What?

“Use your gifts and your talents to greatest possible effect while you can. Spread joy wherever possible. Laugh at jokes. Tell jokes. Make puns and bugger the embuggerances. Read books. Read my books. You might like them. You might find something else you like even more than them. Look for these things in life.

Question authority. Champion good causes. Speak out against injustice. Do not tolerate bullies or bigots or racists or anti-intellectuals or the narrow-minded. Use your education to challenge them. Broaden their perspectives. Make the world you interface with a happier place.

These are your choices. Choices you have been fortunate to have been given, so don’t waste them while you have them. Don’t look back in years to come and wish you had grasped a fleeting opportunity. Grasp it now with both hands, Live. Strive. Love.”

from A Little Advice for Life taken from ‘Terry Pratchett: from birth to death, a writer.’

—Sir Terry Pratchett; April 28, 1948 – March 12, 2015

One of the greatest compliments I've ever received is that I resemble Sam Vimes.

Mind how you go.

Sir Terry Pratchett awakens. A skeleton stands at his bedside, wearing a long black robe. He sits up. “Well, hang on, let me get my hat,” he tells it.

The skeleton reaches into its robe. From abyssal depths it produces a heavy book bound in sheets of lead and night. It is the kind of book that gets stolen by a rugged adventurer from a temple with more spike-traps than the average house of worship contains. It is the kind of book to which the word “tome” might properly be applied. Frost forms on its pages from the lingering chill of the void. 

The skeleton coughs once and holds the book out to the man sitting on the bed.

WOULD YOU SIGN THIS? it asks. BIG FAN.

One of the things I love about Terry Pratchett is how pro trans his later writing is, which came very naturally from his pro-subversion of assigned gender roles position in his earlier writing. This is the exact kind of development I want to see from my middle aged white men and it's sad how often that simply doesn't happen.

It’s not a Discworld joke unless you read it, don’t parse it as a joke, and then carry on with your life for ten years until someone stops you to say something like “It’s a pavlovian response because the dog ate a pavlova” and you scream Terry’s name with enough indignant rage you hope it rattles the pillars of the multiverse so wherever his soul is he’ll hear it.

#i don’t think this is what pterry meant by ‘a man’s not dead while his name is still spoken’

I absolutely think it is

I read Jingo for the first time when I was 13.

I’m 33 now, and I still discover a new joke every time I reread it.

Terry was a comedic genius

— Feet of Clay, Terry Pratchett

IN A DISTANT and second-hand set of dimensions, in an astral plane that was never meant to fly, the curling star-mists waver and part . . .

See . . .

"GNU Sir Terry Pratchett" - L-Space Wiki / Ursula K. LeGuin / "Terry Pratchett" - Wikipedia / "GNU" - Urban Dictionary / Going Postal by Terry Pratchett / Reaper Man by Terry Pratchett / Brandon Sanderson / Paul Kidby / The Colour of Magic by Terry Pratchett

Lighting a birthday candle behind some moving shutters...

The meaning should be obvious, and is based on the 6-shutter code from the game "Clacks", rather than the 8-shutter one from "The Fifth Elephant", "Going Postal" and others, whose code alphabet was never fully described.

Here's a breakdown of the message string...

...and here's an official 8-shutter clacks tower as illustrated by Paul Kidby (Official Visual Discworld Chronicler).

It’s a shiny rock, what’s not to like?

I fucking adore amethysts. I don’t care what their “meaning” is…magpie brain like pretty purple rock. Adorn self with rocks. Be cute.

Hee hee hoo hoo shiny rock

Honestly I do like knowing the ‘meanings’ of gemstones but I think of them as less a thing they ‘do’ and more like you know. The meanings of flowers. Like, amethyst means peace and calm. Having one isn’t going to magically heal my anxiety sure that’d just be silly but I like that I can give a pretty purple rock to a friend as a way of saying ‘I hope you have a nice chill time today’ just like you would with flower language. Especially since saying the same thing with flower language would use lavender and a lot of people I know are allergic to that so here have a purple rock instead

the only medicinal properties crystals have is “I did not previously own a shiny rock but now I do :)”

Unless it is specifically rock salt. Then you can also add ‘mmm tastey’ to the list.

Then a distant shuffling was born in the heavy silence. It turned out to belong to a very old woman who appeared, at first sight, to be as dusty as the rocks she, presumably, sold. Vimes had his doubts even about that. Shops like this one often looked upon the selling of merchandise as, in some way, a betrayal of a sacred trust. As if to underline this, she was carrying a club with a nail in it.

When she was close enough for conversation, Vimes said: “I’ve come here to—”“Do you believe in the healing power of crystals, young man?”snapped the woman, raising the club threateningly.

“What? What healing power?”said Vimes. The old woman gave him a cracked smile, and dropped the club.

“Good,”she said. “We like our customers to take their geology seriously. We’ve got some trollite in this week.”

-Terry Pratchett, “Thud!”

From Neil Gaiman’s Conversation with Michael Chabon:

In the years that followed, we would have the kind of conversations where Terry would say to me things like, “So I’m done with the Discworld and now I’m going to do this big science fiction series, I’ve come up with it, and this is the plot of the science fiction series.”, and would tell me all about it and get to the end, and I’d say, “Well, that’s all very well, but you should do a book about Death.” And then a week later my phone would ring and I’d pick it up, and a voice would say, “You bastard, it’s called Mort.” and he’d put the phone down.

Today is March 12, sir Terry Pratchett Memorial Day, a day that is important for me to remember. This man, his books, helped me a lot in my childhood and are helping me up to this day. Therefore, every year I draw a lilac - this is a kind of a way to say "thank you" to a person who unfortunately will never hear it. But the world will hear his name once again, and a man is not dead while his name is still spoken.

I saw a post asking about GNU Terry Pratchett today and it occurred to me how wild it is that this man wrote fantasy, yes, but how he wrote about things that were real. He wrote about an act of love and grief, about keeping a man alive through his name and through what he loves, about rememberance, and how when he eventually passed himself we took that act and put it into the real world because that part of his writing was always real.

GNU, a message passed on, not logged, and turned around at the end. It might pass under your hands and be passed on once or a thousand times and each time is an act of love. He may have gone but his name still matters and it is still spoken because he is still loved. It will not be forgotten while that is still true.

GNU Terry Pratchett

what I really like about Pratchett's work among all the other things, is that he basically opens all his books with exposure and "here is an immuable, very eternal law upon which the world is built" and then he spends the rest of the book trampling on that law

"it is impossible for a woman to be a wizard, so we're going to follow this wizard girl's journey"

"dragons are gone forever and dormant, here be no dragons. say hi to this one lady dragon tho"

"nobody can resist elves. that's why Magrat is going to deck their queen in the face"

"everyone knows women can't fight"

"everyone knows golems don't have souls. they all have names and personalities and-"

"all dwarves are men. then they were introduced to gender"

"Death is eternal and unchanging. Let's see what happens when he goes through all major human development stages in reverse starting with his retirement"

All in all "here's this thing everyone knows is true, here's why it's bullshit, here's how untrue it is, and here's how nobody is going to learn a lesson from being shown that this law of nature is bullshit. We all know people never learn right. or do they"

And he mostly wrote those openings last of all. He'd write the book to find out what it was about and then wrote the openings when he was done with the first draft.

—  - Terry Pratchett, “Straight from the Heart, via the Groin,” A Slip of the Keyboard (via thelonelyskeptic)

there’s a bit in pratchett’s going postal where someone accuses the protagonist of indirectly causing 2.338 statistical deaths. recently it’s made me wonder, did pterry ever think about the lives he saved, himself? the people pulled out of the dark by his writing, in the same kind of fractions and possibilities? the people who survived by kindness that was only offered because he made each of us a little bit better?

he saved a piece of my life. without discworld, i would have been a little less likely to have made it this far. we talk about how he’s not really dead while his name’s still spoken, and a lot of the time we reference that same book when we do. but he’s alive in so much more than that. there’s a bit of his voice in every breath i take, because i don’t know for certain i’d be taking it if not for him.

and i think… don’t we all have that power? maybe the world would be a better place if we all understood that one well-placed kindness is all it takes to save a piece of a life.