And as for you mentality - that's a hard one. Discworld of course are his best books (he has done some others), and within that series of books there are different spin-offs. Some are written from the perspective of the witches of discworld, some on the wizards (unrelated to the witches), some on the police, some are randomly based on a few individuals.

My dad started with the book about the police (or The Watch, as they're known in discworld). I let him start from the 1st book and he really didn't enjoy it, too fantasy for him, but fortunately he quickly realises comedy rather than fantasy is his niche. So while the very early books are a good read if/when you love discworld or fantasy, they're not always the best starting point.

I'd recommend therefore the City Watch books, as i did with my dad. They're an easy starting point. In order:
* Guards! Guards! 1989
* Men at Arms 1993
* Feet of Clay 1996
* Jingo 1997
* The Fifth Elephant 1999
* The Truth 2000
* Night Watch 2002
* Monstrous Regiment 2003
* Thud! 2005

I would recommend starting at the start if you mean to go on. The characters become more familiar and often you find the stories more sentimental and humorous if you know the characters. This list includes my top 3 favourite books of his, so definitely a good starting point. The books about Death (the character Death) are very good too.

In reply to this comment by dannym3141:
And as for you mentality - that's a hard one. Discworld of course are his best books (he has done some others), and within that series of books there are different spin-offs. Some are written from the perspective of the witches of discworld, some on the wizards (unrelated to the witches), some on the police, some are randomly based on a few individuals.

My dad started with the book about the police (or The Watch, as they're known in discworld). I let him start from the 1st book and he really didn't enjoy it, too fantasy for him, but fortunately he quickly realises comedy rather than fantasy is his niche. So while the very early books are a good read if/when you love discworld or fantasy, they're not always the best starting point.

I'd recommend therefore the City Watch books, as i did with my dad. They're an easy starting point. In order:
* Guards! Guards! 1989
* Men at Arms 1993
* Feet of Clay 1996
* Jingo 1997
* The Fifth Elephant 1999
* The Truth 2000
* Night Watch 2002
* Monstrous Regiment 2003
* Thud! 2005

I would recommend starting at the start if you mean to go on. The characters become more familiar and often you find the stories more sentimental and humorous if you know the characters. This list includes my top 3 favourite books of his, so definitely a good starting point. The books about Death (the character Death) are very good too.

Thanks for the recommendations!

No offence r1ok, but terry pratchett is an intellectual of the highest order. Easy for me to say 'genius', but i won't because it's bandied around too much. His books are filled with such amazing philosophies and opinions, explained and parodied in such subtle ways often and never preachy, he always shapes it into the fiction of his novels. In the genre in which he writes, he is unparalelled. He's one of the greatest wits in the world. He's friendly, he's caring.

To attempt to ridicule THIS MAN because he has read the same material as you but forms a different opinion borders on the farcical. You engender the 'bible-thumping' stereotypes by doing this at all. Terry is more intelligent than you or i, more witty, far more experienced, he's read more than most of us ever will - yet when he expresses his opinion on a writing, you try to call him small minded.

SMALL MINDED? Terry fucking Pratchett? Who the fuck are you anyway?

And as for you mentality - that's a hard one. Discworld of course are his best books (he has done some others), and within that series of books there are different spin-offs. Some are written from the perspective of the witches of discworld, some on the wizards (unrelated to the witches), some on the police, some are randomly based on a few individuals.

My dad started with the book about the police (or The Watch, as they're known in discworld). I let him start from the 1st book and he really didn't enjoy it, too fantasy for him, but fortunately he quickly realises comedy rather than fantasy is his niche. So while the very early books are a good read if/when you love discworld or fantasy, they're not always the best starting point.

I'd recommend therefore the City Watch books, as i did with my dad. They're an easy starting point. In order:
* Guards! Guards! 1989
* Men at Arms 1993
* Feet of Clay 1996
* Jingo 1997
* The Fifth Elephant 1999
* The Truth 2000
* Night Watch 2002
* Monstrous Regiment 2003
* Thud! 2005

I would recommend starting at the start if you mean to go on. The characters become more familiar and often you find the stories more sentimental and humorous if you know the characters. This list includes my top 3 favourite books of his, so definitely a good starting point. The books about Death (the character Death) are very good too.

Hmm this thread did not explode into a Matrix discussion as I like to see happen. I guess the time of those movies has long past. Hard to believe the first one is more than ten years old. The Matrix is now older now than Batman 1989 was when The Matrix came out. That blows my mind. Funny, in my opinion, you still don't see effects looking better than they did in Reloaded and Revolutions. The volume and density of the effects in the Zion battle are unbelievable.

I think it's almost criminal the way the first movie could have taken a place alongside Star Wars as the globe's real shared modern mythology of choice. A piece of pop culture so accessible yet profound at the same time, that was successfully designed to give satisfying takes on many different levels. A fucking movie that changed the way people looked at the world around them by having actual ideas behind the fury onscreen. And then they make the sequels and it's like mitichlorians plus Jar Jar Binks to the nth power. Still some awesome shit in the sequels between pure action and the ideas that were so overpackaged. I mean damn were they hard to love with all the nonsense and goofiness (Morpheus' speech, lol).

I was sixteen at the time, and had gone through life hating them both with a passion that's hard to explain to someone who's never lived under a dictatorship. I must admit I cheered and clapped when I heard they were dead, and even seeing the shameful way they were killed didn't diminish the primal scream of joy we all let out when we knew for certain they were both dead and there was no going back to the dark days. After a few weeks, I felt embarrassed and ashamed at having cheered the deaths of two old people, vicious though they may been - and I think that's the way most people felt after a while.
The way Romanian politics works though, if he were alive he'd be in Parliament now, so...
Shameful bloody trial though. Further reading, if you're interested:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jul/19/ceausescu-1989-romania-revolution

I've recently done a lot of reading about post cultural revolution China and I think I would find it hard to believe that China entering the capitalist stage was running on the heels of the 1989 Tienanmen Square incident. Some of these examples are better founded, like the 9/11/Iraq war link which I could reasonably believe was implemented while the nation was in shock. I can't fact-check all of the examples, but I'm reasonably suspicious that this video isn't as factual as it appears on it's surface.

That's a pretty damn awesome replica.

From here it would seem it's some Swede's 1 Million dollar labour of love.

How insanely awesome... I would love to see/hear it running though... really would. It's certainly seven shades of awesome better than this piece of crud. There are some awesome ones out there though, this one is pretty darn nice and there are others here too.

Great projects... to have the know how and the time and money to do these...

When I was in the 10th grade (1989), I was in a high school science class, and the professor had a drinking bird. He offered some form of extra credit if we could explain how it worked. I quickly went out and bought my own drinking bird, studied it, and had no freaking clue. So I pulled out some encyclopedias (remember those? yes kids, we used to have books of information), did some reading at the library, and 3 months later figured it had to have something to do with Boyle's Law.

I proposed my weakly formed solution completely missing out on the thermodynamics part, and never did get that extra credit.

If only I had google: Heat will not naturally flow from a body of lower temperature to one of higher. It will however, flow in the other direction. So what does all this have to do with our classic drinking bird? The answer: plenty. Couple this law of thermodynamics with Boyle’s law stating the inversely proportional relationship of temperature and pressure relating to volume and you can begin to understand how this magical little bird can seemingly bob up and down forever.

If you played that in reverse, that'd be me from 1989-2009. Um, plus like another 50lbs.

Tags for this video have been changed from '1989, School Assembly, Swallow your pride, Ill be your friend, we can carry on' to 'Morgan Freeman, 1989, Swallow your pride, Ill be your friend, we can carry on' - edited by calvados

>> ^ajkido:
Wow. The host hardly even smiled.


I smiled and LOLed.

Thanks EA!

In reply to this comment by EndAll:
*comedy *talks *quality

From Wikipedia:

As Nasty As They Wanna Be and "Me So Horny" controversy
The group released their album As Nasty As They Wanna Be in 1989, which also became the group's most successful album, largely because of the single "Me So Horny", which was popular in spite of little radio rotation, thanks, in part, to prevalent play on MTV. The song was based on a quote from a Vietnamese prostitute in Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket and took a sample from Mass Production's Firecracker. This album was also produced by Mr. Mixx.
The American Family Association did not think the presence of a "Parental Advisory" sticker was enough to adequately warn listeners of what was inside the case. Jack Thompson, a lawyer affiliated with the AFA, met with Florida Governor Bob Martinez and convinced him to look into the album to see if it met the legal classification of obscene. In 1990 action was taken at the local level and Nick Navarro, Broward County sheriff received a ruling from judge Mel Grossman that probable cause for obscenity violations existed.[2]
Navarro warned record store owners that selling the album may be prosecutable. 2 Live Crew then filed a suit against Navarro. That June, Judge Jose Gonzalez ruled against the album, declaring it obscene and illegal to sell. Charles Freeman, a local retailer, was arrested two days later, after selling a copy to an undercover police officer. This was followed by the arrest of three members of 2 Live Crew after they performed some material from the album at a live performance held at the Futura Night Club in Hollywood Florida. They were acquitted soon after. In 1992, the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit overturned the obscenity ruling from Jose Gonzales, and the Supreme Court of the United States refused to hear Broward County's appeal. A notable feature of the case was the distinguished literary critic and now Harvard University professor, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. as an expert witness on behalf of the defendants. He argued that the material that the county alleged was profane, actually had important roots in African-American vernacular, games, and literary traditions and should be protected.
As a result of the controversy, As Nasty As They Wanna Be sold over two million copies. It peaked at #29 on The Billboard 200 and #3 on the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart. A few other retailers were later arrested for selling it as well. Later hard rock band Van Halen sued over an uncleared sample of their song "Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love" in the 2 Live Crew Song "The Fuck Shop". The publicity then continued when George Lucas, owner of the Star Wars universe, successfully sued Campbell for appropriating the name "Skywalker" for his record label, Luke Skywalker Records. Campbell changed his stage name to Luke (and changed the record label's name to Luke Records) and the group released an extremely political follow up album, Banned in the USA after obtaining permission to use an interpolation of Bruce Springsteen's Born in the U.S.A. 2 Live Crew paraphernalia with the Luke Skywalker or Skywalker logos are usually sought after as collector's items.

>> ^Shpydir:
>> ^Shepppard:
I don't like the concept of "Project D"
My generation is basically one of the last to realize the gap between where we've come from, and where we're going. Being born in 89, I grew up with PSX, N64, genesis, ect. but we all knew about the previous consoles, and knew about where it came from.
Kid, I don't mean to sound like a cranky old fart and I kinda see what you're saying, but if you missed the 80's, you don't even know. There were these places called Ar-cades that we used to go to. They were just these whole rooms full of games. You put a token in and then you got to play the game for a bit.
It was nuts.


Well, to be fair, the arcade scene persisted very much into the 90's. Street Fighter 2 was not released until 1991, for instance. In Japan video arcades are still popular. But if you were born in 1989 in the US then you definitely missed a big part of gaming history. I was born in 1981 and I still too young to experience the real start of a gaming culture. I don't know when exactly that was, but Pac Man was released in 1980. Pong was back in 1972 so some old farts could claim that to understand the history of gaming you would need to be alive back then, but I'm skeptical of that.

I played the Atari but I never really liked it. It wasn't until the Nintendo with games like Final Fantasy (1990) that I was drawn into gaming. PC games like King's Quest, Hero's Quest, Sim City (1990), Civilization (1991), and Doom (1993) played just as big a role.

Having spent a fair amount of time hanging out in arcades, I can safely say that I don't miss it at all. I find the idea kind of sleazy, actually -- make children give up their money as fast and reliably as possible, in an environment with minimal parental supervision. PC or console games are so much better because they're not trying to quickly kill you so that you need to put in another quarter. They also have persistence, so you can build your character over many sessions. I've seen some clever Japanese arcade games that accomplish this by synergizing with RFID enabled collectible card games, though.

Thanks!

In reply to this comment by RhesusMonk:
on the contrary: *promote this gem! this is a folklorish remnant of our post cold war *history. and so magically facetious.