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Reene posted:I'm amazed at how wrong a person can be about Small Gods. It was the first Discworld book I ever read and is still my favorite. The ending still makes me tear up every time I go back for a re-read. The apparent inability to understand what the book was about on a basic level and how beautifully Pratchett put the story together right up to the last paragraph just kills me. No see it doesn't have real moral conflicts like a kid trying to jerk it while his parents are trying to get into the bathroom That's something worth running to the bookstore to buy
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Apr 2, 2017 07:14
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| # ? May 20, 2024 01:52 |
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It's interesting to think of antagonists in Pratchett's books. He managed to cover a variety of very different types, with varying degrees of having a direct or indirect presence. As has been said, a recurring trait of the human antagonists is a lack of empathy. They're seldom insane; quite the opposite - very chillingly sane. Or for the stories where the stakes aren't world-threatening, incredibly self-absorbed. And then you have the otherworldly ones - the Elves, and the Auditors who are completely amoral, but from the opposite ends of the spectrum (self obsessed, capricious, and malicious vs highly ordered and regulated). And then there are the abstract concepts; the Gonne, the Music, the Summoning Dark. It's quite a bunch, really.
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Apr 12, 2017 00:50
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A lot of Pratchett's antagonists are absolutely human and believable; look at Mr. Pin and Mr. Tulip and Lord de Word -- the first two are motivated by greed, the latter and his associates by haughtiness and racism. They all happen to have sympathetic sides as well, flashes of humanity and insights into their pasts that make them more than two dimensional setpieces. I need to read The Truth again soon, that was such a good book. MUSIC VIZ ROCKS IN! 
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Apr 12, 2017 01:58
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precision posted:I just now made the connection between Angua and "she-wolf of the SS". Wow I feel dumb. Godddamnit
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Apr 12, 2017 09:06
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Pesky Splinter posted:As has been said, a recurring trait of the human antagonists is a lack of empathy. I think the best summation of his idea of evil is in... Wintersmith I think? Granny Weatherwax talks about sin being treating people as things.
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Apr 12, 2017 17:34
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Carpe Jugulum, when she was talking to the Omnian priest.
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Apr 12, 2017 17:52
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EvilTaytoMan posted:Carpe Jugulum, when she was talking to the Omnian priest. I just went looking for a Granny speech and spent 20 minutes reading all her quotes in Witches Abroad. Holy poo poo she was seriously the best character. It's insane to me that anyone prefers Vimes, at least in:re quotability. “Good and bad is tricky," she said. "I ain't too certain about where people stand. P'raps what matters is which way you face.”
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Apr 12, 2017 19:20
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Yeah, Granny has some really really fantastic character moments.
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Apr 12, 2017 19:45
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precision posted:I just now made the connection between Angua and "she-wolf of the SS". Wow I feel dumb. What's the connection? Like yeah her brother is a notNazi and she's a hot German lady, but that's about it. Ilsa ran the concentration camp and was herself a Nazi. Other than 'is an attractive German lady' and 'can be called a she-wolf' I don't see much of a connection between Ilsa and Angua.
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Apr 13, 2017 04:05
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I don't get the joke of "music with rocks in". Is it supposed to be a pun or a reference to something? It just sounds like a sentence fragment to me
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Apr 13, 2017 16:23
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Meyers-Briggs Testicle posted:I don't get the joke of "music with rocks in". Is it supposed to be a pun or a reference to something? It just sounds like a sentence fragment to me Rock n' Roll. It's a very bad joke not up to his standards.
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Apr 13, 2017 16:25
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Or, even more on-the-nose and simply; rock music.
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Apr 13, 2017 16:26
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It's that, it might also have a double meaning also being music with balls too.
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Apr 13, 2017 16:26
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Actually that line always struck me as really awkward. No one yells "Rock music!" as a kind of generic celebration
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Apr 13, 2017 16:37
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Number Ten Cocks posted:Rock n' Roll. It's a very bad joke not up to his standards. yeah but why is it phrased horribly I get rock music but 'music with rocks in' doesn't make any sense terry you wacky fellow ill have my ouiji board ready for you to answer this question tonight
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Apr 13, 2017 16:54
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It's a callback to Soul Music, where pop music was invented on Discworld. The progenitors named themselves The Band With Rocks In because that's what the troll drummer used for drums, and Music With Rocks In became the accepted name for the new sound. They don't yell "Rock n' Roll" for the same reason they don't exclaim "Jesus Christ" but there are always local equivalents.
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Apr 13, 2017 17:31
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yes, I understand that but "the band with rocks in" sounds really stupid, I just wanted to make sure I didn't miss anything why isn't it "the band with rocks in it" it's missing a crucial word there I live in 'a house with people in'
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Apr 13, 2017 17:37
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Meyers-Briggs Testicle posted:yes, I understand that but "the band with rocks in" sounds really stupid, I just wanted to make sure I didn't miss anything  https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/54245/music-with-rocks-in-british-english
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Apr 13, 2017 18:32
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ulmont posted:
this is exactly what I was looking for, thanks
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Apr 13, 2017 18:58
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For example Veterinari is supposed to remind you of Medici, only slightly less so, just as a vet is not quite a doctor. lol, i had never thought about the medici thing
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Apr 13, 2017 20:49
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Hogge Wild posted:For example Veterinari is supposed to remind you of Medici, only slightly less so, just as a vet is not quite a doctor.  Me, either.
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Apr 13, 2017 21:34
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Paul.Power posted:Take that one literary critic who read Small God's after the Internet pestered him to read some Discworld - one of the bits that most stuck out to me from the review was his criticism of Vorbis, "a man without a single redeeming feature or any back story to explain how he became so utterly inhuman". quote:It does not matter to me if Terry Pratchett’s final novel is a worthy epitaph or not, or if he wanted it to be pulped by a steamroller. I have never read a single one of his books and I never plan to. Life’s too short. No offence, but Pratchett is so low on my list of books to read before I die that I would have to live a million years before getting round to him. I did flick through a book by him in a shop, to see what the fuss is about, but the prose seemed very ordinary. I don’t mean to pick on this particular author, except that the huge fuss attending and following his death this year is part of a very disturbing cultural phenomenon. quote:But Terry Pratchett? Get real. It’s time we stopped this pretence that mediocrity is equal to genius. a) is a huge tosspot b) probably didn't read Small Gods with the desire to find anything good about it
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Apr 13, 2017 22:16
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What a massive gobshite.
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Apr 13, 2017 22:25
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The guardian is not immune to pushing angry hackery to boost their CPM I see.
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Apr 13, 2017 23:29
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Hogge Wild posted:For example Veterinari is supposed to remind you of Medici, only slightly less so, just as a vet is not quite a doctor. Terry went into great detail about how he constructed his gags in an interview in 1991, between Reaper Man and Witches Abroad. Note also the last sentence, as the man casually demonstrates his insight again. quote:"Parody is the wrong kind of word, for say, Guards! Guards!. They're not parodies in there but resonances, I think. If you write something akin to a police procedural novel it resonates. It has to. There's no way you can avoid it happening. So all you have to do at times is simply tell people that that's exactly what does happen. In the same way that I'm doing the Discworld religions one, it has to resonate with lots of things which have been going on in the last few years, lots of things that people know about the Christian religion and Mohammedism and things like that. There is no way you can avoid that so you have to take it on board. Emphasis mine; once you start actively looking out for that sort of thing, you can't stop... quote:"Incidentally, the Seriph's palace, the Rhoxie, is indeed a 'resonance' with the Alhambra -- a famous Moorish palace which became a synonym for an impressive building, and later became a common cinema name as in Odeon and, yes, Roxy." Trin Tragula fucked around with this message at 23:42 on Apr 13, 2017 |
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Apr 13, 2017 23:38
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The Vetinari thing was all but spelled out in Night Watch I thought, given that his nickname at school was "dog-botherer."
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Apr 14, 2017 01:27
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Reene posted:The Vetinari thing was all but spelled out in Night Watch I thought, given that his nickname at school was "dog-botherer." That his name sounds like "veterinarian" is obvious, what's less obvious is that this is a reference to anything in particular. That "Medici" sounds like "medic" and therefore their names are related is something that never occurred to me either. Especially since I've always more closely associated him with Machiavelli in my mind.
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Apr 14, 2017 02:52
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Apraxin posted:I realize we've mostly moved past this discussion, but I think it's worth pointing out the reason the internet 'pestered' Jones into reading Terry Pratchett was his previous column 'Get Real: Terry Pratchett is Not a Literary Genius, written a couple of months after Pratchett died, which opened with: Jones is the art world's version of Jeremy Clarkson, employed by the Guardian precisely because he rubs so many people the wrong way, thus ensuring a steady stream of clicks. Don't give him the satisfaction. He's also infuriating because (like Clarkson) he's pigheaded and obstinate while still sometimes grazing upon the truth. Jones is correct that Pratchett doesn't have an above-average prose style, and he's also correct that this is par for the course in the SFF genre. He misses that the Discworld books are about a) dialogue, and b) the sum of their parts being greater than the whole. Anyway, I just finished Lords and Ladies in my slow re-read of the series, and I think now (as I did when I was a teenager) that it's probably the best of the Witches series (with the caveat that I never read any of the Aching books). I always thought Pratchett was at his best when he did genuine drama amidst the comedy, and Lords and Ladies has a starter with Granny and Diamanda going through the standing stones and then escaping the elves, with the great third act where the kingdom is invaded entirely and there's a hugely creepy sense of terror from these malevolent elves. The whole thing is just fantastic. I think this part of the series is really where Pratchett starts transitioning from "good" to "great." Also, the culmination of this book has Granny proud of herself for Borrowing a whole swarm of bees. I don't know if we do spoiler tags in the Pratchett appreciation thread, but is it just my imagination, or at some point does she Borrow, or at least sense, the whole country of Lancre? Has that already happened? Is it in Wyrd Sisters?
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Apr 14, 2017 12:11
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Wyrd Sisters has two scenes where all the wild animals gather up to confront people, but that wasn't Granny, that was the will of the Lancre itself.
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Apr 14, 2017 13:59
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There is definitely a scene that ties it in with her Borrowing ability, I just can't remember which book it is. That's the problem with a re-read, I don't know if I'm remembering something from last year or 15 years ago.
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Apr 14, 2017 14:44
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freebooter posted:There is definitely a scene that ties it in with her Borrowing ability, I just can't remember which book it is. That's the problem with a re-read, I don't know if I'm remembering something from last year or 15 years ago. In Wyrd sisters they discuss her communing with the land, and it is Borrowing in a way but not the same as when she controls the bees.
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Apr 14, 2017 15:14
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RoboChrist 9000 posted:What's the connection? Like yeah her brother is a notNazi and she's a hot German lady, but that's about it. Ilsa ran the concentration camp and was herself a Nazi. Other than 'is an attractive German lady' and 'can be called a she-wolf' I don't see much of a connection between Ilsa and Angua. It would be quite an embuggerance for me to find them but in The Fifth Elephant or one of the other Uberwald-heavy books there are several more jokes but I mean yeah you've grasped the basics of it, and the fact that it's such a basic reference is why I felt stupid for never seeing it before Also for what it's worth I thought "music with rocks in" was a funny phrase
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Apr 14, 2017 20:54
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I'm watching Soul Music on YouTube and there's a scene when they're touring the cities where some animator has snuck in a girl in the crowd who gets her tits out.
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Apr 14, 2017 20:57
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Flipswitch posted:I'm watching Soul Music on YouTube and there's a scene when they're touring the cities where some animator has snuck in a girl in the crowd who gets her tits out. Only appropriate.
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Apr 14, 2017 22:27
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freebooter posted:He's also infuriating because (like Clarkson) he's pigheaded and obstinate while still sometimes grazing upon the truth. Jones is correct that Pratchett doesn't have an above-average prose style, and he's also correct that this is par for the course in the SFF genre. He misses that the Discworld books are about a) dialogue, and b) the sum of their parts being greater than the whole. I get really tired of hearing this complaint levied at SF, especially older SF, from critics who don't seem to have any grasp of the pulp background that the genre grew out of. In Pratchett's case, as you said, he deliberately writes in a very conversational style because it suits the tone he's trying for. Neither his writing nor the setting take themselves seriously right up until the brief moment that they do, and we get an epic moment of a character being true to themselves.
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Apr 14, 2017 22:30
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Cicadalek posted:Actually that line always struck me as really awkward. No one yells "Rock music!" as a kind of generic celebration I always interpreted that scene as Otto deliberately going up the scale of "phrases that get a dramatic lightning strike" and ending with "music with rocks in" which generates the thunderclap that forms the scene transition. But I'll admit it's not the most straightforward gag.
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Apr 15, 2017 10:28
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I don't know about you guys but I have heard people yell "ROCK AND ROOOOOLLLLLLLLLL!!!!!!!!!!!!" at like, more than half the shows I've ever seen. And I'm not even counting Guitar Wolf in that.
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Apr 19, 2017 19:55
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What happened to the rumoured remake of the truckers tv series, just dug my VHS copy out for the kids to watch and it really hasn't aged that badly
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May 7, 2017 19:33
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Finally got around to reading Raising Steam. It well. It was a book and I'm glad I read it. It's a shame that a lot of the New Ankh stuff won't ever be fleshed out more, the modernization of Ankh-Morpork was always one of my favorite subjects, almost all of my favorite Discworld books are set there.
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May 8, 2017 01:07
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| # ? May 20, 2024 01:52 |
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Happy 25th of May. GNU Terry Pratchett. (and do you know where your towel is?)
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May 25, 2017 22:15
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