Let’s talk about nightingales.

The specific way "A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square" is invoked at the end of the Good Omens Book is like… the whole reason the original song also invoked that imagery of a Nightingale in Barkley Square is because that would be an unusual, whimsical thing to happen. Nightingales prefer rural areas and wouldn’t make it all the way to the very center of London, so if you heard one that would be just as special and magical as the moment you met the Love of Your Life.

And then in ‘Good Omens’ this reference comes during Sunday, which shows that although Adam has brought the world ‘back to normal’, things have still changed. In terms of character arcs, in terms of how Adam had restored things, in terms of him using his powers just one last time to nudge things for the people he cares about, and in this case, in terms of the idea of reality having been already twisted into a pretzel by a little boy who honestly wanted to believe that the world was a wonderful place having some ‘fallout’…

The world has become a slightly more magical place, so that as Angels (or at least two beings of ‘Angel Stock’) dine (romantically?) at the Ritz, this whimsical little moment from a love song actually happens in real life. It’s a tiny little moment of ‘Magic’, not obviously supernatural, but still unusual in a way that is already a familiar shorthand to a Special Magical Moment. Crowley and Aziraphale themselves were unaware of it, it’s imperceptible over the mundanity of daily routine (the noise of the traffic), but that moment of whimsy still happened, and it still mattered.

It’s a poignant little moment even without knowing it’s referencing a specific song. I actually didn’t know of “A Nightingale Sang in Barkley Square” basically up until the TV Show came out, but I still felt like the ending of the Ineffable Husbands’ segment of Sunday was very effective. Whatever is going to happen next, whatever God and Heaven and Hell are planning…. There’s a little songbird singing in the very middle of the city, and even if they didn’t know of it, even if no one else noticed it, that still mattered. And obviously with knowing the song, there’s also this added romantic subtext to it, of God or Adam or maybe just the Universe/Reality itself giving a little nod of approval at Crowley and Aziraphale’s partnership.

And then the way the GO2 Ending tried to reference it, it was maybe a little weird to have the Husbands be aware of ‘the nightingales’. Like, it was actually very thematically important in the original ending that the nightingale sung despite no one hearing that it’s there. But like, obviously Crowley and Aziraphale would at least be aware that there is a very famous love song about ‘Angels’ dining at their favorite restaurant and also nightingales. And maybe the nightingale being unnoticeable is part of the Point. Crowley can’t hear the nightingale singing in the middle of London (his and Aziraphale’s happiness, their love, hope, the everyday miracles of life), but we know that this doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s not there, just under the noise of the traffic…

But then fucking GO3 came along and totally botched any sort of meaning the nightingales are supposed to have outside of the most basic, surface level symbolism of ‘Nightingales = Crowley and Aziraphale’s happy ending’.

A nightingale singing near some rural cottage, it’s, I mean I guess it’s still nice because nightingales singing is nice, but this is a considerably less special and whimsical moment then a nightingale singing in Barkley Square because that’s literally why it’s in the goddam song! I guess this is a world without Supernatural elements now and this is supposed to be beautiful, so we can’t even have the little not-technically-explicitly-supernatural magic of a bird singing somewhere it’s unlikely to be! Only plausible reasonable birds singing where the birds are plausibly reasonably going to be! This is like what an insulting parody of an Atheist in a cartoon by Fundies will say would make for a ‘good ending’……

And then we only know there’s a Nightingale because Anthony explicitly points out ‘hey, did you hear that nightingale?’. We moved from a little moment that mattered even if no one noticed that it happened, that we can believe in and hope for even without directly perceiving it, to one that only exists because of the characters blatantly pointing out that it happened. Would that nightingale still ‘be there, right enough’, narratively speaking, symbolically speaking, if Anthony didn’t notice it? And then also, we don’t even actually know it was a nightingale!

I mean, to be quite honest, the shift from Crowley and Aziraphale’s love and happiness and hope being symbolized by a rare but never totally impossible moment of mundane magic that definitely exists and matters even when it’s not directly perceived… you know, the way love and happiness and hope are, to Asa and Anthony’s Happily Ever After being a considerably more Mundane and Reasonable thing that only really exists because we are told it’s there and even then maybe it’s not, that is like the perfect symbol of a massive downgrade Fellony is compared to the Ineffable Husbands in every possible regard.

The one silver lining to Gaiman being way too involved with fandom is that we have the receipts for what a lying sack of shit he is.

Assuming go3 and the whole "free will is a hoax" is actually Neil, there isn't a single lie in there, just misdirection. Read it carefully. He never says "angels have free will". He asks a question with an apparently obvious answer and lets you run with it. "Angels have whatever humans have" - he never says humans have free will, and according to go3, they don't, and neither do angels. "How did Lucifer rebel?" - according to go3, it was because god wanted him to.

Hate to break it to you, but based on these quotes, Neil never lied. He simply misdirected.

The text of the book and S1 is very explicit that humans have free will. There are multiple instances specifically mentioning it. So if "angels have whatever humans have," then yes, angels and demons should also have free will. Then he did a 180 in GO3 and said free will wasn't real with no previous textual support or discussion. Also, lying by omission is still lying.

We live in a system that makes money off of your misery and ambivalence. It relies on people thinking that they are inherently bad for the planet and that the world is ending so why change? Why try? --This is untrue! We belong here, on this one beautiful green earth and we have to work together to protect it. You have the power to do more than you know. You have a role to play in your ecosystem!

some of my favourite additions/examples in tags

[last screenshot is of asthedeathoflight's tags, their url didnt fit in a screenshot]

we are not either above, below or separate from the natural world. we did not just appear out of nowhere completely outside of the natural order, we are the product of the natural order, just like everything else.

yes, there is a minority of humans who are destructive and violent, but just like how a couple "man-eating" sharks shouldnt make you hate the whole species, neither should the minority group of billionaires and capitalists and warmongers taint *our* entire species. keep your hate targeted at those who deserve it (those at the top, those in power doing nothing, those corrupted by greed), and keep your hope plentiful!

First everybody was mad bc they ‘weren’t human’ so they couldn’t be considered to “really” be in love / get down / wtf ever.

Now they’re human and they saved the rest of humanity and they’re clearly together years later still in love so

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ????

What a baffling take.

I've been in this fandom for 7 years and I've never seen anyone say they couldn't love because they're not human.

I think OP misread what those people were saying. Before season 3, some fans wanted them to become human in the end so they could love each other SAFELY. So that they can "really" be in love as opposed to hiding it all the time. But the bit where they were actually in love, that was regardless of their species. It didn't matter if they were human or not. We all just wanted them safe. And safe they never got to be.

It's still not really safe for gay men to be together in many places in the world, though. And anti-queer policies are on the rise. I don't think being human makes them safer. And it gives them much less time together.

soliloquy by an immortal cave painter.

pencil, ink, and ochre on paper

First everybody was mad bc they ‘weren’t human’ so they couldn’t be considered to “really” be in love / get down / wtf ever.

Now they’re human and they saved the rest of humanity and they’re clearly together years later still in love so

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ????

What a baffling take.

I've been in this fandom for 7 years and I've never seen anyone say they couldn't love because they're not human.

fucked up to me that some people dont let their pets on the furniture. you have this little guy in your house and youre not gonna let them sit on the couch with you? no kitty on the bed? incomprehensible.

So the thing is that the issue of the Afterlife in the original GO Universe is basically the one area where you can make the argument that this was a problem so grand and terrible that it justifies the Universe Reset. I mean, I'm not saying everyone would've accepted it still, but there would at least be more grounds to stand on then with with the Free Will thing the Show actually chose to focus on despite the many many levels on which this just Does Not Make Sense.

Like, yeah, we did not nearly get enough focus on how the GO Afterlife work to really justify hinging the entire climax of the Show on it. But all the information we did get on it made it seem like a truly abysmal state of affairs; Humans are judged based on very harsh and inhuman standards - based on the very small number of 'top rated musicians' who managed to make it into Heaven, for example... Hell is some cartoonishly awful torture (even if our only direct example of what it's like came from a bunch of Unsympathetic Actual Literal Nazis……), while the states of Souls in Heaven is… frustratingly unclear.

So, yeah, on the one hand this part of the setting never got a lot of narrative attention and detail, but what little we do know does make it sound extremely unfair and horrible towards the Humans. It's not like the Free Will thing where it's this big philosophical conundrum where previously canon had a pretty positive outlook on its existence in this universe, or God, who has been presented in a generally more ambivalent light. This is an Objectively Terrible Thing inherent to just how that Universe works and you can argue that it's something that must be fixed maybe even with the price of something as radical as a Universe Reset…

But on the other other hand, if we did have any sort of focus on the Afterlife (in the Decision itself and in a narrative hypothetically actually building up to it), we'd have to contend with the fact that GO3 isn't just arguing that Heaven & Hell's Afterlife System being Bad justifies a whole Universe Reset, but also it's so bad that it justifies replacing it with Nothing. (Like, even if Asa and Anthony are Aziraphale and Crowley reincarnated on some level, the Universe that the Ineffables asked of God was a ‘Godless Universe’, and clearly this means like, a scientifically-accurate Atheistic Universe. When they asked for ‘No Heaven and No Hell’ that clearly insinuated ‘No Afterlife’, and the narrative framed Crowley and Aziraphale as Correct and Heroic and Selfless for asking for something like that, whatever or not this is what they actually got. And I can actually understand the logic by which Crowley and Aziraphale got ‘reincarnated’ on a There Is No Lore, There Is Only Meaning level… but then also whatever Meaning this ending was going for clearly hinges on the idea that this world is the Real Godless Afterlife-less World that we live in…)

And, y’know, there’s a huge difference between, from a Real-World perspective where we can't truly know if an Afterlife exists or not, to develop worldview that values the life we do know we have, and, in a universe where the Afterlife and Souls do exist, to argue that this is Inherently Bad and we’d all be better off if our consciousness disappeared after death. I get this is all a metaphor for an Atheistic Critique of Christian Fundamentalism. But within the In-Universe literal angle of the story, it’s pretty hard to ignore the fact that if Souls did exist and did last after Death, suddenly deciding that they shouldn’t kinda feel like killing them. Like, for Someone’s Sake, ‘destroying the Afterlife completely’ was the scheme of the Big Bad in the Grand Finale of ‘Adventure Time’. And that guy’s whole characterization is that he’s the Embodiment of Extinction and most single-minded Evil guy ever. Destroying the concept of Souls and removing the Afterlife when we already know it exists is Literal Cartoon Villain Shit in most cases.

But I'm not even saying that "The Afterlife is Bad, Death Should be the End" is an inherently Bad Argument, but this is a very very difficult thing to argue for and convince your audience of. Like, even from an Atheistic perspective... From my Atheist Perspective, the Afterlife is a concept invented by Humans, because it is a very very Human thing to wish for. You’re going to work very hard to establish why the Afterlife would deserve to be Abolished completely and/or why a cessation of existence is an acceptable solution. And Good Omens obviously did not do any of this hard work.

And, especially since the Afterlife itself is a general concept with so many variations, it’s also hard work to convince your audience that ‘people get tormented for Eternity for minor transgressions' versus 'everyone's consciousness gets wiped out' are the only options they can pick from. Like, it’s absolutely not rare to find Religious People in the Real World who believe there’s some sort of Medium Place for morally-average people, or that Hell isn’t actually that bad if you’re not a bad person, or that only a very very very small amount of Really Bad People actually go to Hell, or that Hell is only temporary and everyone gets to Heaven eventually. And that’s without getting into Afterlives that don’t have any clear Heaven/Hell equivalents at all, or Afterlife Systems in fiction. There’s a reason why most stories about the Afterlife being Bad go with an Afterlife Reform as their solution.

I mean, when the original Good Omens book also tried to criticizes the concept of an Afterlife, it very wisely chose to do it not from the fantastical in-universe perspective of whatever it should exist - but from the angle of Belief in the Afterlife, the Angle that the Readers are engaging with that concept in the Real World. Adam argues that people being told there is an Afterlife and that it’ll be all ‘sorted out after they’re dead’ is preventing people from valuing and fixing the world that they live in. Both an easier argument to sell then saying there shouldn’t be an Afterlife, and one that is actually relevant to the Audience.

And then, of course, the Universe Reset didn’t even really address this one argument Adam made. Because if the New Universe really is supposed to be Our Universe, whatever or not there's an Afterlife, there are obviously a whole lot of people who still believe it will all be sorted out after they're dead!

Yup. Erasing the old universe means not just killing the 8 billion people + 20 million angels/demons, but ??? billions of already dead souls. Are they getting reincarnated to fill out the new quarter million years of human history? Or are they just gone?

I kinda feel like "should there be an afterlife (even a terrible one)?" is just not a question Good Omens is equipped to engage with or has any interest in answering. It is a story starting with the premise of a literally real Heaven and Hell and a 6000 year old Earth.

The focus of the book is very much that what's important is your life on Earth and the actions you take while you're alive. The show added elements showing that the "political" systems of Heaven and Hell are deeply unfair for the angels and demons. The souls aren't really discussed.

But in both... for better or worse, this is the way the world was created. I feel like the message is kinda... yeah there are structural and systemic problems that are unfair and which we may never be rid of. Just like unfair human systems. You have to try to do what you think is right anyway.

prev's tags were too good @assassinregrets

Ah HAHAHAHAHAAA

Emily Wilson was right, he SHOULD be embarrassed to have written that.

imo the question of "was Stratt justified in forcibly sending Grace on the Hail Mary" is irrelevant in that it's downstream of her actual inexcusable fuckup. How the fuck do you let both the primary and alternate science officer get blown up together. She never should have allowed both trained volunteers for any of the crew positions to be in the same vehicle at the same time, let alone on-site with experimental quantities of astrophage. The rest of her actions were pretty standard ends justify the means, someone has to make the hard choices kinds of atrocities, but that was a simple lack of obvious failsafes.

--Stratt at her own defense hearing. (she doesn't expect this to be an effective defense, she's just still mad at herself for that one.)

Ranking of Canon Crowleys Based on How Much They Like Being a Snake

If your business can only be reached and all info about it only be accessed via Facebook or Instagram, know that it isn’t reachable or accessible AT ALL.

The whole metaverse can no longer be properly viewed without an account and I am definitely not making one just to see your contact info or opening hours.

Get a fucking WEBSITE. It can be just a static landing page with the relevant information. But get off the metaverse!

If you ever think "I don't have enough time to write this so I must use AI" I would like you to know that I just wrote about 4,500 words of my dissertation in two days fueled almost entirely by panic. Learn to be scared of deadlines. You will manage to write without AI. I promise.

Slightly more usefully, now that I've slept a bit, here are some tips for writing academic work on an extremely short deadline:

The rough template for essays that got me through college is:

Number of paragraphs in between opener and closer are variable. Three is usually enough to get you through most undergrad essays, depending on how much info you need to provide. Opener and closer are a must though. Opener so they know what to expect (thesis statement), closer to remind them what they just read and how that ties in to the opener (thesis statement was proven).

I would shift the internal paragraphs from "here is how this person/argument agrees with me on X" to "here is the piece of the argument I am making and how I am defending it, including by citing this person/argument."

It doesn't really matter that Bob agrees with you on X--you need to be able to present a convincing argument, and you can cite Bob's existing research to back you up.

I would broadly approach essays like this:

As an example, in the section I was just working on, one of the arguments I was making was that, for TV shows (within my dataset) that aired both before and after 9/11 and were set in locations/had protagonists that would have been directly impacted by the attacks, in its immediate aftermath shows set in NYC had a greater focus on the human impact of the attacks and the personal/citywide devastation while those shows set in the DC area had a more distant, political focus.

So the structure is (broadly):

If only there was some sort of technology that facilitated structuring documents, creating and customising templates, finding and formatting citations, serving as a soundboard to challenge your hypotheses and identify biases, reformulate clunky arguments or run-off sentences… perhaps in such a world your two days could have been compressed to six hours of intensive focus on the research matter and less on making the PDF look pretty. Too bad no such thing has existed for the entirety of your university career.

The first thing you're going to learn in the workplace is that nobody will reward you for your effort. They will reward the quality of your output. It's up to you to decide whether and how your time and energy is worth saving, and how you get to that output.

You'd think someone so dedicated to research would understand that there's such a thing as nuance.

I'm sorry, do you think I spent most of those two days formatting a document?

I spent roughly 7 minutes at 1am making everything the right font/format and setting the header structure properly in Word. I spent another probably 25 minutes doing all of my citations, and I did use OWL Purdue's citation generator for a few of my citations because it is good and also I had no idea how to cite photos properly.

I think you're implying that I should be using generative AI to do my doctoral dissertation, which 1) lol, and 2) is a deeply stupid suggestion, but here we are, so now I'm going to talk about it.

To be clear, first, I finished my master's degree in 2018, so no, generative AI in the form you seem to be suggesting I use has not existed for "the entirety of my university career." ChatGPT was released to the public in November 2022.

If you are curious what I spent a lot of those 2 days doing, I spent Monday mostly in the office at my job, where I work full time, given that I have had a full-time job at this company since 2019, because again, I have been an adult for quite a while.

At that job, I have had to do extensive research, information gathering, analysis, and synthesis, which has often involved not just reading documentation but also holding real conversations with real human beings where I have to have a solid enough understanding of the material that I am asking/talking about that I can ask intelligent questions, explain my point of view, and respond in real time. Sometimes, I have had to do that without any access to a computer/phone--just myself, whatever materials I prepared beforehand, and my own understanding of what I am talking about.

I then need to be able to produce or update documents, decks, briefing materials, or whatever else is required, and then often I need to be able to present that information and correctly answer questions on the fly, which again means that I need to have a solid understanding of what I am talking about.

To build this understanding, I need to engage firsthand with the entire scope of information. I can't rely solely on summaries or other people's work, even coming from other people who know the material. Those of us who are working on something need to engage with the material together, bring our own subject matter expertise and point of view, and build a shared understanding together, not based on whatever garbage a glorified autofill plagiarism machine can manage to spit out.

And to your point about the workplace, people do reward effort. Not everyone, obviously, and quality does matter, but showing up and actually putting in work is genuinely important in the workplace.

I have also been in the workforce long enough that I can tell the people who outsource their efforts, including to AI. It may seem great to have AI fix your clunky or run-on sentences--but the act of doing fixing them, of forcing yourself to more clearly articulate an idea, makes you understand that idea better or reveals the places where you don't understand that idea. The people I've worked with who can't fix their own clunky writing have historically also been those who had the least understanding of the ideas articulated in that writing, and that is not a coincidence.

Now back to my PhD.

I probably didn't actually spend that much more than six hours of intense focus on the work I did over those two days. That time was broken up, of course, by things like breaks and sleep and my gainful employment, but of the time I spent actually heads down working, it was probably somewhere between 6 and 10 hours, which is an extremely reasonable amount of time to write 4,500 words of a doctoral dissertation.

And I could do that at least in part because I am familiar enough with this topic that I am not learning it from scratch when I sit down to write about it. I have sat with it and discussed it with real humans and interrogated my thoughts on it and built my point of view.

If I weren't interested in doing that, if I weren't interested in becoming a genuine expert in my topic, I wouldn't be doing this work in the first place.

Anyway, learn how to format your own documents. Learn how to challenge your own biases. Learn how to fix your own run-on sentences. Learn how to put the work in. You will be better for it.

Congratulations, you have a PhD. I'm not implying that you should use AI. I'm implying that it's not a moral virtue to not use it. Tools are tools and exist to be used while working. If you can do excellent work without them, great, go ahead and do whatever you're best at. But going around treating all AI use as equally dishonest and automatically dismissing anyone just for trying to take advantage of the literal supercomputer in their pocket is neither fair nor honest. Not everyone has access to grants and academic research tools and the financial freedom to spend a decade in academia. The majority of people are working with increasingly shitty tools, increasingly restrictive environments, hostile pricing and barely scraping enough time out of their limited free time to do unpaid work with the expectation that someday it might be stumbled upon by people who can do something with it to improve the world, or at the very least a modicum of cash. We don't all have the same 24 hours. For a lot of people, this is their one chance to break out of the cycle of misery. You shouldn't be so quick to judge the ones who take shortcuts.

I do not have a PhD, I am currently a part-time doctoral student because, as I said, I work full time. I don't have grants. I am not paid for any of my doctoral work.

If you're looking for academic research tools, I highly suggest you check out the free resources on JSTOR, as well as open source journals in your field. Perspectives on Terrorism is one I use in my field.

But my point (or at least part of it), if you had read my response, is that the people I work with who outsource their work to things like genAI are worse at their jobs. And it's not just AI that people outsource their work to--people have been outsourcing their work for forever to their coworkers, to the internet, to anything they can find. Right now, it just happens to be genAI.

The work I see that is produced using genAI is almost universally less clear, less factually accurate, and less specific to the context we are working in, and the people I know who use genAI regularly in their work are usually less able to answer questions, have a worse undertanding of the material, and are less useful at their job when they are unable to get answers fed to them by genAI.

When I ask a coworker to explain work they have given to me and they are unable to, it is a problem--and this happens all the time, particularly with coworkers who use genAI a lot in their work.

I don't want my doctors, my nurses, my engineers, my architects, my emergency planners, my policymakers, my regulators to take shortcuts. I want them to know what they are doing.

Hopefully, in some reality, Aziraphale and Crowley remain themselves. they stay together, cuddled in the bookshop as it rains softly outside, Crowley's snake eyes fixed on the angel he loves. Aziraphale's wings holding Crowley close, shielding him from whatever is to come. They are content. They have found their own little peace with each other, within the chaos that surrounds them.

Some tidbits from Rob Wilkins at The Ineffable Con 6. 🤍🖤

"Nothing can top the kiss...apart from...I can't talk about Season 3 can I". ROB WILKINS

Rob saying there's no reason for there not to be more Crowley and Aziraphale, that they have their lives to live together going forward? Oh my heart. I am begging please. #TIC6

Source 1 2

He also, when asked what historical period he wanted to see portrayed, said “the future” 🫠

I cannot imagine what he thought about when saying something from the finale tops the kiss in s2. I’m guessing someone will ask him that. But all I can guess is that fucking finger kiss before they die, which I think is worse because they, ya know, die right afterwards 😓