#relevant

Dogvengers Assemble!!

LOKI: Tengo un ejercito...

STARK: Nosotros un Hulk

LOKI: Tengo buen pelo.

STARK: Yo una barba mejor.

LOKI: Soy un Dios

STARK: Yo Robert Downey Jr.

LOKI: ¬_¬

Art by Stjepan Sejic

Little Things you can do to Improve your Mental Health

1. Make sure you go outside, or change your environment at least once a day.

2. Text, snapchat and message your friends. Make sure you don’t isolate yourself.

3. Budget for small treats and indulgences.

4. Decide to say “no” to people-pleasing tendencies. Be secure in who you are and in what you want for yourself.

5. Invest in hobbies which your genuinely enjoy, and which tend to leave you feeling good about yourself.

6. Have a favourite playlist which you know will lift your mood.

7. Decorate your space or room in a way that reflects you, and your unique personality.

8. Limit how much time you spend with those who drain your energy.

9. Treat yourself the way you’d treat a special person, or good friend.

10. Don’t compare yourself to others. Just appreciate being you.

Just to add that if your atacker is a woman, go also to the groin. The idea that women are inmune to groin attacks is false. Also punching a boob should hurt a lot.

Other good pointers:

if your attacker is male, go for his junk - especially if he’s wearing loose pants. There’s no sportsmanship when it comes to assault so fuck them balls UP

punching pretty much ANYWHERE in the face is going to actually hurt you a LOT (just think - you’re punching your bones into their bones and ow). If you’re going for the face, my suggestion is to strick upwards with your palm.

see that meaty portion highlighted in red? There’s a lot of muscle and fat right there which makes it excellent for striking. Hold your hand as shown and aim for the nose or chin (though I’ve been told in extreme circumstances, doing this to the nose can be fatal but I’ve never really heard if this is true or not) and just aim upwards

other delicate areas: 

the shin (hurts like a bitch if you kick it right - also, you can hit this spot if you’re being held in a choke-hold and if your attacker has to move in order to stop you from kicking him, he’ll have to angle his body so as to expose his stomach and crotch to the wild spastic jabbings of your elbows)

the solar plexus (either jab while holding your hand in a sort of spear position or use your elbows - unless you’re super strong, your punch probably won’t wind your attacker. Your elbow or a spear hand will, however)

Originally in (most) martial arts, you hit the solar plexus because it supposedly contained an important chakra. Now we know that it actually also contains like a bunch of necessary organs that are exposed just below your ribs and is also (roughly) where your diaphragm lives so getting punched there is not pleasant.

the clavicle (from experience, getting hit in your clavicle HURTS LIKE A MOTHERFUCKER. If you strike downwards with your knuckles, the person might just cry. Like I did.)

the ear (this is probably the best place to punch besides the throat. It’s all cartilage so it probably won’t hurt you all that much and most people will be like “DUDE YOU PUNCHED ME IN THE EAR WHAT THE HELL”)

the kidneys (this is harder to hit without training but if you somehow get your attacker’s back to face you, try to hit’em in the kidneys. Again, from experience, this FUCKING HURTS. You can’t really hit the kidneys from the front with any effect but from the back it is super painful)

if you’re held in a choke-hold, try turning your head so the forearm isn’t pressed into your throat. If you can position yourself right, you can sort of force your chin into the crook of the elbow, making you able to still receive (limited) oxygen and provide time for you to kick some shins or elbow some spleens and shit

REALLY BLOODY EXCELLENT OMENS...

Many, many years ago (it was Hallowe'en 1989, for the curious, the year before Good Omens was published) Terry Pratchett and I were sharing a room at the World Fantasy Convention in Seattle, to keep the costs down, because we were both young authors, and taking ourselves to America and conventions were expensive. It was a wonderful convention. I remember a huge Seattle second-hand bookstore in which I found a dozen or so green-bound Storisende Edition James Branch Cabell books, each signed so neatly by the author that the bookshop people assured me that the signatures were printed, and really ten dollars a book was the correct price.

I could afford books. Good Omens had just been sold to UK publishers and then to US publishers for more money than Terry or I had ever received for anything. (Terry had been incredibly worried about this, certain that receiving a healthy advance would mean the end of his career. When his career didn't end, Terry suggested to his agent that perhaps he ought to be getting that kind of advance for every book from now on, and his life changed, and he stopped having to share a hotel room to save money. But I digress.) Advance reading copies of Good Omens had not yet gone out, but a few editors had read it (ones who had bid for it but failed to buy it) and they all seemed very excited about it, and thrilled for us.

On the Saturday evening Terry left the bar quite early and headed off to bed. I stayed up talking to people and having a marvelous time, hung in there until the small hours of the morning when they closed the hotel bar and all the people went away, and then headed up to the hotel room room.

I opened the door as quietly as I could and tiptoed in the dark across the room to where my bed was located.

I'd just reached the bed when, from the far side of the room, a voice said, “What time of the night do you call this then? Your mother and I have been worried sick about you.”

Terry was wide awake. Jet lag had taken its toll.

And I was wide awake too. So we lay in our respective beds and having nothing else to do, we plotted the sequel to Good Omens. It was a good one, too. We fully intended to write it, whenever we next had three or four months free. Only I went to live in America and Terry stayed in the UK, and after Good Omens was published Sandman became SANDMAN and Discworld became DISCWORLD™ and there wasn't ever a good time.

But we never forgot it.

It's been thirty-one years since Good Omens was published, which means it's thirty-two years since Terry Pratchett and I lay in our respective beds in a Seattle hotel room at a World Fantasy Convention, and plotted the sequel. (I got to use bits of the sequel in the TV series version of Good Omens -- that's where our angels came from.)

Terry and I, in Cardiff in 2010, on the night we decided that Good Omens should become a television series.

Terry was clear on what he wanted from Good Omens on the telly. He wanted the story told, and if that worked, he wanted the rest of the story told.

So in September 2017 I sat down in St James' Park, beside the director, Douglas Mackinnon, on a chair with my name on it, as Showrunner of Good Omens. The chair slowly and elegantly lowered itself to the ground underneath me and fell apart, and I thought, that's not really a good omen. Fortunately, under Douglas's leadership, that chair was the only thing that collapsed.

The crumbled chair.

So, once Good Omens the TV series had been released by Amazon and the BBC, to global acclaim, many awards and joy, Rob Wilkins (Terry's representative on Earth) and I had the conversation with the BBC and Amazon about doing some more. And they got very excited. We talked to Michael Sheen and David Tennant about doing some more. They also got very excited. We told them a little about the plot. They got even more excited.

Rob Wilkins and David Tennant on the second day of shooting.

Me and Michael and Ash aged nearly 2.

What it was mostly like shooting Good Omens: peering into screens while something happened round the corner.

I'd been a fan of John Finnemore's for years, and had had the joy of working with him on a radio show called With Great Pleasure, where I picked passages I loved, had amazing readers read them aloud and talked about them.

(Here's a clip from that show of me talking about working with Terry Pratchett, and reading a poem by Terry: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p06x3syv. Here's the whole show from YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7OsS_JWbzQ with John Finnemore's bits too.)

L to R: With Great Pleasure. John Finnemore, me all beardy, Nina Sosanya (Sister Mary in Good Omens) Peter Capaldi (he played Islington in the original BBC series of Neverwhere).

I asked John if he'd be willing to work with me on writing the next round of Good Omens, and was overjoyed when he said yes. We have some surprise guest collaborators too. And Douglas Mackinnon is returning to oversee the whole thing with me.

So that's the plan. We've been keeping it secret for a long time (mostly because otherwise my mail and Twitter feeds would have turned into gushing torrents of What Can You Tell Us About It? long ago) but we are now at the point where sets are being built in Scotland (which is where we're shooting, and more about filming things in Scotland soon), and we can't really keep it secret any longer.

There are so many questions people have asked about what happened next (and also, what happened before) to our favourite Angel and Demon. Here are, perhaps, some of the answers you've been hoping for.

As Good Omens continues, we will be back in Soho, and all through time and space, solving a mystery which starts with one of the angels wandering through a Soho street market with no memory of who they might be, on their way to Aziraphale's bookshop.

(Although our story actually begins about five minutes before anyone had got around to saying “Let there be Light”.)

from https://journal.neilgaiman.com/2021/06/really-bloody-excellent-omens.html

Yo: ¿Por qué estas destruyendo la Tierra? Alienigena: Porque hay personas que creen que el inglés es el único lenguaje que necesitan hablar Yo: Es justo, lo entiendo.

me: why are you destroying earth!!!

aliens: because theres people who think that english is the only language they need to speak

me: thats fair i understand

Don’t get me wrong, i just thought about giving the smaller gun to the more “spy-ish” of the couple. In my mind, GRU is more prone of carrying big guns (in fact, my protagonist is a sniper, but just carry the vintorez around when he is about to snipe), on the other hand, KGB is seen as more cover, more tricky, and i see more fit to give her a smaller and (i thought) more reliable gun. My story is set between 1989 and 1995, everywhere from Moscow to Libya, but mainly on Germany, and my doubts are if i should use the weapons to give information about the characters (bulk and old fashioned for him, and slender and versatile for her), or explain the character by their weapon choice (smart, professional and crazy prepared vs stick to what is issued to her, retorting to improvisation) or even don’t get into the specifics of weaponry just settling with generic guns, and let the reader guess if he is firing a glock or a walter ppk. I’m also concerned about the problems that can arise if someone catch my characters on the late 80s Western Germany carrying russian guns, but i should research the german weapons around by that dates. Thank you for your time.

Hello, my character is a spetsnaz GRU working with a female KGB companion, should he use a Tokarev and leave a Makarov to the girl? Both with Maks as is a more modern model? Maybe he can keep his GRU sidearm for cover ops, or it will hint too much that he is a spy? Thoughs, please.

As I’ve said several times before, smaller guns deliver more recoil into the user. There’s less mass in the pistol to counter the force of the bullet, so that’s passed on to the user regardless of their gender. As a result, when fired, heavier guns are actually easier to control.

The problem is, I have no idea when you’re setting your story, and if you’re asking, “what gun should my characters use?” Then “what year is it?” becomes a very important question to answer.

The Makarov PM was designed, to be a replacement for the Tokarev TT. The Tokarev entered service in the 1930s, and left production in the fifties. The Soviet military spent the next decade replacing the aging TT-33s with new PMs.

This means, after the mid-sixties, you wouldn’t see a Tokarev in service as an official sidearm.

The GRU was formed in 1949. So that puts it solidly in an era when the Tokarev was in service. The KGB was founded in 1954, two years after the Tokarev left production. The Makarov entered production in 1951.

So that, roughly sets your story sometime between 1955 and 1963. If it’s not, then all of these assumptions start to fall apart.

As with the Tokarev, the Makarov isn’t a great pistol. The Russian military has been looking for an opportunity to replace it since at least the eighties. In fact, modern Spetsnaz units don’t even use Makarovs, they transitioned over to the PSS in the early 80s. My understanding is that KGB and the later FSB also transitioned to the PSS, but I’m not entirely certain.

The Lebedev PL-14, MP-443 “Grach,” and MP-448 “Skyph” were all developed with the goal of becoming the new Russian military service pistol. I’m honestly not familiar with the internal politics that have affected their decisions, though I believe the Grach was adopted as a service pistol sometime in the last decade.

Of course, you couldn’t give a KGB agent any of those guns, because the Committee for State Security was dissolved along with the rest of the Soviet Union in 1991. It’s successor, the Federal Security Service (FSB) was founded in 1995. There’s nothing stopping you from giving an FSB agent a Grach or Skyph and calling it good. (The Lebedev hasn’t entered production yet.)

Interestingly, the push for a replacement pistol actually predates the fall of the Soviet Union. So, even if you’re using an alt history setting, where the Soviet Union never fell, you’re still probably looking at new pistols, that never existed in our world.

You don’t pick guns based on the gender of the shooter. With military weapons, you choose them based on the politics and doctrines that shaped their design and acceptance.

-Starke

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“She made a planet for herself. Ink rivers flowed to oceans of paint. Her canvas cities were all galleries, libraries, and blissful solitude.” -QuietPineTrees