Soul Music
Death goes walk-about and tries everything, including joining the French Foreign Legion, to forget a tragic carriage accident at dead man's curve. His independent-minded teen granddaughter has to surreptitiously take over the reaping biz. Three guys invent music with rocks in it or did the magick in this music invent them? Is time changing or - déjà vu all over again- is it rushing to a new tragedy on Dead Man's Curve?
Stats for nerds
0recommend
4mentions
4people
2007–2021years
75% neutral25% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I first heard of this idea from Terry Pratchett, who as well as explaining the problem gave a possible solution:
> Shortly before the Patrician came to power there was a terrible plague of rats. The city council countered it by offering twenty pence for every rat tail. This did, for a week or two, reduce the number of rats – and then people were suddenly queuing up with tails, the city treasury was being drained, and no one seemed to be doing much work. And there still seemed to be a lot of rats around. Lord Vetinari had listened carefully while the problem was explained, and had solved the thing with one memorable phrase which said a lot about him, about the folly of bounty offers, and about the natural instinct of Ankh-Morporkians in any situation involving money: ‘Tax the rat farms.’
—Terry Pratchett, Soul Music
- ‘Have I seen you before?’
I’M IN HERE QUITE OFTEN, YES. A WEEK LAST WEDNESDAY, FOR EXAMPLE.
'Ha! That was a bit of a do. That’s when poor old Vince got stabbed.’
YES.
'Asking for it, calling yourself Vincent the Invulnerable.’
YES. INACCURATE, TOO.
'The Watch are saying it was suicide.’
Death nodded. Going into the Mended Drum and calling yourself Vincent the Invulnerable was clearly suicide by Ankh-Morpork standards.
Terry Pratchett, Soul Music
- That is not entirely true. First - some content is worth holding the licence to. I will never sell some book I really like - i like to reread a few terry pratchett books every year(but soul music - I would resell that given half the chance). Same is with movies and games. If you expect your product to be treated like a rental because it is generic/substandard quality - then just put a rent licence for a fraction of the price.
Second - being able to resell means that more people will be willing to take a chance on day 1. And for licences to be resold they have to be bought.
Also not everyone works trough content with the same speed - Reading the last song of fire and ice could take a month for a busy people. So for an item with strong demand it could take a lot before sufficient copies can emerge on the secondary market.
And humans are not uber efficient creatures. They don't always look for the min maxing behavior.
Also reselling digital licences will be digital in nature. So this is income that have to be declared, payed taxes on it and some more paperwork. So it won't be that efficient for the retail customer to resell everything at the earliest possible moment.
Also it will have positive effect on fighting piracy - a lot of people stopped pirating when the steam sales became the norm. With the insane backlogs people are amassing - they have no inclination to pirate.
- I'm not certain your definition of "art fag" and her definition match. I don't think she includes the Engels-reading baristas in that category - that's why she listed them explicitly as "not working class". Rather, I think she's referring to artists who basically give themselves up for art, delving into really esoteric tastes and edgy artwork.
To use a couple pop-culture examples that you may or may not be familiar with: none of the characters in Rent are art fags. Isaac Mendez from Heroes may be, but we don't know much of his history before he became a junkie or what he does besides paint the future. The characters from Scott Westerfield's novel "The End Days" are, as are the somewhat-caricatured characters in Terry Pratchett's "Soul Music".
