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Comment by t-3 | Hacker News Reader

> (except the Tiffany Aching ones)

Those are actually some of the better ones among the later books though! If you're going to skip, skip the Moist von Lipwig books. They're substantially worse than the other books in the series, IMO. Not too big a fan of the Watch books after Night Watch either (Night Watch was definitely peak Vimes though!).

> These are books you cannot really appreciate if you’re too young.

Other than maybe missing one or two sex jokes, not really?

> The only story revolving consequentially around gods is Small Gods, about a meme-stock god named GameStop, whose power crashes, and who ambitiously plans to pump himself back up to a new high.

Did an LLM hallucinate or is this supposed to be a joke? The god's name is Om.

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I think your comment just goes to show we all have different tastes - I love Moist, and his chain-smoking girlfriend.

There's only one Discworld book I don't like, and it is unseen academicals - the football one - I struggled to finish that, and it's the only one I've read only a single time. Every other discworld book I've read numerous times over the past 20+ years.

I'm with you on Moist. As for Unseen Academicals - yes, I think that was one of the ones where Alzheimers was really getting its teeth into him. Raising Steam is similar.

There's a point where you get a lot of rather similar monologues from his characters. I presume these are from the period after he had to dictate as he couldn't write directly any more. If so it's amazing that they're as good as they are.

What an embuggerance (as he said himself).

> I think your comment just goes to show we all have different tastes - I love Moist, and his chain-smoking girlfriend.

The one thing I'll fault the Moist books on is they're sort of the same book 3 times if you're in it for the story. If you enjoy the post/finance/rail exploration, that's enough to get past it, and I certainly did, but I can't blame others who didn't.

I voted you up because I don't fully disagree, but the "if you're in it [only] for the story" part is an important conditional. Once you get beyond the story outline similarities, the books feel different in fundamental ways.

For eg., Going Postal and Making Money have the same basic setup, and a one-line story description would sound very similar. But Going Postal is about themes of past and future, regret and risk, connecting to the past while bringing in the future; while Making Money feels like a constant tug-of-war between order and chaos, and hence ultimately about balance.

I’m pretty sure it’s a joke. Gods in Discworld are, essentially, scams based on belief; an unkind person might posit that meme stocks are similar.

Also, Hogfather is another one. The Hogfather is a god, essentially Discworld's Santa Claus, and the whole story is about a plot to kill him off.

What makes Hogfather interesting is that I might argue that he is not a god. At least for taken meaning of what a god is and acts like in/on Discworld. He is more so a force of nature like Death. Or a thing like tooth fairy.

Such entities have a special existence on Discworld.

Why not both? LLMs are hilarious when they aren't trying to be funny. They are pretty bad at jokes normally, but when LLMs hallucinate more than normal it has the right amount of absurdity to be funny.

Did you get all the fonts and other printing terms in The Truth? Did you get all the philosopher and academia jokes in Pyramids? Did you really understand all of Vimes' middle-aged gloom as a youth?

More power to your elbow if so, but I didn't. Fortunately the broader slapstick and parody was right up my alley and I grew into (at least some of) the rest.

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