I Shall Wear Midnight
grandmaster of fantasy, Sir Terry Pratchett, this is the fourth in a series of Discworld novels starring the young witch Tiffany Aching. As the witch of the Chalk, Tiffany Aching performs the distinctly unglamorous work of caring for the needy. But someone—or something—is inciting fear, generating dark thoughts and angry murmurs against witches. Tiffany must find the source of unrest and defeat the evil at its root. Aided by the tiny-but-tough Wee Free Men, Tiffany faces a dire challenge, for if she falls, the whole Chalk falls with her....
Stats for nerds
2recommend
4mentions
4people
2014–2026years
50% recommend50% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Since no one has mentioned it so far, I recommend the Discworld series by Terry Pratchett. This year, I finished (numbers in Discworld order, annotated by the series):
9. Eric [Rincewind]
10. Moving Pictures [Independent]
12. Witches Abroad [Witches]
18. Maskerade [Witches]
19. Feet of clay [The City Watch]
23. Carpe Jugulum [Witches]
32. A Hat Full of Sky [Tiffany Aching]
37. Unseen Academicals [Wizards]
38. I Shall Wear Midnight [Tiffany Aching]
Brilliant series, highly recommended. Whenever I feel down, I re-read one of the Witches series - I spot something I never noticed before - an immediate mood-booster!
- Recently finished:
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow -- frankly, I found it kind of boring, and also found the narrator unsympathetic. I'm not sure if the author intended him to be an Unreliable Narrator or not.
Facts, Values, and Norms by Peter Railton -- Gains three stars for combining serious consideration of ethical and meta-ethical issues with a completely naturalistic worldview and a genuine grappling with history and ideology. Loses two stars for being far, far too long-winded and using vague, colloquial terminology and appeals to intuition where a methodoological naturalist can and should appeal to the fruits of science. (Copy-pasta'd from my Amazon review)
Rapture of the Nerds by Charles Stross -- pretty funny, even if it made a transhuman superintelligent supercivilization look kind of... dumb.
Currently re-reading for fun:
The Wee Free Men and I Shall Wear Midnight by Terry Pratchett -- It's Discworld. Go read them. NOW. And read A Hat Full of Sky in the middle.
Then there's been a lot of textbooks I've been reading, which I won't list. Though...
Logical Labyrinths by Raymond Smullyan -- dense, and fun, a graduate-level intro textbook to first-order logic disguised as a logic textbook.
- Yes, they did.
> Eight titles were excluded from the analysis due to them being either shorter than the other full-length novels (Eric, 1990; The Last Hero, 2001), or because they are part of his titles for younger readers (The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, 2001; The Wee Free Men, 2003; A Hat Full of Sky, 2004; Wintersmith, 2006; I Shall Wear Midnight, 2010; The Shepherds Crown, 2015).
- It's totally related. There's the old urban myth about the "NASA Pen,"[0] which is a favorite of tech people (It isn't actually true, but it's a great story).
I have a similar apocryphal story that I use in design. I write about it here[1].
> For many years, I have heard stories about some architect – they never say who – that once designed an office park/university campus/government center, etc., and deliberately did not add any paved walkways. Instead, it is said he had the buildings completely surrounded by lawns. After a year, he came back, and paved the areas of these lawns worn thin by people taking the most effective routes around the buildings. He did this because he decided at the start of the project, he’d never be able to account for human nature, and it was his goal to serve the folks using the campus as best as he could. The users of his system would let him know, organically, how to “tune” it so it can best serve them.
Also, anyone that is familiar with the Granny Weatherwax character, by Sir Terry Pratchett, may remember that she practiced what was termed "Headology." That was sort of "practical" psychology, and it involved things like giving headless ghosts pumpkins, so they would stop moaning (actually, it was another character that did that -from I Shall Wear Midnight[2], but it was definitely Granny's "Headology").
[0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-n...
[1] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/the-road-most-travel...
[2] https://www.studynovels.com/Page/Story?bookId=27327&pageNo=6...
