This Joke Never Gets Old

This joke never gets old

Happy Pride

Hello, Mr. Gaiman!

Out of pure curiosity, did you and Sir Pratchett decide to have Aziraphale seem very gay for any particular reason or just because it’s a funny concept? (Just because conceptually, Aziraphale, an angel that looks and acts like that, is hilarious)

Thanks so much!

(Thank you and kudos for writing all those books btw. Quite nice really)

Because that was the character we were writing. We didn't go "wouldn't it be funny if people read Aziraphale as gay-coded" we went "so our angel owns a rare bookshop and will look and behave like this, which means people will probably read him as gay, and he'll be really clever, etc".

That’s a pretty cool political opinion you got there dude. Did your web of online friends and mutuals who all subconsciously monitor each other and self-correct in a panopticon-esque fashion to ensure that your views all stay in line with each other’s at all times pick it for you?

I can’t remember a time in my life where the summers weren’t full of berries to eat. Every trail has at least a few bushes offering their wares to people walking by.

Many of them aren’t monetized, they don’t keep well, not appealing enough for the bother of cultivating them. Salmon berries, huckleberries, thimble berries. We have black and blue berries, too. But you don’t see most of our local berries in the grocery store.

One of my most precious memories with my beloved was our earliest hike together. They didn’t grow up native to the area and exclaimed in alarm when they saw me reach casually toward a bush to pick a berry as we walked by.

“You can’t just eat berries! What if it’s poisonous?!”

“It’s not,” I said, puzzled. “I guess there’s some poisonous berries around here but I don’t eat those ones, it’s really easy to tell.”

“Those are safe to eat?”

I laughed and popped it into my mouth only to immediately realize it was horribly unripe. Salmon berries come in two colors you see, orange and red.

I’d mistaken an unripe red berry for a ripe orange one. It had felt soft enough to be ripe but it was so bitter it hurt. So an instant after asserting it was safe to eat I opened my mouth with a “bleh” to let it fall back out.

“They- they’re not poisonous it just wasn’t ripe,” I insisted.

My beloved looked skeptical but scanned the bush and plucked another berry to me. “Try this one.”

The sun shone beautifully through the dappled tree canopy, illuminating the gleaming berry in their hand, a perfect snapshot of a romantic summer moment. I took the berry, my fingers brushing their palm to bring the little fruit up to my lips while looking into their smiling eyes.

I had to spit it out.

It was as overwhelmingly bitter as the last one, but I didn’t mind the way my beloved laughed at me.

Animorphs really has a way to turn every scifi trope on its head. "Why do alien invasions always start in America?" Actually the body snatchers first landed in a Middle Eastern farming community where they kidnapped the first guy they saw, read his mind, and concluded that, since he was terrified of the US soldiers who had brutally destroyed everything he knew and loved, the US would be the ideal place to center their invasion. This is revealed in the spin-off "Visser" which is an excellent stand-alone book that can be read without any prior knowledge of Animorphs. And you can read it for free and with the author's blessing right here:

https://files.animorphsfanforum.com/ebooks/pdf/Visser.pdf

Fred Hampton Jr visiting his father on Father’s Day…his grave is annually shot by local police