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
odin is like “when thor was born the sun shone bright upon his beautiful face. i found loki on the sidewalk outside a taco bell”
Oðinn spake:
Bright the sun shone | at the time of Þor’s birth, And bathed his count’nance fair. Loki, wolf-father, | the trickster, the liar, I found on the cold pavement While returning in glory | from a grand hunt For a 3 AM quesadilla.
Merry & Pippin figure out p quickly that Boromir knows fuck all about the Shire or about Hobbits & many 100% true things about the Shire (eg we all live in holes) are super weird to him
So naturally they start making things up
They start with fairly plausible stuff like ‘in the Shire we have cows the size of dogs and dogs the size of rabbits’
But then they get bolder and start going in for stuff like ‘in the Shire we don’t make cheese, it just grows on trees’
‘yeah we call them Chrees’
‘good one Pip’
He figures out fairly quickly that they’re messing with him but he has no idea where the line is
Eventually he asks Frodo and Frodo is like ‘no the Shire is really boring’
‘oh’ *kinda disappointed* ‘so does that mean you don’t eat six meals a day?’
‘what no we do that, how many meals do you eat in Gondor??’
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