sampika

[sampika]

for whom good omens is being written

Hey maggots and the rest of the fandom, it's the Good Omens Mascot here. Today I read a post about this tweet:

The accompanying video genuinely made me cry. And I've been thinking about this for a long while, as far back as February, when I saw a lot of conflicting opinions on what people wanted from the third season. It really is true that no matter what you do, some people will be dissatisfied. But what matters is that Neil is writing this for Terry.

And I was reminded of some paragraphs from the Good Omens TV Companion, which I'd read in Amazon's sample excerpt of the book. I know this is a long post, but I really truly do think you all need to read these, I've done my best to select only the most important parts. Here you go:

'His Alzheimer's started progressing harder and faster than either of us had expected,' says Neil, referring to a period in which Terry recognized that despite everything he could no longer write. 'We had been friends for over thirty years, and during that time he had never asked me for anything. Then, out of the blue, I received an email from him with a special request. It read: “Listen, I know how busy you are. I know you don't have time to do this, but I want you to write the script for Good Omens. You are the only human being on this planet who has the passion, love and understanding for the old girl that I do. You have to do this for me so that I can see it." And I thought, “OK, if you put it like that then I'll do it."

'I had adapted my own work in the past, writing scripts for Death: The High Cost of Living and Sandman, but not a lot else was seen. I'd also written two episodes of Doctor Who, and so I felt like I knew what I was doing. Usually, having written something once I'd rather start something new, but having a very sick co-author saying I had to do this?' Neil spreads his hands as if the answer is clear to see. 'I had to step up to the plate.' A pause, then: 'All this took place in autumn 2014, around the time that the BBC radio adaptation of Good Omens was happening,' he continues, referring to the production scripted and co-directed by Dirk Maggs and starring Peter Serafinowicz and Mark Heap. ‘Terry had talked me into writing the TV adaptation, and I thought OK, I have a few years. Only I didn't have a few years,' he says. 'Terry was unconscious by December and dead by March.'

He pauses again. 'His passing took all of us by surprise,' Neil remembers. 'About a week later, I started writing, and it was very sad. The moments Terry felt closest to me were the moments I would get stuck during the writing process. In the old days, when we wrote the novel, I would send him what I'd done or phone him up. And he would say, "Aahh, the problem, Grasshopper, is in the way you phrase the question," and I would reply, "Just tell me what to do!" which somehow always started a conversation. 'In writing the script, there were times I'd really want to talk to Terry, and also places where I'd figure something out and do something really clever, and I would want to share it with him. So, instead, I would text Terry's former personal assistant, Rob Wilkins, now his representative on Earth. It was the nearest thing I had.'

(...) As Neil himself recognizes, this is an adaptation built upon the confidence that comes from three decades of writing for page and screen. But for all the wisdom of experience, he found that above all one factor guided him throughout the process. 'Terry isn't here, which leaves me as the guardian of the soul of the story,' he explains. 'It's funny because sometimes I found myself defending Terry's bits harder or more passionately than I would defend my own bits. Take Agnes Nutter,' he says, referring to what has become a key scene in the adaptation in which the seventeenth-century author of the book of prophecies foretelling the coming of the Antichrist is burned at the stake. ‘It was a huge, complicated and incredibly expensive shoot, with bonfires built and primed to explode as well as huge crowds in costume. It had to feel just like an English village in the 1640s, and of course everyone asked if there was a cheap way of doing it. 'One suggestion was that we could tell the story using old-fashioned woodcuts and have the narrator take us through what happened, but I just thought, “No”. Because I had brought aspects of the story like Crowley and the baby swap along to the mix, and Terry created Agnes Nutter. So, if I had cut out Agnes then I wouldn't be doing right by the person who gave me this job. Terry would've rolled over in his grave.'

And, finally, this paragraph:

"Once again, Neil cites the absence of his co-writer as his drive to ensure that Good Omens translated to the screen and remained true to the original vision. 'Terry's last request to me was to make this something he would be proud of. And so that has been my job.'"

I think that's so heartwrenchingly beautiful, and so I wanted you all to read this, too, just in case you (like me) don't have the Good Omens TV Companion. It adds another layer of depth and emotion to this already complex and amazing story that we all know and love.

Share this post, if you can, please, so that more people can read these excerpts :")

Tagging @neil-gaiman, @fuckyeahgoodomens and @orpiknight, even if you've definitely read these before :)

[sampika]

#rubber duckie....

[sampika]

i’m spending today thinking about how saber toothed cats ALSO probably had a potato form.  how they also had a stage where they were fat little babies with very triangle tails and tiny squeaky voices.  how they also probably play wrestled and failed badly at calculating jumps.

i’m going to fistfight god for killing them off before i could personally see fat potato saber kittens

[sampika]

"Tumblr is my bedroom" this "tumblr is a pinboard" that

Tumblr is an apartment complex with thin walls and every so often you just have to listen to your neighbors say the most deranged shit imaginable

[sampika]

Origami knight made from a single piece of paper with not cuts or tears.

Video of how it was done below

#thats some wizard shit #i cannot comprehend

[sampika]

jonathan harker on may 12th: i witnessed with abject terror as the count descended the sheer stone wall of the castle face first as a lizard would. the unmitigated horror of the spectacle haunts my waking hours like an inescapable nightmare. this man or this thing shall surely be my undoing.

jonathan harker on may 15th: saw the old bastard do the crawling trick again and honestly fuck him it's not even that impressive i don't even care anymore i hope he falls.

[sampika]

some fun facts about the production of hamlet i’m in right now:

the ghost never appears physically

ghost scenes take place in complete darkness, lit only by the guards’ flashlights

rosencrantz and guildenstern’s first entrance involves a tango choreographed to beyoncé’s “crazy in love”

other transition music includes “applause” by lady gaga, “loveless” by lorde, “only angel” by harry styles, and “a little party never killed nobody”

gertrude is either drunk or hungover for the entire play

when polonius encounters hamlet to find the cause of his madness, hamlet is reading a copy of “infinite jest”

rosencrantz and guildenstern try to seduce hamlet into a threesome

they also try to seduce claudius

at intermission laertes goes onstage to practice his swordplay and flirt with the audience members in french. osric watches him from behind the curtain and takes notes

the pirates who deliver letters to horatio are dressed in trench coats, sunglasses, and fedoras

fortinbras is a thirteen-year-old boy

and finally:

hamlet doesn’t give the “to be or not to be” speech. horatio does. at the end of the play. over hamlet’s body

#oh this i HAVE to watch when i have time

[sampika]

I was reading something about Whitestown, Indiana and my eyes nearly popped out of my head thinking it was one of THOSE comically racist towns. Nice to know, at least the name, wasn’t that.

[sampika]

Lena losing her patience and furiously berating Gwen for potentially endangering the staff members of the OAIR is quite literally the opposite of how Elias ran the Archives.

Elias used the Archival staff—as well as his Archivist—as pawns that can be readily replaced as needed. His patron offered them minimal protections at best (the Archivist’s privileges notwithstanding), and even then, he would never actually intervene to save any of them if they were in danger, much less take precautions to protect them at their headquarters. They are used as bait, as sacrifices, as currency, as objects. The listener knows, eventually, how easily he could discard them if his plans called for it.

But Lena. This episode showed us that Lena keeps her entire organization running through keeping her subordinates hidden, safe, and unnoticed by the Externals. It’s quite clear through her conversation with Gwen that such a safety risk has never happened before.

As far as we know, Lena has successfully kept all of her employees alive, watched them come and go, bemoaned the turnover rate, and then got them to look the other way while they documented and dutifully filed the horrors.

But most impressive of all, she’s kept her real work hidden from her subordinates, and her subordinates hidden from her real work—a feat Elias had no interest or desire to accomplish.

#tmp #tmagp #tmagp spoilers

[sampika]

I love it when modern adaptations of old books opt to be loyal to the book's cultural context instead of the specific details of the characters/settings. Like if one character written in a specific era is depicted as being annoyingly obsessed with pocket watches, specifically as a way of illustrating that this man is a fashion-obsessed airheaded fop, it wouldn't make sense in the same way in the 21st century, pocket watches would be an extremely odd and interesting hobby for a modern young man, so it doesn't have the same context. Make that mf a sneakerhead.

Or a specific scene that's constantly used as an example for arguments of "I don't like [the book heroine] because she hates horses", when originally the point of the scene was that all this talk about horse breeds and some specific stud's ankle angles is also going over her head, and it's more of a "send help, car guys won't stop talking about cars" situation.

[sampika]

I’m a cis man sure but i also wanna opt out of the gender binary. None of that shit is my fault or my responsibility and i don’t want any part of it

[sampika]

being so fr with you all we need to drastically accelerate anti-car propaganda.

we need to make it so clear to future generations that we no longer tolerate a world where you cannot conveniently go for a walk or get a coffee or get groceries without a car

[sampika]

I love the use of the phrase 'some strange alchemy' as a descriptor for a process you don't understand.

'Through some strange alchemy(crochet) they turned a bundle of yarn into a stuffed giraffe'

'Through some strange alchemy(bad cooking) they turned a perfectly marinated steak into a charcoal briquet'

'Through some strange alchemy(good cooking) they turned a pile of slop into the fluffiest bread loaf I'd ever seen'

'Through some strange alchemy(bad reading comprehension) they took my polite statement and turned into a disgusting act against the poor'

and so on

[sampika]

Doing more than one? Choose whichever you found the most helpful. ❤️

[sampika]

[sampika]

in times like these i realise i really belong to a community (ao3 down, hundreds of readers flooding tumblr and twitter to talk about it, we were all there at the same time and all faced the same enemy (ao3 being down))

#i was on the first day of a v long road trip so i was lucky to have at leasted opened an entire 80k work and had the page pre loaded

[sampika]

I’m sorry, I can’t come into work today. I didn’t get a long rest and god gave me a point of exhaustion. All my skill checks are at disadvantage.