The one who wrote Coraline, and co-wrote the book of Good Omens and made the TV show, also the Sandman comics writer and co-creator who made the Sandman TV show. Quite nice really.
Hello Mr Gaiman, hope covid is treating you kindly!
I read again recently The Ocean At The End of the Lane, and GOD it was so good
(I only read it once before, and it was the first book I ever read in english without having read it in my own language first. Somehow, understanding half of it, I still felt the exact same way at the end of the book as I do now: a kid feeling very distanced from adults, full of love for humanity and yet bewildered by it)
Anyway, my question is : should I book tickets to go see the show in November? The only ones left are a bit expensive + I need to cross the channel sea... but I feel like I would regret not seeing it.
Thank you and have a good day!
Yes. Definitely. Go and see it. The seven weeks it’s about to do at London’s Noel Coward Theatre may be the last performances, and you’re getting an astonishing team that’s been touring with the show for about a year, and is making theatrical magic happen on a nightly basis. There’s nothing like it.
Hey Neil!! I don't know if this a stupid question but I hope that you answer it ( and by the way, sorry if I made any grammar mistakes, English is not my first language)
So, in Good Omens we saw a lot of biblical figures and angel and demons and all of that, but I don't saw any mention about Jesus in the hole serie, S1 and S2. Is there any particular reason or you just didn't put him in the story bc you just didn't want it?
I'm just curious, bc I can easily imagine Aziraphale being Jesus' best friend.
Anyway, greetings from Brazil!!🇧🇷
I’ve got good news for you! You have a whole episode of Good Omens S1 that you missed! It’s Episode 3
This was a conversation on the Internet almost 25 years ago. It’s about physical fandom, and ways of talking and communicating in physical fandom, some of which we would now talk about in reference to neurointerestingess rather than to fandom. It came up over on Bluesky talking about people who pronounce words wrongly because they have only encountered them on the page.
The poster who brought it to my attention, Scott Kullberg, said “I remember an old USENET post about a speech therapist’s analysis of fannish speech. One of the things she noticed is that it’s common and not considered rude to interrupt with this kind of correction.”
Fascinating for me because a) it checks out in some ways, b) I wasn’t at the event it describes but I could have been and c) reading the thread makes me nostalgic for an Internet that’s been eaten by something else. (I also very much enjoyed Patrick Nielsen Hayden’s contribution.)
Dear Mr. Gaiman, school started about 2 months ago, and I've found it difficult to control my anxiety. I've been insecure about my body my entire life, but being around other people all day makes my insecurities worse. Returning to school has just reminded me how lonely I am. As someone who has lived many more years than me, how do you handle social anxiety? Will it get better was I get older?
Getting out of school helps. Getting into situations where you have more control and prediction about your life helps. Meeting people like you will help. It gets better.
No question, just immeasurable gratitude for creating a universe that has saved me on more than one occasion. Good Omens is my go to book for when I lose faith in humanity which is why it gets read like 5 times a year? Something like that.
Anyway, as a deconstructed former ministry kid, I legitimately look forward to seeing how Zira handles his. It’s hard to accept that the thing that was once your life is fairly irredeemable.
OH! One question. I have two Audible credits to use and I’d like to know what you think I should get. I have your complete reader, two copies of Good Omens, Don’t Panic, Norse Mythology, American Gods, The Graveyard Book, Neverwhere, and Sandman. THANKS!
I’m really proud of The Ocean at the End of the Lane. Stardust is (I like to think) good. The Neil Gaiman Reader gives you a lot of stories for your audible credit.
Have you considered giving fake spoilers? Just increasingly absurd things and everyone can argue about hidden meanings and metaphors.
You mean, I could invent characters, who only exist in a sort of “special spoilers”? Like inventing wives for Crowley and Aziraphale? That kind of thing?
The real reason the studios are excited about AI is the same as every stock analyst and CEO who’s considering buying an AI enterprise license: they want to fire workers and reallocate their salaries to their shareholders
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The studios fought like hell for the right to fire their writers and replace them with chatbots, but that doesn’t mean that the chatbots could do the writers’ jobs.
Think of the bosses who fired their human switchboard operators and replaced them with automated systems that didn’t solve callers’ problems, but rather, merely satisficed them: rather than satisfying callers, they merely suffice.
Studio bosses didn’t think that AI scriptwriters would produce the next Citizen Kane. Instead, they were betting that once an AI could produce a screenplay that wasn’t completely unwatchable, the financial markets would put pressure on every studio to switch to a slurry of satisficing crap, and that we, the obedient “consumers,” would shrug and accept it.
This is the Facebook playbook: you lure in publishers by promising them a traffic funnel (“post excerpts and links and we’ll show them to people, including people who never asked to see them”), and then the rug-pull: “Post everything here, don’t link to your own site. Become a commodity supplier to our platform. Abandon all your own ways of making money. Become entirely subject to the whims of our recommendation system.”
Next will be: “We block links to other sites because they might be malicious.”
Then some kind of “pivot to video.”
Probably not video (though who knows?) but some other feature that a major rival has, which Twitter will attempt to defraud its captive, commodified suppliers into financing an entry into.
In case you were wondering, yes, this is canonical enshittification. Lure in business customers (publishers) by offering surpluses (algorithmic recommendation and an ensuing traffic funnel). Lock them in (by capturing their audience and blocking interop and logged-out reading).
Then rug the publishers, clawing back all the surpluses you gave them and more, draining them of all available capital and any margins they have, until they die or bite the bullet and leave.
I would also give good odds on this leading to a revivification of the “Pay us tens of thousands of dollars a month for a platinum checkmark and we’ll actually show what you post to the people who asked to see it.”
That will be pitched as the answer to publishers’ complaints about not wanting to turn themselves into commodity Twitter inputs. It will be priced at the same (or more) as the revenues publishers expect to lose from being commodified, making it a wash.
All of this seems to me to be an “unfair and deceptive business practice” under Sec 5 of the FTC Act.
If I sign up to follow you because I want to see what you post, and Twitter shadowbans your posts unless they are formatted to maximize your dependence on Twitter, they have deceived me, and are being unfair to you.
This is *very* analogous to the Net Neutrality debate, where a platform blocks or deprioritizes the things its users ask to see, based on whether the suppliers of those things are its competitors.
I’ve written about how an end-to-end principle for social media could be enforced under Sec 5 of the FTCA, how it would address this kind of sleazy practice, how it would be easy to administer, and wouldn’t form a barrier to entry for new market entrants:
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