Tag Archives: Misc

Make it Bigger!

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Make it bigger!
That’s right, it’s bigger!
I just built this thing like half an hour ago!

Neil Patrick Harris – 2013 Tony Awards

Since David Willis has been offering magnets as premiums in his Dumbing of Age Kickstarter campaigns, I’ve been getting all of them. First, they lived on my refrigerator. Then I bought a 2-ft x 3-ft magnetic whiteboard to display them. This hung in my office, but then I moved to another house, and I stopped having my own office, so the whiteboard was stuffed in a corner in the basement puppet workshop.

Then two things happened: I got the magnets with Willis’ TENTH book… and I finally got a new closet for Christmas.

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GNU Terry Pratchett

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In Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, the clacks are a series of semaphore towers loosely based on the concept of the telegraph. Invented by an artificer named Robert Dearheart, the towers could send messages “at the speed of light” using standardized codes. Three of these codes are of particular import:

  • G: send the message on
  • N: do not log the message
  • U: turn the message around at the end of the line and send it back again

When Dearheart’s son John died due to an accident while working on a clacks tower, Dearheart inserted John’s name into the overhead of the clacks with a “GNU” in front of it as a way to memorialize his son forever (or for at least as long as the clacks are standing.)

“A man is not dead while his name is still spoken.”
– Going Postal, Chapter 4 prologue

Keeping the legacy of Sir Terry Pratchett alive forever.

For as long as his name is still passed along the Clacks*, Dᴇᴀᴛʜ can’t have him.

http://www.gnuterrypratchett.com/