Crowley is something else for sure, like, he arrives on Earth and is like ‘how do I blend in and also pick out a persona that I will enjoy’ and he lands on ‘cool rebel guy’ because that’s the only way he can prove to himself that he is both relevant and a demon, and he decides that he is the kind of person who drives cool old cars and owns cool new technology just for the sake of owning it and listens to rock music and achieves Mischief and he focuses very hard on all of this and is like ‘look everybody, I am a Cool Guy’ and then people are like ‘your every action reeks of insecurity but you go on telling yourself that, jack’
and he’s like ‘but have you considered… that I am wearing sunglasses…? check and mate’
we all talk about az being out of touch w technology but what about crowley. when does mr. “crowley automatically assumed all vehicles he drove would have cassette players and therefore this one did” “he forgot abt speakers so his sound system just works perfectly without them” find out no one uses cassette tapes anymore. when does he find out fax machines are obsolete. does he know what body wash is, bc he doesn’t need to shower and he doesn’t go to the grocery store. has he ever seen a granola bar. does he know about automatic transmissions. if crowley hadn’t invented fruit roll-ups i don’t think he would know what they were. there are unplumbed depths here. crowley doesn’t interact with the world like a human any more than aziraphale does and i think we may have forgotten that
It’s also a huge and hilarious plot-point that Crowley’s computer is showy, but doesn’t do much, whereas Aziraphale’s is an outright fossil, but very functional. And he uses it to keep all those scrupulous tax records in which nobody can prove he’s getting away with murder somewhere.
y’all realize this means that aziraphale is canonically 99x better with computers than crowley. aziraphale keeps incredibly detailed tax records on a computer in the 80s. do you know what computer was the most popular – particularly for financial records – in the 1980s? the IBM personal computer.
this thing ran a text-only operating system. the screen couldn’t display any images unless they were ASCII (like the logo shown above). the first iterations didn’t even have a multicolor display – just the standard green on white text you see in retro vaporwave shit.
to use a text-based operating system, you need to know virtually every command you could conceivably need to run in order to do what you need to do. need to open a file? first you need to locate it. you need to type the right command to move to the right directory and then you need to type the right command to open it in a text editor or viewer. you need to either know all these commands, or (in 1983) have them written down in a goddamn book and look them up one by one.
in other words, most people even now wouldn’t have the first idea how to take a crack at one of these motherfuckers.
and of all people, aziraphale can use one – not only reasonably, but well enough to keep tax records SO DETAILED that the IRS DOESN’T BELIEVE THEY ARE REAL.
and crowley’s computer doesn’t do anything. because he doesn’t know how to use it. sure, he’d be able to use windows 10 today with some instruction (what the hell is a mouse for, anyway?) but aziraphale would almost certainly be able to read the error codes the damn thing spits out when crowley inevitably breaks something
neilman no offfense but the only circumstances under which I’ll accept “Aziraphale has beautiful wings and Crowley’s are messy” is because they’re grooming each other’s and Aziraphale is a shit barber and Crowley grooms immaculately
this is almost close enough to jimothy to be credible
:
Aziraphale patted Crowley on the back. “We seemed to have survived,” he said. “Just imagine how terrible it might have been if we’d been at all competent.”
Good Omens, by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, page 339. (via spontaneousthings)
the thought of aziraphale being in Crowley’s flat and seeing that fucking statue every single time he’s there. like hi crowley, oh there’s the statue of us fucking that you thought was subtle enough to be an intimidation tactic but is clearly just a product of your sexual frustration and 6000 years spent pining. lovely. shall we eat at the Ritz today?
What if it was a mutual purchase that they bought while drunk one time at an auction because they both thought it would be hilarious, and now a few hundred years later it’s still in Crowley’s flat because they have an unspoken competition over which of them will mention how awkward it is first
For anyone else who was initially confused like I was lol
willowfoot 