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Hi Internet!

I spent the last week on vacation in a farm where I had iffy connectivity and didn't open the laptop once. (I did, however, read ALL THE GOOD OMENS fic, so I was fine.)

I still haven't watched the Good Omens miniseries either, but I will hopefully soon! (I did watch some Lucifer a couple weeks ago when I needed something 100% mindless, and so far I have not hit a bad GO/Lucifer crossover - right now I am enjoying Angel Network, which started as a Murder Mysteries/Lucifer (TV)/Good Omens crossover and has since added Neverwhere. Have yet to find anyone pulling in the characters from the old Angel/Demon AU porn comic by gNeil that is 100% rule-69 Aziraphale/Crowley; I really need to find those scans and re-up them.) It's so great to have so much fic suddenly appearing for the first 'media' fandom I ever read fanfic for! (It was And When He Falls, not quite twenty years ago. Still good.)

It's really nice that I got a lot of things that had been lingering to-do tasks done before I left, so I came home to a semi-clean slate. I'm thinking of trying to get back into Habitica: anyone have an active Habitica group that wants a 100+ level player with lots of gems to share and absolutely no judging of other people's progress? I seem to only be able to keep it up when there are people who will notice when I don't.

I was at skip=600 for DW when I got back on this morning! It's a pretty great feeling. And now I have ~100 open tabs to go through. :D Maybe I will try to actually save best ones and do a linkspam for once - I will never be a person who linkspams on the regular, but it might be cool to have a record of the kind of things I read via DW. And it's been a very long time since I've had a skip=600 to work with.

I brought the watercolors (and masking fluid, which I'd never used before) along with the idea that I'd paint and send postcards to people: I painted three and sent two; I have 12 blank postcards left in the pack, and lots of sketches of planned things to paint, so we'll see if I do them.

Here is the best one I did, a loblolly pine near the chicken yard (I really love loblolly pine. They are probably my favorite kind of tree to look at. Although I forgot to put in pinecones on this one, so it looks wrong - if I get my paints back out before I get around to sending it, I will add pinecones.)

A watercolor of a loblolly pine tree on a farm

Now I need to figure out a plan for my next vacation so I'll have something to look forward to when I really really need something to look forward to...

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Welcome back! I think the tree looks great, pinecones or no. :)

Thank you! I have discovered that I REALLY LIKE watercolor masking fluid, it is basically an analog selection tool and it makes everything so much cleaner! (Except my brushes, it ruins brushes.)

Yeah for sure. I do watercolors occasionally (used to do more, but you know... time and stuff) and when I use masking fluid I make sure to apply it with a brush I don't care about. Even when you run straight to the sink afterward, it's hard not to end up with a latexy mess.

I read some internet advice for a natural brush to soak it in oil to dissolve the latex (...a strategy apparently learned from, um, bad lube advice) but I didn't want to mess with that while traveling, so I may try it later.

LOL! I've heard that tip too but I never made that connection before. Indeed, oil should dissolve latex whether you want it to... or you really, really don't.

Welcome back! It's good to see you. ^_^

I missed you guys!

I like your pine. Glad you've been having a good time.

It was nice to get away from things for a bit.

Welcome back! That's a great tree -- I'm always so impressed by people who can art (especially watercolours). :-)

The watercolor is part of my ongoing efforts to grow up into a queer old maiden aunt from a 19th century novel. :D

That's pretty!

Thank you!

I have an active Habitica party. It's me, my daughter, and my friend

lydy, plus two people who gave up on the Habitica thing a while ago but we don't want to make them feel unwelcome. Absolutely no judgy. I'll send you an invitation if you tell me your username.

Cool! My username is the same as my DW name. I will have to remember how to log in to use it, though. :D

Habitica says you're already in a party, so it won't send my invitation.

My wife is in a lackluster Habitica team and would love to join another or form a new one of more dedicated people. Their username is BaltiRo, please feel free to message them about joining your team!

Oh, yeah, that's my old party of people who are no longer active. Give me a couple days to square that up, and I'll get back to you?

Haha, I'm likely to get to skip=120 today since I didn't check DW yesterday, and even that thought is stressing me out... I can't imagine dealing with skip=600!

That postcard looks really cool!

I used to regularly get up to skip=750 or so after a trip, but that was a very very long time ago back when there were lots of super-active communities.

I love your loblolly pine painting!

I've been really enjoying the GO resurgence. (And did like the miniseries overall -- with quibbles, of course, but the fun parts were enough fun to make up for it.) I was never in the fandom as such, and am not really now, but a lot of my friends were before and are now, so there were always fanworks popping up on my radar every so often, and it makes for a lovely nostalgia now.

I suspect when I get around to watching the miniseries I will feel similarly - I like a lot of what I've read, but one the other hand from the fandom reaction, it almost feels like it's canonizing a lot of fanon stuff that I always thought weren't really book-compliant, and moving the whole thing away from the Pratchett themes that I love and toward the Gaiman themes that I find vaguely annoying. But I will find out, I guess! At the very least I'm enjoying having the fic come out faster than I can keep up.

I will be curious to hear you expound on this after you watch it!

Book fic or show fic?

The idea of a Lucifer crossover makes my eyes cross. Lucifer is basically Satan unless you're Steven Brust, and the glimpse of Satan in GO (book) seems way different than the Gaiman Lucifer.

IDK - on the GO sides, a lot of them don't bother specifying, unless they're pulling hard on something that was show-only. I think this one may have started before the show was out, but now it's pulling in show elements now?

All you really see of Lucifer in the book is an angry "beginnings of a volcano of Satanic power", though, so it's pretty easy to use any version of Lucifer you want? Like, there's a strong implication that it's not much like Gaiman!Lucifer, but since you never see anything of him except that rumble of power, it's not hard to say either "that wasn't really Lucifer-the-person, it was a well of disembodied power his agents were manipulating" or "it was Lucifer, but he was mostly just REALLY ANGRY they were trying to rev up an apocalypse he was 100% uninterested in, and if he'd fully manifested he would probably have just stabbed Beelzebub and then invited Adam on a playdate with Trixie" - that would certainly change the ending, but it's not like you can rely on appearances for anything else in the book. And he's a Gaiman angel either way, so he fits in really well thematically (GO crossovers with Lucifer/Islington/Raguel are a long tradition, because all the Gaiman angels are definitely from the same family.)

I think Beelz and Metatron had already left the scene; Crowley was pretty sure it was personal, Adam's Father coming to have a Word. Which of course transmogrifies into Mr. Young coming to have a Word, because the Antichrist has been given *way* too much power over reality.

Oh, I'm not saying that you're wrong - it's pretty clear in the book that we're supposed to read it as a very dangerous and on-mission version of Satan coming to Earth before Adam stops things.

But there's nothing actually in the text to contradict the idea that it's actually going to be a very angry and hung-over Lucifer pulled in from LA by forces he no longer has the ability to stop (and that would fit just fine with the cosmologies of both canons.) So there's plenty of scope for crossovers.

I am SO enjoying the Good Omens resurgence.

What an excellent tree!

It's so fun! And Aziraphale/Crowley hits one of my bulletproof ship types (people who have been circling around each other literally forever, not sure if they're enemies or friends or soulmates: see also Doctor/Master among others.)

You must watch GO soonest; do you still have my amazon password?

I plan on getting back to habitica after i move.

I have it downloaded from

thevault, I just have to watch it!

Yeah you said you'd do that after the new year and after you finished your dissertation too. :P

Oh yay i need a download for sure too!

My dissertation isn't technically finished yet, I'm still working on edits. :(

I've watched the Good Omens miniseries, but I haven't looked for the new fic yet. I'm really happy about the resurgence and am looking forward to all the new stuff when I get around to it.

I also keep meaning to try ink sketches with watercolor washes, so your tree is very inspiring. I don't think I've ever seen a loblolly pine, but I like the shape very much.

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