terry pratchett – Page 4

Movie of the Wee…. Oh, WOW. It’s The Color of Magic.

The Color of Magic: starring Tim Curry. And Sean Astin. Don’t get me wrong: Batman Begins is the stuff. But still. The Color of Magic: starring Tim Curry. And Sean Astin.

Moe Lane

Unpacking Discworld.

Being known for being a stone-cold Terry Pratchett fan – particularly of the Discworld series – I’ve been asked for recommendations about where someone should start if somebody was interested in the series. The answer is… it depends.

Essentially, the Discworld has gone through at least 3 upgrades since it was created. Version 1.0 was pretty much a straightforward comic treatment of the sword-and-sorcery genre, complete with various good-natured parodies of other fantasy series. Somewhere around Small Gods (in my personal opinion) we got version 2.0, which is where Pratchett started contemplating the Discworld as a place where serious (yet comical) stories could be told (as opposed to straightforwardly comic ones). At some point – probably around the time that the Science of Discworld series came out – we got version 3.0, which is where we start seeing a fully-conscious examining of the implications of Discworld.

None of these iterations are necessarily superior to any other; but it does mean that new readers may be confused by the sometimes wide divergence in styles between any two books. I therefore suggest that you go by the sub-series, which I’ll discuss below. I’m not going to list every book in said sub-series: there are a lot of Discworld books, and they sometimes cross over into each other’s narrative thread. Continue reading Unpacking Discworld.

Somewhere, a friend of mine is murmuring “Revennnngeeee.”

Where’s My Cow?

My child loves Where’s My Cow?.

I have read Where’s My Cow? to my child five times so far today, and my wife has done so twice.

I expect that this sequence of events will not change in the foreseeable future.

Support your local Morris dancer.

Seriously, they’re worried about keeping the practice going.

Morris dancers urge young to strap on the bells

LONDON (Reuters) – Britain’s morris dancers, renowned for bells on knees, colored rags and flower-bedecked hats, are launching a recruitment drive to convince young people that their stick-slapping art form is not a thing of the past.

The folk revival of the 1960s and 1970s, spearheaded by artists like Bob Dylan, led to a surge in interest in morris dancing in Britain.

But dancers who started out then are now in their 60s and often unable or unwilling to try and keep up with the accordion music.

Continue reading Support your local Morris dancer.