I Miss Terry Pratchett
https://www.mahl.me/blog/the-spell-that-wouldnt-leave/1. Pick an author nerds like.
2. Tell Claude "Write an article about Terry Pratchett, in his style."
3. Don't even fix the faux-witty phrases that, upon closer inspection, make zero sense, like "Sir Terry Pratchett, who knew more about furniture than most", or "Most physics departments would settle for that." or "The Author, refusing to let the Narrator off the hook".
4. Bask in the praise for your wonderful writing.
s/frequently/initially
Also, how is a cowardly underachiever "the perfect protagonist for a teenage boy"?
"technically a wizard but only on a technicality" is obviously redundant
And what part of any of this is supposed to be familiar?
It's just a strange essay.
I feel like the only way to make an AI slop universe worse is to accuse people of using AI when they're not. So I worry we might be doing that is all...
Furniture is established as an image for memories just a few lines earlier. And the quote directly afterwards is framed precisely in this image.
What a terrible, terrible timeline we live in now. Seriously. I genuinely hate it.
When there is clearly a huge demand for great stories and writing like Terry Pratchett's then why is it so hard to make a living out of it? And what happens now we made it even harder?
LLMs harnesses try to make them useful to suggest things, but this is the most destructive thing you can do to a writer. You can work around it by just feeding Claude a writing critique skill.
And Terry Pratchett would have loved it too. Even if it were clumsy.
But thanks for being kind in taking criticism.
It’s funny how anytime an article gets called out for being AI slop on HN, the author’s reaction is something like that: “oh yeah sorry I used AI but just for proofreading I swear, I should’ve done just a tiny bit less”.
No one seems to get the message that relying on AI at all is what makes writing shit. Good writers have confidence in what they produce. The fact that you’re willing to incorporate any AI suggestion at all means you’ve already lost the battle.
This is a little like saying no one will ever paint anymore because cameras exist.
It might be harder to make a living off art now (which...debatable), but at no point, ever, was it easy.
-- Yogi Berra
Writing is hard now, not because AI exists, but because there are so many writers out there and everyone's competing for attention, not just with other writers, nor with books from the past, but with all forms of media. Loads of people today, who might otherwise be reading novels for entertainment, are too busy scrolling their phones or watching TikToks or playing video games.
We don't have another Terry Pratchett because all the would-be Terry Pratchetts are toiling in obscurity, and possibly giving up on writing as a result.
You could totally argue that if people can't tell the difference, it's irrational for them to care which one they get, and I don't totally disagree with that either, but it's not like personal tastes have ever really been a rational thing either. Our ability to enjoy something is the result of a bunch of signals in our brains, and it's not that crazy that adding another signal (or removing one) can change that result in a way that makes it more or less desirable to seek out. Some people might literally like a piece of writing more if they have reason to believe it's from a human than they would if they read the same exact thing but had reason to believe it's from an AI, and while I would find a study showing that as fascinating, I wouldn't see that as an argument that people like the wrong things, because "right" or "wrong" don't really seem like they apply to that sort of thing. If someone told me that knowing there's a human on the other end and that having some sort of indirect, one-way emotional connection to them is an important part of what makes them enjoy it, who am I to tell them that's wrong?
that stopped after twitter
and went asymptotically downhill from there
approaching, but never quite literally getting to the point of eating a dog shit sandwich
(despite the same nauseous feeling and bad taste in your mouth)
It's only partly a joke.
Quite a few days after work, or just on a weekend adventure I'd go to a bookstore a few blocks south of work and grab another Discworld book, and a slice of pizza from my favourite pizza shop labelled "Rays". I'd read some in a park, and explore.
I didn't know a lot of people in the city, filling days with Terry Pratchett was a great joy.
The author of this piece hasn't read the Witches books! I'm jealous, they still have so much great Pratchett to get through.
> What I miss, selfishly, is the next book. There were always going to be more.
> What I miss, less selfishly, is whatever Pratchett-shaped object is supposed to be reaching teenagers now, and isn’t.
I feel the first keenly. I have put off a re-read of Pratchett for several years now: I want to forget as much as possible, to have the pleasure of discovery again. But I have read them all so many times I know it will all be familiar.
I don't know what teenagers read today. I hope Pratchett is still there. Even as an adult, I found his writing encouraged a kind of kindness in me. He had a way of understanding human nature and, with zero preaching, making you consider how people different from you felt. I still remember when I encountered Cheery the first time and how beautifully Pratchett navigated the intricacies of gender. I was an adult who already believed in kindness, with friends who have their own experiences of gender and from whom I learned and who I tried to support, yet he still taught me something.
Which translates (or comes from) a respect and love for the reader.
It's full of attempted Pratchettisms that, if you're paying attention, make no sense.
It's on a blog where almost every post is about AI.
It's the opposite of Terry's warm, intelligent, humanist writing and an insult to his name.
Sadly, I suspect that this may be, because it was an AI, prompted to "Write a short essay, in the style of Terry Pratchett, about how much I miss Terry Pratchett."
I didn't especially like the Science of Discworld books that much, but he didn't really write them.
One character that showed up in every one of his Discworld books -to a point- was Death.
After Sir Terry got his diagnosis, I noticed that Death stopped showing up in the books.
AT LAST, SIR TERRY, WE MUST WALK TOGETHER.
Terry took Death’s arm and followed him through the doors and on to the black desert under the endless night.
The end.
GNU Terry Pratchett.
Or perhaps quietly hid it as an Easter egg in a development environment?
"A man is not dead while his name is still spoken." - Going Postal, Chapter 4 prologue
Well I don’t, because I still read it. And don’t waste my time on “authors” who don’t respect their readers and are just farming attention with machine generated content.
1. They talk too much (and thanks to llms now more than ever)
2. They observe too little
3. They sit too comfortably
> Elves have no proper imagination or real emotions, and therefore such things fascinate them. Because they cannot create they steal musicians and artists [... snipped ...] Even if an elf is, for reasons of its own, trying to be nice, its lack of understanding of humans mean there's always something "off" about it.
(I would submit it myself but I feel that'd be stealing karma :D)
That has stuck with me, and a lot of things I do both in my professional and personal life can be attributed to this: I, too, am very actively lazy.
A side note, if the author reads this: I really like your site and its design, but I find the font really difficult to read. (Edit: switching off `-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;` makes it significantly more legible for me (Safari on a 110dpi panel)
Some odd turns of phrase there that are grammatically correct, but... you know...
> And then there are the memories [...] that arrive uninvited, settle in, and start terrorising the other occupants by kicking over the chairs.
> Sir Terry Pratchett, who knew more about furniture than most, put it this way:
> "Rincewind tried to force the memory out of his mind, but it was rather enjoying itself there, terrorizing the other occupants and kicking over the furniture."
He "put it this way", in the exact same words you just used? Also, he knew more about furniture than most? What? Why?
> "Mathieu and I had read every Pratchett the school library would admit to owning, plus several it would not."
This has the cadence of a witty sentence unless you're paying attention and realize it makes no sense.
> “In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded.”
> Nine words. A complete cosmology. Most physics departments would settle for that.
It's eight words, and the thing about physics departments makes no sense.
> The Author, refusing to let the Narrator off the hook.
Again, cute sentence, unless you're paying attention and you realize it doesn't mean anything.
Even the phrases that don't make sense and the obvious signals of AI writing, like miscounted words, didn't pull me out of the reverie and the reflection of the time when everything that was written came from the mind of a human.
I've never thought about it like this before, but the divide between digital natives and digital naives might be minuscule compared to the divide between people who read the works of other humans and those who constantly live in fear of reading a hallucination.
Now that I am in my middle 40s I just got a couple of his books and I am enjoying the Colour of Magic so much right now, having a real blast!
Otherwise no regrets reading him 25 years ago, none at all.
I am also halfway through Old Gods on my own time. What I find interesting is how different in tone his books can feel. It is a bit of a sprawling question on what to read though, besides "all of it" which is often not so helpful.
One day I will trick her into listening to a Le Guin.
While none of the novels are impossible to read without having read the previous ones, many of them build on the themes and the characters that came before, and some of the magic is lost without knowing what came before.
Pratchett was involved (and appeared) in all three.
The Color of Magic/The Light Fantastic
Hogfather
Going Postal
The Watch was kind of unWatchable for me; which is sad, because I like the actors.
Pratchett’s essential humanism shone (and sometimes shouted) through every page and satirically he was biting but never bitter.
He is without doubt and far away my favourite writer (apologies to Iain M Banks though I’m sure he’d have understood).
I’ve re-read Hogfather every Christmas since it came out.
I was an unsure 17 year old who was uncertain how life would turn out, Now I read it as someone with a family and clear sense of who I am, neither of which 17 year old me would have quite believed possible.
GNU Sir Terry Pratchett.
I read the first 20 or so books in the Discworld series, but I cannot read this website.
Even though I had the experiences he discribes with Douglas Adams first before discovering Terry Pratchett.
Can we start tagging titles in HN with [AI-generated] or something?
I know some people have no problem with it, but it might help others (like me) to steer clear
Didn't see any reason to assume so, and I enjoyed it, plus it introduced me to this apparently great author. So, AI generated or not, I'm glad it was posted.
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=shingles
Furthermore, there was recently a study (published in Nature) suggesting that lithium deficiency could be a cause, since lithium orotate (a compound that reaches the brain) prevented it in a mouse model of Alzheimer's:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44825326
This also fits with the old observation that regions with more lithium in the water supply tend to have fewer cases of Alzheimer's.
So I now take lithium orotate capsules (with 1mg of elemental lithium) as a daily supplement. I will also get the Shingrix vaccine soon, even though my health insurance doesn't pay for it (it only does so for older adults), but it isn't that expensive.
Regarding the authors point about current authors, I think Brandon Sanderson is really trying his best to live up to the mantle left behind by the great fantasy authors of the 20th century. Not all of his books that I’ve read have been bangers but considering he writes multiple novels a year across a wide variety of fantasy and sci-fi subgenres, that’s somewhat to be expected.
I know reading isn’t as popular now that screens have become so engrained into our daily lives, but there are absolutely kids out there getting stuck into books and it’s never been a better time to be a writer given the access of the internet and the ability for an author to promote their work and showcase their storytelling creativity through the medium of social media.