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Terry Pratchett started his career as a crypto-monarchist and ended up the most consistently humane writer of his generation.  He never entirely lost his affection for benevolent dictatorship, and made a few classic colonial missteps along the way, but in the end you’d be hard pressed to find a more staunchly feminist, anti-racist, anti-classist, unsentimental and clear-sighted writer of Old White British Fantasy.  

The thing I love about Terry’s writing is that he loved - loved - civil society.  He loved the correct functioning of the social contract.  He loved technology, loved innovation, but also loved nature and the ways of living that work with and through it.   He loved Britain, but hated empire (see “Jingo”) - he was a ruralist who hated provincialism, a capitalist who hated wealth, an urbanist who reveled in stories of pollution, crime and decay.  He was above all a man who loved systems, of nature, of thought, of tradition and of culture.  He believed in the best of humanity and knew that we could be even better if we just thought a little more.

As a writer: how skillful, how prolific, how consistent.  The yearly event of a new Discworld book has been a part of my life for more than two decades, and in that barrage of material there have been so few disappointments, so many surprises… to come out with a book as fresh and inspired as “Monstrous Regiment” as the 31st novel in your big fantasy series?  Ludicrous.  He was just full of treasure.  What a thing to have had, what a thing to have lost.

In the end, he set a higher standard, as a writer and as a person.  He got better as he learned, and he kept learning, and there was no “too late” or “too hard” or “I can’t be bothered to do the research.”  He just did the work.  I think in his memory the best thing we can do is to roll up our sleeves and do the same.

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i hope that the discussion about student protests does not get reduced to "privileged rich kids faffing around at an ivy league school." setting aside that tenuous claim, over the last week, protests have erupted over the entire country. a few days ago, riot police beat, pepper-sprayed, and arrested NYU faculty shielding students; protests started at the university of southern california when the admin cancelled the valedictorian's speech; encampments appeared at the university of southern carolina, UT dallas, the university of maryland, the university of new mexico, IUPUI, virginia tech, the university of virginia, the university of illinois, the university of north carolina — chapel hill, the university of pittsburgh, uc berkeley, the university of michigan — ann arbor, MIT, emerson, tufts, the university of rochester, rice, swarthmore, the new school, vanderbilt university, with students arrested; students protested or walked out at miami university, northwestern, temple, the 5 claremont colleges: pomona, pitzer, scripps, harvey mudd, and claremont mckenna, stanford, washington university in st louis, students were arrested at ohio state, students were confronted by riot police at cal poly humboldt, after which they occupied campus, students were arrested at the university of minnesota — twin cities, after which faculty walked out; and yes, there are protests at the other ivies, most notably yale, with students facing mass arests after encampments, but there is also an encampment at brown, protests appeared at cornell, princeton faculty issued a statement of solidarity while students are preparing an encampment, and harvard banned the undergraduate palestine solidarity committee. there are thousands of students who are protesting for palestine across the entire country, facing harassment, arrest, and suspension in return

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Funny what a little bit of Holocaust denialism will get you trending with.

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do not separate them…..

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It's crazy that these strikes are happening given that all the writers and actors are asking for is less than 0.3% of the revenue these studios make.

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You gotta love that Tumblr is on the rise because of Twitter and Reddit going down, and not because Tumblr has actually done anything to really improve its website.

I personally kin with a website that accidentally and coincidentally fails upwards.

The site that wins simply by remaining upright.

We are literally this meme, posted eons ago, in our ancient texts.

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So when Earth gets its own permanent superstorm like Jupiter’s Great Red Spot and it makes it so the tropics are basically no longer habitable by humans is it going to have one of these random old-person hurricane names

How fucked up would it be if they chose your first name for that storm

Like you’d pretty much have to change it, right? The storm’s not going away and keeping your name would be in pretty poor taste, I’d think

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imagine simping for capitalism this badly

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The only reason there are pyramids in Egypt

is because they are too heavy to be carried to the British Museum

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According to researchers, coordinated critics have mounted a “misinformation campaign designed to purposefully fabricate doubt regarding the harmful impacts of outdoor cats and stymie policies that would remove outdoor cats from the landscape.”

The conflict stems from a groundbreaking study published in 2013 by scientists from the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. That study evaluated the combined impact of the tens of millions of outdoor cats in the United States. The authors found that roaming outdoor cats kill approximately 2.4 billion birds every year and are the leading source of direct, human-caused mortality to birds in the country. Similar results have since been confirmed in Canada and Australia.

READ MORE

To those of you still in denial about how bad outdoor cats are to wildlife not just in your own countries but globally here’s the cold hard scientific facts stating that you are apart of a movement of uneducated critics spreading misinformation. 

Here’s the link to the open-source scientific artificial as well:

Responding to misinformation and criticisms regarding United States cat predation estimates (2018). Loss S, Will T, Longcore T, Marra P. Biological Invasions; 20(12): 3385-2296

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Whenever I read LotR and reach the battle between Eowyn and the Witch-king, I get the impression that the reason why the prophecy loophole works isn’t that the Witch-king is unkillable except for some illogical weakness nobody had thought about yet for misogynistic reasons, but that the Witch-king himself derives so much of his power from the fear he instills in others and from his own belief that he is unkillable. Eowyn doesn’t fear him, because she doesn’t fear death. When she twists his words right back at him, she’s not trying to exploit a prophecy loophole, she’s just making a play on the double meaning of the word «man» with fairly standard battlefield bravado.

But, crucially, it gets the Witch-king wondering if there might be an actual loophole in the prophecy. He starts doubting his own invincibility. There’s no logical reason why a woman might be able to kill him if a man cannot, but prophecies are tricky things. What if …

And this is what undoes him, in the end. This last minute doubt. The Witch-king, deep down, believes that Eowyn can kill him, thus making it possible for her to do so.

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you know what sure would be nice

pain meds doing what they’re supposed to and actually alleviating some pain

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hope this clears it up!

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