cptsdcarlosdevil:

pollylittlehigher-littlelower:

the-tao-of-fandom:

puzzleaddictyomz:

beanmoreau:

fandomsandfeminism:

fandomsandfeminism:

telaryn:

copperbadge:

badgerbee:

discworldtour:

poorlydescribedpterrybooks:

discworldtour:

Guards! Guards! has one of the first Big Deal Discworld moments for me, and I’m not very good at articulating what that means.

The moment I’m thinking of is the dragon’s speech to Wonse – “we were supposed to be cruel, cunning, heartless and terrible. But…we never burned and tortured and ripped one another apart and called it morality.” That’s a passage that always makes me stop and reread it a couple of times. And it’s a small moment – it’s the only time we hear the dragon speak at all, and it’s a speech that has no bearing on the rest of the story. It could have been taken out of the book entirely and nothing would feel like it was missing. But the fact that it’s there is a Big Deal moment. The great big monstrous antagonist’s judgment of humanity is unavoidable in its accuracy.

And the Discworld series is full of moments like that. Sometimes it’s just one line, sometimes it’s a full scene, and most of the book is so full of shenanigans coming so quickly one after another that you don’t always see the Big Deal moments coming. We think of Pratchett as a humor/satire writer and yes, the books are hilarious, but in between the jokes are these Big Deal moments that casually rearrange our perspective and stick with us even after we think we’ve forgotten.

Then there are the other Big Deal Moments, that are Emotional Meteorite Strike Moments (e.g. the phrase “that is not my cow” can now instantly put me in the fetal position) but I’m having a hard enough time describing this one as it is so I’ll probably go on a tirade about those ‘round about that One Part in Feet of Clay. (You know the one.)

Suggestion: Reblog this with your favorite Big Deal Moment.

YES. It’s so fun hearing everyone’s Big Deal Moments! (although choosing just one is so hard…)

I think my favorite one changes, but right now it’s in Feet of Clay:

The vampire looked from the golem to Vimes.

“You gave one of them a voice?” he said.

“Yes,” said Dorfl. He reached down and picked up the vampire in one hand. “I Could Kill You,” he said. “This Is An Option Available To Me As A Free-Thinking Individual But I Will Not Do So Because I Own Myself And I Have Made A Moral Choice.”

“Oh, gods,” murmured Vimes under his breath.

“That’s blasphemy,” said the vampire.

He gasped as Vimes shot him a glance like sunlight. “That’s what people say when the voiceless speak.”

@copperbadge

All my Discworld books are packed, and usually I’m a City Watch guy, but the first moment like that for me, and still I think my favorite, was in the first Discworld book I read, Small Gods, where Didactylos the Ephebian philosopher is brought before the militant evangelist Omnian priest, Vorbis. 

Vorbis demands that Didactylos recant his claim that the world travels through space on the backs of four elephants who stand on the back of a giant turtle (which in Discworld is true). Vorbis insists that Didactylos agree that it is a sphere, as the Great God Om intended.

To all appearances, Didactylos easily and happily recants, saying something like “Sure, let it be a sphere” and Vorbis – for whom this is as much about humiliating Didactylos as it is about what’s “true” – decides to let him go. Didactylos gets all the way to the doorway before he turns, throws the lantern he carries into Vorbis’s face, and yells “NEVERTHELESS…THE TURTLE MOVES!” before legging it. 

I was thirteenish at the time and wrestling with religion, and I was familiar with Galileo and eppur si muove, but it’s never as satisfying for there to be a myth of a whisper when you want there to be a legend of a roar. Didactylos bashing Vorbis on the head and screaming the truth before beating feet was much, much more satisfying. And as someone who has never borne fools in power easily, it was an object lesson in how to do the thing. 

There is so much I sympathize with, when it comes to Moist Von Lipwig, but if I had to cite a “big moment”, it’s when he’s deconstructing the idea of currency.

“But what’s worth more than gold?“

“Practically everything. You, for example. Gold is heavy. Your weight in gold is not very much gold at all. Aren’t you worth more than that?”

When you get your head around the idea that something’s worth is based on a subjectively agreed upon set of standards, it can rock your capitalist-based worldview right to the core.

He was also the first character to articulate what has kind of become a guiding philosophy for me:

“Make the change happen fast enough and you go from one type of normal to another.”

There are so many for me, but the one that jumpstart out is death and Susan talking at the end of hogfather about the importance of believing in morality and goodness.

“Humans need fantasy to be human. To be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape.”

I want to add one more, because I just finished reading Raising Steam.

The bit where Moist literally throws himself under a train to save a pair of children had me in absolute tears.

A lot of that book is really good to be honest. This line is also really good.
“That’s the trouble, you see. When you’ve had hatred on your tongue for such a long time, you don’t know how to spit it out.”

One of the top ones for me is one that crops up a couple times and a quote/comment that I use in conversation frequently.
I always remember it from in I Shall Wear Midnight;

‘What was it Granny Weatherwax had said once? ‘Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things.“

But of course it’s also in this conversation in Carpe Jugulum

Granny Weatherwax: “…And that’s what your holy men discuss, is it?”

Mightily Oats: “Not usually. There is a very interesting debate raging at the moment on the nature of sin. for example.”

Granny Weatherwax: “And what do they think? Against it, are they?”

Mightily Oats: “It’s not as simple as that. It’s not a black and white issue. There are so many shades of gray.”

Granny Weatherwax:“Nope.”

Mightily Oats: “Pardon?”

Granny Weatherwax: “There’s no grays, only white that’s got grubby. I’m surprised you don’t know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.”

Mightily Oats: “It’s a lot more complicated than that–”

Granny Weatherwax: “No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.”

Mightily Oats: “Oh, I’m sure there are worse crimes–”

Granny Weatherwax: “But they starts with thinking about people as things…”

•People as things•

I always loved the line from the Hogfather mentioned above, but one that usually sticks out more to me from the same book is Susan’s reminder that “Someone should do something” isn’t at all helpful if you’re not gonna end it with “and that someone is me”

because nothing gets done if everyone just sits around thinking “someone should fix this” but no one actually gets up and tries to fix it

I’ll also add another one of my favorites from Feet of Clay which is “Someone’s got to speak for them that have no voices” [I’m probably misquoting slightly but that’s the core of it] and on a larger scale is that the same book gives a voice to one of those voiceless- instead of JUST speaking for [over] them, one of the voiceless gets a voice of their own and a platform to speak from which is so important on so many levels

“A watchman is a civilian, you inbred streak of piss!’

Just like that, in one angry  line, Commander Sam Vimes defines what a police officer is and by extension how they should act. A watchman is not a soldier, and therefor can (should) never act like one.

Magrat’s decision to become Boudicca, because if she will be queen, then she will be the sort of queen that she can respect. She rallies her people, and kills some elves I’m terrifying ways, but she does this while thinking about how dramatic she must look and worrying if she’s doing it right. She’s still in love with her husband, but she’s not going to compromise on having spikes.

It was this message about learning from the past and merging it with the future, but also said that a leader could have doubts and be mocked by everyone else yet still be a leader.

Also, BOUDICCA. I would die for her.

What Brutha had thought was a rock in the sand was a hunched figure, sitting clutching its knees. It looked paralyzed with fear. 

He stared. 

“Vorbis?” he said. 

He looked at Death. 

“But Vorbis died a hundred years ago!” 

YES. HE HAD TO WALK IT ALL ALONE. ALL ALONE WITH HIMSELF. IF HE DARED. 

“He’s been here for a hundred years?” 

POSSIBLY NOT. TIME IS DIFFERENT HERE. IT IS…MORE PERSONAL.

“Ah. You mean a hundred years can pass like a few seconds?” 

A HUNDRED YEARS CAN PASS LIKE INFINITY. 

The black-on-black eyes stared imploringly at Brutha, who reached out automatically, without thinking…and then hesitated. 

HE WAS A MURDERER, said Death. AND A CREATOR OF MURDERERS. A TORTURER. WITHOUT PASSION. CRUEL. CALLOUS. COMPASSIONLESS. 

“Yes. I know. He’s Vorbis,” said Brutha. Vorbis changed people. Sometimes he changed them into dead people. But he always changed them. That was his triumph. He sighed. 

“But I’m me,” he said.

Vorbis stood up, uncertainly, and followed Brutha across the desert. 

Death watched them walk away.

(via cromulentenough)

discoursedrome:

argumate:

femmenietzsche:

femmenietzsche:

Thing in shows which makes me sick to my stomach every time, guaranteed: Random, unnamed characters screaming that they don’t want to die right before they get brutally slaughtered. It’s really nightmarish that that’s the only thing we ever know about them!

discoursedrome said: I find this upsetting but, introspecting, it’s because it’s foregrounding the fact that murder is nonconsensual? which is kinda weird, though perhaps a trenchant commentary on media or something

Yes, that too. Star Wars would be less fun if the stormtroopers pleaded for their lives each time.

Actually, this reminds me of a story from the French Revolution, about the execution of one of the king’s mistresses:

It availed her nothing and on a frosty day, the 8th December 1793, the still lovely fifty year old former courtesan was loaded on to a tumbrel and driven, crying and screaming through the streets of Paris to the guillotine. The aristocratic victims of the Terror prided themselves on their poise and haughty silence in the face of the baying mob – not so Madame du Barry who broke down completely and appealed ceaselessly to the crowds to rescue her from her fate in between screaming and crying with fear.

It was already dusk by the time the tumbrel arrived at the Place de la Révolution via its usual route along the Rue Saint Honoré. It was a freezing cold December day and the crowd was perhaps a little more sparse than usual due to the weather and the lateness of the hour but there were still enough people curious enough to see the former King’s favourite die for there to be a sizeable mob gathered to witness her execution.

It must have been a relief to everyone involved to have finally made it to the square but Madame du Barry’s ordeal was still not over as she was carried down from the cart ‘more like a trapped animal than a human being‘ according to Joan Haslip then bundled up the scaffold steps still screaming and crying out for mercy while the crowd stared in astonishment. By this point the more hardened execution goers would have seen several hundred people die before them but it seems that Madame du Barry’s lack of poise and terrified cries of ‘You are going to hurt me! Oh please do not hurt me!’ was something of a surprise.

Sensing the horrified restlessness of the crowd, the already brisk executioner worked with even more speed than usual, hastily bundling the struggling woman on to the guillotine and forcing her down on to the plank as she begged him for ‘one moment more, please monsieur, do not hurt me.’ When the knife finally crashed down there was one last awful scream of terror before an uneasy silence fell across the square, broken only by the executioner’s shout of ‘Vive la Révolution’ before the next prisoner was hastened with rather more decorum up the slippery wooden steps.

Madame Vigée-Lebrun, who knew Madame du Barry very well and painted her more than once was to write: ‘Madame Du Barry … is the only woman, among all the women who perished in the dreadful days, who could not stand the sight of the scaffold. She screamed, she begged mercy of the horrible crowd that stood around the scaffold, she aroused them to such a point that the executioner grew anxious and hastened to complete his task. This convinced me that if the victims of these terrible times had not been so proud, had not met death with such courage, the Terror would have ended much earlier. Men of limited intelligence lack the imagination to be touched by inner suffering, and the populace is more easily stirred by pity than by admiration.’

that’s absolutely appalling

this is going to kind of ruin the tone of the thread but i want to note that I looked up “tumbrel” because I didn’t know the word and was amused at how it looked sort of like “tumblr”, and the first definition (not the one used in the excerpt) was “a kind of medieval torture device, later associated with a cucking stool.”

Noun

cucking stool (plural cucking stools)

(historical) A kind of chair to which a person (such as a scold or dishonest tradesman) was fastened in order to be punished and socially humiliated, usually by being pelted and hooted at by a mob in front of their own house.

funereal-disease:

morlock-holmes:

PSA: More than membership in the STEM fields, more than Utilitarianism, more than the Sequences, what binds Rationalist and adjacent people together is that we react really badly to the social game of,

“Hey everybody, get a load of this nerd!”

I’m not going to say it never happens, I don’t think you could completely reject it, but it’s a rare move you have to employ extremely carefully.

The whole thing is basically a mutual defense pact against eye-roll gifs.

I think this is why the Internet left has trouble making inroads they default to this communication style really quickly

(via mitoticcephalopod)

mysharona1987:

Some more funny library signs.

(via fierceawakening)

worldsworstfather:

worldsworstfather:

remember when you were a kid and whenever your parents came into the room while you were doing something for pleasure like looking at something on the computer or watching tv and you’d immediately close the thing like you’d just been caught watching porn when you were actually doing nothing wrong this post was made by strict parents with no boundaries gang

my dad: walks into the room while i’m playing club penguin the family computer

me:

(Source: hexglyphs, via ranma-official)

werewolfblake:

gaycism:

@beysexuality

(Source: twitter.com, via koito-yuu)

earthstory:

The meat shaped stone

Carved during China’s last dynasty (1644-1911) to resemble a piece of fatty pork with its crackling fried in soy sauce, this piece of jasper has been cleverly used by the carver. The surface of the skin has been stained to resemble skin, veins and hair follicles carved in. The piece is one of the treasures of the National Palace Museum in Taiwan.

Loz

Image credit: National Palace Museum

Forbidden c r o n c h

(Source: facebook.com)

ms-demeanor:

argumate:

sysice:

relatedly, my all-time favourite translation note concerning a single word

Yo,

When you need a colloquialism to obliterate all previous discourse and narrative and also function as an exclamation calling for immediate attention:

(Source: badeliz, via ms-demeanor)

worldhistoricalgroundzero:

Scientific Regress | William A. Wilson

The problem with ­science is that so much of it simply isn’t. Last summer, the Open Science . . . .

First Things

“Partisans of the new scientism are fond of recounting the “Sokal hoax”—physicist Alan Sokal submitted a paper heavy on jargon but full of false and meaningless statements to the postmodern cultural studies journal Social Text, which accepted and published it without quibble—but are unlikely to mention a similar experiment conducted on reviewers of the prestigious British Medical Journal. The experimenters deliberately modified a paper to include eight different major errors in study design, methodology, data analysis, and interpretation of results, and not a single one of the 221 reviewers who participated caught all of the errors. On average, they caught fewer than two—and, unbelievably, these results held up even in the subset of reviewers who had been specifically warned that they were participating in a study and that there might be something a little odd in the paper that they were reviewing. In all, only 30 percent of reviewers recommended that the intentionally flawed paper be rejected.

If peer review is good at anything, it appears to be keeping unpopular ideas from being published. Consider the finding of another (yes, another) of these replicability studies, this time from a group of cancer researchers. In addition to reaching the now unsurprising conclusion that only a dismal 11 percent of the preclinical cancer research they examined could be validated after the fact, the authors identified another horrifying pattern: The “bad” papers that failed to replicate were, on average, cited far more often than the papers that did! As the authors put it, “some non-reproducible preclinical papers had spawned an entire field, with hundreds of secondary publications that expanded on elements of the original observation, but did not actually seek to confirm or falsify its fundamental basis.”

What they do not mention is that once an entire field has been created—with careers, funding, appointments, and prestige all premised upon an experimental result which was utterly false due either to fraud or to plain bad luck—pointing this fact out is not likely to be very popular. Peer review switches from merely useless to actively harmful. It may be ineffective at keeping papers with analytic or methodological flaws from being published, but it can be deadly effective at suppressing criticism of a dominant research paradigm. Even if a critic is able to get his work published, pointing out that the house you’ve built together is situated over a chasm will not endear him to his colleagues or, more importantly, to his mentors and patrons.”

(via mailadreapta)

met-photos:

Benediction of the Pope on Easter Sunday by Unknown, The Met’s Photos

The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1960 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Medium: Albumen silver print from glass negative

http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/270300