So If We Are In A Simulation Or In A Game And Someone Is Playing Us Idle Animation Would Be Just Zoning

I'm in the middle of Netflix's drifting home and my GOd IT IS SaD just warning for people that this movie is SAd

I don't know what his name is but this is my favorite dino saur

What is your favorite dinosaur?

Triceratops

Frank look I haven't read the book of Good Omens but you have to admit the show is good

Title: Good Omens

Author: Neil Gaiman

Rating: 1/5 stars

I picked this book up at the library because I remembered seeing a few positive reviews, but then I saw a bunch of negative reviews, and the implication that these books are somehow the shibboleth by which one may judge one’s literary taste (or, indeed, that all right-thinking people must like these books) set me against them. (When I was in high school in the early ‘00s, for instance, I was harassed and threatened because my taste in books and music didn’t conform to my peers’ ideas of what people like me are supposed to like. I’m still quite sensitive about it.)

After a bit of procrastination I picked up Good Omens, having heard that it was odd in a good way. As it turned out, it was both good and odd, but it wasn’t the kind of odd that I like.

What is it like? Well, it reminded me a bit of Turtle Diary – that is, it has a great deal of odd detail, all used with an eye towards creating a vivid image. But where Turtle Diary managed this with a deft, artful touch, Good Omens is obsessive. In Turtle Diary you get “Four different forms of religious sign and symbol”: the cross, the Star of David, a crescent moon, and a life raft. In Good Omens you get plant symbols and animal symbols and religious symbolism and religious symbolism based on every ancient and forgotten pantheon there ever was, and the name of every seraph and cherub and angel and demon to ever be mentioned in the Bible, and everything else. You get a whole list of band names that look like gibberish, because if there’s one thing a demon ought to be named after, it’s a band. Needless to say, this casts a long shadow, and every single line, and even every single sentence, is supposed to be not only vivid but also full of meaning and with some sort of cultural reference, even if the reference itself is nonsensical. And often, as in this example, it means that the line will be awfully goofy, no matter what the ostensible subject matter is.

I don’t mind when the vivid detail is organized and aiming toward a particular effect, but there are a lot of minor quirks in the book’s prose, without any discernible pattern. Sometimes it seems to be going for a style of Victorian dialogue, and then it’ll go off on some digression about something that’s supposed to be modern or some-or-other, or it’ll switch to the conventions of head-hopping in modern fiction (the book’s two protagonists, angel and demon, each get “perspective chapters” not just about their own thoughts but their own bodies and feelings), and then it’ll jump back to a dialogue with no word-order changes and different sentence structure from the rest of the book, or to a form of prose that is clearly supposed to be a pastiche of classic literature, and then back to modern head-hopping, to make sure that you keep track of who’s doing what to whom and what they’re saying.

I kept waiting for the effect to reveal itself, and it never did. On the one hand, I can see that Gaiman was trying to do something like Anna Karenina, in which a cast of vivid and realistic characters is put through a sort of symbolic dance in a circus ring of the author’s devising. A lot of people like Anna Karenina, and I think this is because Tolstoy gives his characters a lot of interiority and their relationships a lot of psychological weight. Gaiman also does this in one regard, but … well, what’s the opposite of “psychological weight”? I think it would be “unreliable narrator,” and Gaiman doesn’t quite give that, but a lot of his characters seem unreliable, both in terms of their self-deception and in terms of his self-deception in painting a picture of them and their interactions. Gaiman has some skills as a writer (for instance, creating a sense of humor without playing for laughs), but those skills simply aren’t enough to make him a good writer of the kinds of things that people like about his books.

More vexing, in a sense, than Gaiman’s creative approach is his creative attitude. He seems to have no interest in coming up with original ideas about anything, except in the most superficial sense – as a result, the book feels like a literary junkyard, filled with patches from books and myths and musicals and films and whatever else, unconnected to one another except by the fact that all of them come from the same junkyard.

This might be a lot more acceptable if it didn’t run into the problem that one of the book’s main characters is a woman who runs a bookshop, and this woman – the owner of the world’s single most well-stocked used bookstore, it seems – talks in a weirdly specialized way about books that she read and enjoyed when she was 11, but, on the off-chance that her audience includes someone in her same age bracket, has to talk in the sort of generic awe- and wonder-pilled, “cool literature” style you might expect from the social media of a 13 year old who has never encountered anyone who doesn’t appreciate literature.

There are two things about this that bothered me, one more than the other. The first is obviously an unnatural over-familiarity with these authors and their works, just as would be the case with the 13 year old in the example I gave. The other is the way Gaiman presents a woman as having read in depth and gotten something from a book in her past, even though she only actually mentions a couple of chapters, the plot of the book in question, and a general atmosphere – which is more or less how I would talk about those books, if I had to talk about them at all. Oh, and I mentioned earlier the way Gaiman uses pop culture terms to refer to things from the past and the present. The strange thing is that he doesn’t show any interest in the actual thing – like, it’s hard to imagine that anyone who actually knew anything about them would have said “Oh, you mean she’s reading Colette and Poirot! How very stereotypical and appropriate of a woman!” – which, I can’t stress enough, is how Gaiman mentions these books.

I have no idea why this bothers me as much as it does, or why Gaiman seems to be inviting this kind of questioning in the first place.

WTF TREEE TRUNKS DIE FROM HER APPLE NOO

Wtfff whyyhy

I wanna cry broo

Puckicho stop implying you're God... because you're not

I lived in Taiwan for a time and I saw monkeys swing on trees 

Thank god

I'd like to think this is a weird sort of roundabout way the circus came to be

So it's that time of the year again where I watch over the garden wall

SO HERE IS MY ART