Bonus Episode

#PratchatMerch – Discworld: The Flamethrower

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Our recording of #Pratchat83 was delayed at the last minute, so our discussion of The Ankh-Morpork Archives and The Discworld Almanak will have to wait until later in the month – hopefully around the 25th February. But subscriber Molokov suggested it might be fun to discuss some of the other, less book-like Discworld merchandise available, so in this shorter bonus episode, Ben does just that!

We’d love to hear about your favourite merch, official or fan-made! Drop us a line and/or a photograph using the hashtag #PratchatMerch on social media, via email, or chat to us via our subscriber Discord.

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The merch Ben mentions this episode from the Discworld Emporium includes the Ankh-Morpork Doodle Map, Terry Pratchett’s Hat silver pin badge; Death’s Omega cloak pin; the Band with Rocks In tour T-shirt; the plushie Greebo and rat-onna-stick; beermats of pubs and brands; and the dried frog pills box.

It’s not as easy to link to individual items at Discworld.com, but things Ben mentioned from there include various pins and badges; rare collectible pins; shopper bags; acrylic beanies; and the Great A’Tuin golf umbrella. The Anoia tea towel Ben liked was also from the Emporium, not Discworld.com, though they have tea towels too. He forgot to mention Discworld.com’s notebooks – the Unseen University and Assassin’s Guild ones are especially good. And their T-shirts aren’t as “subtle” as he remembered, though their socks are certainly a bit less subtle than the Emporium’s.

The episode title is a reference to a specific scene in Mel Brooks’ 1987 Star Wars parody Spaceballs.

We’ll be back in late February with #Pratchat83, discussing The Ankh-Morpork Archives Volume I and Volume II, and The Discworld Almanak. If you’re very quick you could still get a question in about those! In March we’re commemorating the tenth anniversary of Terry’s death by discussing his thoughts on dying from “Shaking Hands with Death”, the Richard Dimbleby lecture he gave (with help from Tony Robinson) in 2010. It’s most readily available in A Slip of the Keyboard, but you can also watch the original speech on YouTube. It gets pretty heavy, but we’ll approach this discussion with empathy and kindness. Get your questions for that one in using the hashtag #Pratchat84.

Want to help us get to the end of our six(ish) year mission and read every Pratchett book – and more? You can support us with a tip, or a subscription for as little as $2 a month, and that’s cuttin’ our own throats! See our Support Us page for details.

#Pratchat79A – Cover Stamps

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Scheduling issues pushed back our recording of #Pratchat80, so unfortunately we aren’t going to be able to bring you that discussion of Making Money until October. But it has been a very long time since we talked about Going Postal, so Ben thought you might like a recap to tide you over – plus a discussion of some of his favourite Discworld book covers, prompted by subscriber Ian!

We’d love to hear about your favourite covers, from any of the various editions of Pratchett’s works! Let us know about them using the hashtag #Pratchat79A on social media, or get in touch via email or our subscriber Discord.

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You can find various covers of the Discworld books via the L-Space wiki, or via the Internet Speculative Fiction Database at isfdb.org. For the isfdb, make sure you choose “Fiction Titles” below the search box when searching for a specific book, then scroll down to the bottom of the list of editions and click the link which says “View all covers for [Book Title]”. Note that not all the covers Ben mentions are at those two sources; we’ve linked to other sources below where necessary.

Ben mentions these favourite covers:

We discussed Going Postal way back in 2020, in #Pratchat38, “Moisten to Steal”, with guests Nicholas J Johnson and Lawrence Leung.

We’ll be back in October with #Pratchat80 discussing Making Money with guest Stephanie Convery.

Want to help us get to the end of our six(ish) year mission and read every Pratchett book – and more? You can support us with a tip, or a subscription for as little as $2 a month, and that’s cuttin’ our own throats! See our Support Us page for details.

#PratchatNA7 Notes and Errata

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These are the show notes and errata for our bonus live episode “A Troll New World” featuring guest Tansy Rayner Roberts, discussing the 1991 Discworld short story Troll Bridge.

  • Troll Bridge was first published in the 1991 anthology After the King: Stories In Honour of J.R.R. Tolkien, the most recent edition of which was released in 2012. Other authors in the collection include Stephen R. Donaldson, Jane Yolen, Gregory Benford, Emma Bull, Poul and Karen Anderson, Judith Tarr, Harry Turtledove, Karen Haber and Charles de Lint, among others. The story was reprinted in 2001’s The Mammoth Book of Comic Fantasy (which also features stories by Neil Gaiman and Terry Jones) and A Blink of the Screen, the 2012 collection of Pterry’s short fiction.
  • For those of you listening in the future: a great accompaniment to this episode is the February 15, 2022 episode of LeVar Burton Reads, a podcast in which Star Trek: The Next Generation star LeVar Burton reads a piece of short fiction. In this episode, he reads “Troll Bridge” – and gives a lovely short introduction to Terry’s work, and the Discworld itself. If you’re confused as to why Burton would be doing this, before his run on Star Trek, Burton – at the time known for his role in the television series Roots – was the presenter and executive producer of the children’s story reading programme Reading Rainbow on PBS. Burton was the host and also read some of the picture books featured, but it also featured a raft of different celebrities and actors doing the reading. By the time of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Burton was better known to US audiences than Patrick Stewart! It had a long run from 1983 through to 2006; in 2012, a Reading Rainbow iPad app created by Burton’s company RRKIDZ became the most-downloaded app in the App Store. In 2014, Burton launched a massively successful Kickstarter campaign to expand the reach of the app to Android and the web, but a legal dispute with WNED, the PBS station that owned the Reading Rainbow brand and had licensed it to Burton, ended with him no longer being able to use the name. Burton launched his weekly podcast – for which he primarily reads adult fiction – in 2017.
  • The short film Troll Bridge by Snowgum Films was adapted for the screen and directed by Daniel Knight, and stars Don Bridges as Cohen, Glenn van Oosterom as the horse and John Jenkins as Mica. It was a mammoth undertaking, especially considering it’s a fan film, albeit an extremely polished one: the cast and crew all worked without pay, with production costs paid for by a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter. It’s currently screening in film festivals and fan conventions around the world, but you can still pre-order a digital, DVD or Blu-Ray version ahead of its release in November. Head to www.trollbridge.film to see the trailer and find out more.
  • 1999’s The Mummy, starring Brendan Fraser, Rachel Weisz and John Hannah, is one of the greatest adventure films ever made. (We’re not so fussed about the sequels, though.) We’ve mentioned it in passing in the show notes before, in #Pratchat10 and #Pratchat19. The character Liz describes is, coincidentally, named Captain Winston Havelock, and is played by the late Welsh character actor Bernard Fox. Depending on when you started watching television, you might remember him as the witch-doctor Dr. Bombay on the sitcom Bewitched.
  • English actor Jude Law famously took on the role of Albus Dumbledore in Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, playing a younger version of the character originated on film by Richard Harris and Michael Gambon. He also plays Lenny Belardo, a young Archbishop of New York who becomes the first American Pope of the Catholic Church, in The Young Pope and its upcoming sequel The New Pope.
  • It was announced in early April 2019 that a prequel to the hit 1978 musical Grease was in development at Paramount Pictures, with a script to be written by John August (best known for his work with Tim Burton, as well as his podcast Scriptnotes). Provisionally titled Summer Lovin’, it will supposedly explore the fling that Sandy and Danny had, though as Tansy mentions, we really already know everything we need to thanks to the song “Summer Nights”. We previously mentioned Grease in #Pratchat5, “Ten Points to Viper House“.
  • The Clacks are a system of sophisticated semaphore-like signalling towers which allow the transmission of information very quickly across the Sto Plains to and from Ankh-Morpork. They’re first mentioned in The Fifth Elephant, play a prominent role in Going Postal, and are also important to the plot in Monstrous Regiment and Raising Steam.
  • The Silmarillion is a collection of five works originally pitched by Tolkien as a sequel to The Hobbit, but they were rejected by his publisher as being too obscure. Heavily influenced by Celtic mythology, they tell the story of the creation of the world in which his other books are set, including Middle-Earth, and of the conflicts between its various deities, and form a backstory which explains the history that led to The Lord of the Rings. It was published after his death, compiled from incomplete writings by his son, Christopher.
  • Technically Troll Bridge is the first time we meet a troll under a bridge on the Discworld, as it was published a year before Lords and Ladies, but it’s likely they were both being written around the same time.
  • You can hear all about Good Omens (the book at least) in #Pratchat15, “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And We Feel Nice and Accurate)“.
  • Xena of Amphipolis, played by New Zealand legend Lucy Lawless, is the protagonist of Xena: Warrior Princess, the hugely popular fantasy adventure series filmed in New Zealand which began life as a spin-off from Hercules: The Legendary Journeys. Xena starts out as a ruthless warlord encountered by Hercules, but he convinces her to walk a more righteous path. In the series, which ran for six seasons from 1995 to 2001, Xena roams the world of Ancient Greece trying to help people, accompanied by Gabrielle, the Battling Bard of Poteidaia. In the opening episode of season three, “The Furies“, Xena claims that she is the daughter of Ares, god of war, a frequent antagonist (and a great visual for Greebo, as discussed in #Pratchat12, “Brooms, Boats and Pumpkinmobiles“). While Xena indicates this was a lie to fool the Furies, it’s left ambiguous, so she could be a demi-god…but most of us prefer to think of her as an exceptionally skilled mortal warrior.
  • We explained the Star Wars concept of “midi-chlorians” in the show notes for #Pratchat18, “Sundog Gazillionaire“, which was recorded the night before this live show. In brief: they’re an explanation for why some people can use the Force and some can’t. It didn’t please fans, who didn’t feel the need for such a pseudo-scientific explanation when it was introduced in the 1999 prequel film The Phantom Menace. They’ve rarely been mentioned since.
  • The trailer in question is the first full teaser for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, the last of the sequel trilogy and the final film in the Skywalker saga, to be released in December 2019.
  • The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is a Netflix sitcom created by Tina Fey. The titular Kimmy is a young woman who moves to New York to make a new life after spending 15 years in an underground bunker kidnapped by a cult leader. She ends up living in a tiny basement apartment in Queens with struggling musical performer Titus Andromedon. In the season four episode “Kimmy and the Beest!”, Titus gets a gig directing a school musical and takes it all way too seriously.
  • There is some evidence that “trolling” was a fishing term for dragging bait to attract fish, distinct from “trawling”, or dragging a net. That certainly could be the origin of the “Internet troll”, but there are other competing theories too. It probably dates back to the late 1980s, but it’s first documented use is from 1992 on the newsgroup alt.folklore.urban, where it was more gently used to “troll for newbies” – posting well-debunked stories that existing posters would know were false, but to which new users would respond.
  • In February 2013 – so a little more than five years ago, Liz – authorities in the Czech Republic detected horse meat in frozen IKEA meatballs manufactured by IKEA’s main supplier in Sweden. IKEA temporarily stopped all sale of meatballs across Europe. This was part of a wider scandal that year in which it was revealed that many food supply companies in Europe had substituted cheaper meats like horse and pork for beef to increase their profit margins, with as much as 1% of beef products in Britain containing some horse DNA.
  • Guest Sarah Pearson revealed the existence of Library Captains in #Pratchat11, “At Bill’s Door“.
  • Dr Dan Golding discussed Moving Pictures in #Pratchat10, “We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Broomstick“.
  • Asimov, resident Pratcat, can be heard in the afore-mentioned episode 10 and also #Pratchat18, episode 18.
  • We discussed Small Gods with the Reverend Doctor Avril Hannah-Jones in #Pratchat16, “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Vorbis“.
  • We discussed Lords and Ladies with Nadia Bailey in #Pratchat17, “Midsummer (Elf) Murders“.
  • Each Nullus Anxietas convention has a theme, and the theme for NA7 was Going Postal – hence Liz’s comment that she may have been playing to the audience by favouring the book. The next convention, to be held in Sydney in July 2021, has the theme “Ankh-Morpork: Citie of One Thousande Surprises”. We hope to see you there!
  • We discussed The Colour of Magic with Joel Martin in episode 14.
  • Lucy Lawless has indeed been filming a new television show in Melbourne: a new “comedy drama” titled My Life is Murder, starring Lawless as private investigator Alexa Crowe. It’ll screen on Network Ten in Australia, TVNZ in New Zealand and Acorn TV in the US in mid-2019.
  • Zoë Bell is a New Zealand stuntwoman and actress. Aside from working on Xena: Warrior Princess, she has also been stunt double for Uma Thurman in Kill Bill and Cate Blanchett in Thor: Ragnarok. Her acting work includes the film Death Proof and the videogame Fallout: New Vegas. Liz’s interview with Zoë was printed in Metro magazine (and is not available online).
  • You can find out more about Night Terrace at nightterrace.com.
  • Cary Elwes is most famous for playing Westley, aka the Man in Black, in The Princess Bride, but is also beloved for his portrayal of the lead character in Mel Brooks’ spoof Robin Hood: Men in Tights. You might also know him as Dr Lawrence Gordon in the horror film Saw and its sequel Saw 3D, and he’s joined the cast of Stranger Things for its third season on Netflix.

#PratchatPreviously2 – The Longer Footnote

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Our July episode about The Long Cosmos, fifth and final of the Long Earth series, is arriving on time! But we still thought you might appreciate a recap and reminder of what happened in the previous four novels.

Was this helpful? Were you annoyed by the slight inaccuracies made for brevity? Do you double-dare us to do this for the Discworld series as whole? (Please don’t…) Let us know what you think, using the hashtag #PratchatPreviously2 on social media, or get in touch via email or our subscriber Discord.

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The previous recap, “The Long Footnote”, has a bit more detail on the first three books.

Pick up the story in #Pratchat78, “One Step Beyond”, with Joel Martin and Deanne Sheldon-Collins discussing The Long Cosmos. It should be out by the time you finish listening to this recap!

Want to help us get to the end of our six(ish) year mission and read every Pratchett book – and more? You can support us with a tip, or a subscription for as little as $2 a month, and that’s cuttin’ our own throats! See our Support Us page for details.

#EeekClub2024 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for our special Glorious 25th of May episode, “Eeek Club 2024“, discussing topics chosen by our Eeek tier subscribers.

Iconographic Evidence

Notes and Errata

  • If you need an explanation of the Glorious 25th of May, see #Pratchat54, “The Land Before Vimes”, our episode discussing Night Watch. As mentioned in our previous Eeek Club specials, the 25th of May is also Towel Day and Geek Pride Day.
  • This is our fourth Eeek Club special; the previous ones are Eeek Club 2021, Eeek Club 2022 and Eeek Club 2023.
  • “Ramen hacks” are things you can add into your bowl of traditional Japanese noodle soup to make it even more delicious. (Not a lot of them are vegetarian, so Ben has given them a miss.) If you want to find some, you could look up the hashtag #ramenhacks on TikTok or Instagram, search YouTube, or do a web search, which will find a fair number of listicles.
  • Find out all the details about the Australian Discworld Convention (12-14 July 2024 in Adelaide) at their website, ausdwcon.org.
  • “Mad March” is the name given in Adelaide to the period of the year usually starting in late February and running through March when nearly all of their big cultural events occur: the Adelaide Fringe Festival (the second largest fringe arts festival in the world!), the Adelaide Festival, Womadelaide, the Clipsal 500 car race, and in some years even South Australia’s major horse race and a state election. It used to be not much else of note would happen there during the rest of the year, but as Liz mentions that’s no longer the case.
  • Maid Marian and Her Merry Men was a sitcom pitched at kids created by Tony Robinson. It spoofed the Robin Hood myth by having Robin be a cowardly tailor mistaken for a rebel leader, when actually Marian is the brains behind the outfit. We’ve mentioned it before, though not for a long time – it was way back in #Pratchat7A, “The Curious Incident of the Dragon and the Night Watch”, and #Pratchat17, “Midsummer (Elf) Murders”. The episode Ben is thinking of here is “They Came From Outer Space” from the show’s third series in 1993. (Fun fact: Ben wrote the first – and for a long time only – website dedicated to the show way back in around 1994, and even corresponded with a couple of the writers and actors on the show. A lot of the information on modern Marian sites is plag- well, copied from his site, which no longer exists except in the Internet Archive.)
  • The “Keep your secrets, Gandalf” meme is from the scene where Frodo meets Gandalf as he arrives in the Shire at the start of The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring.
  • We mention a few TV shows:
    • The Worst Witch was originally a series of children’s books written and illustrated by Jill Murphy, the first of which was published in 1974. It chronicles the adventures of Mildred Hubble, a student at Miss Cackle’s Academy for Young Witches; Mildred’s clumsiness gets her into all sorts of trouble and earns her the titular epithet. It’s actually been two different television series, one fairly low budget one in 1998 which was so popular it had two spin-offs, and a newer one in 2017. There was also a stage musical in 2018!
    • Dead Boy Detectives is on Netflix, and is based on characters created by Neil Gaiman for the Sandman comics, who later went on to star in more adventures in comics and appear briefly in the Doom Patrol television series before getting their own show. The titular dead boys are a pair of ghosts who solve supernatural crimes while hiding out from Death so they can stay together. The first season was released ion 25 April 2024.
    • Wednesday is also on Netflix. Created by Tim Burton, it’s a new version of The Addams Family focussed on Wednesday Addams, played by Jenna Ortega. After being expelled from a regular high school, Wednesday is sent to the much creepier Nevermore Academy. A second season is coming, probably in 2025.
    • The White Lotus is a black comedy anthology series on HBO. Each season takes place at a different hotel run by the fictional White Lotus chain. The third season is coming in 2025.

Thanks for reading our notes! If we missed anything, or you have questions, please let us know.

Eeek Club 2024

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It’s the 25th of May, which can only mean one thing: Geek Pride Day! Or Towel Day. Or the Glorious 25th of May and the Battle of Treacle Mine Road…okay, that’s three things. Why not add one more? This is the Pratchat Eeek Club: a bonus episode discussing Terry Pratchett-related topics selected by our “Eeek” tier subscribers.

This year, the topics are:

  • So it’s been a few years of the Podcast. How are you guys holding up?
  • How could one Discworld character use their skills and influence to change the patriarchal nature of the Disc?
  • What is an unwritten Discworld story for you, e.g. maybe a head canon of a specific character, or a general arc of how things came into being or changed on the Disc?
  • Why no gays? (On the Discworld.)
  • Like learning how to not use magic is the whole point of magic, what have you had to learn not to do to make your life easier/better?
  • What other storylines – other than The Watch – would you like to see turned into a television show?

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A big thank you to all our subscribers for making Pratchat possible, but especially to this year’s Eeek Club contributors: Graham, Karl, Jing, the Caths, Jess and Ellie, Stephanie, Nathan and those we didn’t hear from.

You’ll find notes and errata for this episode on our website.

Want to make sure we get through every Pratchett book – or even choose a topic for next year’s Eeek Club? You can support Pratchat by subscribing for as little as $2 a month and get access to bonus stuff, including the exclusive supporter podcast Ook Club! Click here to find out more.

#PratchatPreviously – The Long Footnote

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Our July episode about The Long Utopia, fourth of the Long Earth series, is going to be late! To tide you over for the next week or so, here’s a long footnote of a bonus episode presenting a quick recap of the Long Earth so far.

Was this helpful? Would you like a recap like this for any of the other series we cover? Do you dare us to do this for the Discworld series as whole? (Please don’t…) Let us know what you think, using the hashtag #PratchatPreviously on social media, or get in touch via email or our subscriber Discord.

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As mentioned by Ben at the top of this footnote, Liz and Ben appeared alongside hosts from The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret and Who Watches the Watch on the June 18th episode of Al Kennedy’s Pratchett interview podcast Desert Island Discworld, “7A.1 Discworld Podcasters and Eric”.

Our own discussion of Eric is #Pratchat7, “All the Fingle Ladies”, from May 2018.

Our next episode is still #Pratchat69, with Deanne Sheldon-Collins discussing The Long Utopia. Watch out for it in mid July.

Want to help us get to the end of our six(ish) year mission and read every Pratchett book – and more? You can support us with a tip, or a subscription for as little as $2 a month, and that’s cuttin’ our own throats! See our Support Us page for details.

#PratchatElsewhere Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for the bonus Pratchat episode “We’re on a Road to Elsewhere“, in which Ben discusses recent Pratchett news, and interviews guest Danny Sag from the Australian Discworld Convention.

Iconographic Evidence

The opening sequence to Good Omens 2 – and handily, the still image for this video is the poster Ben also mentioned!
Here’s the official trailer for Good Omens 2!

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title is a riff on the chorus lyric from the Talking Heads son “Road to Nowhere”. It might have made a good title for the Strata episode, but Ben will have to think of another one now! (Elsewhere is the equivalent of hyperspace in Strata, traversed through the use of a “Matrix drive”.)
  • You can see the new narrators and covers for the Penguin Discworld audiobooks at their official website.
  • As well as the intro sequence above, you might find these Good Omens links handy:
  • “Cute aggression”, originally “playful aggression”, was popularised around 2013 by the work of psychologists Rebecca Dyer and Aragón. Note that it refers to superficial aggression; folks who express their feelings about cute things this way are not actually violent or aggressive.
  • A Stroke of the Pen was announced on the 28th of February 2023. You can read about how the stories were rediscovered in this article at LoveReading. The blurb available on several bookstore listings has this to say about the stories within: “Meet Og the inventor, the first caveman to cultivate fire, as he discovers the highs and lows of progress; haunt the Council with the defiant evicted ghosts of Pilgarlic Towers; visit Blackbury, a small market town with weird weather and an otherworldly visitor; and travel millions of years back in time to The Old Red Sandstone Lion pub.”
  • Tiffany Aching’s Guide to Being a Witch was announced on the 12th of May 2023, with more details revealed on the 1st of June. There’s an official page for the book at terrypratchett.com, and an article in The Bookseller magazine which includes some of Rhianna’s thoughts about writing for Discworld.
  • You can find out more about Gabrielle Kent on her website, gabriellekent.com. The books about a boy who inherits a magic castle are the Alfie Bloom series, beginning with Alfie Bloom and the Secrets of Hexbridge Castle, published in 2015. Rani Reports is the series about the young journalist, beginning with Rani Reports on the Missing Millions, which was published in May this year.
  • Knights and Bikes (2019) is the first videogame from indie UK developer Foam Sword Games. It was created by Rex Crowle and Moo Yu, who you might know from their work on games like Tearaway, Little Big Planet, Ratchet & Clank, Ring Fling and MonstrosCity. Crowle is also the brain behind the roleplaying game inspired to-do list app Epic Win. The game is available on most platforms.
  • There are several Discworld books specifically credited to the Discworld Emporium, but most of them do include Terry’s name in one way or another! The credit on The Compleat Ankh-Morpork and The Compleat Discworld Atlas is “Terry Pratchett aided and abetted by the Discworld Emporium”. (The copyright has Terry Pratchett and the Emporium as a partnership as the officially credited authors, with Emporium identified as Isobel Pearson, Reb Voyce, Bernard Pearson and Ian Mitchell in that order.) Earlier books produced by the Emporium like The World of Poo and Mrs Bradshaw’s Handbook are credited on the cover only as “Terry Pratchett presents”, with the Handbook “aided and abetted” credit on the inside, while for the earlier World of Poo fictional author Miss Felicity Beadle was “assisted by Bernard and Isobel Pearson”. Only The Nac Mac Feegles’ Big Wee Alphabet Book uses the credit “by the Discworld Emporium”, separately including the same “Terry Pratchett’s Discworld” identifier seen on Tiffany Aching’s Guide to Being a Witch. (The description on the website says the Feegle book was “lovingly produced by Ian Mitchell”.) Earlier books worked on by Bernard Pearson, like the Discworld Almanack, have him as a co-author with Terry.
    So the new Tiffany book is not the first to identify specific people as the author without Terry being one of them, but it is the first to do so on the front cover. Ben is wrong, but it still feels like a big deal to him.
  • You can see Colleen Doran‘s impressive list of comic book credits, and some of her amazing artwork, at colleendoran.com. You can get notified about the crowdfunding campaign for the Good Omens graphic novel by signing up at Kickstarter.
  • You can see a list of the books published by Dunmanifestin on the company website. They don’t yet list the Good Omens Kickstarter, but “The Terry Pratchett Estate” is listed as the campaign owner, and their username is “dunmanifestin”, so that seems pretty clear. The campaign has been mentioned by the official Good Omens Twitter account, which is @GoodOmensHQ.
  • There are currently eight other active Pratchett podcasts by Ben’s count. He keeps track of them via the Pratchat side-project wiki, The Guild of Recappers & Podcasters.
  • Ted Lasso is an Apple TV+ show starring Jason Sudeikis as the title character, a college football coach from Kansas who is hired to manage Richmond AFC by the ex-wife of its previous owner, who took it in her divorce. It’s a beautiful and heartwarming show that has just finished up its third and (supposedly) final season, and as so many people have said about Unseen Academicals, “the important thing about football is that it’s not about football.” Ben highly recommends the show.
  • As well as Nullus Anxietas, which you can find at ausdwcon.org, we mention lots of Discworld conventions this episode, but missed out a few. Here’s a run-down:
    • The original Discworld Convention, now known as the International Discworld Convention, started in the UK in 1996, as Danny mentions, and runs every two years. Thanks to Rachel Rowlands of Discworld Monthly for pointing out that it has missed two of those years: 2000 and 2020. The next one is in Birmingham in August 2024, and you can find out more at dwcon.org.
    • The Irish Discworld Convention began in 2009 and also runs every two years, though not in 2021. The next one is in Cork in October 2023; find out more at idwcon.org.
    • The North American Discworld Convention also started in 2009, and has run five times since then, most recently (as per Ben’s footnote) in 2019. Their website, nadwcon.org, is offline as of the publication of this episode, but Rachel Rowlands informs us that a team is working on putting together another convention in the US, so keep an eye out for information about it in the near future.
    • Die Scheibenwelt Convention, aka the German Discworld Convention, has run six times since 2011, most recently in May 2023 – and they hold it in a castle! (The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret’s Joanna Hagan went this year; keep on eye on their social media for her video diary if you want to know more about what that was like.) They’re planning the next one for 2025. Find out more at discworld-convention.de (the website is in German and English).
    • Cabbagecon, the Dutch Discworld Convention, has run six times since 2011, and most recently in 2022. The next one will be in October 2024; find out more at dutchdwcon.nl (they also have info available in English).
    • The Ineffable Con is not a Discworld convention, but as it’s name suggests a celebration of Good Omens, specifically the television series. It’s run three times in the UK since 2019, and a fourth online-only convention is coming in October 2023. Find out more at theineffablecon.org.uk.
    • The Llamedos Holiday Camp is the newest fan event, which has run in Wales since 2020. It’s organised by the folks behind Discworld Monthly (hello again Rachel – thanks for the reminder!), and rather than being a traditional convention, describes itself as an “Interactive Immersive Discworld Experience” – it’s presented as if the event is taking place in Llamedos as the Discworld equivalent of an old-school British holiday camp. It will next appear in 2024 with a “Scout Jamboree” theme, and you can find out more at llamedosholidaycamp.com.
  • The special convention episodes we’ve released in conjunction with Nullus Anxietas are:
    • #PratchatNA7, “A Troll New World”, recorded live at Nullus Anxietas 7 in 2019.
    • #PratchatNALC, “Twice as Alive”, recorded for The Lost Con online event in 2021.
    • A special Hogswatch video for the con’s 2021 Christmas event; it’s available to Pratchat subscribers on YouTube.
    • “A Tale of Two Carpets”, recorded for the Discworld Virtual Fun Day in June 2022; the title is from a special version released to Pratchat subscribers with extra footnotes, but you can see the original that played at the event at this link.
  • Blow Up is a 2023 Australian reality television show made by Channel 7 in which contestants compete to make the biggest and best balloon sculptures. It’s based on a Dutch show, also called Blow Up, from 2022. You can watch Blow Up via 7Plus, which is the channel’s catch-up streaming service, though it may not be available to viewers outside Australia. We won’t spoil the results in case you want to watch it for yourself, but don’t get your hopes up for a second season; Blow Up was moved from Channel 7 to one of their digital-only channels, 7flix, after two episodes, thanks to disappointing ratings.
  • Werewolf is a social deduction party game. Players are secretly assigned a role as a werewolf or villager, and play in alternating day and night turns. The werewolves, who know who each other are, eliminate one villager player each night turn, while during the day turns the villagers must debate who are the werewolves and vote to eliminate players they suspect. Either team wins if they eliminate all of the other players. The game was invented in Russia as Mafia by Dimitry Davidoff in 1986, but didn’t take off in America until it was re-themed to be about werewolves by Andy Plotkin in around 1997. It is often treated like a folk game, even though it’s origin can be traced, and there are many, many published and free versions available, many with large numbers of unique roles for the villagers which grant them various special abilities and win or lose conditions. Personally Ben considers it inferior to newer social deduction games that don’t rely so heavily on player elimination, but he’s developed a couple of variations of his own, including Spy Catcher and Smuggletown.
  • For more about the Australian Discworld Convention, visit their website or Facebook page, join their Facebook group, or follow them on Twitter, Instagram or YouTube.

Thanks for reading our notes! If we missed anything, or you have questions, please let us know.

#PratchatRuby – How Did Discworld Get to 40?

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24 November 2023 marks forty years since Terry Pratchett’s The Colour of Magic was first published. That’s right – it’s Discworld’s fortieth birthday! To celebrate, join Pratchat producer and co-host Ben McKenzie as he – and a bunch of special guests – try to figure out why that book, and moreso the Discworld series it started, have endured for so long.

This episode is something of an experiment for Pratchat, and as Ben says during the episode, this can’t possibly cover all the reasons why the series is so beloved. We want to hear about your favourite Discworld books, and what the Discworld means to you. And we’d love to know what you thought of this episode, and whether you’d like to hear more like it in the future! Tell us via the hashtag #PratchatRuby on social media, or get in touch via email or our subscriber Discord.

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Huge thanks to everyone who contributed to this episode:

Our original discussion of The Colour of Magic can be found in #Pratchat14, “City-State Lampoon’s Disc-Wide Vacation”, from December 2018.

Our December episode will be #Pratchat73, discussing the stories of Father Christmas’s Fake Beard. But we are hoping to bring you one more little extra before the year is out.

Want to help us get to every Pratchett book? You can subscribe for as little as $2 a month – and that’s cuttin’ our own throats! (Sorry.) Check out our Support Us page for details.

Want to help us get to the end of our six(ish) year mission and read every Pratchett book – and more? You can support us with a tip, or a subscription for as little as $2 a month, and that’s cuttin’ our own throats! See our Support Us page for details.

#Pratchat57West5 – Daniel Superbaboon

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We take a last-minute step (or five) to the West, as Liz and Ben delay their chat about The Long Mars to go back to where it all began: Pratchett’s original 1986 short story “The High Meggas“.

Larry Linsay, who perfected the belt technology that allows humans to move between parallel Earths, has shunned civilisation. He’s living near the coast of what would be France in a world in the “high meggas”, the weirder Earths a million or so removed from the original. Like all the other Earths, it’s devoid of human life – or it was, until two guards from Forward Base, the nearest human settlement many worlds away, arrive in Linsay’s world. The first one he finds, Joshua Valienté, claims he’s chasing the other one: a terrorist who poisoned the other fifty personnel at Forward Base. Trouble is, that’s exactly what she says about him, too…

When we had to change plans at the last minute and delay our episode on The Long Mars, we decided to take the opportunity to produce a bonus episode about the story where it all started. “The High Meggas” was written in between the first two Discworld novels and never published until its ideas became a novel, and it’s a fascinating look at how Pratchett’s idea evolved. Some things are very similar – names like Linsay and Valienté, the concept (though not the name) of the Long Earth. Others are tweaked – the belts become boxes, movin‘ becomes stepping. And then there’s some which are flipped entirely – compare the “Sideways Doctrine” to the idea of US Aegis.

Do you prefer the more technological version of “stepping” in the original story? Does the central drama of the story work for you, or is the villain too obvious? And what do you think Pratchett’s career would have been like if The Colour of Magic hadn’t been a success, and this had been his next big project instead of The Light Fantastic? Join the conversation using the hashtag #Pratchat57West5 on social media.

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As usual, you can find notes and errata for this episode on our website.

This bonus episode won’t stop us from discusses the third Long Earth novel, The Long Mars, with returning guest Joel Martin! …or at least that was the idea. #Pratchat57 was to be released the same month as this one, but unfortunately some further technical problems complicated the editing process, so we’ve delayed it until the 25th of August. For our regular August episode, #Pratchat58, we’ll be reading another short story: 1988’s “Final Reward”. Send us your questions using the appropriate hashtag on social media, or via email to chat@pratchatpodcast.com.

Want to help us get to the end of our six(ish) year mission and read every Pratchett book – and more? You can support us with a tip, or a subscription for as little as $2 a month, and that’s cuttin’ our own throats! See our Support Us page for details.