#discworld quote

[zakalwe-the-ninth]

Terry Pratchett never went to university, but did an impressive job of capturing the essence of faculty life.

Hard to drag and very good at kicking, indeed…

[stupidphototricks]

“You know what day it is, Ping?” said Colon. “Er…25th of May, Sarge.” “And you know what that means, Ping?” “Er…” “It means,” said Nobby, “that anyone important enough to ask where we’re going—” “—knows where we’ve gone,” said Fred Colon. The door slammed behind them.

[leoreadss]

Morning Coffee

Every night, I read a few pages (aka a chapter or two) of a book (Sourcery in this case), and in the morning, I dedicate five to ten minutes to picking it up again while drinking my coffee.

Sometimes something funny happens. I totally forgot where I left the story the day before and this morning was one of those moments.

For a moment I thought I was reading Good Omens (the actual book) mixed with a GO Fan Fiction (@phoen1xr0se I'll live in yours DFAFM forever) in which they like to hold hands and it was perfect!

Also, can we talk about the Rinswind / Crowley parallel? I think there's something there worth exploring!

[ziriath]

Some relevant Discworld quote

Vetinari leaned back and placed his fingers together 

 ‘Let us consider a situation in which some keen and highly inventive men devise a remarkable system of communication,’ he said. ‘What they have is a kind of passionate ingenuity, in large amounts. 

What they don’t have is money. They are not used to money. So they meet some . . . people, who introduce them to other people, friendly people, who for, oh, a forty per cent stake in the enterprise give them the much-needed cash and, very important, much fatherly advice and an introduction to a really good firm of accountants.

 And so they proceed, and soon money is coming in and money is going out but somehow, they learn, they’re not quite as financially stable as they think and really do need more money. Well, this is all fine because it’s clear to all that the basic enterprise is going to be a money tree one day, and does it matter if they sign over another fifteen per cent? It’s just money.

 It’s not important in the way that shutter mechanisms are, is it? And then they find out that yes, it is. It is everything. Suddenly the world’s turned upside down, suddenly those nice people aren’t so friendly any more, suddenly it turns out that those bits of paper they signed in a hurry, were advised to sign by people who smiled all the time, mean that they don’t actually own anything at all, not patents, not property, nothing. 

Not even the contents of their own heads, indeed. 

Even any ideas they have now don’t belong to them, apparently. 

And somehow they’re still in trouble about money. Well, some run and some hide and some try to fight, which is foolish in the extreme, because it turns out that everything is legal, it really is. Some accept lowlevel jobs in the enterprise, because one has to live and in any case the enterprise even owns their dreams at night. And yet actual illegality, it would appear, has not taken place.

 Business is business.’ 

Lord Vetinari opened his eyes. The men around the table were staring at him. ‘Just thinking aloud,’ he said.

(Terry Pratchett - Going Postal, 2010)

[bluebirdsongs16]

Good Omens drabble fic: if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a lie

canard: 1. A false or unfounded story, rumour, or claim, esp. one that is deliberately misleading 2. (French) a duck

“A base canard!” interrupted Garhartra. “What’s a canard?” said Twoflower. “I think it’s a kind of duck,” said Rincewind from the far end of the long table. — Terry Pratchett, The Color of Magic

180 words of Aziraphale and Crowley discussing lies, ducks, and books, in the style of Sir Terry Pratchett, under the cut~ 🦆🦆🦆

“I’m afraid the Metatron has fed me a rather appalling, bald-faced canard! And I, like an idiot, lapped it up!”

Crowley’s brows furrowed. “You’re complaining they served you duck in Heaven? I don’t see the problem—you love duck.”

Aziraphale gave him a long-withering look, the kind of expression that only came out when his nerves were fraught and withering away at his patience. “You really ought to read more, my dear.”

Crowley bristled at that. He actually read rather a lot, thank you very much. What else was there to do whilst loitering inside an eclectic bookshop waiting for one’s angelic counterpart to return from running errands? He’d, in fact, understood perfectly and had chosen to make a joke. One he had lifted from a book by a certain well-regarded British humorist author Aziraphale had a soft spot for.

But he let it go. Perhaps the imminent Second Coming of Lord and Savior Jesus Christ to Earth wasn’t the time to make jokes about ducks. Personally, Crowley thought it was the perfect time. But different strokes, and all that…

[itsmultifandommadness]

“People die and nothing changes” - Sam Vimes 

Night Watch by Terry Pratchett

(click for better quality)

[sorenthestoryteller]

And Susan was bright enough to know that the phrase "Someone ought to do something" was not, by itself, a helpful one. People who used it never added the rider "and that someone is me." But someone ought to do something, and right now the whole pool of someones consisted of her, and no one else.

Terry Prachett, “Hogfather”

[ghastmaskzombie]

let me tell you a story. it’s a story about anime.

long ago, bro went through a period i can only describe as his First Great Summer of Anime. he spent every waking hour streaming anime from dodgy sites. everything he could find. he was probably about fourteen at the time, and discovering a whole new medium for the first time, so obviously there were some things of questionable quality in there. last month* he told about an awful show that he watched a whole season of, desperately hoping it would get better, because the opening was just that good. but there were also some of the great classics in there.

i was almost entirely unaware of this at the time. i didn’t really know what anime was yet. i only knew it from bad dubs like cardcaptors and yu-gi-oh, or western cartoons cashing in on the craze like kappa mikey and hi hi puffy amiyumi. and i didn’t really know where the line was. i just didn’t know how much bigger the medium of animation was in japan. and i was kind of off in my own little world in those days, anyway.

so when he would tell me about the stuff he was watching, my response was always to politely nod and say something like ‘that’s nice, bro.’ at least, i hope it was. it would be now. i might have been a rude bitch back then. but there is one show i remember from that time, although i didn’t for a lot of years. i think i saw a clip of it over his shoulder once. two robots were throwing galaxies at each other. it looked absurd and stupid. bro told me some things about 'spiral energy' that didn’t make any sense to me. i didn’t really care. so i didn’t really remember.

years passed. slowly, i came over to the weeb side. some of it was revisiting old nostalgia, with the proper, subbed** version this time. some of it was the overlap between my obsession with webcomics and bro’s interest in reading manga online. most of it was just cultural osmosis facilitating the inevitable.

i watched promare with my father when it hit theatres. it’s crazy how it came to that but that’s a story for another time. anyway, after seeing all those jokes about the return of someone called ‘kamina’ online, i decided to finally look into an old-ish show that i’d heard a lot about, called gurren lagann. bro heartily encouraged me to do so. it seemed important to him for some reason.

the show started with an obvious hero, obviously at a point late in the narrative, standing on the deck of a spacecraft and saying ‘if all the lights in the sky are our enemies, we’ll still keep fighting to the end.’ and then it stepped back to the beginning of the story.

drills were a recurring theme. spiral designs kept recurring in meaningful places. there was a lot of mech fighting. the heroes got another, even bigger mech, and then yet another mech, bigger still. their power grew exponentially, driven by a mysterious energy that came directly from their fighting spirit. not even halfway through the series, they came to what by all rights should have been the final battle, for the freedom of all of humanity. i wondered how much further they could go. and in that moment i remembered.

i cried, just a bit, during the (actual) final battle of gurren lagann. i won’t pretend its message was deep, or subtle, or bold. but what it said, it said beautifully. it was moving for the same reason that a sweet song in a language you don’t speak is moving. it didn’t matter what the words were. it spoke in the language of raw emotion, of determination and unyielding hope, of last stands and last chances. and in that moment, i understood.

it had already been years since i had anything but adoration for anime, but only with that show did i understand why it had all mattered so much to bro back then. for is it not written, “seeing, contrary to popular wisdom, isn’t believing. it’s where belief stops, because it isn’t needed anymore”? bro doesn’t let media move him like i do. but i know he felt awe and wonder, for much the same reasons i felt all the things i felt. and he was with me as i watched it, to see how it struck me, to experience it for the first time again through me, to see me make that connection to him across the years... truly, the greatest thing i could ever say of a work of fiction is that it connected me to something real.

i don’t really remember where i was going with this. i may have passed it and kept going. but i think i’m satisfied with where i ended up.

*q **i have a neutral stance on subs vs. dubs (this is not the same as having no stance). i watch dubs all the time. but trust me, there were some bad dubs back then.