I don't think people get how reactionary the captain vimes books are. look at what's happening in those books. in plain english, you have a cop and his band of good apples + adorably bad apples saving the ass of a dictator again and again, because sometimes you just need a clever steady hand in charge. Pratchett was informed by liberal humanist values, and there's plenty of great stuff about tolerance in there. but the foundation of any vimes novel is an institutionalist urge to bootlicking. it just has to be the right boot
this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2024
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I think Pratchett understood that, despite people romanticizing revolution, revolutions often end up opening the door to something as bad or worse. Especially in a place like Discworld.
In Night Watch:
“Vimes/Keel tells Ned Coates not to put his trust in revolutions "They always come around again. That's why they're called revolutions. People die, and nothing changes" This is a common theme in Pratchett regarding authority figures”
That said Vimes does participate in a revolution of sorts in that book, as “John Keel”, in the past.
yeah that's the conservative spirit right there
Books would be really boring if the protagonists were all just the author speaking as themself but using various funny voices.
there's not a lot of ambiguity in what the novels are getting at, so no offense but this line of argument is not worth engaging directly. but I will point out that I didn't say what pratchett's views were. part of why people don't look askance at these books is that his other work is at odds with the realpolitik message I'm pointing out. I can't and I don't draw conclusions about his 'real' views based on the vimes novels
The novels may be trying to say something, but how it plays out still needs to make sense in the world of the novel and be coherent with the characters as depicted.
Vimes is basically a stereotypical jaded and cynical old-timer who has ideas about how things could be better, but has seen enough to know that the powerful would never allow it.
Incremental improvements are made but larger changes are difficult except sometimes in places that are even worse than Ankh-Morpork.
It's kind of like all the people who are aware of what's likely needed to prevent climate change disaster, but are also aware that they don't have the power to make it happen and that the forces of inertia and corruption are powerful enough to block or roll back anything remotely significant.
It sucks to have to decolonise your darlings. It sucks that a lot of our most enjoyable stories are copaganda. Even the most redeemable stories about cops have probably inspired people to become cops.
other-other-other-other scott tweeted again. apologies, it's slightly US-pol
it's a doozy:
spoiler of the image too, just in case
transcript of insane scott adams, creator of dilbert, tweet
I'm revising my debate scoring. My first impression was a tie, which I called a Harris victory.
But the only thing I recall about the debate today is "They're eating the dogs."
Visual. Scary. Viral. Memorable. Repeatable. And directionally correct in terms of unchecked immigration risk.
It's the strongest play of the election.
Trump won the debate.
I gotta stop underestimating his game. Trump had no base hits in the debate but his long ball is still rising. Incredible. 6:32
as a reminder, this is the same guy that's so keen on thinking the llm can hypnotize him into orgasm
Hillary is going to assassinate him for sure this time for revealing the hidden dog lore.
Friend-of-the-show JZW rips a YC backed startup a new one:
The terms, concerningly, don't give a firm data retention time frame, and say that LineLeap may be "unable to fully delete or de-identify" user data due to "technical" or "other operational reasons."
My villain arc is going to be turning into Thanos and collecting them stones just to enforce GDPR forever into cosmic law with a snap of my fingers.
This person is as correct as they are committed to the vibes. Great sneer.
the very first thing I thought of as I started reading this is this track by a small ZA artist I discovered a while back, and I started it to play as backtrack for reading
Late response but cool song recommendation :)
haha yeah it’s quite fun
Saw this gem of a plaintive plea from a promptfan:
can’t you just train a LLM to only output “sorry, I can’t answer your question”?
I read that differently.
I parsed it as having the bot only output "sorry, I can't answer your question". Ever.
sleep( math.rand(15,20)); print("I'm sorry. I'm afraid I don't know the answer to that question.");
I call it HonestGPT, and will accept my billions in VC money now.
The New Yorker gamely tries to find some merit, any at all in the writings of Dimes Square darling Honor Levy. For example:
In the story “Little Lock,” which portrays the emotional toll of having to always make these calculations, the narrator introduces herself as a “brat” and confesses that she can’t resist spilling her secrets, which she defines as “my most shameful thoughts,” and also as “sacred and special.”
I'm really scraping the bottom of the barrel for extremely online ways to express the dull thud of banality here. "So profound, very wow"? "You mean it's all shit? —Always has been."
She mixes provocation with needy propitiation
Right-click thesaurus to the rescue!
But the narrator’s shameful thoughts, which are supposed to set her apart, feel painfully ordinary. The story, like many of Levy’s stories, is too hermetically sealed in its own self-absorption to understand when it is expressing a universal experience. Elsewhere, the book’s solipsism renders it unintelligible, overly delighted by the music of its own style—the drama of its own specialness—and unable to provide needed context.
So, it's bad. Are you incapable of admitting when something is just bad?
"They would like you to believe that their indecision reflects a particular attunement to ambiguity and nuance. But in truth they just won’t know where they stand until they’ve figured out where you do."
This is exactly why these people always feel so weird. Like, have you considered not hanging out with assholes?
Yeah, just give it to the feller who reviewed Guy Fieri's restaurant. It's better to just rip the bandaid off.
Sadly, he's left the game just the last month: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/06/dining/pete-wells-how-restaurants-have-changed.html
alas!
Honor Levy
someone tell me it isn't just me who always parses this person's name as "honour tax" and has a doubletake first thinking "..yeah, accurate" before remember it's actually their name-name not and not a byname
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