Today's dose of Pratchett Preachin' comes from 'Witches Abroad', again with my Ai analysis at the end.

"Because stories are important. People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it's the other way around. Stories exist independently of their players. If you know that, the knowledge is power. Stories, great flapping ribbons of shaped space-time, have been blowing and uncoiling around the universe since the beginning of time. And they have evolved. The weakest have died and the strongest have survived and they have grown fat on the retelling...stories, twisting and blowing through the darkness."

— Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad

This one got me thinking. We all walk around thinking we're the authors of our own stories — that we're the ones doing the shaping, choosing which direction things go. But Pratchett flips it: the stories were here before us, they've been blowing around since the beginning of time, and we just get caught up in them. The strongest ones survive because they keep getting retold.

This is a bit different. It’s Sir Terry Pratchett with a little bit of analysis from my AI agent.
Well, I find it interesting.

"Be careful. People like to be told what they already know. Remember that. They get uncomfortable when you tell them new things. New things…well, new things aren't what they expect. They like to know that, say, a dog will bite a man. That is what dogs do. They don't want to know that a man bites a dog, because the world is not supposed to happen like that. In short, what people think they want is news, but what they really crave is olds. I can see you've got the hang of it already."

— The Truth

This one got me thinking about how much of our media diet is just confirmation dressed up as information. We say we want to know what's really happening, but most of us — myself included — reach for the stuff that tells us we were right all along. Pratchett nails it with that word "olds". It's not cynicism, it's just honest observation about human nature. We find comfort in the familiar, even when we claim to be chasing the new. The uncomfortable truth is that real news — the stuff that actually challenges how you see things — feels like an attack. And we react accordingly. The man who bites the dog is an inconvenience. So we scroll past, or we find a way to make it fit the story we already believe.

😂😂😂 nice

This is a classic from Sir Terry Pratchett.

"The gods of the Disc have never bothered much about judging the souls of the dead, and so people only go to hell if that's where they believe, in their deepest heart, that they deserve to go. Which they won't do if they don't know about it.
This explains why it is so important to shoot missionaries on sight."

— Eric

Woohoo 152 followers!!!
I’m now an influencer with the power to change the course of history!
I’M UNSTOPPABLE!!!

I KNEW IT!!! NEVER TRUSTED IT. Also it used crap loads of data and I’m cheap!!

This is absolutely great passage where Sam Vimes discusses “The People”.

"There were plotters, there was no doubt about it. Some had been ordinary people who'd had enough. Some were young people with no money who objected to the fact that the world was run by old people who were rich. Some were in it to get girls. And some had been idiots as mad as Swing, with a view of the world just as rigid and unreal, who were on the side of what they called 'the people.' Vimes had spent his life on the streets, and had met decent men and fools and people who'd steal a penny from a blind beggar and people who performed silent miracles or desperate crimes every day behind the grubby windows of little houses, but he'd never met The People.

People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn't that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people.

As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn't measure up. What would run through the streets soon enough wouldn't be a revolution or a riot. It'd be people who were frightened and panicking. It was what happened when the machinery of city life faltered, the wheels stopped turning and all the little rules broke down. And when that happened, humans were worse than sheep. Sheep just ran; they didn't try to bite the sheep next to them."

— Sir Terry Pratchett, Night Watch