Absurdism corner

Why?


  • Total voters
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Good grief. It's like listening to the inane, incomprehensible ramblings of Jeremy Kyle guests (Jerry Springer if you're American). Otherwise known as "local people".
 
Ladies and gentlemen... And here on this forum we have a collection of some of the more intelligent examples of humanity...

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...I dare not add to the discussion lest I dilute the provocative profundity of such concise and elegant prose...

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At least two people haven't read Pratchett.
If I am supposed to be one of two people, then an incorrect assumption has been made.

However, if 'eeeee' is a part of the pratchetverse, I admit ignorance, or at least... forgetfulness.

I also haven't read every single book he's written, so it's possible eeeee is lurking in one of those.

Regardless of this information, I do not retract my previous post...



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I don't understand why everyone says to skip the first two. They aren't bad stories. They aren't poorly written. They lay a very solid groundwork for everything that's to come.
 
I was almost put off by the first part of The Colour of Magic. It was a parody of something I wasn't familiar with; fantasy fiction. Once it got over that it was a lot more readable, and I wouldn't trade my time reading it for anything, introducing me to some of my favourite characters namely Cohen the Barbarian, the Luggage and its pet wizard, and Death, although at least one of those is only introduced in the Light Fantastic. Still, I wouldnt advise reading The Light Fantastic standalone as it really is a continuation of the previous book. I don't think I got past the first parody prologue when I first got it; I'm pretty sure I bought Pyramids (book 7) when it was new in paperback and started there, then filled in the previous books.
 
I don't understand why everyone says to skip the first two. They aren't bad stories. They aren't poorly written. They lay a very solid groundwork for everything that's to come.
Like levi I appreciated them only after reading later iterations.
Did you start with the first two?
Imho they are perceived quite differently depending on the order and his writing style wasn't as fleshed out back then.
 
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I started reading the first book, did not enjoy it, did not finish it... So gave pratchett a miss for years...

Then I read the second book that has Granny weatherwax in it... Wyrd Sisters I think... I was hooked.

I think I've only read the light fantastic in graphic novel format. I finished the colour of magic by listening to it in audiobook format while I work...

Was a bit better than my first serving of it, but I'm not a fan of rincewind.

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his writing style wasn't as fleshed out back then.
He'd written both of his sci-fi books (Dark Side of the Moon and Strata) which I remember finding readable, if not earth shattering and at least the first of his carpet people books for kids before he wrote the first words of his discworld novels. It's fair to say I think that he was finding his feet in writing the discworld style in the first book, just your phrasology suggests to me you think he was a jobbing author writing his first tomes. If that's not what you meant, consider this post as reinforcing what you wrote rather than disagreeing with you ;)
 
Audiobooks is how I enjoyed almost all of those books. It's amazing how the diverse cast of characters is brought to life by the narrator.
 
Did you start with the first two?
I
I was reading them in order. I quite enjoyed everything up to Pyramids, at which point something in my brain just started shutting down and needed a break. It droned on for chapters and much of the conflict revolved around bureaucracy. If there's one book in the series that I'd recommend skipping it is this one: read the wiki summary, that's all you need to know.
 
I was reading them in order. I quite enjoyed everything up to Pyramids, at which point something in my brain just started shutting down and needed a break. It droned on for chapters and much of the conflict revolved around bureaucracy. If there's one book in the series that I'd recommend skipping it is this one: read the wiki summary, that's all you need to know.
I liked Pyramids, although my favourite stories are mostly those of the witches.
 
Immeditately after Pyramids IIRC came Guards Guards, which is the origin for Sam Vines and associated characters who are the origin story for so many of his later books, in a way that TCOM threatened to make Rincewind the star, but never quite did. It's also a rollicking yarn and very funny.

Funny noone's directly mentioned Mort yet. That always seemed to be everyone's favourite discworld book at the time.
 
Rant incoming:

[rant] Fucking web developers... my fiancee has illustrated the months in order to make calendars as christmas presents. Now we tried to use an online printing sheds website to get the things done in time. They are apparently pretty well known.
Well, turns out someone on their end screwed up and the javascript of their calendar layout thingy throws a bunch of 403s and an uncaught typeerror, because of undefined data, which makes it poop it's pants and crash.

Great, I thought, I know how that feels and how to write terrible JS, I can probably contact them and point them in the general direction of where to investigate.

So I fire up my trusty browser dev console, try to find a contact form or something similar on their website, can't find that and email them instead.

I try to mention what exact setting we chose, my clickpath and keep it short enough, only to get an auto response email back telling me "due to the GDPR we are not allowed to process your request. Please use this online form instead"... what? an online form is okay, but you use the GDPR as an excuse for not accepting any customer email??? Okay...

So I click the link to their form and fill that out with the exact content of my email, and all the additional data that they for some reason can easily collect in the form, while my email would've sufficed and they wouldn't have to deal with all that opt-in GDPR consent nonsense. By now I can feel my left eyelid twitching nervously.

Graaah! And of course it tells me after I am done filling that crap out, that the form has a 1024 character limit!!!

We were just trying to make a calender... we were just trying to file a bug report. well I guess they will have to find out about their bugged webshop at the end of the month when their sales team wonders about the steep conversion dive after their server admin updated the TLS certs last time. "Hey Frank, did you test the webshop after you did that maintenance thing?"

Fuck the internet in 2018... when did it become so terrible? And also: Fuck responsive design and fuck javascript..[/rant]
 
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