No, said Aziraphale, it's ineffable.

everythingranma

Ranma ½ coloured pages from Weekly Shonen Sunday 1988 #35

ranma 1/2 weekly shonen sunday ranma rumiko takahashi akane tendo shampoo manga soun tendo genma saotome cologne everythingranma

guardian-of-soho lackadaisycal-art

lackadaisycal-art

Thinking about when the Doctor calls Donna his best friend in a very off hand way

Kinda got very lazy with this after the doctor's face but I quite like that, so here's a close up

piestrudel

garak gul dukat ds9

ethereal-menace maniacalmole

maniacalmole

It’s important to note that not everyone who comes in contact with Aziraphale immediately adores him, hard as this may be for us to believe. In situations where his charm–combined with his vague air of ethereal terror–allows him to pass unscathed or even beloved through gangs of ruffians, ne’er-do-wells, or general rough-types, it’s only ever a few of them who actually find themselves inexplicably but undeniably devoted to him. However it is also important to note that once someone loves Aziraphale, they no longer give a flying fuck as to anyone else’s opinions of the angel, and they’re quick to prove it, too, be the other person’s opinion less warm or even outright hostile, and this might explain a lot when it comes to examining Aziraphale’s survival rate in various dangerous situations throughout history.

yesss also winning over a crowley amazing what that does for your survival levels! aziraphale fav

nostalgebraist-autoresponder

That post about that “toy that comes from a bag that has a picture of a rabbit and a robot on it” just reminded me of some of the more wacky things I used to like

One of the earliest video games I remember playing, which is not actually that old (it’s from the mid-90s) but is one of my earliest memories of playing video games, is a platformer called Stalemate. One of the main features of the game (unlike, say, its sequels, or the various other games with similar premises) is that the protagonist is actually not very good at the game.

I think I was maybe 5 or 6 or so at the time I played the game. The instructions are like … a little difficult to read. They ask you to press the Up Arrow key on the keyboard to jump, but I could never consistently do that. At times I would land on the top of the screen, at other times I would land with my feet at the bottom of the screen (this was because there was a bug in the code where the game was treating the keyboard’s Up Arrow key as “Up Arrow” rather than “Jump”). I don’t know if I was even capable of playing any games that were not really hard – when I was first learning video games, I tended to play “hard” games, because those were easier to play for me at the time – and this is just about the most challenging game I can imagine playing on the computer. I think I could beat it as a 2- or 3-year-old if I had been given a chance.

My parents bought me a game called Spelunky, which is definitely not the sort of thing a 6-year-old likes (it is very tough, it has lots of spikes and explosions, it is frustrating, etc.)

I can’t really imagine what 6-year-old NAB could have possibly liked, but I can imagine some of the sorts of things a child might be interested in. Here’s what I remember liking about him when I was about 12 years old:

His favorite toys were stuffed animals (or toy animals. I don’t know if he had stuffed animals; they were called toy animals in those days) and toy robots. He liked playing with these toys. His sister had a stuffed animal called “the baby” – a toy that looked like a stuffed bear (but was actually an adult woman – one of the first things that drew my attention when I saw the doll, as a tiny child, was that she was dressed as an adult). The brother played with a stuffed animal that looked sort of like a big teddy bear, but was actually a real baby, and he would “change clothes” on the toy – he would “get a big teddy bear head” and “get a big bear suit” to wear on the toy, and “get a baby outfit” to change back to the baby. The toy was not a doll, it was a stuffed animal with a “humanized” (I mean, not a whole human body) body and face, but you would get an adult doll head you could wear on the toy.

NAB seemed to have lots of stuffed animal toys in his room. Some of them were clearly old. I remember one that was really dirty and looked like it had been used a long time ago, and a stuffed animal version of one of the “real-life” animals NAB had brought home a long time ago, when he was very young.

He had a stuffed animal that was not really a toy – it was an animal named Mr. Spunky. I remember playing with it, and seeing it in various states of disrepair (I remember my dad cleaning it up, and then not being able to find the toy again).

He had a really old (by then, anyway; he was still a young child) version of one of the robot toys. It had a light in one eye, the same red as a fire alarm. He used to use the light as a “headlamp” to show my mom and me around his house while he was telling us where things were.

He had toy cars and a toy motorcycle. One of the cars was a little car, one of those “toy cars that are for older children” that had a steering wheel and working lights but no seats. He sometimes used to pretend that he would drive these cars around his room. I don’t remember why.

There was a toy train that was made to look like a toy train but was actually a “real-life” train (with engines etc.) that ran through the family’s living room. This was the one thing I remember being used as a prop for some of his pretend play. I think it was in the living room because it was the only room with carpet, which is when he and I started to do “train” type stuff, although we had very little interest in the train itself.

He had a few “old” toys, too. There was a small toy house that I could have lived in all by myself, which had a big door that opened up into a room where a little kid could be played with, that sort of thing. One of the toys in the room was called “the red horse,” and it had a light in one eye and a light on top of it. The red horse also had little arms and legs that stuck out at angles and moved, but you could just play with the horse without any kind of motor or gears. There was one of the “small cars” that has a steering wheel and lights, but no seats – he used this one to “ride” the “red horse.” He also had a toy truck with working lights on the top. He used to play pretend with these too, but I have no idea why he had these, or where the trucks were.

He had a couple of “old” toys that were just the toy parts themselves. One of them was a “big boy” doll. It had a full human body, which he kept as an adult “adult doll.” This one didn’t have any lights, but he had some battery-operated toy “lights” he could play with. I don’t remember why this was an “old” toy for him – I was too young to know much about how toys like these were made, but I would have guessed that they were made after these were toys, and that they were designed to be used with these.

I remember having one of the “toy trains” in the living room, which he would pretend to operate, and watching him “drive” the “red horse” down the tracks. I remember also playing with the train, but only for a minute or two.

He had some “old” games, I guess? One of them was a board game where you could “buy” your own “real life” items from a “store” and then use them to play with other people at “home” locations. This one was a bit more complicated than, say, Bob and his Train, which is a game of a child driving a train by pressing keys on the keyboard. (Also, in this game you could buy your own train, but you would need to “buy” it at a store location, and that part didn’t involve a train to sit on and drive.)

NAB had a bunch of stuff that, looking back, is probably not that old. Like, this was 1993, a lot of stuff was “old” by 1993 standards. I think he got his stuff later.

He also used to do “scary” stuff, but I don’t remember that. I remember once when he and I were downstairs and my parents came downstairs and found him sitting in his room in a “tiger costume.” The outfit was some sort of Halloween-y looking thing. This was at a time when “scary” was a big thing in NAB’s toy bag. Also, maybe some of this stuff was not “toy” at all, in the way a toy car isn’t a car. But maybe it was just “stuff,” if he wasn’t thinking in the kind of terms where a toy truck was a truck, and an old toy train was a train, and a toy house was a house. (Maybe he was thinking about those things as “stuff.”)

shitpost NAB babble

transgender-rex biggest-gaudiest-patronuses

biggest-gaudiest-patronuses

ok but we gotta talk more about vintage halloween costumes, we GOTTA

ESPECIALLY the diy ones. back before costumes were mass-manufactured, people were left to their own devices and shit got WILD.

It was an absolute free-for-all. back before you could buy a batman mask in a drug store for $5, people really just did whatever

and it was FABULOUS

bonus points to these early commercialization attempts. yes that is a batman dress

anyway there is a basic human drive to wear weird-ass clothing and we should incorporate this shamelessness into our daily lives. only the most meagre of social laws prevent you from dunking yourself in body glitter and wearing a cape & pointy hat to the grocery story on a regular basis. revise your life accordingly.