Day Twenty-Two - Coffee / Tea

Not quite the great escape

Bluebottle: "How are we going to get out of here!?"

Seagoon: "Don't worry lad - this evening I received a cake from a friend, and guess what was inside it?"

Bluebottle: "You mean...?"

Seagoon: "Yes! Raisins!"

castleoflions:

(Click for high-res)

Collaboration between myself and Sammi.

VERILY. SHE DID SO.

I wish all teen shows were like this... I'd watch this show to death

To my uk trans people and allies out there.

hey please for the love of god when youre hearing news about gas prices and increasing oil production:

remember that there are people still fighting against pipelines poisoning indigenous land and water. do NOT forget about us in the midst of all this.

qadashdinex, zisan! chin'an shida!

listen to me, stand up! thank you, friend!

King Solomon’s Mines are not are not diamond mines as commonly believed, but a series of land annexations that King Solomon made by pointing around and declaring, “mine.”

i think a lot about Angua ad Carrot’s personal arcs in Feet of Clay, and as part of how the book seems a lot about identity or claiming your identity via Dorfl and Cheery (Dorfl being declaring that he OWNS himself, and Cheery being the first Discworld dwarf to say ‘I am She’, and both of them starting cultural revolutions by simply saying “I am who I am”)

and the relevant point is that they start out on opposite sides of sympathizing.

Carrot’s reactions to Cheery speaks for itself. And they’re bad, and worse for the fact that it’s Carrot doing it. He comes off as very much the tradtionalist dwarf he was raised as, with quietly acidic comments like ‘I’m pretty sure my mother is a woman but at least she has the decency not to show it’ and other, even nastier things. It might not have been written as transphobic but it sure as hell reads like it. Most notably, it actually gets Angua pretty steamed, given that she keeps things close to the chest and conceals her feelings. It gets her genuinely pissed. It’s unsettling, like his Men At Arms bigotry towards the undead.

But. Carrot is the only one, throughout a large chunk of the book, to treat golems as people. Everyone else considers them mindless machines, and even Nobby and Colon, who are usually totally harmless, flat out try to use Detritus’ crossbow to kill Dorfl when he is offline; nobody trusts golems, who can do nothing but endlessly labor forever and suffer in silence, deprived of even a voice for themselves, and no one admits they are alive. And as Vime later thinks, that the real reason people are so scared of them is that they know they would deserve it if the Fantasy Robot Revolution came for them, after the way they mistreat the golems.

Carrot is the one to believe in Dorfl, to fight for him, and who believes that what is happening to the golems is wrong.

Angua is Cheery’s only friend at first. She’s the one who helps Cheery accomodating herself to more feminine things that are extremely new for a dwarf, she’s even protective of Cheery and desperately hides that she is a werewolf, knowing that Cheery hates people like her. She inspires Cheery towards what becomes the bedrock of the dwarfish openly female-presenting movement, and its a very humanizing and good thing from their friendship.

She’s also, put bluntly, a vicious and even cruel figure whenever golems are around. She openly regards them as non-sentient machines, hates them effectively because it helps her to have someone to look down on as an undead, and she rationalizes their horrific treatment and endless servitude as ‘being accepted’. She even gets mad at Carrot for empathizing with them and not her, specifically, though she does note that she is asking him to be unfair.

Much of their respective character development in Feet of Clay is their subtle growing over the worst aspects of themselves in this particular book. Carrot grows into less of a traditionalist with knee-jerk reactions, and Angua grows to empathize with the golems and view them as people.

Perhaps most relevant is the capstone to both their character arcs?

Using the pronouns Dorfl and Cheery prefer.

A message from Rob Wilkins.

Shortly before he died, Terry Pratchett assured me that, if there is an afterlife, he would give me a ring and let me know. That was ten years ago - and still no call.

From which, incidentally, I draw no firm conclusions. What if there was an afterlife, but with no phone signal?

But of course there is one place where Terry indisputably lives on: in the pages of his books and in the minds of the millions of readers around the world who turn those pages and continue to find them funny and true. For, while his words live on, so does Terry, and that will be the case, no question, not just for this one decade so quickly gone, but for many further decades to come.

So let me join Lyn and Rhianna in raising a glass today to the magical persistence of books and to Sir Terry; gone but still so very firmly with us.

Rob Wilkins

Day Ten - How I Wake up in the morning

I feel not unlike a small boy, waking from a bad dream to find reality not much of an improvement. ~ John Byrne

I think I was probably born to hibernate; I find waking up to be the biggest challenge of each day, especially if I have nothing on my to-do list for that day. Usually I require the assistance of an alarm clock with several alarms set to ensure that I actually stay awake. Once I've been awakened by my alarm I have a minute or two in which to actually get up, if I don't - chances are I'll go back to sleep again until the next alarm wakes me.

I'm not adverse to getting up early - this morning (with help as usual from Amanda) I was up at 7.45 in order to go to a local market and for a previous job of mine I had to get up at 6.30 to get a train... which wasn't fun.

...anyways, that's today's topic roughly covered, more to come tomorrow!

Nik

The sleigh slewed around at the end of Money Trap Lane. COME ON, ALBERT. "You know you’re not supposed to do this sort of thing, master. You know what happened last time." THE HOGFATHER CAN DO IT, THOUGH. "But… little match girls dying in the snow is part of what the Hogswatch spirit is all about, master," said Albert desperately. "I mean, people hear about it and say, ‘We may be poorer than a disabled banana and only have mud and old boots to eat, but at least we’re better off than the poor little match girl,’ master. It makes them feel happy and grateful for what they’ve got, see." I KNOW WHAT THE SPIRIT OF HOGSWATCH IS, ALBERT. "Sorry, master. But, look, it’s all right, anyway, because she wakes up and it’s all bright and shining and tinkling music and there’s angels, master." Death stopped. AH. THEY TURN UP AT THE LAST MINUTE WITH WARM CLOTHES AND A HOT DRINK? "Er. No. Not exactly at the last minute, master. Not as such." WELL? "More sort of just after the last minute." Albert coughed nervously. YOU MEAN AFTER SHE’S— "Yes. That’s how the story goes, master, ‘s not my fault." WHY NOT TURN UP BEFORE? AN ANGEL HAS QUITE A LARGE CARRYING CAPACITY. "Couldn’t say, master. I suppose people think it’s more… satisfying the other way…" Albert hesitated and then growned. "You know, now that I come to tell someone…" Death looked down at the shape under the falling snow. Then he set the lifetimer on the air and touched it with a finger. A spark flashed across. "You ain’t really allowed to do that," said Albert, feeling wretched. THE HOGFATHER CAN. THE HOGFATHER GIVES PRESENTS. THERE’S NO BETTER PRESENT THAN A FUTURE. "Yeah, but—" ALBERT. "All right, master." Death scooped up the girl and strode to the end of the alley. The snowflakes fell like angel’s feathers. Death stepped out into the street and accosted two figures who were tramping through the drifts. TAKE HER SOMEWHERE WARM AND GIVE HER A GOOD DINNER, he commanded, pushing the bundle into the arms of one of them. AND I MAY WELL BE CHECKING UP LATER. Then he turned and disappeared in the swirling snow. Constable Visit looked down at the little girl in his arms, and then at Corporal Nobbs. "What’s all this about, corporal?" Nobby pulled aside the blanket. "Search me," he said. "Looks like we’ve been chosen to do a bit of charity." "I don’t call it very charitable, just dumping someone on people like this." "Come on, there’ll still be some grub left in the Watch House," said Nobby. He’d got a very deep and certain feeling that this was expected of him. He remembered a big man in a grotto, although he couldn’t quite remember the face. And he couldn’t quite remember the face of the person who had handed over the girl, so that meant it must be the same one. Shortly afterward there was some tinkling music and a very bright light and two rather affronted angels appeared at the other end of the alley, but Albert threw snowballs at them until they went away.

Hogfather, Sir! Terry Pratchett (via zombeesknees)