In Memoriam Terry Pratchett

So. Farwell then Pterry.
Or should I say
HELLO

It seems rather redundant to write anything about Terry Pratchett, with so many other tributes on Twitter, the wider internet, and even (shockingly) things that aren’t the internet. I saw him give a talk at university, and in the Q&A afterwards my friend asked him about the Discworld game that was either in development or had just come out, and if he enjoyed adventure games. Seeing as he was a Proper Grown Up and everything I was rather expecting him to give qualified praise, or dismiss computer games entirely; this was the mid-90s, before everyone was a gamer. Instead he told us that the type of game he really liked was the one where you got to shoot demons with a shotgun. He’d heard of Doom! He *played* Doom! He continued to talk about one of the most interesting things he’d seen, a group of kids playing the Alien Total Conversion of Doom on networked PCs, co-operating with each other to fight the monsters, a fairly mind-blowing notion at the time.

A rather lovely movement has started to add an X-Clacks-Overhead header to web servers, and if all is working as planned kiasa.org should be joining in. As another article puts it: “the encoding of Pratchett’s name into the fabric of the internet seems a fitting modern homage, as though millions of computers were whispering his name, and chuckling softly to themselves.”

GNU Terry Pratchett