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i understand why the ‘grizzled loner who slowly melts & improves their outlook on life when forced to take care of a kid’ trope is a male exclusive role, bc the optics of a grizzled loner woman healing by becoming a mother are maybe not so good, but every time i think abt a hypothetical female version of that trope i black out instantly. could we maybe just do it one time and all agree to be cool about it

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An embroidery piece of the luggage from the Discworld series, ivory teeth, lolling red tongue and almost two dozen legs included. I somehow also managed to make it seem like it's grinning. Took me two months with two-thread embroidery. 😂

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Aziraphale collected books. If he were totally honest with himself he would have to have admitted that his bookshop was simply somewhere to store them. He was not unusual in this. In order to maintain his cover as a typical second-hand book seller, he used every means short of actual physical violence to prevent customers from making a purchase. Unpleasant damp smells, glowering looks, erratic opening hours - he was incredibly good at it.

Terry Pratchett

Books must be treated with respect, we feel that in our bones, because words have power. Bring enough words together they can bend space and time.

Terry Pratchett

People were stupid, sometimes. They thought the Library was a dangerous place because of all the magical books, which was true enough, but what made it really one of the most dangerous places there could ever be was the simple fact that it was a library.

Terry Pratchett

This book was written using 100% recycled words.

Terry Pratchett

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I’ve seen multiple “Best Death Personification” brackets on this website, and every time the Discworld fandom turns up en masse to vote for Discworld Death, and it’s always deserved, and it’s always funny. A horde of book nerds rising up in defence of their collective grandfather.

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I'm being completely serious when I say Granny Weatherwax's "What about the fire?" speech from Lords and Ladies has done more to help me recontextualize and manage my anxiety than like 5 years of therapy did

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Happy Holidays from the Holiday Boar

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One of the great themes of Terry Pratchett's writing is that moral progress is possible, but not by changing human nature. Human nature isn't going to change, especially not if you shout at it. People are stubborn and stupid and dishonest and mostly just trying to get through their days. You can't change the world by changing them. But you can still change the world.

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now im imagining what pride events in ankh morpork are like

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Maskerade thoughts

I enjoyed this one so much I just ploughed straight on to the next book without stopping to collect my thoughts!

The mystery plot is genuinely engaging, although I remembered André being set up as a red herring more than he actually was. I also love the multiple layers of parody and reference - it's not just Phantom of the Opera, it's not even just Michael Crawford as the Phantom, but Michael Crawford as both the Phantom AND Frank Spencer (which sadly may be lost on younger or non-British readers).

Same person!

Agnes Nitt is one of my favourite Discworld characters (she's even the icon for this blog) and I appreciate that Pterry remembered her from Lords and Ladies and turned her into a main character. There's something about the outsider character who knows they're different and will never truly fit in that appeals to me, not just as a fat person but as a neurosparkly person. I just... wish he hadn't leaned so hard on the fatphobia. The things that characters say about Agnes behind her back are the things so many fat people worry everyone says about them, and having it confirmed is honestly pretty depressing. (Glenda Sugarbean, several books later, almost feels like an apology for Agnes.)

Granny and Nanny are on good form as always, and The Joy Of Snackes is still amusing, although again I wonder if younger readers will appreciate the reference there.

I wish there'd been more Agnes stories, but after Carpe Jugulum, I think Pterry switched his attention to Tiffany Aching as the next generation of Discworld witches, and while Tiffany was definitely interesting (saving people with the power of autism!), she was also another thin girl who had boys winter gods trying to court her. Agnes' stories seem intent on reminding fat girls that they will always have to be the outsider, and while I do want to see stories about women that aren't always romance-focused, sometimes I want to see the fat girl get some love.

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Okay so Dear My Followers Who Aren’t Discworld People,

I bet you get so FUCKING confused when I and dozens of others are putting all this “Glorious 25th of May” stuff on your dash so let me TELL YOU what it’s ALL ABOUT okay but I had a couple shots too fast so bear with my lightweight ass.

It’s a thing from a book called Night Watch by Terry Pratchett. On May 25 in-universe, a thing happened called the “Glorious Revolution” where in this city called Ankh-Morpork the leader (Patrician) died (was sort of assassinated sort of induced into having a heart attack) and a new leader came to power. There was a lot of unrest in the city because the regular people were like Life Sucks We Want Things To Not Suck In These Particular Ways. So the Bad side of the police got dispatched to quell the rebellion and also the damn army got made involved, while there was a group of ragtag Good police who ended up just trying to actually keep the peace and protect the rebels so things would calm down, but a bunch of them got killed and the revolution ended with the new leader sucking almost as bad as the old leader and yeah everything still kinda sucked.

Fast forward a bunch of years to our hero Sam Vimes the commander of the Watch cops chasing a criminal and getting zapped back into the past by magical lightning no that’s not a joke. Vimes was a teenage new police recruit the first time the Glorious 25th happened and now he’s in the past having to pretend to be the guy who trained him the first time. As the same things happen as happened before in this pivotal moment in his life/the city’s history.

And like!! Vimes knows what’s going to happen! He knows people are going to die!! And he knows that if anything about the past changes too much, he won’t be able to go home to his proper present. But the criminal he was chasing got zapped back to the past too so he has to catch that guy so he can go back to the present and have justice be served.

BUT!!!! Even though he KNOWS he probably can’t save anyone who’s “supposed to die” and even though he KNOWS he’s doomed to lose everything he has in his present if things change too much (his wife! is about to have their child!)!!! HE TRIES TO SAVE PEOPLE. Because they’re good men!! And if the price of going home is NOT TRYING! and selling those good men to the night! He doesn’t want to pay it!!

So he TRIES. So fucking hard. Because if he didn’t, he wouldn’t be Sam Vimes.

And okay anyway let’s not spoil the whole book KidK but anyway! When the good cops are out doing their duty trying to just help things be peaceful in the city, one of them is like “we should have some kind of banner or plume to show we’re in this together” and one of them is like “how about sprigs of lilac I mean they’re all over the place.” So that’s why lilac.

And that’s why Glorious 25th.

And the fandom decided to celebrate it as a remembrance of Terry Pratchett and as a Thing to raise awareness for Alzheimer’s because that’s what PTerry died of.

So that’s what this is all about. A really good book about time travel and found family and comradeship and trying your best against the worst kind of odds. And a really good author who shouldn’t be dead and trying to help others with his same illness.

That’s why lilac, that’s why 25th of May. Okay? Okay.

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"’As I recall, they used to sing it after battles,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen old men cry when they sing it,’ he added.

‘Why? It sounds cheerful.’

They were remembering who they were not singing it with, thought Vimes. You'll learn. I know you will.”

- Night Watch, Terry Pratchett

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Book #88 - Interesting Times by Terry Pratchett

(first time read, technically. I did dnf it once before, because I got bored about a hundred pages in and… well…) It was bound to happen sooner or later. Nothing to be done about it. Like I said way back about Equal Rites, there is no way that I would love all of them. And so it happens to be the case that… well… This book bored me to tears for the majority of the page count. Before someone jumps out the woodworks and clubs me over the head for it - I do like parts of it. Rincewind remains his pitiable, slightly annoying yet endearing self. I liked seeing Twoflower again. Glad he’s well. But apart from Ponder and Hex, that’s about it. Rincewind is funny, but his plots don’t seem to grab me properly. The Silver Horde is… well… I don’t like them. Sorry. They are, and pardon this pun, uninteresting to me. Which is why the rest of this post is about Hex. Reading Discworld chronologically is actually quite fascinating. Not only do characters and places carry over from book to book, evolve and grow and carry on with their background life… Abstract concepts do as well. Lords And Ladies introduced the idea of an insect hive as a complex, decentralised version of a brain. So what’s the next step of that idea? Well, a magical computer running on an ant hill, of course. And since it is used outright to process knowledge, it has some properties of books, too. And books have power, books have a form of personality, and so logically, Hex does, too. Only that Hex isn’t made up of paper, Hex is made up of a bunch of random stuff, some of which is also alive. And it has a name. I will remember this book as the one that was mostly boring but made me slightly afraid of Hex.

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"There was a tension to the thing, a feeling of mute straining and striving towards some distant and incomprehensible goal. As a wizard, it was something that Ponder had only before encountered in acorns: a tiny soundless voice which said, yes, I am but a small, green, simple object - but I dream about forests."

Terry Pratchett, Interesting Times

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After reading Interesting Times and its kirby-lore butterflies, I can never look at this official illustration in a normal way ever again

Also I redrew it in my style for funsies

(The official illustration: )

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May you live in intresting BORING times

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Interesting Times thoughts...

I don't know quite why this one took me so long to finish. Maybe because it's another Rincewind book, which is probably my least favourite set of books, or maybe because the Orientalism was embarrassing this time around. But I finally finished it, so here are my thoughts:

* this was one of the first Discworld books I ever read, being quite newly released when I first discovered the series, and it's definitely slipped a long way down on my faves list. I think in my first read, I enjoyed the Cohen sub-plot most - my copy has chunks of the Horde scenes underlined for some reason I can't recall, so clearly they must have been important to me for something. But now, it's all a bit clumsy and heavy-handed, and it reads as very colonialist. European-coded characters go to east-Asian-coded country to overthrow a communist-coded regime and laugh at the weird Asian-ness of t all. 1990s British writing at its most British.

* not enough Twoflower.

* Hex! Hex might be my favourite character in this book. Coding jokes ftw. I will always appreciate an 'anthill inside' sticker on a laptop.

* uh... I don't think I have much more to add, which is disappointing for how long it took me to finish this book.

* basically, Orientalism bad, glad the series got better.

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Thank you! Yes, Velvet Underground, of course! And now, 30 years later, I feel like my understanding of my first ever Discworld novel is finally complete.

Soul Music thoughts

I was a little bit anxious about re-reading this one, because Soul Music was my first Discworld book, way way back when I was 14, and I think people's entry into Discworld shapes the way they view the series and setting a considerable amount. Discworld was, for me, first and foremost a comedy series that paralleled our world for humorous effect, and the philosophy stuff came later.

I was also disappointed to realise that the book that brought me into this wonderful world had some pretty obnoxious, albeit brief, racist stereotypes in the scenes involving the takeaway restaurant that Susan visits. It was tough to read through those moments, even though I know that English language pop culture was still full of those stereotypes for comedy in the '90s, laughing at accents and using minorities as punchlines.

On the flip side, this fandom seems to have overlooked Gloria as the series' first trans dwarf. She's most definitely she, attending an all girls school and described as wearing ribbons in her beard. Gloria walked so that Cherry Littlebottom could run.

On a re-read, some of the music jokes feel a bit clunky - this is where the Cosgrove Hall animated adaptation absolutely surpasses the source material, capturing the parody element with incredibly well crafted songs that are so evocative of the styles they're imitating while still being wonderful songs in their own right. That moment in the Cavern when they play one chord and immediately you know it's a Beatles parody is just *chef's kiss*. Do watch the animated series if you can.

There were plenty of other musical references that I didn't get on my first, or even second or third, read, but which finally hit many years later - I've already posted the felonious monk gag, but finishing the story with a Kirsty MacColl reference was beautiful (there's a guy works down the chip shop, swears he's elvish). The only musical reference I still didn't get this time around was 'Surreptitious Fabric' - can anyone clue me in on this one?

Other fun moments from this one:

* Glod redecorating hotel rooms

* Ponder Stibbons and the students of the High Energy Magic building

* "We're on a mission from Glod"