Guavanaut posted:

smellmycheese posted:

Sky on form this morning

fuctifino posted:

https://i.imgur.com/ELANLLS.mp4

smellmycheese posted:

While we’re on NI. This is one of the worst political cartoons I have ever seen in the Grauniad - and that is a low loving bar

smellmycheese posted:

Sky on form this morning

Jedit posted:

Amusing though it is, I assume they're talking about Camilla.

NoneMoreNegative posted:

Kwasi doing his best SICKOS here

forkboy84 posted:

This reminds me: I don't really know where Emma Little-Pengelly came from. Like, why is she the Deputy First Minister rather than someone like Edwin Poots who seems to have a higher profile?

smellmycheese posted:

While we’re on NI. This is one of the worst political cartoons I have ever seen in the Grauniad - and that is a low loving bar

forkboy84 posted:

This reminds me: I don't really know where Emma Little-Pengelly came from. Like, why is she the Deputy First Minister rather than someone like Edwin Poots who seems to have a higher profile?

Angepain posted:

why did they not just draw the women larger with regular sized arms. why the political body horror

crispix posted:

had a bit of a grudge against the guardian since the day that cabbage faced twat disparaged Terry Pratchett tbh :/

crispix posted:

this was literally a week or so after he died in 2015 and he wrote an article saying his work was rubbish, despite, admittedly, not having read any of it

Tedsville posted:

What the gently caress. Who wrote this?

Jonathan Jones posted:

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. In the age of social media and ebooks, our concept of literary greatness is being blurred beyond recognition. A middlebrow cult of the popular is holding literature to ransom. Thus, if you judge by the emotional outpourings over their deaths, the greatest writers of recent times were Pratchett and Ray Bradbury. There was far less of an internet splurge when Gabriel García Márquez died in 2014 and Günter Grass this spring. Yet they were true titans of the novel. Their books, like all great books, can change your life, your beliefs, your perceptions. Everyone reads trash sometimes, but why are we now pretending, as a culture, that it is the same thing as literature? The two are utterly different.

Actual literature may be harder to get to grips with than a Discworld novel, but it is more worth the effort. By dissolving the difference between serious and light reading, our culture is justifying mental laziness and robbing readers of the true delights of ambitious fiction.

Because life really is too short to waste on ordinary potboilers. I am not saying this as a complacent book snob who claims to have read everything. On the contrary, I am crushed by how many books I have not read.

This summer I finally finished Mansfield Park. How had I managed not to read it up to now? It’s shameful. But at least now it’s part of my life. The structure of Jane Austen’s morally sombre plot, the restrained irony of her style, the sudden opening up of the book as it moves from Mansfield Park to Portsmouth and takes in the complex real social world of regency England – all that’s in me now. Great books become part of your experience. They enrich the very fabric of reality. I don’t just mean 19th-century classics, either. I also read Post Office by Charles Bukowski this summer. My God, what a writer. Bukowski is a voice from hell with the talent of an angel. I must read every word by him.

But Terry Pratchett? Get real. It’s time we stopped this pretence that mediocrity is equal to genius.

serious gaylord posted:

Who needs to die for Andrew to be king

Bobby Deluxe posted:

To be fair the title of the rebuttal implies an interesting point, which is that entertainment is its own thing, and it's stupid and elitist to assume that everything has to be up its own arse to be valid.

It's just that he made that point by being elitist and up his own arse in the original piece.

OwlFancier posted:

I want to say his name was jonathan something, I gather he's a culture reviewer of the guardian or something.


E:
https://www.theguardian.com/artandd...inment-than-art

OwlFancier posted:

I also object to the charge that terry pratchett's work does not touch on real things. It is literally the fundamental element of his work.

crispix posted:

yeah

the stupid oval office didn't read it

the discworld is used to explore what's bad, good and nonsensical about this world