Nullus Anxietas

#PratchatNALC Notes and Errata

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These are the notes and errata for our bonus live episode “Twice as Alive”, revisiting #Pratchat1 and the 1993 Discworld novel Men at Arms.

  • The episode title is a reference to the teaser at the start of #Pratchat1, in which both guest Cal Wilson and Liz declared that they didn’t think of werewolves as undead, but rather “twice as alive”.
  • The Lost Con was intended “as an 8 hour taster for the non-virtual convention in Sydney next year” – the Australian Discworld convention, Nullus Anxietas 7a (NA7a). The Lost Con was free to all members of the 2022 convention, whether full or supporting, and ran from 4 PM to midnight on Saturday, July 3rd – the original weekend planned for NA7a, which was last year postponed from 2021 to 2022. The move was prudent – Sydney was at the time of publication experiencing a serious outbreak of the Delta strain of COVID-19 and had been in lockdown since 26 June, with several stages of local restrictions imposed before that. This is the first major lockdown experienced by Sydney since the nation-wide lockdown in early 2020. From your hosts in Melbourne – we really hope you can get out of it faster than we did last year. Our thoughts are with you all.
  • The theme of Nullus Anxietas 7a was intended to be “Ankh-Morpork: Citie of One Thousand Surprises”. (The theme of NA7 was “Going Postal”.) Unfortunately, due to further concerns as part of the COVID-19 pandemic, the convention was eventually cancelled. The next Australian convention would be in Adelaide in 2024 (with the theme “Come ALIVE in Überwald!”), but Sydney hosted the one after that, in April 2026, with the theme “A Celebration of Witches”. We were there, and you can hear the result in #PratchatNAX, “The Snail Trick”.
  • We discussed the vote for the first book preview episode in #Pratchat0, “And the Winner is…“, and in Liz’s blog post “Let’s Start From The Very Beginning (but not actually)“.
  • #Pratchat1, “Boots Theory“, was released on the 7Ath of November, 2017 – three years and eight months ago in real time, or 237 years ago in COVID time, at release of this podcast.
  • Members of The Lost Con Zoom chat were split over whose pronunciations they preferred. The folks from Discworld Monthly informed us that according to Stephen Briggs, there were definitely disagreements over pronunciation for the audiobooks. You can find his guides for some pronunciation in the front of some of his play adaptations; for example in Jingo he specifies that Angua’s name should be pronounced with a hard “g”, but either “Angwa” or “Ang-you-ah” is listed as acceptable.
  • One of the perils of not actually having time to re-read the book (or even re-listen to the entire previous episode) is that we forget little details. Like the fact that Carrot does indeed pick up the gonne, and after a brief look smashes it against a wall, destroying it. As he says when Vimes warns him not to touch it: “Why not? It’s only a device.” Of note: he leaves the broken bits in the clocktower of the Assassin’s Guild, where any fool (or assassin) could find them…
  • The western roleplaying videogame with the spittoons that Ben mentions is West of Loathing, a spin-off from the online game Kingdom of Loathing.
  • You can read more about the Yarra river in the episode notes for #Pratchat1.
  • Liz’s Detritus pun, which Ben didn’t pick up on at the time, was “inflammation of the d’être”, as in raison d’être, a French term meaning “reason to be”. It’s commonly used by English speakers as an alternate way of referring to something so important it gives them a reason to be alive. Note that in French it’s not really pronounced in such a way that makes the pun work, but English speakers often say it that way.
  • Detritus’ brain-cooling helmet makes later appearances in Jingo (#Pratchat27, “Leshp Miserablés”), where it breaks down trying to keep his brain cool in the desert, and The Truth (#Pratchat42, “Truth, the Printing Press, and Every -ing”), where he switches it on in order to deal with William de Worde.
  • The two-player roleplaying game Ben is discussing is Tin Star Games’ Partners, released in digital form in 2021 following a successful Kickstarter campaign.
  • We discussed Feet of Clay in #Pratchat24, “Arsenic and Old Clays”, released in October 2019.
  • We discussed Jingo in #Pratchat27, “Leshp Miserablés”, released in January 2020.
  • Hitchcock and Scully are the two rusted-on detectives who serve in the 99th precinct of the New York Police Department on the sitcom Brooklyn Nine-Nine, portrayed by Dirk Blocker and Joel McKinnon Miller respectively. They are notoriously incompetent, unhealthy and lazy, concerned primarily with snacks and other food. Originally supporting characters, they became a staple of the show and feature in the opening credits as of season six, the second episode of which (titled “Hitchcock & Scully”) explored their backstory as hotshot detectives in the 1980s.
  • The Ankh-Morpork Archives, Vol. 2 was published on the 29th of October, 2020, collecting material from the Discworld’s Ankh-Morpork City Watch Diary 1999, the Discworld Fools’ Guild Yearbook and Diary 2001, the Discworld (Reformed) Vampyres’ Diary 2003 and Lu-Tze’s Yearbook of Enlightenment 2008. Ben is right that the City Watch diary, published in September 1998, came out after Jingo (November 1997) and before The Fifth Elephant (November 1999).
  • We discussed The Fifth Elephant in #Pratchat40, “The King and the Hole of the King”, released in February 2021.
  • Asimov is one of Liz’s cats, who along with her other cat Huxley and Ben’s cat Kaos are collectively known as the “Pratcats”. Huxley and Kaos are relative newcomers, but Asimov has been around since the beginning; as well as hearing his bell jingling in the background of many episodes, he was featured as a guest on #Pratchat22, “The Cat in the Prat”.
  • The cult in Guards! Guards! are the Elucidated Brethren of the Ebon Night (not to be mistaken for the Illuminated and Ancient Brethren of Ee). We discussed their similarity with incels and other “alt-right” groups in #Pratchat7A (see the next point).
  • We discussed Guards! Guards! in #Pratchat7A, “The Curious Incident of the Dragon and the Night Watch”, released in June 2018 and The Truth in #Pratchat42, “The Truth, the Printing Press and Every -ing”, released in April 2021. The other book in which there’s a plot to dispose Vetinari is Feet of Clay, which as mentioned above was discussed in #Pratchat24.
  • As per the excerpt from #Pratchat1, our original suggestion was that Vetinari become a vampire, but we have previously discussed the idea of a zombie Vetinari…though we’re not entirely sure when! Possibly it was in #Pratchat30, “Looking Widdershins”, which is also where we first discussed the possibility of Moist Von Lipwig being groomed as the next Patrician (as suggested by listener Luke Jimenez).
  • The “critical Black Mass” joke in The Light Fantastic, as discussed in #Pratchat44, “Cosmic Turtle Soup”, refers to a collection of “books that leak magic”.
  • Ben and Liz both discuss their Pratchett origin stories in #Pratchat9, “And the Winner is…”. Liz realised her first was not in fact The Fifth Elephant just after recording #Pratchat7A, as discussed near the start of #Pratchat9, “Upscalator to Heaven”.
  • We discussed the Johnny Maxwell books in 2020: Only You Can Save Mankind in #Pratchat28, “All Our Base Are Belong to You”, released in February; Johnny and the Dead in Pratchat34, “Only You Can Save Deadkind”, released in August (though currently not available); and Johnny and the Bomb in Pratchat37, “The Shopping Trolley Problem”, released in November.
  • Early versions of ”Guns don’t kill people, people kill people” go back to as early as 1913, in press releases in various American magazines from a lobby group aligned with gun manufacturer Colt. These were designed to counter growing public concern about the availability of cheap mass-produced firearms, especially pistols, and the resulting escalation in deaths by shooting, which even back then were leading to calls for more regulation and control of guns. While earlier versions included things like “it’s not the gun, it’s the man behind the gun”, the current version is the most recognisable, and seems to have first arisen in the 1950s or 1960s. It’s nonsense, of course; no-one ever suggested that a gun could kill someone on its own. The point of the phrase is to make guns themselves seem neutral, neither good nor evil, but also to paint the perpetrators of gun deaths as obsessed murderers: killers who will use any means necessary, whether they have a gun or not. This ignores the fact that guns are deadlier than other weapons, and indeed the fact that guns even are weapons, i.e. devices designed only to harm living creatures. If you want to know more, the phrase is also the title of a very useful 2016 book on the subject: “Guns Don’t Kill People, People Kill People” and Other Myths About Guns and Gun Control, by Dennis A. Henigan.
  • The gonne influences Vimes by telling him that All that you hate, all that is wrong, I can put right, and Vimes finds it difficult to resist. He also remembers it pulling its trigger by itself, dragging his finger along with it, and only ends up putting it down and not shooting the villain because Carrot orders him to attention.

#PratchatNAX Notes and Errata

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These are the notes and errata for our bonus live episode “The Snail Trick”, discussing Rhianna Pratchett and Gabrielle Kent’s 2023 Discworld book, Tiffany Aching’s Guide to Being a Witch – in front of a live audience at the Australian Discworld Convention in Sydney!

Iconographic Evidence

Liz, Ben and the Megapode (ho! The Megapode!) at the Gala Dinner during Nullus Anxietas X.

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title blends Ben’s favourite new detail from the book, Petulia’s “snail hotel” purse, with the most infamous – her “pig trick”. But you knew that.
  • We’ve previously appeared at several other Nullus Anxietas events, and released the results as episodes in one way or another:
    • “A Troll New World” about “Troll Bridge”, was our first live episode, recorded at Nullus Anxietas 7 in Melbourne in 2019, with guest Tansy Rayner-Roberts.
    • “Twice as Alive” was a special live online episode recorded for Nullus Anxietas: The Lost Con, the online convention held in 2021. It revisited Men at Arms for the first time since #Pratchat1, “Boots Theory”, in 2017.
    • “A Tale of Two Carpets” was a pre-recorded discussion comparing The Carpet People (1971) and The Carpet People (1992). It was broadcast as part of the Virtual Discworld Fun Day in 2022, as a replacement for the sadly cancelled Nullus Anxietas 7a. The original Nullus Anxietas version is available on YouTube, and there’s also an annotated version (i.e. Ben added text-caption footnotes and a few other extras) available only to podcast subscribers.
    • “Unalive from Überwald” about “Death and What Comes Next” was our second live in-person episode, recorded at Nullus Anxietas 9 in Adelaide in 2024, with guests Tansy Rayner-Roberts and Karen J Carlisle.
  • Our interview with Rhianna Pratchett and Gabrielle Kent about Tiffany Aching’s Guide to Being a Witch was released as Pratchat74, “Hogswitch”, in December 2023.
  • Paul Hogan (1939-) is an Australian actor and comedian who leveraged appearances on a television talent show into his own sketch comedy series, before finding international fame as Mick “Crocodile” Dundee, the titular character in the 1986 Australian film Crocodile Dundee. It’s essentially a romantic comedy in which Sue, a journalist from New York, travels to the Northern Territory to meet Mick, a “legendary” white bushman who fights off snakes and crocodiles with ease. It hasn’t aged well in many respects, but several of its scenes and lines became iconic, including one in which Mick scares off a would-be armed mugger by drawing his much bigger knife. The film was a major hit at the time, and established the modern American “outback fantasy” idea of what Australia (and Australians) are like. Hogan went on to become a tourism icon for Australia, famously inviting Americans by promising to “throw another shrimp on the barbie”. The film had two sequels, neither of which is highly regarded, though 1988’s Crocodile Dundee II – in which Sue’s ex-husband sends evidence against a drug cartel to Sue before being murdered, putting her and Mick in danger – was also a box office hit.
  • James Eoin Stephen Paul McKeown, better known as Jimeoin, is an Irish comedian who rose to prominence in the 1990s in Australia. His self-titled television show, Jimeoin, ran from 1994 to 1995, and featured the snail joke Ben re-tells in this episode.
  • The Fifth Element is a 1997 sci-fi action film directed by Luc Besson, starring Bruce Willis, Mila Jovovich and Gary Oldman. Set a few centuries in the future when the Earth is threatened by the return of a “great evil”, the weapon that can defeat it made up of the four classical elements, and a mysterious “fifth element”, represented by a young woman who is destroyed and then re-built using futuristic technology. The film is visually incredible, but is perhaps the poster child for the problematic narrative trope dubbed “born sexy yesterday” – a “blank slate” young woman who is magically or technologically created as a physical adult, but with limited maturity and life experience.
  • The Fifth Elephant is the 24th Discworld novel, published in 1999 when The Fifth Elephant was still fresh in everyone’s memories. Aside from the title, it doesn’t really have any connection to the film. We discussed in #Pratchat40, “The King and the Hole of the King”, in 2021.
  • The 1990s hit TV series Charmed originally starred Shannen Doherty, Holly Marie Combs and Alyssa Milano as “the charmed ones”, a trio of sisters who discover they are witches, each with a magical superpower, who can combine their magic to cast spells and vanquish demons. It ran for eight seasons between 1998 and 2006, though Shannon Doherty left after the third season and was replaced by Rose McGowan as a secret half-sister of the other three. They don’t seem to ever seriously claim that zippers were invented by witches, but in an early episode from the first season, “The Witch is Back”, a witch summoned through time from 300 years earlier is so impressed with the zipper on a dress she is loaned that she declares “a wise witch made this!” A reboot of the series with a new trio of charmed ones ran for four seasons from 2018 to 2022, though it had no involvement from the original cast and crew, and wasn’t as successful as the original.
  • We covered The Witches board game in #Pratchat67, “The Three-Elf Problem”. In the game, players take on the role of Tiffany or one of three other trainee witches, visiting various locations in the Lancre area to solve “problems” like sick pigs, pregnancies and deaths. Successfully solving a problem involves rolling dice, but there are various ways to improve the result, including using magic – though this and other missteps earn you “cackle counters”, which track your progress to becoming like Black Aliss. You can only remove cackle counters by sacrificing a turn to move to a location with another witch, “taking tea” and talking about your problems to keep you both grounded.
  • We discussed Raising Steam in #Pratchat90, “Mind the Ginnungagap”.
  • The pig trick first appears in A Hat Full of Sky, where the audience at the Witch Trials are amazed that Petulia intends to do it “without a pig” and “using only a sausage”. This may indicate that “the pig trick” is something infamous from witch lore, and the sausage version is Petulia’s unique spin on it. Since Tiffany and Granny are staring at each other at the time, the narration from Tiffany’s point of view only notes “a squeal”, followed by a “gasp of amazement” and applause from the crowd.
  • Willow is a 1988 fantasy film directed by Ron Howard and produced by George Lucas, starring Warwick Davis as the titular character, a wannabe wizard from a village of humble farmers. Early in the film, Willow botches his “disappearing pig trick”, which as Ben mentions is stage magic rather than actual sorcery. The movie stands up pretty well, and also stars Val Kilmer as the swordsman who helps Willow protect a baby who is prophesied to be the doom of an evil sorceress, played by Jean Marsh.
  • “The pissing boy in Brussells” is the famous statue Manneken Pis, a bronze of a small naked boy which is part of a fountain located not far from the main square in Brussells, the capital of Belgium. Some version of the fountain dates back to the 15th century, though the version known now was sculpted by Jérôme Duquesnoy the Elder in around 1619, and upgraded in the early 18th century. The one on public display is a replica, as the original was frequently stolen, and is now in a museum. He’s a popular tourist attraction and is often dressed in various clothes made for him – there’s even a museum of his outfits (which number in the hundreds) down the street.
  • Gnomes is the English title of the 1976 book, Leven en werken van de kabouter (‘Life and work of the gnomes’) by Dutch writer Wil Huygen, and based on the illustrations by Dutch artist Rien Poortvliet. The book pretends to be a biological and historical study of a species of tiny humanoids known as gnomes, based on European folklore, and credited to a gnome named David. It was a huge hit, including in the United States and Spain. It was adapted for television, first in 1980 as a one-hour telemovie in the US, and later as several series for Spanish television, starting with David, el gnomo in 1985 (dubbed into English as The World of David the Gnome).
  • Mage: The Ascension was first published by White Wolf in 1993, with later editions in 1995 and 1999, plus a Twentieth Anniversary Edition (M20) published in 2015. That last edition contains a brief bit about magic vs magick on page 41, under the heading ‘That “M” Word with that Funny “K”’. The fictional author addressing the player’s character, a new mage, says:

Many people find the word pretentious… but then, a certain degree of pretention is inevitable when you play games with reality. As far as I’m concerned, it’s pretense only if you can’t live up to the power of your claims. And since living up to such power is what magick is all about, that spelling seems appropriate to me.

  • The snail purse does appear to be new to Tiffany Aching’s Guide to Being a Witch; it’s not mentioned in any of the novels in which Petulia appears, and snails are generally only mentioned in the context of being farmed and eaten by Feegles.
  • For the record, the gear Ben used to record this episode was a PreSonus AudioBox 44VSL digital interface, three Shure SM58 microphones, and a 2019 13” MacBook Pro running Reaper (the software Ben still uses for all his audio editing). When we meet in person for board game episodes, he currently uses a set of RØDE Procaster microphones instead, and is hoping to upgrade to a newer digital interface or mobile digital mixer/recorder in the near future. (The AudioBox works, but is getting a bit old.)
  • You can read the Modiphius media release about their upcoming board games on their website. As of the publication of this episode, no updates have been given about either Readers Digested or Kill Sam Vimes, though we’ll note that the former is also the title of
  • We were pressed to mention a few of our favourite guests, and while we hasten to say “splendid chap, all of them”, the specific mentions go to:

#PratchatNAX – The Snail Trick

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Liz and Ben were once again fortunate to be guests of the Australian Discworld Convention – this time in Sydney! In this live recording from day two of Nullus Anxietas X: A Celebration of Witches, we discuss Rhianna Pratchett and Gabrielle Kent’s 2023 book, Tiffany Aching’s Guide to Being a Witch. (We previously interviewed Rhianna and Gabrielle about it in Pratchat74, “Hogswitch”.)

Tiffany Aching has been a witch for some years now, and has been writing down what she’s learned. When she gets the opportunity to publish her work, and hopefully inspire a new generation of witches, she sends the manuscript to her mentors to get their thoughts via notes in the margins. And a couple of uninvited guests give their opinions, too – on everything from proper headwear, to the relationships between witches, and the supernatural threats one is likely to face…

Which new bits were your favourites from the book? What did you think Petunia’s “pig trick” was when you first read about it in A Hat Full of Sky? Do you have a favourite witch, and why is it Nanny Ogg? (We won’t tell Granny.) Are you a Dolly Sisters fan, or a Dimwell diehard? (The reason this is important will become apparent when you listen.) What do you wish we’d do on the podcast before we finish up with all the novels – or perhaps do next, when Pratchat is over? We’d love to know! Use the hashtag #PratchatNAX on social media to join the conversation, or email us at chat@pratchatpodcast.com (we do read them all, though we’ve been a bit slow to reply of late).

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Nullus Anxietas, the Australian Discworld Convention, has been running for nearly twenty years. The next convention will be in 2028 in Melbourne! You can find out more at the official convention website, ausdwcon.org. You can also follow Nullus Anxietas on YouTube, Instagram and Facebook.

You can find the full show notes and errata for this episode on our web site.

Huge thanks to everyone who attended the convention; our wonderful live audience, especially Danny, Helen and Jeremy; and especially offer enormous thanks to the “big jobs” – the team of hard-working volunteers and committee members who make Nullus Anxietas happen, especially Joanne, Steve, Danny and Kurt – but there were so many others. We hope to see you all in Melbourne for the next one.

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.

#PratchatRuby – How Did Discworld Get to 40?

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

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

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Huge thanks to everyone who contributed to this episode:

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

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

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

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

#PratchatNALC – Twice as Alive

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With the ei- the twice-fourth Australian Discworld Convention postponed until next year, Liz and Ben fired up their crystal balls to project themselves live for the one-day online event, Nullus Anxietas: The Lost Con! In this special one-hour mini-episode, we revisit the very first Terry Pratchett book discussed on the podcast: the fifteenth Discworld novel, 1993’s Men at Arms!

You can of course listen to #Pratchat1 again if you like, though we’ve included a few important excerpts in this revisit episode. As well as discussing the book in the light of everything we’ve read (and everything that’s happened) since, we reminisce about figuring out how the podcast would work, and answer some questions posed by the live online audience. Has your opinion of Carrot/Angua changed over time? Is Cuddy’s death still too upsetting to think about? What other names and Discworld-specific words are we pronouncing wrong? We’d love to know! (Except maybe that last one.) Use the hashtag #PratchatNALC on social media to join the conversation.

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Intrigued by the idea of a Discworld fan convention? You should be! Old-school fan conventions are few and far between, and we’d love you to support one of the few left in Australia. Find out more about Nullus Anxietas, the Australian Discworld Convention, and get a convention membership (attending or supporting) at ausdwcon.org. You can also follow Nullus Anxietas on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

You can find the full show notes and errata for this episode on our web site.

Huge thanks to everyone who attended the convention, those who listened to us live and asked questions, and to the other panelists – there were some amazing discussions and great fun to be had by all! Especially big thanks once again to the massive team of hard-working volunteers and committee members at Nullus Anxietas, especially “the Man with the Vote”, Steve Lewis, and question wrangler Danny Sag. While Nullus Anxietas 7A was sadly cancelled in the end, the Australian Discworld Convention returns to life in 2024 with Nullus Anxietas IX: Come ALIVE in Überwald! in Adelaide. We hope to see you there.

This is the closest thing we’ve done to a live show since our appearance at the last Nullus Anxietas convention, but the online format seemed to work pretty well. We’ll look into the possibility of doing our more online live events in future – let us know if that’s something you’d like to see!

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 – A Troll New World

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Back in April, Liz and Ben attended the seventh bi-annual Australian Discworld Convention, Nullus Anxietas VII! They enlisted fellow convention guest (and friend of the podcast), author Tansy Rayner Roberts, to discuss Terry Pratchett’s first Discworld short story: 1991’s “Troll Bridge”!

Cohen the Barbarian has led a long life, but his greatest glories and biggest adventures seem far behind him. It’s time to tick a few items off his bucket list – starting with facing a troll in one-on-one combat. But when he and his annoying talking horse reach one of the few troll bridges left on the Disc, things aren’t as straightforward as they were in the old days…

With the Snowgum Films adaptation of “Troll Bridge” being screened at the convention, it seemed only right to cover the source material in this, our first ever live show! Like a lot of Pratchett’s work, “Troll Bridge” is by turns silly and deep, drawing on the traditions of Tolkien and Howard while at the same time pointing out that their worlds couldn’t stay the same forever. Did you find it poignant? When do you think it happens in Cohen’s timeline? And is a short story enough for an entire podcast? We’d love to know! Use the hashtag #PratchatNA7 on social media to join the conversation.

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Guest Tansy Rayner Roberts is an award-winning writer and podcast host. She’s written fantasy novels, short fiction, feminist essays and much more; of particular interest to Pratchat listeners is Pratchett’s Women, a collection of essays about the women in the Discworld novels. She co-hosts the podcasts Galactic Suburbia (about sci-fi and writing in Australia) and Verity! (about Doctor Who), and has her own fiction podcast Sheep Might Fly. You can find Tansy on the web at tansyrr.com, on Patreon at patreon.com/tansyrr, and also on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

You can find the full show notes and errata for this episode on our web site.

We’d like to extend our warm thanks to everyone who attended the convention; you all made us feel so welcome, and it was such a special experience to be among so many Discworld fans, speaking on panels and chairing debates and meeting you all! Especially big thanks to those of you who came to be in our first live audience, and to the massive team of hard-working volunteers at Nullus Anxietas, without whom fan conventions like this just couldn’t happen. That goes eig- er, one more than sevenfold to Suzie Eisfelder, Lisa Lagergren, Steve Lewis and all the other members of the committee, who organise such a massive undertaking every two years. We hope to see you all in Sydney in 2021 for Nullus Anxietas 7A!

We also hope to do some more live shows in the future, probably as bonus episodes like this one. Regular episodes will continue to be released on the 7Ath of each month…and in #Pratchat21, coming up next in July 2019, you can find out what Genghiz Cohen did next as we discuss Interesting Times.

Want to make sure we get through every Pratchett book – and maybe make a few more live episodes like this? You can support Pratchat for as little as $2 a month and get subscriber bonuses, like the exclusive bonus podcast Ook Club!

Kicking off the Year of the Incontrovertible Skunk

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The next few months are a busy time for your friendly neighbourhood Pratchatters – and you can catch us at some great events coming up in March and April!

Ben has had a busy start to the year: in January he launched a new weekly Star Trek podcast, re:Discovery, with co-host Carla Donnelly, and in February he’s running a crowdfunding campaign as part of Kickstarter’s Zine Quest collection to publish his roleplaying game Amateur Hour Apocalypse. Watch out for more on that one on Twitter when it launches!

In March, Liz and Ben will be appearing (separately) at Speculate, the Victorian speculative fiction writers’ festival! The festival happens over two days in Melbourne at the Gasworks Arts Park on March 15 and 16. You can find the full program and tickets at specfic.com.au – note that earlybird ticket prices are only available until February 11, so get in quick if you want a discount! The con is also on Twitter at @SpecFicVic.

Liz and Ben will also be appearing as special guests at this year’s Australian Discworld Convention, Nullus Anxietas 7, over the weekend of April 13 and 14! As well as appearing on several panels and events, they’ll be recording a live episode of Pratchat which we’ll release as a bonus in the regular podcast feed. You can find out more about the convention and get yourself a membership at ausdwcon.org, or follow them on Twitter at @ausdwcon. We’ll post full details of the Pratchat appearances when they’re finalised!

April is also Melbourne International Comedy Festival time! You can catch Ben in his new show, You Chose Poorly, with Alanta Colley from April 1 to 7 at Campari House. We’ll post more details, and a roundup of Pratchat guests also appearing at the festival, in March.