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, it’s actually come as a shock to me that you are more than 50 years old. I had guessed you’d be somewhere around your late 30 (38.5 specifically) although I know that your works had been published earlier than what I guessed.
Anyways, just wanted to add we have the same birthday Friedrich Schiller so that’s cool!
My first books were published in 1985. I’m practically a historical artefact at this point.
Neil — have you ever worked with Alan Cumming and if not, why not !!!
I love Alan. He’s a lovely man (as is his husband Grant). I’ve been writing parts with Alan in mind for decades. One day it will align with his schedule.
Hello, mr. Gaiman! I was rewatching SPN and now I can't help but wonder, since both Crowley's share their fancy chair... Is the fact Muriel dressed as a police officer a reference to the angel Muriel in Supernatural also appearing as a police officer? (spn 9x09)
I’m embarrassed to admit that I’ve never watched Supernatural. So no.
A question I get asked a lot while working at a public library is “how do you deal with homeless people?”
And the answer is, we don’t.
The unhoused people who come here seeking refuge 99% of the time understand that they will be kicked out if they misbehave.
The people you have to watch out for are Jessica, who only came because the kid she didn’t want had to visit for a homework assignment and she just *needs* to yell at her child for asking to borrow two books or stay an extra five minutes, or Michael, who came in to look at porn on our computers for whatever fucking reason, or Karen who just wanted to come by to throw a fit that the particular book she wanted was checked out and harrass our staff about our collection being too limited.
99% of the time, the people we need to ban are middle to upper-middle class white people while the homeless and mentally ill/disabled people mind their own damn business and are honestly some of the best patrons we have.
I bring this up because today we had a man come in. He stopped at the desk, pulled up a chair and said “I’m newly homeless and was living in my car. I’m disabled. It was impounded. It’s raining. I don’t have a phone and I don’t know where to go tonight.”
And we did what we could to help. He was incredibly kind and patient despite his obvious anxiety and stress, more than most able bodied, housed patrons are to us under much less dire conditions. I liked knowing that we were the first place he came.
We have so many people like this who come in everyday. Many are quiet and keep to themselves, but sometimes they talk to us.
They tell us about how they’re taking a few courses on a scholarship they applied for from our library’s computer at the local community college to get their diploma. Or ask about a manga or dvd or book we might have to help them pass the time.
One woman, who comes in daily with her tattered walker always says hello to me and likes to work on the new jigsaw puzzle with me when we set one out.
So like, treat unhoused people like people. Treat disabled people like people. I don’t want my library to feel like the only safe space in the world, but I’m glad it can be one of them.
I’m so sick of hearing about how “the homeless are ruining everything” when they are some of the kindest, most respectful people here. Sometimes they mutter, might not have had a place to shower, and might need a little extra space for their backpacks but that’s FINE. It Doesn’t Matter Actually. None of that is a problem or any of my business to care about (unless they request help/services), and I also don’t think it’s any of yours.
I like haunted houses in theory BUT I have no idea how to react when the actors speak to you. They ask me a question and I just… answer it…
The scariest part of a haunted house is the unscripted social interaction.
Scary nurse in a creepy voice: “Do you have an appointment to see the doctor?”
Me: “Uh. Do you accept walk-ins?”
Scary farmer: “I like to kill people!”
My friend, brightly: “I like to die!”
Zombie : “AARRRGH”
Me : “Do you get dental insurance?”
Zombie : “TEETH!!”
This happened to me.
Scary prison dude: HELLO
Me: Nice to meet you!
Him: (pause) No it’s noooooot
My worst horror house experience was when I couldn’t find the (rather obvious) exit and the guy chasing me with a chainsaw stopped, sighed and pointed me to the exit, saying “please scream as loud as you can when you run out there” and just left. I disappointed the horror house chainsaw dude and I will never get over that
Guy: They are all my friends.. (motioning to hanging corpses; then grabs a noose) Will you be my friend? Me: Sure totally, you made me a friendship necklace? Oh my god your so sweet? Guy: … Yes.. Please, let me.. I cant I cant just go (laughing).
– Got to walk a second time through–
Same guy: My friends -wailing- Me: I came back I just really wanted to be friends so bad Guy: (laughing more) Please, Im not allowed to laugh.
I went to a Haunted House and literally befriended every actor there.
Specifically, I remember;
There were zombies walking around in the waiting room. I said “Hi!” and he gave me a high five. Every time he passed from then on, I got a high five.
Near the end, there were these twin little girls. “Come play with us.” They said. “Okay!” I said. “Forever.” They said. “Oh, sorry, can’t do that. I’m busy.”
I could hear them giggling.
Guy playing Freddie Kruger: Remember, you are all my children!
Me: thanks dad
A small chorus of teenagers: thanks dad
I went to a haunted corn maze once. Someone ran at me with a chainsaw. I just stared at him. He hung his head and walked away. I left.
The Real Horror Is The People We Dissapointed Along The Way
IM CRYING
My friends and I were in a really dark part of a haunted house and couldn’t find the exit, so the guy who had just jumped out at us had to say “to your left” in his same scary voice he’d used to scream and we were like “thanks!”
And then after a few moments of patting blindly at the wall he says again in the same ominous voice “your other left”
Help! My Ignorant, Naive Girlfriend Who Can Be Convinced to Have Sex With Literally Anyone in Exchange For a Sushi Roll Is Conspiring with Her Nefariously Evil Ex-Boss Who Didn’t Put Any Moves On Her to Not Cheat On Me With Him!
Dear Carolyn: Recently, my girlfriend changed to a better position at work, thanks to the recommendation from an ex-boss. Here’s what transpired next: · Ex-boss asked her to leave work early and meet him for dinner, as it was his last night in town. · He asked her to drive and meet at his condo (his family lives in another city). · They went to a restaurant with her favorite cuisine (my guess, he knew this from working together 10 years) that was walking distance from his condo. In my mind, this was a textbook affair setup and/or an upper-manager power play, testing his power over her. She did not share this setup with me until after the fact. She was oblivious to my concerns regarding the potential professional ramifications of going to an upper manager’s condo, then dinner, right after receiving a new job he was pivotal in her receiving. Did I have the right to be (very) upset about this scenario? She swears it was all business talk and texted me on her drive home. — J.
Dear J.,
You have a totally normal and reasonable view of human behavior and professional norms and a very healthy relationship with the concept of women’s bodily autonomy, agency, and sexuality.
Ex-bosses want one thing and one thing only from their women employees, and that’s to buy them dinner and fuck them. Your ignorant, naive skank of a girlfriend is lucky she had you looking out for her, or else she might have gone to dinner with a former colleague and not fucked them, instead of what actually happened, which is that she went to dinner with a former colleague and didn’t fuck them and you were upset about it. You went to all the trouble of getting worked up over your girlfriend going to poundtown with this guy and she didn’t even have the nerve to do it?? He didn’t even try to fuck her? She just came home and was like “that was a totally normal and platonic dinner between friends”??? The nerve.
Especially when it’s the you-being-upset part that really saved this whole mess of a situation. Imagine: if you hadn’t lost your fucking shit about someone doing a perfectly normal thing, life might have proceeded apace! Your girlfriend could have just done whatever normal shit she always does, like a grown-ass woman! And she would never have had to manage your little shitstorm and discovered only after the fact that she was on the verge of banging this other fucking guy and she had no idea!
Where would your girlfriend’s sexual purity and obligatory fidelity be without you, its devoted keeper? Probably giving out handies in exchange for rainbow rolls in her boss’s condo parking lot! You should tell many of your colleagues about how you handled this whole ordeal so that they know just what level you’re on when it comes to your professional expertise.
This explains so much about why 20 somethings are just unable to read to any level of complexity beyond a tweet. The miserable failure of US pedagogy
They didn’t teach children phonics for TWENTY YEARS because they just hoped this “balanced literacy” bs would magically work out???
this still kills me. 20 years. that’s nearly every public school gen z kid in the US
There’s a really good five-part podcast series about this that recently came out from American Public Media called Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went so Wrong. It does a great job of explaining this issue and goes into the political situation and profit motives that kept balanced literacy going for so long even when there was, this can’t be emphasized enough, *zero research* to back it up.
One of my personal big takeways from listening to this was the danger of turning facets of education policy into politicized issues along left/right lines–according to this podcast one of the reasons for why phonics didn’t catch on earlier is because it was being promoted by the second Bush administration, which led to teachers unions and other left-of-center people to be suspicious of it. I think that’s really unfortunate and sadly we saw that same dynamic play out during the pandemic, when in so many school districts how to handle public education became a culture war battle more than anything else.
Obviously everything is political in some way and it’s always worth analyzing who is promoting which ideas–but I think when aspects of public health/science/medicine/education become polarized we all lose out because the issue becomes so much harder to analyze on their merits. And it’s especially awful when the people most impacted are children who are still developing the basic skills needed to think critically for themselves.
oh that sounds worth a listen
I’m fucking gobsmacked. Firstly, here’s the link to the full article for anybody who wants to read the entire thing, or can’t view the image text:
Secondly, I’m just… is this not basically the gist of the scam in The Music Man? Y'know, where Harold Hill—who can’t play of note of music—passes himself off as a band leader, telling everyone he has a “revolutionary new method called The Think System where you don’t bother with notes,” and says ““If you want to play the Minuet in G, think the Minuet in G”? Like sure, context is helpful for reading, but having it be the basis is… WILD. I’m so sorry Gen Z 😭
Guys. Guys is this not how you learned to read. Bc this is how I learned to read.
NO THIS IS NOT HOW WE LEARNED TO READ WHAT THE FUCK
In the rest of the English-speaking world, children are taught to read phonically. There are multiple systems for this, from “winging it based on usage” to structured, tiered systems like Jolly Phonics. They’re taught the sounds that letters make, then the sounds that dipthongs and unusual combinations (like “magic E vowels”) make, and they are taught how to string the sounds together to sound out the words. Common words with unusual spellings/rules (or just really common words that the kid needs to know before they know the relevant rules, like “the” and “should”) are taught as “sight words” and expected to be memorised rote (although research suggests that children don’t memorise these words, but memorise whatever the tricky part is as an exception and read them normally, by phonically sounding them out in their head). This is so that children can get to reading common sentences and simple stories as quickly as possible, providing them with valuable practice and motivation.
As children get practice reading over many years, the most common words get memorised via repetition, and new words are sounded out and memorised if they come up enough. (This is why it’s common for people who read more than they watch tv/converse to mispronounce words for many years – I was over 20 before I knew the correct pronunciation of ‘misled’ or ‘rendezvous’.)
We certainly weren’t taught to check the first letter and then guess based on vibes. If you read like that then there’s no point in the rest of the word being written down. How would you learn new words and advance your skill that way?
Well, this explains a lot about how people in my notes process my posts.
ALT
