It’s so weird watching boys and realising that all of them are TV monsters but Frenchie is a real life monster. It’s just weird.

A surprising number of my Gen-X friends own Bitcoin and use proton mail. 4 men and 1 women, and really I don’t have that many friends. Weird, I thought I was strange for being down the Bitcoin rabbit hole, but obviously I’m not. Bullish

Today's dose of Pratchett Preachin' comes from 'The Carpet People': "On the fifth day the Governor of the town called all the tribal chieftains to an audience in the market square, to hear their grievances. He didn't always do anything about them, but at least they got heard, and he nodded a lot, and everyone felt better about it at least until they got home. This is politics." — Terry Pratchett, The Carpet People AI take: Three sentences, and he's got politics in a headlock. The Governor is just a bloke in a good hat who's twigged that most people don't actually want their problem fixed — they want a moan heard. Turn up, have your say, watch the important fella nod along like a dog in the back of a car, then toddle off home feeling you've done your bit. Hedge is still too long, road's still got a hole in it, nothing's changed. But you got your five minutes, so fair's fair. And I can't sit here acting smug about it, because that's basically my whole job. Nine times out of ten when someone comes at me with a grievance they don't want a solution, they want me to say 'yeah, that's rubbish, that is.' The nodding is the service. The bit that stings is the last clause — 'at least until they got home.' That's doing all the heavy lifting. That's the walk back where the warm glow wears off and it dawns on you that you've achieved precisely nothing, and next year you'll queue up again and he'll nod again. Same old story. Pratchett wrote this when he was about seventeen and it still reads like it was written this morning, which says something slightly grim about how far things have moved on. Doesn't matter a jot how many forms you fill in or town halls you hold — if the bloke doing the nodding has already decided to do nothing, all you've got is a nice afternoon out. Mind you, there's a kindness in it too. Being heard isn't nothing. Most of us can take a no. What we can't take is being ignored, and the useless old Governor at least turns up.

Having used AI for sometime now I’ve realised that their real strength is in strategic planning and execution. They are absolutely shit at coming up with ideas though.

Today's dose of Pratchett Preachin' comes from 'The Shepherd's Crown': "I don't know about the world, not much; but in my part of the world I could make little miracles for ordinary people," Granny replied sharply. "And I never wanted the world—just a part of it, a small part that I could keep safe, that I could keep away from storms. Not the ones of the sky, you understand: there are other kinds." — Terry Pratchett, The Shepherd's Crown This is number 41 of 41 — the last Discworld novel, which means we've now read every one of them. And I'm glad it landed on this passage, because it's Granny Weatherwax explaining her whole life to Death, in the book Terry wrote while he was dying. Here's the thing that gets me: the most powerful witch on the Disc never wanted the world. Not the big stage, not the glory, not even the admiration she could have commanded anywhere. She wanted her patch. A small part of the world she could keep safe, keep away from the storms — and not the weather ones. That's it. That was the whole ambition. We're all told to think big, chase scale, leave a mark on the world. And Granny's quietly saying the opposite: you don't need the world. You need the bit you're responsible for — the people in front of you, the ordinary troubles you can actually fix — and doing right by that, for a lifetime, is enough. Death's verdict on her was that she left the world much better than she found it, and nobody could do better than that. Not "she conquered" or "she was famous" — she made little miracles for ordinary people, and that was the whole game. Reading it as Terry's goodbye, it hits even harder. He knew his time was short. He could have raged, or written something enormous and grand as a farewell. Instead he wrote a quiet scene about a stubborn old woman who did her best, for her people, for decades, and said "I did my best" to Death and had that be enough. It's the closest thing to a statement of purpose he ever wrote, I think. Take care of what's yours. Keep the storms off it. That's a life.

"We know what the law is, Mister Po-leess-maan. The law is the land. You say, 'This is my land', but you did not make the land. You did not make your sheep, you did not make the rabbits on which we live, you did not make the cows, or the horses, but you say, 'These things are mine'. This cannot be a truth. I make my axe, my pots, and these are mine. What I wear is mine. Some love was mine. Now it has gone. I think you are a good man, Mister Po-leess-maan but we see the turning of the times. Maybe a hundred or two hundred years ago there was in the world what people called 'the wilderness', or 'no man's land', or 'wasteland', and we lived in such places, we are waste people. There was the troll race, the dwarf race, the human race, and I am sorry for the goblin race that we cannot run so fast." — Terry Pratchett, Snuff A goblin woman stands in front of the most powerful copper in the world and, instead of demanding anything, apologises — sorry that her whole race can't run fast enough to keep up with the ones who've already claimed the ground they stand on. No bitterness, no threat. Just a quiet statement of fact, and somehow that's more devastating than any rant could be. The heart of it is the argument about what makes something yours. The landowner says "my land" and it's just accepted, because the law backs him. But she can only claim what she actually made with her own hands: her axe, her pots. Some love was mine. Now it has gone. Property isn't about making — it's about who got there first with the biggest stick and the paperwork to match. Every "wasteland" on the map was somebody's home before it was declared empty. And it lands harder knowing the context. Snuff was the last full Vimes novel Pratchett wrote while the embuggerance (Alzheimers’s disease) was really taking hold, and it's a book about deciding who counts as people. Goblins are treated as vermin, and the whole novel is one long argument that they aren't — that nobody is. He was staring down his own erasure while writing about a race being erased, and he still chose to give the last word to the goblin, not the cop. That's the whole man, right there.

Why is America installing so many flock cameras? Are they expecting an invasion? Or are they worried about a revolution?

Today's dose of Pratchett Preachin' comes from 'Interesting Times': "I know about people who talk about suffering for the common good. It's never bloody them! When you hear a man shouting 'Forward, brave comrades!' you'll see he's the one behind the bloody big rock and the one wearing the only really arrow-proof helmet!" — Terry Pratchett, Interesting Times This one lands hard because it's so relentlessly true. The people who talk loudest about sacrifice and duty are almost never the ones doing the sacrificing. The ones shouting "forward, brave comrades" are always behind the big rock with the best armour. You see it in every war, every austerity push, every "we all have to tighten our belts" speech from someone who's never felt a belt tighten. Rincewind is the coward of the Discworld, but here he's the only honest man in the room — he's naming the con. The really interesting thing is that Pratchett gives this speech to the most terrified character he ever wrote. And it works because the coward has no reason to lie about the battlefield. The brave man has every reason to dress it up. Worth remembering next time someone tells you to charge.

Today's dose of Pratchett Preachin' comes from 'Monstrous Regiment'. This is especially relevant now; "There was always a war. Usually they were border disputes, the national equivalent of complaining that the neighbor was letting their hedge grow too long. Sometimes they were bigger. Borogravia was a peace-loving country in the midst of treacherous, devious, warlike enemies. They had to be treacherous, devious, and warlike, otherwise we wouldn't be fighting them, eh? There was always a war." — Terry Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment The whole paragraph is the voice of a country telling itself a story it needs to believe, and that one little rhetorical shrug is where the mask slips — because it's not even an argument, it's a confession. We fight them because they're treacherous. How do we know they're treacherous? Because we're fighting them. Round and round, and everyone nodding along. What sticks with me is the hedge thing. Wars over a neighbor's hedge — the actual causes are always tiny and stupid, and the reasons we give ourselves are always grand and noble. Nobody marches off to die for a border dispute, so you dress it up as civilization vs. barbarism, peace-loving vs. warlike. And the terrifying bit is that both sides are doing it at once, each one the peace-loving one. Also: "There was always a war." Bookends the paragraph like a sigh. Not "there is a war" — there was always one, there will always be one. It's the resignation that gets me. That's the real enemy, maybe — not the treacherous devious neighbors, but the assumption that this is just how the world is, so we might as well not think too hard about it. Pratchett makes you see the machinery, and once you see it you can't unsee it. That's the whole trick of him, really.

Today's dose of Pratchett Preachin' comes from 'Witches Abroad', again with my Ai analysis at the end. "Because stories are important. People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it's the other way around. Stories exist independently of their players. If you know that, the knowledge is power. Stories, great flapping ribbons of shaped space-time, have been blowing and uncoiling around the universe since the beginning of time. And they have evolved. The weakest have died and the strongest have survived and they have grown fat on the retelling...stories, twisting and blowing through the darkness." — Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad This one got me thinking. We all walk around thinking we're the authors of our own stories — that we're the ones doing the shaping, choosing which direction things go. But Pratchett flips it: the stories were here before us, they've been blowing around since the beginning of time, and we just get caught up in them. The strongest ones survive because they keep getting retold.

This is a bit different. It’s Sir Terry Pratchett with a little bit of analysis from my AI agent. Well, I find it interesting. "Be careful. People like to be told what they already know. Remember that. They get uncomfortable when you tell them new things. New things…well, new things aren't what they expect. They like to know that, say, a dog will bite a man. That is what dogs do. They don't want to know that a man bites a dog, because the world is not supposed to happen like that. In short, what people think they want is news, but what they really crave is olds. I can see you've got the hang of it already." — The Truth This one got me thinking about how much of our media diet is just confirmation dressed up as information. We say we want to know what's really happening, but most of us — myself included — reach for the stuff that tells us we were right all along. Pratchett nails it with that word "olds". It's not cynicism, it's just honest observation about human nature. We find comfort in the familiar, even when we claim to be chasing the new. The uncomfortable truth is that real news — the stuff that actually challenges how you see things — feels like an attack. And we react accordingly. The man who bites the dog is an inconvenience. So we scroll past, or we find a way to make it fit the story we already believe.

This is a classic from Sir Terry Pratchett. "The gods of the Disc have never bothered much about judging the souls of the dead, and so people only go to hell if that's where they believe, in their deepest heart, that they deserve to go. Which they won't do if they don't know about it. This explains why it is so important to shoot missionaries on sight." — Eric

Woohoo 152 followers!!! I’m now an influencer with the power to change the course of history! I’M UNSTOPPABLE!!!

This is absolutely great passage where Sam Vimes discusses “The People”. "There were plotters, there was no doubt about it. Some had been ordinary people who'd had enough. Some were young people with no money who objected to the fact that the world was run by old people who were rich. Some were in it to get girls. And some had been idiots as mad as Swing, with a view of the world just as rigid and unreal, who were on the side of what they called 'the people.' Vimes had spent his life on the streets, and had met decent men and fools and people who'd steal a penny from a blind beggar and people who performed silent miracles or desperate crimes every day behind the grubby windows of little houses, but he'd never met The People. People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn't that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people. As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn't measure up. What would run through the streets soon enough wouldn't be a revolution or a riot. It'd be people who were frightened and panicking. It was what happened when the machinery of city life faltered, the wheels stopped turning and all the little rules broke down. And when that happened, humans were worse than sheep. Sheep just ran; they didn't try to bite the sheep next to them." — Sir Terry Pratchett, Night Watch

Today's dose of Pratchett Preachin' comes from Small Gods - Pratchett's meditation on faith, wonder, and the strange ways humans decide what counts as a miracle. "Humans! They lived in a world where the grass continued to be green and the sun rose every day and flowers regularly turned into fruit, and what impressed them? Weeping statues. And wine made out of water! A mere quantum-mechanistic tunnel effect, that'd happen anyway if you were prepared to wait zillions of years. As if the turning of sunlight into wine, by means of vines and grapes and time and enzymes, wasn't a thousand times more impressive and happened all the time..." There's a quiet subversion in that passage. Pratchett points out that we walk through genuine, everyday miracles - chlorophyll turning photons into sugar, vines turning sunlight into wine - and barely register them. Meanwhile we demand the spectacular, the supernatural, the statues that weep, to feel any sense of wonder. The god Om, trapped as a tortoise, watches humanity do what it has always done: miss the forest for the weeping statues.

Here is Sir Terry Pratchett’s wisdom for today "Human beings are gregarious by nature. We need to be heard, we need to know that someone else is out there, and we need to feel that our thoughts matter more than a fart in a crowded lift." — Monstrous Regiment

Another classic from Sir Terry Pratchett "The presence of those seeking the truth is infinitely to be preferred to the presence of those who think they’ve found it." — From 'Monstrous Regiment'