yakalskovich | Gahhh!!! - A Geek's Lament

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Gahhh!!! - A Geek's Lament

I see why photobucket.com needs to place advertising on every page when you upload and so forth; they have to get the money back from somewhere for the great service they're providing.

But this is going too far: there's this totally obnoxious rich media ad haunting my bucket where this badly animated chick that looks like one of those Japanese combine-them-yourself icons lurks for you to touch her with your mouse cursor, to start squawking in the most jarring American accent, "Hi, my name is Tina, and in the next thirty seconds..." yadda yadda yadda.

I long to reply: "Hi, you name is nothing, you stupid cow from Arizona, because you don't bloody exist! Get that into your nonexistent head!"

I am avoiding her like an electric cattle fence, but I don't always succeed.

ETA: ("For the loan of a flagpole and two dozen cups" and all that.) Please be warned that There Be Spoilers for Going Postal in the comments; they just turned up by themselves.

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Ahahhaha! Hahaha! Ha!

On a personal note, I am half way through 'Going Postal'. Integrating into the RP shall be bloody hell, and Sacharissa's player needs to read, or be spoilered on it immediately.

Ponder is his lovely, usual self. I read the part with him first.

Urgs, you too? I really have to try get it today at a shop, instead of waiting for Amazon still saying the book is published on October 7th.

Hell, huh? Tzk. Anything worse than Margo and Havelock playing something like chess by clacks, and Sacharissa having a wedding ring? I heard about those.

Sacharissa-mun is

dreamkin, same as Sam-mun.

Ah, so you've heard about the ring? Does Dreamkin know?

Mostly, and I really don't consider this a spoiler, but the post systems seem to have been defunct all over the Disc since clacks were invented. So all those clever little hints at the post running funny that we all started making? Actually might hinder us. We'd have to say that when we said mail, we meant clacks, because no one actually uses the mail anymore at all. However, the clacks do run funny, so we could be okay there... What I don't get is that the clacks were only built about 5 years ago-ish, and the post seems to have been abandoned for much longer than that...

I'm just hoping William doesn't show up with a wedding ring...

Not at all? Not even random mail getting through, and the rest not? That is odd. I have heard of letters arriving in other books, you know. Carrot was forever writing letters to his parents, wasn't he, and other dwarves sent home money as well.

Yes, in the reviews I read I noticed the discrepany as well. Pterry really has painted himself and all of us in a corner here.

William-mun (

polaris_starz) has posted about having finished GP, with spoilers (friends-locked), and no, William doesn't show up with a wedding ring. If he did, we wouldn't have the minor brain-break with the mail, we'd have major brain-break.

And as far as I know, Dreamkin doesn't know yet.

Nope. No mail at all. One character even says something along the lines of: everyone knew by the end that if you wanted to get rid of a dead body, you should send it to the post office because you'd never see it again. This character was thirty, but spoke of 'the end' as if it was ages ago.

Yes, the mail coaches were still running in Lords and Ladies, which was 6 years ago, and in Hogfather which was about 5.

Well, we've got jokes like that about the mail here! And we send money by normal letter instead of registered, as registered letters with money in vamish more often, that sort of thing, and everybody knows it. Still, most of the mail gets through.

And speaking of which, the mail coaches were running in "Thief of Time", where an Igor gets delivered to Jeremy Clockson by mail coach from Überwald, and somebody even says there's nothing faster than the mail coach from Überwald.

So what we get here is a major discrepancy within the Discworld canon, not just a prob for our RPG. Ordinary fen and readers don't have to worry about it, but we poor RPers have to go and break our brains trying to make sense of it and somehow retconning it into the RPG.

I'd still say it wasn't all the mail which got lost, but I'm yet to read the book - I will try my luck today at a bookshop, but if they don't have it yet, it's waiting for Amazon, and, erm, the mail might eat my delivery of GP just like it ate the one of "Good Omens" and "The Golden Key". At least Amazon is sending replacements for those.

Yes. All the non-clacksed mail. The post office is abandoned enough to be pigeon infested and thoroughly grafittied. Several letters from the sign on the building are missing, and then turn up on another store having been "bought off a fellow in a bar a few years ago".

This might be the one that sends us AU, mightn't it? Not that we aren't, in a way. There's an adorable gay joke early in the book, btw. Just in general, that proves (in case we needed proving) that homosexuality is something that goes on in AM, and people are starting to be okay with it (but folks from forn parts are still dodgy).

On the other hand, there's not much which anchors this book time wise...we could always wait to incorporate it for, say a year or two (that's a plot planning, innit?), or pull a Theif of Time ourselves and declare a time patching. There's a wizardy thing which is mentioned during the book (destruction of the universe) which could explain that...

Read it with haste, I say! It's funny. I've laughed outloud a few times now.

All, huh? No discussing or retconning it away or anything. Well, that's bad.

I don't think that needs to send us AU, really; we can say it was the clacks, or we can say that there are several different mail organisations (like postal service, UPS, Fed-Ex and so on), and only the Post Office proper didn't run, while the other (mail coaches from Überwald) quite obviously did.

We could also be perfectionist enough to go and edit all the entries that mentioned the mail and take those mentions out again, which would mean jettisoning Sacharissa's article altogether, and deleting the comments in which she interviewed Lajos and Ponder, but I think that would be overkill.

Nah, for us going AU, Pterry would have to have Other Plans for one of our OTPs where everybody can see it. Like Sacharissa actually being married to William.

Destruction of the universe, huh? That's pretty nifty. Tell me more.

I think we could certainly get away with a private messenger service: young lads paid to take a letter anywhere, 'cause anyone'll do anything for money, that is not an official organization or anything; just like gophers.

Do you want spoilers?

Yes, we will, and that is what we shall do then, eh, to retcon the new canon into the RPG.

And yes, I want spoilers!! Thank you for offering! I will ETA a warning on the entry, so spoil away.

Right. So. BS Johnson, sometime before 'the end' for the post office invented a better sorting machine by making pi exactly 3. This caused quantum (twice) and they started getting letters to send before they had been written. Some wizards who used lingo that makes me think 'Ponder and pals', thought this was brilliant, but then it all got to be too much and they started recieving letters that only had the possibility of being written (Ponder, in his Reader of Invisible Writtings capacity must have had an orgasm). The wizards advised not shutting it down, lets it destroy the universe, but them one of the postal workers got fed up and shut it down anyway. The wizards declared the universe had been destroyed, and then remade in the same second, and you could tell by looking.

It sounds to me like we could say this happened, and when it was remade, the post office had been in ruin for years. Trousers of time sort of thing.

BS Johnson was around less than thirty years ago??

Underworld, that man is elusive, time-wise!! He bloody did some work for Lady Sybil's grandfather, another piece of canon claims.

And yes, that sounds like a very, very good explanation for it all, canon continuity and RPG continuity wise. I think I will have to link this conversation from the comm in a few days's time when more people have read it so they get to know what happened for us - we had the universe destroyed. Nothing easier than that.

Some people do claim that is actually what happens from moment to moment and causes time, as far as I know. And it most certainly is what a computer screen does. So it is true for us.

Hooray!

Yes, between us, we know managed to save the universe, or at least the small part that's under our influence. Or, if not save it, at least explain it.

And the universe can just as well be terribly unsaved for all practical purposes, or at least a large part of them. It has no influence on Beth almost openly (!!!) talking relationships (!!!) with his dear Mster Wizard (!!!).

Yes, will that be continuing? Ponder's got more to say...

Yes!!! I already continued it just now. I closed the reply window on an error message before, I think; but I replied again, and it is there now.

Beth thinks it fatally cute...

Sorry for the Paul, btw...

You don't have to be sorry for the Paul to me, I don't mind Paul! I met him as Beth and as Grigori, and always came out on top, and am not frightened by him at all. As I said somewhere, yesterday it was, I think?

I don't mind Paul either...

I dare say, it's his suspendors o' doom.

Suspenders? Of doom?

Sorry, I don't know Paul in any other incarnation than you RPing him. I know that some people seriously find him spooky, but I can't bring myself to think so. Underworld, his icons are in my bucket. How dangerous can such a person be?

Am I slightly weird for finding Paul as you RP him actually rather cute?

Yes, he's got suspenders because you weren't fully dressed without them in the 30's, and he wears second hand pants.

A lot of people found him seriously cute on the show too. Check out the ff.net Stephen King section sometime. It's Paul Mary Sues gone wild...

Gah!! I can't abide Mary Sues even when they're tame...

I don't even know whether the show was on yet in German TV, I don't have a TV guide any more. TV is crap, and if I want to see a movie, Flak the Metropolitan is sure to have the DVD. I asked him about Kingdom Hospital, but he's a staunch supporter of the Lars von Trier version and thinks that American Remake = Ugh. I hope he remembers that I was interested if he ever comes across it on TV or anything.

Me either, and Kingdom Sues are dreadfully untame. Imagine the uberangstiest punkgoth Sue you can, and you'll have imagined one of the less painful Sues.

I hear tell you can download the series online. And I don't know what region you are over there, but the series can be bought on amazon UK, and will be available in the US on the 12th.

UK = Region Code 2, just like I am. And amazon.de normally carries all the DVDs amazon.co.uk does, but at a prohibitive price. I recently bought "Gormenghast" and have hardly recovered from that yet. But for "Kingdom Hospital", I might think about it again. To finally meet the Paul in his canon incarnation.

I think those Sues is something I will give a wide berth, then. I don't put my face into a ceiling fan, either, after all.

He's very lovely. And though he is 15, his actor is 22 and therefore pervable.

Also, there's Andrew McCarthy-age.

Unfortunately, I don't know who Andrew McCarthy is, but I can ask IMDB.

He's an American movie star from the 80's: one of the brat pack. You may know him from "Mannequin" or "Pretty in Pink".

I have looked him up at IMDB, and I must admit, to my deep shame, that I have never seen one of his movies. Not one.

Sorry, but do you realize how long I've been dying to read this discussion?

Anyway, I don't think there was a real problem here. I _always_ thought, even before _GP_, that what Ankh-Morpork had was a very informal messenger-service system rather than a proper post office. Haven't there been references to things like handing a letter to someone who happens to be going in the right direction and hoping that it somehow gets there? And _GP_ makes it clear the "mail coaches" were not really the Postal Service, just a coach-for-hire service using the old Post Office equipment. Therefore canonicity is saved and the universe does not explode, QED.

Yes; we have become very all right with it all since then. Morgan mailed some things to her friends in Llamedos, and the Captain got a letter with stamps on from Teppic. And then some.

I am especially keen on Clacks Tower 181, the personnel of which has two scenes, because that's said to be near enough to Bonk that people go there on their day off. So I've been mentioning it a few times in passing already.

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Gahhh!!! - A Geek's Lament

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