piranesiandtheother asked:
neil! I always see pictures of you wearing a black shirt, black skinny jeans, and a black overcoat. is this your daily attire? why? (not judging, just curious)
fremedon:
elljayvee:
uniquecrash5:
neil-gaiman:
My daily attire is a bright red coat, a green tee shirt and yellow trousers. They just show up black in photos.
Ha! I joke with you amusingly.
It is indeed my daily attire. It keeps the elements at bay and gives me a place to put my keys, stops me being arrested on charges of public nudity and so much more.
Sometime in the late 90s, possibly at a book signing or a Comic Book Legal Defence Fund reading, I heard you say
“I love black. Black goes with everything. Well, goes with everything black anyway.”
… and I quote it frequently.
NOT TO GO OFF ON A TANGENT, but:
a few years ago (pre-pandemic, maybe six years ago?) I read an article by a woman who had decided she wanted both a recognizable personal style AND not to think about her clothes, so she made herself a uniform (it was pastel tops and white trousers or jeans, with a nice pastel jumpsuit for dressy). I’d heard about uniforms before – I’d seen people who clearly wear them (Hildi from Trading Spaces, @neil-gaiman, every sysadmin at my old job who lived in khakis and free conference tshirts) – but something about that article really hit me.
Experimentally, I wore nothing but striped tops and gray jeans (or black dress trousers, on the rare occasions jeans were not appropriate) for an entire year. I liked it. I liked how I looked. I never had to think about anything. It also, for whatever reason, broke me of the habit of clicking around nordstrom.com for hours searching for clothes. I didn’t need clothes. I had my gray jeans and my striped tops. I was good to go.
After a year, I loosened it up to patterned tops and any color jeans. It’s still pretty easy to not think about my clothes. I’m still doing that version all these years later. I have a very identifiable personal style, which I never had before, and all my clothes go together, and I always know that whatever happens I will be appropriately dressed for it (surprise visit from the Secretary of Ag? I am in a patterned buttonup and black jeans, looking put-together and exactly like a nice respectable researcher who can be trusted with grant money. ER run with child who broke their arm at the bike park? I am in a striped sweater and jeans, very comfortable for holding upset child and spending hours in a plastic chair.) I always look like me, when before I didn’t always look like me and wasn’t always comfortable with how I was looking and didn’t know why.
Highly recommend finding yourself a uniform. The reduced mental and emotional load is substantial – more than I could have imagined when I decided to try it. One of the most surprisingly and delightful things of my adult life.
I do enjoy thinking about clothes some of the time, and I’m still working on my summer uniform, but for three seasons of the year I am in a long jersey knit dress and boots.
Working from home and just want to be comfy? I am in a jersey knit dress, basically an overgrown t-shirt with a few extra seams. In the office? I am in a dress which looks neat without ironing. It’s cold? Add tights and a cardigan. Don’t like tights ? Wear tall boots and socks, or low boots and knee socks. Need to dress it up more? Add a scarf or a necklace. It’s raining and muddy? Boots wipe right off and my hem is out of the mud. Walking a long way? Boots are sturdy and dresses breathe. And the entire weight of the outfit hangs from the shoulders, so the waist doesn’t bind.
I like to play with fun color combinations and print or colorblocked dresses, but if you do not, you can get all your cardigans, tights, and socks in black or whatever your favorite neutral is and never have to worry about matching anything. The dress matches itself–you’re done!
I am very satisfied with this uniform and recommend it to anyone who wears dresses or thinks they might like to wear dresses.
probablyasocialecologist:
The study itself is titled, “Long-Term Regret and Satisfaction With Decision Following Gender-Affirming Mastectomy,” and sought to study the rate of regret and satisfaction after 2 years or more following gender affirming top surgery. The study’s results were stunning - in 139 surgery patients, the median regret score was 0/100 and the median satisfaction score was 5/5 with similar means as well. In other words… regret was virtually nonexistent in the study among post-op transgender people.
In fact, the regret was so low that many statistical techniques would not even work due to the uniformity of the numbers:
In this cross-sectional survey study of participants who underwent gender-affirming mastectomy 2.0 to 23.6 years ago, respondents had a high level of satisfaction with their decision and low rates of decisional regret. The median Satisfaction With Decision score was 5 on a 5-point scale, and the median decisional regret score was 0 on a 100-point scale. This extremely low level of regret and dissatisfaction and lack of variance in scores impeded the ability to determine meaningful associations among these results, clinical outcomes, and demographic information.
The numbers are in line with many other studies on satisfaction among transgender people. Detransition rates, for instance, have been pegged at somewhere between 1-3%, with transgender youth seeing very low detransition rates. Surgery regret is in line with at least 27 other studies that show a pooled regret rate of around 1% - compare this to regret rates from things like knee surgery, which can be as high as 30%. Gender affirming care appears to be extremely well tolerated with very low instances of regret when compared to other medically necessary care.
[…]
The intense conservative backlash, to the point of disputing reputable scientific journals, likely stems from the fact that reduced regret rates weaken a central narrative these figures have championed in legal and legislative spaces. Over the past three years, anti-trans entities have showcased political detransitioners, reminiscent of the ex-gay campaigns from the 1990s and 2000s, to argue that regrets over gender transition and detransition are widespread. Some have even asserted detransition rates of up to 80%, a claim that has been broadly debunked. Yet, research consistently struggles to find substantial evidence supporting this narrative. The rarity of detransition and regret is underscored by Florida's inability to enlist a single resident to bear witness against a lawsuit challenging the state’s ban on gender-affirming care.
(via neil-gaiman)
noknowshame:
noknowshame:
it was such a risky narrative choice for black sails not to introduce the titular island in treasure island until the very end but I just love love love how it was done. the island is framed like a ghost story to the characters themselves, but of course it’s already a ghost story to us, the audience, because we know exactly what it signifies. and even though the characters don’t know that, it still manages to create such a deep feeling of mutual foreboding that transcends the fourth wall. skeleton island is a ghost story in the first place not because what has already happened there, but because of what will happen there. but everyone understands that it is a ghost story all too well.
“Unlike other narrative forms, where we can distinguish between the reader’s time (the time of the reader/audience’s perceiving of the narrative) and the narrative, or sign time (which is part of the fictional world), in the horror story audience-time and narrative-time collapse into each other as the storyteller proceeds… In the horror story the boundary between the real and the fictive, the interpretations of experience by the audience and the characters, is continually drawn and effaced. Both the story and its context of telling dissolve into a uniformity of effect.”
– Susan Stewart, The Epistemology of the Horror Story
(via falcon-fox-and-coyote)
thealogie:
The best little fanon thing they confirmed for me was making the Bentley a little pet. Cause in the book it’s just a one off joke about how the CDs turn into queen if you leave them in A car long enough but it’s like no…the Bentley loves aziraphale and gives him sweets and plays whatever he wants and turns yellow for him and parks where he tell it to and plays “a nightingale sang in Berkeley square” when crowley is heartbroken and plays “good old fashioned lover boy” when crowley is racing back to help aziraphale. And crowley coos to it like it’s a puppy. Love that car
(via falcon-fox-and-coyote)
