrative, I've said it before as well but... it really does defang the point your story is trying to make about the beauty in moral ambiguity if you can't even allow one of your main characters to be the kind of guy (gender neutral) who enjoys hot-gluing coins on the sidewalk. It's okay if Crowley is a little shit or selfish in his own way. If he's got actual shades of gray and wasn't just 'too kind and caring for Heaven' and really grumpy about it. (On kind of a metatextual level, maybe retconning out Crowley's projects is the reason why Show!Crowley seems to be getting gloomier and gloomier every season... They unwritten one of his main hobbies and sources of pride out of existence).

I've been considering the idea of, like, what if the story just treated Crowley's mischief slightly more seriously... Like, just tried to explore this idea that yeah, it's funny and relatable and maybe even understandable that Crowley has been doing this minor mischief and inventing small frustrations just so his bosses will get off his back and let him go on dates with his boyfriend at peace and maybe because it's the closest he'll ever get to hanging stars in the sky ever again. But maybe we can also explore the perspective of the humans who used to get caught up in his shenanigans? Like, use this thread as a jumping-off point to explore the same sort of "it's just me and my Angel against it all" attitude that also keeps leading Show!Crowley to repeatedly suggest giving up on saving the world and fucking off to the stars?

I'd say there's even groundworks for that in the original book! Like, Crowley and Aziraphale are absolutely not the main focus of the book and don't have the same prominent arcs as their Show counterparts get in S1, but... if you look very closely, they absolutely do still have arcs.

Aziraphale has roughly the same Arc between the Book and the Show, just with the show turning up the drama waaaay up. Book!Aziraphale does start out notably more jaded about Heaven...

But he does talk himself (and allows Crowley to talk him) into believing Heaven would want him to prevent Armageddon...

Right until that talk with the Metatron, which shatters what little faith in Heaven he had left...

Which also leads to him swearing for the first time in four thousand years, and shifting from "Oh, we have to do something about the Antichrist.... but nothing too horrible obviously" to "I am going to lie-by-omission (and also just plain lie) these humans into shooting the 11-years-old dead for me".

Meanwhile, Crowley... there are definitely moments when you can say 'okay, yeah, these are the same story/character beats from the book, but with More Drama...

But while Show!Crowley has his Alpha Centauri stuff, which was an interesting way to add extra stakes, this possibility of a selfish escape from doom. Which would probably not even work in the Novel, in which the Universe is implied to not only be a much younger world that is scientifically indistinguishable from a billions-of-years-old universe as a Sick Prank from God, but is also a much smaller world that is scientifically indistinguishable from an infinite universe as a Sick Prank from God.

Book!Crowley, I think, has a thread regarding, much like Aziraphale, what he feels about his job. So much of the Crowley's perspective early in the book is essentially about him justifying and rationalizing what he does. I mean, humans do way worse then what I can think of anyways! It's all about Free Will! Which I don't even have, I don't have a choice but to do my job! Like, the observations about human cruelty and kindness and free will are meant to be poignant and important to themes of the story.... but they are also just kinda Crowley rationalizing why he keeps programming traffic lights with durations that are just annoying enough to tempt people to run the red light.

And then the M25 happens, and Crowley is finally directly faced with the consequences of his meddling, the fact that his job does have a real effect on people, and on him, and his narration takes on a very different tone...

Crowley ends up having to sacrifice the Bentley, his one most prized possession in the whole world, because of this mess. And then when Adam notices him for the first time and seem to supernaturally identify what Crowley and what he is done, and Crowley seems to instinctively know that he's got a lot to answer for...

Because Adam's relation and feelings about Crowley and Aziraphale are not straightforwardly positive as they were portrayed/implied in the show. Like, the metaphor here is Cold War spies, Crowley and Aziraphale are complicit in Cosmic Imperialism, even if they were mostly interested in minimizing their work and maximizing the amount of fucking about and General Hedonism they were doing. They were on the side of preventing the War from heating over because the Cold War status que benefited them, but that's not quite the same as being good for Humanity, as far as Adam is concerned. And while he calls both of them out equally, the narrative focuses on Crowley's emotional reaction.

although it did also affected Aziraphale as well, because all of this, Crowley's being faced with the consequences of his mischief and the way humans must feel about them, Aziraphale losing the last bits of faith he had in Heaven... That all leads into the closest thing in previous GO Canon to the GO3 Ending.

It is the culmination for their arcs here. The whole recurring thing about how Aziraphale is supposed to intrinsically always do the right thing and Crowley has no choice but to do 'Evil', going all the way back to their first discussion in Eden. Crowley and Aziraphale both realize that however inconsequential and/or benevolent their work might've seen to them, it did cause a lot of troubles for humanity, they are the main representative of Heaven and Hell on Earth right now, so they need to take responsibility for that, by sacrificing themselves to give the Humans time to escape Literal Satan.

Of course, the central joke here is that this is far too dramatic for a silly comedy like Good Omens, and that Crowley and Aziraphale are just not the Heroes, or even Anti-Heroes, of the story. So the actual protagonist, Adam, comes in and solve the entire problem for everyone causality-free...

And then they just... settle back into their old ways, more or less. Because, again, they're just a couple of complicit selfish hedonists at the end of the day (but it's okay because they're OUR complicit selfish hedonists uwu). The other joke here is that this whole story was about shades of grey, and it's kinda okay if Crowley and Aziraphale only ever wanted to help Earth and Humanity out of their own self interest. That's actually very Human of them. the main thing they actually seem to learn out of it all is Crowley’s new found realization (until he gets mindwiped) about the sheer Scope of God’s Ineffability and control of everything that happened. Which is kinda the other biggest set-up to GO3, but is played up much more… joviality here.

I can... understand the logic that if you're doing any sort of Good Omens continuation where Crowley and Aziraphale are the actual Main Protagonists, that means you have to circle again to the Sacrifice but this time actually going through with it. Like, I honestly believe there are very little story concepts that are Inherently Bad, it’s all about execution, the devil’s in the details, so to speak. TV Omens just failed to meaningfully build up to that ‘Sacrifice’ at the end of GO3 for so so many reasons. This post is already long enough as it is, I can’t even begin to list them all. But a big factor is that we kinda…. lost the arcs that led into it the first go around. They were both already kinda trying to retire from their jobs. Aziraphale had an arc about getting disillusioned with Heaven in GO1, only for the show to walk back on it and have him, even minutes before the supposed ‘culmination’ of his arc, still hold the perception that Angels = Inherently Good.

And meanwhile, Crowley got even less. The switch from “let’s just run away from it all and be happy together” to “we have to sacrifice ourselves for all of humanity” happened way too abruptly and with very little actual connective tissue. Partly because that connective tissue used to be made from all the rougher edges and sharper corners that were gradually sanded off TV!Crowley.

And like, if the point of GO3 is to kinda deconstruct GO1’s optimism about Free Will at the face of an omnipotent and omniscient deity… instead of pulling on these random Crowley Quotes in the Climax even though they kinda make the opposite point of what this ending is trying to say and make it seem like after all of this journey, we still can’t actually find something more insightful to say then what was printed in the start of the 1990 book….

Why not give these lines the full ‘Resurrectionist’ treatment? Like, take a bit that was presented in the Book in a more ambiguous manner and spend some time REALLY deconstructing and arguing against it?

Have Crowley start out espousing those lines about Free Will and how he doesn’t really have it but how Humans have it and that’s wonderful, then have an experience that gets him disillusioned with the concept, while also facing the realization he was kinda using this logic to Justify Being an Asshole (or because he genuinely felt he had to please Hell to be safe but also wanted to prove how Smart he is, or because it was one of the few outlets to his creativity he had left available to him or…)

Well, the big hitch with the whole thing is the whole ‘Universe Reset’ thing, the more involvement, even comedic intentionally silly involvement, Crowley canonically has in Mortal affairs the Weirder it becomes that the new godless universe is implied to be ours and is, on the surface, 100% identical to the original timeline. But, like… that aspect of the Finale also Sucked Ass for Many Reasons, so I certainly wouldn’t mind another excuse for dropping it. Just have Crowley and Aziraphale sacrifice their immortality and powers to make all the Angels and Demons human, that's a big enough gesture as it is.

I mean, this is just a random suggestion, mostly stream-of-consciousness. You don’t have to reintroduce Crowley’s Actually Doing His Job and Being Damn Good at it to make GO3 make sense. And I don’t think that exploring Crowley’s mischief means you have to build up towards a GO3 ending either. There are plenty of character arcs and character conclusions you can build off the idea of Crowley doing, and even kinda enjoying, his Job. (I do really think it works well synergizing with an arc about how Selfish the fantasy of abandoning the Earth for Alpha Centauri is. Crowley is absolutely capable of caring and kindness! It’s just that fear, of Hell, of the Apocalypse, makes him shrink down his world to just himself and Aziraphale).

Maybe if you tone it down enough you can even just keep it as just a silly little running gag even… Again, this story is about moral ambiguity and the beauty in moral imperfection, Crowley and Aziraphale are Human enough that they don’t need to be 100% morally upstanding all the time to be lovable protagonists! Having satisfying character arcs as main characters doesn’t have to mean overcoming every single personal foible!

Much as I adore season 1, it does make Crowley and Aziraphale more unambiguously heroic. I did like the idea that TV Crowley was using mischief and mundane misery as his only creative outlet, because TV show Hell was so much worse than the Book Hell. The Book Hell only tortured people for eternity, it wasn't particularly good at crushing your spirit. Book!Crowley was afraid of hell, but he wasn't worried about it destroying who he was. So to me it makes perfect sense that even forever-optimistic Crowley would have a moment where he just wants to snatch up Aziraphale and run away together. It read as a last-ditch effort to me. He didn't believe they could actually escape, it was a dream, all he wanted was for Aziraphale to say yes, that would be lovely, wouldn't it, if only we could? One change I do really dislike about Aziraphale in the show is the bit where he demands Crowley 'do something' about Satan, complete with an accidental sword waving. His foisting the responsibility onto Crowley really was a microcosm of their issues and we didn't get an apology from him the way we did in the book. I've said it before, but I interpret Aziraphale's farewell (I'll have known, deep down inside...) as his acknowledging that he hasn't been good to Crowley. He's disregarded him and dismissed him as 'naturally evil' too many times and he's sorry.

And it would have been lovely to have a version of that apology as a 'repair' for that moment with the sword. I am of the firm belief that Season 3 is simply wrong for what the book was trying to say about grey morality and hope for the world even when it's about to end. I think it's Gaiman's darker creative streak coming in. I don't attribute it to his being a terrible human being - it's just how he is as an artist. He's a cynical person who prefers malevolent, uncaring gods toying with humanity over people learning to be good to each other. Very occasionally his work has some optimism in there, but generally speaking he's a bit of a knife-twister.

we're looking to create an AI policy, and when we were talking about this, my boss (older millennial) was genuinely shocked to hear that younger people do not (seem) to view AI positively (a la the recent commencement speakers being booed)

please rb for larger sample size!

Question 1/3

Thank you for helping with this data collection. Please rb for as big a sample as possible!

This homeless person is making me uncomfortable. Should I call [a man with a gun]?

My neighbor is having a loud party. Should I get [a man with a gun] involved?

There are some teenagers skateboarding. Do you think [a man with a gun] would get rid of them for me?

The media (owned by rich people) are currently going "WOW? SO CONFUSING! BAD LABOR BUDGET BAD! MASSIVE TAX HIKES!" but what actually is happening?

Negative gearing ISN'T being abolished. Literally everyone who already benefited from it on their investment portfolios continues to have it. Anyone complaining and saying they're going to raise the rent because it's made things less profitable for them is lying and a scumbag.

The change is going forward any ADDITIONAL properties an investor wants to get tax breaks on can only be applied to NEW builds, thus encouraging investors to build new properties (instead of buying all the currently existing ones and driving prices up). So who is negatively impacted by this? Literally no one. Who does this benefit? Anyone who wants to live in a house because it increases housing supply and makes the housing market less competitive for investors vs home owners.

Really simple.

What about capital gains tax discount? Basically, in the 90s John Howard made it so that when you sold a house you'd get a 50% discount where half of the profit wasn't taxed. Investors went woohoo! Bought up all the affordable houses to drive prices up and make a big profit. It fueled the housing crisis for the past 30 years. But Labor went "actually, what if we just tax it at 30% instead with no discount?" So instead of half of the money being tax free, it's all taxed. You know... like how making money normally works???

30% is still actually lower than the top two income tax brackets so rich people will still manage to make lots of money without having to work BUT... they'll just have to pay a little tax. BUT only on profit. If a property makes a loss it's not taxed. The amount of tax is also adjusted down relative to inflation so a $100,000 profit isn't taxed $30,000 but actually less depending on how much inflation happened during the time the asset was held.

Also capital gains tax doesn't apply to the home you live in so unless you're a property investor YOU'RE NOT GETTING TAXED! THE VAST MAJORITY OF AUSTRALIANS ARE NOT BEING AFFECTED HERE AND YET WE'RE SEEING WIDE PUBLIC OUTRAGE OVER A TAX DESIGNED TO MAKE THE HOUSING MARKET LESS COMPETITIVE AND THUS EASIER FOR HOME OWNERS TO ENTER IT.

This budget literally mostly just slightly inconveniences the 1% of investors who own a WHOPPING 25% OF INVESTMENT PROPERTIES IN AUSTRALIA.

The capital gains tax discount was never for working Australians! It was never for you! It was always just a tax perk for investors to encourage them to buy up houses away from those who needed them and hike up rents. Labor fixed that.

No wonder the rich media moguls and politicians who make most of their money off property investments like Pauline Hanson and Angus Taylor are mad about it and want YOU to be mad too. They don't want to pay taxes! Booo! The problem is: if we can't get the uber-wealthy to pay a little bit of tax then YOU will NEVER own a home!

So the changes are really simple. They're mild. And yet the right is outraged over how it even slightly benefits working and ordinary Australians.

I recently listened to the radio drama Good Omens and absolutely fell in radio! azicrow

They literally old married couple okay

So may I present my own casting choice for Odysseus:

Absolutely not

You know who would try that shit?

Is this the face of a man who would defy the very gods to get home to his wife?

You know who would defy the gods just to show he could get away with it?

And I'm just so tired of the "well they werent REALLY IN LOVE they were just dumb teenagers with hormones" take.

What do you mean "not really" in love? They werent real people. They are fictional characters. The story says they are in love. The omniscient chorus says they are in love. The themes of the entire play are built on the fact that they are in love.

So what does it add to undermine that except as an excuse to not engage authentically with the story? To suggest that actually it's the two teenagers fault that they died because they were being stupid and hormonal, rather than society and their families for the senseless hate that forced them to extreme measures? Does that seem like Shakespeare's intent? Does that seem like an interesting or useful reading, or as a cop out reason to role your eyes and refuse to engage with the play at all?

it’s about the way their parents and families failed to love them enough, or failed to demonstrate that love adequately.  it’s about how putting pride and honor and revenge above things like “love” and “the safety and happiness of your children” is a shitty way to parent.

But I do want to push back on the idea that Romeo and Juliet are "dumbass teenagers."

The things people generally point to as them being dumb tends to be fast/impulsive decisions, but there are reasons in the narrative for why they are forced to make those decisions quickly. The violence and Juliets impending arranged marriage put them on a timer that they didn't choose. If they had waited, not gotten married, not been together on their wedding night- they might have lived, but they also wouldn't have had even those few fleeting hours together.

Juliets feigned suicide with the sleeping potion is supposed to allow her to sneak away with Romeo without escalating the bloodshed by getting Romeo accused of kidnapping, and without her being forced into the *deadly sin* of adultery if she were forced to marry while already being married. She BEGS her parents for more time, to delay the marriage to Paris so she can think of something better, and is told no.

And the plan WOULD have worked if the messenger had successfully reached Romeo- but didn't because of plague slowing travel.

To see kids go from ‘I don’t want to read Shakespeare, love is gross, school is dumb’ to boldly debating who’s more at fault for what happened to Romeo and Juliet, and also other characters like tybalt ! oooh the kids always love tybalt. and they blame Romeo a little for his death, but they also blame the adults, and the culture, and the messaging that both Romeo and tybalt are given as young men.

One student, a struggling reader I was working with, who is also one of our EL students, was completing an assignment this year where for part of a class, students take a character, write a paragraph about how that character would translate to the modern day, and then draw the modern day version of the character. He didn’t know where to start with the writing, so I told him to start with the drawing first, then we would work on the writing together. At first he didn’t know which character to even start with, so I read some of the shorter lines from some of the characters in the most recently assigned section, and I forget exactly what it was but it was something about Tybalt being described by another character, he stopped me. He said he wanted to do Tybalt. I asked him why and how he wanted to make Tybalt modern.

He started the drawing and while he worked, he told me about his older brother who taught him to play soccer, a fast and skilled athlete, who hasn’t been able to play much recently because he took a part time job to help out the family. Who laughs loudly and takes every opportunity to be active, but who also cares deeply for his loved ones and would defend them. He sketched out a (very rough sketch, he’s an athlete at an arts school, he’s doing his best) drawing of a tall boy in a soccer jersey, shin guards, cleats, and wrote in pencil at the bottom, ‘[his brother’s first name] prince of cats’ all lowercase. Then we worked on talking through his paragraph. At the end of class, when students could pick up their phones from the phone holder, he wanted to show me a picture of his brother, mostly joking with me, to try to convince me that he did actually put effort into his very quick very rough sketch. But also probably because I let him tell me about his older brother, who he clearly idolizes, as younger brothers sometimes do.

When the class got to the death scene and were reading and discussing it, this student spoke up and said he didn’t blame Romeo. He wanted to know how were the characters supposed to know that they are defending the same family (since Romeo had married in to the family secretly right before this fight scene) and wanted to know why no one taught them to talk things over first before fighting. He referred to Romeo and Tybalt as family a few times in that discussion, getting so specific about reminding other students that they’re related to each other now, and didn’t get the chance to figure that out because they always have to be fighting.

I think after this year, every time I read or teach R + J, I will always picture this student’s older brother playing the role of Tybalt.