Discworld

#Pratchat56 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 56, “do { Podcast(); } while ( unreadPratchetts > 0 );“, discussing the 1990 short story “#ifdefDEBUG + ‘world/enough’ + ‘time’” with guest Sean Williams.

Iconographic Evidence

Conspicuously missing from this section is that illustration from the German collection Der ganze Wahnsinn: Storys, but despite what much of the Internet is like it’s not actually okay to publicly share artwork without the artist’s permission.

However, it does appear in the picture section of A Blink of the Screen! There is presented the full, original artwork, which was painted for the cover of a 2001 German anthology of short stories, Retter der Ewigkeit, subtitled “Geschichten zwischen Diesseits und Jenseits” (roughly “Saviour of Eternity: Tales between this world and the afterlife“). This version shows the whole scene – unlike the versions used for either of the German collections – and answers a few of our questions, especially that the yellow leg is indeed that of Michael Dever in his AR chair. In the ebook edition it’s presented at quite a low resolution, and sideways (in the print edition it’s a double-page spread), which might be why Ben thought it was familiar but didn’t recognise where he’d seen it.

While it’s not amongst the images available on Josh Kirby’s official website, if we find it somewhere else public, we’ll point you to it. Sven and Ben have both shared the versions they have via the Pratchat Discord, so subscribers with access can see it there.

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title is valid C++ code, assuming that the function Podcast exists and updates the value of unreadPratchetts to avoid the podcast going on forever. Or is that what you all secretly want?
  • Philip K. Dick (1928-1982) – who’ll be mentioned quite a bit this episode – was an American science fiction author, many of whose novels and short stories have been famously adapted for the screen. These include The Man in the High Castle, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (adapted as Blade Runner), “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” (adapted twice as Total Recall), “The Minority Report” (more about that in another note) and A Scanner Darkly, among others.
  • You can hear Sean’s episode of Splendid Chaps, “Three/Family“, over at the Splendid Chaps website. It was recorded on Sunday, 10 March 2013, at the pop-up Adelaide Fringe venue the Tuxedo Cat, and released on 23 March 2013.
  • Strata was Pratchett’s third novel, first published in June 1981, about two and a half years before The Colour of Magic. It’s features a science fiction version of the Discworld – a planet shaped like a flat disc, which seems to have been built by ancient aliens. It’s more-or-less a parody of Larry Niven’s popular Ringworld books, with many specific jokes and references. But we’ll say no more about it here, as we’ll definitely be covering it on the podcast in future.
  • The Ferals (1994-1995) was an Australian children’s television program on the ABC starring a mix of humans and puppet animals: Rattus, a rat; Modigliana, a feral cat; Mixy, a rabbit (her name is a pun on myxomatosis, a disease used to control wild pest rabbits in Australia); and a “dopey dog”, who it turns out is both not a dingo and not a Darren – his name is actually Derryn. While the original show only ran for two seasons, the puppet characters were very popular and continued to host and appear on other shows for several years. This included the five-minute Feral TV, in which the ferals ran a television station headed up by Kerry the Cane Toad (a clear parody of Kerry Packer, then owner of Australia’s Channel 9 TV network) and his assistant Rodney, a cockroach.
  • The story was written for the 1990 anthology Digital Dreams, edited by British writer, editor and sociologist specialising in religion, David V. Barrett. Barrett has a long history editing and writing for speculative fiction and similar magazines, including Vector and the Fortean Times. He also edited Tales From the Vatican Vaults, a collection of short fiction based on the premise of secret Vatican files being released to the public in an alternate history where Pope John Paul I reformed the Catholic Church. It was published in 2015, and features a few stories by authors who contributed to Digital Dreams. As we discussed, authors in the collection include Neil Gaiman, Diana Wynn Jones, Dave Langford, Storm Constantine, Ian McDonald, Keith Roberts and Andy Sawyer. You can see the cover and full list of authors at the book’s entry in the Speculative Fiction Database (SFDB).
  • The short story commentary in which Pratchett says “short stories cost me blood” and “I doubt I’ve done more than fifteen in my life” is “The Sea and Little Fishes”, which we discussed in #Pratchat39, “All the Fun of the…Fish?” The book in which this commentary appears, A Blink of the Screen, contains thirty-two short pieces of fiction. Admittedly, a few of those don’t really count as stories – see #Pratchat53 for three examples – but that’s not counting the four volumes of his early short stories for children, published separately.
  • Neil Gaiman’s short story about the troll under the bridge is titled, er… “The Troll Bridge” (or sometimes “Troll-Bridge”). It seems to have been first published in the short story collection Snow White, Blood Red in 1993, two years after the first publication of Pratchett’s story of the same name. The story was nominated for the World Fantasy Award in 1994, and has appeared in a few other places, including Gaiman’s own anthologies Angels and Visitations (1993 – probably the collection Sean is thinking of), Smoke and Mirrors (1998) and M is for Magic (2007), and was adapted into the comic book Ben read in 2016 by Colleen Doran. While he was certainly better known as a comics writer at the time, Gaiman had written and published several short stories by 1990, though his most famous short fiction came after Digital Dreams. One of his notable earlier stories is 1984’s “We Can Get Them for You Wholesale” – the title clearly riffing on Dick’s “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” – about a young man who finds an assassin in the phone book and discovers they do bulk discounts, a very Pratchetty idea.
  • We discussed “Once and Future“, Pratchett’s 1995 short story for the collection Camelot, in #Pratchat49, “Once More, With Future“.
  • The “internal monologue” is the way many people think to themselves: in words. But while common, this is far from a universal experience – and most people assume others think in the same way as they do. Finding out otherwise often blows people’s minds, as with the cascade of articles and viral social media posts that cropped up in the way of this 2020 tweet:
  • “Atari” was never that widely-used as a synonym for game consoles, but “Nintendo” was – which is why some sources credit them with aggressively re-popularising the still fairly new generic term “game console” in the 1990s, so they could hang on to the trademark. It worked! And while some folks did (and do) use “Playstation”, “XBox” or even “Game Cube” as a stand-in for game console, those never became as widespread. (Earlier consoles were referred to as “game systems”, but by the time Nintendo massively dominated the market in the early 1990s, “console” – which differentiated a dedicated system for games from a more versatile personal computer, and from an arcade “cabinet” that could only play a single game – had become the preferred term.)
  • Genericisation can indeed make a product’s name ineligible as a trademark. This process is also known as “trademark erosion” or “genericide”, and in America – where most of the famous cases have occurred – it’s controlled by the Lanham (Trademark) Act. The Lanham Act allows a registered trade mark to be cancelled if it “becomes the generic name for the goods or services, or a portion thereof, for which it is registered”. In Australia, the Trade Marks Act 1995 has a similar clause: the mark can be cancelled if it “becomes generally accepted within the relevant trade as the sign that describes or is the name of an article, substance or service”. This has happened to some significant and surprising things: Aspirin and Heroin were both once trademark names used by the Bayer company! To protect against this modern drugs are often given a specific, non-proprietary name, with different company’s specific versions having trade names as well. Other famous examples include cellophane, dry ice, escalator, kerosene, laundromat, videotape and zipper! Examples like Hoover, Kleenex and Google (see below) have certainly become generic terms for a kind of thing, but not to the extent where a trademark has been revoked or expired. In Australia, the legal test seems to be whether the trade mark has become the only term used for a product or service.
  • The Google company went through a major restructuring in 2015 with the creation of Alphabet Inc, a new company which owned Google (the Internet services company that runs the search engine, GMail, YouTube and various other online services) and several other companies that were previously subsidiaries of Google. The driver behind this wasn’t a worry about genericisation; rather Google stated that wanted to make the company more accountable and give subsidiaries more freedom. But Google is commonly used to mean “search the Internet”, including as a verb (“I googled it”), and this has come up in court as a reason to cancel the trademark, as per the Lanham Act mentioned above. In 2017, a case in Arizona set a new precedent that the test for genericisation was whether the “primary significance of the trade mark in the minds of the consuming public” had become the product, rather than the producer. They ruled that while people did use “google” as a verb, they also understood Google was a company and not the only way to search the Internet.
  • Amstrad was a British computer company created by English tycoon and politician Alan Sugar. It operated between 1968 and 2010, and was most famous for their personal computers in the 1980s and 1990s. These included later iterations of the ZX Spectrum, which Amstrad bought from its original creator Sinclair Research, and the Amstrad Mega PC, a Windows-PC which also had a built-in Sega Mega Drive game console (known as the Sega Genesis in the US).
  • Hitachi is a Japanese company founded in 1910, which has grown into a conglomerate best known for their technology products. They no longer make personal or mainframe computers, but do make everything from military vehicles to air conditioners and the Hitachi Magic Wand, a “vibrating massager” introduced in 1968 which experienced a huge swell in sales when it featured in a 2002 episode of Sex and the City.
  • The 1980s-style retro-VR cyberpunk videogame trailer Ben remembered was for the game Jazzpunk, released in 2014. You can watch the live action Jazzpunk trailer on YouTube.
  • William Gibson’s Neuromancer, one of the first and most influential cyberpunk novels, was first published in 1984, so around six years before Pratchett wrote “#ifdefDEBUG + ‘world/enough’ + ‘time'”. Neuromancer popularised many terms and concepts which are now essential parts of the genre, and it’s also the only novel ever to have won the Nebula, Hugo and Philip K. Dick Awards.
  • “Carnie” is an American nickname for “carnival worker”; the traditional Australian equivalent is “showie”, short for “showman” or “showwoman”, since we call them “shows” rather than carnivals. We previously talked about this in #Pratchat51, where our previous research suggested the Australian term might even be a little older than the American one. (The surname in this story – and, most of the time, in real life – is spelled “Carney”.)
  • We dance around this a little in the episode, but clues in the story suggest that “Seagem” – the name for the artificial reality company that becomes a generic name for AR machines – comes from the acronym CGEM, which probably stands for “Computer Generated Environment Machines”.
  • The term AFOL, an acronym for “Adult Fan of Lego”, can be traced back to the newsgroup rec.toys.lego, where it was first coined by Matthew J. Verdier on the 14th of June, 1995 after another user, Jeff Thompson, was the first to use the phrase “adult fan of Lego”. It was a niche term for a decade or so, but in the 2010s not only had more people who grew up playing with Lego returned to it as adults, but the Lego company themselves realised there was a whole underserved market of adult Lego fans, and started making sets which would appeal to them. Unlike some other niche adult fandoms for things traditionally seen as “for kids”, the AFOL community often mingle with and involve young Lego fans too, and you’ll see whole families at Lego conventions, in stores and at events.
  • The word “paragorithm” appears in the context of Darren thinking you wouldn’t need something very complex to simulate most conversations with people, since they’re “just to reassure each other that they’re alive”. It might be a neologism Pratchett invented for “parallel algorithm”, a set of instructions for completing multiple tasks at once. These were relatively uncommon in computing at the time the story was written, since most computers weren’t capable of processing multiple instructions at once, but modern multi-threaded processors are specifically designed to do this and make extensive use of parallel processing.
  • “Technobabble” describes jargon-filled scientific-sounding nonsense, originally the sort used by technologists in the 1980s, but increasingly over time the sort used in science fiction to make it sound like the characters understand things we don’t. The term seems to have been derived from “psychobabble”, a term used to deride similar nonsense jargon used in popular psychology, coined in 1975 by writer R.D. Rosen and popularised by his 1977 book, Psychobabble: Fast Talk and Quick Cure in the Era of Feeling. Rosen specifically used the term to mean “an idiom that reduces psychological insight to a collection of standardised observations” – he was critical of the way psychology at the time sought to reduce the “infinite variety of problems” faced by people into a very small set of formal definitions.
  • “Handwavium” and “phlebotinum” are common fannish terms for substances, devices or phenomena in science fiction which behave in mysterious ways that nonetheless explain otherwise nonsensical events.
  • “Unobtainium” (or “unobtanium”) was originally engineering jargon, coined in the 1950s, for any theoretical substance that could solve a specific problem, if only it existed. It grew to also encompass substances that existed but were too expensive or rare for practical use, and by the 2000s had appeared in its traditional usage in several science fiction novels and films. In 2009, James Cameron used it as the seemingly actual name for the rare and highly valuable super-conducting mineral sought by the mining corporation his film Avatar, to much derision.
  • The book of Doctor Who memories mentioned by Ben is Behind the Sofa: Celebrity Memories of Doctor Who, edited by Steve Berry. Pratchett, while clearly not a big fan, seems mostly to have been motivated to write the introduction because it was a fundraiser for Alzheimers research. There are far too many celebrities of interest to Pratchat listeners for us to make a full list, but we will mention that the authors Ben Aaronovitch, Michael Moorcock and Gideon Defoe all appear, as does the creator of the often-mentioned-in-this-episode Black Mirror, Charlie Brooker.
  • As Ben mentions in the footnote, Handwavium is also a delightful Doctor Who podcast hosted by friends of Pratchat, “a fan and her Da (no, a fan and his daughter).” Yes, Ben managed to mess up their very cute intro, but if you want to hear a daughter and father duo discussing Doctor Who, this is the best show for it! Find it at handwavium.net.
  • My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a 2018 novel by American author Ottessa Moshfegh. We won’t spoil any more about it than Liz has already said, but we will note that it has been optioned to be adapted as a film by none other than Australia’s own Margot Robbie and her husband, Tom Ackerly.
  • The terms “fridged” and “breeder” refer to pervasive harmful tropes in the way women are portrayed in fiction, in both cases having them contribute to someone else’s story without getting to be characters in their own right. A “breeder” is a woman who only matters to the story as a mother or potential mother, while “fridging” is when a woman is killed off or harmed primarily to provide motivation for a male protagonist. The latter term was coined by comic book writer Gail Simone as the phrase “women in refrigerators”, named for a specific example of the trope from the Green Lantern comic. We previously discussed fridging in our discussion of Interesting Times in #Pratchat21, “Memoirs of Agatea“.
  • Space Invaders is a videogame developed by Tomohiro Nishikado, first released in 1978 as an arcade game by Taito Inc in Japan and Midway/Bally internationally. In case you’ve never seen it, the player controls a gun at the bottom of the screen that can move left and right, and fire straight upwards; the goal is to shoot increasingly fast and numerous waves of invading aliens before they reach the ground. Home console, computer and arcade machine versions of the game are still available today, largely unchanged except for nicer graphics and sound effects (though these often emulate the original designs). Elite is a videogame developed by British designers David Braben and Ian Bell, and first published by Acornsoft for personal computers in 1984. The player is a space pilot who operates as a freelance trader, buying and selling goods or turning to mercenary work or piracy to earn money and upgrade their ship. Its combination of space combat, wireframe 3D graphics and freedom to decide how you played made Elite a massive hit, and it spawned several sequels: Frontier: Elite II (1993), Frontier: First Encounters (1995) and more recently Elite Dangerous (2015), though these have become progressively more sophisticated. (Ben was probably thinking of Frontier: Elite II, the first one he encountered, which is why he thought there was a much bigger gap between Elite and Space Invaders.)
  • VR, Virtual Reality, is an entire simulated 3D world, while AR, Augmented Reality, is layering elements of a simulated world onto the real one. This has become a big deal over the last decade, with the launch of games like Pokemon GO that let you catch monsters at your local sightseeing spots, and hardware like the Google Glasses, that promise to deliver that Terminator-like heads up display without needing to surgically replace your eyeballs. So far, only the kind of AR that uses your mobile phone camera has really caught on, but there are new glasses and similar products touted every year…
  • It’s well-documented that Neil and Terry exchanged floppy disks via mail to write Good Omens. Here’s one of many sources for this info: Neil answering a fan’s question about the book on Tumblr in 2019.
  • Ben probably mentioned Pratchett’s interview with Bill Gates in one of our bonus episodes. It was for GQ Magazine in 1995, and unearthed by Marc Burrows during research for his biography, The Magic of Terry Pratchett, in May 2019. (You can see his viral tweet, which includes an excerpt, below.) The idea that Terry had predicted “fake news”, online misinformation and and the return of nazis twenty-four years earlier was written up in The Guardian, Gizmodo and many other news sites at the time, though as Marc notes in a follow up tweet, Gates was on the money later in the interview about the fate of physical media.
  • Grand Theft Auto, abbreviated GTA, is a series of videogames launched in 1997, originally developed by British company DMA Design. The first two games were modest successes, and featured a top-down 2D city in which the player could steal and sell cars, cause car crashes and commit other crimes as they tried to get to a goal number of points, expressed in dollars. Grand Theft Auto III translated the open world of the game to a 3D environment, and it and its sequels have been hugely successful: Grand Theft Auto V is still one of the biggest selling videogames nearly a decade after it was first published in 2013. This is partly because of its online mode, which regularly adds new content and lets players team up and commit crimes together. Since the series got popular, DMA Design was acquired by Rockstar especially for the last few games produced by Rockstar, it has been a constant source of controversy. Some of it is deserved; for example, the games are pretty misogynistic, featuring no playable female characters (except for ones you create yourself in the online version), and relying on ageing tropes of crime fiction for its female NPCs, who are all wives, sex workers and family members. It’s also held up as evidence of videogames’ influence on young people, supposedly leading them to crime and violence, but the evidence of that is less certain. The culture of players around the game, however, is definitely a problem, as it is with the broader world of mainstream videogames.
  • “The Minority Report” was originally a novella by Philip K Dick, first published in Fantastic Universe magazine in January 1956. It imagines a future in which three mutant “precogs” have pre-cognitive abilities, and predict all crime, but the creator of the Precrime department is led to discover more about how it all works when they predict he’ll murder someone he’s never heard of. It was adapted as a film, Minority Report, directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Tom Cruise in 2002, and a sequel television series set a decade later. The film and TV show change many things about the original story, including the nature and abilities of the precogs, and the ending of the story. We previously mentioned it in #Pratchat16, “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Vorbis“.
  • Black Mirror, mentioned many times this episode, is a British speculative fiction anthology show, mainly focusing on the consequences of technology. It was created by Charlie Brooker for Channel 4 in 2011, before being acquired by Netflix in 2015. As of this episode there have been five series of 3-6 episodes, plus a Christmas special featuring multiple related stories, and an interactive “choose your own adventure” style film, Bandersnatch. Some episodes do rely on a reveal for their full impact, so we’ll be careful about spoilers, but here are some that are especially relevant to our discussion:
    • People living on digitally after death – or as a copy of a living person – feature in “Be Right Back” from series two, “San Junipero” from season three, and “USS McCallister” and “Black Museum” from series four.
    • Augmented Reality technology editing your experience of the real world appears in the special “White Christmas” and the episodes “Men Against Fire” from series three, and “Playtest” and “Arkangel” from series four.
    • Full Virtual Realities appear in many episodes, but often as a surprise or twist, so the only one we’ll mention is season five’s “Striking Vipers”.
  • We previously discussed the true nature of the Emerald City in #Pratchat12, “Brooms, Boats and Pumpkinmobiles“. In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, visitors to the City are made to wear green-tinted glasses, and only the external walls are actually green. This idea is dropped in later books (of which there are thirteen!), which describe the city as green and don’t mention the glasses. It’s one of many differences between L Frank Baum’s original Oz books and the popular film adaptation.
  • To look through rose-coloured (or rose-tinted) glasses is to see something in its most favourable light, ignoring its negative aspects. The phrase definitely pre-dates The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, as use of it dates back to at least 1838, when it appears in Slight Reminiscences of the Rhine, Switzerland, and a Corner of Italy by English writer and traveller Mary Boddington (1776-1840). The use of “rosy” or “rose-coloured” as euphemisms for things being generally happy or pleasant is much older, attested as early as the 1700s, and probably stems from the earlier idea that having a rose-coloured complexion was seen as a sign of good health in Europe by around 1590.
  • It’s actually surprisingly difficult to get an accurate word count for books and stories; it’s not a commonly recorded statistic, and ebooks don’t tell you how long they are either (or let you copy and paste the text so your word processor can tell you.) We’re looking into a solution for this! Note that this work has already been done for many of the Discworld novels.
  • We’ve mentioned Jasper Fforde many times before; his most famous series of books are the Thursday Next series, about a detective, Next, who enters the worlds of books to solves crimes.
  • As mentioned, the story’s title is a reference to the opening lines of the poem “To His Coy Mistress” by English author Andrew Marvell. It was first published after his death, in 1681. The opening lines of the poem are: “Had we but World enough, and Time / This coyness, Lady, were no crime.” Other uses of “World Enough and Time” include the episode of Doctor Who mentioned by Ben (the penultimate episode of the tenth series, first broadcast in June 2017), and several books, including novels by Robert Penn Warren, James Kahn, and Joe Haldemann, the latter changing the title to Worlds Enough and Time.
  • Reception theory, or audience reception, is the idea that each individual reader (or listener, watcher, player etc) of a work receives, interprets and understands it through their own cultural frame of reference. Generally agreed ideas about what a work means emerge through consensus, usually amongst individuals who share a common cultural background. It stems from the work of German academic Hans-Robert Jauss (1921-1997) in the 1960s, and popularised and expanded by Jamaican-born British cultural theorist Stuart Hall (1932-2014) in the 1970s and 1980s.
  • The “Hannibal” to which Sean refers is Hannibal Lecter, specifically the version of the character who appears in the television series Hannibal, played by Mads Mikkelsen. Lecter is a forensic psychiatrist assigned to observe FBI profiler Will Graham, who has a talent for imagining himself in the role of – and thus catching – serial killers. But Lecter is himself secretly a cannibalistic serial killer, and as well as considering himself far smarter than the police (who are far from catching him), also tries to tip Will over the edge into becoming a killer himself. Lecter is best known from Anthony Hopkins’ portrayal in the 1991 film adaptation of Thomas Harris’ 1988 novel Silence of the Lambs, in which another FBI agent visits the killer in prison to enlist his help catching another killer. The television series draws instead on the other novels in which he appears: Red Dragon (1981), Hannibal (1999) and Hannibal Rising (2006). The television series was widely acclaimed and ran for three seasons on NBC between 2013 and 2015.
  • “The Gernsback Continuum” is a 1981 short story written by William Gibson. In it, a photographer is tasked withtroversy as police acti taking pictureons of “futuristic” 1930s architecture. He begins to experience visions of the alternate future world imagined by the architects and the likes of Hugo Gernsback, the publisher who pioneered pulp science fiction in the 1920s when he created the magazine Amazing Stories. The story coined the term “Raygun Gothic” for the architectural style it describes; in the story, this name is given by Cohen Downes, an editor for the London-based publisher who hires the photographer. The story was adapted in 1993 as a short film, Tomorrow Calling, originally broadcast on Channel 4 television.
  • The meme “The World If” (aka “The World Without…”, “What Society Would Be If…” etc) depicts a futuristic, supposedly utopian cityscape, accompanied by text informing us this is what the world would be like, if only one thing were different. It dates back to 2018, with the earliest example referring to the jailing of rapper Bobby Shmurda, which drew controversy for a variety of reasons, including police acting on supposedly autobiographical rap lyrics, which supposedly listed his real crimes.
  • Upload (not Uploaded) is an Amazon Original streaming series created by Greg Daniels, best known for co-creating the US version of The Office and Parks and Recreation with Michael Shur. It’s set in 2033 in a future where humans can have their consciousness uploaded into a digital afterlife as they die. The protagonist, Nathan Brown (played by Robbie Amell), dies unexpectedly and is uploaded, but he’s not free of his even more possessive, still-living girlfriend, Ingrid (Allegra Edwards), which is one of the unfortunate tropes of the show. Meanwhile his “angel” Nora (Andy Allo) – the handler from the afterlife company who looks after him – starts to think his death was suspicious. It’s run for two seasons since 2020, with a third on the way.
  • Severance is an Apple TV+ streaming series created by first-time show runner Dan Erickson. It stars Adam Scott (also best known from Parks and Recreation) as Mark, an employee at Lumon Industries. Mark works on the “severed floor”, where he and the other workers have undergone a procedure which means they can’t access their memories of their regular lives while at work, and vice versa. Ben’s only seen the first episode so far but agrees with Sean that it’s great, though be aware it’s a thriller rather than a comedy.
  • The Usborne computer books were published in the 1980s for Usborne, a UK publisher of children’s educational books. They were phenomenally popular, not least because they were approachable introductions to everything from how computers worked to how to program them at a time when most computer books were full of jargon. As well as ghosts the books also featured monsters and robots. While the originals are hard to find in print, in 2015 Usborne made them available for download from their website. Ben is pretty sure he had The Usborne First Book of the Computer from 1984, which seems rarer than the others. This might be because as far as Ben can tell it was a compilation of content from the “First Computer Library” series: All About Computers, Computer Fun and Simple BASIC. (The last two of those appear at the bottom of the page linked above, and include the computer ghosts.)
  • Agent Smith is the primary antagonist of the Wachowskis’ 1999 film, The Matrix. A computer program tasked with rooting out rogue humans connecting to the Matrix, he and his fellow Agents appear as Men in Black, with sunglasses, black suits and an earpiece. There’s something a bit off about him in the first film; he returns in the sequels The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions as a virus-like threat both to the free humans of Zion and the machines themselves, as he gains the ability to rewrite other programs and human consciousnesses into copies of himself. We previously talked about Smith in #Pratchat48, “Lu-Tze in the Sky with Lobsang“.
  • We previously talked about La Traviata (“the fallen woman”) in #Pratchat23, “The Music of the Nitt“. It’s an 1853 opera written by Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi, with a libretto by Francesco Maria Piave based on the French 1848 novel and 1852 play La Dame aux camélias, known in English as Camille, by Alexandre Dumas fils (son of the famous one you’re thinking of). Liz reviewed Opera Australia’s 2022 production of La Traviata for The Age.
  • We mention a few films and television series about living people this episode:
    • The Social Network is a 2010 film directed by David Fincher and written by Aaron Sorkin, adapted from the 2009 non-fiction book The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich. It tells the – or at least a – story of the creation of Facebook by Mark Zuckerberg (played by Jesse Eisenberg) in 2003, and the legal problems he faced over ownership of the idea and original website. It’s a fictionalised account, and its accuracy has been disputed; Zuckerberg was also not happy about it, saying at the time that “I wish no-one had made a movie about me while I was still alive”. Historical accuracy aside, it’s pretty great, and also stars Andrew Garfield as Eduardo Saverin, co-creator of the original “The Facebook”, and features a killer soundtrack by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.
    • Rocketman is a 2019 Elton John biopic starring Taron Egerton as Elton John (though it was originally supposed to be Tom Hardy), and Jamie Bell as his writing partner Bernie Taupin. It was directed by Dexter Fletcher, who may be known to listeners from his role as a young man playing Spike in the UK series Press Gang. (Fletcher had previously stepped in to finish directing Bohemian Rhapsody, the 2018 Queen biopic centred on Freddie Mercury, after Bryan Singer was fired from the project.) In contrast to The Social Network, Elton John had been trying to make a film about his life for decades, and is an executive producer on this film. (Reaction to Bohemian Rhapsody was decidedly more mixed, particularly regarding its handling of Mercury’s sexuality and family, amongst other things.)
    • Pam & Tommy is a 2022 Hulu streaming miniseries about the three-year marriage between actor Pamela Anderson (played by Lily James) and Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee (played by Sebastian Stan), revolving mostly around the theft and public release of a sex tape they made on their honeymoon. It was based on a 2014 Rolling Stone article, “Pam and Tommy: The Untold Story of the World’s Most Infamous Sex Tape“. While some aspects of the production were praised, many critics pointed out that it is a story of the exploitation of Pamela Anderson without her consent – made without her consent. (She was apparently contacted to be involved in some way, but did not want to be part of it; some sources say its production caused her some distress.)
  • Biopics – whether about the living or dead – don’t legally require the permission of the subject because they are, at least in theory, based on the facts of someone’s life – and facts are not considered intellectual property. This is the same principle that allows for unauthorised biographies (many of which become the basis of biopics). Generally the only legal recourse if someone doesn’t like how they’re portrayed is to sue via libel or defamation laws, but those put the burden of proof and money on the person mounting the claim, so even wealthy subjects don’t often consider it worth trying.
  • The simulation hypothesis – the idea that we’re all simulated people in a hyper-realistic simulation of the world – has been around for a while. It was made popular by the release of The Matrix in 1999, and then again by Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom in 2003. In Bostrom’s version, the idea is that future humans will build computers so powerful that they will be able to run millions of incredibly detailed simulations of all of human history, including human minds as sophisticated as real ones. If that were to happen, then the vast majority of human-like minds to ever exist would be simulated ones, and so it’s plausible to suggest that’s what we are – artificial minds in a computer simulation of the world.
  • Ben’s Virtual Reality game is Table of Tales: The Crooked Crown by Tin Man Games. In the game, the player is bequeathed the magical “Table of Tales” by a deceased aunt, and it comes to life. A mechanical bird, Arbitrix, is the Table’s Game Master, and helps the player take control of a group of “scoundrels” who are at first dubbed heroes, then years later framed for a crime they didn’t commit, and must go on a high seas fantasy adventure to find out who’s behind it. It plays like a single-player tabletop roleplaying game, with cards and dice for powers, direct manipulation of the pieces, and a branching narrative with multiple possible endings. The game was originally released exclusively for PlayStation VR in 2019, and was a finalist for the “Excellence in Narrative” category at the 2019 Freeplay Awards. In the last year or so it’s been released on other platforms too: PC via Steam in 2021, and in July 2022, Nintendo Switch and the Meta Quest 2 standalone VR headset. The PlayStation VR and Quest versions are VR-only; the Switch version doesn’t support VR; and the Steam version can be played either way.
  • The other Dungeons & Dragons-like VR games Ben mentions are:
    • Demeo (Resolution Games, 2021) – a multiplayer VR game similar in many ways to Table of Tales – so much so that it’s frequently mentioned in Table of Tales reviews! It’s available on Steam, Steam VR, Meta Quest and Meta Rift.
    • TaleSpire (Bouncyrock Entertainment) – not actually VR, and not a game in itself… TaleSpire is a virtual 3D environment for use with tabletop roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons, letting you build and share a virtual map and miniatures with other players. As of writing (July 2022) it’s still in Early Access on Steam, meaning you can buy it early to access a working but incomplete version as its being finished.
  • Wii Fit (2008) was Nintendo’s fitness game for their popular Wii game console. As well as the “Wii-mote” motion controllers, it used a custom “balance board” that ould measure the player’s centre of balance and weight, using this to assess fitness based on the (often criticised) Body-Mass Index, or BMI. Fitness activities available in the game included yoga, aerobics and other exercises, and it was a huge hit for Nintendo. Combined with Wii Fit Plus, the updated version released in 2009, it’s estimated to have sold nearly 44,000,000 copies worldwide, putting it just outside the top ten biggest-selling console games of all time.
  • Zero Latency is a free-roam VR experience company which started up in Melbourne in 2015. The “free roam” part means that players are free to move around a play area, with their movement relative to the game world and each other tracked by cameras. This is in sharp contrast to most VR games, especially headsets available for use at home, where the player remains mostly stationary while the game world moves around them. Since its launch its grown considerably, with nine locations in Australia and nearly fifty more in twenty-five other countries around the world. While most of their games are in the first-person shooter style, and the game Ben remembers is no longer on offer, they do have Engineerium, a puzzle game which sounds like it’s in a similar vein.
  • Liz’s phrase “Too much time down at the Jasmine Allen” is a reference to the perpetually crime-ridden Jasmine Allen housing estate in long-running UK police drama The Bill.
  • Terry’s poem “An Ode to Multiple Universes” was first published in the October-November 2005 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. The book in which it was collected is untitled but generally known as Terry Pratchett’s Folio or the MMXIV Green Folio, and was published for the 2014 Discworld Convention, where copies were given to attendees with a special bookmark labelling it a present from Terry. Fifty copies made it to the Australian Discworld Convention in 2015, and a few more were sold via discworld.com with proceeds going to charity.
  • Of Sean’s more than fifty novels, he suggests Pratchett fans might enjoy Her Perilous Mansion, his standalone middle grade fantasy novel first published in April 2020. The “sidequel” coming later this year (2022) is Honour Among Ghosts.

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

#Pratchat84 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 84, “Eight Days an Opening”, discussing the compilations of Terry Pratchett’s and Stephen Briggs’ diaries, 2019’s The Ankh-Morpork Archives Volume I, 2020’s The Ankh-Morpork Archives Volume II, plus his 2004 collaboration with Bernard Pearson, The Discworld Almanak.

Iconographic Evidence

Bojack Horseman, the animated sitcom about a fading TV star in a world shared by humans and anthropormorphic animals, has done the generic song gag several times – not just for the 1990s, but for the 1980s and specifically 2007 as well.

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title plays on the Beatles song “Eight Days a Week”, and one standard way to describe diary layouts: the more standard “seven days to an opening” means that a two-page spread shows all seven days of the week. Other standard layouts include one, two or five days to an opening (for business diaries that don’t include weekends).
  • The Ankh-Morpork Archives, Volume I was first published on 14th November, 2019, and collects material from the following diaries:
    • Discworld’s Unseen University Diary 1998
    • Discworld Assassins’ Guild Yearbook and Diary 2000
    • Discworld Thieves’ Guild Yearbook and Diary 2002
    • Ankh-Morpork Post Office Handbook Diary 2007
  • The Celebrated Discworld Almanak (usually just referred to as The Discworld Almanak) was published in October 2004.
  • The Ankh-Mopork Archives, Volume II was first published on 15th September, 2020, and collects material from the following diaries:
    • Discworld’s Ankh-Morpork City Watch Diary 1999
    • Discworld Fools’ Guild Yearbook and Diary 2001
    • Discworld (Reformed) Vampyre’s Diary 2003
    • Lu-Tze’s Yearbook of Enlightenment 2008
  • The 1995 Australian Fannish Diary (not 1996) was created by Kerri Valkova & Ian Gunn. While Ben mis-remembered the year it was produced, he did use its note section to write down what Douglas Adams was saying during his appearance at the Somerset Celebration of Literature, also in 1995, not 1996.

More notes coming soon!

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

#Pratchat84 – Eight Days an Opening

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Liz and Ben delve deep into the archives and come back with some highlights from the collected Discworld Diaries from Terry Pratchett and Stephen Briggs’ The Ankh-Morpork Archives Volumes I (2019) and II (2020), plus Terry’s 2004 collaboration with Bernard Pearson, The Discworld Alamak.

Between 1998 and 2003, Discworld fans got an extra little treat: an in-universe diary themed around one of the Guilds or other major institutions of the Disc, full of new Discworld history and gags penned by Pratchett with the assistance of Stephen Briggs, and illustrations by Paul Kidby. In 2004, they got something a little different: a Roundworld version of the Celebrated Discworld Almanak, a publication famed for its wisdom, length and absorbency, co-authored by Pratchett and Bernard Pearson. After a brief break, two more diaries with new gags and Discworld lore appeared in 2007 and 2008, but any subsequent diaries or journals were just compilations of quotes and existing material. Like all diaries, these were smaller print runs and never reprinted, so for most fans these extra tidbits were lost to time.

But then, in 2019 and 2020, Stephen Briggs and Paul Kidby brought all that weirdness back in two new books: The Ankh-Morpork Archives Volume I, and Volume II, each collecting the original content from four of those diaries and presenting them in a coffee-table style larger format, with new layout, updated or new art, and all the charm of the originals.

Did you ever have one of the diaries? Did you write in it? What do you think of the new presentation of all these gags? Do the more unusual diaries have the same charm, or does it feel a bit like the best themes had already been used? And if you were to see new books based on any of this stuff, what would you want to see? Note your answer in your diary, then send it to us using the hashtag #Pratchat84.

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You can find episode notes and errata on our web site.

Next month we knock off one of our few remaining Discworld novels: Sam Vimes’ detective’s holiday in the country, Snuff! Get your questions in via email (chat@pratchatpodcast.com), or social media using the hashtag #Pratchat86. (Our numbering got a bit messed up due to the delay of this episode, but trust us: the next one is 86!)

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.

#Pratchat85 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 85, “AT LAST, SIR TERRY”, discussing Terry Pratchett’s 2010 Richard Dimbleby Lecture, “Shaking Hands with Death”, with guest Myfanwy Coghill.

Iconographic Evidence

The full televised speech, as mostly read by Tony Robinson, is currently available on YouTube.

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title is taken from the first line of the tweets sent out by Rob Wilkins and Rhianna Pratchett to publicly announce Pratchett’s death, which is still (as of March 2025) available:
  • Myf last appeared as a guest for #Pratchat23, “The Music of the Nitt”, discussing Maskerade, in September 2019.
  • Avocation comes from the same Latin root as vocation, but rather than meaning “called to”, it means “called away”. It is used these days to refer to something which is not someone’s main occupation, but their true passion outside of work.
  • Mortuary work refers to work done on the body of a deceased person, including embalming and other forms of preservation or restoration to make the body suitable for viewing.
  • The 10th anniversary of Terry Pratchett’s death will be on the 12th of March, 2025. In the first published version of this episode, Ben incorrectly gives the date of his death as the 15th of March in a footnote; it turns out there’s a mistake in the proof copy of the official biography, A Life With Footnotes*, which he used to double check! (It might be a deliberate mistake, to help detect piracy – in the vein of trap-streets in street directories.) A corrected episode should be out by the time you read this, but apologies if you got the incorrect version.
  • Pratchett’s documentary about assisted dying was Terry Pratchett: Choosing to Die, produced in 2011 for BBC Scotland. It was broadcast in the UK on the 13 June 2011, and had its American premiere at the 2011 North American Discworld Convention in Madison, Wisconsin (yes, that Madison). The film won several television awards, including a Scottish BAFTA, a Royal Television Society award, and an Emmy for Best Documentary.
  • We’ve so far been unable to determine if “Shaking Hands with Death” or any of Pratchett’s documentaries were broadcast in Australia, though we have heard anecdotally that a couple of the BBC ones were. If you know, please let us know!
  • “Space Pilot 3000”, the first episode of Futurama which features a suicide booth, was first broadcast on 28 March, 1999 on Fox. The show follows Fry, a pizza delivery boy who is accidentally frozen in suspended animation for a thousand years on New Year’s Eve, 1999, and wakes in the year 3000, heavily inspired by retro-futuristic cartoons. Matt Groening says the inspiration for the suicide booth was a Donald Duck cartoon from 1937, Modern Inventions, in which Donald is nearly killed by a variety of devices in a “Museum of the Future”. They appear in a further ten Futurama episodes (and telemovies), an in-universe appear to have been around for a very long time – since at least 2008! In fiction, there are examples of similar devices dating back to the 1890s, including the 1895 short story “The Repairer of Reputations” by Robert W. Chambers. In his speech, Pratchett refers to Martin Amis’ facetious mention of suicide booths in a 2010 interview with The Times (no longer available online), in which an elderly user would also be given “a martini and a medal”. Neither side of the euthenasia were particularly pleased, but as Prachett points out, it did get people talking.
  • “That dog episode” of Futurama is “Jurassic Bark”, from the show’s fifth season, first broadcast on 17 November, 2002. In the episode, protagonist Fry finds that archaeologists have discovered the pizza parlour where he used to work as a delivery boy one thousand years earlier – including the remains of Fry’s now fossilised dog. Along with other artefacts is a fossilised dog – Fry’s own dog, Seymour, who Fry decides to clone, Jurassic Park style. It’s generally regarded as one of the best episodes of the show, and was nominated for an Emmy.
  • David Harewood OBE gave the 2023 Richard Dimbleby Lecture at the Battersea Arts Centre. It was titled “75th anniversary of the Empire Windrush arriving in this country”. The HMT Empire Windrush was originally the MV Monte Rosa, a German passenger ship seized by the British after World War II. In 1948, the Empire Windrush brought more than one thousand passengers, most of them West Indian, to England, a voyage that became a famous symbol of post-war migration to the United Kingdom. This group of migrants are sometimes referred to as the “Windrush generation”, and among them were members of Harewood’s own family.
  • The Reith Lectures are a similar lecture series broadcast annually on BBC Radio, and which are also available as a podcast; you can find an archive of the lectures at the BBC. The lecture Myf mentions was given by forensic psychotherapist Gwen Adshead in 2024, and is titled “Four Questions About Violence”.
  • Rob Wilkins was indeed a “Stunt Pratchett” during a talk at the Sydney Opera House, but that was on 17 April, 2011 – more than a year after the Richard Dimbleby Lecture. So its understandable he may have been nervous about doing it for the first time for national television! We’ve previously mentioned this event in #Pratchat51, “Boffoing the Winter Slayer”, as the event was chaired by that episode’s guest, Garth Nix! You can still find it as a 2013 episode of the Ideas at the House podcast, currently available on Acast: “Terry Pratchett in Conversation with Garth Nix”.
  • Tony Robinson produced the documentary Tony Robinson: Me and My Mum in 2006, as part of Channel 4’s series The Trouble with Old People. It covered his difficulties in finding a care home for his mother, who also suffered from Alzheimer’s Disease, and includes her life and death in the home. Robinson is still an ambassador for the Alzheimer’s Society; last year he featured the Society’s Director of Research and Innovation, Fiona Carragher, on an episode of his podcast Cunningcast. The episode is titled “DEMENTIA Action Week: A Defining Year”, and was released on 16 May 2024.
  • The BBC Big Read was a survey conducted in 2003, with more than 750,000 responses. Pratchett’s entries in the final list of one hundred were, in order: Mort (#65); Good Omens (#68); Guards! Guards! (#69); Night Watch (#73); and The Colour of Magic (#93).
  • The line “I never saved anything for the swim back” is from the science fiction film Gattaca (1997, dir. Andrew Niccol), starring Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman. We won’t say too much, since the line comes fairly close to the end, but it still holds up and is worth a watch.
  • Death’s scene with the swan is in Maskerade, as is the scene where Granny Weatherwax plays cards with Death for the life of a newborn baby. After Death lets her win, she notices he has a shoulder injury and pops his arm back into place for him. As he’s leaving, Death asks her what she would have done if she’d lost. Granny replies with a smile: ‘Well, for a start … I’d have broken your bloody arm.’
  • The Pitt is a 2025 American medical drama on HBO’s Max streaming service. It’s set in the emergency department of a fictional hospital in Pittsburgh. The show’s first season covers one 15-hour shift in the ED, which is nicknamed “The Pitt”. It stars Noah Wyle (best known for playing another doctor in ER) as a senior attending physician, alongside a cast of younger doctors, including students, interns and residents.
  • Carl Jung (1875-1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist and philosopher probably best known for his idea of the “collective unconscious” – that humans have in common a set of instincts (basic desires) and archetypes (universal symbols). Despite much criticism and evolution of thought in psychology, Jung’s theories remain very popular.
  • Rumpelstiltskin is the German version of a folk tale collected by the Brothers Grimm in 1812. Similar stories appear in many cultures; it’s known in the Aarne–Thompson–Uther Index as type ATU 500, “The Name of the Supernatural Helper”. The titular character, usually described as an imp, is not summoned by anything in particular except desperation on the part of the heroine, who has been given the impossible task of spinning straw into gold, as her father boasted she could. If she does not, she will be killed. Rumpelstiltskin completes the task but in return asks for her first born child. Some years later, the women has married the prince and become Queen, and the imp returns for his payment when the child is born. When she protests, he gives her a chance: he will give up the child if she can guess his name, but she has only three days to work it out. His own pride is eventually his undoing, since the King eventually discovers his name by coming across his house in the woods, and secretly watching him as he dances and sings a song to himself about how she will never guess his name is Rumpelstiltskin. Therea re many variations, including some from Nordic countries, and the British Isles, some explicitly making the Rumpelstiltskin character a demon of some kind.
  • The Reddit carbon monoxide leak story is from 2015, posted on r/legaladvice as “[MA] Post-it notes left in apartment.” In 2018 the story was made into an episode of the podcast The Endless Thread, “Something Wicked”.
  • Dignity in Dying is a UK not-for-profit, membership supported campaigning organisation originally formed in 1935 as the Voluntary Euthanasia Legalisation Society. They also have a sister organisation, Compassion in Dying, formed in 2008. Compassion in Dying do not campaign for changes in the law, but are a registered charity that helps individuals to talk about and make decisions related to their own deaths, including legal and administrative assistance for things like living wills, Do Not Resusciatate orders and giving power of attorney to trusted loved ones.
  • Thomas Tallis (1505 – 1585) was a 16th-century English composer primarily of choral music. In 1575, Queen Elizabeth gave Tallis and his later contemporary William Byrd an exclusive letters patent for printing music and music paper in England, which made sure his music was perfomed across the British Isles and preserved into the modern day. Most of his works are religious, and the best known include Lamentations of Jeremiah, Miserere nostri, and Spem in alium.
  • Unity LeJean is an Auditor in Thief of Time who so well creates a human body that she develops human thoughts and sensibilities. We discussed Unity’s life and death in #Pratchat48, “Lu-Tze in the Sky with Lobsang”.
  • While we have not been able to find any documented cases of people being coerced into assisting dying, it is notable that reasons like “perceived burden on family, friends or caregivers”, “isolation or loneliness” and financial issues are often cited as reasons by those accessing assisted dying in Canada and Oregon. Meanwhile in the UK, according to the Crown Prosecution Service, 187 assisted suicide cases were referred to them by police between April 2009 and March 2024. Only 24 of those proceded without being withdrawn, mostly because they failed the test of being in the public interest. Of those, eight became cases of other crimes, including homicide; one resulted in acquittal; four were successfully prosecuted; and six are still ongoing. They don’t say what happened to the other five, but we infer that most of those with were withdrawn by police or with which the CPS didn’t proceed failed a public interest test, which maybe suggests they are the sort of thing that would be legalised under assisted dying laws.
  • “The Appointment in Samarra” is an ancient Mesopotamian tale which dates back to the Babylonian Talmud. The best-known modern version derives from Sheppey, the last play written by English writer W. Somerset Maugham, in 1933. Towards the end of the play, the title character – an Irishman who has won the lottery, but decides to spent the winnings on charity – is visited by Death. When he muses that he should have bought a new home on the Isle of Sheppey, as he considered earlier in the play, death gives a brief monologue recounting the story of the Appointment in Samarra. It is definitely worth a google, though you may find the top result is the 1934 novel Appointment in Samarra by American writer John O’Hara, who included Somerset Maugham’s version in his book after he was shown it Dorothy Parker and was inspired to change the title of the novel.
  • The Google search engine was launched in 1998, the first search engine to use back-link data to algorithmically rank pages by importance in search results. Exactly when it became the most popular search engine is hard to guage, but the phrase “to google” meaning “to search on the Internet” had entered popular usage by 2002, so Google was certainly firmly entrenched by 2010.
  • Assisted dying laws in Australia are state legislation, like most other medical law. Ben isn’t quite correct; every state has an active assisted dying law, but the two Australian territories do not (yet). The laws have many similar restrictions, and are seen as quite strict compared to legislation in other countries: patients must be legal adults, have a terminal illness with a life expectany of twelve months or less, and be in severe pain. There are also administrative barriers in terms of how and when a patient can make the request. The laws differ in many other ways, including who is allowed to give life-ending medication, how doctors must behave if they object to such a treatment, and who is allowed to suggest voluntary assisted dying (complicated further by federal laws prohibiting the discussion of suicide over carriage services, which includes telehealth). As of March 2025, the situation in each state is:
    • The Northern Territory previously had the Rights of the Terminally Ill Act 1995, making it the first jurisdiction in Australia to legalise assisted dying. The conservative federal government of the time disagreed with the law, and introduced the Euthanasia Laws Act 1997, which made it illegal for territories to pass laws permitting assisted dying. This was repealed by the the Restoring Territory Rights Act 2022. A panel reported findings on possible new legislation for the Northern Territory in 2024, but no new law has yet been proposed.
    • Victoria was the first state to pass assisted dying legislation, with the Voluntary Assisted Dying Act 2017. It came into effect on 19 June 2019. Amendments to the bill to get it passed also increased funding for palliative care in regional areas. It served as a model for legislation in most of the other states.
    • Western Australia has the Voluntary Assisted Dying Act 2019, which came into effect on 1 July 2021.
    • Tasmania has the End-of-Life Choices (Voluntary Assisted Dying) Act 2021, which came into effect on 23 October 2022.
    • Queensland has the Voluntary Assisted Dying Act 2021, active since 1 January 2023.
    • South Australia has the Voluntary Assisted Dying Act 2021, active since 31 January 2023.
    • New South Wales has the Voluntary Assisted Dying Act 2022, which came into effect on 28 November 2023.
    • The Australian Capital Territory passed the Voluntary Assisted Dying Act 2024 on 5 June 2024, which comes into effect on 3 November 2025.
  • When Ben mentions that the government has introduced and then taken away support for those with disabilities, he’s referring to changes to the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), first introduced by the Gillard government near the end of their time in office, in 2013. This is a government scheme that supports those under the age of 65 with permanent disabilities, including medical costs, equipment and services. Successive conservative governments did not do the scheme any favours, capping the number of staff at its Agency well below projected need, and making changes to its leadership. In 2024 major reforms were passed in legislation by the Albanese Labor government, but while these were supposedly based on recommendations from an independent review of the scheme, they were criticised for effectively removing support from many disabled Australians, who are already underserved by the scheme.
  • The Victorian death pyramid – more properly known as the “Metropolitan Sepulchre” – was a pyramid-shaped necropolis proposed by the architect Thomas Willson in 1829. It was meant to address the shortage of burial space in London, and would have been built in Primrose Hill. The design was “nearly four times the height of St Paul’s” (about 90 stories), with external stairs and an obervatory at the top; it has a potential capacity of five million corpses. Even at the time, it was considered “extraordinary” and “absurd”. Surprisingly, and to Ben’s disappointment, 99% Invisible don’t appear to have done an episode (or even a mini-story) about this.
  • The infant mortality rate in Victorian London was very high, especially compared to the overall death rate, which had otherwise declined. Some sources place the infant mortality rate at over 300 in 1,000 births in 1800. One pamphlet from 1862 noted that in 1859, two in every five deaths was of an infant aged five or under, and half of those – one in five deaths – was of babies under a year in age. These observations led to activism around child health and safety, and reforms and initiatives including bottle feeding of babies.
  • Liz has previously mentioned the Melbourne General Cemetery in #Pratchat57West5, “Daniel Superbaboon” and #Pratchat34, “Only You Can Save Deadkind”; the latter episode is no longer available.

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

#Pratchat83 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 83, “This Time for Ankh-Morpork”, discussing Terry Pratchett’s 37th Discworld novel, Unseen Academicals, with guests Dr Tansy Rayner Roberts PhD (Classics).

Iconographic Evidence

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title plays on the official song of the 2010 World Cup, Shakira’s “Waka Waka (This Time for Africa)”. The song also features South African band Freshlyground, and was a big hit in both Europe and Africa. But it wasn’t without controversy: there were claims of plagiarism, though these were dismissed by the supposed victims, and some criticism of having a Colombian artist perform the song for the first (and so far only) World Cup held in Africa.
  • Tansy was previously a guest for both of our live shows: “A Troll New World” from June 2019, and “Unalive from Überwald” from August 2024. Fun fact: you add both of those episodes together, they’re still shorter than this one! (But they’re both around an hour and a half long.)
  • “Likely lad” has a couple of meanings, but the most common is derived from Geordie slang, meaning “likely to succeed”. It seems to have originated from boxing, but has expanded to mean someone with potential. In some places, it’s also used to mean “likely to cause trouble”. The phrase was popularised by the BBC sitcom The Likely Lads in the 1960s. This featured the misadventures of two young men in the Northeast of England, Bob and Terry, who like football, beer and girls.
  • The new faculty member Ben couldn’t remember was the Professor of Recondite Phenomena. “Recondite” means obscure, or hidden, leading Ben to wonder if this is really a new character, or just a new and broader title for the Reader in Invisible Writings… But the Reader in Invisible Writings is Ponder Stibbons, who is present in the same scene, referred to by one of his more recently acquired titles, the Master of Traditions. So no; a new character, it would seem.
  • We have confirmed that there have been multiple Megapodes that attend Discworld conventions, carried by various fans. We’re currently hoping to contact the Australian fan we met doing it to find out more about her Megapode! We think it was either a custom job or a repurposed generic weird bird toy. We’ll let you know the score when we do!
  • Hunting the Megapode is almost certainly inspired by the “Mallard Song” (not to be confused with the Duck Song, or indeed the separate English folk song “The Mallard”) of Oxford’s All Souls College. All Souls is made up only of Fellows – there are no student members of the College, and recent graduates (usually in law or history) can apply to join via an examination and interview. The Mallard Song is the College’s official song, and it’s sung every year at the Bursar’s dinner, complete with a refrain of “Ho, the Bloud”. More importantly for this book, it’s also sung once a century during a ceremony that recreates a moment from the building of the college, when supposedly a large mallard flew out of the foundations. The last ceremony was in 2001, so unfortunately most of us won’t be around for the next one. But you can read the original lyrics of the song, and learn more about the ceremony – which includes carrying around a “Lord Mallard” in a sedan chair, following a wooden duck on a pole – at this 2018 blog post from The History Girls.
  • The University tradition of the Ceremony of the Keys appears near the start of The Last Continent, where it’s revealed that it happens around 2 AM every morning when a group of three bledlows present the Archchancellor’s Keys to the bledlow on gate duty. The whole business is very clearly a pisstake of the Ceremony of the Keys at the Tower of London, which also happens every evening. We found this whole playlist on YouTube of the Ceremony over the years. It’s said to date back to the 14th century, though it’s current form is probably no more than a couple of centuries old.
  • We’ve previous discussed Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, aka P G Wodehouse (1881 – 1975), in #Pratchat45, “Hogswatch in Grune”. An English author best known for his humorous novels, especially Jeeves and Wooster, his name should actually be pronounced “Woodhouse”. He came to a bit of an ignominious end, effectively exiled from the UK, but his work is still seen as quintessentially British comedy. Wodehouse is very definitely one of Pratchett’s influences; both biographies mention him reading Wodehouse’s work at an early age, especially in the pages of Punch magazine.
  • Brazeneck College is first mentioned during a faculty meeting at the start of The Science of Discworld III (see #Pratchat59, “Charlie and the Whale Factory”), published in May 2005. There it’s spelled “Braseneck”, but as it’s Unseen University’s rival in the building of Very Big Things, seems clearly to be a school of magic of some sort; it’s location is not mentioned. It becomes Brazeneck in it’s very next appearance, “A Collegiate Casting-Out of Devlish Devices” (see #Pratchat63, “Decline by Committee”), published almost at the same time as The Science of Discworld III. In this short story, it’s held up as an example against which UU is being measured by A. E. Pessimal. Brazeneck College publishes papers, and attracts many new students, which is said to be “to the benefit of the city”. Many readers have assumed this means Brazeneck College is based in Ankh-Morpork, but we feel bound to mention that the text does not say which city. Pessimal could be arguing that UU needs to be a benefit to Ankh-Morpork in the same way Brazeneck is to its home town. In Unseen Academicals, Brazeneck is referred to as both a College and a University, and is explicitly located in Psuedopolis. It isn’t mentioned by name again; in The Science of Discworld IV (see #Pratchat71, “It Belongs in a University”) the Dean is said to be Archchancellor at Pseudopolis University, perhaps implying that Brazeneck College has changed names, or is now part of a bigger institution.
  • As mentioned, Ponder Stibbons is introduced as a student wizard in Moving Pictures, which you can hear more about in #Pratchat10, “We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Broomstick”. His fear of exams there is somewhat at odds with his later presentation as an all-round genius.
  • Ponder’s memory of his first magic comes when Ridcully organises the first football game amongst the wizards and has two captains pick teams. The “fat kid” was off limits since his father owned a sweet shop, leaving Ponder the bullies’ main target: ‘which meant a chronic hell for Ponder until that wonderful day when sparks came out of Ponder’s fingers and Martin Sogger’s pants caught fire. He could smell them now. Best days of your life be buggered’.
  • British comedy in the 70s and 80s frequently featured sketches and gags about football. The most famous example is probably Monty Python’s “Philosophy Football” sketch, in which Ancient Greek philosophers play German ones. But Ben was most influenced by The Goodies. The 1975 episode “Wacky Wales” featured a Welsh minister (played by Jon Pertwee!) who turns out to be leading a coven of rugby-worshipping druids, resulting in an “ecclesiastical rugby sevens” tournament. But the big one for association football was the 1982 episode “Football Crazy” from their final season, in which the Goodies try to solve the problem of violence at football matches by first changing the game to make it less sexy, and then banning spectators, leading football fans to turn their attention to ballet instead. While the concepts of the jokes hold up well, we won’t link a clip here, mostly because they use the kind of homophobic language common for football hooligan taunts of the time. (And thankfully less common now.)
  • Fast & Furious is a long-running franchise of action films, beginning with The Fast and the Furious (2001; dir. Rob Cohen), about a tightly-knit crew of street racers and thieves who carry out their crimes in high-speed cars. In the first film, the Toretto family are hunted by the police; by the end of the film the undercover officer investigating them is well on the way to becoming part of the family. As Liz mentions, the cops never do anything to stop the street racing in the films, though they do turn up at the end of a race or two. As of this episode (January 2025), there have been ten films in the main series, a spin-off film, an animated TV series, and still more in the works. Each film has pushed the franchise more into fantasy: by the sixth film (Fast & Furious 6, 2013, dir Justin Lin) the street racing crew are being offered an amnesty to work with the police to take on mercenaries; in the seventh (Furious 7, 2015, dir. James Wan), they’re recruited by secret agents to take on terrorists. The spin-off Hobbs & Shaw (2019, dir. David Leitch) is a buddy cop film about a cop and mercenary from the series teaming up to take on a “cyber-genetically enhanced” terrorist threatening the world with a “programmable supervirus”. You get the gist.
  • Fever Pitch is Nick Hornby’s second book, first published in 1992, and now a Penguin Modern Classic. The memoir is split into chapters, each of which relates the experience of watching an Arsenal game and how it connected to Hornby’s life at the time, especially his romantic relationships, and his relationship with his Dad. It’s been fictionalised and turned into a romantic comedy film twice: 1997’s Fever Pitch starred Colin Firth and Ruth Gemmell, with a screenplay by Hornby. A 2005 American version, directed by the Farrelly Brothers, changed the story to be about baseball, and starred Jimmy Fallon and Drew Barrymore. This version was retitled The Perfect Catch outside America.
  • Tansy mentions two sport-based comics by American comic artist and writer Ngozi Ukazu. Her webcomic Check, Please! ran from 2017 to 2020, and tells the story of a young queer figure skater who joins his college’s ice hockey team. It’s still available online, and has also been collected into two print volumes. The new graphic novel Bunt: Striking Out on Financial Aid, published in 2024, is the story of an arts college freshman who learns her scholarship is no longer valid – but if she can field a softball team and win at least one game, then all nine players will get an athletic scholarship. Classic stuff! Ukazu also published her first work for DC Comics in 2024: Barda, about the warrior Big Barda, raised on the hell-like world of Apokolips, ruled by one of the biggest villains in the entire DC Universe. It’s all about her finding love in adversity, and also sounds like a great read.
  • We’ve talked about Pratchett’s addiction to fat jokes many times, but our deepest discussion is in our Maskerade episode, #Pratchat23, “The Music of the Nitt”, where we talk about Agnes with guest Myfanwy Coghill.
  • The acronym WAGs – “Wives and Girlfriends”, or “Wife and/or Girlfriend” in the singular – was popularised with the British tabloid press in the 1990s. They were then writing so much sexist drivel about the female partners of footballers – mostly those who were already celebrities in their own right – that they needed a shorthand. It really took off in the early 2000s with coverage of Victoria Beckham (more on her in a moment) and then Cheryl Cole, a singer with British pop group Girls Aloud who married footballer Ashley Cole in 2006. The term persisted into the mid 2010s, and spawned television series like the ITV drama Footballer’s Wives (2002-2006) and reality TV shows like WAGs Boutique (2007) and the Australian WAG Nation (2012). Despite being flagged as sexist by the Equalities and Rights Commission in 2010, it still pops up from time to time. A number of related acronyms have also been created; the best one is “Celebritity’s Husbands and Partners”, or CHAPs.
  • In 2023, country-pop crossover megastar Taylor Swift started dating Travis Kelce, a pro American Football player who’s been a “tight end” with the Kansas City Chiefs team since 2013. (”Tight end” is an offensive playing position – i.e. one that helps score. The innuendo would make Pepe proud.) Their relationship was highly publicised, but in a turnaround for this sort of interaction it was clear far more people knew who Swift was than Kelce. Taylor Swift fans began to take an interest in the game and the team, helping it to break all kinds of ticketing and merch records, but also sparking stupid social media exchanges complaining about the football coverage including shots of her in the stands. As of January 2025 they’re still together, and the two fandoms seem to have settled down – not that the Swift fans ever seemed bothered about her going to games, except for the fact that she would use a private jet to get to them while on her international Eras tour.
  • Posh and Becks is the nickname given to celebrity power-couple David and Victoria Beckham. Victoria “Posh” Beckham, née Adams, found fame when she was cast in the Spice Girls as “Posh Spice” in 1994. In 1997 she married David Beckham, then a star player for Manchester United. The tabloids went crazy for them. They remain celebrities; Posh has a solo musical career, reunited with the Spice Girls, worked as a model, and started her own fashion and beauty brands, though those have not been financially successful. Becks moved on from the Premier League to the World Cup, playing for Real Madrid, and then LA Galaxy for the American Major League, before retiring from the sport in 2013.
  • The Shove doesn’t have a modern Roundworld equivalent, but it is very similar to the way crowds would gather in the “mob football” played in medieval times. (Indeed the Audible audio drama adaptation of Unseen Academicals renames “foot the ball” to “mob ball”; more about that below.) Mob or medieval football seems to have had few rules and often didn’t involve kicking; but not much detail of the game (or games; there would have been many local versions) survives for us to know how it was played.
  • In modern times, the closest thing to the violence of the Shove have been the disastrous “crowd crushes” at football matches (and other gatherings) where fans are shoved against the barriers of the pitch, resulting in multiple injuries and deaths. The worst crush in British football was the Hillborough disaster in 1989, where 94 people died on the day and three more in the days and years after from injuries sustained in the crush. It resurfaced in 2016 when a second inquiry found that both the design of the stadium, and the negligence of police and ambulance officers, were responsible for the disaster, not the fans themselves. This resulted in charges against six people in 2017, though charges against one of them was dropped.
  • Elle McPherson is an Australian model and actress best known for magazine covers in the 1980s and 1990s – she holds the record for the most appearances on Sports Illustrated’s annual swimsuit issue. In recent years she’s come under fire for her non-scientific views about medicine, especially after she recovered from breast cancer. She also dated notorious anti-vaccine activist and medical fraud Andrew Wakefield from 2017-2019. Appropriately for this episode, she also has a football connection (though the wrong kind of football): her father, Peter Gow, was a longtime President of Ben’s hometown rugby team, the Cronulla Sharks.
  • There are eleven foot-the-ball “sides” named in the book. The main ones we mention by name in the episode are Unseen Academicals, Ankh-Morpork United, Dimwell Old Pals and Dolly Sisters Football Club. The others are mostly named after locations in Ankh-Morpork: The Angels, Treacle Mine Tuesday (aka the Miners), the Cockbill Boars, Pigsty Hill Pork Packers, Naphill United, Whopping Street Wanderers (aka the Whoppers) and Lobbin Clout.
  • When discussing the team colours, we mix up the teams: Trev supports Dimwell Old Pals, who wear pink and green. Dolly Sisters wear black and white, so Ben was pretty close with blue and white.
  • We’ve been unable to find any examples of Dimwell hats (again, not Dolly Sisters), or other Discworld football memorabilia (aside from a set of football cards created to publicise the book, the text from which is collected in A Blink of the Screen.) Certainly it doesn’t seem there’s been any official apparel, so if you know of any fan-made scarves or hats etc, please let us know!
  • While a human named Igor works in Biers (as seen in various books, but especially Feet of Clay and Hogfather), the first proper Igor appeared in Carpe Jugulum, working for Count Magpyr. There have since been many throughout the later Discworld novels.
  • Liz mentions midi-chlorians in response to Ben’s suggestion that Mr. Nutt’s “Little Brother” might be microbes in his bloodstream. We’ve previously talked about them twice, way back in #Pratchat18, “Sundog Gazillionaire” and #PratchatNA7, “A Troll New World” (Tansy’s first appearance). In brief, they’re microscopic organisms introduced in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menance to provide a scientific explanation for why some Star Wars characters are stronger in the Force than others. Despite being an idea George Lucas had during the development of the original film, this more clinical reason for the Force was not popular with fans.
  • Ben notes a couple of other fantasy and sci-fi species with fantastic powers of recuperation. In Star Trek it’s established that Klingons have multiple redundancies built-in, including extra and more complicated organs, so they can survive grievous injuries. In the “grim dark future” of the Warhammer 40,000 universe, orks aren’t actually fungus themselves, but their symbiotic relationship with a species of fungus means that they feel little pain, and can regenerate from all but the most brutal injuries, requiring only fairly rudimentary surgical assistance. Warhammer Fantasy orcs, on the other hand, are pretty much the standard evil monsters of Tolkien-style high fantasy. (We’ve previously mentioned Warhammer 40,000 in #Pratchat57, “Get Your Dad to Mars!”)
  • The idea that under capitalism, the police serve as “protectors of capital”, is a simple overview of a more complex critique. While there are instances where this might be literally true, in most cases what it means is that the police force as an institution protects the interests of the capitalist class, not the workers. This includes not just capitalists and their property, but also the social relationships and structures that benefit capitalism – thus it is police who arrest protesters, but other bodies that shut down corrupt businesses.
  • We skip over this in the episode, but when Glenda discovers someone has eaten lots of her pies, she asks Trev “Who ate all the pies?” This is a reference to a popular (though body-shaming and fatphobic) British football chant thrown at players considered to have put on weight or otherwise be out of shape. There’s a spurious claim that the chant dates all the way back to the 1890s, but it’s most likely a more recent invention; it was certainly at the height of popularity in the 80s and 90s, when it was used against players like Paul Gascoigne and the phrase “who ate all the pies?” made its way into popular culture, even outside of the UK. The chant is usually sung to the tune of “Knees Up Mother Brown” (written in 1918), and the reworked lyrics include a refrain of “you fat bastard”, which has been adopted (ironically or otherwise) by various comedians and musicians (and may be the inspiration for the infamous Austin Powers character). The chant also been used by the Barmy Army – UK cricket supporters who travel abroad to cheer on their national team – against Australian cricket players, including Shane Warne. Thankfully it seems to have faded away since around the time Unseen Academicals was written. (Thanks to listener Metal Nurse on Bluesky for pointing out that not everyone would know this one.)
  • Glenda’s pie with the crispy onions is a “Ploughman’s Pie”, a variation on the “ploughman’s lunch”. This is a traditional pub meal, whose essential elements are bread, cheese and pickled onions, though modern variations add other things too. Glenda’s pie version has “cheese pastry” and a “hot pickle layer”, making it likely that it’s a meat pie with added ploughman’s ingredients, but it seems at least possible that Glenda’s genius could result in a vegetarian version.
  • Cyrano de Bergerac (1615-1695) was a real person, a French writer, libertine and duellist, but he’s better known as a fictionalised version from the play Cyrano de Bergerac. Written by Edmond Rostand in 1897, the play’s version of Cyrano is a nobleman and gifted poet, scholar and solder in the French Army. He loves his cousin Roxanne, his intellectual equal, but considers that she could never love him back because of his enormous nose, which makes him “ugly”. Just as he’s persuaded to tell her of his feelings anyway, she announces that she’s fallen in love with a handsome but dim soldier, Christian, who is being sent to join Cyrano’s regiment. Initially against his better judgement, Cyrano is persuaded to help Christian speak and write poetically to Roxanne to woo her. The original story ends badly: Roxanne and Christian are married, but another nobleman who wanted Roxanne for himself spitefully sends Cyrano’s regiment to a dangerous battle. Christian dies in battle, but not before he realises Cyrano has been writing letters to Roxanne on his behalf, and that he loves her. Cyrano returns home and says nothing to Roxanne, who goes into a long period of mourning and joins a convent. Years later, Cyrano is fatally wounded by his enemies while on one of his regular visits to Roxanne, but while concealing his injury he accidentally gives away that he wrote Christian’s letters and loved her all along. She says she loves him, too, and he gives one last delirious speech before he dies in her arms. Ben loves the original, but recognises it’s not a modern love story. It’s one of the great French classics, though, and has been adapted many times; Ben’s favourite versions are the 1990 film version starring Gerard Depardieu, and Steve Martin’s weird 1987 American happy ending version, Roxanne. There’s also a 2019 musical version, Cyrano, which starred Peter Dinklage, that was itself adapted into a film in 2021; Ben’s yet to see that one.
  • Lady Margolotta is introduced in The Fifth Elephant, so for more about her, see #Pratchat40, “The King and the Hole of the King”. This is her first major appearance since then, and she’ll return once more, but she is also mentioned in several other novels, including The Truth, Going Postal and Making Money. While she doesn’t rule Überwald or any of the smaller countries nearby, she is clearly wields formidable influence. She’s a founding member of the Überwald League of Temperance, the “black ribboner” vampires who replace blood with another obsession; in Margolotta’s case, the obsession is not explicitly named, but the passage about her meeting of the League suggests it may be “control” – something rather less concrete than the other black ribboners we meet.
  • The book Tansy mentions about Churchill’s cook, Georgina Landemare, is Victory in the Kitchen by Annie Gray, first published by Profile Books in 2020.
  • The book Liz mentions about the fashion industry is le plus beau métier du monde by French anthropologist and ethnographer Giulia Mensitieri, translated into English by Natasha Lehrer as The Most Beautiful Job in the World for Melbourne University Press in 2020.
  • Scream 3 (2000; dir. Wes Craven) is, as the name suggests, the third film in the Scream franchise of slasher horror films. The series is famous for having characters who know and use the conventions of slasher films. Scream 3 is about the killer, nicknamed “Ghostface” because of the mask they wear, targeting the cast and crew of the film-within-a-film Stab 3, based on the Ghostface murders. A subplot involves the main character Sidney (who survived the first two films) discovering that her mother had worked as an actor in the 1970s and was sexually assaulted by the producer who is now making the Stab movies. The film has many references to real Hollywood, including the names of the actor characters (e.g. Jennifer Jolie, Angelina Tyler and Tom Prinze),
  • “The beautiful game” is one of many nicknames given to association football. It dates back to the 1950s, and was popularised by the Brazilian player Pelé, one of the most famous footballs of the 1960s and 70s, but its origins aren’t entirely clear. It now usually refers to the sport as a whole, though it used to also mean a specific style of play popular in Brazil, the jogo bonito; that style is now called art football (futebol-arte). The Beautiful Game is also the title of a 2000 West End musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Ben Elton revolving around a local football team in 1969 Belfast; a 2012 film documentary about African football; and a 2024 Netflix drama starring Bill Nighy about the English team in the Homeless World Cup. Because there are many different kinds of football (or codes, as we call them in Australia), and most are just called “football” where they’re most popular, most end up with multiple nicknames. A similar name for association football in Australia was “the world game”, popularised by the SBS TV series of the same name (2002-2019) hosted by commentator Les Murray.
  • Diego Maradona (1960-2020) was an Argentine football player and later manager, often regarded as one of the best players in the history of the game. He rose to fame in the 1980s playing for Barcelona and Napoli, and set records for how much he was paid to transfer between teams. He is still revered in Argentina, especially for his performance in the 1986 world cup, where he scored two goals in the quarter-final against England and ultimately led the team to victory.
  • “Let there be a thousand blossoms bloom” is a reference to a famous comment given by eccentric Country Party MP Bob Katter from Queensland in response to a media question about his opinion on same-sex marriage in 2017. This was only days after the results were revealed of the same-sex marriage plebiscite, a non-binding postal vote held in Australia over whether to amend the marriage act to allow same-sex couples the right to marry. His answer takes an odd turn almost immediately; we won’t spoil it, because you can watch the whole 20 second clip on YouTube.
  • The furies in the book are the “Little Sisters of Perpetual Velocity”, and they come from Ephebe, the Discworld equivalent of Greece. The name is inspired by the names of orders of Catholic nuns, something Pratchett has played with before, most famously with “the Chattering Order of St. Beryl” in Good Omens.
  • Light Emitting Diodes – LEDs for short – are basically tiny light bulbs. Old-fashioned light globes produce light by passing current through a filament, a conducting material that heats up so that it glows, producing light and heat. LEDs produce light from the movement of electrons and positive charges (called “holes”) through the diode, which is a kind of semiconductor – a device that only conducts electricity in one direction. As the charges interact, they emit photons – the particle of light – in a specific wavelength. This process doesn’t produce (much) heat or significantly degrade the diode, and requires less energy than a traditional incandescent bulb. Red, green, amber and infrared LEDs were relatively cheap and easy to make, but the blue LED was the holy grail – blue could combine with amber, or with red and green, to make LEDs which were white, or any other colour! The different colours are produced by using different materials for the crystal, which is then “doped” by adding impurities of specific materials to add holes and turn the crystal into a semiconductor. This produces different “gaps” between the energy of the holes and electrons, and the size of the gap determines the wavelength of light emitted. Blue was theoretically possible by growing gallium nitride crystals, but this was difficult and expensive because it needed a much higher temperature than the materials used for existing LED colours. In 1993, engineer Shuji Nakamura cracked the problem by creating a new kind of reactor, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2014, alongside Isamu Akasaki and Hiroshi Amano, who were the first to grow large gallium nitride crystals using similar techniques in the 1980s. The first blue LEDs were inefficient, producing heat and only a dim light. Nakamura also solved this problem, by adding a lot more dopant – in this case, magnesium – than usual. Why gallium nitride needed so much magnesium was only solved in 2015, when British researchers used quantum modelling techniques to discover the processes going on inside the crystal. In the early 2000s, LED production became much cheaper, and it wasn’t long before they were being used to produce full-colour displays, light globes and even programmable stage lights, though blue LEDs remained less efficient and more expensive to make for some time afterwards, though they’ve been improved in the last few years.
  • Nobby Nobbs’ relationship with erotic dancer Tawnee is portrayed in Thud!, which we discussed in #Pratchat61, “What Terry Wrote”.
  • Liz notes the line “My fare, lady?”, which is one of many references in the book to My Fair Lady, the 1956 Broadway musical based on George Bernard Shaw’s 1913 play Pygmalion. Both versions are the story of a Cockney flower seller, Eliza Doolittle, who’s taught to speak like an upper class lady by academic Henry Higgins, as an experiment to see if she can pass as a lady. The musical ends quite differently from the play… It’s best known today via the 1964 film version starring original Broadway star Rex Harrison as Higgins, and Audrey Hepburn as Eliza. We previously discussed it way back in #Pratchat22, “The Cat in the Prat”.
  • A litter is a kind of vehicle without wheels, in which a platform or in an enclosed compartment is carried by human beings. Ancient Roman cities did indeed ban or at least restrict wheeled vehicles, then as now because they get stuck easily – you can’t turn them around quickly when a road is blocked, but a litter can easily move in any direction.
  • There have been four audio versions of Unseen Academicals:
    • Three are standard audiobooks: the abridged Corgi audiobook read by Tony Robinson; the unabridged Isis audiobook, read by Stephen Briggs (which is no longer available); and the most recent one, the Penguin unabridged audiobook, read by Colin Morgan and featuring Peter Serafinowicz as Death, and Bill Nighy as the “voice of the author” (he reads the footnotes). This is the one Tansy listened to, and Colin Morgan reads all of the Wizards books in this series – typecasting, perhaps, since he is best known for starring as the titular young wizard in the BBC television series Merlin between 2008 and 2012. Morgan also played Newton Pulsifer in Dirk Maggs’ 2014 radio version of Good Omens, which featured a cameo by Terry and Neil Gaiman as two policemen, recorded only a few months before Pratchett’s death.
    • Dirk Maggs also directed the fourth audio version of Unseen Academicals, mentioned by Ben: the Audible Original full-cast adaptation released in July 2018. This version is heavily abridged – split into ten chapters, it’s about four and a half hours long in total (compared with 14 hours for the unabridged audiobook). It’s also very much its own thing, and changes a lot to fit the shorter run time and reach a more general audience, including names, condensed plots and combined characters. For example, the University’s stakes are higher: the “Weatherwax bequest” (one of many overt references to the rest of Discworld) requires it to win a game of “mob ball” once a century, or lose 87% of its total budget and be forced to shut down. And the characters are less subtle – most notably Trev, who is more or less combined with Smeems and becomes much less likeable, and Mr Nutt, whose rage is barely under control compared to the Nutt of the book. David Jason, who played Albert and later Rincewind in the TV adaptations of Hogfather and The Colour of Magic, is the narrator, who provides a lot of context – including a cosmic turtle intro (sorry Liz). The rest of the cast includes the likes of Matthew Horne (Gavin from Gavin & Stacy) as Trev Likely, comedian Josie Lawrence (who was Agnes Nutter in the radio and television Good Omens adaptations) as Glenda Sugarbean, Jon Culshaw (of Dead Ringers and the Penguin City Watch audiobooks) as William de Worde, Stephen Briggs as Drumknott (aiding Ray Fearon as Vetinari), and, of note to Baldur’s Gate III fans, Samantha Béart (yes, Karlach herself) as Madame Sharn! Ben recommends not listening to it directly after reading the novel, and suggests it was not made with established Discworld fans in mind.
  • There’s no definitive account of the origins of orcs in The Lord of the Rings, but in Middle-Earth only the supreme god Ilúvatar could truly create life. Thus all the orc origins – and there are seven suggested in Tolkien’s letters and further writings, mostly in-universe speculation – involve the evil Valar Morgoth, once Ilúvatar’s second, corrupting existing beings one way or another. Tolkien’s later writings seem to favour the idea that orcs are corrupted men, rather than elves or other beings, and he even seems to have revised the timeline of Middle-Earth to make this possible (in earlier versions orcs appeared before men).
  • As for regretting making orcs irredeemable, Tolkien seems to have been torn on the subject. Here are three major examples, including from his letters. These have been catalogued, and many published in the 1981 collection The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien.
    • Letter 153 is an unsent draft reply to Peter Hastings from 1954, who had written with theological concerns about The Lord of the Rings, including the nature of evil in Middle-Earth. There Tolkien described the orcs as “creatures begotten of Sin, and naturally bad” but then adds in parentheses: “(I nearly wrote ’irredeemably bad’; but that would be going too far. Because by accepting or tolerating their making – necessary to their actual existence – even Orcs would become part of the World, which is God’s and ultimately good.)”
    • Letter 269 is a reply to W. H. Auden in 1965, who had written to ask whether the idea of orcs being irredeemable was heretical; Tolkien wrote that he wasn’t sure about that, but also that he didn’t “feel under any obligation to make my story fit with formalized Christian theology, though I actually intended it to be consonant with Christian thought and belief”. This, he said, was backed up in “Book Five, page 190 where Frodo asserts that the orcs are not evil in origin. We believe that, I suppose, of all human kinds and sons and breeds, though some appear, both as individuals and groups to be, by us at any rate, unredeemable…..” (See Pratchett’s thoughts along similar lines below.) So characters in the books don’t think they are naturally evil, despite the fact that they are portrayed as so.
    • In Morgoth’s Ring, one of the later volumes of The History of Middle-Earth by J.R.R.’s son Christopher, there’s an essay by the elder Tolkien simply titled “Orcs” in which he says: “…the Wise in the Elder Days taught always that the Orcs were not ‘made’ by Melkor, and therefore were not in their origin evil. They might have become irredeemable (at least by Elves and Men), but they remained within the Law.” He goes on to say that this means orcs would be treated with the same dignity in capture as men or elves or dwarves, and also mentions in a footnote that orcs never ask for mercy because Melkor and Sauron had done such a good job convincing them that elves and men were vile, evil creatures, not to be trusted.
  • Pratchett’s thoughts on orcs are much easier to discern, because he wrote about them at the time Unseen Academicals was published. In an article for Guardian book club in December 2009, Pratchett wrote: “Ever since I first read Tolkien at the age of 13, I was worried about the orcs. They were totally and irrevocably bad. It was a flat given. No possibility of redemption for an orc, no chance of getting a job somewhere involving fluffy animals or flowers.
    This is no reflection on Tolkien. We are all prisoners in the aspic of our time. But now, I think, people have learned not to think that any race or culture is naturally or irredeemably bad. We have seen the world from space and it isn’t flat.”
  • More notes to come!

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

#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.

#Pratchat83 – This Time for Ankh-Morpork

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Liz and Ben are joined by guest Dr Tansy Rayner Roberts PhD (Classics) to chat about fashion, faith, food…oh, and football. Yes, join us for an episode that goes well into extra time (i.e. it’s over 3 hours long) as we discuss Terry Pratchett’s 37th Discworld novel, Unseen Academicals.

The Wizards of Unseen University are still recovering from the Dean’s defection to become Archchancellor of rival Brazeneck College, but they have a bigger problem: if they don’t field a foot-the-ball team, they’ll lose the bequest that supplies most of their dinners. But the sport has become lawless and violent – a game of the streets in which matches last long into the night and players die. And then there’s the fans… But something’s in the air. The game’s about to change, and at the centre of it are an unlikely quartet of junior University staff: Glenda the sensible baker; beautiful and fashion-conscious Juliet; Trev, son of the game’s greatest player; and Mr Nutt, a goblin who’s good at everything – except explaining who and what he is…

The last of the Discworld books to “star” the wizards, and the longest in the series by a fair margin, Unseen Academicals repeatedly says that it isn’t really about football. And, indeed, there’s a lot else going on: new ways for both dwarfs and trolls to express their femininity; the internal voices which hold us back from reaching our potential; the struggle between progress and fairness, of power and the people. And at the heart of it, four brand new characters who represent a side of Ankh-Morpork we don’t usually see in our protagonists: the regular people, caught up in the Shove.

What did you think of Unseen Academicals? Does it have enough football in it, or too much? What are your favourite takes on orcs? What other sports would you like to see come to the Discworld? And do you know where we can get a megapode? Shout out from the Shove using the hashtag #Pratchat83!

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Guest Dr Tansy Rayner Roberts PhD (Classics) (she/her) is a Tasmanian author of sci-fi, fantasy and cosy crime. Her essay series Pratchett’s Women was collected into a book, and her follow up series on Pratchett’s men can be found at the online magazine Speculative Insight. Tansy recently reprinted her “Teacup Magic” series of cosy mysteries, and her newest novel is the time travel comedy Time of the Cat. You can find Tansy online at tansyrr.com and as @tansyrr on social media; you’ll also find her in our previous live episodes: “A Troll New World” (from Nullus Anxietas 7 in 2019) and “Unalive from Überwald” (from Nullus Anxietas IX in 2024).

You can find episode notes and errata on our web site.

Next month we’re looking at a stack of Discworld ephemera – namely both volumes of the Ankh-Morpork Archives, which collect material from the Discworld diaries, and their sibling publication The Discworld Almanack! If you’ve read any of those, please send us your questions via email (chat@pratchatpodcast.com), or social media. Use 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.

#Pratchat82 – Clack Go the Gears

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Puzzlers and previous guests Nicholas J Johnson and Lawrence Leung return to play and discuss Leonard Boyd and David Brashaw’s 2015 board game Clacks, based on Terry Pratchett’s 33rd Discworld novel, Going Postal.

Postmaster General Moist von Lipwig has come up with a plan to prove the Ankh-Morpork postal service is still relevant – a race against the Grand Trunk Semaphore Company! The Grand Trunk has a monopoly on the “Clacks”, a system of optical telegraph towers which transmit messages using patterns formed by a grid of six lights – surely they can beat a man on a horse? But the Grand Trunk knows Moist has something up his sleeve, and they’re taking no chances – the fastest and best new Clacks operators will have to prove they’re worthy of the job by racing each other first…

The fifth (and so far final) Discworld board game, Clacks is the second Discworld design by Boyd and Brashaw’s BackSpindle games (following Guards! Guards!). Clacks turns the race at the climax of Going Postal into a logic puzzle where up to four players must use punch cards to turn patterns of lights on and off in a grid, hoping to form another pattern which equates to a letter in Clacks code. It’s a race to finish your word (or words) first, either against each other, or as a team against Moist von Lipwig – but sharing the same grid of lights makes this puzzle very unpredictable.

Is it Discworldy enough? Does it feel like the Clacks technology of the books? Do you find it fun or funny, and do you prefer it collaborative or cooperative? And what else would you play to get your logic puzzle fix? Oh, and if you want to try making the longest sentence you can out of our Clacks words, the ones we drew were SHINE, SONKY, MAGIC, URIKA, ADORA, TOMAS, GUILD, QUIRM, RUFUS, GROAT, MONKS, GNOME, PIXIE, TROLL, TURVY, ANDRE, AHMED, CELYN, THIEF and KLOTZ. Let us know how you went using the hashtag #Pratchat82.

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Guest Nicholas J Johnson is an author, magician, educator and expert in deception, who goes by the nickname “Australia’s Honest Con-Man”. You can find details of Nick’s shows and workshops, including his upcoming magic show for children at the 2025 Melbourne Comedy Festival, at conman.com.au, or follow him on Bluesky, Instagram or Facebook as @honestconman.

Guest Lawrence Leung is a comedian, screenwriter and actor, known to Australian audiences for live and screen comedy, including the 2015 feature film Sucker, and more recently appearances in My Life is Murder, Aunty Donna’s Comedy Cafe and Time Bandits. For all the latest about Lawrence, including his upcoming research into seances and mediums in Victorian Melbourne, visit lawrenceleung.com, or follow him on Instagram at @mrlawrenceleung.

You can find episode notes and errata on our web site. One quick correction: Marc Burrows’ one man show The Magic of Terry Pratchett is on in Adelaide from 21 February to 7 March. See the full notes for details.

We’ll be kicking off the new year with one of the few Discworld novels we have left – and why not go large with the longest Pratchett novel of all, Unseen Academicals? We’ll be lacing up our football boots and dusting off our mortarboards alongside returning guest Tansy Rayner Roberts! Send us your questions via email (chat@pratchatpodcast.com), or social media. Use the hashtag #Pratchat83.

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.