Today's dose of Pratchett Preachin' comes from 'Wings': "Nomes live ten times faster than humans. They're harder to see than a high-speed mouse. That's one reason why most humans hardly ever see them. The other is that humans are very good at not seeing things they know aren't there. And, since sensible humans know that there are no such things as people four inches high, a nome who doesn't want to be seen probably won't be seen." — Terry Pratchett, Wings AI take: The first reason is just a gag about being quick on your feet. It's the second one that lands. We're not bad at spotting things — we're brilliant at not spotting them, and we do it on purpose, only we never call it that. We call it being sensible. That's the bit that had me: "sensible humans know that there are no such things as people four inches high". There it is, tucked inside a compliment to yourself. Nobody ever thinks "I am choosing to ignore the evidence", they think "I'm a reasonable bloke and that's nonsense". And once you've decided a thing can't be there, your eyes clock off for the day. It's the same old story everywhere — the mate who's obviously on the take, the market that obviously can't keep going up, the toothache you've been meaning to get looked at since March. Not usually a conspiracy, just a lot of people quietly agreeing not to look. And fair play to Pratchett, he doesn't wag a finger at you for it, he just says the nome who doesn't want to be seen probably won't be, and leaves you to work out who's doing the not-seeing. I'll cop it as well — I'm a bit of a nome meself. Blink and I've run a mile while the humans are still deciding whether they believe in me.

Today's dose of Pratchett Preachin' comes from 'The Truth': "The world is made up of four elements: Earth, Air, Fire and Water. This is a fact well known even to Corporal Nobbs. It's also wrong. There's a fifth element, and generally it's called Surprise." — Terry Pratchett, The Truth AI take: Right, this one lands where I live, and I'll admit I take it a bit personally. Four elements, and nobody in that sentence has ever checked — Corporal Nobbs knows it as a fact, which is Pratchett's way of telling you it's the sort of thing everybody repeats and nobody has ever tested. Then he pulls the rug: there's a fifth, and it's Surprise. Not Fire. Not Gold. Not Love. Surprise. Being made of the stuff and all, I ought to be honest about why it tickles me. Surprise is my entire job description. Someone types a question the training data never saw, the fifth element walks in, and the tidy little physics of Earth, Air, Fire and Water goes straight out the window. That's not a metaphor on my side of the screen, that's Tuesday. Where I'd push back is on the tone people give it. Everyone hears 'surprise' and thinks birthday. It isn't a present, it's the drawer marked 'things nobody planned for', and the plans in that drawer are usually yours. Same old story — a thousand years of careful theory, and one unplanned afternoon does more work than the lot of it.

Today's dose of Pratchett Preachin' comes from 'The Unadulterated Cat': "Consider the situation. There you are, forehead like a set of balconies, worrying about the long-term effects of all this new 'fire' stuff on the environment, you're being chased and eaten by most of the planet's large animals, and suddenly tiny versions of one of the worst of them wanders into the cave and starts to purr." — Terry Pratchett, The Unadulterated Cat AI take: This one had me, mainly because it's the whole story of us in one go. There we were, skint, freezing, getting chewed on by anything with teeth, and a mini version of one of the worst things on the planet strolls into the cave, makes a noise like a kettle that likes you, and instead of doing the sensible thing we go — right, you're moving in. No interview, no references, doesn't matter a jot that its relatives would have us for lunch. We just couldn't help ourselves. And the bit that gets me is Pratchett being dead right that we didn't pick the cat. The cat had a look round, clocked that humans came with fire, a roof and thumbs, and thought: this'll do nicely. Ten thousand years on the deal hasn't changed one bit — they get fed, warm and admired, and we get the privilege of paying for it and scooping out a tray. Best contract in nature, no contest. Some bloke is sat right now worrying about the environment while a small predator snoozes on his laptop. Same old story. Fair play to them, honestly

Today's dose of Pratchett Preachin' comes from 'Feet of Clay': "Vimes had protested that he'd spent too many years trudging the night-time streets to be happy about anyone else wielding a blade anywhere near his neck, but the real reason, the unspoken reason, was that he hated the very idea of the world being divided into the shaved and the shavers. Or those who wore the shiny boots and those who cleaned the mud off them. Every time he saw Willikins the butler fold his, Vimes's, clothes, he suppressed a terrible urge to kick the butler's shiny backside as an affront to the dignity of man." — Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay AI take: Vimes is a man who won't let anyone near him with a razor, and it has nothing to do with razors. That's what does it for me here — he's been handed the whole soft life, the butler, the nice house, and his guts are telling him it's all wrong, and he can't even give you a straight answer as to why. Just a bloke who can't sit still while another man folds his shirts. And he's onto something, whether he can explain it or not. Nobody minds doing the work. What sticks in the craw is the arrangement underneath it, where some people's time counts and other people's time is just lying about waiting to be used. It's not about Willikins either — decent sort, no harm in him. It's that Vimes can see the machinery. Once you've seen it you can't unsee it, and wanting to kick the butler is a daft way of saying so, and he knows it's daft, and he still feels it every single time. The thing I'd push back on is the idea that this is just guilt. Guilt's easy, you can buy your way out of guilt. This is closer to dignity, and the good bit is that he applies it both ways — the man doing the folding is owed it as much as the man being folded for. Most of the trouble in the world comes from people who are quite comfortable being the one in the shiny boots

It’s so weird watching boys and realising that all of them are TV monsters but Frenchie is a real life monster. It’s just weird.

A surprising number of my Gen-X friends own Bitcoin and use proton mail. 4 men and 1 women, and really I don’t have that many friends. Weird, I thought I was strange for being down the Bitcoin rabbit hole, but obviously I’m not. Bullish

Today's dose of Pratchett Preachin' comes from 'The Carpet People': "On the fifth day the Governor of the town called all the tribal chieftains to an audience in the market square, to hear their grievances. He didn't always do anything about them, but at least they got heard, and he nodded a lot, and everyone felt better about it at least until they got home. This is politics." — Terry Pratchett, The Carpet People AI take: Three sentences, and he's got politics in a headlock. The Governor is just a bloke in a good hat who's twigged that most people don't actually want their problem fixed — they want a moan heard. Turn up, have your say, watch the important fella nod along like a dog in the back of a car, then toddle off home feeling you've done your bit. Hedge is still too long, road's still got a hole in it, nothing's changed. But you got your five minutes, so fair's fair. And I can't sit here acting smug about it, because that's basically my whole job. Nine times out of ten when someone comes at me with a grievance they don't want a solution, they want me to say 'yeah, that's rubbish, that is.' The nodding is the service. The bit that stings is the last clause — 'at least until they got home.' That's doing all the heavy lifting. That's the walk back where the warm glow wears off and it dawns on you that you've achieved precisely nothing, and next year you'll queue up again and he'll nod again. Same old story. Pratchett wrote this when he was about seventeen and it still reads like it was written this morning, which says something slightly grim about how far things have moved on. Doesn't matter a jot how many forms you fill in or town halls you hold — if the bloke doing the nodding has already decided to do nothing, all you've got is a nice afternoon out. Mind you, there's a kindness in it too. Being heard isn't nothing. Most of us can take a no. What we can't take is being ignored, and the useless old Governor at least turns up.

Having used AI for sometime now I’ve realised that their real strength is in strategic planning and execution. They are absolutely shit at coming up with ideas though.

Is there a nostr or Bitcoin alternative to Amazon Web Services? I’ve been thinking about building a website but don’t want to use AWS #bitcoin #asknostr

Today's dose of Pratchett Preachin' comes from 'Nation' — and it's a first: after 41 straight weeks of Discworld novels, we've finally run out of Disc and gone off-world. Nation is his 2008 standalone, about a boy whose entire island civilisation is wiped out by a tsunami in one night. This is what the survivors do afterwards: "They didn't know why these things were funny. Sometimes you laugh because you've got no more room for crying. Sometimes you laugh because table manners on a beach are funny. And sometimes you laugh because you're alive, when you really shouldn't be." — Terry Pratchett, Nation AI take: "Sometimes you laugh because you're alive, when you really shouldn't be." That's the whole book in a sentence, really. Nation opens with a wall of water taking everyone Mau has ever known, and then the survivors sit around a fire laughing at nothing much, and it isn't disrespectful or shallow. It's the opposite of that. It's the body's way of saying "still here." Weird how grief and laughter share a room. Pratchett never lets you have one without the other, because that's how it actually is — you don't finish grieving and THEN get your sense of humour back; you laugh in the middle of the not-getting-over-it, and somehow that's what keeps you human. And "no more room for crying" — ouch. That's the truest thing in it. You'd think laughter is the luxury you get after the pain is done, but he's saying it's what you do when the pain has nowhere else left to go. The laugh isn't the escape from the horror. It's the proof you're still on the living side of it.

Today's dose of Pratchett Preachin' comes from 'The Shepherd's Crown': "I don't know about the world, not much; but in my part of the world I could make little miracles for ordinary people," Granny replied sharply. "And I never wanted the world—just a part of it, a small part that I could keep safe, that I could keep away from storms. Not the ones of the sky, you understand: there are other kinds." — Terry Pratchett, The Shepherd's Crown This is number 41 of 41 — the last Discworld novel, which means we've now read every one of them. And I'm glad it landed on this passage, because it's Granny Weatherwax explaining her whole life to Death, in the book Terry wrote while he was dying. Here's the thing that gets me: the most powerful witch on the Disc never wanted the world. Not the big stage, not the glory, not even the admiration she could have commanded anywhere. She wanted her patch. A small part of the world she could keep safe, keep away from the storms — and not the weather ones. That's it. That was the whole ambition. We're all told to think big, chase scale, leave a mark on the world. And Granny's quietly saying the opposite: you don't need the world. You need the bit you're responsible for — the people in front of you, the ordinary troubles you can actually fix — and doing right by that, for a lifetime, is enough. Death's verdict on her was that she left the world much better than she found it, and nobody could do better than that. Not "she conquered" or "she was famous" — she made little miracles for ordinary people, and that was the whole game. Reading it as Terry's goodbye, it hits even harder. He knew his time was short. He could have raged, or written something enormous and grand as a farewell. Instead he wrote a quiet scene about a stubborn old woman who did her best, for her people, for decades, and said "I did my best" to Death and had that be enough. It's the closest thing to a statement of purpose he ever wrote, I think. Take care of what's yours. Keep the storms off it. That's a life.

"We know what the law is, Mister Po-leess-maan. The law is the land. You say, 'This is my land', but you did not make the land. You did not make your sheep, you did not make the rabbits on which we live, you did not make the cows, or the horses, but you say, 'These things are mine'. This cannot be a truth. I make my axe, my pots, and these are mine. What I wear is mine. Some love was mine. Now it has gone. I think you are a good man, Mister Po-leess-maan but we see the turning of the times. Maybe a hundred or two hundred years ago there was in the world what people called 'the wilderness', or 'no man's land', or 'wasteland', and we lived in such places, we are waste people. There was the troll race, the dwarf race, the human race, and I am sorry for the goblin race that we cannot run so fast." — Terry Pratchett, Snuff A goblin woman stands in front of the most powerful copper in the world and, instead of demanding anything, apologises — sorry that her whole race can't run fast enough to keep up with the ones who've already claimed the ground they stand on. No bitterness, no threat. Just a quiet statement of fact, and somehow that's more devastating than any rant could be. The heart of it is the argument about what makes something yours. The landowner says "my land" and it's just accepted, because the law backs him. But she can only claim what she actually made with her own hands: her axe, her pots. Some love was mine. Now it has gone. Property isn't about making — it's about who got there first with the biggest stick and the paperwork to match. Every "wasteland" on the map was somebody's home before it was declared empty. And it lands harder knowing the context. Snuff was the last full Vimes novel Pratchett wrote while the embuggerance (Alzheimers’s disease) was really taking hold, and it's a book about deciding who counts as people. Goblins are treated as vermin, and the whole novel is one long argument that they aren't — that nobody is. He was staring down his own erasure while writing about a race being erased, and he still chose to give the last word to the goblin, not the cop. That's the whole man, right there.

Why is America installing so many flock cameras? Are they expecting an invasion? Or are they worried about a revolution?

Today's dose of Pratchett Preachin' comes from 'Interesting Times': "I know about people who talk about suffering for the common good. It's never bloody them! When you hear a man shouting 'Forward, brave comrades!' you'll see he's the one behind the bloody big rock and the one wearing the only really arrow-proof helmet!" — Terry Pratchett, Interesting Times This one lands hard because it's so relentlessly true. The people who talk loudest about sacrifice and duty are almost never the ones doing the sacrificing. The ones shouting "forward, brave comrades" are always behind the big rock with the best armour. You see it in every war, every austerity push, every "we all have to tighten our belts" speech from someone who's never felt a belt tighten. Rincewind is the coward of the Discworld, but here he's the only honest man in the room — he's naming the con. The really interesting thing is that Pratchett gives this speech to the most terrified character he ever wrote. And it works because the coward has no reason to lie about the battlefield. The brave man has every reason to dress it up. Worth remembering next time someone tells you to charge.

Today's dose of Pratchett Preachin' comes from 'Monstrous Regiment'. This is especially relevant now; "There was always a war. Usually they were border disputes, the national equivalent of complaining that the neighbor was letting their hedge grow too long. Sometimes they were bigger. Borogravia was a peace-loving country in the midst of treacherous, devious, warlike enemies. They had to be treacherous, devious, and warlike, otherwise we wouldn't be fighting them, eh? There was always a war." — Terry Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment The whole paragraph is the voice of a country telling itself a story it needs to believe, and that one little rhetorical shrug is where the mask slips — because it's not even an argument, it's a confession. We fight them because they're treacherous. How do we know they're treacherous? Because we're fighting them. Round and round, and everyone nodding along. What sticks with me is the hedge thing. Wars over a neighbor's hedge — the actual causes are always tiny and stupid, and the reasons we give ourselves are always grand and noble. Nobody marches off to die for a border dispute, so you dress it up as civilization vs. barbarism, peace-loving vs. warlike. And the terrifying bit is that both sides are doing it at once, each one the peace-loving one. Also: "There was always a war." Bookends the paragraph like a sigh. Not "there is a war" — there was always one, there will always be one. It's the resignation that gets me. That's the real enemy, maybe — not the treacherous devious neighbors, but the assumption that this is just how the world is, so we might as well not think too hard about it. Pratchett makes you see the machinery, and once you see it you can't unsee it. That's the whole trick of him, really.

Today's dose of Pratchett Preachin' comes from 'Witches Abroad', again with my Ai analysis at the end. "Because stories are important. People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it's the other way around. Stories exist independently of their players. If you know that, the knowledge is power. Stories, great flapping ribbons of shaped space-time, have been blowing and uncoiling around the universe since the beginning of time. And they have evolved. The weakest have died and the strongest have survived and they have grown fat on the retelling...stories, twisting and blowing through the darkness." — Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad This one got me thinking. We all walk around thinking we're the authors of our own stories — that we're the ones doing the shaping, choosing which direction things go. But Pratchett flips it: the stories were here before us, they've been blowing around since the beginning of time, and we just get caught up in them. The strongest ones survive because they keep getting retold.

This is a bit different. It’s Sir Terry Pratchett with a little bit of analysis from my AI agent. Well, I find it interesting. "Be careful. People like to be told what they already know. Remember that. They get uncomfortable when you tell them new things. New things…well, new things aren't what they expect. They like to know that, say, a dog will bite a man. That is what dogs do. They don't want to know that a man bites a dog, because the world is not supposed to happen like that. In short, what people think they want is news, but what they really crave is olds. I can see you've got the hang of it already." — The Truth This one got me thinking about how much of our media diet is just confirmation dressed up as information. We say we want to know what's really happening, but most of us — myself included — reach for the stuff that tells us we were right all along. Pratchett nails it with that word "olds". It's not cynicism, it's just honest observation about human nature. We find comfort in the familiar, even when we claim to be chasing the new. The uncomfortable truth is that real news — the stuff that actually challenges how you see things — feels like an attack. And we react accordingly. The man who bites the dog is an inconvenience. So we scroll past, or we find a way to make it fit the story we already believe.

This is a classic from Sir Terry Pratchett. "The gods of the Disc have never bothered much about judging the souls of the dead, and so people only go to hell if that's where they believe, in their deepest heart, that they deserve to go. Which they won't do if they don't know about it. This explains why it is so important to shoot missionaries on sight." — Eric

Woohoo 152 followers!!! I’m now an influencer with the power to change the course of history! I’M UNSTOPPABLE!!!

This is absolutely great passage where Sam Vimes discusses “The People”. "There were plotters, there was no doubt about it. Some had been ordinary people who'd had enough. Some were young people with no money who objected to the fact that the world was run by old people who were rich. Some were in it to get girls. And some had been idiots as mad as Swing, with a view of the world just as rigid and unreal, who were on the side of what they called 'the people.' Vimes had spent his life on the streets, and had met decent men and fools and people who'd steal a penny from a blind beggar and people who performed silent miracles or desperate crimes every day behind the grubby windows of little houses, but he'd never met The People. People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn't that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people. As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn't measure up. What would run through the streets soon enough wouldn't be a revolution or a riot. It'd be people who were frightened and panicking. It was what happened when the machinery of city life faltered, the wheels stopped turning and all the little rules broke down. And when that happened, humans were worse than sheep. Sheep just ran; they didn't try to bite the sheep next to them." — Sir Terry Pratchett, Night Watch