#glorious revolution of the 25th of may

[dimity-lawn]

A prediction.

[aeshnacyanea2000]

People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn’t that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people.

Terry Pratchett - Night Watch

[pratchettquotes]

"Now, this is a soldier's song, see? You don't look like soldiers but by the gods I'll see you sounds like 'em! You'll pick it up as we goes along! Right turn! March! 'All the little angels rise up, rise up, all the little angels rise up high!' Sing it, you sons of mothers!"

The marchers picked up the response from those who knew it.

"How do they rise up, rise up, rise up, how do they rise up, rise up high? They rise heads up, heads up, heads up--" sang out Dickens as they turned the corner.

Vimes listened as the refrain died away.

"That's a nice song," said young Sam, and Vimes realized that he was hearing it for the first time.

"It's an old soldier's song," he said.

"Really, Sarge? But it's about angels."

Yes, thought Vimes, and it's amazing what bits those angels cause to rise up as the song progresses. It's a real soldiers' song: sentimental, with dirty bits.

"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.

Terry Pratchett, Night Watch

[wilga-art]

Truth! Justice! Freedom! Reasonably Priced Love! And a Hard-Boiled Egg!

[justafterjericho]

The 25th of may. I plan to do other characters this way in the future (and not a near future), but for now, here’s Vimes and Vetinari

[saysun]

Свобода! Равенство! Братство! Любовь по разумным расценкам! И яйцо вкрутую!

[yojfull]

"But here’s some advice, boy. Don’t put your trust in revolutions. They always come around again. That’s why they’re called revolutions. People die, and nothing changes."

Terry Pratchett, Night Watch

[beardedmrbean]

[weepylucifer]

It’s remarkable to me that the Rallying Song that Pratchett made up for Night Watch and the Glorious Revolution (How Do They Rise Up) is deliberately NOT Do You Hear The People Sing, because that’s a song that... glorifies revolution, and that’s not what Night Watch is trying to do. It is always, from the moment we first hear the song, established as being about the dead. “People die” is the point.

That said, Do You Hear The People Sing (Reprise) is, weirdly enough, pretty much describing the things that happen during the Vetinari Patricianship

[thewhimsyturtle]

Happy Towel Day!  Time to grab your favorite towel and contemplate hard-boiled eggs and the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything!

And remember:  DON’T PANIC.

[joqatana]

Do you know where your AM YMRGIBS Towel is?

[dimity-lawn]

[demonahw]

It’s the twenty-fifth of May: this is a beautiful little fic about remembrance from my bookmarks.

Maybe the mess the world was now was the kind of muck that things could grow in.

[mouser26]

May 25th is apparently all nerds day

So in the spirit of all

Lilacs for the Prachetts 🪻

Towels of the Hichhikers🟥🟥

And may the Force be with returning Jedis ✨

[todayontumblr]

Thursday May 25.

The People's Revolution of the Glorious Twenty-Fifth of May.

It's May 25th, but it's not just any May 25th. It's a particularly glorious one, after all, as it is The People's Revolution of the Glorious Twenty-Fifth of May, as depicted of course in Terry Pratchett's beloved Discworld series. It also happens to be Wear the Lilac Day. #gnu terry pratchett—you know what to do, folks.

-

But wait—what is Wear the Lilac Day? you once again enquire.

"Wear the Lilac Day was adopted by Discworld fans the world over as a day to commemorate Terry Pratchett's writing, and following his diagnosis in 2007, to support research into Alzheimer's Disease.

On May 25th, certain members of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch, and a few others around the city, wore a sprig of lilac. The 25th of May was the day that they remembered those who fought and fell for hardboiled eggs, truth, justice, and reasonably priced love, who died, and in Reg Shoe's case rose and kept fighting, in the Glorious Revolution of Treacle Mine Road."

-

Happy May 25th, comrades x

[comicaurora]

Happy Glorious 25th of May. Thank you for getting me into the discworld books (at least in an indirect way). They have quickly become one of my favorite series of books, even if I've only read a handful of them. As for a question, what have been your biggest takeaways or lessons from the discworld books? Whether it be how you write, how you engage with stories, or even how you look at the world.

we got another one lads

It's a little hard to boil it down! The books cover so much ground, and I read them at such a formative age it's hard to tease out how much of me is made from them.

On the most basic level, I love how angry those books are. Every POV protagonist is seething at unfairness and injustice and this is never framed as a bad thing - just something that needs to be controlled, directed, weaponized.

I like that everything is a joke, but in-universe everybody is absolutely sincere. The characters are charicatures and punchlines because of their sincerely-held beliefs and ideals. Captain Carrot is shiny and literal-minded and perfection personified and it's funny because he really is that good. Nanny Ogg is an outrageously horny and boisterous old woman and it's funny because she's having such a good time with it, especially when contrasted with her stern and serious foil Granny Weatherwax, and it's funny because the two of them know each other incredibly well and deal with each other's eccentricities with the practice of decades. The dwarves are funny because they're goofy little guys with big beards that think about nothing but gold and new songs to sing about gold, and as the books go on, the complexities of a culture that looks like that punchline become the deepest and most fascinating element of the worldbuilding in the entire Disc. The world is mounted on the back of four elephants and we made a book called the Fifth Elephant, how wacky, hey let's casually integrate the worldbuilding consequences of massive deposits of perfectly-crisped organic matter caused by the collision of a planet-sized elephant with a planet-sized planet. The discworld tells a joke and then commits to the consequences with its entire ass, and I love that.

A lot of the characters are in some way one-of-a-kind and unprecedented, or at least appear to be on the surface because nobody like them has even been publicly known, and the stories frequently explore how these unique people navigate their existence without a roadmap and trailblaze the way for the people just like them to someday follow. People who break rules by existing and make the world question what purpose those rules serve if they aren't actually unyielding principles of reality. The dwarf gender cultural revolution, the female wizard, the golem given a voice, the entire existence of Susan Sto Helit. It produces a world that feels like it's absolutely full of protagonists, like every story is one-of-a-kind and every individual person matters and has the right to choose the way they want to live, no matter what anyone else thinks. can't believe some terfs really think these books are for them as if they aren't precision-built to tell them to go fuck themselves

The cast full of protagonists makes the crossover events a delight. All these characters existing in the same universe means they can just run into each other sometimes, and they're all such absolute weirdos that their interactions never fail to be absolutely incredible. The world feels very thoroughly lived-in, to the point where the stories sometimes almost feel like they're telling themselves.

they're just really fuckin good ok