I'm starting a collection

The fact that Microsoft Word has to be a subscription is upsetting. I already paid for it why do I have to pay again

Yes please be mad about it, genuinely- You used to be able to purchase a single disk to install it and use it forever after that initial purchase of one key. It sickens me to see all this stuff which used to be a one time purchase be shunted under a subscription now.

THIS

"Why is pirating going back up?!"

This. This is why. People don't mind paying a high price for software if it's only the once, or every 4-5 years.

But having to pay a high price regularly? Especially in the cases where you lose access to your own work if you don't?

That's why people are pirating software.

It’s possible to buy a non-subscription version of Word; Microsoft just intentionally makes it very difficult to find (and also expensive).

However, I know a guy who knows a guy website: MS Office Pro for $50. If the link starts going to a Page Not Found, just search the site; they usually have some form of this sale available. 

Worth noting: while $50 is still more money than $yo-ho-ho, that money is a great way to make VERY clear to Microsoft that we DO want one-time-purchase products, not subscriptions.

My laptop just died. If it can't be fixed and I need to replace it, this post is gonna be a real life saver, because my family has been sharing an old version of Word that came with a limited number of lifetime licenses, and we're fresh out.

https://www.libreoffice.org/download/download-libreoffice/

Get LibreOffice. It's fully compatible with MS Office, but it's free and open source. You're welcome. :-)

Ok but if you don’t buy the subscription version then you have to pay separately for upgrades. “But I don’t need to upgrade!” you say. And maybe that is sort of true, but if you don’t get updates, you are not getting security patches. If your computer is not in the internet I guess that is fine, but I feel like that isn’t most people and you do want those updates. The sad truth is that it is impossible to write bug free software and the more our functionality uses the internet the more exposed we are to hackers. The security patches and bug fixes matter, and that is a major reason software companies have moved to subscription models, and why people have been willing to put up with it.

Solar eclipse shadows

We were able to get pictures like this with colander.

Ohio Total Solar Eclipse

We were so lucky to have good weather.

Small ways to activate your "happiness" chemicals

DOPAMINE: the reward chemical

• Complete a task

• Doing self care activites

• Eating some food

• Celebrating your little wins.

OXYTOCIN: the love hormones

• Playing with a dog

• Playing with a baby

• Holding hands

• Hugging someone

• Giving someone else a compliment

SEROTONIN: the mood stabiliser

• Meditating

• Running

• Be in the sun

• Walk in nature

• Swimming

ENDORPHIN: the pain relief

• Laughing exercises

• Essential oils

• Eating dark chocolate

• Running

i think "it takes a village" shouldn't be just "to raise a child". we should understand it takes a village to do literally everything we do. all day every day. without our communities we would not have drinking water or electricity or clean streets or food or shelter or anything. we cannot do any thing alone. we just can't. and with that comes the fact that you are not alone. you already have a community, seek to be an active part of it, you will feel better. reach out and thank them, they're happy to have you too. i promise. it takes a village to live.

There are a couple of things about Aziraphale that I think we, as a fandom*, focus too much on and get it slightly wrong in the process.

*= I am talking about the regular Good Omens fandom and Aziraphale fans here, not including the Aziraphale haters, who can skip this post because they wouldn't care or understand anyway.

First of all, yes, Heaven is an abusive work environment. The angels in charge are bullies, while Aziraphale is a sweet little cinnamon roll. Absolutely no question there.

And yes, Aziraphale is scared that his relationship with Crowley is discovered. Again, elementary, my dear Watson.

But he is always much more scared for Crowley, if Hell would ever find out, than he is for himself. He's terrified that something could happen to Crowley (see Edinburgh leading to the whole Holy Water blow-up). He knows, or can at least imagine, what Hell would do to Crowley, and he wouldn't even be able to get to him, much less help. Maybe not even immediately realise when it happened.

But he himself has been lying to God and Heaven from the very beginning (what he says to the Starmaker in Before the Beginning, about not wanting to get him into trouble, proves that he was always wary and filtering his words carefully). He lied directly to God's face right after Eden. And he always got away with it. We see him getting more and more comfortable with it during the millennia.

Yes, he sometimes still gets nervous when he faces a surprise or a new threat and he has to think on his feet, but he does it. Every time.

But we are tending to treat him like a little scaredy cat that lives in constant terror of Heaven, and I don't think that's the case. In later centuries he knows that he can run circles around the archangels when it comes to Earth, because he is the expert and they are absolutely clueless. Earth is his domain, where he holds all the power. (Or at least, all the knowledge, which some philosophies argue is the same.)

And while he is much more naive than his book counterpart in his belief that Heaven is good and Hell is bad, this also isn't as extreme as we sometimes make it out to be.

He knows what Sandalphon did during Sodom and Gomorrah. He knows what God did to people with the Flood. He knows what God did to Job. He was told - or is telling himself - it was just, and even that he already started to doubt. With Job, he knew it wasn't.

He hasn't, as I just read in an otherwise rather similar post, been drilled to believe that the Apocalypse is the end goal. He was taught it was inevitable. That it was Hell's end goal. That Heaven winning (what Hell would start) was inevitable - and just! And that was what made him believe that when he finds a way to make it not inevitable, the other angels would have no choice other than to support him, that God herself would want to support him, because they're supposed to be the good guys. And when he learns that that is not the case, he still immediately goes on to do it by himself. He isn't unsure, after he stepped into the circle, when the military angel tries to draft him for the war, or pondering what he should do. He spends the whole time trying to figure out how to get back to earth, and when he discovers a possibility, he doesn't even hesitate for a second.** And when he leaves Earth to take the job as the Supreme Archangel, he does so because he believes he can change it into what he still thinks it should be, knowing full well what it is.

Now I, personally, am not with the nihilistic / resigned Gen-Z crowd who seem to think that trying to change things is stupid, because only violent revolutions and total destruction of existing structures could achieve any real change, and that Aziraphale somehow has to apologise for believing otherwise and trying. (?) Maybe that's because as an elder millennial I can rest in the knowledge that I won't be around when our planet becomes uninhabitable, or maybe it's because I was actually alive to witness the collapse of the USSR, which, incidentally, was pretty much the same time at which Good Omens was written.

Which brings me to my next point.

I don't want to take anything away from fans who relate to Aziraphale because they themselves have experienced religious trauma. He is certainly a powerful metaphor for it. But Aziraphale the character does not experience religous trauma, because he doesn't experience religion.

The existence of God, of Angels, the creation of the world in 7 days, those are not beliefs for Aziraphale, they are simple facts. He has actually witnessed them, he has worked on some of them himself, he is an angel himself. He knows how everything works (or where it doesn't). He isn't a human who has free will and is supposed to have faith, who gets to interpret and re-interpret and guess at how it all works while forming self-important little groups around it and lay it down as law for anyone who wants to join (or remain). It's simply his job. (Well, job for life, and the whole reason for his own existence, but still his job.) God is literally just his boss. A largely absentee boss, but still his boss. He actually even talked to Her at least once.

For angels and demons, Heaven and Hell are not religions, but simple work environments (with certain accompanying ideologies). In the book, being 30 years older than the show, the two sides are quite open references to the two sides in the cold war, and Crowley and Aziraphale are likened to spies in the field. (Pretty much the only thing remaining from that in the show are the St. James Park Bench scenes.)

And I would like people to start remembering that. Aziraphale is not a traumatized little kid who tries to escape a religious cult. He is a Secret Agent who is walking the very dangerous line of collaborating with an Enemy Secret Agent, undermining both their nations and their ideologies at the same time. (Think John Le Carré characters rather than James Bond.) He is afraid of dangers that are very real, but that he has faced and flaunted during his whole career. He knows what he's doing. Which also means he knows what's at stake. And yeah, that is terrifying, naturally. (Again, John Le Carré writes those kind of spy stories brilliantly.)

But Aziraphale is the fucking Angel of the Eastern Gate. He was issued a flaming sword that he gave away against his orders because he believed it to be the right thing to do. Who befriended his demon enemy because he liked him, more than he ever liked anyone from his own side. And who is basically using the seven deadly sins as a to-do-list. That he has a sweet little face that lights up like a christmas tree when he's happy and in love, or that he still believes in the basic goodness and justice of the world, or that he tries to be kind or at least polite whenever he can, does not take anything away from that.

And for the 2nd Coming in season 3 he will be what Crowley was for Armageddon in season 1: The Inside Man.

**= Here I would also like to add that again, as much as I was disappointed for not getting the tv evangelist scene in the show, book!Aziraphale is still much less naive and more cynical about Heaven's goodness - even while show!Aziraphale's defiance of Heaven is much more outspoken and obvious, I can't actually imagine him delivering the whole "if that's your idea of a morally acceptable time" speech.

I was laid off in 2023, and the thing I thought most about as I watched the end of Good Omens S2 was… if they offered me my job back, would I take it? Would I want to go back? What would make me want to go back? Because there were many things I liked about that job, but, like Heaven in Good Omens, the real problems were at the top.

Also not wanting to take away from anyone’s experience of religious trauma here. But it is fascinating to me how easy it is to superimpose stories of all kinds onto this story.

Voting for Democrats makes a difference.

#VoteBlue

I would definitely read it. I get most of my books from the library but I would definitely ask the library to buy it. It sounds like all the things I like to read - sci-fi/ fantasy and character growth are my favorite things.

It is important to expect nothing, to take every experience, including the negative ones, as merely steps on the path, and to proceed.

Ram Dass

TPP Episode 146: A Study in Fic - "Demonology and the Tri-Phasic Model of Trauma" Part 2

NEW EPISODE! Our very special "Study in Fic" series continues, where we give Good Omens fic, "Demonology and the Tri-Phasic Model of Trauma" the book club treatment. Join long-time fans of this fic, @foxestacado and Charles, re-read this fic with first-time readers, Sofia and Topher, and discuss chapters 5-10.

LISTEN at: https://three-patch.com/2024/01/18/episode-146/

Missed our discussion of Chapters 1-4? Listen here! https://three-patch.com/2023/10/11/episode-145/

It's the second part!

They found some very kind and polite ways of saying, "this is kind of hard to follow" when they got to the densest and most opaque sections. :-D They also analyze Crowley's protective factors in an interesting way, which I'll want to comment on if I can get the druthers.

I can’t wait to listen.

did you know they say calculus is the language of God. did you know they tried to hold math up to infinity like a candle to the void. did you know statisticians plunged into the vastness of random chance and picked out patterns and equations and eight hundred ways to tell you how big your inevitable errors are and how far off those guesses at errors might be. math haters I can't sit with you anymore. human innovation is cradled in these ancient, methodical, desperate attempts at understanding what we are not designed to understand

Much like there are reincarnated lovers, there are reincarnated enemies. This pair, however, has a problem this time around. They reincarnate as siblings this time.

My grandmother used to say that last birth’s enemies are reborn as this birth’s children. 😂

We all deserve this kind of support.

I was lucky for most of my professional career and did not experience any layoffs. The pandemic put an end to that streak, and I have been a part of three layoffs now; one in 2021 and two in 2023. In one of those, I was laid off.

I have very complicated feelings about the whole thing, which I am still working through. I personally think I was treated very humanely throughout the process. A business is, in the end, a group of people trying to accomplish something and if they need a different group of people to accomplish the thing, that is not inherently evil. I was given months of severence, COBRA, and outplacement services to help with resume writing and updating my LinkedIn and I found a new job in four months. The thing I struggle with, and the thing that I may never get over, is that the product I worked in for my whole career is being sidelined despite there not being a viable replacement product for the company. It is clearly the wrong thing to do for the customers and it hasn’t worked out well for all the laid off people either. From what I understand he current employees aren’t doing so great either. Who is benefiting from these crazy decisions? The shareholders? Why should they benefit while employees and customers alike suffer?

Something is wrong with corporate America. The grow or die mentality does not lead us to good outcomes.

Ohio governor vetoes ban on gender-affirming care for minors. 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈

This is a decision to protect lives.

DeWine is an old school republican. He is for extreme abortion bans but is not a crazy MAGA. I don’t like him and would not vote for him but he is the type of Republican I can respectfully disagree with.

Apparently there was some kind of race scheduled at a local park or something so I've been trying to avoid the main trail but a little while ago when I had to cross near it I overheard the following shouted exchange

And goddamn if that didn't rewire my brain a little bit.

Last place is still a place, baby.

I like to jog 5k races and I am very slow. Like my husband WALKS next to me while I jog kind of slow. My motto is, “going is better than not going.”

No disrespect to Neil but this is 100% something they need to get an Indian and preferably Hindu writer to do. This isn’t some story from a long dead religion; this is a religion actively practiced by hundreds of millions of people. Profiting off other cultures is exactly what cultural appropriation is and it is not ok